5 reasons design thinking facilitation can amplify the success of your internal team

Everybody needs somebody, sometimes.

One of the great superpowers of design thinking is that it’s a methodology that anybody, or any organization, can learn and deploy, quickly and efficiently. As proof, one only needs to look at the growing numbers of organizations and enterprises building internal design thinking capabilities and teams. We have worked with some great internal teams who are embracing the methodology and positively transforming their products, services, processes and cultures.

All of this success might beg the question, “if these companies are getting so good at design thinking, why would they, from time to time, choose to bring in outside design thinking consultants and facilitators, like Ideo, IBM or Magnani?” Of course, there may be specific technological, industrial design or procedural expertise lacking in the clients’ existing team that drives the decision to seek external resources. But in this post, we’ll cover more universal reasons that even the best internal design thinking and innovation teams might benefit from the addition of an outside resource.

1. Rising above organizational inertia.

Design thinking is a methodology, not magic.Adhering to its principles and practices can do much to help its participants move past, “the way we’ve always done it.” But some organizations have deeply entrenched behaviors and norms surrounding certain aspects of their business that it can be difficult for anyone, or any group, to implement change.

Bringing in an outside facilitator can give participants newfound abilities to take on an alternate perspective, at least through the duration of the exercise. We liken the dynamic to those situations when a surprise guest calls you on a Saturday morning and announces they will be at your place within minutes. Suddenly, you are able to adopt the guest’s perspective and see a seemingly infinite number of new things you need to clean, straighten, dispose of, etc. It is the exact same home that previously felt “fine” but now, with your newfound perspective, appears in direct need of attention. It’s important to note that those issues weren’t suddenly in need of attention. They needed attention all along. But complacency and inertia rendered them invisible.

In that same way, the facilitator’s presence and leadership can amplify participants’ ability to see new opportunities for improvement to which they would otherwise have been collectively, figuratively blind. Product or service features that were “fine” suddenly may reveal themselves as a challenge to overcome when participants begin to view them through the eyes of their new “guest.”

2. Amplifying the voice of the customer.

Successful design thinking depends on maintaining a human-/customer-centered perspective throughout the process. External facilitators are in a unique position to be (and, I would argue, have a professional obligation to be) a powerful advocate for the customer throughout the process.

An external facilitator should bring to the process no other agenda than that of designing the best possible service or experience that solves the defined challenge, regardless of what other constraints are influencing the process. For some idea of those constraints, see the other four points covered in this post.

3. Brokering the peace.

As companies grow and incentive structures are created independently, in siloed departments or geographies, when trying to implement change, one will inevitably encounter misalignment of those incentives. Now throw into the mix an innovation that requires major operational or behavioral changes and enterprise-wide coordination. Resistance to change is likely to occur on just as major of a scale.

On top of that, one is also likely to encounter fundamental struggles over ownership and control. Don’t misunderstand that I am in any way representing these challenges as superficial or easy to overcome. They are very real and generally difficult to surmount.

However, when discussing those challenges, having a third party facilitating the design thinking process can help keep the group focused on benefits to customers and the organization as a whole. It can also help minimize the impression that the innovation came from any single department or an executive who may be perceived as having a more personal interest in the success of the change. If you have no dog in the hunt, so to speak, it’s harder for anyone to argue you are inherently biased as to which dog ultimately wins.

4. Broadening the strategic perspective.

Bringing a broader range of experience and cross-sector perspective to a client engagement is a benefit inherent to management consulting, across the board, and it certainly applies to design thinking facilitation.

We’ve had the pleasure of working with clients in sectors as diverse as health care, financial services, packaged goods, hospitality, industrial manufacturing and sporting goods, to name a few. And as distinctive each of these sectors may seem, there was always some strategic market, customer or business insight learned from one that we could draw upon to inform the strategy of another. Technologies and industries may change, but basic human nature applies to all.

5. Adding horsepower. Pure and simple.

The design thinking process, when done at the enterprise level, requires deep resources and thrives on expertise. Adding outside facilitators to the mix can reduce the impact of bottlenecks that normally result from in-house resources being diverted mid-project back to the day-to-day needs of the business.

For one, it’s about getting on the winning side of the numbers game. Generally, the greater the number of qualified minds applied to a problem, the greater the number of possible solutions generated.Further, it’s about having dedicated resources, ready, willing and able to shepherd a project through its various complexities and challenges, always focused on success and free of competing priorities.

Go ahead, point that finger.

There’s little more rewarding than amplifying organizations’ abilities to work through the stages of design thinking to solve what could seem like truly intractable challenges, develop new lines of business or improve the customer journey. The business is more competitive. The customer is more satisfied. And the internal design thinking teams should be able to point to improved ROI from their efforts.

5 ways to maximize the value of your UX research

It’s all about putting humanity in human-centered design.

Qualitative user research, in the form of interviews and observations, is an incredibly important aspect of UX design and experience design. It’s in users’ stories where you find true points of differentiation and previously unknown opportunity. Here are five considerations you should keep in mind to help ensure you’re getting the most from your UX research investment.

1: Be clear on what you want to learn.

It’s easy to jump into the methodology of who you’re going to interview, how those interviews will be conducted (i.e., online or in person) and the questions you want to answer. If this sounds familiar, stop right there and take a step back!

