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Following Twitter's announcement of their own sales platform only yesterday, this news highlights the challenges faced from retailers' point-of-view: rapidly evolving sales platforms. With every technology company trying to reposition and reframe themselves as a payment platform, retailers must ensure that they are prepared at each step along the way. Ideally, this would involve a robust asset management system that can flexibly repurpose content across these channels, all from a centralized sources that is tightly integrated with a financial back-end. Organizations that have developed such capability for omni-channel media will be well-positioned for this continuing evolution.

#e-commerce #platforms #apple

This is an early step in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy, hopefully even fun. Users will get access to offers and merchandise they can’t get anywhere else and can act on them right in the Twitter apps for Android and iOS; sellers will gain a new way to turn the direct relationship they build with their followers into sales. We’re not building this alone: we’ve partnered with Fancy (@fancy), Gumroad (@gumroad), Musictoday (@Musictoday) and Stripe (@stripe) as platforms for this initial test, with more partners to follow soon.

Twitter has long struggled to articulate their monetization strategy, although few doubt the value of such a large and highly engaged community of users. In the wake of a similar news from Facebook, this announcement shows how Twitter plans to augment their platform with integrated e-commerce capabilities.

Such integration will lead to more natural buying behaviour than that supposed by the previous tweet-to-buy system, which allowed users to add items to their cart on Amazon by using the #AmazonCart hashtag. Retailers are eager to see a more direct link between social engagement and sales, and third-party solutions have sprung up to fill this gap.

The latest developments from Twitter and Facebook make such previous solutions seem ad-hoc, and potentially compromising to the integrity of these social platforms. Forcing users to tweet about something in order to make a purchase (as with #AmazonCart) may have seemed clever to those who envisioned the dual benefit of sales and chatter for their products. However, users who are willing to put down cash for a product are not necessarily also willing to tweet about it. The fact that a purchase is made on a social platform will make it more likely that a user will share this information if they choose to do so. The separation of the Tweet button and the Buy button allows users to do each on their own terms, and is an altogether more user-centred solution to the integration of social and sales platforms.

#platforms #e-commerce #twitter

To help the Digital Service achieve its mission, today the Administration is releasing the initial version of a Digital Services Playbook that lays out best practices for building effective digital services like web and mobile applications and will serve as a guide for agencies across government. To increase the success of government digital service projects, this playbook outlines 13 key “plays” drawn from private and public-sector best practices that, if followed together, will help federal agencies deliver services that work well for users and require less time and money to develop and operate.

The technologies used to create digital services are changing rapidly. The Playbook is designed to encourage the government to adopt the best of these advances into our own work. To further strengthen this important tool, we encourage folks across the public and private sectors to provide feedback on the Playbook, so we can strengthen this important tool.

The White House announced the formation of the U.S. Digital Service, which is very much in the vein of the UK's Government Development Services team that is behind the high-lauded design of GOV.uk. Along with the team itself, the Administration also released a playbook that echoes many of the principles outlined by their UK counterparts. Namely, starting with user needs, taking a holistic experiential / service perspective, and prioritizing openness is both products and process.

It's particularly good to see immediate evidence of this guide in action. In the spirit of the final item - "default to open" - anyone can propose and discuss changes on GitHub. They've also included an accompanying handbook "for Procuring Digital Services Using Agile Processes".

#government #design strategy #design methods #openness #user-centered design

GDS has always had a focus on designing around user needs, largely by following its set of 10 design principles which have been developed since the department launched back in 2011.

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Bracken pointed out that the work of GDS and its transformation of services in government has made attracting people for jobs possible. He said:

"The transformation of government digital services, and the technology that underpins it, is a compelling proposition. By creating an environment in which this kind of change can happen, government is now able to attract technical experts who want to do work that matters."

