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Monday, October 08, 2007 |
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This is my last post on this blog. Radio Userland has served me well since I started blogging in 2003. I will post more details on the transition, at my new blog - for now I just wanted to make this announcement, and provide the new url and feeds. My old blog will be archived at its old url (http://radio.weblogs.com/0121664/) and I will keep the archives going. Stuart, who has worked out the platform for Conversations with Dina on Wordpress has done some neato hacks - one that I love a lot is that the search function will not just search the new blog archives, but also my old Radio blog archives. And he has managed to transfer some of my posts over too. That's so cool!!! Lots more needs doing there ... and that will emerge I'm sure. 12:26:59 PM  comment [] trackback []
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Monday, March 19, 2007 |
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"Design Democracy is the wave of the future. Exceptional design may only
be done by great star designers. But the design of our music
experiences, the design of our MySpace pages, the design of our blogs,
the design of our clothes, the design of our online community chats,
the design of our Class of '95 brochures, the design of our screens,
the design of the designs on our bodies---We are all designing more of
our lives. And with more and more tools, we, the masses, want to design
anything that touches us on the journey, the big journey through life.
People want to participate in the design of their lives. They insist on
being part of the conversation about their lives." Bruce Nussbaum, Businessweek Online [link via Putting People First] 12:26:21 PM comment [] trackback []
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Saturday, December 23, 2006 |
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Choices, "If you're using the term simplicity to mean "grace and economy" or "elegance," that's terrific. A great example of this is the difference between the way you search for music on Rhapsody and the way you search for music on iTunes. Rhapsody makes you decide if you want to search for albums, tracks, or artists. iTunes doesn't give you any choice: it just searches all fields, which works just as well and is easier. Economy means power, in this case, and it’s a feature. On the other hand, if you're using simplicity to mean a lack of power, a lack of features, that's fine, if you want to be in the paper clip business, good luck with that, but the chances that your product will solve my exact problems starts to shrink and your potential market share does, too."Great stuff from Joel Spolsky. 1:33:45 AM comment [] trackback []
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Wednesday, November 08, 2006 |
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is on November 14, 2006. An interesting initiative from Making Life Easy: As part of World Usability Day we’re asking you to make some noise about things that are hard to use. London-based research and design consultancy Flow is marking World Usability Day with a campaign to get people to speak up about the things that make their life needlessly difficult.
Confusing cash machines, unclear signs, frustrating websites - poor usability is everywhere and it gets in the way of life. Sometimes it is just annoying. At other times it stops us doing what we need to do. It can even be dangerous.
World Usability Day is an international event promoting the message that people have had enough of things that are hard to use. We want people to share their usability frustrations with their fellow sufferers. Record your experiences at the campaign website MakingLifeEasy.org and: 1) See what is frustrating other people Get Involved! Submit an Entry Usability Hall of Shame/Hall of Fame Send us a photo of your good or bad usability example! Either add it to our Flickr Group or email it to us and tell us what's good or bad about it. Then, join our blog and you can write and submit a blog post to put your submission in the running for the Usability Halls of Fame/Shame and we'll post it to the blog where everyone can comment and vote! Log In To Add A Submission Here Vote for the Usability Hall of Shame and Hall of Fame Cast your vote on any of the examples you find on the site by adding a comment with a +1 (for Hall of Fame) or -1 (for Hall of Shame). We'll tally the votes and announce the inductees on World Usability Day, 14 November 2006.
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Sunday, October 15, 2006 |
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"A camel is a horse that was designed by a committee. In my experience, market research can sometimes feel very much like "design by Committee", which can spell disaster with a capital D. Your product, or service, can't be all things to all people, even those within your target market. So beware of embracing the committee mentality. Sir Barnett Cocks said it best: A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled." Danielle Rodgers reminds us of some of the challenges in traditional Market Research and shares some boobytraps to watch out for. Tags: market research, marketing research 8:48:48 AM comment [] trackback []
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Tuesday, August 22, 2006 |
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I discovered and enjoyed a series of qualitative user research reports by Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase, who takes some amazing photographs and blogs them with observations at Future Perfect. [link via Chetan Kunte via Adaptive Path]  "What sets these locations apart from cities in more 'emerged' markets?