There are different ways to use qualitative user-experience-based research, and prior to agreeing to a methodology, you must be clear on the overall objective(s). For example, is your goal to learn more about your users—their wants, beliefs, needs and thoughts? Or, are you undertaking this research to test hypotheses and evaluate designs?

The first objective is more exploratory in nature. The knowledge gained should help us uncover and understand the needs of “real” users. These insights help inform products and services design to create the best outcome without our personal biases in mind.The second is much more evaluative, allowing users to interact with products or designs to ensure that we’re achieving what we were aiming for throughout the design process.

Taking the time to clearly write down what you’re hoping to learn and ensuring all stakeholders agree will ensure the best methodology is developed for your research initiative.

Action plan:

Write out your goals, specifically and succinctly. Prioritize them if you’ve listed more than three.

2: Determine who you really need to learn from.

When it comes to user research, it’s easy to fall into one of two categories:

1. Assume you can talk to a few users and get the insight you need to benefit all of your user segments

2. Get overwhelmed by the vast number of user groups and feel the need to “boil the ocean” by talking to all of them to gain insights before moving forward

While ultimately the decision of who you need to interview and how many interviews you need to conduct are tied to many factors, including overall objectives, timing and resource constraints, it is imperative to take the time to determine and prioritize your audience segments.

Action Plan:

Conduct an audience-prioritization exercise. Follow these three easy steps:

1. First, write down your segments on sticky notes. Be specific on what makes the segments different.

2. Then, arrange these sticky notes to prioritize them from primary users to secondary and tertiary users.

3. Review your prioritization against the goals you wrote down and determine the segments that are imperative to gain insights from vs. those that would be “nice to have” insights from.

While there is no firm guideline on how many interviews are “enough,” you must interview multiple people to ensure you don’t make decisions based off of singular individuals who may be outliers. “Enough” interviews is when the data becomes saturated and additional participants don’t provide any additional insights.

For usability testing, within the first couple of interviews, you may recognize you have a problem you must address, and it may be worth resolving that issue prior to additional user testing.

In more exploratory research, we typically look to conduct a minimum of 5–7 interviews per segment and 15–21 interviews total for an initiative to ensure insights are robust and decisions can be confidently made from the data.*

3: Create an interview guide.

While these interviews should be conversational in nature, creating a guide ensures the interviews stay on track.

Take the objectives determined in Step 1 and then establish what questions or usability tasks will lead you to reach your objective. Have your team of stakeholders do the same. Then look at all of the questions and organize them appropriately. Any questions that are leading in nature will need to be reworded.

A research guide should never be used as a checklist, and questions or usability tasks shouldn’t be based on preferences (ex: what color is more likely to make you click this button).Instead, in usability testing, it should ensure the user can achieve the desired tasks without having to “think.” And in exploratory research, it should help uncover the “why” of certain behaviors or decisions and ultimately dig into the “why” of the “why” to gain deeper levels of insight.

Action plan:

Have the entire stakeholder team align the questions they’d like to ask against the agreed upon objectives.

4: Use an experienced interviewer.

While it can feel like a simple task, conducting interviews while listening between the lines of the answers and then being able to shift and redirect questions to dig deeper is a skill set that requires practice.

An experienced interviewer knows how to set aside their own knowledge and beliefs on a topic and engage with research participants in a way that makes them comfortable explaining their thinking and points of view. Experienced interviewers know how to redirect conversations when necessary and how to direct questions in different ways to dig in deeper.

Most importantly, experienced researchers, especially professionals, are able to remain objective. It is easy for non-experienced interviewers and those too close to a project or desired outcome, to unconsciously believe they are hearing one thing from research participants based on their own beliefs without being truly objective.

Action plan:

Find someone with significant experience or hire an outside expert to conduct objective interviews.

5: Take your time analyzing findings

Record the interviews, if possible, and transcribe them for the purpose of deep analysis. It’s easy to make assumptions based on your notes and memory; however, when going through transcripts, you often find insights and opportunities you missed in real time.

Invite team stakeholders to be involved in the analysis process. When involving additional stakeholders:

1. Ensure everyone reads the transcripts

2. Ground the team in your research goals

3. Conduct a workshop to uncover insights with the larger group

4. Cluster themes that arise from the workshop for your final report

Using a team-based approach for analysis not only allows all stakeholders to build empathy with the user but also creates a greater understanding of the concerns or challenges that need to be solved through user-experience design.

Action plan:

Host a stakeholder analysis workshop.

*Note: This number is highly dependent on audience size and projected incidence rates, so this should be used only as a guide.

What is business design thinking (and why should you care)?

Don’t let the name fool you.

To those new to the concept, the term design thinking may seem like something that only designers could, or should, do. But nothing could be further from the truth. Business design thinking is the utilization of the traditional design-thinking methodology to conduct a more human-centered examination of a product, service or experience, to define what aspects of those things might be improved, to imagine and prototype solutions for addressing those improvable aspects, and to test and refine your solutions.

We’ll briefly cover the specifics of these steps in a moment, but suffice it to say, for now, this methodology is an equally powerful tool whether you’re looking to create a new web application or to increase the efficiency of budget approvals. Basically, any time you find yourself asking, “Could we do this a different, better way?” you would be well served to undertake a little business design thinking.

So, for starters, what are the five steps of design thinking?

There seem to be as many flavors of design thinking as there are consultancies in the world. But most of those flavors are variations on five common design-thinking steps: Empathize, Define, Ideate,Prototype and Test.

