Archive for February, 2009

Social Media Design

February 19th, 2009, posted in Design, Social Media, Twitter, User Experience

So I’ve started musing about social media design lately.  I place social media design as a subset of communication design.  I’m making these terms up as I go, but I think it shold make a fair amount of sense.  Commnication design is the process by which you design your communication strategy & infrasrtucture.  Social Media obivously is much the same but focused on social media.  Social media if you wanting a definition is are technologies that connect people.  They usually involve a profile, and the ability to connect with people in some way, prototypical examples of the day are twitter, facebook, myspace, & linkedin.  You can design communications for an organization as well as an individual.

What I’m proposing is that just like any other design situation what you do should be intentional, and should serve the real human needs of those involved.  What I mean by intentional is that it is not haphazard or something that simply grew up over time.  I’m all for organic growth of systems, as long as there was some intentional starting point, and preiodic review of those systems to make sure they are still serving the needs of those using them.

So many organizations today are saying both internally and externally: we want to blog, we want to get out there and get into this whole social media thing.  I say, for the most part, that is probably a good thing, but you shouldn’t do it just because it sounds cool, you should do it to serve some purpose, whether that be to further the bottom line, open the lines of communication with your customers, enahnce your brand, or some combination of the three plus many of the other possibilities.  Blogging for blogging’s sake is silly and may be counter productive.

Here are my initial recommendations to organizations that want to get involved in social media. You need to:

  1. Identify what you want to accomplish with social media
  2. Identify people within your organization that already feel comfortable with social media
  3. Get an understanding of what your stakeholders/clients would want via social media
  4. Find some way to measure your efforts, i.e. we’ll be successful when:____
  5. Make sure 1&4 align.

I’m going to write about this more, but this is a first shot.

My next step is to look at how traditional design process fit into this model.

read more 1 comment

Being a preferred candidate

February 16th, 2009, posted in Games, Grad School, Internal Stuff

Here’s the position I just got notice that I’m the preferred candidate for: (complete details on the entire project here)

Description: In recent years, the paradigm for industrial research and innovation has shifted from a ‘technology push’ model towards a ‘user centred’ model so that industrial research and innovation is now more than ever focusing on application development that addresses end-user needs. Although techniques such as Contextual Design also aim towards a contextualized understanding of user needs, they do not meet the current needs of the industry, i.e., limited focus on a specific class of products, and limited understanding of user needs. What is needed is a better understanding of the contextual settings in which innovation occurs. By positioning user insights between problem states and desired states, consumer insights are formulated and further exploited for creating innovations by means of techniques such as a value propositions. This project will develop methods to enhance the market relevance of existing user centred creative processes, as these apply to industrial research by steering user centred innovation practices with marketing data. The proposed method will be refined through its application in creative problem-solving practices within Philips Research.

Outcomes: Methodology development, towards an integrated approach for a user insight driven creative process, will focus on: (i) ethnographic methods for collecting rich contextual data from which user insights can be derived; (ii) techniques for translating user insights into consumer insights that can be validated in terms of their market relevance; (iii) methods for deploying consumer insights into the creative phase of formulating innovative propositions.

In more simple terms it is this: today companies realize that technology alone cannot be the driver in creating and innovating on products or services, we need a user-centered perspective.  What makes this project fairly unique is that they want to fuse user-centered design methods to create a concept, and then use marketing research and business ideas to validate that concept.

In the simplest terms we want to let all the qualitative goodness of design driven research and add in quantitative marketing data and business values.

So what does it mean that I’m the preferred candidate?

It means that the project head and local committee have given me the thumbs up, and that the head of the overall proect committee have to say yes as well, but it would be fairly unlikely that they wouldn’t have the same decision as the people who are heading the project, interviewed me, and will be working with me directly.  We are VERY excited about the prospect of it, and as long as the final offer comes back close to the numbers  they gave me initally with some decent benefits (which is likely given the difference of health coverage in the EU) then we will undoubtedly say yes.

They initially wanted an April 1 start date, but of course I’m planning on attending CHI in Boston so it will have to be after that. We are thinking of having me go directly after CHI and getting things all set up and then Vanessa and the boys following after the school year ends and Vanessa has her performance with Indy Opera in late May.

Some thoughts on the research

Of course it’s interesting that design and user research is positioned between problem states and solutions.  Of course that is a huge step forward from letting design and user research just be a final step, but as per some of the conversations over at NextD that I’ve been participating in, it seems that design is moving and changing and moving even farther upstream towards the problem framing stage.  My thought however is that even when design moves farther upstream and it’s not as if we should then let technology or engineering be the driver from there on out.

The two things I am very excited about are these: adding in some vast amounts of marketing data, and the fact that I’ll be workign directly at Phillips research.  I won’t be simply coming up with some theoretical business process, but starting with what is currently going on at the User Reseach group at Phillips and then moving forward, putting the methods and theories directly into practice.

read more no comments