We’ve been working hard towards organizing an interesting, relevant, and high impact Bangalore World Usability Day this year. I’m happy that BIAL put up a big ass 10 by 2 metres banner at the Bangalore Airport to announce the event.
The BIAL COO (and projected CEO) Mr. Marcel Hungerbuehler is speaking at the event and I’m looking forward to hearing their stories - as much as those of the Reva electric car, bus rapid transport systems in India and technology interventions in transportation.
After 4 years with Oracle (and the brief stint with PeopleSoft before it got acquired), I have moved to Yahoo for a new gig in User Experience Design. I started off last week and am based in the the very conveniently located Inner Ring Road office in Bangalore. I will be working on a couple of properties including Yahoo’s next generation open advertising platform and some emerging market areas. I’m hoping to retain some of my learnings from enterprise user experience but at the same time immerse myself in the consumer Internet space with a very open mind. So far the office’s been good, there’s an experienced and enthusiastic product and design team here and the India office has a nice casual vibe.
I hope to also blog more about my experiences in this space.
I usually don’t get excited about new technology launches (yes, I admit, I’m not a technology ‘early adopter’) - the iPhone launch didn’t give me goosebumps, the Nintendo Wii didn’t register till much later and i discovered Adobe Buzzword, Microsoft Photosynth and Google SketchUp much later than most people did.
And yet, I’m excited about Google’s proposed Chrome browser : - ) As a longtime member of the Internet community (which hasn’t switched to Safari), I feel we could do with some excitement in the browser space. The buzz is already quite strong - from ZDNet to the Guardian and Telegraph to Techmeme - lets see how Chrome fares. I hope Google outwits the Google-bashers!
A few weeks back, I had an interesting discussion with Akhila Seetharaman, journalist with TimeOut Bangalore about the field of design and user experience and its relevance for our everyday life (including in Bangalore). We spoke about the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) Bangalore(which I head), the growth of the User Experience community in Bangalore in the past 5 years, good bad and ugly products and services and experiences in Bangalore, and the role design can play in improving all of these.
My friend Sarit Arora from Human Factors (also head of the ACM SIG on Human Computer Interaction and CHI Bangalore) also joined me for a morning chat with Akhila at the Indira Nagar Coffee Day. TimeOut recently published Akhila’s article - you can read the article on TimeOut’s website.
The article covers topics most of us are familar with: Globalization, the rise of the creative economy, the importance of design and story telling and how the design and User Experience field has evolved in India. It also lists products and experiences we’ve all struggled with or appreciated in India: kick-starting scooters, filling in paper forms, the Indian railways website, cleartrip.com and such.
Norman & Nielson just finished 10 years in business. Though some in the User Experience and design community tend to be dismissive of their ‘expert-speak’, these folks have been a source of inspiration for many beginners in the field. Their work has been focused, consistent and in general, very useful.
The other day I was musing over why mobile operators in India have not yet integrated text/image/voice ads with the basic voice calls, SMS/MMS or atleast with value added services? I started wondering how the more mature European market is doing on this front.
In my search I stumbled upon this interesting interview with Marko Ahtisaari who heads User Experience and Branding for BLYK, the first ad-supported Mobile Virtual Network Operator operating out of the UK and other European countries. BLYK targets 16-24 year olds and provides free SMS and voice minutes for end users in return for watching ads. So it sounds like an ad-driven model is beginning to take off globally.
The interview highlights some interesting experience aspects of an ad-based mobile service. I liked Marko’ answer to the last question: “We founded Blyk because we felt strongly that for mobile advertising to take off, you needed a company with the capabilities of an operator, but the ethos of a media company. And we think it’s important to work within existing patterns of behavior.”
I wonder what the future of mobile advertising has in store for us - Hollywood has been feeding us images of inter-planetary communication through videophone - what contextual ads will you see when you get a call at 3 am from a wrong number versus at 8 am from a tele-marketer versus an SMS at 11 pm from the cute girl across the lounge?
This could be a space for interesting innovations - if the content and context are well understood by markets and advertisers - otherwise the ads might just have a run in with future spam filters.
I am busy with planning out Dcamp 2.0, the second edition of the Dcamp unconference series. After last year’s rather fun experience of organizing Dcamp 1.0 at the Yahoo campus in Bangalore, I’m looking forward to seeing newer topics and perspectives this year. This year, the folks at Aditi Technologies have been nice enough to provide ample event space in their Bangalore campus.
I am hoping to invite creatives from other fields to Dcamp as well – including from art, photography and film. If you know of any good folks I can send a Dcamp presentation invite to, please email me at pande dot amit at gmail dot com
Microsoft announced the launch of multi-touch technology with Windows 7 by 2010.