Step 1: Empathize

The purpose of this step is to thoroughly understand the people or customers for whom you want to improve a product or experience. It’s all about observing, interacting or immersing yourself into their world. Get into their heads. Walk a mile in their shoes. Pick your cliché. Just do it. The real benefit here is that you uncover how things really are experienced versus how they are assumed to be.

Step 2: Define

Here, you process the findings from your observations and interactions and synthesize a point of view as to what challenge you want to solve for and what moments in the customer experiences you wish to improve.

Step 3: Ideate

Now that you know what you’re solving for, explore the widest variety of possible solutions to your defined challenge(s). You should then begin to prioritize which of the ideas generated are at once desirable (people would want to engage with the solution), feasible (the solution is technically possible) and viable (the resources required to deploy the solution don’t outweigh its value to the company).

Step 4: Prototype

Find some way to make your proposed solution real—or at least real enough to evaluate. That could be something as simple as an artfully arranged collection of Post-it notes to a fully deployed test-market product launch.

Step 5: Test

You’ll want to put your prototype into the hands (minds) of people and evaluate whether you’ve created a satisfactory solution to the challenge you originally defined. From here, you might go forward with the “real” version of your solution, go back to any of the previous steps and iterate, or abandon the effort altogether.

You should understand that despite the linear presentation of these stages, you may find yourself circling back to any early stage, from any later stage, as greater levels of insight, nuance and plain old unforeseen issues reveal themselves. So how might applying design thinking within your company offer any real business advantage?

Design thinking can help improve every business process.

As useful as business design thinking can be in forwarding an enterprise-level change-management initiative, it scales perfectly well to small tasks like improving a work intake form or how invoices are routed for approval.

Design thinking increases decision-making transparency.

Integral to the design-thinking process is documentation and sharing of learnings and outcomes along the way. Empathize helps everyone know exactly who the solution will help. Define provides an objective challenge around which to build consensus, early. Ideation documents and lays bare all of the solutions in contention. Prototype and Test provide objective and empirical evaluations of ideas. So, when someone in another part of the company or who was simply not involved in the process asks why or how decisions were made, you’ll have a record.

Design thinking gets to solutions in a repeatable way.

A common issue facing many is that people aren’t always sure how to get started. Business design thinking provides a common starting point as well as a path forward. Further, the more that everyone in the organization understands the practice and value of the methodology, business design thinking can provide an accelerative influence over process improvement.

You can start right now.

While there are certainly greater benefits to formal business design-thinking training or working with a design-thinking firm, simply introducing the discipline of the methodology of design thinking can improve your business decision-making today.

Who should own the digital customer experience? Marketing or I.T.?

It’s an age-old debate.

In a perfect world, every department within every company, and all of the incentive packages of everyone working in every department making up those companies would be aligned around delivering a seamless, amazing digital customer experience. But in our professional experience, there are frequent debates (some of them quite fierce) about what department or group “owns” it.That debate arises from a number of factors. The most common, as you may have guessed from reading the opening line of this post, is misalignment between budget authority, project accountability, and controls.

It’s not a people problem. It’s structural.

Often, I.T. teams are incentivized to get a digital property launched quickly, at the lowest cost that satisfies the technical and functional requirements. Just as often, marketing teams are incentivized to envision amazing experiences that customers will love and that drive conversions and revenue before they consult about the resource ramifications of their decisions.

In that situation, inevitably the two teams get so far down their respective planning paths before coming together to explore opportunities and evaluate compromises, that each sees the others’ goals as an impediment to achieving their own. Without a massive change in incentive plans and budget controls, how can a company remedy these issues?

Your customers should own the experience.

The first step in answering the question of what department owns the customer experience is to understand the question itself is a distraction from the real purpose of what you’re building. The customer should own the experience. Or, at least, what it takes to make their journey as engaging and emotionally satisfying as possible, in a way that is also lucrative for the business. Elevating the customer to the theoretical position of owner forces decisions made by all involved parties to be evaluated on their experiential value as opposed to their relevance to departmental incentives.

You should create the vision statement together.

Continuing with the idea that you should establish evaluation criteria for project elements based on their experiential value for the customer, a vision statement provides just such a guidepost. This can be a statement as simple as, “To minimize the number of clicks required to find and purchase a product,” to something that is complex enough to cover the emotional requirements of multiple target audiences, or specific parts of the journey.The main purpose is to raise the bar of expectations jointly, so that every interested party—from Marketing to I.T., Customer Service or the C-suite, understands that when the inevitable new opportunity or compromise discussion comes up, everyone has a uniform standard of reference.

You should designate ambassadors.

Creating any substantive digital property, whether it’s an app or a website, can be a long, detailed process. It’s not practical to expect full teams to jointly handle major decision-making regarding every detail. But you can designate one or more people from each department to be on call to attend meetings where those major decisions are being made. It helps to ensure a balanced dialogue around the table, even if it’s not an actual vote.

Ultimately, customers don’t care about governance. They only care if it’s bad.

It’s easy in an enterprise, or any size company for that matter ,for the same incentive structures that help the company manage budgets and drive efficiencies to create unintended barriers between departments. And it is not unusual for those barriers to manifest in a series of small decisions that create larger issues for the customer experience. So, just remember, the customer owns the experience, and the rest of your decisions can only lead to amore fulfilling experience for them and a better business outcome for everyone in the company.