Who would have thought that human-centred design would make such a coup in government services, of all industries? Despite the common complaints of the entrenchment of government bureaucracy, GOV.uk has made a mission of introducing useable and cohesive digital services that respect the citizens they serve. This group has been an inspiring case study for the design professionals, and the industry as a whole. For the most part, the redesigned products have taken centre stage, along with the articulation of the design team's mission (including their 10 design principles). Now, the story of the organizational (here, governmental) benefits are beginning to come through. When you successfully adopt a human-centred ethos, there are inevitable benefits not only for the people that you serve, but the people that make up your organization and, therefore, your organizational as a whole.

#organizational change #people #design methods #design research

"We like to think of ourselves as a kind of diversified media company. Ultimately audiences have more choice but they are behaving across all these different places and ultimately brands have to do the same thing. At some point the publishers and the media companies might not have dominance any more because there will be enough owned and social channels to augment those. They're still going to be a very important part of the strategy because I think they provide an enormously important service just in the overall consumption of content, news and information. It's just not the sort of hegemony any more."

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What Hill and GE are keen on are more sponsorship style deals such as those with Vox, and in particular the kind of close, content-led partnerships the company has developed with the Economist on its Look Ahead series.

#brand as publisher #GE

...Service Design is equally about process improvement (for its own sake). And Service Design is about improving the staff experience (for its own sake). And Service Design is about infrastructure, and culture, and roles & responsibilities, and professional development, and organisational capability. And so to approach Service Design as an extension of UX as you’ve been practicing it on your ecommerce site or your app is to completely fail to appreciate the problem you’re tackling.

To approach a Service Design project you need to think holistically, think systemically, and think about the end-to-end flow as PEOPLE move through the service (on both sides of the counter). And you need to look under the bonnet at the processes, systems and infrastructure required in order to deliver on that service.

Service design is about more than the problem under consideration. Many design disciplines are becoming aware of the complex context in which they are situated, but this acknowledgement alone is not enough. Service design describes a practice with an explicit goal of addressing and synthesizing these complexities, through methods that are specifically oriented to cultivating a holistic perspective of the system, by engaging directly with its various components. It is not what we know that makes service design our domain - it is the actions, methods, and engagements of our practice.

#Service Design #design methods #human-centered design #Practice

Professors Tim Bell, Mike Fellows, and Ian H. Witten have figured out how to teach the concepts of computer science through games, puzzles, and magic tricks. Taking the computer out of the picture—for the time being—allows children as young as 5 to learn about the basic ideas that undergird computer science.

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Unplugging computer science opens it up to many who have felt excluded until now—young students, female students, students who aren’t “into computers.” In fact, Computer Science Unplugged has expanded access even beyond the traditional student population, to include senior citizens, for example, and members of the general public who attend science fairs and festivals.

The transition from the Industrial Age into the Information Age is about more than the tools that we use - it is about the mental modes that these tools reinforce. A fixation on the tools of this deep shift is itself a behavioural vestige of the waning, mechanistic paradigm. Computer Science Unplugged is an example of how we can focus on mental modes over tools in a practical manner.

#tools #network #information age

Yes, the homepage is still dead, which is why our new front door is quite different from most. Now, when you come to qz.com, we are offering an efficient briefing on global business news, called the Brief. It’s intended to be read straight through, like a well written memo from a trusted advisor. What it’s not is a sea of headlines, like you find on the homepages of many news sites.

Think of the Brief as a continually updated version of our popular morning email, the Daily Brief, which will continue to be published as usual. As always, we will link you to the best sources for each story, whether that’s us or someone else.

Quartz has rapidly gained readership since their launch in September 2014 thanks in large part to their ability to embrace their digital-only platform. Quartz realizes that publishing news on the web - and on the web only - leads to an entirely different relationship with users than with traditional media. The rapid pace of their redesign is nice, but it is this underlying motivation that will be enable them to maintain this impressive trajectory. The most recent redesign of Quartz is not just keeping pace with best practices of responsive design or trending aesthetics. Instead, it reflects emergent modes of online news interaction in ways that would be impossible if their web platform was merely one of republishing.

