Recently we came across a documentary being developed and showcased on www.kickstarter.com called “Design & Thinking” and it poses several questions to the Design Thinking approach and the incredible value that design plays in everything we do.

Shyam Patel, our LB Creatologist spoke last week at Ignite Dallas during the Big Design Conference on his approach to Saving the World from Bad Design and the value of design thinking and our current complacency with status quo. 

“Design is not about just making things look better, it’s about making people’s lives better.” 

We need to be conscience that every decision we make impacts the design of our own lives and the world around us.

In the movie trailer it spoke about the idea that “design is not a luxury, it’s a discipline”. We believe that to be true in all that we deliver. Maybe we could even elevate it to Design “doing” because we believe it is an absolute necessity in all our efforts at LB.

If we view the challenges of our society through the lenses of a design problem, the problems become infinitely more approachable and solvable. The industrial age taught us to be system thinkers, but the information age requires us to become design thinkers.  We must stop being passive consumers and creators.  We are not passive witnesses to these problems, we participate in them by the way we choose to design our lives and the work we do.

The industrial age encouraged us to gain a depth of knowledge in one area of expertise; the digital age requires that we supplement that depth of knowledge with a breadth of knowledge. Understanding all dimensions is critical and requires that we think through usability and aesthetics, form and function.

So what is design thinking? Well as I mentioned, design is about making people’s lives better – thinking and doing are about the process we use to ensure that we achieve that goal in whatever we are trying to create. 

Let’s use form design as a great example. It’s amazing how applying design thinking to a form can change the world. Think about default options of a form.  This country suffers from an abysmal savings rate due to over consumption.  By changing the default option on 401(k) plans to be opt out saving rates have been shown to increase to 11% compared to negative savings rates nationally.

That’s design thinking and design doing at its best. We must pledge to be design doers. Saving the World from Bad Design means no more status quo, it means challenging ourselves to ask questions, absorb information and ultimately deliver better end results.

Our LB mantra…

We believe that design is a craft at the intersection of art and science, form and function. It is about more than being creative; inspiration and innovation are its fundamental principles. Design is about having the courage and the audacity to pursue our vision through our work to make the world what it can and should be and not settle for what it is now.

To see Shyam’s presentation for Ignite Dallas, check it out here: http://slidesha.re/oMul4V  

Photo/illustration courtesy of: Emerson College blog post by Nitjyot Saroan

Dear Facebook, I have been cheating on you. It was completely unintentional and I can explain everything…sort of.

This week I finally got my invite to Google+.  I had been waiting, wanting to dive in and better understand this shiny new toy that everyone is talking about. This week I got a chance to satisfy my initial curiosity and better understand this new gadget.  

I fumbled some in the beginning until I figured out the interface. I found that it got a bit more interesting as I started understanding how to add people to circles.  It’s been fun to find Ashton Kutcher or Michael Dell and add them to my circle of “Inspirational People”. In this new social tool, I don’t need to be connected to close friends to get content going. I already know this could be addictive.

Here’s a deeper dive into a few of the features I found interesting…there are many more yet to discover:

• Circles: Circles seems to be a hybrid of friending and following that seems difficult at first, but once you get the hang of it, it’s cool. You can put anyone in a Circle, and they can choose to reciprocate or not. The interface is easy and very dynamic.  Drag a user here.  Drop them there.  Put them in multiple groups.  The animations for creating, deleting and modifying Circles are also easy to use and fun.  Very cleverly designed.  It also allows for communication streams to be far more organized than on Facebook. While the “group” feature exists in Facebook and is similar to Google +, Google has definitely mastered the art of making it extremely user friendly.
• Stream: The stream — essentially the Google + version of a Facebook news feed — pulls in information from posts made by people in your circles. You, or anyone following you, can also give your personal endorsement, the +1, to any post or comment. Similar to the “like” button. Aesthetically, it’s a big step up from the News Feed.  One of the best features for me was the ability to sort your stream by Circles to see posts only relevant to work or to catch up on the latest news from your friends, etc. Again, bit confusing until you get used to the interface, but highly addictive thereafter.
• Hangout: I personally have yet to try this feature, but from what I understand it is super cool.  The functionality will allow users to post the hangout to their circles and your friends in that circle will be able to join the hangout which is basically a video conference for multiple people.  I believe it will be interesting to see how this actually unfolds within the Droid and the iPhone app interface.  Could this be a significant VOIP play in the future?