Three smart reasons why you should be customer journey mapping

A Google search for “customer journey maps” reveals there are nearly unlimited ways to document a journey. The most important thing is that you choose a format that highlights areas of insight that align with your goals for mapping in the first place.

First, what do we really mean by customer journey mapping?

In any of its existing forms—and there are many—customer journey mapping is simply the act of describing what occurs at every stage of interaction between a customer and your business. That could cover everything from how they find the business (online or physically), what happens during any visit or transaction, how they experience customer service or even how they talk about your business” on social media before, during and after the transaction.

Most journey maps are built along a timeline. Usually, the timeline is broken into stages, like Awareness, Research/Inquire, Purchase and Possess—the specific titles depend on the type of journey, industry or mapping technique. Further, for each of those stages, the map provides places to record the activities, motivations, rewards, barriers, challenges or questions the customer faces at each stage.

What stages command your greatest attention will certainly depend on your specific business. But there is always something to be learned from formal observation and documentation of the customer journey and, simultaneously, examination of our assumptions and biases. So, how can you get started?

Before you begin, have a goal in mind

First, understand ahead of time what exactly you want to do with the information gathered throughout the process. It will help determine what structure or formats make the most sense for documenting your findings. Most businesses can bucket those goals into three main categories: improving the customer experience, creating a new experience altogether and aligning the organization around the needs of the customer. So, how can customer journey mapping help you achieve those goals?

Goal: Improve your existing customer experience

Even the best customer experiences can be improved. More importantly, they can be copied and improved upon by nimble new competitors should you choose to rest on your extremely comfortable laurels. Journey mapping exposes the places and moments most critical to delivering a superior experience. At what point in the journey are your customers most concerned? When are they most confident? When are they open to learning? What moments turn them from interested to evangelist? A thorough journey mapping exercise can bring those moments into focus and help inform and prioritize innovation efforts at multiple points.

Goal: Create an entirely new customer experience

When working on innovation projects with clients, one of the most basic questions we ask at the beginning of any engagement is, “Does [it] have to work like this?” So often companies assume that if the entire industry conducts business in the same fashion, it must be the best way. But as we see disruptive competitors enter markets, they succeed because they look to the incumbents’ strengths and see a weakness. Journey mapping is a great way to explore those new ways to structure a transaction or business model. It forces you to think about satisfying motivations and emotional needs first, then architecting experiences and behaviors around those.

The trick is starting with more audacious foundational questions. You don’t create an Airbnb experience without asking something like, “How might we give travelers a hotel option almost as inexpensive and comfortable as staying at a friend’s house?” Or, more generally, something like, “How might we increase the number of available rooms without investing in more real estate?” Either of those questions could lead to a number of potential solutions. Journey mapping gives you the opportunity to uncover the emotional bumps in the road that will either make or break your service or product design.

Goal: Align the organization around the needs of the customer

In most larger businesses, different moments along the customer journey are likely owned by different departments. Marketing owns the message and fills the funnel. I.T. builds and maintains the digital storefront. Sales fields inbound leads. Operations fulfills. Customer Service, well, services the customers. And everyone may be optimizing around different and sometimes competing goals.

Taking the time to examine the full journey, end to end, and exploring how every physical, digital and interpersonal touch point affects the experience creates an opportunity to document, in a single place, just how competing incentives and KPIs create friction. As important, documenting the journey creates visibility into moments that drive positive momentum along the way and perhaps areas where an alternative incentive structure could improve the experience and create greater internal alignment.

A journey of a thousand miles…

Regardless of the various styles and formats of journey mapping, or your specific business goals, the universal benefit is a deeper understanding of your business from your customers’ perspective. And that is always a valuable perspective for any business.

How to start prototyping (and why you should).

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Everything is a prototype.

If we’ve learned anything from watching the progress of evolution in the natural world, it’s that everything, no matter how established, is a prototype for a more highly adapted successor. That isn’t meant to be a life-or-death warning of doom; it’s meant to say that prototyping is part of the natural order of exploring, evaluating and optimizing ideas.

And, as you’ll see as we move through this blog, prototyping doesn’t have to involve creating elaborate physical models, programming or spending large sums of cash(though all of those are viable prototyping methods).

How to get started prototyping.

In its simplest form, a prototype is simply any externalized creation for understanding if an interaction or experience will work the way you imagine it will. That could be something as low fidelity as using multiple stacks of sticky notes to prototype a website navigation or a pencil sketch to work through visual design problems. Or, it could be as high fidelity as launching an actual business in a limited-geography test market.