Aside from the scale of what's on sale there is a thriving market for device repair services ranging from swapping out components to re-soldering circuit boards to reflashing phones in a language of your choice ,
naturally. Repairs are often carried out with little more than a
screwdriver, a toothbrush (for cleaning contact points) the right
knowledge and a flat surface to work on. Repair manuals (which appear
to be reverse engineered) are available, written in Hindi, English and
Chinese and can even be subscribed to, but there is little evidence of
them being actively used. Instead many of the repairers rely on informal social networks to share knowledge on common faults, and repair techniques.
It's often easier to peer over the shoulder of a neighbour than open
the manual itself. Delhi has the distinction of also offering a wide
variety of mobile phone repair courses at training institutes such as Britco and Bridco turning out a steady flow of mobile phone repair engineers. To round off the ecosystem wholesalers' offer all the tools required to set up and run a repair business from individual components and circuit board schematics to screwdrivers and software installers."Not so different from what I had described in this series on culture of business in India. And more - some observations and insights into non-literate communication practices - wow - this is a staggering fact - "Everyday many of the 800 million non-literate people in the world use phones and mobile phones to communicate." "We noted that textually non-literate users of public call
offices often took a scrap of paper with a phone number scrawled on
it to the owner and asked them to dial the number. This system is
open to errors caused by inaccuracy, either because the number was
not clearly transcribed, or simply because the paper on which the
number was written was worn and faded from being carried. User interface designers often talk about the user's mental model of a system, and how it maps to the reality of how a device actually functions. It is typical for designers to use metaphors such as the 'desktop' or 'soft keys' to support the building of an accurate model. Textually non-literate users will not have access to textual cues, so their mental model may well be poor. Whilst a poor mental model is not a problem within a limited range of (rote learned) tasks, if and when errors occur users may adopt the wrong strategies to correct the problem. Designers use a myriad of audio, visual and textual cues to support the user's understanding of how the mobile phone works. Literate persons are able to quickly absorb (and subsequently ignore) this textual information and apply the knowledge in practice. A positive outcome reinforces their understanding of how the system works and helps build an accurate mental model. Textually non-literate people are required to make assumptions for the textual prompts based on how the device responds to their actions. A plausibly positive result is sufficient to believe that is how the system works regardless of how well it maps to the actual system."  There's also a brief report on 'Mobile Essentials - Field Study and Concepting' (download paper, 0.4mb). The paper introduces three interrelated ways to understand human behaviour - centre of gravity, point of reflection and range of distribution."The second idea is the Point of Reflection - the
moment when leaving a space when you pause current activities turn back
into an environment and check you have the mobile essentials. Typically
this involves looking at the Center of Gravity, sometimes tapping
pockets, sometimes speaking aloud. Not seeing the objects where they
are supposed to be (the Center of Gravity) can be a sign that they are
already carried." Great stuff ... and no wonder then that Nokia is always stretching the boundaries of mobile phone usage in India. All images here are from Nokia and Jan's blog ... thanks for sharing these reports and observations ... it is is not what most 'corporates' believe in or do. Tags: qualitative research, ethnography, india, mobile technology 9:16:24 AM comment [] trackback []
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Friday, June 16, 2006 |
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This is the last in the series of Cultural Insights for doing business in India. Just wanted to say these observations are based on learnings over 18 years of doing qualitative research in India. It's interesting to see how some things have changed, while others remain constant, over generations.
