Rather than take sides or make bold predictions, I’d like to mention what needs to happen for physical goods & services to remain healthy. Retailers must focus on customer experience.

Online has stepped its game up.  To make its customers comfortable, stores have made ordering as painless as possible: they offer free returns & shipping, customer feedback, fast checkouts, stored logins.  Above and beyond these expected features, companies set themselves apart through their dedication to personalized service.  People shopping at these sites feel like their patronage is taken seriously by actual humans and not by automated timedown scripts and stockroom robots — Gilt I’m looking at you!  Zappos has gotten attention for their buzzing company culture, which emerges in pleasant service calls as well as the fun copywriting on their website.

Personal touches are everywhere in the online retail sector.  Sound equipment retailer sweetwater.com assigned me a Professional Sales Engineer just to ensure my 20-dollar purchase of headphone pads went smoothly.  In another example, last week I complained to endless.com when a pair of shoes didn’t arrive when expected.

[excerpt from my email]
Why did you request a return to sender? Why Endless? Why Amazon? Why FedEx?  My feet were looking forward to being swathed in luxurous leather loafers today… I’m very sad & disappointed

[excerpt from their response]
We pride ourselves in convenience and efficiency at Endless.com, but I can see we didn’t meet that standard here. I hope you’ll give us another chance to make this right, and that we can prove the quality of our service with your next order.

To help make up for this, I’d like to give you a $30.00 promotional certificate for use toward your next endless.com order.

Notice the emotional tone of my complaint and their similarly worded email; their reaction was appropriate and was written in a heartfelt tone.  I appreciate that online retailers are trying to be more personable, and that they realize that these small interactions are important for the success of a company.  Corporations evaluate their success based on a figure called the net promoter score based on the answer to the question “would you recommend our service or product to a friend or colleague?”  By using a service tactic, they turned a potential negative NPS score to a positive one.

Brick and Mortar retailers must raise their bar to compete with the online world’s service orientation.  They must go back to their roots & make the customer experience the most significant aspect of a sale.  The salesperson serves the pivotal role.  Hospitality, knowledge and courtesy ensure the customer leaves satisfied and with a smile on their face.  When executed smoothly, these people leave a memorable good impression of the company and the clothing as a whole.

Retail stores are rising to the challenge. In my recent trips to the Gap & Banana Republic (both owned by Gap corp) downtown, I have been greeted at the dressing room by an attendant who asked my name, offered theirs and made suggestions on items in my selection.

Both times part of our conversation involved going online to shop a larger selection on their web catalog (for a missing style or fit), an interesting addition to the retail experience. The fact that I received a similar customer experience in both stores clued me to the fact that a service orientation is becoming a top-down mandate from the execs at the organization. They realize that positive and memorable attitudes of sales clerks are market differentiators.

Domain expertise is another important factor to the survival Brick and Mortar shops.  Product recommendations from an online sales team or from fellow consumers cannot match the wisdom or passion of an expert craftsmen.

I recently purchased a new pair of spectacles in a boutique optics store in San Francisco.  They provided me the expertise & honest attention that I needed to make a significant purchase.  Each time I’ve been there looking for frames, I was treated with respect and individualized attention. I was never rushed to make a purchase & were completely patient with me although I had been in there three times (last Thursday was my third and final visit, before I finally decided to buy a pair).  They explained subtle differences between frames, drawing from a wisdom only gained by years of experience to help me make a purchasing decision.  Call it flattery, but they showed me how the frames I chose complemented my facial shape and features.  I wouldn’t be able to get this in Walmart, Target or big chain optics.

Admittedly, I’m as big an online shopper as most.  In fact, sometimes I prefer shopping online. It’s pressure free and you can poll “peers” about the item.  But as long as I get a novel & refreshing customer service experience, I’ll continue to return to B&M stores to balance out my online shopping.

via

hilarity and absurdity ensue.

It took a minute to notice the affordance and the proper interaction — I even ended up ripping one corner apart before noticing it — but once I learned it, I was amazed at the simplicity. Not as jaw-dropping as some other packaging design, but this attention to detail is micro-ingenuity that I admire.  This box design allow manufacturers to save on materials (tape, cardboard, metal staples) simply by leaning on the human mind to learn a new pattern for interaction.

something urban

something sleek

something proportional

Someone with good advice.

something anticipated

frame·work – (frām’wûrk’) n.

