Posts tagged “arizona”

Putting your message into your interaction

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Ranger station, Sabino Canyon, AZ, January 2009

Check out the fire danger indicator: the slider is a Smokey Bear head.
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It’s a smart opportunity to build the visual aspects of their brand into a somewhat ordinary presentation, creating a bit more personality and engagement.

See also: Juice Is In The Details and What Is The Loon Smoking?

Thank you for voting

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Thank you for voting, Green Valley, AZ, January 2009

An interesting way to toot one’s own horn. This sign in Papa Murphy’s prominently yet graciously thanks us for voting for them as BEST PIZZA CHAIN in America. To paraphrase Monty Python, I didn’t vote for them. Did you? In fact, a little investigation reveals that this was a customer satisfaction and preference survey by Restaurants & Institutions Magazine. A survey is not an election. No one voted for anything.

R&I’s Consumers’ Choice in Chains survey respondents are a representative sample of U.S. consumers weighted to match the population by age, gender, household income, ethnicity and region. In all, 3,132 adults provided data about their awareness and patronage of more than 200 of the largest U.S. chains. These brands were selected for inclusion based on rankings in R&I’s 2007 Top 400 Chains list. The margin of error for this data is +/- 2%.
To gauge customer loyalty, respondents who patronized a chain in the past year are asked whether they intend to return. In addition, guest satisfaction on eight attributes is measured through customers’ ratings of each chain they patronized. To derive overall scores, performance on the attributes is weighted according to the category. This is done using separate ratings that consumers provide to indicate the importance of each attribute in selecting a restaurant in a given category. The weighted overall score can be used to compare chain performance across segments.

I applaud Papa Murphy for trying to induce a sense of participation in their patrons, reframing an external assessment as something that we can feel some involvement in, thereby sharing in their success. But the fact that the claim doesn’t stand up to just a little bit of scrutiny reveals them to be a little bit dishonest. Almost, but not quite.

See previously: Local Starbucks exhibits passion for their customers

How long to plan for growth/change?

From Arizona Adds Digit to License Plates to Keep Up With Growth

The increase in motor vehicles has exhausted the 10.6 million or so combinations of characters on the state’s six-digit plates, said Cydney DeModica, a spokeswoman for the state’s motor vehicle division.

So Arizona is joining New York, California and other more populous states in adding a seventh digit. The extra digit allows for 106.48 million possible combinations – three letters followed by four numbers – which should accommodate a growing population through 2040.

2040 doesn’t seem that far off when it comes to making sweeping changes to infrastructure. Do they know what they might do after that? Or do popular growth (or motor vehicle ownership) predictions not hold valid beyond 30 years? Seems like a perfect problem for long term thinking, the absence of which created technology challenges such as the Y2K bug.

Of course a key difference here is that the Y2K bug failed to address a definite event (the year 2000 would eventually be reached, at a predictable time in the future), whereas the growth in Arizona cars may follow a trend but it’s far from definite as changes in weather patterns and oil prices could conceivably change the trend dramatically by 2040.

Postcards from the road: PHX to PDX

It’s been a busy-yet-fun few days on the road, from giving a plenary presentation and workshop at ASU’s Design Research Symposium (more to come, whenever I get my pictures – Hi, Greg!), to meetings, dinner with colleagues, and helping a client synthesize fieldwork data from China and Russia into product concepts. Here are some images I captured along the way:

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Font problems @ Sky Harbor Airport, April, 2008

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No carry-on tires, Sky Harbor Airport, April, 2008

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Well, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

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Pay Here, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

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Fear God, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

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Disengaged Citrus, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

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Life imitates The Simpsons, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

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Busy license plate, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

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Crepes To Go, Portland, OR, April, 2008

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Font Era #1, Portland, OR, April, 2008

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Font Era #2, Portland, OR, April, 2008

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Dog Paintings, Portland, OR, April, 2008

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Sign upon sign, Portland, OR, April, 2008

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Lift party, Portland, OR, April, 2008

Dan writes: One persons’s ‘dumbing down’ is another person’s ‘smartening up’

There’s a really interesting public discourse going on in Gilbert, Arizona, regarding the Perry Branch Library’s decision to do away with the Dewey Decimal System in favor of a bookstore-like system of organization. Peruse the comments below the article for 3 pages of heated, fascinating dialogue!

Here’s one of my favorite excerpts from the discussion:

And also with RFID, who is going to bother searching for a book when they can look up the book on a wiki, hit a button and get a robot to bring it to them where ever they are sitting.

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