Prototyping Quick Reference Guide

Low Fidelity Medium Fidelity High Fidelity

Type (Relative Cost)	Best Use Case	Standard Tools	Basic Testing Method
Paper ($)	Early concepting, quick iteration on a feature level, general user interaction exploration	Pencil, paper, Post-it® Notes	Internal, informal interviews and discussions
Digital Sketches ($)	Blocking content zones, understanding relationships of content or navigational elements	Sketch/InVision, Axure, InDesign	Internal interviews
Interactive Digital Sketches ($)	Understand flow of experience from object to object, page to page, interaction to interaction	Sketch/InVision, Code, Axure, InDesign	Internal and external qualitative interviews
Stories/Storyboard ($)	A simple, cheap way to portray the flow and touch points of a new experience. A story or storyboard enables both stakeholders and potential customers to imagine themselves in the midst of your concept	Pencil, paper, Post-it® Notes	Internal, informal interviews and discussions, first interaction with users
Physical Model Build ($)	Solicit feedback from your users and provide a springboard for new ideas. Tinkering with a physical model can lead to new insights about your design, too	Magazines, paper, cardboard, clay, pipe cleaners, tape, tinker toys, Lego® blocks	Iterative hands-on creation with your team, putting a model in the hands of your users for feedback
Wireframes ($$)	Understand volume and quality of content, labeling, wayfinding, features and functions	Sketch/Invision, Axure, InDesign	Internal and external qualitative interviews
Interactive Wireframes ($$)	Understand volume and quality of content, labeling, wayfinding, features and functions, initial concept testing	Sketch/InVision, Code—HTML/CSS/JavaScript, Axure, InDesign	Internal and external qualitative interviews
Skit ($$)	Depict a process, service or even how an object gets used	Team members, users and props: clothing, signs, photos, boxes	An effective skit can solicit corrections and enhancements from your users, right on the spot
Design Flats ($$$)	Understand brand expression, viewing of final form, user sentiment	Sketch/InVision, Photoshop, InDesign	External qualitative Interviews
Functional Front-End Prototype ($$$$)	Confirm learnings from earlier prototypes and prep for launch into development, test-drive final form	Code—HTML/CSS/JavaScript	External qualitative Interviews
Test Center ($$$)	Specific location that allows your customers to interact with a new product or service in a controlled space	Team to design and create the mechanics needed, users, video or ethnographers	Can be conducted where users are located for ethnographic study or a special space designed for the tests (Beta testing in the software world)
In-Market Product/Service/Business ($$$$)	Building a prototype that is a complete product, service or business allows you to test not only User Desirability but also Technical Feasibility and Business Viability and how choices in one area affect another	All aspects of the product, service or business	$

The best prototypes deliver the greatest amount of tangible feedback in the least amount of time for the lowest investment (perhaps one of just a few areas where you can get good, fast AND cheap). Outside of those criteria, there’s really no wrong way to prototype. That being said, here is a list of the most common methods, use cases, tools, testing methods and relative costs (not included, but just as valuable: Play Doh™, pipe cleaners, cardboard boxes, string and rubber bands).

Why you should prototype.

Aside from the aforementioned gut-check benefits of bringing your internal understanding to life, prototyping provides a number of operational and financial benefits:

Understand the problem more clearly.

Engaging with prototypes allows you to walk a mile in a user’s/customer’s shoes, so to speak. Whether you’re creating physical, digital or virtual prototypes, the more hands-on (or minds-on) you can make your ideas, the faster you’ll know if the solution resonates with or achieves its intended result for the intended target market.

Build consensus/resolve ambiguity.

Conceptual experiences, even when described in great detail, can be interpreted quite differently by individuals. Prototypes allow all parties involved to see and experience the concept in a similar, if not identical, fashion. It helps everyone to more clearly understand what problem they are solving and what outcome they are all striving to achieve.

Improve speed to market.

The more iteration and refinement you can achieve in the low- to mid-fidelity stages of the prototyping process, the faster and less expensively you can make those changes. It’s much easier to cut new cardboard, scribble new sticky notes, make new sketches or twist another pipe cleaner than it is to reprogram, machine new parts or retool a production line.

Limit exposure to risk.

Ideas are great, but execution is everything. If it wasn’t obvious from the previous three points, prototyping is not simply about refining and optimizing ideas; it’s about managing risk in the design and development processes. Prototyping can help surface issues early concerning the desirability, feasibility and viability of a product or experience.

So, go forth and make stuff.

Always remember, in prototyping, anything you can do or use to test out your idea is fair game.Grab any scrap of paper, twigs, rocks, crayons, clay, you name it, and start cobbling whatever materials you have on hand to bring an approximation of your idea to life, ASAP! In the long run, it will most certainly improve your end product.

What’s the difference between digital transition and digital transformation?

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Caught between a platform and a paradigm

Often swapped out for one another, digital transition and digital transformation actually differ greatly in focus and, usually, in scope. Digital transition focuses on the basic (though still potentially massive) shift from analog, or physical, information to that which is stored, recalled or manipulated, using a digital platform. There may or may not be advantages like improved speed, accuracy, reliability, privacy, etc., but generally, we're talking about facilitating exiting behaviors and transactions with new digital tools. Digital transformation involves a change in how the enterprise or institution structures relationships or conducts transactions enabled by technology. Let's take a look at a few examples of related transitions and transformations to get a better feel for the nuance.

Email vs. marketing automation

When email became pervasive in most businesses, it was a perfect example of a digital transition. Correspondence had shifted from something that moved via paper and stamps and was stored in folders and file cabinets to something that moved via the internet and, ultimately, was stored in local or cloud-based servers or on hard drives.

When marketing automation systems like Marketo, Pardot and Mailchimp, et al. were introduced, they represented a digital transformation. More than simply moving the original behavior (correspondence) onto a new digital platform, these systems enabled fundamentally different, previously unavailable interaction models, e.g., automated and behavior-driven campaigns, mass customization, etc.

