Brian Jepson’s Weblog

Cool. Jeneanne Rae’s slides are illustrated by explodingdog.com. “How a train rocked my world”. She was tasked with dealing with the new high speed train for the northeast corridor. Remember the old image of “Amtrak”? Late trains, stodgy. At Ideo, they assembled a team; it was their first US services project, first brand build, first big government contract, first “customer journey framework”, first assessment of diffs between products and services. First train!

Customer journey:

learning-->planning-->starting-->entering-->ticketing-->
waiting-->boarding-->riding-->arriving-->continuing

Too much focus on riding ignored the totality of the experience! For example, there was no car rental facility at the Route 128 terminus (continuing!), so Acela had to delay opening it until it could be established. (Her notion of the customer journey reminds me of the Reader’s Journey, which is at the center of how a Head First book is organized).

They had a huge prototype of the train car in the Ideo offices, would try using it in wheelchairs, check out the bathroom experience. Amtrak kept bringing people from different parts of the company through the prototype, and the prototype became a device by which people in Amtrak could communicate with one another. This prototype also sat in Union Station for a long time so the public could explore it.

We have now made a big shift to a services economy. Tipping point was in 1987. This is going to require us to be more sensitive to customers, and is good news for designers. The bad news is that people aren’t ready for this: service companies aren’t ready to engage in conversations with their customers, aren’t prepared to innovate. But many companies will rise to these opportunities to innovate, and it’s time for us to all play.

Josh Koppel is talking to us about album art: brandished Some Girls album. Showed the interactive design of it. People would stare at it for hours.

15 years later, we got the CD. Not a terrible experience, but a step down. Now we’re in another format change… All we get is a 16k JPEG.

But some albums have more: PDF liner notes (pretty miserable to use, actually).

Developed a new kind a liner note: TuneBook, flash-based, plays in iTunes. More interactive, like a DVD title page, but more interactive.

Warner Bros. dug it, convinced Apple, now it’s in iTunes.

It was all going great, lots of business. But then iTunes 7 came out, and it stopped working!

So it was time for something else. The user focus was never on iTunes anyhow. The user experience is on an iPod now, and so is his new software. Rotate, zoom, even move the faces, and call up lyrics. The demo was pretty amazing.

He said he didn’t want his kids growing up not knowing what Mick Jagger looks like.

Jane Fulton Suri from Ideo spoke about “redefining research for innovation.” She gave her story in three parts: personal journey, how it played out, and what the future holds.

Grew up in an artistic family, sought structure (in data, in design) in college.

We can design better things in the world if we understand people better.

Challenged at one point to design the kitchen of the future. She turned it down because she felt she didn’t have the tools in her arsenal. Sent them to a design firm, joined one herself, and realized she did have the tools.

Kitchen: learning lab? cockpit of control?

Children’s storage system: don’t measure children’s height and reach… Crawl around on the floor as they do.

Research was important, but rational and intuitive approaches rounded it out. What if we went beyond the consumer and considered everyone in the system?

“The Empathic Economy”

Clay Rockefeller of the Steelyard had to get one formality out of the way first: “Yes, I am a Rockefeller Rockefeller”. It has opened doors but also created some big shoes to fill. The label of being an Innovater makes things complex. Clay thinks of himself as having different softwiring. Risk-oblivious.

Wondered if ADD is a label they slap on rich kids who aren’t all that smart?

Steelyard is a space where people can look beyond what they already know. His goal is to increase peoples’ opportunities to find out what they are good at.

Opened the remaining ‘Gansett after commenting on his instinct to reach for the beer.

Jim Lavoie of RITE Solutions is up now. Some prop comedy that I can’t do justice to here. Innovation intervention. Management intervention… In-turd-vention. “Tell us about your latest innovation.”

But… Your invention needs… Investment… Further investigation… Sales guarantees.

Keep it up, you’ll be labeled a BIF (bad influence). You’ll either get an MBA or join the innovation protection program and become a but-head.

Eventually you’ll be a company man. Jim got lucky and got invited to a BIF summit. Liked the idea of a roomful of bad influences. (I didn’t get how he made the transition from company man back to bad influence.)

Sang a song… “in a box there’s no room for two” (and some more prop comedy).

Larry Keeley of Doblin, Inc. was up next. Sometimes things change… When Edison sunk his teeth into the lightbulb problem, the current designs of bulbs were getting 7 minutes. Edison would obsessively and compulsively try different filaments (he even tried cheese).

Never go into an innovation challenge without engineers. Never go into an engineering challenge with only engineers.