1. A structure for supporting or enclosing something else, especially a skeletal support used as the basis for something being constructed.
2. An external work platform; a scaffold.
3. A fundamental structure, as for a written work.
4. A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Why does this Illustrator icon set deserve to be called a UI design framework? In the author’s words, it includes a GUI Library, icons set, and a styles library. Yes, it’s good looking… maybe even useful. But not a framework.

I’d like to think UI design is more than visual design, the skinning of an interface. But maybe what I’m thinking of is called interaction design… or is it user experience design…

Steve Portigal posted his excellent talk from a CHIFOO conference, “Skill Building for Design Innovators“.   His summary:

How can you broaden your sphere of influence within the field of human-computer interaction? You can start by building your muscles! Steve will take a look at some fundamental skills that underlie the creation and launch of innovative goods and services. He will discuss the personal skills that he considers to be “the muscles of innovators” and the ways you can build these important muscles, including noticing, understanding cultural context, maintaining exposure to pop culture, synthesizing, drawing, wordsmithing, listening, and prototyping. Along the way, he will demonstrate how improving these powerful skills will equip you to lead positive change. http://www.portigal.com/blog/skill-building-for-design-innovators-from-chifoo/

Working out is a great analogy for design skill-building.  “Hitting the gym” (can you say that phrase and not sound like a douche?) is necessary to keep your body and mind fit, alert, and ready to handle the challenges of any given day.  Also, from what little I know about weight-lifting, working out different muscles in a systematic & balanced way yields the best results, just like a designer benefits most by training & growing in a multifaceted way. Like a good trainer, Steve tells us to hit the gym with his recommended training regiments: taking a camera with you on stimulating walks; collecting items that only make sense in other cultures; wading in the shallows of pop culture; and even tweeting to help with wordsmithing (crafting copy and short labels).

There are three skills that I feel are part of a well-equipped designer toolkit, and could have been included in the talk.  The first is dialoguing, or facilitating.  A good designer finds a way to encourage an exchange of ideas on level ground, without egos involved.  Sometimes sharing opinions becomes personal, but a good designer should be able to brainstorm, let ideas compete, then devise a solution without weakening bonds of professional trust and without killing a team’s enthusiasm.  Imagining is another important skill, which is important to devise solutions and envision paths to completing them. This muscle can be exercised by day dreaming or doodling or sketching.  The last important skill is persuading.  A designer is a salesman of ideas; practice runs before presentations or doing talks in front of peers are good ways to exercise our skill of selling.

People, especially Americans, are wasting a ton of food. Figures vary from study to study, but something from 60-100 billion lbs of food is thrown in the trash. That food, or roughly one quarter of the 356 billion pounds of edible food available, costs the average family of four $1,039 annually (source) Not much of that waste is being recycled – only 2% to be exact (source). By addressing food waste, society steps closer to the goal of ending hunger. It is a very salient issue for me, since as a child my mom always hassled me when I wanted to leave the dinner table prematurely. “Better eat all your food on the plate; some starving person in Africa could eat it!” The guilt of throwing away food still resonates with me to this day.

The situation

How does all that food end up the trash? Every time I stock my fridge, some of the food I purchase will contribute to food waste. Committing to buying fresh groceries means food will spoil from forgetfulness. The problem is compounded by the fact that I live with three other individuals, who cram their groceries in the fridge, finding whatever arrangement that fits their food in the fridge. This situation creates a lot of food that gets hidden, only to be discovered when it is already too old to eat. Food that is getting old isn’t visible and I don’t do extensive enough reviews of my fridge to stay on top of it.

I want to commit to buying fresh food, but it is hard to stay vigilant about food waste. Remembering exactly what I bought and what needs to be eaten is not at the forefront of my mind at all times. Is there any way we can get a reminder?

