brandonschauer.com

You've heard of 'Peak Oil.' What about 'Peak TV'?

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:08:50 -0800

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.

The Business Case For (Or Against) Service Design

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:28:17 -0700

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.

Q: who's designing services? A: not service designers

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:47:49 -0700

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.

market sizing for service design, round 2

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 23:01:39 -0700

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.

market sizing for service design

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 21:05:25 -0700

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?

Even as early as 1999, services accounted for roughly 80% of the U.S. economy [source: U.S. Department of Commerce report] although Wikipedia quotes services as making up 76.9% of the U.S. economy in 2009.
Service workers outnumber goods-producing workers by a 5-to-1 ratio. “According to preliminary statistics compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and published in Establishment Data Historical Employment (2005), workers who provided services (111.5 million) outnumbered workers who produced goods (22.1 million) by a ratio of five to one.” [source:stateuniversity.com]
While the U.S. is running an overall trade deficit, it has a trade surplus in services. “U.S. services exports totaled $551.6 billion in 2008, up $54.4 billion (or 10.9 percent) from 2007. This rise in exports helped the U.S. to have a record trade surplus in services at $144.1 billion, up $24.9 billion (or 20.9 percent) from 2007.” [source: U.S. Department of Commerce fact sheet]
The big service industries are trade, transportation, utilities, and government. ”The largest category of service-providing jobs is found in the group of trade, transportation, and utilities occupations (23.1% in 2005). Federal, state, and local government jobs (21.8 million) accounted for 19.5% of the total service-providing jobs in 2005.” (See Table 2.2.) [source: stateuniversity.com]

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.

Among the ten largest employers in 1955 were GM, Chrysler, U.S. Steel Standard Oil of New Jersey, Amoco, Goodyear and Firestone. Today, four of the ten largest companies by total employees are Walmart, Target, Sears, and Kroger. [source:Huffington Post]
An international list of largest companies by employee from Money Magazine.
A similar list of largest international companies by employee from Wikipedia
Or you can dig up the largest employer in each state here.

Knobs, Buttons, & Dials: A Brief History of NASA's Mission Control

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 20:55:00 -0700

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

Here’s a video of Tesco’s virtual stores in Korean...

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 20:57:25 -0700

Here’s a video of Tesco’s virtual stores in Korean subways. Why’s this so much more compelling than a mobile commerce shopping app? (by majedhs1417)

top 5 themes most critical to UX this year

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:13:16 -0700

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:

designing for mobile as the primary digital channel
experiences that bridge two channels — I used to say ‘web plus one channel,’ but it might be moving to ‘mobile plus one channel’
designing for and managing through the explosion of new devices
UX leadership inside the organization — leadership requires an entirely different set of skills (and perhaps values) than what is focused on inside the IA and UX community; organizations can’t invest in UX without individuals covering this gap; meanwhile, customer services, operations, and people from other backgrounds are jumping into the driver’s seat.
The UX factory — I’m not sure what else to call it, but I’ve seen many organizations staffing up UX teams in a big way, possibly in response to #3 above, or to compliment agile scrums. Designing the process, roles, and work for such staff — and doing it in a customer centered way — is a giant challenge until itself. While there’s plenty of UX-Teams-of-One out there, I believe there’s also growth in the UX-Teams-of-Plenty.

8 rules to being a better manager

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 23:35:20 -0700

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:

Be a good coach
Empower your team and don’t micromanage
Express interest in team members’ success and personal well-being
Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented
Be a good communicator and listen to your team
Help your employees with career development
Have a clear vision and strategy for the team
Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team

restaurants on agile?

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 06:54:48 -0800

Something about the NYTime’s article “The Perfect Menu. Now Chang It.” makes me think of agile or kaizen:

Park Avenue Winter/Spring/Summer/Fall, a restaurant in New York, has completely transformed its menu and dining room every three months since June 2007. Craig Koketsu, the executive chef, says that the changeover now takes just two days because every dish is minutely plotted on an Excel spreadsheet, a process that begins about six weeks beforehand. Making such major changes in a high-level restaurant depends on systems, not cooking skills, he explained. “A really good kitchen is a machine,” he said. “If all the parts move smoothly, you can do anything.”

more on the little secret to product planning: cupcakes

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 07:37:00 -0800

Last week I posted this video on the Adaptive Path blog, showing the value that a cupcake mentality can bring to successful product planning:

