The Experience Design Scout

The blog posts I’ve enjoyed reading during week 2 of 2009:

• Employee Service is a Key Ingredient to Success. Judy at The Employee Factor posted an interesting read why firms should have employee service and ‘need to, in parallel with a focus on the customer, help their employees understand the desired experience, their role in delivering it and their value to the overall success of the brand’. She poses some interesting questions such as ‘Are the employees that understand your unique value replaceable?’
• 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design.  User experience is not user interface design, a step in the process, or just about usability. Whitney Hess does a good job debunking these myths. My favorite has got to be ‘user experience is not the role of one person or department’. Whitney says ‘Our greatest skill is that we [ux designers] know how to listen’.
• Business Empathy: 6 questions to connect experience with strategy. Brandon Schauer from Adaptive Path reminds us to uncover the an organization’s overall business strategy when designing an experience. Several basic, yet strong questions like ‘how does the business make money’ and ‘where do they invest in’ can make design teams a lot smarter about their client’s business they are designing for. Brandon calls this ‘business empathy’.
• ‘Design’ is not the answer to all our problems. ‘Design Thinking’ should not be turned into another managment fad. Idris Mootee over at Innovation Playground makes a great call with saying that ’Design-driven Innovation’ is more accurate and appropriate than ‘Transformation’. And ‘Design-driven Innovation become transformational when there are relentless pursuits of truth, beauty, balance and responsibility’.
• Brazil vs Argentina: Latin America Creativity. Ok, a much lighter post. This one is about typography in advertising. Who said Latin Americans don’t have humor?