Skilful Minds

JANUARY 31, 2013

In Social is the plural of personal JP Rangaswami contends that institutional innovation is required to achieve the potential that social software offers organizations in general, and for-profit companies in particular. JP's voice is one of several important contributions to current thinking about innovation.

Innovation 52

Innovation Design Social Software Voice 52

Skilful Minds

JANUARY 2, 2013

An early Skilful Minds post introduced The Great Innovation Debate, focusing on the distinctions between Tom Friedland's conception that when it comes to innovation the world is flat, and the alternative point of view espoused by Richard Florida that the world is spiky. Meaning that the aggregation of creative people in cities, in proximity to one another, largely drives innovation and economic growth.

Innovation 47

Innovation Alternatives Collaboration Job 47

Skilful Minds

NOVEMBER 17, 2011

I recently received an invitation from Mads Soegaard, Editor-in-Chief at Interaction-Design.org to offer those who read this blog an early view of a new chapter on Social Computing in their encyclopedia. I’m a little late on this writing for you to get a pre-publication view of the chapter but I wanted to make sure and point it out for [.].

Social 44

Social Write Blog Interactive Blogging 44

Skilful Minds

NOVEMBER 8, 2011

One of my earlier posts discussed the learnability of a service as a key challenge for experience design. Today I ran across this early video from Don Norman on learnability and product design. I thought I would share it.

Design 43

Design Video Discussion Services 43

Skilful Minds

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

There is nothing like an exception to the way things are done to highlight the need to increase knowledge sharing, especially if the exception is one instance of a pattern that results in bad experiences for customers. As Jay Cross recently noted, people learning at work rely on social, or informal learning, around 80% of the time. Interestingly, I noted in a former post, Social Learning and Exception Handling, that John Hagel and John Seeley Brown contend that "as much as two-thirds of headcoun

Social 70

Social Social Learning Informal Learning Pattern 70

Skilful Minds

JUNE 27, 2011

Social Flow in Gameful Design made the point that social flow contrasts to Csikszentmihalyi's original concept of individual or solitary flow, in which a person's engagement in actions is optimal, where they lose a sense of time and awareness of self in an intrisincally rewarding feeling. Social flow implies a qualitatively different order of the flow experience, a group-level experience.

Games 96

Games Social Design Collaboration 96

Skilful Minds

MAY 21, 2011

Don't Gamify Wild Bill discussed the importance of designing for voluntary play in serious games. Play is the baseline requirement for any game designed to provide useful indicators for gauging individual and organizational successes over time. Specifically, my point is that those interested in gamifying employee engagement in social business, and who also aim to effectively use collaboration, must optimally design for emergence not just competition and cooperation as guiding principles.

Games 57

Games Design Social Gamification 57

Skilful Minds

APRIL 25, 2011

There is a lot, actually a whole lot, of buzz over the past year about the gamification of business, specifically marketing, training, customer service. Much of it misses the simple point that it is the experience with it, the playfulness of it, that makes a game. Not the scoring system, or the rewards, or anything else can make up for a game that participants (customers or employees) don't experience as play.

Gamification 48

Gamification Games Score Customer Service 48

Skilful Minds

APRIL 5, 2011

At the end of February I co-presented at STL UX 2011 with Dave Gray. Our presentation was called Exploring the Usefulness of Chartjunk. The collaboration behind the presentation started as an exchange between the two of us on Twitter regarding whether the whole concept of Chartjunk is a myth. Over a series of conversations about recent research on the relative importance of visual embellishment in how people remember and understand data, I suggested to Dave that we develop a presentation around

Twitter 41

Twitter Collaboration Conversation Issue 41

Skilful Minds

APRIL 1, 2011

Back in 2006 I read the following point on Hugh Mcleod's blog, Gapingvoid: "If people like buying your product, it’s because its story helps fill in the narrative gaps in their own lives." At the time I thought it conveyed nicely the point made by Gerald Zaltman in How Customers Think that "companies should define customer segments ont he basis of similarities in their reasoning or thinking processes" (p. 152) rather than the conventional constructs related to demographics.

