OK, so now what?
]]>I wrote up a version of this story for my book (which is coming along nicely, by the way), but it didn’t make the cut. I was going to use it as an example of how companies which are adaptive to the changing environment, and their unfolding understanding of the market context, will be able to jump on opportunities as they arise, rather than sticking doggedly to a pre-ordained strategic plan. Here it is below.
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In the late 1950’s Honda contemplated a bold move: entering the motorbike market in the United States. We all know how this story turns out — today Honda is a dominant player in the US, selling a wide range of models in large numbers. But its start could not have been more improbable or less likely to succeed. It was only by staying flexible to an emerging understanding of what the problem — and the opportunities — were, that Honda succeeded in its long shot.
Honda had done well in its native Japan, leaping in a short amount of time to the number one position largely on the strength of its Super Cub model, which was based around a new lightweight, 50cc engine that Honda had developed. The engine was inexpensive which allowed the bike to be sold for a low price, an important factor in Japan’s struggling post-war economy. The Super Cub had also been designed with close attention to customers’ needs such as the ability to drive it one-handed to facilitate carrying a package in the other arm.
At face value, the Super Cub had little appeal for the American buyer. The motorbike market in the US at the time was quite small and dominated by entrenched players such as Harley Davidson, Indian, and imports like Triumph and Moto Guzzi. There were only 1,000 full-time motorbike dealers in the entire country (compared to some 10,000 today), and most bikes were either in the mold of Harley-Davidson — large, heavy, and built for noisy cruising, or were sportbikes made for performance, exemplified by Triumph. Motorbike riders were generally seen as nefarious outsiders, clad in leather jackets and riding in packs to terrorize small towns and cause trouble at funfairs, an image played up by Hollywood — think James Dean, Marlon Brando in The Wild One, and Easy Rider. Furthermore, Japanese products with funny names were looked upon suspiciously by American consumers.
In 1958 Honda dispatched Kihachiro Kawashima (who went on to become president of American Honda) and his assistant, to spend time in the US and scope out the market for Honda’s bikes. Honda had no market research of any kind, and in fact knew very little about America at all. Kawashima’s reaction upon arriving in the US was, “How could we have been so stupid as to start a war with such a vast and wealthy country?”
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Given that the average consumer gets a new cellphone every 18 months, this isn’t really different from what’s been going on for years, it’s just that the price-point is far higher. But it’s not out of line for other smartphones, and if anything Apple has been pushing prices down in the category — for launch prices at least. BlackBerry and Palm both had to launch the Storm and Pre, respectively, at the $200 pricepoint, or they wouldn’t stand a chance against the iPhone.
The difference is that in the past launch prices quickly dropped, sometimes to free, whereas Apple keeps them consistent throughout the life of a product generation. So while it puts pressure on competitors for their launch prices, it also opens the door for them to drop their prices over time, perhaps significantly undercutting the iPhone.
[And for the record, I sympathize with a commenter on the Bits Blog post that it’s unfortunate that so many see resource-intensive products like cellphones as disposable on such a frequent basis. Granted, they get beat up a lot being handheld and portable, but upgrading is by far the most common reason. I have to plea guilty as charged here too, though I generally hang on to a phone for more like 3 years (my Sony Ericsson has a cracked screen, but otherwise I still use it).]
]]>Perhaps the most common reason given for joining the microsharing site Twitter is “participating in the conversation” or some version of that. I myself am guilty ofusing this explanation. But is Twitter truly a conversational platform? Here I argue that the underlying mechanics of Twitter more closely resemble the knowledge co-creation seen in wikis than the dynamics seen with conversational tools like instant messaging and interactions within online social networks.
What makes for a good conversation? There are obviously many different kinds of conversations, but I think what most people would consider a conversation has a number of key elements:
Twitter is supposedly breaking more into the mainstream, but for me it is far from certain that the attributes that have served it well in its niche pioneer audience of techies will translate into a mass medium. The lack of ability to define what Twitter does has made it part of the fun so far, but will hinder its broader adoption.
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OK, so now what?
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Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, is the first real competitor to Google.
I rarely use Google. Or rather, I rarely use Google.com. Because Google is embedded into Safari, I just use the search box there, which creates huge sticky-ness that’s hard to displace. Of course, Microsoft has the same option now for embedding Bing into IE, assuming it’s allowed to by the courts. But the very short amount of time I’ve spent with Bing has me re-thinking my search engine options seriously for the first time.
I know a lot of people gush about Google’s user experience, and certainly there are a lot of nice things about using it: speed, accuracy of results, some things like weather that give instant contextual results. But from an aesthetic point of view I’ve found its minimalism to be on the drab side, rather than the chic side. It’s utilitarian, not fancy, and mostly not that fun.
Bing has had the courage to say “to hell with eeking out the last millisecond of page load time” which both Google and, historically, Yahoo have always emphasized. In today’s world and moving forward it’s just not that important (mobile being an exception, but for that you can provide a custom experience).
Katherine Boehret at WSJ has a write-up on the niceties of Bing, so I won’t repeat them here. It does some things different than Google, breaking some ingrained habits, and while there isn’t much that’s significantly worse, there is quite a bit that is considerably better. The results that come back are somewhat different, sometimes more on target, sometimes not, I’d say the jury’s out on that, especially since this is a just-launched service (assuming it’s not just a re-skin of Live, I don’t know what’s under the hood), and assuming it will improve as users contribute with clicks. (Like Google, it lists this blog as the top search when I self-search, so that’s a plus.)
It presents the search results in a whole lot nicer way than Google, especially image search (multi-size thumbnails and grids, different choices of detail, filters by image size, colors, etc., and overall a presentation that focuses on the images themselves). I love how sounds and videos are embedded into search results and start playing with a mouse-over for a small preview. Hovering over the right edge of a search result description pulls up more info without having to click on it.
