Onze ideeën

Dinsdag 2 april bezocht Sabrina een workshop over 'design sprints' in de Hermitage (Amsterdam). Het bijzondere hieraan was dat het gefaciliteerd werd door Jake Knapp zelf, de schrijver van een boek over deze methode. Verrassend was de inhoud van de workshop niet maar dat maakte het niet minder leerzaam.

Designing and delivering customer-focused services relies on a deep understanding of the customers themselves. Personas are one technique to reach this goal, but tell only one side of the story. Experience maps — on the other hand — put the journey and experience of customers in the context of the service.

Consumer relationships with brands are constantly evolving, yet traditional customer research methods often lag behind. According to Amsterdam-based MARE research, dynamic new approaches are called for to gain better insight into customer behavior.

Our experience has taught us that ad hoc design efforts within the enterprise environment are often doomed to fail. Success in planning and implementing design-based change requires a structured, repeatable and process-based approach. Design models and methodologies provide just this.

Earlier this year we looked at the role that service design is increasingly playing in government, reflecting a trend that is being picked up around the world. While it’s one thing for designers and external parties to suggest the discipline to government clients, what’s the view from “the inside”?

As a discipline, service design continues to earn greater attention within the design and business communities, but what’s happening in academia? In Delft, one university is looking at what role industrial design education has in educating future service designers.

Milan Guenther’s recently-published “Intersection: How Enterprise Design Bridges the Gap Between Business, Technology and People” takes an in-depth look at the broad set of disciplines and techniques that fall under the term “enterprise design” – a subject close to our heart.

Enterprise software is big business. It underpins the corporate world, counts untold end-users, and represents a significant chunk of IT spending. But enterprise software vendors often fail to apply the tried-and-tested methods of customer experience design to the way in which they get their products to market. Julie Hunt thinks they’re missing an opportunity.

Although it’s recently caught on as an industry buzzword, “Design thinking” has been around for more than two decades. It evolved in response to the need for a more structured, methodological approach to previously free-form creative problem-solving. Here’s a dense but compact overview of the discipline.

In early 2012, Adaptive Path held the “Managing Experience” conference in San Francisco, and saw their own Chris Risdon and Todd Wilkens share some thoughts on customer journey mapping.

I recently attended the UX Immersion conference 2012 on Agile/Mobile (April 23-25, 2012 ~ Portland USA), hosted by Jared Spool’s User Interface Engineering. I’m responsible for design processes within Informaat, so the topics seemed especially relevant. Here’s what I learned.