Outside Innovation

Contemplating Amazon’s Fire Phone

I haven’t gotten my hands on the new Amazon Fire Phone yet, so I can’t really comment on its most dramatic feature: what Jeff Bezos refers to as “Dynamic Perspective” – the 3D effect of its unique user interface. But, without the benefit of first hand experience, I tend to agree with Sean Madden of Wired, whose excellent post, “Amazon’s Fire Phone May Be Too Magical for Its Own Good,” talks about the trade-off between magical and practical UI features. Sean points out that, while “magical” works for seldom-used features, it becomes annoying when applied to things you need to do all the time.

“The ideal balance is one that Apple, Samsung, and Google have all zeroed in on after much trial and error: confine the “magic” to occasional interactions and celebrated results, and get the obstacles out of the way for frequently used ones with clear goals.”

~ Sean Madden, Executive Managing Director of Client Experience at Ziba Design

Here’s Sean’s sketch of why the lower left quadrant works best for frequent and practical actions:

 

Customer Journey Mapping—Seybold Style

We’ve had a lot of demand for Customer Journey Mapping recently. Perhaps it’s the customer experience flavor du jour. But we’re happy that so many companies are paying renewed attention to the quality of the end-to-end customer experience they deliver.

We’ve been mapping customer experiences for over 25 years with clients in many different industries—way before the term Customer Journey Mapping was invented. What’s good about a single Customer Journey Map is that it represents the end-to-end experience you want to provide from the first moment a customer engages with your brand until their last breath (or until they no longer need you). What’s challenging about creating a single end-to-end Customer Journey is that every organization has a lot of different types of customers in different contexts at different stages. And different customers in different contexts need and care about different things. In this first article about our approach to Customer Journey Mapping, we explain how you can capture the requirements of your key target customer segments using Customer Scenario Maps and then combine the key patterns from those scenarios to create an end-to-end Customer Journey Map that accurately reflects all of their needs.

Customer Journey Mapping
How to Ensure that Your Customer Experience Journey Map Reflects Your Customers’ Scenarios
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO & Sr. Consultant, May 23, 2014

 

Best of Our Innovation Articles

This week, we’re celebrating innovation and innovative ways to be innovative. To that end, I’d like to recommend these particular articles:

Why Chaos Is Important for Innovation
How an Organization, Group, or Individual Can Foster Innovation
by Patricia Seybold
Jan. 17, 2014

How to Address “Wicked Problems”
Use Dialogue Mapping to Build a Shared Understanding and Evolve a Group’s Thinking
by Patricia Seybold
May 23, 2013

New Metaphors Spur Innovation
How We Describe Things Impacts How We Think about Using Them
by Peter Horne
Mar. 6, 2013

How to Innovate Business Models
Should You Create a Business Model Innovation Factory?
by Patricia Seybold
May 3, 2012

Bootstrapping Innovation
Leveraging the Collective IQ to Achieve Powerful Results
by Ronni Marshak
June 3, 2010

 

How a Finnish Journalist Tried to Save Nokia

Here’s a great story about how Lauri Malkavaara, a journalist for the Helsinki Sanomat newspaper, tried to save his country’s mobile phone company. You can read Lauri’s entire article here. I’ll paraphrase and quote a few excerpts. [The emphasis is mine—highlighting the lovely way he describes the phone’s usability issues.]

On August 18, 2008, Lauri wrote a letter to Nokia providing his feedback about the design of Nokia E51 phone he had just been given to use by his employer.

Dear Nokia:

“… .Last week my second mobile phone broke and my employer bought me the third mobile phone that I have ever had in my life. I have wondered about it for a week now. At first I did not even know how to call with it without the manual, and I still do not understand very much of it.

The problem is that half a year ago a friend of mine at work showed me a device manufactured by Apple called the iPod Touch. I fell in love instantly… I ordered my own iPod touch, turned it on, and knew immediately how to use it. I have used the device now on a daily basis for over six months, and I have not even thought about any manuals…. It is no wonder that it is a huge success all over the world.