I like that the front cover photo changes each day and how you can float over it to find the hidden easter eggs that lead you on unexpected paths (one is shown popped up in the bottom right of the above image). Ask.com tried the splash-image approach but that was more of a skin, but Bing’s approach is more engaging and encourages you to actually visit the front page, rather than bypass it as quickly as possible to get to the results.
Bing avoids two traps: One, it doesn’t just try to ape Google. Two, Microsoft hasn’t over-styled it and thrown in the kitchen sink of aesthetics and functionality, as they have with many of their other products. There is clearly an editorial hand at work that hasn’t allowed it to get focus-grouped to death. Kudos to Microsoft for that.
I’m going to drop Bing into my toolbar bookmarks and give it a whirl for a while. Who knows, maybe it will be enough to displace the 800lb gorilla.
]]>]]>I think students need to focus on the intellectual aspects of design, rather than becoming enamored with the more obvious, traditional, and seemingly glamorous parts of design. Many students see Karim Rashid, or other flamboyant form givers, talk about design, and fail to realize that these are purposefully produced public approaches to a profession, much like Paris Hilton is to media. Design isn’t about that, at least not the design that’s going to land you a job and help you pay your mortgage. It’s about something thoughtful, and methodical, and useful, and beautiful, all at once. The design I talk about, and the design work we do at frog, is so far away from the “making beautiful objects” of yesterday that it’s almost a different job entirely.
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I long for a day where designers, without long and convoluted explanations and examples and spec work and hand waving, are paid for the output of their mind, rather than their hands. We produce artifacts to visualize, and to illustrate, and to show what we mean; these are ancillary to the things we think. Doctors, lawyers, even smarmy politicians aren’t compensated directly based on their output – only on their intellect. Ultimately, we need to realize – and we need to communicate to our clients and to the general public – that design is a culturally embedded phenomenon about changing behavior.
Myself and a couple of colleagues — Sara Louise Todd and Mary Anne Masterston — will be running a workshop as part of the Sustainable Brands Conference in Monterey, CA, in early June. The line-up of speakers is impressive, including frog’s own Robert Fabricant talking about Project M. If you’re into this area and are in the fortunate position of having a travel/conference budget, it should be a good conference.
They haven’t updated the workshop description yet from the original one we sent them before we’d finalized the workshop agenda, so here are more details. Our workshop is coming at the end of the conference, so we are using as an opportunity to help people frame the ideas they’ve been hearing/thinking about into something actionable:
]]>What do you do on Monday morning?
How do you convert the ideas and examples you’ve been hearing about in the previous days into action in your own organization? How do you synthesize everything you’ve absorbed into something comprehensive and meaningful to your company? How does what you’ve learned this week apply directly to your company’s long-term goals?
Using our frogThinkTM creative work session methods, we’ll take you through a series of activities that will assist you in applying your inspired energy from the week into actionable goals. This will be a high energy, hands-on, collaborative workshop, out of which you will get a distilled set of ideas and next steps, written down in a form to be easily shared with others on Monday morning.
Using a series of provocations we will help you explore the long-term positioning of your brand. Next we will provide approaches to define the first steps in getting you there, acknowledging the challenging economic client in the near-term. Activities will be team-based, but your take-a-ways will be focused directly on your individual needs and circumstance.
;)
click to enlargeMy colleague Celine Pering just picked up this book by Kim Goodwin of Cooper, and it’s a stunner. A real tome at 700+ pages, it covers a huge swath of the design research and development process for complex digital products, with an unsurprising emphasis on Cooper’s persona process. It’s well organized, with a nice balance of theory and practical advice, and highly visual. For a comprehensive hands-on guide with lots of examples, this is the best I’ve yet seen. Kudos to Kim, this must have been a big undertaking.
]]>Coincidentally, this essay was the first place where I ran across the concept of wicked problems, something which I would return to years later.
Here are some excerpts from it. I think it’s striking how much it presages of current ideas on design thinking.
Despite efforts to discover the foundations of design thinking in the fine arts, the natural sciences, or most recently, the social sciences, design eludes reduction and remains a surprisingly flexible activity. No single definition of design, or branches of professionalized practice such as industrial or graphic design, adequately covers the diversity of ideas and methods gathered together under this label.
There is no area of contemporary life where design — the plan, project, or working hypothesis which constitutes the “intention” in intentional operations — is not a significant factor in shaping human experience.
To gain some idea of how extensively design affects contemporary life, consider the four broad areas in which design is explored throughout the world by professional designers and by many others who may not regard themselves as designers:
- Symbolic and visual communications
- Material objects
- Activities and organized services
- Complex systems or environments for living, working, playing and learning
Reflecting on this list…it is tempting to identify and limit specific design professions within each area… But this would not be adequate, because these areas are not simply categories of objects that reflect the results of design. Properly understood and used, they are also places of invention shared by all designers, places where one discovers the dimensions of design thinking by a reconsideration of problems and solutions.
There are so many examples of conceptual repositioning in design that it is surprising no one has recognized the systematic pattern of invention that lies behind design thinking in the twentieth century.
Design problems are “indeterminate” and “wicked” because design has no special subject matter of its own apart from what a designer conceives it to be. The subject matter of design is potentially universal in scope, because design thinking may be applied to any area of human experience.
[W]hat many people call “impossible” may actually only be a limitation of imagination that can be overcome by better design thinking. This is not directed toward a technological “quick fix” in hardware but toward new integrations of signs, things, actions and environments that address the concrete needs and values of human beings in diverse circumstances.
The essay is reprinted in the book The Idea of Design
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