Its good to see that touch is generally becoming a more common form of interaction. Its time we got rid of the clunky keyboards and error-prone and mechanized voice recognition technology through some intuitive, instantaneous, responsive and almost-fluid Touch Interfaces.
Business Today recently released a BT-Monitor group study on India’s most ‘innovative’ companies. This is a timely study and it brings out some of the key areas in which Indian companies are innovating – unique distribution channels, customizations for first time consumers, lower cost product development, and in some cases, technology interventions.
However, I believe this study is incomplete and skewed because it fails to take into account two dimensions that are highly critical to innovation: Consumer Experience and Product/service differentiation through Design.
Consider similar lists released recently by Fortune and Business Week documenting the world’s most innovative companies.
Scanning across the names of the world’s top innovators what are the common threads you find? Is it simply low cost product development? (No- they all contract manufacture in China). Is it lower prices (No – companies like Whole Foods and Apple have significant markup)
No – what is truly common (or uncommon) to Apple, Whole Foods, Amazon, Starbucks and even once-stodgy technology giants like Cisco is their relentless pursuit to creating a compelling, integrated and delightful user experience for their end consumers. Not only how to streamline costs and operations but how to make their offerings resonate with customers’ deepest needs and desires.
Here’s how BW put it “Not so long ago, no conversation about innovation would be complete without the story of 3M inventor Art Fry’s eureka moment that led to the Post-it Note. Today, that tale, which verges on cliche, has been almost universally replaced by the story of the iPod, Apple’s omnipresent icon of design. It should come as little surprise, then, that Apple tops the BusinessWeek-Boston Consulting Group’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for the third year in a row. That sort of staying power speaks volumes about the sort of innovation that matters today. Unlike the Post-it Note, which proves the value of lone inventors, the iPod epitomizes today’s innovation sensibilities. These include the ascendance of design, the focus on the user’s experience, and the power of ecosystems….”
My conclusion – some if not many of the Indian firms that are being touted as ‘innovative’ as currently innovative simply because of a temporary cost benefit, a monopolistic market position, or deep pockets. These firms will struggle in years to come as Indian consumers and indeed global consumers become more and more demanding in the ‘experiences’ from these companies and their products and services.
Here is my pick of two sectors that may lose their ‘innovation’ edge unless they get their customer experience defined right, and soon.
1.Airlines – In this sector, consumer experience can range from frustrating to terrifying. Read some of the first hand accounts below on the rudeness, unprofessionalism and callousness of the service staff of some Indian airlines.
2.Banking – Untrained and unprofessional customer service reps, non-working ATMs over holiday weekends, long queues at bank centers, lousy ‘relationship managers’, spam calls – there is a litany of complaints against most Indian banks and the way they treat their customers.
To end things on a more positive note, I would say that the Telecom, FMCG and Automotive sectors have comparatively been showing much more initiative and maturity in defining good consumer experiences by optimizing the various touchpoints of the experience (pre-sales, sales, service, repeat sales). They also seem to have taken notice of the need for differentiating themselves based on design innovations (Think Swift and Scorpio, Airtel HelloTunes and mCheck payments, think Kurkure and Bingo)
Via Tom Stewart on the upcoming ISO 13407, a good article on the need to include the language of ‘user experience’ within existing usability standards. Mr. Stewart’s expansion to the ISO standard will define User Experience as ‘all aspects of the user’s experience when interacting with the product, service, environment or facility….a consequence of the presentation, functionality, system performance, interactive behaviour, and assistive capabilities of the interactive system….all aspects of usability and desirability of a product, system or service from the user’s perspective’.
I particularly liked the reference to the Apple Store in the article. I’ve used the Apple store as an example of stellar Customer Experience (not just individual user experience) in several of my presentations. Apple did so many things right - they followed the golden role of rapid, iterative prototyping (under the vision of Mickey Drexler and the smarts of Steve Jobs), they hired passionate Apple enthusiasts instead of the sorts of run of the mill floor staff you find at Best Buy or Walmart and they kept ‘live’ (Wifi/music/video enabled) products you could play with (which Nokia’s concept stores do a pretty tacky job of as far as I’m concerned) for as long as you want. The Apple store is a brilliant component of the Apple experience ecosystem.
All in all, the broadening of the ISO usability standard to ‘User Experience’ is a step in the right direction - Apple illustrates how user experience driven products and services can lead to significant market innovation. I hope more companies can learn from them without blindly imitating them.
Entries (RSS)