I’ve found this cake metaphor to be a powerful concept because:

Everyone feels the pressure to get results quickly — whether the challenge is moving a business metric or responding to competition, everyone feels the need to make an impact in the near term, not just a gesture towards something that will be great in another 12 to 18 months.
However, it’s rarely clear how to also deliver something delightful — to differentiate and release something noteworthy, one of the common assumptions is that more has to be more. Cupcakes is a metaphor for thinking about what could feel complete and exciting, even if it is feature-for-feature less than another offering or substitute.
It’s easy to remember and reference — executives and staff both remember the cupcake idea. After I share the cake metaphor, I often hear references days and weeks later like, “that’s not a cupcake!”

One of the common results I’ve found from Cupcake Thinking (<— yes, I’m going there), is that a team will look longer and deeper for the things a business already does well. You’ll look for ways to leverage what’s already differentiating, then bake that into the solution. Rather than try to stretch to cover gaps that a business doesn’t address well, a team will often ignore gaps and end up embellishing the core strengths of the firm in the solution.

For example, a financial institution with a large force of financial advisors could try to compete with a digital channel as full featured as a Schwab or Fidelity. Or, in more of a cupcake mentality, it could use the digital channel to reinforce the financial advisor relationship and make the advisor’s services more evident and more valued. The latter is lower complexity, it’s valued by the client and the advisor, it’s differentiating, and it’s why the client moved to the financial institution in the first place.

And if you can’t sit through the movie, here’s the condensed one-frame summary:

Communicating experiences? Be visual

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 14:01:00 -0800

Communicating experiences? Be visual:

Even the New York Times needs more than words to successfully communicate a customer experience. In an article about web retailers bullying customers, they used this comic to get it right.

what normal people want from tv

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 21:45:51 -0800

I talked with Peter Merholz following his talk at the New TeeVee conference on What Normal People Want From TV:

I asked Peter about the reported rise in behaviors where people will both watch TV and use their computer simultaneously:

“A recent Nielsen study found that consumers now spend on average 3 hours and 41 minutes per month watching TV and browsing the Internet simultaneously and roughly three out of five TV viewers engage in two-screen consumption.”

Is this a new behavior, or are media providers like Bravo just making two-screen easy enough of an experience (to build on Peter’s points in the talk).

Peter responded:

People definitely multitask while watching TV, with internet/web usage as quite high. It makes me wonder what, activities, specifically qualify as “browsing the internet.” We saw everything from active publishing (blogging), statusing (Facebook), and researching (Wikipedia related to the show being watched).

Because TV is “unproductive”, people want to feel productive while watching TV. So, while in the past, it might have been household chores (and hell, Stacy and I still fold laundry while watching TV), or when I was a kid, it was doing my homework, now people are engaged in online behaviors. I would be surprised if the amount of multitasking has actually changed all that much — I suspect it has simply shifted to something easier to measure.

BERG’s new video explorations of Media surfaces:...

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 09:26:23 -0700

BERG’s new video explorations of Media surfaces: Incidental Media shows yet again why experience designers will have to become great with video prototyping — both low-fi and hi-fi.

"There are no easy answers for content publishers right now, which is why in some ways they can..."

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 15:22:00 -0700

“

There are no easy answers for content publishers right now, which is why in some ways they can hardly be blamed for their iPad enthusiasm — at the very least, they aren’t ignoring the sea change that tablets represent. Perhaps like many of us, they need to fail their way to success. That’s a legitimate strategy, and if they’re nimble enough to recover from these wild miscalculations before it’s too late, then I applaud them for it.

More likely, they will waste too many cycles on this chimerical vision of resuscitating lost glories. And as they do, the concept of a magazine will be replaced in the mind — and attention span — of consumers by something along the lines of Flipboard. If you ask me, the trajectory of content consumption favors apps like these that are more of a window to the world at large than a cul-de-sac of denial. Social media, if it’s not already obvious to everyone, is going to continue to change everything — including publishing. And it’s a no-brainer to me that content consumption is going to be intimately if not inextricably linked with your social graph. Combine Flipboard or whatever comes along and improves upon it with the real innovation in recommendation technology that we’ll almost undoubtedly see in the next few years, and I can’t see how the 20th Century concept of a magazine can survive, even if it does look great on a tablet.