The complete series: Many thanks - to all those who have commented and linked to this series of posts - I love the conversations around these issues - keep them coming - and I will add my two-cents shortly! 5:37:35 PM comment [] trackback []
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Monday, March 13, 2006 |
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Charu is sick of Focus Group bashing, and feels, Don't Shoot the Messenger! Tags: qualitative research, ethnography, india 8:33:45 PM comment [] trackback []
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Thought I'd share some great blog posts and papers I had bookmarked and finally got down to reading: "The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don't need advertising to make them. The Intention Economy is about markets, not marketing. You don't need marketing to make Intention Markets. The Intention Economy is built around truly open markets, not a collection of silos. In The Intention Economy, customers don't have to fly from silo to silo, like a bees from flower to flower, collecting deal info (and unavoidable hype) like so much pollen. In The Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer's purchase. Simple as that. The Intention Economy is built around more than transactions. Conversations matter. So do relationships. So do reputation, authority and respect. Those virtues, however, are earned by sellers (as well as buyers) and not just "branded" by sellers on the minds of buyers like the symbols of ranchers burned on the hides of cattle. The Intention Economy is about buyers finding sellers, not sellers finding (or "capturing") buyers. In The Intention Economy, a car rental customer should be able to say to the car rental market, "I'll be skiing in Park City from March 20-25. I want to rent a 4-wheel drive SUV. I belong to Avis Wizard, Budget FastBreak and Hertz 1 Club. I don't want to pay up front for gas or get any insurance. What can any of you companies do for me?" — and have the sellers compete for the buyer's business." Reading this, and with my limited understanding of the Attention Economy, am wondering .... does one follow the other ... from Attention to Intention ... or Intention to Attention?Tracking the Future of Telephony ... a great transcript of a very interesting by Norman Lewis director of research for France Telecom at eTel. Really good stuff ... some snips: "The fundamental point is voice and audio now just becomes another application on the Internet.
And that is incredibly exciting, as far as I am concerned, because it
is like time, it is now liberated, it is not a stand alone application
anymore. It is embedded in everything we do…Time has became intrinsic
in everything. I think that is where voice is going in the future. I
think that is truly revolution". "... we have that possibility of taking that application [voice]…and liberating it [voice] from that kind of stranglehold that I think telcos have had in the past… and now we can begin to do things we have never done before. …If you just look at the recent period with Ebay-Skype...voice is becoming something of an adjunct to other services and will open up new possibilities...I see this as a huge golden opportunity for immense innovation...What we [the telcos] are doing is re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic. That is essentially what a lot of us are doing in our companies. The innovation landscape has changed…" "It can actually create a sweet spot for all of us…for me innovation is rarely about identifying problems our customers have got and trying to solve them. Real innovation is about social change. It is about adopting, it can be incremental, it can also be very disruptive. But if really had to begin with real social motivations, of why people are doing things. What kind of things that they really want to do… it is a social consequence that they [“digital children”] introduce technology into their lives in ways we do not quite fully understand… understanding customers [social] behaviour and motivations…that is the coal face as far as I am concerned…Are we going to develop Internet apps that really embed voice in everything we do, and fundamentally transform that whole experience. I think that is the question." danah who is a really really smart researcher, ethnographer, media-ecologist, digi-culturist, sociologist, (she's looking for someone to bestow upon her an 'ist') explains Why Youth Heart MySpace. Geeks in Toyland - a Wired article on how Lego managed to effectively convert their customers to their R&D labs and effectively re-wrote the innovation game! [link via Steve at All this chittah-chattah] "Some Lego executives worried that the hackers
might cannibalize the market for future Mindstorms accessories or
confuse potential customers looking for authorized Lego products. After
a few months of wait-and-see, Lego concluded that limiting creativity
was contrary to its mission of encouraging exploration and ingenuity.