My first few days with Google Plus have been addictive. I’m not certain when the “shiny new toy” syndrome will wear off, but for now Google + was fun to use and has a lot of potential. I could see using it in addition to Facebook, but until Google weaves more of their existing services into G+ and I can integrate more of the people I know, it won’t become my main way to socialize online.

Facebook, can we still be friends?

“Nothing ruins a great website… like people using it.”

This remark was made by SmashingMagazine.com writer Ian Lurie in his recent article featured on the site, Getting Started With Defensive Web Design— a piece in which Lurie explores how the shortcomings of a website’s usability can pose problems that can’t be saved by even the most captivating visual design or creative content. If the user runs into a problem that can’t be easily solved, it’s likely that they’ll simply abandon the site, never to return again as a result of their frustration. The aim of any website is to expand its audience, but it’s just as important to maintain that which already exists, and defensive design focuses on just that.

So what exactly is “defensive design”? It’s a contingency plan for when design fails— and this fail may very well be a mistake made by the user, so it’s important to create a web design that is both proactive and reactive to errors. So now the question is how to design defensively.

Web design should first and foremost be proactive to potential road blocks that will leave the user banging his or her head against the wall or worse, completely uninterested in further interaction with the site. Here are some ways to avoid making someone’s hate list and to instead make him or her feel like a valued visitor:

1.     Never assume that the user will “just know” their way around your site and how to use it. Create contextual help that appears on the current page or roll over inline help boxes that help guide users in the right direction and create confidence in their navigation of your site.

2.     Create a website that is still functional even in the event that your images fail to upload due to slow speed or poor connections. You’ll never know exactly what you’re dealing with, so be positive that under no situation will your site be unusable.

3.     Consider providing an on-site search option, and remember that to err is human— features like closest-match for misspellings and auto-completion for the absentminded are great ways to ensure that search and navigation of your site are seamless.

4.     Forms are the proven enemy of many users. Highlighting errors makes any mistakes clear and easy to correct. Courteous error messages prevent the user from feeling scolded or belittled, and preservation of data that has been previously entered by the user facilitates the otherwise laborious process of filling out forms.

5.     Page errors are expected to occur. Finding creative and kind ways to display the “page not found” screen never hurts, and helping the lost and confused user find his way back or to his intended destination make for a better user experience. Use analytics to determine if a reoccurring page error is fault of your own.

6.     Limited landing pages or ambiguous copy can stir up trouble as well. Be sure to avoid making these kinds of mistakes in designing your site, and again, as Ian Lurie warns, do not assume that the user will just “figure it out.”

Taking these points in consideration will minimize potential errors and will almost certainly increase traffic to your site, consisting of both new and returning users. A better web experience equals a better brand experience, and that is ultimately the goal of any website. Don’t let a weak defense make your website work against you.

As the saying goes, “a good defense is the best offense.”

Written by: Savannah Harper, LB Wordsmith

Photo courtesy of Wild Women Entrepeneurs

A friend and I were talking about digital media the other day and he asked me a question: When do new media and digital marketing become a part of traditional media and evolve to the new “normal”? I didn’t have an answer. I would like to say in many ways we are actually there…but as I listen to clients and view the marketing world that exists today, I would say we still have a way to go.

In my life as a consumer, the two are completely intertwined. I look at all social mediums every day, from my phone, my laptop, at my desk, on the treadmill, before bed…you get the picture. I am extremely connected. I see the vanity URLs on commercials and immediately take mental note to see what they deliver. I scan the QR codes and want to know what magical thing is revealed.  This has become my new “normal”. Even as the growth of social media explodes with over 600 million people on Facebook, more than 200 million on Twitter and the numbers and networks are still growing, I sincerely believe we are in the infant stages of understanding how all of this becomes integrated in a way that doesn’t mean brands are sticking a Facebook share button on their websites and then stating they are “digital” and “socially engaged”.