We overestimate the amount of change that will take place in the short run: take the LED light bulb. An engineer will tell you that it’s superior. But it’s not going to kill incandescent bulbs right away (for example, the cost of a large scale switch is too much right now). How do we get there? “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” So, take yourself to Helsinki. It’s dark there. The future of lighting is distribtuted thickly there. Helsinki Municipal Lighting Project: showcase of lighting innovation. They even took the vitamin D issue into consideration (some lights they use have the right wavelengths to produce vitamin D).

Nothing really happens until you have a point of view: an innovation intent.

Mark Hellendrung of Narragansett Beer opened a ‘Gansett on stage at 11am. Will he drink it? It’s foaming up. He loves beer. His story with beer starts a few years ago, when he was unemployed. He was having a beer, a nice craft beer with his friend, and realized that craft beers were getting in his way of drinking an awful lot of beer in one sitting. They lamented that they didn’t have a beer that they wanted. His friend said “Whatever happened to Narragansett?” The founders of the original brewery had the same problem: they came from Germany and wanted a lager. So they started brewing it. First to do large-scale canning, survived prohibition (made ice and ginger ale during that time), and evangelized the medical community about beer. Little known fact: during prohibition, there was a “medical marijuana” type exception for beer. If you had a prescription, you could get it.

Hi neighbor, have a ‘Gansett

What happened? They sold to Falstaff, competition got stronger, Budweiser came out with light beer, improved marketing and distribution, and grew. Falstaff didn’t spread the message; instead, they “harvested the brand” and it died out.

But with beer getting richer on the high end, and flavorless on the low, there was room in the market for Narragansett to come back. But there was also a brand opportunity; he thinks that given a choice, most people will choose to support a local company.

Mark can get away with making marketing decisions in the boardroom: “My boardroom is a bar.” He goes out to the bars and VFW halls, and finds out what people want. Instead of sponsoring Texas Hold-Em tournaments, they sponsored a Pitch (southern New England game). Solidifying connections to the region and people.

(just a sip)

Diane Hessan of Communispace has always been interested in marketing and customers. Her parents don’t have footage of her playing sports, ballet, etc., but instead acting out an Ivory Soap commercial. Thinking about the movie Big, in which Tom Hanks’ character is the perfect toy company employee: one of their customers in an adult body. Of course, we can’t do this for real, but how can we come close?

Fletcher Music is a small company in Southern Florida. A chain of retail music stores specializing in organs. When her group met them, the home organ market had disintegrated. They were locked in price wars with competitors, and needed a way out. So they were tempted by portable keyboards, and went out to find their customers. They were surprised to learn they were around 75 years old. They weren’t buying organs to become great musicians, but instead to have a sense of achievement and satisfaction. Not only that, but they didn’t want some kind of space-age gadget, but a simple keyboard that looked nice in the living room and wasn’t complex to use. They wanted to get involved through their keyboards; it was part of a social circle, and lessons were critical.

Their response: they found an Italian manufacturer to build the first organ ever designed for senior citizens. Sold out their 8-month supply in 3 months. They offered lifetime free lessons as well. They eventually became, and still are, the largest retailer of organs.

Conversations with customers will help you when you’re struggling to come up with the next innovation. “Wouldn’t it be great to have customers connected to your company in real time, all the time?”

Tim is the founder of Pandora.com, and a musician. He started out wondering how a listener finds musicians, and realized that we all have a “genome” in our head for the music we love. Tim wondered how he could put the genome down and use it to suggest music that you might like. This was the start of the Music Genome Project, a massive taxonomy of music. Whether you are Tom Waits or Ella Fitzgerald, they can describe your voice along the same axis. The Music Genome Project uses 400 attributes to describe music.

The Music Genome Project has used specially trained musicians to describe and catalog half a million songs. On top of that data, they launched Pandora.com, which lets listeners create stations that fit their tastes in ways previously impossible. Pandora just reached 3.5 million users (not sure I got that number right) without any advertising.

How do you turn your thoughts into action? John Donoghue a Brown Professor who is working with Cyberkinetics; he’s telling the story of how they took it from the laboratory into a company. BrainGate is a product for turning thought into action: he showed a video of a paralysis victim using her thoughts (the part of her brain for moving the arm) to control a TV.

The activity in the brain can be read and decoded. To figure out how it worked, they wired up monkeys and had them play video games. After the monkeys learned how to play the games, and after John’s team cataloged the data, they were able to take the joystick away and the monkey could play the game with his mind.

They have started a trial: four participants with spinal cord injury or strokes.

He played a recording of brain activity (a crackling sound that corresponds to thinking about an activity). One of the patients was able to read and send email using the “Cyberkinetics Desktop”, a computer user interface connected to their equipment. They even wired one of their participants into a robotic hand. In case you’re wondering, yes they do have equipment wired right into their brains, Matrix-style.

He showed a video of a stroke victim verbally communicating for the first time since her stroke. When asked what she thought of the system, she tapped out “I love it” using a predictive text system wired to her brain.