Making great products that people love is pretty simple. It all comes down to three things: A simple user experience, design the product around its socialability of uncovering memories and pleasure of a product…

• Understand the core feature that a user wants and then relentlessly reduce complexity and unnecessarily elements until you get to a simple user experience.
• Map out the product’s socialability – its affiliation with social groups and any product or its category and how it is connected to different social groups or product group.
• Look hard to find memories that are related to the product and pleasure that are directly and indirectly associated by using the product. Hire an anthropologist to help.

Listening to Jony Ives and Dan Riccio explain the design and manufacturing process is fascinating, and leads to a greater appreciation for the innovation that is at the heart of the Apple brand.

(I’ve embedded the YouTube clip, but watching the video on the Apple site is a better viewing experience.)

Via Daring Fireball

Additionally, much of the current evolution of social software is in improving the communication between people who provide a service and people who use a service. This is what I think is meant by “social media marketing”. This is somewhat of the fourth wave…when social applications not only improve the conversations between people using the site, but between people who provide the site and those who use it. (Tearing down the firewall isn’t easy) While email has done much of the heavy lifting here for many years, the mere act of putting these conversations public changes further interaction around them, while scaring the wits out of executives who worry that negative conversation will bring down their empire. (What they don’t count on are the fans they have who defend them)

So while all of this stuff is constantly evolving, and the word “social” is bandied about in countless ways, social design is relatively concrete: it’s designing software that support social interaction.

Well, for starters, unlike my experience on Grainger, many advertisers aren’t focused on building the digital applications that people want to use; they’re focused on somehow cramming marketing into them. Some kid comes up with the next YouTube, Facebook or mobile platform, and most advertisers want to figure out how to market on it. Instead of designing and developing useful applications that could give brands the opportunity to insert themselves meaningfully into our lives, we get cutesy but useless “Sprite Sips” on Facebook, ubiquitous banners in all shapes and sizes and microsites that you won’t likely return to. And I’m talking about digital advertising — never mind traditional.

As agencies and our clients strive to add value to the lives of the average consumer, user and active participant, it’s helpful to think about how we can do this in a framework I like to call the “Three U’s of Advertising in the Application Economy.” They are:

1) Usefulness. Any experience is useful when it’s meaningful and serves a purpose.

2) Utility. Utility is interaction that delights us in some way.

3) Ubiquity. We are living in a fragmented world with what seems like infinite touch points available to us.

But don’t take my word for it. You won’t want to miss reading the rest of the article here.

In The Craftsman, Richard Sennett “gathers case after case in which we see how the work of the hand can inform the work of the mind,” writes Lewis Hyde in a New York Times book review (4/6/08). Richard’s assumption is that we all have abilities as “craftsmen” and that pursuing those abilities “enables people to govern themselves and so become good citizens.” In so doing, we can learn “how to negotiate between autonomy and authority (as one must in any workshop); how to work not against resistant forces but with them (as did the engineers who first drilled tunnels beneath the Thames); how to complete tasks using ‘minimum force’ (as do all chefs who must chop vegetables) … and above all … how to play, for it is in play that we find ‘the origin of the dialogue that the craftsman conducts with materials like clay and glass’.”

While ideas can be quickly copied by competitors, Vossoughi writes that:

There is still one frontier that remains wide open: experience innovation. This is the only type of business innovation that is not imitable, nor can it be commoditized, because it is born from the specific needs and desires of your customers and is a unique expression of your company’s DNA. Yet the design of an experience is often overlooked in the rush to market.

Identifying the 360-degree experience is key, and requires a keen understanding of: knowing where you are in the innovation cycle, knowing your DNA, making emotional connections and designing for the complete experience.

Paul Graham 

A Brief Message