Posts tagged “redesign”

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • After 40 years, Heinz revamps ketchup packets [msnbc.com] – The redesigned ketchup pack, unveiled Thursday by H.J. Heinz Co., is shaped like a shallow cup. The top can be peeled back for dipping, or the end can be torn off for squeezing. It holds three times as much ketchup as a traditional packet. "The packet has long been the bane of our consumers," said VP Dave Ciesinski. "The biggest complaint is there is no way to dip and eat it on-the-go." Heinz struggled for years to develop a container that lets diners dip or squeeze, and to produce it at a cost that is acceptable to its restaurant customers. Designers found that what worked at a table didn't work where many people use ketchup packets: in the car. So two years ago, Heinz bought the design team a used minivan to give their ideas real road tests. The team studied what each passenger needed. The driver wanted something could sit on the armrest. "We created the packet in 1968," he said. "Consumer complaints started around 1969."

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • "Hack things better" with malleable silicone SUGRU – "Why are so many products just so bad? Uncomfortable tin openers, leaky trainers, they get our goat! Why should you have to spend £20 on a designer tin opener? You shouldn't! Hack the one you have instead. Power to the (handy) people! Sugru is like modeling clay when you take it from its pack. Once it's exposed to air, it cures to a tough flexible silicone overnight using the moisture in the air. Working time = 30 mins. Cure time = 24hrs (3-5mm deep)" The sugru website includes a blog that features product improvements achieved through its use.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • What’s this? A kinder, gentler IRS? [Consumer Reports] – On Monday the IRS introduced a redesign of nine of its form letters, or "notices," to be more consumer friendly, or, as they put it, "as part of their ongoing effort to improve the way it corresponds with taxpayers." In the true spirit of our bloated bureaucracy, this initiative was the result of the "Taxpayer Communication Taskgroup" which started its work way back in July of 2008, and, other than the nine (9!!) newly designed letters, the Taskgroup's efforts also resulted in the establishment of a new office, the "Office of Taxpayer Correspondence." You can find a link to a pdf comparing the original and redesigned letters on the Consumer Reports link… what do you think?

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Social science meets computer science at Yahoo [SF Chronicle] – Yahoo Labs has bolstered its ranks of social scientists, adding highly credentialed cognitive psychologists, economists and ethnographers from top universities around the world. At approximately 25 people, it's still the smallest group within the research division, but one of the fastest growing.

    The recruitment effort reflects a growing realization at Yahoo that computer science alone can't answer all the questions of the modern Web business. As the novelty of the Internet gives way, Yahoo and other 21st century media businesses are discovering they must understand what motivates humans to click and stick on certain features, ads and applications – and dismiss others out of hand.

    Yahoo Labs is taking a scientific approach to these questions, leveraging its massive window onto user behavior to set up a series of controlled experiments (identifying information is always masked) and employing classic ethnography techniques like participant observation and interviews.

