Purchasing patterns on unpredictable incomes
Niti Bhan does a lot of work in the Bottom of Pyramid (BOP) market segment. She's got tremendous insights into these markets. Her blog Perspective, is a place to keep track of her thoughts and ideas. A recent post on Perspective is on how to position a product or a service in a segment where income levels are irregular or unpredictable or both. She cites 4 strategies:
- Paid for in advance (e.g. prepaid airtime)
- Bought in bulk (e.g. food supplies when money is available)
- Sachets or single portions (e.g. shampoos, razor blades, etc.)
- On demand or daily purchase (e.g. perishables such as bread and eggs)
Such insights can be invaluable for those trying to offer credit or position new products or services such as new mobile services and plans.
Permalink | Friday, April 04, 2008
E-services is the new “others”
I'm seeing many websites, especially government ones, put many important tasks under the "e-services" label. Important stuff like making payments, applying for new account or canceling a request are all parked under this label. Basically, anything that is a web transaction is parked under this label. From a users point of view, I really don't care if the service is online or not, but I do care about the time it's going to take for me to get the task done or the different ways in which I can get it done. In such a case, putting the keyword "online" does make a difference, but parking all such tasks under a generic label defeats the purpose as I may not find the task in the first place. For example, consider this Canadian Immigration page, at first glance I know the tasks that I can do. But if I found an "e-services" label somewhere there, I would never click it. It's time we moved away from the e-services label and focus on the tasks that users can accomplish -- "I want to..." is a good start.
Permalink | Thursday, April 03, 2008
Search patterns
Peter Morville has put up a sandbox page to collect all kinds of search patterns. From site search to mobile search, he's got a place for each kind of search.
Permalink | Saturday, March 29, 2008
Bridging the Designer–User Gap
Jakob Nielsen has a good article on using usability to close the different levels of user-designer differences. He identifies 3 such levels of difference:
- Level 1: The Designer Is the User
- Level 2: The Designer Understands the Product
- Level 3: Designing for a Foreign Domain
Permalink | Tuesday, March 25, 2008
A UH report shows that blended learning works
A research study from the University of Houston provides the numbers to what many of us already believe and practice: blended learning works.
"A technical report from a University of Houston Department of Health and Human Performance researcher finds that students in a "hybrid class" that incorporated instructional technology with in-class lectures scored a letter-grade higher on average than their counterparts who took the same class in a more traditional format."
Permalink | Tuesday, March 25, 2008
IA and interactive agencies
Interesting piece in Adage magazine that was pointed out in the IA mailing list. Phil Johnson writes about what it takes to be a truly good interactive agency vs. yet another ad agency. Here are his three points:
- The truly interactive shops had senior technology leadership that was shaping agency direction and client engagements. That's a big difference than having a wicked smart programmer who's dancing to the tune of the creative department.
- They worshipped information architecture. The interactive agencies had a deep respect for a discipline to which ad agencies, at best, play lip service.
- The agencies that got it didn't try to push interactive engagements through a process developed 100 years ago for advertising. If you're an ad agency, you will need to break some bones to reset them correctly. We should be walking again soon.
Permalink | Friday, March 21, 2008
E-learning then is still e-learning now
A nice find by Patrick Lambe: some photos from an old book that predicts the role of tech in the future. Looking at the photos, yes, it's easy to see that we've not travelled very far in the last few decades. That is why I think that open learning that we're experiencing today, thanks largely to the Web2.0 surge, is a big change in the right direction.
Permalink | Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Exploring the Intranet Hive
Cairo Walker from StepTwo Designs provides another perspective on managing intranets. He introduces the "hive" concept that explores the following in a two part article (part 1, part 2):
- Strategy - know where you are going
- Design - make it easier for staff
- Content - meet the business need
- Change and communications - inform and support everyone
- Technology - keep it all working
- Team - be effective
Permalink | Monday, March 17, 2008
Google is good but it’s not God
Gerry McGovern nails with this piece:
"Almost every search result in the first page of search results for practically every important search has worked really hard to get into that first page. The owners of these websites have worked hard to make their content search friendly. They have worked hard to make their metadata search friendly. They have worked hard to get as many links as possible, knowing that every link increases their search rankings.
Having good search does not mean you shouldn’t have a good classification and navigation. In fact, a good classification will make for even better search results. Search and navigation are interdependent in many ways. People often use search to jump a couple of levels down into a website. Then, they like to navigate."
Permalink | Monday, March 17, 2008
Health 2.0 - Apps & Trends to Watch
Health is the next big area to feel the impact of the Web 2.0 drive. The time is ripe for setting expectations and experimenting with health related data and applications. The ReadWriteWeb takes a look at some trends in this area.
Permalink | Sunday, March 16, 2008
Turn Usable Content into Winning Content
On writing well for the online environment:
"Findable. Scannable. Readable. Concise. Layered. We know much these days about how to make Web content usable—thanks to experts such as Robert Horn, Jakob Nielsen, Ginny Redish, and Gerry McGovern. What we don’t understand as well, however, is how to make content win users over to take the actions we want them to take or have the perceptions we want them to have. We don’t understand how to make Web content both usable and persuasive. I, by no means, intend to imply that we should sacrifice the usability of content to make it more persuasive. Truly winning content must be both."
Permalink | Sunday, March 02, 2008
A Visual Tutorial on the Creative Commons License
Simple, visual and with a story. Good tutorial on the creative commons license and why its important. [via Soulsoup]
Permalink | Friday, February 29, 2008
Starbucks training experiment - did it work?