Besides, the hackers were providing a valuable service. "We came to
understand that this is a great way to make the product more exciting,"
Nipper says. "It's a totally different business paradigm - although
they don't get paid for it, they enhance the experience you can have
with the basic Mindstorms set." Rather than send out cease and desist
letters, Lego decided to let the modders flourish; it even wrote a "right to hack" into the Mindstorms software license, giving hobbyists explicit permission to let their imaginations run wild. Soon, dozens of Web sites were hosting third-party programs that helped Mindstorms users build robots that Lego had never dreamed of: soda machines, blackjack dealers, even toilet scrubbers. Hardware mavens designed sensors that were far more sophisticated than the touch and light sensors included in the factory kit. More than 40 Mindstorms guidebooks provided step-by-step strategies for tweaking performance out of the kit's 727 parts. Lego's decision to tap this culture of innovation was a natural extension of its efforts over the past few years to connect customers to the company." I tested VoiFi ...was disappointed with the basic sound quality. Uninstalled. Bookmarked ... and still to read/play with: - When The Long Tail Wags the Dog and The Long Tail of Popularity - On quick glance, basic orientation by Paul Beleen in a whitepaper called Advertising 2.0 (pdf), on "what everybody in advertising, marketing and media should know about the technologies that are reshaping their business" Printed, to be read in detail on my flight to Delhi later this week. - Veer, who has an excellent blog that I recently discovered on the Indian mobile revolution, has launched MyToday, a public RSS aggregator, with Rajesh Jain. Haven't yet played with it ... will soon! I like that it has a mobile phone edition too. - A collection of articles on Creative Thinking [link via Chuck Frey's Innovation Weblog] 7:46:37 PM comment [] trackback []
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Wednesday, January 18, 2006 |
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Last Session - Digital Summit 2006 Moderator - Rohit Mull, Tata AIG
Foundation of naukri.com is based on the virtuous circle ---- we have the most jobs - so we get the most traffic - so we get the most response, so we get the most clients - so we get the most jobs. So first you have to have massive aggregation of content, unique content, need to know content and not nice to know, dynamic and updated content, and provide the best search of the content because there are 85,000 jobs on the site at any point in time. Promotion and awareness - bootstrapping was a strategy - get repeat visitors, get buzz and word of mouth thru user experience, PR, early mover advantage. Today it is a much larger business with funds and a focus on promotions both offline and online. Harsh Roongta - apnaloan.com Put all resources into the online medium, although it was an online-offline service at that point in time. The biggest learning is that it is a mix of 4 issues - better online experience, value proposition - wanted to harness the power of the interactive medium, where our offers could be tailored, delivery to consumer - customer delight programmes - eg. we would contact the customer within 10 minutes of his putting his application online (so huge process adherence and processes were required) - and this got a lot of salience and goodwill. And finally, the CRM track. Some things were learned as we went along -- that we could calibrate our exposure to customers depending on our process capabilities. To summarize - while user experience and value propositions are important, how you deliver, how quickly you deliver, and what tracking systems are in place are key. Satya Prabhakar, President & CEO Sulekha.com The most valuable commodity today is human attention. The number of offerings to us is exploding. So as the demand for human attention increases, but supply is constant, the value of attention will only decrease. The cost per unique visitor to site is about 30--35$ in the US. Sulekha - connects Indians worldwide - blogs, groups, networks, classifieds, events, yellow pages. The Internet can be a double-edged sword - while it is low cost to try and new service, it is also low cost to spread bad word of mouth. The 'mantra' - you get people, you get them to stay, you make them do new things. So acquisition is important, but retention the key. How can you get retention -- by providing value, a great user experience, caring for the customer at every turn. Many media companies have a conflict between advertiser value and user value. Focus on the user, and the advertising will come. Anup Bagchi COO, ICICI Web Trade Ltd Asks the audience, how many of you are in an online job -- i'd say over three-fourths of the audience had their hands raised. The point he makes is that businesses are businesses whether online or offline. The online world proposition must be strong. And is slightly ahead of its time - and thats good - examples - airline tickets, banking, naukri.com, apnaloan.com. In