Monthly Archive for May, 2003

outline/thinking/hypertext tools

Published
by
Karl
on May 30, 2003
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

Tinderbox
This tool has a lot of potential, enormously powerful and complicated, its a great thinking tool, with incredibly powerful exporting options, I think if you played around in this you could prototype a site very quickly and then export the site map as HTML. I warn you though this tool has some annoying idiosyncrasies and makes you do things that feel like work-arounds.

Voodoo pad
its a notepad that acts like a wikki, one of the best tools for hypertexting notes together, you can also drag and drop files and folders onto it and it creates hyperlinks ot them.

DevonThink
Not an outliner or a hyper text tool but it is very good tool for managing tonnes of text documents, indexing them and infering connections between them. More of a search engine for your harddrive.

(all mac os X)

co-creation with experience design

Published
by
Karl
on May 28, 2003
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

Many organizations, analysts, business advisors and strategists talk about customer experience as a competitive advantage. Many have developed frameworks for looking at experiences customers have with web sites, but most of them use the perspective of “customer satisfaction”.

I would suggest that from a competitive standpoint it might be more useful to analyze the customer experience from a more, dare i say, interactive standpoint, as an exchange of value above and beyond the purchase price. Customers on the web are not just consumers, they are integral parts of an organizations value network, analyze amazon.com from the standpoint of customer satisfaction and you are missing a large part of the picture.

Experience Design is a process that co-creates value with customers/users, and that is where it can contribute most significantly to the competitive advantage of an organization.

Check out:
HBR article called Co-opting Customer Competence by C.K. Prahalad and Venkatram Ramaswamy
and
The Future of Marketing Mohan Sawhney

stanford paper

Published
by
Karl
on May 21, 2003
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

Just found a great paper at Stanford Does the Quality of Online Customer Experience Create a Sustainable Competitive Advantage for E-commerce Firms?

Just a quick synopsis, yes it does lead to competitive advantage, and of the five factors they look at:

  1. web site usability
  2. customer confidence in the web business
  3. selection of goods and services offered on the site
  4. the effectiveness of relationship services such as virtual community building and site personalization
  5. the extent of price leadership practiced by the firm

The two factors that most contribute to competitive advantage is “customer confidence” and “effectivness of relationship services”. Interesting that web site usability did not contribute to competitive advantage (in this study). There is an interesting discussion about this specifically at Diary of a Superfluous Man

e-business

Published
by
Karl
on May 16, 2003
in Marketing
. 4 Comments

my original topic was how experience design could contribute to competitive advantage, but as I refine my research question it is just too big and amorphous to tackle so I’m narrowing my focus (for the dissertation) to how experience design can contribute to the competitive advantage of e-business. It seems a much more manageable topic and also enables me to use some of my previous research into e-business models. I’ve got to admit though I found it very amusing today when i came across an article about CMGI, the title was “CMGI: Inside the Internet’s Incubator Powerhouse”

Oucherooo, it seems like an age away. Anyway, I still think the internet is going to be big. Later, Karl

moore or less

Published
by
Karl
on May 9, 2003
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

The fact that computing power will double over the next 18 months or so doesn’t matter to me that much any more. In fact it’s been a while since it has mattered to most of us. A few years ago the difference between a 150 mhz processor and a 300 mhz was enough to make even the most luddite word processor drool, now the difference between 1ghz and 2ghz doesn’t make anyone except the most avid gamer shiver with anticipation.

Now we have the computing power what are we going to do with it?

“Instead of stuffing more technology down its customers’ throats, the IT industry must help them to use its wares to become more productive. That might be termed Google’s law, after the popular web-search engine that owes much of its success to concentrating on its users.”

For even more proof that google will take over the world one service at a time take a look at froogle.com.

This is a quote from an interesting economist article about how Moore’s law is running out of steam (Moore, the co founder of intel suggested in the early 70’s that computing power (number of transistors fitting a silicon chip) would double every 18 months).

survey update

Published
by
Karl
on May 2, 2003
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

The survey is going very well so far, it’s about ready for the wider community. One thing people are sure of from what I can tell is that almost everyone agrees that “Experience Design’s contribution to organizational goals is not well understood by most people in my organization or organizations I’ve worked with.”

My original idea of trying to link Experience Design with compeitive advantage was to try and help a wider business community understand the value of (Experience) Design in familier terms. I use the bracket because the same could be said for design.