Opportunity

The refrigerator is a machine that, despite its innovations in engineering & energy efficiency, still has plenty of opportunity for design improvements. After all, the core model has not changed since its inception: it is still a box we open, throw food in, and neglect until needed again. There is no communication or interaction between it and the rest of our life outside the kitchen. However, as a product that is intimately tied to our food consumption and waste, the refrigerator needs to play a greater role in mediating our behaviors.

Food waste will be better managed when the refrigerator is designed to communicate with us. STILL HERE!, it will tell us. There is food still here, there is no need to go to the supermarket. Throw me in a stir fry… and fast! Don’t go out to eat, I have plenty of leftovers!

Solutions

The Information Architect says,

Organize your fridge according to a lifespan system. Designate areas of your fridge for buckets of consumables that are fresh and/or have a short lifespan (check the expiration date). Make sure that food in that bucket is visible and easy to grab for immediate consumption. Put food with preservatives and long shelf lives (eggs, milk, etc) into less accessible areas of the fridge. Once the food is organized clearly in a way that creates awareness for food spoilage, behaviors will align with eating food before it goes bad

This requires significant change in our behavior since we tend to designate areas for food types, not according to time.

The product designer says,

Food products do a poor job of communicating how long food remains good & edible; clearer communication of spoilage, made visible through better package design, can inform the consumer when they need to eat the product. Expiration dates on objects like dairy, pre-packaged meat, and other processed foods should be displayed prominently and oriented towards the front of the package. Stickers on produce can inform the eater of its expect lifespan.

Another solution involves innovative packaging used to communicate spoilage through color information. Design a produce bag or box with ink that is sensitive to bacteria, odor, or age. Packages that are red in the fridge should be eaten soon or else!  Designing products in this way engenders a system of reviewing the contents of one’s fridge by color instead of looking at each individual item.

The interaction designer says,

It is remarkable that with so much powerful technology readily available in society, fridges are still ignorant devices. As I watch fridge users struggle with doing fridge inventory, I see an opportunity to create a HUD (heads-up display) on the outside of the fridge that communicates with storage devices in the fridge. Tupperware can be made smarter through user interaction (such as marking the date on leftovers with a digital pen) which can inform a system of food storage.

With simple user data inputs, information becomes available to the fridge: when food was stored, shelf-life of food, whether the food is a full-meal or an ingredient. The HUD on the outside of the fridge can then spit out recommendations – what to eat when, how to prepare it, what to throw out.

“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”

-Eero Saarinen

These are all great innovations. However, I am wary of a trend towards badges & other virtual assets to reward donors. For some donators, a badge prominently displayed on a social profile for all to acknowledge them as Mother Teresa reincarnated provides the requisite incentive that motivates giving to charity. (Fred Wilson sums up some of the reward systems that have benefited the Haitian crisis). I am equally skeptical towards people whose charity is motivated in this way, as I am towards designers who integrate these status symbols into their social systems. They are submitting to the deepest reaches of psychological egoism, tinting our actions with a self-serving spin, re-framing donation as an activity that demands acknowledgement and adoration by our peers and strangers. Social networking helps spread ideas, but when the main idea is that “I donated, I am awesome”, we are cheapening the act.

Is there a need for these symbols in the humanitarian space? Are organization failing to demonstrate that your money, charity, and actions are creating a better place, so they need to give you a virtual goodie to donate? Perhaps traditional donation methods that leverage the direness of the situation and empower the compassionate individual are failing and there is a need for these crappy incentives. I don’t think they are. Let us rely on the skills of the journalist, copywriter, photographer, and graphic designer to build bold and illustrative campaigns that draw attention to the situation on the ground & open the hearts of the reader.

I still believe in coming up with new ways, even social ways, to increase donations. But I think the pat-you-on-the-back badges is moving in the wrong direction. Here are some alternatives for low-cost incentives to motivate charitable action:
1) Phone call or letter written by someone you’ve helped
2) Unlocked premium content
3) Tax returns
4) Removing ads and banners

Services can also be re-designed to allow for donating in small amounts. (A creative re-use of Bank of America’s “Keep The Change” campaign is one example)

Although badges might be increasing donations, we are also increasing narcissism and the act of donating for self-interest. We should design for compassion, which unlike virtual assets, has lasting benefits for society.