The way we consume media and information has changed dramatically even if we can’t gauge or measure the exact result.  I read a story online recently that very much imitated something that would seem very normal to me.  It was a story about two co-workers talking incessantly about a recent TV commercial they had seen. But the thing was that they hadn’t actually seen the ad – at least not in the traditional sense of the word “seeing”. That is of course if the first image that entered your head when you thought about seeing a commercial is sitting in front of an HDTV watching a commercial break. How they saw this ad was completely personal: one colleague’s daughter had tweeted her a note to check a posting she’d made on her Facebook wall for a link to the YouTube-located commercial that she’d had been alerted to by a co-worker on LinkedIn. Is that the new “normal”?

And if that seems a bit round-about, there are two things you ought to know: First, the entire interaction from start to finish took less than 4 minutes, and that included the commercial being viewed twice (once by the daughter and once by the employees) and subsequently an additional comment being posted by a colleague who then alerted her son in another city and another time zone. Second, this is increasingly becoming how real brand communication and engagement is taking place – at the speed of the consumer.

Social media marketing and the various connecting tools currently available to brands can be extraordinarily useful in opening channels of communications between brands and customers. However, it is just one tenet in a comprehensive marketing strategy. Social media should be seen as a conversation and part of an ongoing relationship with a consumer, but only a part of the relationship. Digital platforms should be leveraged in a way that complement and ultimately extend traditional marketing engagement to deepen relationships with consumers and create even more compelling marketing strategies.

So when will we get to this new “normal”? To be honest, I’m not sure.  I think many people that you ask would react the way I initially did with the answer that we have already arrived. Some would say we will never get there and others would say we are somewhere in the middle of the journey. 

I don’t know the exact timing…but let me check my Facebook and LinkedIn and get back to you!

 Marketing and customers are two words that have been around for years. Transactions have been a part of cultural norms most likely as far back as the caveman days. I’m not sure where or when the actual word “marketing” became widely known, but certainly the concept is not new. How we market however, has evolved as both customers and commerce have progressed.

Marketing used to be all about “push”.  Essentially companies just shouting the value of their products hoping to incite people to go buy them. It was a one-way medium. That worked for a while and then a theory popped up that suggested the customer become the center of marketing efforts and the traditional 4P’s (Product, Price, Place and Promotion) became more about Consumer, Cost, Convenience, Communication – you got it, the 4 C’s. I don’t think any of this gets lost in our new digital age, but I certainly would argue the world of social collaboration, digital engagement and interactive strategy have birthed many new ways to engage with consumers.  This in turn has dramatically changed our approach to creating marketing strategies that build intimate connections with consumers.

So what should we be considering instead of the traditional marketing approach? We need to begin the process of looking at these marketing concepts a bit differently. Online and digital strategies have changed the way consumers engage, influence and make purchasing decisions. There are apps for everything from buying a movie ticket to depositing a check. We can search in Facebook, Bing, Yahoo, Google and Twitter for anything imaginable.  There are influencing reviews on everything from doctors to restaurants. E-commerce is now in Facebook. All of these items designed in a way to leverage a new evolving marketing mix. So what should we be thinking about?  Hear me out on this…in a recent brainstorming session here at LB we referred to it as SSED:

• Place is now about Search Engines and discoverability – location, location, location.
• Promotion is now about Social influence and engagement – real-time engagement and influence.
• Product has become more about Experience – creating a more intimate connection.
• Price has become second to Design in many ways – functionality and utility over cost.

I am not suggesting we dismiss the previous P’s and C’s, yet that we simply allow for new factors (you guessed it… the SSED’s) in the ongoing marketing game. Interactive strategies must embrace these new paradigms and create digital footprints that leverage each of these new tenets to create a wholistic marketing strategy. Interactive is now as important as traditional mediums. The intricate details and objectives of each must be woven together in a way that complements and provides a 360 view of the consumer and subsequently how we build connections with them. Websites and social mediums are the new storefronts and it is critical they be created and ultimately designed in a way to maximize this new SSED approach.

It’s a whole new ballgame and B2B and B2C marketing is requiring the balance of the traditional 4P’s with these new and engaging ways to market in real time. Search, Social Influence, Experience and Design are all going to play a larger part in how we evolve marketing strategies and leverage the digital landscape.