Social Media 76

Social Media Research Media Social 76

Skilful Minds

DECEMBER 9, 2010

We know that most learning in the workplace is informal. Most observers put it at around 80%. Recently, John Hagel and John Seeley Brown contended that "as much as two-thirds of headcount time in major enterprise functions like marketing, manufacturing and supply chain management is spent on exception handling." The most basic point to remember is that exceptions to formal business processes require efforts to design a scalable learning architecture that supports content co-creation needed to ad

Social Learning 85

Social Learning Learning Social Enterprise 85

Skilful Minds

OCTOBER 4, 2010

I've discussed ethnography, especially digital ethnography, several times taking note that, whether we use ethnography in marketing or design research remains irrelevant to the methods employed. What matters is whether we develop the research questions around the assumption that sociocultural practices provide the data source for answers. Ethnographers research settings, situations, and actions, with the discovery of surprising relationships as their most basic goal.

Yahoo 45

Yahoo Social Media Video Tagging 45

Skilful Minds

AUGUST 14, 2010

What do you think the typical manager might say if you told them their employees don't gossip and engage one another in non-work related tasks enough? Most managers have heard of the watercooler effect without ever having the meaning of the concept sink in to their understanding of how it relates to performance and collaboration. A couple of studies released this summer dealing with performance and collaboration in teams merit consideration.

Social Networks 90

Social Networks Collaboration eLearning 2.0 Enterprise 2.0 90

Skilful Minds

JULY 12, 2010

Digital ethnography is an increasingly feasible research technique as smartphones decrease in cost and more people carry them around. The photographic capability of smartphones is an important resource in making digital research ubiquitous, giving people the ability to capture images and record observations as they go about their everyday lives, and characterize those observations for ethnographers.

Video 60

Video Analysis Design Games 60

Skilful Minds

JUNE 24, 2010

Recent studies, one by Sentiment360 and the other by FreshMinds, contend that social media monitoring tools aren't very accurate in measuring sentiment, much less influence. The insight isn't a new one and speaks to the now well-known issue of whether social media engagement is scalable. Consequently, we now see social media monitoring companies merging with text analytics companies to bundle their service offerings to fine tune their ability to monitor a customer's activity and online influence

Analytics 69

Analytics Enterprise 2.0 Social Media Enterprise 69

Skilful Minds

JUNE 7, 2010

On several occasions I've discussed dialogue in relationship to organizational self-orientation, open innovation, brand strategy, and learning. The overall premise of my thinking on the topic rests on the idea that stakeholders, whether consumers, customers, partners, and others with influence in a company's ecosystem are gaining increasing power to affect the meaning of brand offerings and the evaluation of operating assumptions, making strategic efforts of organizational transformation inevita

Social 54

Social Strategy Custom Social Media 54

Skilful Minds

APRIL 20, 2010

My last post dealt with transformations in the grocery shopper's service journey in the United States since the late 19th century after creation of the shopping bag. In recent years, local and state governments, grocery and other retailers, as well as many shoppers increasingly understand the environmental impact of using so many disposable bags, whether paper or plastic.

Design 44

Design Services Tagging Innovation 44

Skilful Minds

APRIL 15, 2010

Grocery shopping is one of those chores that we all have to do from time to time. I'm introducing the topic of grocery shopping as a service journey not because the concept is new. Few people who analyze what grocers do and how people who shop in their stores get the job of buying groceries done would be surprised that it is a journey. What I want to do is provide a brief history of the grocery shopper's journey, and key transformations of that journey.

Services 68

Services Tagging Design Innovation 68

Skilful Minds

MARCH 29, 2010

Marketing, especially social media marketing, and learning are both essential components of a dialogue strategy for customer experience design and management. A dialogue strategy builds on the assumption that companies learn more from customers when customers learn from them, and doing so benefits both. I increasingly think it provides a basic framework to think about as an overall framework for social business design.