  • Domino’s "The Pizza Turnaround" [YouTube] – Domino's Pizza uses customer research to spawn product redevelopment, and then uses that process to promote their improved product. Note the negative quotes posted on the walls of their office.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Listening to customer feedback? Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes (Thx, @susandra) – In '77, 3M decided to test-market. It failed to ignite interest. “When we did the follow-up research, there just weren’t a lot of people saying this was a product they wanted.”
    "We knew the test markets failed, but we just kept saying, ‘Maybe it was us. Maybe we did something wrong. Because it couldn’t be the product—the product was great.”
    To see for themselves how people responded to Post-it Notes, 2 execs cold-called offices, giving away samples and showing people how to use 'em. The responses were more enthusiastic. “Those things really were like cocaine. You got them into somebody’s hands, and they couldn’t help but play around with them.”
    1 more test was in order. They got newspapers to run stories about it. They festooned stationery stores with banner displays and point-of-purchase materials. 1000s of samples were sent to office managers, purchasing agents, lawyers, etc. People demonstrated it to potential customers. It was a huge success, and 3M decided to launch Post-Its.
  • Listening to customer feedback? Peter Arnell Explains Failed Tropicana Package Design – Big outcry over the Tropicana packaging design (which this suggests was NOT tested but that's hard to believe) led to a return to the previous packaging.
  • Listening to customer feedback? Malcolm Gladwell on the Aeron chair – The Aeron chair was originally despised and deemed ugly. It didn’t catch on for 2 years, and then it quickly became the most popular chair. Everyone came to love it. Gladwell concludes that people find responses about some topics extremely difficult to articulate. While they may think they dislike something (like the Aeron chair), in their hearts they may actually like it. There is a disconnect that causes people to express dislike in their heads while they actually like it in their hearts (and vice versa).
  • Listening to customer feedback? Hate Facebook's new look? You'll like it soon enough. – Slate advances the point that people react to change negatively but eventually get used to the change and make it work.
  • Listening to customer feedback? Problems With NBC’s ‘Parks & Recreation’ – When do you listen to negative feedback and when do you follow your vision? I think there's an important middle-ground that is often ignored: understanding what lies beneath that feedback and choosing carefully if and how to respond to it, or how to create supporting activities that help get over the barriers that the rejection points to

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • HotStudio describes their user research process for their redesign of Dwell.com – Of course, numbers are open to interpretation, and it was interesting to find some of the data contradicted by other research, namely existing data we pulled from trolling the existing community site. Rather than asking about their preferences, we could observe users directly there, and note what people were talking about and what they wanted to do. We found that many users really do want to promote their design services. We also reviewed user comments on articles throughout the site.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • IxDA SF presents Interaction09 Redux – Saturday, March 14th – I'll be leading a condensed version of my IXDA workshop from Vancouver (Well we did all this research…now what), looking at a framework for transforming questions into answers, answers into insights, and insights into actions.
  • Steve's photos from Vancouver, Feb 2009 – I was in Vancouver to run a workshop at the IXDA conference and to visit family. Some of the photos will make their way into dedicated blog posts but meanwhile here's the whole set.
  • Juice is in the details – Tropicana's redesign is being heralded for the caps that look like oranges. We've got a carton in the fridge and it's as plain as plain can be, so I'm not sure where these great caps are lurking. Meanwhile, back in 2006 we were seeing orange-looking caps on Florida's Natural packaging.
  • Tropicana reverts to "classic" packaging after their crappy redesign is met with broad scorn – Mea pulpa: "Asked if he was chagrined that consumers rejected the changes he believed they wanted, Mr. Campbell replied: “I feel it’s the right thing to do, to innovate as a company. I wouldn’t want to stop innovating as a result of this. At the same time, if consumers are speaking, you have to listen.”"

Benchmark, Mockup, and Prototype

Fast Company describes how Alaska Airlines has been redesigning their check-in environment. Some nice bits of process to note

White assembled a team of employees from across the company to design a better system. It visited theme parks, hospitals, and retailers to see what it could learn. It found less confusion and shorter waits at places where employees were available to direct customers. “Disneyland is great at this,” says Jeff Anderson, a member of White’s skunk works. “They have their people in all the right places.”

The team began brainstorming lobby ideas. At a Seattle warehouse, it built mock-ups, using cardboard boxes for podiums, kiosks, and belts. It tested a curved design, one resembling a fishbone, and one with counters placed at 90-degree angles to each other. It built a small prototype in Anchorage to test systems with real passengers and Alaska employees.

It appears that Alaska had some obvious (and shared) design goals: increase throughput and reduce confusion. There’s a whole class of environmental redesign projects where the goals aren’t as clear. In those cases, there’s some generative research needed to understand what aspects of the overall experience could and should be different.

Beta Blocked

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Well, Yahoo’s TV page is in beta with its new facelist. Sexy. Content-y.

And useless. I don’t need to have a Rich Media Interaction with the Property and the Brand. I want to see if this episode is a repeat. The old version said very clearly
Original Broadcast Date: xx/xx/xxxx – if that was today’s date, then it was a new episode.

Sometimes they’d put (repeat) if it was a repeat, but the absence of that information doesn’t seem sufficient to verify it’s not a repeat. And reading the plot summary and trying to decide if I’ve seen that one? That’s work.

I know, users like to gripe when things get changed. But did they ask anyone how they use it, first? Or did real estate for big banner ads for the show take precedence over actionable data? I dunno.

Update: even worse…if you click on a show in the grid, say, the 10:00 pm listing for Law and Order, Yahoo shows you the “Law and Order” page, with information about the next episode. But the next one is a 2:00 pm syndicated episode on TNT. It requires much more work to get to the details of the episode I already told them I wanted. Finding the “all upcoming episodes” link and then looking through that to find the 10:00 link, clicking that and finally, the info I am seeking. Ludicrous!

flickr redesigns

flickr just launched a new interface. Here’s some screenshots. I don’t think I can be objective about it; of course, I’ve got habits to break and new ones to learn, and that will take a while. I will say I trust them and so am hopeful for good things.
flickr-photos-from-steve-portigal-5-16-2006-12-17-19-pm.jpg

Update: I just noticed this: There are sneaky advertising links buried in flickr!

Taken with a Nikon D50.

is now
Taken with a nikon_25x25.gif D50.

and that logo is a hotlink to a Nikon advertising site.

Renovating Ronald Redux

The McDonald’s redesign is getting some more attention in blogland. A really powerful rant (even if you don’t support all the points) comes from the consistently acerbic Marginal Utility

So having abetted the atomization of American society, undermining traditional rituals of eating that once fostered polite society and turning food into on-the-go fuel, McDonald’s now wants to present the simulacrum of what it helped destroy, an ambiotronic environment in which the semblance of civility is exhibited for maximum marketing appeal. It wants to cater to the illusion that people have time to hang out, that people enjoy being in public with strangers, that its own food is something to be savored rather than inhaled on the run. The corporation can subsidize a few people hogging the comfy chairs and watching the TVs in order to give its bread-and-butter customers – the harried single people in a hurry – a warm, fuzzy feeling about what they are about to eat, as if a Big Mac can give them access to the laid-back linger-zone life by proxy. But most people, McDonald’s knows, don’t really want to linger. Rest assured, regardless of the redesign, the heart of McDonald’s will remain as hard a plastic as ever.

Renovating Ronald

BusinessWeek writes about a just-launching redesign of McDonald’s stores, trying to bring them up to date. This is sure to be a big design story in the business press, with lots of oohing and aahing about the furniture and so on, but the article points to some serious business challenges that the company faces here (and presumably anytime they want to do some sort of reinvention).

In a recent letter to management at the company’s headquarters in Oak Brook, about 160 franchisees from North Carolina spelled out why they oppose the new plan. They say the roof change erases 40 years of brand building and that ‘there has been no business case presented which justifies the change.’ Says Frederick Huebner, who owns 11 McDonald’s in North Carolina: ‘We don’t want to lose the iconic look of what we’ve got.’ If franchisees balk, McDonald’s can refuse to renew their contract.

Check out the new designs, which seem to bring McDonald’s firmly into the 90s.

Don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone

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The New York Times reports on a grassroots taxi redesign effort: A nonprofit group called the Design Trust for Public Space plans to ‘define the ideal taxi and taxi system of the future.’ At a workshop on May 24, designers, architects, city officials and representatives of taxi owners and drivers sketched out an array of ideas. Matthew W. Daus, the chairman of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, has given cautious support to the effort. “This is a good exercise to get the perspectives of consumers and passengers, and also of architects and designers who are not involved in the day-to-day business of cabs.”

Yet the perspective of consumers and passengers is not included in the process! This seems like a fantastic opportunity to try to understand the needs of the users of the system from another point of view, rather than as users of the system who presumably arrive at these workshops already ready to solve the problems they’ve defined. Let’s take a step back and try to understand what isn’t working for someone else. Ethnographic study of the cab-riding experience, anyone?

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