My new Nokia telephone model is called the E 51. Unfortunately the phone has not been designed so that just anybody could learn to use it easily…..”

Learn from Alaska Airlines’ Director of Customer Innovation

By Ronni Marshak

In her interview with Curtis Kopf, Managing Director, AlaskaAir.com and Customer Innovation, Patty Seybold learned how the commitment to providing an exceptional customer experience resulted in the airline’s pioneering work in customer-facing innovation. It surprised me to learn that Alaska Air Group (Alaska and Horizon Airlines) is the seventh largest airline in the U.S. (Here, on the East Coast, Alaska Air seems very niche and exotic). Further, the airline was the first to book flights and sell tickets via the Internet, the first to offer Web check-in, the first to use onboard POS devices to accept debit and credit cards in the air, among other innovations! Who knew?

Curtis Kopf heads up Alaska Airlines’ digital, mobile, and ecommerce team. Patty is a fan of his combination of responsibilities: “It’s hard to separate e-commerce and online self-service from mobile tools and your mobile-friendly web site. So it also makes sense to combine mobile and e-commerce/online under one role. But what’s different and particularly interesting to me about Curtis Kopf’s role at Alaska Airlines is his involvement in the company’s initiatives to use technology to make it easy for customers to get things done when they’re interacting with Alaska Airlines and its personnel at the airport and/or on the plane.”

How could your organization benefit from an explicit executive focus on customer innovation? Maybe it’s time to hire or promote a Director/VP of Customer Innovation in your company.

~ Ronni

Managing Customer Innovation at Alaska Airlines
Alaska Airlines Combines Customer Innovation with E-Commerce & Mobile
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, May 31, 2012

Open Innovation: Combining World-Class Skills with Local Knowledge

One of the most seductive forms of open innovation is to recruit the best minds in the world to work on really tough problems. Often this is done in the form of competitions. And, when the goal of the competition is to make the world a better place by solving a tough social problem, they tend to attract world-class talent as well as considerable press. What’s great is when the people who are attracted to address these challenges have a lot of local knowledge, because without that local knowledge and context, the designs are often fatally flawed.

Two such competitions caught my eye this month:

* Local Motors Goes International: Still Time to Vote on Five Great Vehicle Designs

Shell is sponsoring this competition with Local Motors for the design of appropriate vehicles for five different cities in the world. Each vehicle is supposed to be able to be built from locally sourced materials, be environmentally friendly, and to address a social issue that is specific to the city. It’s really fascinating to look through the entries and to read about both the problems being addressed and the local materials being promoted. It’s also great that in each case, the competitors include designers from the local regions who are familiar with the local traffic and road conditions as well as with the local materials.

Among my favorite designs are:

What Do Customers Want to DO on Your Web Site?

We’ve been thinking a lot about web site design recently. In particular, how to ensure that your prospects and customers know what they can DO on your site and understand how what you offer fits with their needs. One of our favorite reference sites is Nature Education’s Scitable.com. You’ll notice that at the top right of their home page is a simple box that lists 4 things you can DO on their science library and personal learning web site:

- Browse & Search Science Articles
- Get Help or Connect with Peers
- Build an Online Classroom
- Contribute & Share Your Content

Ronni Marshak uses an analogy to describe the need for this kind of clear navigation on your home page. She calls it “Book a Load, Track a Load.”

Promoting Your Sweet Spot
Make Sure Your Web Site Makes It Easy for Customers to Do What They Most Likely Want to Do
By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, September 1, 2011

How NOT to Provide Documentation

Most of the world has become Apple fans, even those who don't use Apple products. I thought about that last night, as I unpacked and provisioned my new Blackberry sent overnight from Verizon Wireless when my old phone died. (No, I can't get decent AT&T service, so I can't use an iPhone, the Android isn't available in a dual-mode GSM version from Verizon, and I am a Crackberry addict). As I pulled all the doodads out of the Blackberry box, and dived into the manual in order to just learn how to put the battery in, get the device activated, and begin to figure out how to use it, I find myself muttering, "this sure isn't from Apple." Apple would have provided a simpler box of goodies and a one-page set of pictures and instructions that would show me the 4 steps I needed to take. Verizon and Blackberry expect me to wade thru the manual and figure out what's in the box. The good news is that I am very happy with my new Blackberry Bold.