an online world service is key --- if you screw up, customer will go away and you cannot really track him. In an offline world, you can 'repair' the relationship - give him tea, suck up to him etc. Can't do that in an online world. Online can be cruel - it is completely transparent to the customer - you cannot fumble because he will not go to the next page. So the processes and policies have to be really well thought thru. Customer Activity Management must be really strong. There are no second chances, you don't have the nuances that talking to a customer can bring and that you can exploit to your advantage (IMO - Voice and even video may help here - more touch-feel definitely when servicing a customer!!!). And finally, there is a large offline portion to distribution -- eg. the supply chain has to be completed -- railway tickets must be ultimately delivered home the next day. Anaggh Desai, CEO, D'damas Jewellery (I) Pvt. Ltd What is customer acquisition --- boon or bane! Sells travel, and fine diamond jewellery. He uses the 3 I's model -- identify, invite, incentivize them to continue being with you. They provide a feel-good factor as opposed to the rest of the panelists who provide more functional offerings :). They kept advertising their travel portal on naukri.com -- naukri was doing the work and we were getting the customers ! Q&A Q - A part of the job is to make it convenient for the customer to find what they are looking for ... but it takes ages to download many sites -so what works? A - it is true - we need more usability testing (yayyy). This is very important in a country like ours where bandwidth can vary so much. The panel agrees it is one of the biggest factors in customer satisfaction and usability. It doesn't matter how good the site looks, if it doesn't load fast enough. Q - From a client perspective --- people invest in media in order to build the business for the future. Why is it they are not willing to invest now even in a cost-per-lead model - and support this medium so that it pays back in the future? A - no real answer Q - related qn --- have you killed the medium with the Cost Per Lead model ? The problem with an emerging medium, there are a large number of questions being asked by seniors about why you want to get into that space. And it is a medium that allows clear measurement and quantification. It really is the most measurable form of advertising. It is a process of evolution. It will happen. Another view --- Also, making marketing expenditure accountable is one of the key characteristics of this space. If you move away from that, you will kill the medium. If you can't deliver, you should not be there ! Q - How are cost per leads worked out by clients? What if their own processes or products don't get conversions? Or interfere with leads? A - the way forward is to start off with a figure of faith - both parties must believe and trust in the value they have worked out. Its a partnership of leads, quality and conversion. Also, are their parallel processes to identify what it the weak link if you under deliver? It was great meeting Rohit Mull and Harsh
Roongta after many many years. I had done some qual research for
apnaloan.com many years ago. 4:46:48 PM comment [] trackback []
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Monday, January 16, 2006 |
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Since today seems to be my day of linking, I thought I'd
also shoot out this list of things that have caught my interest
recently ... many are from bloggers I read regularly - Nancy for
instance is a huge repository of resources. I've bookmarked many of them with Furl too. The Individual is the new group From Push to Pull Some of these links are sooooo Web 2.0 ... yeah I know, I know many feel its just a buzzword or marketing hype. But I'm really ok with the term, it's easy on the tongue, it is more of an attitude than a technology, a renaissance. And, it is easier to explain 'social software' to the uninitiated, with some help of course :). . Jory des Jardins, in a comment here says : "2.0 encapsulates both optimism and caution. It applies logic to
illogical impulses to connect, share, and inform. It pulls the
collective experience of kids straight out of college, with older folks
(like you and me), and corporate older, older folks who are ready to
move beyond the rules that have guided their careers. 2.0 seems to be
this point of convergence. "
Web 2.0 sort of stuff I found myself playing with last week: Face Recognition - My Heritage 1000tags.com 2:26:46 PM comment [] trackback []
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Sunday, January 15, 2006 |
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I finally got around to doing some
housekeeping on my blog. Have edited the categories and links - am
hoping they will render alright. The nice thing is each of them
acts as a separate blog - so readers can subscribe separately to
specific categories that interest you! Here they are - links and RSS feeds
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