As an example, the Quartz homepage now features the Brief (mentioned above), which feels like a combination of a blog roll, Twitter feed, and an email newsletter - one that is novel and particularly well-suited to its context. This nuanced understanding is made possible by their focus on the web as more than a publishing platform - it defines their organization fully through its behavioural and operational implications.

#Quartz #platforms #content platform

A characteristic component of human-centred design research methods is their ability to cultivate empathy. Adopted from the field of anthropology, ethnographic methods are a means of immersing ourselves in the worlds of others to understand their lived experience. Whether the scale is societal, cultural, or personal modes of interaction, design research seeks to enrich the project with the rich perspective of others. Design researchers often think of themselves as user advocates - they are responsible for bringing the voice of the user into conversations with businesses and brands, where they are typically under-represented or neglected.

Empathy is a critical component of strategic consulting as well. As consultants, we must seek to understand the perspective of our partners, clients, and stakeholders if we hope to achieve any lasting impact. Facilitative practices of service design often seek to close the gap between the front- and back-stage of a service as part of the design process. In this way, empathy is not just a tool, but an outcome, and a reliable lens through which to determine the value of any activity when you're in the weeds of a complex project.

#empathy #design methods #design research #consulting

Source - IBM CEO Study

#human-centered #customer experience

This presentation shows yet another massive, traditionally IT-oriented consulting and services firm adopting design principles toward systems on the scale of organizations. The main take-away here is that design practice must be applied to employee-facing service in addition to the more obvious consumer-facing services. Human considerations govern the behaviour of organizations just as they do the behaviour of their customers. As alignment between the front- and back-stage of organizations is a primary goal of service deign practice, the integration of design practice into each side seems not only natural but necessary.

#Service Design #operations #SAP #organizational change

In this talk from this year's LeanUX conference, Jabe Bloom presents a reading of organizational theorist Russel Ackoff's systems thinking theories. The main concern is that, in dealing with the future, we must necessarily make two sets of assumptions: the ideal design solution as well as the future context of that solution. Bloom says this untenable approach results in "variety reducing" systems, which diminish an organization's capability to respond to any other possible future.

Instead of trying to predict a future state and achieve that future state by basically making your system as efficient as possible and projecting toward a single ideal end goal, what you want to do is make the system capable of dealing with the fact that the future is unpredictable.

This statement mirrors one from Ackoff himself:

Design into the organization or institution enough flexibility and responsiveness so that it can change rapidly and effectively to meet whatever it encounters.

Bloom advises that, instead of making assumptions about the context of the future ("Preactivism"), we must instead design for the current context - responsively and iteratively ("Interactivism"). This is the main thrust of LeanUX, which, being derived from the history of pre-software-centricity organizational theorists like Ackoff, is widely applicable across domains.

We must pursue the ideal design for our current context. In taking this approach, we can begin to "understand what constraints impede us from achieving that ideal. By managing constraints, we create variety increasing systems." Such systems are more resilient and responsive than those based on, and therefore vulnerable to, the assumptions of preactivism.

An Interactivist perspective is reinforced by a design approach, which uses the here-and-now reality of touchpoints and experience as lenses through which to distill and (most importantly) act in the face of ambiguous, complex systems.

#lean #systems

Instead of putting the process model first and giving the process model highest importance (the traditional model for BPM), these teams put experience design first and then optimize and transform underlying business processes to fit the desired experience. Adopting this type of “experience first” approach is counter-cultural in the BPM world, since best practice dictates a “model first” approach when it comes to good process design.

Clay Richardson interviews Phil Gilbert, the General Manager of IBM Design. Phil has extensive experience in Business Process Management (BPM) - as does IBM - and he presents a clear vision for the alignment of process and experience through design:

… I’m really trying to break down… this concept of the enterprise value proposition. Too much of what we do in technology is about the enterprise value proposition. What great design and great design thinking is starting to do - and, what I think ultimately this notion of the consumerization of IT, I think really what this is all about - is it’s saying “stop, you need to focus on whether people use it.” If people use it, then you have a shot at achieving some sort of higher-value proposition.