Electronic medical records (EMR) vs. telemedicine

I am old enough to remember the introduction of tablet computing, e.g., the GRiDPad, the Apple Newton, etc., and their niche application within the medical industry. These represented one of the first digital transitions of medical records to the EMR space. The use case was narrow, replacing patient flip charts in hospitals, mainly. This puts the adoption of those devices squarely into the digital transition category.

Let's contrast that with recent telemedicine initiatives. A specific example would be stroke telemedicine. Effective stroke treatment depends highly on reducing the time between a stroke event and the administration of proper treatments. The problem is that most small or rural locations do not have the resources to keep a qualified neurologist on staff or on call. But, utilizing a series of networked toolsÑfrom video conferencing to real-time, remote radiological consultations—time-critical treatments can be provided at the smaller facility in time to reduce stroke-related disabilities prior to the patient being moved to a more-equipped facility. It's a new, transformed approach, enabled by digital technologies.

Electronic banking vs. bitcoin

At this point, if I am correctly channeling the proper step-and-repeat cadence of Malcolm Gladwell, you are likely able to review the previous two examples and see quite clearly, from the subhead alone, where I am going with this one. But that won't stop me from writing it myself.

While it might be fair, ways, to characterize the financial industry's early shifts to online banking as a digital transformation, perhaps, due only to my personal biases, I am inclined to file it under digital transition. It had no real effect on the business model, how fees were assessed, etc. What was arcane or cumbersome in meatspace banking remained so in cyberspace banking. How money was tracked, transferred or otherwise accounted for remained basically unchanged.

Contrast that with bitcoin (or your cryptocurrency of choice). Blockchain technology decentralized the ledger, anonymized the transaction and made banking decidedly not institutional. Definitely a digital transformation (not to mention, potentially, a major long-term disruption).

In the end, it boils down to media vs. methodology

It's a pretty simple heuristic but, in this case, an effective one. If the change is a conversion from one format of storage (in most cases analog to digital) to another, it's surely transition you're talking about. If the project involves changing the methodology of how a company or customer gets from point a to point b, it is a transformation. Okay, one last analogy: Electric cars—transition . Self-driving cars, transformation.

Service design vs. experience design: How are they different and why does it matter?

The short version:

Service design encompasses distinctive foundational business model issues as well as the comprehensive, end-to-end journey, whereas experience design addresses the design choices that affect direct interactions people have, physical or virtual, along that journey. In other words, service design is trying to solve ecosystem-level problems and experience design generally is trying to solve interaction-level problems.

But, obviously, there’s more nuance when you’re in the trenches.

The longer, more nuanced version(Tock vs. OpenTable):

Sitting down to write this post, I was reminded of an episode of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, which featured Nick Kokonas, co-owner and co-founder of The Alinea Group of restaurants (Alinea, Next, The Aviary, Roister, The Aviary NYC) and founder and CEO of Tock, Inc., a reservations and CRM system for restaurants. His discussion of the thinking that gave birth to Tock is a perfect example of service design versus experience design. This may be best exemplified by the question he asked himself, which was (I’ll paraphrase): “Why do restaurant reservations have to work the way they do?” The question encompasses much more than the specifics of the design of the digital product or experience. It begs exploration of the motivations, rewards and journeys on both sides of the transaction, customer and restaurant.

In the case of Tock, attempting to answer that initial question led Kokonas to the core insight: traditional phone-based reservation systems relied on a transactional model that was so opaque that the two parties involved were continually lying to each other in an attempt to achieve their desired outcome.Customers were often lying about the size of their parties to claim what openings were available, or because there was no monetary risk involved, making reservations at multiple restaurants as they were planning their outings, resulting in empty seats and lost revenue at the restaurants. Restaurants were overbooking reservations to compensate for the uncertainty, resulting in extended wait times (“We’re running a bit behind this evening. Please have a seat at the bar and we’ll call you when your table is ready.”).

Through an experience design lens, solving this problem had been already attempted byOpenTable. They created an online analog of the phone-based process that ultimately gave those existing bad behaviors, as they say in Silicon Valley, scale. In that sense, it was an effective experience design exercise. It certainly reduced friction and was, by most assessments, a better experience for both parties within the bounds of the transaction as it stood. Looking at it through a service design lens, however, OpenTable hadn’t addressed fundamental issues and resulting pain points within the service model itself.

In creating Tock, Kokonas wanted to address at least two of the most pressing structural issues: improving transparency and reducing wait times for customers and removing uncertainty and maximizing yield for restaurants. In regard to the former, Tock delivered two basic innovations. First, was the transparency of restaurant inventory. Instead of customers calling an establishment and asking if a specific time and party size might be available, they could see the full inventory of available tables (and in some cases see how pricing varied throughout the week), and, by putting down a non-refundable deposit, guarantee the availability of that table at the exact time booked.

For the restaurants, the system delivered a more certain reservation—customers who’ve paid a deposit are more likely to follow through. But it also provided a novel approach to yield management—transparent variable pricing. When customers booked a reservation for Alinea, they could see at a glance what dates were available for a party of their size and what price differences were for different packages.

In the interview on the podcast, Kokonas likened the feature to purchasing tickets for a baseball game. The seats in the third row just behind the dugout on aSaturday are priced differently than upper deck on a Tuesday. Everyone understands and can see the difference when purchasing and can select among various choices based on what matters to them.

Searching for available tables at Alinea on Tock.com

A distinction that makes all the difference:

Service design and experience design are often two sides of the same coin. In the end, both are a means to make an engagement or transaction more customer-centric and satisfying. And any project centered around either may involve some form of the other.

