A great example of empathic design, a bike that transforms from a tricicle to a bicicle as you move forward faster.
Three Purdue University industrial designers who tapped into memories of their own childhood cycling misadventures have built a bike that ditches the training wheels but keeps rookies stable.
Called SHIFT, it slowly transforms from a tricycle to bicycle configuration as the rider pedals faster, then returns to trike formation as the rider slows down.
By RICK CALLAHAN, Associated Press Writer
Berkowitz said that, in a bid to improve the userexperience with the search engine, the company began to implement a program in early April to reduce by 31% the number of ads it shows at the top of its results pages. The company’s tests show that a smaller number of ads boosts the frequency with which people use the site and aids user retention. As such, Jeeves expects the change to help lift query volumes and ad revenue later in the year.
Ask Jeeves CEO Comments on Improving User Experience By Reducing Number of Ads on Results Pages
Your customers are already talking about you, passing on information to other customers about you. They’re creating, defining and guiding the marketplace conversation, are you participating in that conversation, or are you still shouting over them with an advertising monologue.
The number of blogs has doubled in the last nine months, and Tony Conrad asks the question, “What are you doing to empower your customers to express your brand?”
He suggested that advertisers make their song, logo and content available for fans to manipulate and extend. He showed two commercials - one created by the agency and one created by a fan - and the fan one rang true. User creativity in new media cannot be stopped. In the digital world, it is all available to everyone. And for the most part people do great things with it.
The Five Big Ideas AD:TECH BLOG
Providing the tools for your customers to be creative is, IMHO, the pinnacle of customer experience, or the highest order of customer experience. It’s not just usable, useful, desirable, it’s now something they have invested in and co-created value with.
I love this combined use of google maps and flickr, basically someone has annotated a satellite picture of their childhood stomping grounds.
Matt Haughey childhood, seen by Google Maps on Flickr
Add to that a whole group that started providing visual narrative’s of their childhoods: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/memorymap
Both google and flickr have put a framework in place to allow customers to co-create value with their customers allowing their customers to be creative, and provide value to other customers.
Just remember though, neither of these companies skipped the steps to create that deep level of customer intimacy.
Trust > Competence > Autonomy > Creativity/Relatedness
See the The Customer Experience Hierarchy [updated]
WOW - craigslist and Google Maps
Things like this continue to confirm my belief that this internet thing is going to be big.
Thanks to Peter Merholz for writing more eloquently about this topic.
church of the customer has just noted how McDonalds came shot itself in the foot, or more appropriately, capped itself in the ass by coming up with a campaign that would pay rappers to mention Big Mac’s in their songs.
Maven Strategies, who pitched this idea, must have got some killer sales people, because the only way this idea could fly is if ether was pumped into the room as all the middle aged, white marketing execs imagined a future where every gangsta rap included a reference to a Big Mac.
Well, to save us from having to richly imagine that future, a fake rap group - Gatbustaz! - has already created a parody.
Here’s just one delicious line from the song:
“I like big macs, like my ho’s like big dicks, shove one in there mouth, and damn, ‘I’m Loving It’”
I’m assuming some disclaimer would be appropriate here, like, “big macs, and I’m loving it are registered trademarks of Mc Donalds corporation”
The cluetrain continues to run down the track unabated. This is another great example of “your customers working for you.”
Plurality of Brands’ Organic Search Links Are User-Created Content - MarketingVOX
“Jupiter Research has shown that out of ten search results for a company, the plurality (three out of ten) of links come from blog posts, message boards, opinion sites or other user-generated content.”
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