An active user of Flickr, I was astonished to read that it is being acquired by SmugMug. The email said, “We’re excited to announce that Flickr has agreed to be acquired by SmugMug, the photography platform dedicated to visual storytellers.” This would be the third time in over a decade that Flickr has changed hands with its owners since its launch by the Vancouver-based Ludicorp in 2004. It was in early 2005 that Yahoo! decided to buy this image hosting company for $35 million. Then in 2017 Verizon acquired Yahoo! and all its assets in a $4.48 billion deal, and now it’s SmugMug acquiring Flickr from Oath Inc. for an undisclosed sum. Despite its base of over 90 million users, I think it’s becoming harder to sustain itself in competing with the established photo-sharing social networks, although it’s one of the few places where professional photographers (the folks who experiment with DSLRs) still venture out. I’m not sure what the future holds for Flickr, I adore it, to be honest, but I doubt that it has a long way left now. Given that mobiles are adept at capturing & sharing incredible photos & videos at higher resolutions, only time will tell if the era of image hosting platforms is entering its last lap.
For The Love Of Our Planet Earth
The winter this season showed no signs of abating and it was anything but ordinary. Then last week, just as I was expecting the spring to bring some warmth and sunshine to the chill, there was an unprecedented ice storm sweeping across the city of Toronto. It also resulted in some serious collisions on the roads & power outages in parts of the city. Some would have attributed this abnormality to the ‘wrath of nature’ or ‘God’s will’, but I believe it was a direct result of the effects of climate change more than metaphysical. Sadly, we only pay attention to ‘climate change’ from the media when a rising mercury scorches the earth or causes drought, though it also affects the monsoon patterns. In some areas, it brings incessant deluge that floods low-lying areas while displacing human settlements. Now, it’s anybody’s guess whether the forecast for this year would be chilly, soggy, or oppressively simmering! Nonetheless, on this Earth Day, we must pledge to ‘act green’ in protecting our planet, it’s the only place in the entire universe that we must love & preserve. Let’s go green!
Redefining UX Through Service Design
Giving in to my inherent desire for discovering new insights, I stumbled on yet another industry report on UX, this time from Loop11. They have produced an insightful 24-page document about the outlook on UX in 2018, and I wasn’t surprised to see Service Design redefining UX as the methodology for improving the overall customer experience. Consider the following data:
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- 28% consider UX as referring to all the touch points or experiences a user has with a product, service or interface.
- 14% simply described UX as the ‘user experience’, sometimes going on to mention contact points or interactions.
- 13% believe UX refers to the emotions and attitudes a user displays or feels about a product, service or interface.[/perfectpullquote]
The respondents are alluding to an approach to map & improve the “touch points” or services integrated with an overall customer experience strategy. In which, the ‘service’ supports a user’s emotional context of the experience during a product’s lifecycle, but also in enabling a structured framework to redefine those intangible experiences that a customer would likely endure, before, during and after experiencing a product or a service. I have briefly covered this concept on this blog where I have spoken about incorporating a 360° strategic outlook “which includes a product’s physical & environmental aspects besides UI”. As digital transformation brings automation and companies look for social innovation, designers need to broaden their UX mindset by not just embracing the functional aspects but also by connecting with various other fields of activities that would indirectly complement the desirability factors of a product or service.
Service Design is a cross-disciplinary practice which combines numerous skills in design, management, and process engineering, in developing user-centered business models that are empathetic to user needs. In other words, it helps to improve and deliver intangible services aimed at remodeling customer experiences.
Revisiting Toyota’s Mirror Control Mapping
This happened to be my first experience driving a Toyota Corolla that gave me my brief moment of ignorance and embarrassment and also reminded me, yet again, of the value of standardization in common design practice. Car manufacturers have strictly adhered to standardization practices such as the placement of the foot controls like the brakes, the clutch, and the accelerator. Then with the two stick knobs – one, with which we control the speed of the windshield wipers, and the other stick control for the directional lights, both residing in a ‘V’ shape behind the steering wheel. Similarly, there are standards which dictate where the driver’s seat should be positioned — left or right, depending upon the country you’re driving the vehicle. These are some of the standard laws & features that exist for any make of a car or country regardless of the geography, though I realized soon enough that the side mirror controls do not seem to figure on that list of standard design practices. The mirrors play a vital role in the manoeuvring of the car. Also depending on the height of the driver, they need to be adjusted to fix the viewing angle of incoming cars in traffic on both sides, and I was left confused in operating this standard procedure on the Toyota Corolla which I will talk about in detail later in this article. Mind you, in some countries, the side-view mirrors are manually controlled from inside the vehicle and I am not referring to those mechanisms in this article, those have a well-defined conceptual model.
Luckily, I was reading the expanded version of Don Norman’s classic The Design of Everyday Things or DOET and found my answer through the importance & criticality of standardization in relation to cars. The book mentions that “standardization provides a major breakthrough in usability” in reducing user’s confusion; although machines or tasks could continue to remain complex per se, just as driving a vehicle is, once standardization is integrated within a particular device or machine the user feels justifiably confident in meeting their desired goals. (p. 248; Chapter 6: Design Thinking) Take the example of driving a car, once you familiarize and develop the skills of controlling the vehicle you could pretty much be driving any make or model at anyplace in the world.
A little background about DOET which is an insightful discourse on ‘human psychology’ (previously published as The Psychology of Everyday Things or POET), and a must-read if you’re in the profession of designing interfaces, human-computer interaction, or product consulting. The key emphasis of the book is to promote the importance of developing products that fit the needs and the capabilities of people in creating usable products that align with the psychology of the users to accomplish the purpose for which they are designed. For now, though, I was keen to set out and tackle the task of reducing the confusion from a complex mechanism of the side view mirror controls in this particular make of Toyota Corolla.
Design Thinking For Organizational Innovation
An insightful quote from the Innovation by Design book caught my attention at a local bookstore and luckily I was able to find it on the author’s blog through some rigorous Googling. It gains prominence especially since in my experience, some experts have associated with the design thinking (DT) methodology as a UX design activity referring to its iterative design activities. Hence it was important to make a note of its broader value in innovation here.
The criticality of using DT or ‘human-centred’ design in enterprise software development has been documented in an incisive paper by IBM, but the frameworks also stimulate the transformation journey in combining the organization’s strategic vision involving various inter-organizational initiatives as listed below. Essentially, if you are a practising consultant at the intersection of business design & digital IT in your organization and believe that your role is limited to software consulting, you could expand the scale of your engagements and contribute to the maturity of your institution in more than one ways.
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- The influence of design thinking at scale on the organization’s culture
- The creation of new products, services and experiences
- The design organization processes, systems, and structures
- The creation and leadership of long-term strategy to distributed innovation
- The functioning of teams, decision-making and conflict resolution
- The design of collaborative environments
- The use of external design thinking experts and consultants
- The training and development of employees in design thinking
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