TibetanTailor

Tempurpedic announces on their commercial to “twitter what your friends think” regarding the quality of their mattresses.

Wow! This is word of mouth. This is consumer reports & product reviews. This is social. This is brilliant. This content doesn’t even live on your website.

It used to be the social media gurus said make the content on your website easy to steal. Make it easy for it to live off of the island. Here we see tempurpedic going even farther than that, this is direct consumer to consumer. UGQ(User generated question) to UGC(User Generated Content).

There are three reasons that Issue Boards work well for promoting consistent corporate creative performance. It has to do with 3 things that Issue Boards do very well Alignment, Serendipity, and Diverse Stimuli.

Alignment
The Issue Board is centered around a central Issue. There can be only one and that is the center of the Diagram. The ensures the interests and actions of participants are directed toward the key goal. It is the central pivot point. The focus. The center. We might be able to come up with ideas with poor alignment, but we cannot be consistently creative unless we are strongly aligned toward the Issue.

Serendipity
Because too much focus can limit creativity, the Issue Board deliberately incorporates serenditity with having the image forms in the same picture as the issue. In order to promote discovery, what Robinson and Stern, describe as “made by fortunate accident in the presence of sagacity (keenness of insight), the Issue Board is structured to make it easy to recombine and make connections between things that may seem unconnected. By grouping and placing the forms into “concepts” it helps people tranverse the intellectual distance between abstruse connections.

Diverse Stimuli
The Issue Boards deliberately involve “diverse stimuli” by making participants see and think about the variety of forms. This simuli helps to provide fresh insights. And because the Issue Board is something that a group is supposed to gather around and talk about, it gives a real opportunity for people to tell other people about the stimuli they receive from the issue board and the possibilities these stimuli suggest to them.

References:

Issue Boards

Example of Issue Board: Search

Using Issue Boards with Bodystorming

I came across these 3 things when I was reading Corporate Creativity: how innovation and improvement actually happen by Alan Robinson and Sam Stern.

Here is an wonderful example of an issue board. Developed by Anthony Hyun and Dennis Schleicher. We used it last week in a Design Studio exercise. We generated almost 12 new ideas in less than 30 minutes. All participants really enjoyed it and wanted to do more. What was great was that many of the ideas do not involve massive new functionality or features, but would still increase the “loyal customer experience.”

In a bodystorm how do you handle “experts” and “dominant talkers?”
Bodystorming works best when you bring together different people. But what happens when someone is a “expert” and tries to guide the group down only their path.

Dealing with Self appointed experts

• Other people will defer to them SO really set the stage with everyone first putting down what is known about the issue.  It helps to give each body storm group  materials (like an issue board) so that everyone is using the same set of “facts”.
• Underscore the fact that everyone has tacit knowledge that needs to be brought to bear on the issue and they need to talk & ACT in order for their tacit knowledge to be expressed.
• In addition when the people are first introducing each other, try to avoid encouraging responses that would highlight participants level of education, socio-economic status, or amount of experience with the issue.

Dealing with Dominant Talkers

• Spot them in the pre-session small talk and make sure during the body storm you keep a close eye on them and perhaps spend more time with that group in the initial start.
• If that doesn’t work then give them a speaking stick or other object that if you want to speak you have to hold to make it painfully obvious how much one person might be dominating dialogue.

Best is to Set the Stage from the start

• “In body storming exercises like this we know that some people talk a lot or seem to drive the group. It is essential for body storming success to have all of you participate because only through everyone working together does all the tacit individual wisdom get bubbled up and affects other individuals and coalesce in the whole of the body storm.. So if I come over an interrupt to make sure everyone is participating, please don’t be offended. It is just my way of making sure we get good results from your investment in your body storm.”

References

Focus Group Moderation Guides for the same issues

You want more money? More sales? How about having your current customers buy your product(s) more frequently.

Try the Entrainment Recipe (entrainment is about synchronization, alignment between two organisms, systems, etc. It is the dance between your customers’ lives and your webpresence)

A simple approach strategy to increase sales is thus to increase frequency of purchase.

But how do you do that? How to do that within user centered design?

An Entrainment Recipe (A delicious blending of web use sugar and customer life-cycle flour)

Ingredients

1 cup           Good understanding of your customers’ lifecycles
1 pound     Good understanding of how frequent they use your site
2 oz             Design thinking on how to support their lifecycle on your site

1. Find out how frequent do your customers use your website.
2. Find out what your current customers’ “rounds” are. (A daily/weekly/monthly/yearly “round” is the re-occuring cycle of activities.)
3. Determine the current “entrainment” between your customers and your website.
4. Determine what frequency you want to go for (which is of a shorter cycle time than you found in step 1)
5. Figure out how you will support (this might involve new features, functions, or even product/service assortments.)

Basically, If you first look at the activities that your customers are doing (their frequency), then figure out in which ways you can entrain your website with what your customers are doing on a more frequent cycling than what they are currently doing.

So, give this recipe and I’d love to hear how it tastes to you.

Examples

• Perhaps you have a payment schedule that occurs on a monthly basis, why not entrain your users with that monthly cycle. WOW!
• A sad example thought might be those ISPs that try to falsely entrain the users with e-mail use. Yet that is more of a interrruption tactic, whereas google uses a more subtle associated tactic.
• Look back to my diagram connecting Structure, Function, and Process, you can see how to show the relationship between customer activities and web presence.

References

How do you measure frequency of purchase?

Entrainment definitions in Wikipedia (a variety)

In order to help you do better bodystorming one thing I have found helpful is building an issue board. Below is an example of an issue board. Then a diagram of how the overall board is organized. Lastly, how each radian decomposes from the Issue through concepts to each of the individual forms. Go to the Issue Board Page to see my thinking behind this.

The Benefits of the Issue Board for bodystorming are:

• Helps us to more fully align the success of the product/service with the needs, desires, and success of the customers.
• Focused on the BIG DEEPR ISSUE to give us PROFOUND INSIGHTS & INTERPRETATIONS
• Help the company to understand what is truly meaningful in relation to complex human issues of culture, lifestyle, culture, and values.

Now to show you how the issue board is organized.

Here is how you choose each of the images. the logic behind each of the images and the structural relationship.