I hope we have illustrated, however, that there is a distinction. In one shorthand, it would be fair to say, changes in service design have a greater effect on the overall cost (positive and negative) of the engagement or transaction, whereas experience design has a greater effect on customer confidence along the way.

In any case, both modes of thinking are critical to ensuring your business remains customer-centric and competitive.

How to Produce SEO Content

It’s about writing from the outside, in.

The content (or inbound) marketing movement has spawned vast quantities of keyword-stuffed blog posts across the world. The philosophy goes something like this: “If you can satisfy searchers’ thirst for knowledge, your customers beat a virtual path to your business.”

But satisfying that thirst requires more than simply penning the correct answer. You need to ensure how you’re saying what you’re saying aligns perfectly with how your customers are phrasing what they’re asking for. In other words, let the consumer frame the problem for you, then sit down to create. Thankfully, there are four fairly straightforward ways to get to that understanding.

Scour your analytics.

Assuming you use a modern analytics package(statistically speaking, probably Google Analytics), you can easily get an understanding of the search terms that are currently bringing organic traffic to your site. If you are using Google, in your Webmaster Tools account, navigate to referral data in your dashboard. If you have more than one domain attached to your account, click on the domain you want to review, then on  “Search Queries.” There, you can review the data for the top 1,000 queries for which Google returns pages of your website.You can monitor click-through rate, as well as impressions and average position for each query.

The downside to this approach is that it is only a rearview mirror. It points to the way people are getting to your site now and may offer insights into what phrases you may wish to amplify your relevance against. But it won’t tell you what all of the valuable customers who are ending up on your competitors’ sites are searching for. Luckily, we have the tools for that as well.

Get the 30,000-foot view.

To gain a better overview of what topics interest the market at large and, more importantly, what part of that market’s search behavior you’re not capitalizing on, you need to investigate outside of your analytics. Thankfully, there are a few easy-to-use tools that can give you just that kind of insight.

Google Ads Keyword Planner

You will have to sign up for Google Ads, but, assuming you’re trying to run a business based, in part at least, on driving web traffic to your site, you likely should already have an account. You can use this tool to quickly understand how many search queries are conducted against specific words and phrases and, more importantly, how they perform at generating click-throughs. Of course, you can begin to play with long-tail search phrases, but that is, in effect, kind of hit or miss. Again, there is a better way.

AnswerThePublic.com

AnswerThePublic.com is basically reverse engineering for SEO. You put in the keywords you want to optimize around, and the tool delivers the natural language search phrases people are using most against the topic. It also delivers related search information, as well as comparative searches, e.g., “SEO content vs. technical content.” And each of the main results are clickable, so you can see the results for those searches directly in a Google search results page. The best news about this tool is that it is, for most use cases, free. If you do more than 30 or so searches in a day, they will cut you off for a bit and ask you to pay for the pro license. But I assume the usage of most businesses will fall well below that limit.

The old-fashioned way—ask actual people.

And by old fashioned, we don’t mean “bad.” We mean primary market research. Whether you create online surveys (again, for more generalized markets, Google has a relatively affordable solution here), conduct individual interviews or conduct focus groups, these methodologies can help you get to a more nuanced understanding of your customers’ relationship with the subject matter than what their search terms can tell you. Further, if your market is composed of low-volume but high-value customers (an extreme case would be something like purchasers of control systems technology for nuclear plants), the most important search terms or phrases wouldn’t occur at high enough volume for generalized tools to surface them during your research.

Translate queries into titles.

If you have spent even a small amount of effort optimizing your site or content to be Google-friendly, you’ll know the importance of the title tag in letting Google (not to mention your readers)gain an immediate and clear understanding of the content to follow. An example would be, well, this article. How’s that for proof of concept?

Enhance your SEM planning, too.

At Magnani, we are fans of incorporating long-tail strategies into our SEM planning (see that post here). These tools and methods can just as easily be employed to give you insights into that market activity as well.

Go forth and create content.

The next time you’re sitting at your laptop, wondering what you’ll write about, blank page staring you in the face, just take a few minutes and use these tools to let your customers tell you what they want to read.

How Does Your Brand Impact Your Customers’ Experience?

How Does Your Brand Impact Your Customers’ Experience?

Today, the experience is the brand and the brand is the experience. 

Take a moment to think about every interaction a customer has with your brand. Consumers no longer think of your logo as your brand. Your brand is the sum of every experience with customers—the entire customer journey from awareness to loyalty. But, I’d argue, that branding is more important than ever before. In fact, 2019 has been dubbed “The Year of the Rebrand”.

Traditional branding still matters, it’s just not enough.

Brand isn’t the logo. It isn’t the color palette, ad campaign or tag line. And while getting those things right is wildly important, in the experience economy, that importance is becoming increasingly outweighed by the impact of the quality of the interactions consumers have. A great brand today isn’t owned by marketing. It’s more a set of guiding principles. It lays the foundation for why your business looks and feels the way it does, of course, but it also dictates the kinds of products your company should create, informs the creation and of the digital properties your company will generate. The customer journey today is less linear than ever, and what ultimately amounts to your brand in most consumers’ minds are a collection of fleeting encounters, not the direct line from campaign exposure to sale.

Exceptional experiences = exceptional brands.