Social Networks 49

Social Networks Social Design Learning 2.0 49

Skilful Minds

MARCH 3, 2010

One of my earlier posts asked the question, Who's on Your Team? Its focus was on the importance of social software applications in the Enterprise to the ability of distributed project team members to recognize who is on their team at any point in time, and who isn't. Organizational analysts refer to the challenge as a boundary definition problem for teams, when members are spread across large distances whether geographic or cultural in nature.

Social Learning 77

Social Learning Wiki Social Networks Collaboration 77

Skilful Minds

FEBRUARY 16, 2010

As I noted in a post on Peter Morville's Findability several years ago, "Interfaces are not what they used to be. The computer-human interface is both more and less than it was a few years ago. Interfaces are not only, or even primarily, a screen anymore.". Tags: Experience Design Ubiquitous Computing Web 2.0 v-Tags Everyware Findability social media social networking user experience visual tags.

Social Networks 46

Social Networks Design Social Network Tagging 46

Skilful Minds

FEBRUARY 4, 2010

I've discussed ethnography several times before, the first taking note of the trend toward virtual anthropology and the next talking about the significance of Tom Boellstorff's ethnography of Second Life, followed by a couple of posts about ethnography in relation to empathy and globalization. Indeed, Cheskin's Davis Masten and Tim Plowman characterized digital ethnography as the next wave in understanding the consumer experience in a Design Management Journal article as early as 2003.

Research 69

Research Digital Second Life Journal 69

Skilful Minds

JANUARY 2, 2006

Three of the four people in my household own an IPod, with yours truly the only holdout. I love what the device does, but since I first toyed with my wife's, I've been reluctant to buy my own. Tags: Experience Design usability user experience.

iPod 40

iPod Toys Tagging Design 40

Skilful Minds

FEBRUARY 2, 2006

A folksonomy results from distinct ways of organizing cultural categories developed from the tags, keywords, people use to describe specific content, or services, on the web. The emphasis in folksonomies is on organizing data, not making friends. Tags: Customer Communities Social Networks Web 2.0 social networking.

Folksonomy 40

Folksonomy Social Networks Social Network Web 40

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.

Interactive 43

Interactive Communication Social Social Media 43

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 Methods Tagging 61

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 Video Tagging Collaboration 44

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

OCTOBER 20, 2009

Word of mouth communities and networks using social software are increasingly spread over regional, national, and international borders, making them much more important to those who market branded products and services, online and off. The recent buzz around the concept of social business points to the growing importance of social networks and communities to the evolution of business practice.

eLearning 2.0 69

eLearning 2.0 Community Social Networks Custom 69

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

SEPTEMBER 23, 2009

My previous post discussed the Open/Closed culture fallacy in social business design. I contended that leaders of large corporations are typically unable to answer the key strategic questions posed by David Armano in an important post recently. In this post I'll continue that line of thinking by considering a combination of David's third and fourth questions in light of the open/closed culture fallacy.

Social Networks 72

Social Networks Social Network Analysis Social Network Analysis 72

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 Culture Social Open 55

Skilful Minds

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

Social media is not a noun (media) accompanied by an adjective (social). In fact, as long as we think of it that way social media can only fail to achieve what the thought leaders who advocate its use believe it capable of doing. Social media is, in fact, a compound noun. Neither term is sufficent to describe what is done by those using it unless we consider it as part of the other.

Social Media 74

Social Media Enterprise 2.0 Media Social 74

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.

Learner 41

Learner Tagging Design Discussion 41

Skilful Minds

AUGUST 27, 2009

To get to the main point quickly, let's do what few people offering thoughts about collaboration actually do. Let's explicitly discuss what it is. First off, collaboration isn't just about people sharing information to achieve common goals. Collaboration is about people working with other people to achieve common goals. Advocates of Enterprise 2.0 sometimes make the fundamental mistake of arguing that collaboration is really only about achieving goals, leaving the implication that incorporating

Collaboration 78

Collaboration Enterprise 2.0 Social Networks Social 78

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 Learning Web 41

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.

Wiki 62

Wiki Social Networks Enterprise 2.0 Social 62