Innovation is Social

All Products are Conversations

My business card sports this drawing by Hugh McLeod @gapingvoid.

When we create a product, solution or experience and offer it to consumers, it’s only the opening line of a conversation. Each customer interaction with the brand (product, service, experience) is an opportunity to interact and engage. When these engagement points are carefully thought out, and are resonant and unexpected for the person interacting with the product, the reaction is often WOW!!!

For example, the dining experience in Virgin Atlantic Upper Class used to delight diners with these adorable “Wilbur and Orville” salt and pepper shakers.

In fact, travelers were so delighted, their numbers began to dwindle due to thousands of people “pinching” them. What was Virgin’s response?

The Death of Curiosity

I facilitate action-learning sessions for various companies. During these sessions, project owners arrive with a problem or challenge. Over the course of the day, teams unpack their challenges, identify assumptions and possible solutions, then design experiments to test their assumptions before placing bigger bets with their resources.

After one such session, an executive pulled me aside and asked “how can I make my team more curious?” This question still nags at me.

Over the past three years, I have noticed a disturbing trend: declining curiosity among students and corporate citizens in the U.S.

Where has our curiosity gone?

I have a number of hypotheses about this. Here are three…

Moocs as Learning Experiments

On March 12, I attended TEDxBayArea, hosted by Tatyana Kanzaveli. The invited speaker was Eren Bali, CEO and co-founder of Udemy, a startup that aims to democratize education by supplying a platform that enables anyone to teach and learn online. “Students” vote with their attention and wallets, providing feedback on which instructors, formats and content have the most value.

Post-session, I found myself noodling on a few questions:

How might instructors develop online classes that satisfy learning styles that differ from their own bias?
How might brick-and-mortar institutions (educational, government and corporate) learn from online engagement metrics to inform decisions on best topics, instructors and curriculum designs?
As more people learn new subject matter using Massive Open Online Classes (MOOCs), how will businesses evolve to evaluate true mastery of the topic? Will degrees become less important?

Education Posted by Erin 25 Mar 2013 / 0 comments

Design for America | Stanford Studio

Design for America uses student-led teams and human-centered design to tackle national challenges in Education, Health, our Economy and our Environment. I’m mentoring teams working out of the Stanford Studio.

I was asked to do a Mentor guest blog for Design for America. Click here to read it.

I believe innovation is a team sport. There are lots of opportunities to share design thinking wisdom and prototype feedback with participating students. If you are interested, and in the Bay Area, respond to this post and I’ll add you to our event list.

Cheers and happy holidays!

Erin

Education Posted by Erin 15 Dec 2012 / 0 comments

Don’t Kick the Habit, Transform it

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to create addictive experiences.

In July, I decided to buy a Fitbit to get a better read on how much I move around each day, and how many calories I’m burning during workouts and over the course of the day. I also tried wearing it to sleep for about a week.

What did I learn?
I don’t sleep much, but when I do, I sleep like a stone. My sleep cycle times were very consistent, re-starting around 1:45 AM and again around 3:45 AM. I found I was averaging about 5 1/2 hours a night, with 7 hours on a good day.

I was also getting specific feedback on how much I was (or wasn’t) moving around. I also learned that the ability to press a button to access steps and calories at any time was changing my behavior. It made me want to move around more, and see how the numbers changed. Within the first week, I realized I was hooked. It was amazingly gratifying to be able to measure progress on my fitness goals.

Around this time I stumbled on a thought-provoking book called “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg, an investigative reporter for the New York Times.

Using a combination of storytelling and science, Duhigg does a wonderful job of explaining how habits are made and how we can change them. Using the existing trigger or cue, and the usual reward at the end, we can make the change to the behavior that happens in the middle. For a craving to develop, the behavior must become so ingrained that we start to anticipate the reward before doing the behavior. This creates a motivating force that drives the behavior.

Now, while working with clients to design the next software solution, game, service or product, I find myself thinking, what if the result of using this was so addictive, that people actually craved it? How does that translate to it’s design and context of use?

With all of the “big data” available these days, I’m looking forward to seeing the next wave of products and services that drive us to be healthier and more fulfilled in our daily lives.

If you have a story, please share it here!

Inspiration Posted by Erin 02 Sep 2012 / 0 comments

Stop Talking Start Making

This morning, I stumbled onto a prototype that literally stopped me. It was so stunningly simple, yet so effective; I wanted to share it here.

This stop sign is at the corner of Ramona and Homer Ave. in Palo Alto. What’s different about it is that a reflective red rectangle was attached to what is normally an invisible, drab gray pole.What I love about this approach is someone likely took an analogous invention, the bicycle reflector, and used it in a new way. It should be easy to measure whether this results in behavior change – fewer tickets, fewer collisions (car vs. car/bike/pedestrian), etc.

I don’t know who is behind this experiment – it seems to be the only one of its kind at the moment, but I applaud the ability to take an idea from the whiteboard, bring it into the world, and (hopefully) measure what happens.

Culture Posted by Erin 28 Jun 2012 / 0 comments