UX managers design the process not the product. #mxconf12 Ian Swinson
— brandon schauer (@brandonschauer) March 5, 2012
Peak Oil is the idea that one day (soon) the world will top out on the amount of oil it can extract from the earth and it will start a decline. Maybe TV might soon hit its own peak where it’s no longer guaranteed engagement with an audience.
NYTimes covers a recent study showing that while TV is still American’s favorite pastime, use of the TV for entertainment is suddenly starting to drop with people ages 12 to 24 as they switch to other media channels (mobile) and activities (gaming):
It has long been predicted that these new media would challenge traditional television viewing, but this is the first significant evidence to emerge in research data. If the trends hold, the long-term implications for the media industry are huge, possibly causing billions of dollars in annual advertising spending to shift away from old-fashioned TV.
(Source: The New York Times)
Today at the Service Design Network Conference in San Francisco I presented the Business Case For (Or Against) Service Design.
I care about service design because I come at it as a leader of an organization that design services for our clients. Therefore, it’s in my best interest to know how and why it delivers real value. The more value it creates, the more organization will seek out, use, and pay for our work in service design.
I believe strongly that the approaches and mindset of service design can bring about more human and more empathetic services that connect people and business in better ways. But to forward this potential I focused this presentation hard toward the numbers side to find the spaces where service design has the best economic impact.
Here’s a PDF of the presentation (19.7 MB).
This presentation contains some updated versions of some of the market sizing work that I’ve shared in previous posts here. As always, these are my estimates based on the facts as I continue to collect them.
I wanted to better pose the question that I ended yesterday’s post on market sizing for service design. Here goes:
If roughly half-a-billion dollars is spent on the design and planning of services in the U.S., then why are service designers only doing $70 million of that work? (And for the record, I think this is an extremely conservative guess at the total market size.)
I think the answer is clearly that other professionals, and possibly numerous different types of professionals with very different skills, are doing the work.
Based on some prior fact-finding, I constructed the following two estimates of the total U.S. market for service design, in dollars. They’re very rough, but the only attempt I’ve seen at doing it.
First, a top-down evaluation of the market size. This estimate works from the size of the U.S. service economy down to how much a subset of businesses would spend on planning and designing those services:
As is the case with all market sizings, this top-down is larger than the following bottom-up market sizing. But the difference is quite large.
Second, the bottom-up market sizing. This estimate works from the number of service design firms and internal teams to a total annual investment in service design:
The question I have is why such a huge discrepancy between the top-down and bottom-up estimates? There’s a 614% increase from the bottom-up estimate to the top-down estimate.
My hypothesis is that farm more “agencies” and internal teams are doing the work of service design, but they call themselves different things or approach the work with different toolsets, approaches, and mindset. There are many ways to plan and design a service.
In preparation for my talk at the upcoming Service Design Global Conference I’ve been taking a stab at sizing the U.S. market for service design. Here’s the start of what I’ve turned up: What’s the size of the U.S. service economy? Who are the big U.S. employers? I’m asking this question as I hypothesize that those who employ many people are more likely to be service-oriented organizations.
Knobs, Buttons, & Dials: A Brief History of NASA's Mission Control -
Here’s my wife’s presentation on the evolution of interaction design, devices, and culture at NASA Johnson Space Center’s Mission Control Center. There’s some great stories about precursors to email, IM, and other technologies, as well as how interactions evolved — or didn’t — in the change from analog to digital
#proud
[video]
Some friends chairing a conference asked me today what I though the top 5 themes would be most critical to UX over the coming year. I said:
Usually when you read guidance on management and HR it’s a lot of conjecture. That’s what I like about Google’s research on 8 good behaviors of managers — its based on Google-style rigorous analysis of data. They poured through review data and interviews to find out what made a good boss at Google.
Here’s the 8 good behaviors of managers:
