• Lu's: A Pharmacy for Women is North America's first women-only pharmacy – In Vancouver's tough Downtown Eastside where many pharmacies feel risky because they focus on dispensing methadone to heroin addicts. The welcoming atmosphere of the new full-service pharmacy was designed in conjunction with the University of British Columbia's school of architecture.
• Alaska Airlines to fly San Jose-Austin 'nerd bird' – The route which connects the two tech hubs has been dropped by American, the original Nerd Bird carrier, and then picked up by Alaska, starting September 2.
• Would you like ketchup with your cake? – To commemorate its Canadian centennial and thank Canadians for 100 years of support, Heinz has created The Great Canadian Heinz Ketchup Cake — an ideal dessert for any celebration. It's red, perfectly spiced and delicious. Think carrot cake without all the work. "We all think of ketchup as the perfect complement to hotdogs, hamburgers and fries, but its unique taste makes ketchup an ideal flavour enhancer for many recipes, including desserts," explains Amy Snider. The professional home economist and culinary nutritionist works with Heinz. "Heinz Ketchup not only adds great flavour to the cake, but it also creates a wonderfully moist texture."

  (Thanks, Mom)

• MediaMaster is shutting down – We did some really interesting user research to help define the overall value proposition, concept, and user experience. Exciting to see what they were able to do but obviously disappointing to see where it ended up a few years later. "Don’t wait for large corporate partners to make your business viable, it needs to be so on its own. Design it well from the start, it helps when you don’t have to re-engineer the interface, it’s the most complex part! (That was not a problem we had)"

Starfucks sticker, Taipei, December 2007

Service outages seem to be common news stories lately. Sure, it’s news when many people in Florida lose power, but also when Pakistan causes a 2-hour YouTube blackout, BlackBerry service goes down, or Hotmail is unavailable.

There’s a sense that we are relying on far too many fragile systems and that as complexity increases, these stories will become even more commonplace (and perhaps even less newsworthy). But being forced to do without something seems to be a tactic companies enjoy using to extract a sense of the value of their service. The Whopper Freakout ad campaign is the most prominent example, but other companies such as Yahoo and Dunkin’ Donuts have conducted (consensual) user research experiments where people go without something and report back on the sense of loss.

But Starbucks pulled off the genius move, closing for a few hours to retrain staff, and making front-page news not for their failure (see: Florida, Blackberry, YouTube, Hotmail above) but for their retraining efforts towards a clarified service promise

Starbucks is welcoming customers back Wednesday with a new promise posted in stores: “Your drink should be perfect, every time. If not, let us know and we’ll make it right.”

This won’t address all of the challenges Starbucks is facing, but it’s a pretty brilliant P.R. success, hitting the denial-of-services hot button and emphasizing the valid, powerful reason behind the outage.

Today we “attended” a webinar about innovation in services. The talk was to create some buzz for an upcoming IIR/PDMA conference about Service Innovation Design and Development and was presented by Jeneanne Rae from Peer Insight.

The slides and recorded audio may be forthcoming (although there was a lot of technical problems that really took away from the whole experience) but in the meantime, they’ve got a very detailed report from a study of the service innovation process available as a PDF here. The first few pages will give you a reasonable overview of the talk.

Some tidbits and thoughts:

1. Services are the dominant economic force in developed countries, but the buzz/mindshare/process is around the creation of products.

2. Some of the service companies described were surprising: i.e., Wal-Mart, Home Depot. Is retail a service business? Not in the same way banking is (although it’s interesting that they call their offerings products). Not in the same way hospitality is, either. Maybe this is a commonly understood distinction but it wasn’t clear to me.

Is software a service? If it comes in a box (i.e., Adobe Illustrator)? What if it’s on the web (i.e., Google Docs)? What if it’s tied to a product (i.e., iTunes)? Or resident on a device (i.e., Windows CE)?

3. The IHIP framework dates back to 1978 and is the classic articulation of what differentiates services from goods. IHIP stands for inseparability, heterogeneity, intangibility, and perishability.

• Inseparability – Unlike a product which can be taken home after purchase and used later, services are consumed in the same time and place where they are purchased.
• Heterogeneity – Although each product produced can be identical, the experience of interacting with a service is always going to be different from customer to customer.
• Intangibility – You can see and touch a product before you buy it; you can’t experience a service experience until you experience it.
• Perishability – You can count how many products you have on hand; you can’t taken inventory of a service.

From All Things Considered the remote California town of Iowa Hill will finally get land-line phone service. And their cell coverage is spotty, at best. The woman interviewed explains that people in the community have designated areas where there is cell reception as phone booths; a nice colloquialism since we’re likely to envision a purpose-built structure rather than a warchalked wooded area. She also describes the local 911-proxy: fire your gun three times in the air and hope someone comes to your aid.

These dimmer switches are new and they will always be warm to the touch

Seen in a lecture hall at the Berkeley School of Information. Presumably maintenance got fed up with responding to what they deemed to be false alarms. I’m no electrician, but I do have to wonder about dimmers that are warm enough to warrant a service call.

I saw this sign earlier this week in Colorado Springs. Turns out that yes, it’s a real place.

What are the two things people don’t like doing on a regular basis? Why, washing their Vehicle and washing their Dog of course. Both are time consuming and messy. So I created a professional, clean and fun environment where you can bring your vehicle, dog or both and get them clean.

The Hyatt Wake-Up Call service provides Hyatt guests with the opportunity to wake up to personalized greetings from loved ones back home. For a limited time, you can also receive a celebrity greeting from Christie Brinkley. From the press release the service is designed to help frequent business travelers maintain connection with others while on the road and personalize their stay with the sound of a familiar voice in the morning.

To celebrate the launch, supermodel Christie Brinkley, well known for balancing a hectic travel schedule and life as a mom, recorded two limited-edition wake-up greetings available for download.

The direct mail piece I received today comes with 4 perforated cards that I can give to others so they can record messages for me. I can see this being a hit with families with young children, but it’s going right into the recycling for me.

The mail piece:
Family and friends can easily record wake-up calls for you
By using the enclosed cards, family members and friends can create and schedule personalized Hyatt Wake-Up Calls for your stays. The process is simple.
1. Hand out the attached Hyatt Wake-Up Call cards with unique access codes
2. Remind them when you will be at Hyatt
3. Have them call the phone number or visit the website listed on the card and follow the instructions.
4. Look forward to special wake-up messages via your cell phone

Cell phone? They can’t even integrate this into their wake-up service at the hotel? You actually don’t need this to be tied to your hotel stay to use it? You could prank call a bunch of friends, or have Christie call them. It’s masquerading as a “wake-up call” but in fact, it’s just a recorded message delivery, outside of any hotel interaction.

Lame, lame, lame.

We did an unplanned meal shopping thing at Safeway the other day – went in for that night’s meal, thinking “let’s get some fish, and maybe some vegetables.” We check out the fish and choose Dover Sole, relatively bland. We think about some spices and I go off to the spice aisle for something from Zatarains or whoever has that silhouetted dancing chef (anyone?), but then we see this pretty cool display right in front of our noses (there’s so much crap on display in these stores that I guess we tend to look past it when possible) – a variety of spices and marinades.

The fish-prepping man was incredibly nice, very genial, and asked lots of questions as he prepared our food (“how spicy do you like it?”, etc.). We could get the spices on the fish, or on the side. He pointed out another flavor they had but didn’t have room for in the display. We went from ingredients to meal with an enjoyable and custom bit of service (yeah, you can buy flavored/spiced fish and chicken, already done, but this was done at that moment, just for us).

Of course, there were no ingredients on these containers and if you’ve ever read the packages on marinades and flavoring spices you’ve probably noticed the ridiculous amount of salt they contain. We usually comparison shop at length until we find something that is not going to drown us in NaCl. Well, as you can imagine, the fish was spicy and really really really really salty. Each bit was like someone held your tongue with a pair of tongs and held a container of free-running salt above your head for a full minute.

Interestingly, I don’t blame Safeway for that. I take responsibility – caveat emptor – for purchasing a likely-to-be-salty product without finding out more. I compliment Safeway for providing a value-added experience (with the quality of the service – the human – really making it work). I guess we won’t do that next time, and will take the prep burden back on ourselves.

also: I thought the design of the marinade dispensers was kinda cool, allowing you to measure and presumably prevent overpouring.

A uniquely horrible part of our trip to Kauai was stopping here for a shave ice. This place was staffed by a gaggle of poorly trained, incompetent, aggressive, rude teenage girls. They stood behind their window and acted as if the people on the other side were not human, but merely objects. One stood there talking loudly about her social plans for that evening, ignoring the long line. Another complained about the line, and how much work she had. “I hope this fucking line goes away soon! I’m so sick of people!” she yelled to her friends, not 18 inches from the fucking people who were waiting to give her money. Everyone was made to feel as if they were inconveniencing these girls’ lives. One man received his shave ice in a foam cup with a leak; he went back up to return it or get a new cup and they were horrible to him; he shouldn’t expect anything from them since he only spent a few bucks!

This place is in the Hanalei Center on the north side of the island. Do not go there.

We only saw one other shave ice place on the whole island, Jo-Jo’s Shave Ice in Waimea. The experience there was great. This place here sucks.

Hawaii, especially Kauai is a tourist economy; people were appropriately awesome in most places we went to. This place was off the scale in the other direction. Please stay away.