It's worth listening to the full interview to get a sense of the deep integration that IBM hopes to achieve between experience design and process management. Phil rightly frames design as "a mental model as opposed to a prescribed process" with which to modify other existing, layered, tangled processes. He explains that "BPM solutions, too often, are built to the same standards that applications are built to," and that a design-led approach can bring clarity of purpose to BPM by placing and constantly reasserting the focus on outcomes.

#process #BPM #IBM #Business Process Management #design consulting

The industrial era was built on the kind of carrot-and-stick management that rewards some behaviors and punishes others. This has been successful in a world of predictability, where work can be broken down into routine tasks that can be done according to a prescribed formula. But it won’t serve us in the 21st century. In the coming years we will need to get the absolute best our people can offer. We will need their heads and hearts as well as their hands.

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A podular approach allows a large company to act as if it were a flock or swarm of small companies; it gives the whole a level of flexibility and adaptiveness that would never be possible in a divisional organization. A podular organization is a fractal organization: every pod is an autonomous fractal unit that represents, and can function on behalf of, the business as a whole.

The network paradigm of the 21st century has implications beyond the immediately apparent consequences for communication media. At such cultural scale, certain feedback mechanisms become unavoidable, and we ignore them at our own peril. "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us," "The medium is the message" - we've heard it all before and this is what it means in the real practice of organizational design. If our products are changing, so should our methods, our interaction, our frameworks, and our organizations.

It's always interesting to note how this perspective leads toward greater human centricity:

At Morning Star, workers manage themselves and report only to each other. The company provides a system and marketplace that allows workers to coordinate their activities.

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That customer-service culture is at the core of Nordstrom’s success. The entire system is organized in order to support that salesperson on the Nordstrom floor to help them deliver the best possible customer service.

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One of the principles underlying Semco’s success is the idea that every business should be small enough that each worker can comprehend it as a whole system...

Another principle is transparency and trust.

#organizational change #network #fractal

So there’s not going to be one metric that you look at. I love metrics and I love thinking about optimization, but I think that the optimal state is being slightly suboptimal because as soon as you try to actually optimize, particularly for a single metric, you end up finding that the best way to optimize for that metric ends up perverting the metric and making the metric mean the opposite of what it used to mean.

More from Jonah Peretti, co-founder of BuzzFeed, demonstrating how the best "tech-led" perspective is one that seeks the alignment of technology with human factors, rather than trying to cheat the human element with technological proxies.

#human-centered

I think of “D“esign as an exploration of the conceivable futures. I use my sketches and wireframes as means to make explorative moves and assess the consequences of those moves. As I explore the problem space, I could relatively easily keep the design models in my head, but I would fail in my primary objective to create a framework for a conversation among the stakeholders, the intended audience, and me.

... it’s a process of problem setting as much as it is a process of problem solving...

This is the value of a design-led approach. Wireframes, sketches, maps, and frameworks, are all means of prototyping, through which we can explore a problem space and a solution space simultaneously. Complex problems require an approach that is capable of dealing with uncertainty in this way. Design methods help us to do so in a visual, collaborative, conversational, and iterative manner.

#design methods #process #prototyping

A new type of executive is emerging at the center of the transformation: the chief marketing technologist. CMTs are part strategist, part creative director, part technology leader, and part teacher. Although they have an array of titles—Kimberly-Clark has a “global head of marketing technology,” while SAP has a “business information officer for global marketing,” for example—they have a common job: aligning marketing technology with business goals, serving as a liaison to IT, and evaluating and choosing technology providers. About half are charged with helping craft new digital business models as well.

Regardless of what they’re called, the best CMTs set a technology vision for marketing. They champion greater experimentation and more-agile management of that function’s capabilities. And they are change agents, working within the function and across the company to create competitive advantage.

- By 2017 the CMO will Spend More on IT Than the CIO

- Some ideas on how that might come about

#content platform

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