”

- Khoi Vinh on My iPad Magazine Stand pointed to by @henningfischer

"Designers become machine nerds. Machines define what you can do. That and finding the right..."

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 09:24:40 -0700

“Designers become machine nerds. Machines define what you can do. That and finding the right operators for them.”

- Zero History by William Gibson

Positional good: 'How much do I need?’ vs. 'I want more than the next guy!'

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 21:37:00 -0700

I love behavioral economics because the field defines helpful concepts for understanding humans behaving as humans; oh, and they often back it with real empirical research, not just opinion. The better we understand how we behave the better we can design for good outcomes.

An example of such a concept from the Rotman Magazine’s Q&A interview with Dan Ariely, the behavioral economist:

Q: You have said that people don’t know what they want, unless they see it in context. What are the repercussions of such ‘relativism’ for decision making?

A: The term ‘positional good’ refers to the idea that in many cases, people don’t really care how big something is, they just want to have more than the next guy. Take sea lions, for example: they want to be bigger than the other sea lions, because if you’re bigger, you will attract more females. But in the race to become bigger, they tend to get much too big, and many die from health complications. Now think about humankind, and how nice it would be if our collective ‘footprint’ was half the size that it is now: we would use less energy; we would need less resources. In the race to have ‘more’, we have hurt the species — all because we care so much about comparing ourselves to others. Executive salaries fall into this category as well. Many executives make a substantial amount of money. The fact is, nothing would happen to their lifestyle if they made a bit less. But the way they look at it isn’t, ‘How much do I need?’, but, ‘I want more than that guy over there’. And it’s not just executives — we are constantly making these types of comparisons in many domains of life.

So, could one design for positional good, where having more or doing better than the next guy could help people actually make better decisions?

The two smart pieces of Amazon's approach to product development

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 13:52:00 -0700

@Peterme pointed out this great Q&A thread on Quora on “What is Amazon’s approach to product development and product management?”

There’s two great ideas here that I push all the time with clients, internally at Adaptive Path, and when I teach and speak:

Working backwards — working backwards from the customer rather than starting with a product then trying to make it acceptable to customers. I call this an “outside-in” approach, working from the customer’s perspective back into the business. Businesses, often for very good reasons, start with the internal systems and procedures perspective and work outward to the customer. At Adaptive Path, we try to counter this bias and work from the customer’s perspective inwards.
Internal press releases — Amazon initiatives reportedly often start with the product manager writing an internal press release to describe the finished product. At Adaptive Path we often call this type of envisionment, a tangible future, or a [whatever]-from-the-future. That’s because these can take forms other than a press release. We’ve done blog posts, t-shirts, and posters from-the-future to help show the benefits of a successful initiative from the customer’s perspective. What they create is a clear vision for where we want to end up. Of course the final service deviates somewhat from the original vision, but everyone involved knows from the start what direction we are heading in.

Somehow, it doesn’t surprise me that Amazon’s on top of it.

William Gibson narrative on the commoditization of design practices

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 10:17:00 -0700

I’ve been thinking a bit on the commoditization of common (user-centered) design practices. Overall, it’s a good thing that organizations more often think about their services with the customer in the forefront. Practice-wise, it clearly means we can push farther ahead.

I’m reading William Gibson’s Zero History novel, and enjoyed this exchanges between the wealthy and shady risk-taker Hubertus Bigend and main character Hollis Henry.

“Designers are taught to invent characters, with narratives, who they then design products for or around. Standard procedure. They are similar procedures in branding, generally, in the invention of new products, new companies, of all kinds.”

“So it works?”

“Oh, it works,” he said, “but because it does, it’s become de facto. Once you have a way in which things are done, the edge migrates. Goes elsewhere.”

Let’s continue to go elsewhere, please.

(Oh, and I’ll bet the novel does take this point to nefarious places… but that’s not my point.)

"Starr insists that companies he funds can express their mission statement in under eight words. They..."

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 21:07:01 -0700

“

Starr insists that companies he funds can express their mission statement in under eight words. They also must follow this format: “Verb, target, outcome.” Some examples: “Save endangered species from extinction” and “Improve African children’s health.”

The mission statement is a key part of Mulago’s approach, but it’s not the only part. Once the mission statement is establish, Starr insists that companies that get investment “measure the right thing” and “measure it well.

”

- The Eight-Word Mission Statement, reported by Eric Hellweg of HBR