"On Feb 26, 2008, Starbucks closed over 7,000 stores for a unique 3 hour company wide training effort. The following day, Elliott Masie visited the local Starbucks in Saratoga Springs, NY and did an in-depth interview with the store manager on the learning outcomes, processes and texture of this experiment."
Permalink | Friday, February 29, 2008
Starbucks Takes a 3-Hour Coffee Break
I really hope this works for Starbucks. It seems impossible to teach values and ways of a culture by having a 3 hour training session.
"In its campaign to revive the intimate, friendly feel of a neighborhood coffee shop, Starbucks orchestrated the closing of 7,100 of its American stores at precisely 5:30 p.m. for a three-hour retraining session for employees."
Permalink | Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Youth Olympics 2010 in Singapore
I got the goosebumps listening to Jacques Rogge make the announcement. Congrats Singapore!
Permalink | Friday, February 22, 2008
The Immutable Laws of Web Design and Development
Brian Fling of Blue Flavor has collected some of the most used laws in web development. Now I don't have to hunt them down. Here's my favorite:
Parkinson's Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
Permalink | Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0
John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler talk about Learning 2.0 and how its going to impact how people learn.
"We now need a new approach to learning—one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up an inventory of knowledge in students’ heads. Demand-pull learning shifts the focus to enabling participation in flows of action, where the focus is both on “learning to be” through enculturation into a practice as well as on collateral learning."
Permalink | Sunday, February 17, 2008
Google apps - team edition
This was kind of expected: a secure team-based use of Google apps like document, spreadsheet, calendar and messaging. In the intro video, you can see that this is targeted at small companies and schools. Going by the crappy stuff out there in schools and universities, this should be widely embraced by teachers and students alike. Now only if they included Blogger into the fold.
Permalink | Thursday, February 07, 2008
Better Living Through Taxonomies
Heather Hedden writes about taxonomies for Digital Web Magazine:
"It goes without saying, then, that developing a good hierarchical structure is important for creating a well-designed and easy to navigate website. By understanding the fundamentals and best practices of taxonomy development, web designers and information architects can design better websites. This involves knowing whether concepts or topics are indeed of a broader-narrower (parent-child) relationship and not merely an associated relationship. A concept can be narrower to another concept only if it is a kind of, instance of, or part of the broader concept."
Permalink | Thursday, February 07, 2008
Quotable quotes
Here are some quotes that I've been collecting:
"You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail." -- Charlie Parker (1920-1955) Jazz musician
"To model an object is to possess it." -- Picasso
"Design is not just what it looks like or feels like, but how it works." -- Steve Jobs
"Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally." -- General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard
"There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all." -- Peter Drucker
"If I had 20 days to solve a problem, I would take 19 days to define it." -- Einstein
"The wise know too well their weakness to assume infallibility; and he who knows most, knows best how little he knows." -- Thomas Jefferson
"One test is worth a thousand expert opinions." -- Quoted by Bill Nye, scientist & mechanical engineer
"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think and act anew." -- Abraham Lincoln
"Truth springs from arguments among friends." -- David Hume, philosopher
There is a saying among airline pilots: "never do something that you have not visited in your mind ten minutes before". -- From the Airplane Disaster Investigation Series
Permalink | Thursday, February 07, 2008
Interactions Magazine now online
The Interactions Magazine is now online. Loads of in-depth articles from Primal interactions to an article on idioms and metaphors.
Permalink | Tuesday, February 05, 2008
7 Strategies for implementing corporate wikis
Industry Week reports on a study by the Society for Information Management's Advanced Practices Council (APC) on implementing corporate wikis. Here are the recommendations:
- Integrate the wiki as one of several important tools in an organization's IT collaboration architecture.
- Understand the wiki "rules of conduct" and ensure they are monitored and enforced.
- Optimize the use of wikis for collaborative knowledge creation across geographically dispersed employees, and for crossing divisional or functional boundaries, in order to gain insights from people not previously connected.
- Assign a champion to each wiki and have that champion observe contributions that people make to the wiki; the champion will help foster employees who adopt the important "shaper" role within the wiki.
- Recognize that the most difficult barrier to cross in sustaining a wiki is convincing people to edit others' work; organizations should ask their champion and managers to help with this.
- Recognize that a significant value of wikis comes from embedding small software programs into the wiki that structure repetitive behavior. Some include organizing meeting minutes, rolling up project status or scheduling meetings. Ask wiki participants to keep watching for repetitive activity to evolve and enhance wiki technology.
- Understand wikis are best used in work cultures that encourage collaboration. Without an appropriate fit with the workplace culture, wiki technology will be of limited value in sharing knowledge, ideas and practices.
Permalink | Thursday, January 31, 2008
Intranet governance 2.0
Paul Miller from the Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF) takes a jab at governance model that bridges all three types of intranet he identifies - traditional intranet, informal/flexible intranet (blogs, wikis) and the outside intranet (facebook). There's no harm in looking in these directions, but I think it matters more if we focus on delivering staff value based on current and future needs and behaviors. At some point, the three types will merge and then there will be just boundaries of relationships and identities.
Permalink | Monday, January 28, 2008
Noticeboard clutter
I took this photo at a clubhouse in Bangalore. This noticeboard contains important information such as changes in timing and polices. This arrangement gives me the creeps but I found old members patiently going through the information.
Permalink | Monday, January 28, 2008
40 Downloadable Open Source Social Software Applications
This list definitely needs to be bookmarked. Categories include Social Bookmarking, Social Filesharing, Social Networking and Social Search.
Permalink | Thursday, January 10, 2008