Social Strategy & Design by @KarlLong

I usually keep this blog more topical, so we interrupt our normal programming for a message from our sponsor. I’m moving to Dallas. In the last couple of months I’ve been doing some contracting for a technology company, Digital Architects and I’ve now been offered a full time role. My role is going to be a combination of client facing work, market facing and building an internal dicipline around UX (user experience). My working title right now is dir. of user experience and I hope to help this technology company differentiate in the crowded and homogenous market place of technology shops.

As for practicalities, i wil be getting my brakes and air-conditioner fixed next week and driving my jeep grand cherokee from boston to dallas. I’ve bought route 66, a mapping application, which i will hook up to my GPS receiver to make the trip more interesting. So far the only waypoint I’ve added to my trip is the “Pancake Pantry” in Nashville. Anywhere else I should stop? I’ll post a screen shot of my route.

I’m really looking forward to moving to Dallas and already have a sweet apartment, just north in an area called Las Colinas. The only thing I’m a little concerned about is how hot it gets here. Being from England i don’t deal well with the sun. Our complexion is actually a pale blue and it takes at least a week in the sun to turn white

Peace out!

a gig of space but is hardly an insurmountable advantage, if it costs google $10 a year to provide that storage then whats to stop yahoo adding a gig of space (apart from institutional and investor resistance).

The reason that google will eat yahoo’s lunch is because it has looked at how people use email and has built a web based email client that uses the powerful functionality that you can get in modern browsers. The way it threads discussions or conversations as it calls them, the elegant spell check, the auto complete, the keyboard shortcuts, I mean this browser based email client is as full featured as my desktop client and in some ways even better than that. If google takes that design discipline to its other products, it will trounce yahoo in the life engine category in the end.

It’s amazing to me that Yahoo went from agile upstart to a potentially vulnerable corporation unable to revamp its products fast enough. i’ve been using yahoo mail for 4 years and it hasn’t changed to take advantage of the opportunities new browsers present. Yahoo is like the American car industry in the 70’s with investments in old technology getting blindsided by the Japanese car industry that had been forced to re-tool due to getting wiped out in WWII.

The Power Of Design a business week cover story highlights some of the value that comes from a focus on customer experience. Comments on some of IDEO’s insights from observational research falls rather flat for me. I mean commedians have for many years been making observations about the ludicrus customer experience that we get from doctors, and the way they’ve written about it in business week doesn’t even benefit from decent comic timing.

ìIDEO’s sociologists explained that patients hated Kaiser’s examination rooms because they often had to wait alone for up to 20 minutes half-naked, with nothing to do, surrounded by threatening needles. IDEO and Kaiser concluded that the patient experience can be awful even when people leave treated and cured.î

Well as practitioners we wonít be going far in the business world unless our insights are, well, a little more insightful

Needless to say I have loved IDEOís past work and have a great deal of respect for their methodology and leadership, they just could have used a better example of insights that come from the “deep dive” research that they do.

Burger King says Web chicken won’t go mainstream… that is to say, more mainstream than a news article on yahoo.com

Many of us that spend too long on the internet participating in the navel gazing that can be blogging and email listservs have heard about the subservient chicken. As it turns out it was an underground campaign to promote some burger king chicken sandwiches. This was an entirely unbranded campaign, more of a buzz builder until it started slowly leaking that it was really burger king pushing chicken products.

I think this kind of marketing can actually form a bond between the company and the market that “gets it”. I think as companies start to get it we’ll end up with more of these socially engineered campaigns. You know what, I heard that disney dressed this fat guy in a tron costume to promote tron 2.0

I like the exclusive nature of this kind of campagn, it appeals to my english pentient for irony, as irony has been charicterized as sarcasm that not everyone gets, but when you do get it you are part of the club. As the economist puts it “A quiet joke at your expense”