The bad news is that very few companies have figured out how to provide "get started" instructions or assembly instructions for the things we need in our lives. Apple does a good, but not perfect job. Their "getting started" documentation is great. But I have still been confused by what they take for granted when I try to use their devices.

The current trend in documentation is to provide picture-rich instructions that are universally understandable no matter what language you speak. This is great in theory. Graphics are attractive and accessible. They save a lot of money and time by preventing needless (and often bad) translations. But as you'll note from reading Ronni Marshak's article, there's a problem with illustration-only instructions. Many of us are verbal, not graphical people. A set of complicated illustrations can be very confusing. Case in point, my husband and I spent 5 hours last Saturday assembling very well made and affordable bunk beds. But the other Amazon reviewers claim to have spent only 2 hours! We had to redo a number of things because there were no words or symbols explaining what you needed to pay particular attention to in doing the assembly. So we had to retrace our steps a couple of times. My brother loves video instructions. But he, too, complained bitterly when he and a buddy were trying to assemble his Endless Pool (indoor swimming lane) and the assembly instructions were in the form of a video. Imagine that you're doing a plumbing job and you need to climb out of the enclosure and go rewatch that section of the video. (I guess that's what iPads are for, but I don't think you'd want to risk the potential damage by using it during your home fix-it project.) How do YOU like your instructions?? And how do you test them before you ship products to customers?

See Ronni's perspective:

Use Your Words
Although Pictorial Instructions Avoid Localization Issues, Some of Us Don't Respond Well to Diagrams
By Ronni T. Marshak, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, August 19, 2010

Nokia’s Design by Community Phone

Scott Jordan sent me a link to Nokia’s “Design a Concept Phone by Community” site. I’ve been following the traffic and the dialog for a couple of weeks. What Nokia is doing is offering a series of interactive design polls about different aspects of a new concept mobile phone. Here’s this week’s:

Each week you get to “vote” by moving sliders on a different aspect of the phone design:

• Display and User Interface

• Size and shape

• Materials

• Operating System

• Connectivity

• Camera

• Enhancements

Local Motors: Reinventing the Car Industry from the Outside In

One of the most inspiring "stories" at the Business Innovation Factory's fifth annual summit, BIF-5, in Providence, Rhode Island was told by Jay Rogers, the founder of an innovative new American car company, Local Motors (www.local-motors.com). Jay is an ex-marine whose grandfather instilled in him a passion for cars. His grandfather owned, among other companies, Indian Motorcycles. Jay grew up in a car-mad family. His experience fighting in Iraq convinced him that the U.S. needed to shed its dependence on foreign oil. So he has invented a new kind of car company.

The cars are made out of easily assembled, lightweight composite materials to reduce fuel consumption. The car chassis is licensed from an existing mass-producer of cars (the first one uses a BMW chassis). The "proprietary open source" car designs are contributed by world-class industrial and automotive designers participating in open competitions on the Local-Motors Web site. The designs are submitted, evolved, voted on, and critiqued by car fans, designers, and prospective customers (customers' votes count more). The car designs are specific to each region of the country. The community also participates in the design-to-build phase through an open prototyping process for each new model. Each phase is photographed, commented upon and posted, with trade-offs discussed.

Once each local car model is in production in its micro-factory, each customer helps assemble his own car at this local sales/manufacturing facility/service location. (Think Build-a-Bear for cars!). As Jay Rogers explained: your car is the second most expensive investment most people make in their lives; why shouldn't you have an amazing experience and an amazing car?