Skilful Minds

AUGUST 18, 2009

The emergence of social media provides people inside and outside organizations with a way to actively speak about, speak to, and engage the product and service offerings of enterprises. Currently, 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content and 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands.

Social Networks 62

Social Networks Wiki Enterprise 2.0 Social 62

Skilful Minds

DECEMBER 2, 2009

One of the most visited posts on this blog is titled, Empathic Research Methods and Design Strategy. In it I add to points made by Adam Silver, a Strategist at Frog Design, noting that globalization and digitalization in the 1990s resulted in product and service interfaces with more culturally diverse and geographically distributed customers. The combination of these forces led designers to search for new methods to augment artistic intuition.

Global 61

Global Design Research Market 61

Skilful Minds

APRIL 6, 2009

The topics discussed at Skilful Minds fall in a range of challenges involved in translating strategic business goals, and the complex needs of people, into exceptional experiences, for employees who provide products and services and those who consume them, whether the latter are customers, users, learners, or just plain people. Commentators and practitioners of experience design tend to focus on the latter while largely ignoring the former.

Custom 61

Custom Attention Services Discussion 61

Skilful Minds

SEPTEMBER 22, 2009

Think about a closed business culture. Try to visualize what it looks like. Now, think about an open business culture. Try to visualize it. What image comes to mind in each thought? Does the former image looks something like a pyramid? Does the latter one look something like a spider web turned on its side? If you think about it in a comparative way however, these two images exhibit very similar relationships between their parts.

Social Networks 55

Social Networks Open Culture Social 55

Skilful Minds

OCTOBER 22, 2009

You know social networking is going mainstream when service companies like Roto-Rooter start using it. My sewer line backed up yesterday and I called Roto-Rooter to clean it. The guy came out like always, did the job, and I paid him. As he handed me the receipt he also gave me a flyer that asked me to go to either Google, Yahoo, Citysearch, or superpages.com and write a review of the service.

Social Networks 53

Social Networks Social Network Network Social 53

Skilful Minds

JULY 7, 2009

Shared experience, not just shared information, is fundamental to the social networks underlying collaboration and innovation. Many, if not most, employees don’t only need to get to know one another through reputation systems, like who people tag as possessing expertise. Comfort with one another is needed to develop a shared experience that encourages the open sharing of information.

Social Networks 53

Social Networks Collaboration Social Business 53

Skilful Minds

JULY 28, 2009

I first read Edwin Abbot's Flatland several decades ago. It is considered the first science fiction novel, after all, since its first printing in 1885. I must say though, the simplicity of the story never really hit me until I watched the following Carl Sagan interpretation of it recently. Tags: Experience Design Uncategorized metaphor.

Tagging 50

Tagging Design 50

Skilful Minds

AUGUST 10, 2009

When a learning architecture supports all types of learning along the range of formal, non-formal, and informal experiences, it simply means that small chunks of formal learning are available as resources for non-formal and informal learning. It also means that the knowledge created through non-formal learning (whether mentored, self-directed, or accomplished in collaboration with others), or informal learning taken on its own, becomes a resource in developing new formal learning content.

Enterprise 2.0 49

Enterprise 2.0 Social eLearning 2.0 Business 49

Skilful Minds

APRIL 20, 2009

Speaking the language of customer-centricity is not good enough. Companies must talk-the talk and walk-the-walk for brand strategy. Brand strategies are most effective when based in the design and delivery of business services themselves. Listening to the conversations people engage online about a topic (such as your brand), and eliciting the participation of those people in the development and refinement of products and services, are two key parts of an experience design strategy.

Social Media 49

Social Media Social Networks Media Social 49

Skilful Minds

MAY 20, 2009

I first took real notice of the term "social business" in a post early this year over at Peter Kim's blog. The concept is discussed by a range of observers interested in the implications of large numbers of people using web 2.o technologies, especially social media, within corporate enterprises as employees, or outside them as customers. Policies, processes, channels, touch points and transactions are increasingly viewed as parts of the social experiences organizations use to engage employees in

Open 47

Open Social Organization Business 47

Skilful Minds

NOVEMBER 18, 2009

While meeting for drinks and food at Llywelyn's Pub a few weeks ago on a Sunday evening with two of my oldest friends, one of them mentioned recently using Cisco's Telepresence video conferencing. I was keen to learn about the experience. Rocky said the experience was really immersive and described in vivid detail the sense of sitting around an oval table with video feeding into displays that curve with the shape of the table to present participants at distant locations.

Conference 44

Conference Tagging Collaboration Video 44

Skilful Minds

OCTOBER 12, 2009

I've seen the Validation Principle at work in my own experience managing online communities, as well as participating in many online communities. The key to any online experience is engagement, and engagement means relating empathically to other people in a way that they appreciate. Tags: Brands Customer Communities Customer Experience customer community empathy empathy with customers validation principle.

Community 43

Community Custom Tagging Online 43

Skilful Minds

FEBRUARY 2, 2009

The Social Communicator While reading the posts over at Design Observer recently, I scrolled through the images of the day and clicked on The Social Communicator image. The link takes you to The Museum of Lost Interactions (MoLi). The Museum of Lost Interactions opened in 2006, and many of you may know about it already because of the initial [.]. Tags: Cool Entries Experience Design social media interaction archaeology interaction design lost interactions social communicator.

Communication 43

Communication Interactive Social Social Media 43

Skilful Minds

SEPTEMBER 1, 2009

I usually keep my discussions here focused on issues of experience design that cut across challenges faced by a range of professionals as they work to engage learners, customers, consumers, and just ordinary people. However, I saw something today that made me think about soil and the experience of working the soil. Tags: Experience Design smartphones soil.

Tagging 41

Tagging Issue Discussion Design 41

Skilful Minds

AUGUST 19, 2009

Health care is increasingly gaining attention as an area in which innovation involves informal learning, and many of the other topics that go along with using Web 2.0 to engage people. The current debates at the national level about changing health insurance carry with them an underlying focus on innovation in the design and delivery of [.].

Informal Learning 41

Informal Learning Informal Innovation Web 41

Skilful Minds

MARCH 3, 2009

I know a lot of books were written on visual design and communication over the past decade, but in my opinion VizAbility really stands out as both a classic and enduring resource of inspiration. It helped me through the visual design side of a couple of tough multimedia projects when I first read it in 1996. A short excerpt gives a good sense of its approach.

Communication 41

Communication Tagging Project Design 41

Skilful Minds

MAY 27, 2009

Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) is a term used by Doc Searls and other members of ProjectVRM to distinguish market relationships between vendors and consumers where the latter gain increased control over that commercial relationship. Building on the VRM concept, Jeremiah Owyang recently noted that VRM offers a potential future for public relations agencies in which the future of PR is in representing communities rather than brands.

Social Networks 40

Social Networks Social Network Doc vendor 40

Skilful Minds

AUGUST 1, 2009

Skilful Minds is now a Featured Source for the eLearningLearning Community. Tags: Learning Experience e-Learning 2.0 social media informal learning learnscape.

Community 41

Community Learning 2.0 Social Media Tagging 41