“The approach ignores the magic and the soul.
I understand the value of data and a rational approach to things like engineering. I would like someone who is designing an airplane to use a rational, data-driven, scientific, rigorous approach to understand how much weight that plane can hold. But in the same example, we find an obvious illustration of what happens when we only use an analytical approach. Flying sucks, and it sucks because it’s been engineered to death. Using Google is starting to be a lot like flying, probably because it’s being engineered to death. An emotional approach has value, because it provides things that are unexpected, sensual, poetic, and things that feel magical.”
A/B Testing Ourselves To Death | Austin Center for Design
While I’m on the subject of EQ and IQ, this captures what I mean perfectly. The thing about engineering in general is that, when it comes to interfacing with real-world phenomena, we are creating models - effectively minimizing the guesswork of the physical world into something that works as a reasonable heuristic for behavior of manufactured artifacts.
I hear too often about designing products, the idea that the virtual world allows us to shed some of these constraints, as code is a unique thing in that the idealized world is the production environment. This may be true, but, the minute we begin to interface with humans, we face a problem that requires heuristics and mystery.
This is all well and good… until we realize that anytime we find ourselves innovating, there is no algorithm, and probably not a heuristic either.
So, pivots are a curious thing. The problem with pivots is that we can’t measure everything. Emotion is not measurable. But even left with the things we can measure, we don’t know what to measure (i.e., what counts) - and figuring out where to look is part of this process. And to figure out where to look, we have to watch and observe something for long enough to really gain some new knowledge from it.
(via ninakix)
Shouts & Mumbles: Don't Call Me a Marketer
Just a thought that occurred to me this morning.
My title is Marketing, but I do not like to refer to myself that way. Marketing is an archaic term. To me, that is dead. Marketing with analytics, numbers, marketing research and focus groups and theories based in business aren’t as important….
Marketing by Design
Originally posted on Moment’s blog.
For the last year (well, 10 months technically), I have been a marketer among designers. At Moment, we design digital products and I am not a designer; I was merely a design fangirl when I arrived here, but that’s taken on a whole new meaning now. Being among visual and experience designers everyday, ‘design thinking’ has permeated how I think about and approach marketing and everything it entails. The separation of those two worlds has become blurred in my mind as I absorbed tidbits of design know-how from my colleagues and apply them to marketing be that content strategy and creation or community management.
Lately, there has been a lot of talk about experiences. From the experience design of a specific product to the brand experience and all this has to be designed to. When it comes to considering to the marketing side of that experience, I find myself turning to the bits and pieces I’ve learned from my designer colleagues more and more. No doubt that ‘good design’ is subjective, but there are 3 aspects of good design that stand out to me, especially in relation to marketing: ease, utility, and longevity.
Ease: Keep it simple:
No one likes being confused; we just want to understand things. So it is sort of shocking how many products, experiences, services and more are so complicated and fussy. When I entered the ‘land of design’ (also known as Moment), I stumbled across Dieter Rams’ infamous words “Good design is as little design as possible.” You can see this motto in all his work, especially his Braun products, but those words have stuck and spread throughout, never losing their meaning: keep it simple. When it comes to designing digital products, John Devanney sums it up best; make a product that is perfectly featured, rather than fully featured. What are the features that really matter to the user, but also the product? Applying that to marketing, think about channels of communication. Consumers are saturated with information and choices for communication (Facebook, Twitter, Path, email, etc) and the old ‘everywhere at once’ method of marketing communication doesn’t work.Utility: Make it work.
In the end, an idea is just that, an idea. It only means something if it actually makes it into the hands of the users. If a product serves a purpose, a utilitarian purpose (and yes, entertainment counts as a utility), it will have meaning.Utility in marketing is very similar, practically intertwined with the product experience. Whether it is creating useful content or providing a useful service, it’s all part of marketing now. Users and consumers are more sophisticated and knowledgeable; thus, you need to give them more. More does not mean adding features and flourishes, it means adding value in the form of utility. The more value you can create, the more meaningful and lasting the relationship.Longevity: Make it learnable.
Previously, I only really thought about that first use case of a product or the introduction to a brand, but after steeping in my colleagues’ know-how, there is more value in designing for the third use and all the uses that follow. So how can that apply to the branding and marketing world that I live in? It’s all about creating a lasting meaning or purpose for the consumer. It’s not just about making that initial connection, but maintaining it by thinking about the ‘repeated use’ of something such as content or even the relationship.Coming up on a year, it is hard for me to see the separation between design and marketing as disciplines. While they could not be more different, they share the same target, the user, and are part of a holistic brand experience each aiming to create meaningful relationships.
(Source: kingofdicks)
“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.”
(Source: ibushi-sama)
(Source: minfinite)
