Posted: December 5th, 2011 | Filed under: Stuff I've Done | Tags: Design, mobile, strategy | 1 Comment »
Last Saturday I gave this presentation at MiKE‘s MADE at MiKE event.
I’m curious to find out what everyone built at the 24 hour hackathon that started right afterward!
Posted: April 9th, 2011 | Filed under: Thinking | Tags: Brands, Marketing, Personas | 2 Comments »
Ever heard somebody say “Your wife ain’t your momma?” It’s usually in response to a man expecting his wife to behave like a mother would – maybe by cutting up his meat at dinner or reminding him to take a shower.
The thing is: if you’re a husband, your wife and mother are two entirely different people, with different needs and desires. I’ve never met a woman who aspired to cut up her husband’s meat, and I’ve never met a mother who wanted to marry her son (we know what they smell like at age 10).
And if you’re designing for a brand, it’s really important to remember that your brand user is not usually the end user. Look at the image above: it’s my own interpretation of Harley Davidson’s two target users.
Harley clearly has two user groups: their aspirational brand user and their actual user. As the brand user, the impossibly handsome and rugged Marlon Brando is used to inform their brand’s personality, position and promise. In the case of web design, this sets the direction of visual and emotional design, copy and imagery.
But if you think about it, Marlon Brando types aren’t really the volume customer of Harley, are they? No – they’re too busy riding to live and being impossibly handsome (and sadly passed away). The people who actually buy Harleys are the people who can afford them: higher income people, usually men, with cash to spare.
This is the businessman on the right. He likes to think of himself as Marlon Brando when he’s on his Harley. He’s probably a 9 to 5 businessman, and he has completely different needs and desires than somebody who spends most of his time on the open road, brooding attractively and causing trouble.
Brand Users are aspirational users, based on general market research. It’s the brand saying “if you want to be like this user, interact with our brand.”
End Users are the actual people using the product or service, based on specific research like surveys and customer feedback. They’re based in reality. It’s users telling the brand “this is who we are.”
You want to make sure you’re not using a brand profile for your project’s information design, interaction design and usability testing. A few pointers:
Also remember: your user probably isn’t Marlon Brando (sadly), and your wife ain’t your momma (thankfully).
Posted: February 7th, 2011 | Filed under: Have you seen this?, Humor | Tags: Ad Age, PR Blunders, Social Media | Comments Off
The Cringeworthy Tweet
Last week, Kenneth Cole himself posted this very icky tweet, evidently trying to jump on Twitter’s #egypt hashtag in order to promote his spring line.
Of course, Twitter members then the mainstream media jumped all over it, and today Advertising Age used it as a shining example of the Seven Stages of Comitting a Social Media Sin.
Made me smile.
Posted: July 2nd, 2010 | Filed under: Humor | Tags: Adaptive Path, Design | Comments Off
Ha! (Via Brandon Schauer over at the Adaptive Path Blog)
Posted: June 17th, 2010 | Filed under: Have you seen this?, Thinking | Tags: culture, sketching, social psychology | Comments Off
Here is a fantastic video detailing a study about what motivates us at work. Turns out it’s not money.
“If we start treating people like people, and not assume that they’re horses; you know, slower, smaller, better-smelling horses… we can actually build organizations that make us and our work lives better off, and I think they have the promise of making our world just a little bit better.”
Thanks to Ann for this!
Posted: June 10th, 2010 | Filed under: Stuff I've Done | Tags: Content Strategy, presentations | Comments Off
mkeUX: Hugfest!
Last night was mkeUX‘s inaugural meeting, and it was great! About 30 Milwaukee-area UX’ers, designers, developers, project managers and strategists gathered at Lightburn for a talk on content strategy and a few barley pops.
After my kickoff content strategy presentation, Appropriate, Inc.’s Margot Bloomstein schooled us all on how to sell CS into projects. As my friends at mkeUX say, Hugfest!
Here’s the presentation I gave:
Posted: May 18th, 2010 | Filed under: Stuff I've Done, Thinking | Tags: Content Strategy, Hanson Dodge | Comments Off
(This article originally appeared in Hanson Dodge Creative’s May 2010 Active Insights newsletter.)
Back in the early days of interactive, all we talked about was HTML— the simple way to breathe life into website and, by extension, user experience. Quickly we realized HTML wasn’t enough. Websites needed to be easier to get around and find things in, so we started talking about usability. But before long, even usability wasn’t enough. People began to clamor for a user experience that’s beyond beautiful, useful and thrilling. Websites packed with pertinent information — that also reflect our clients’ brands, and, of course, their marketing goals.
Flash-forward to 2009. We aren’t just designing website user experiences any more. We’re designing experiences for any number of online, mobile and offline properties. Consumers have grown to expect all of the things we’re designing to be beautiful, fun and easy to use. That stuff’s a given.
Posted: May 10th, 2010 | Filed under: Thinking | Tags: Marketing, Social Media, Twitter | Comments Off
The Huffington Post reported the other day on some recent studies that show what we reasonable people have been saying for years: that the people with the most followers are not necessarily the most influential on Twitter.
In fact, there does not seem to be a correlation at all between follower count and influence.
Of course, anybody on Twitter for more than a few days already knows this: the funniest, most interesting and engaging Twitterers don’t care how many people are following them. They’re there because they’re curious, interested in other people and like to share. And they’re highly influential because of it – everybody pays attention when they speak, because it’s sure to be something good.
And on the flip side: mass followings, spam and begging for “re-tweets” are a surefire way to lose friends and alienate social media people.
You see, Twitter isn’t really anything more than a big party, taken to the internet. The funny and interesting people get all the attention, and the ones desperate to make friends are avoided like that cousin at the cookout trying recruit for his new pyramid scheme.
So why do marketers continue to obsess over friend, fan and follower count? Because it’s far easier to measure numbers than a person’s charm. Problem is, the old marketing measurements don’t apply in social media. But the old-fashioned ideas of being interesting and a good listener do.
Read more about the study at ReadWriteWeb.
Posted: May 5th, 2010 | Filed under: Events | Tags: Content Strategy | 1 Comment »
Milwaukee has a new UX nerd group in town: mkeUX. Two local UXers Mike Kornacki and Michael Seidel have teamed up to form this informal group that will meet to “pop the tops on a few beers and let the ideas ping-pong,” according to its first blog post.
I’ll be helping to pop beers and ping pong on June 9th when Margot Bloomstein and I are there to chat about content strategy. Head on down!
Content Strategy on the Realz
Wednesday June 9th, 6pm
Lightburn Design
325 East Chicago Street
Milwaukee, WI 53202 (map)
More info: http://mkeux.com/
Posted: November 16th, 2009 | Filed under: Thinking | Tags: Marketing, Social Media | Comments Off
As a the number of brands appearing in social media is growing, it seems so is the confusion about how to use it. Can social media bring return on investment? Should it replace a traditional marketing? Which sites are most effective?
The answer is nuanced. Social media can be a marketing tool, but it is also PR, customer service, focus groups and networking, among other things.
And if brands use the wrong approach at the wrong time, they can make huge missteps – and with all those millions of people watching, it can be disastrous. Router manufacturer Belkin learned this lesson the hard way when they tried to pay a blogger for good product reviews.
So what is social media? Read the rest of this entry »