The most successful brands define an aspirational state of what the enterprise would like to achieve or accomplish.They provide a clear guide for evaluating business choices today, as well as evaluating and prioritizing future plans of action.

It’s no longer enough to maintain a consistent voice in the market, companies must maintain a coherent experienc eacross every interaction. Marketing teams understand this value and have mastered the art of protecting your brand and maintaining consistency. But what about other areas of your business? How about product management teams, innovation teams and digital design teams? How is brand relevant to all other areas of the organization?

Creating brand positioning for the experience economy.

Your brand needs to focus the efforts of the entire organization. Yes, you need your brand style guidelines (i.e. how to use your logo, fonts, etc.). But, just as important, you need to articulate what your brand stands for. What is its purpose? Companies should create overall brand positioning that provides employees a clear and succinct understanding of how the brand should be reflected in every experience, fromR&D to digital design. The best brands start by creating a brand positioning that reflects a greater purpose or mission.

Here are a few great examples of how todo this:

Patagonia: “We’re in business to save our home planet”

• Build the best product

• Cause no unnecessary harm

• Use business to protect nature

• Not bound by convention

Oracle: “The Oracle brand is built upon a consistent set of brand behaviors. These are our measuring stick for all communication.”

• Simple

• Authentic

• Adaptive

• Engaging

• Knowledgeable

• Relevant

Airbnb: “Of course, an identity is about more than symbols. So we’ve redesigned the entire Airbnb experience to better reflect the people who make up this community. Our shared vision of belonging is the thread that weaves through every touchpoint on Airbnb.”

• People

• Places

• Love

• Airbnb

At the core of every experience is a brand—which is paramount to any marketer’s success.

Keeping the Human in Human-Centered Design

Recently, at Experience Design Week in Denver, I led a round table discussion with a group of experience design professionals who worked for a range of companies; some as large as Amazon and Google, some as small as a recently-pivoted tech startup. No matter the size of the enterprise, we heard the same issues discussed as challenges from nearly every participant:

• Clearly defining and coming to consensus around what problem to solve

• Maintaining the perspective of the end customer throughout the design process

• Designing an experience that satisfies the needs of a broad range of potential audiences—from end consumers to internal audiences and external trade partners

Generally, we’ve found that difficulty with those issues stem from a lack of empathy for, or deep knowledge of, the human beings for whom we’re actually designing the experience. As we advised in the session, we’ve found that infusing the design process with detailed user narratives can go a long way toward solving these common challenges and keeping the human in human-centered design. Here are a few of the solutions I recommended in the session:

Use storytelling to build understanding and consensus.

Within organizations, perspectives vary.When people only see functional and technical specifications, for the most part, they’ll understand the purpose and vision of the project filtered through the lens of whatever job title or department they hold.

When you take the time to begin drafting a broader story around the project, it helps build a more universal understanding and consensus. When building these stories, we leverage our personas (more on those in the next section) and begin to add highly detailed contextual information to our customers’ journeys. We describe not only what encounters and steps are taken, but also what’s happening in their lives to generate the encounter, what their thought processes are and what emotional triggers and results are at each point.

Our shorthand for this is an emotional requirements document. We’ve found if we can build a narrative that all stakeholders agree on and it conveys the desired outcome on an emotional level, it’s far easier to gain shared understanding and consensus around the functional and technical requirements.

Don’t create personas. Bring human beings to life.

The use of personas in experience design is certainly nothing new. But far too often, we’ve seen companies create them in a fashion more analogous to a generic LinkedIn profile, or worse, a listing of demographic data.

Again, we find more detailed persona narratives add an incredible amount of value to a project. We recommend adopting more of a day-in-the-life perspective. Where and how do they live? Who are the people in orbit around them–friends, family, etc.? What do they do for work? For play? What are the emotions that are driving them into orbit around your brand or your experience? What are they greater social pressures affecting their decisions?

The more we take time to build out these persona narratives, again, the easier it is to communicate consistently across various teams and stakeholder groups. The better we know the humans that are going to use the experience, the better we can all understand how to design for them.

Use story to explore hierarchy and prioritization.

The act of writing a story does a number of interesting things. It forces you, the author, to edit and prioritize to keep the story moving. Further, it lays bare whether assumptions made still ring true when put into the context of a real human making considerations. And finally, behaviors that are too complex to be described well or efficiently are likely too complex to perform and should be reimagined.

When we complete all of our individual persona and journey narratives, we review them and assess what are the common core motivations, needs, desires, etc. Then we explore what differences are significant. In the end, the stories serve as a tangible guide to what’s really important emotionally—which is always a good indication for what should be prioritized visually and experientially.

If you still have questions or would like to chat in greater detail around how to keep the human in human-centered design, please don’t hesitate to hit “The Contact Page” in the main nav and drop me a note.

The Death of Jibo: Why Experiences Should Return to the Edge.

R.I.P., Jibo.

If you haven’t seen the videos yet, take a moment to watch. We’ll wait.

The melancholy programmed into this “dying” little appliance is palpable. When Jibo hit the crowdfunding scene, it was touted as “The first social robot for the home who looks, listens and learns. Artificially intelligent, authentically charming.” The main issue we have with that characterization is that the robot you purchased does none of those things; the Jibo cloud AI servers do those things. Well, “did” those things.

Jibo is bankrupt and has shuttered its offices. Its servers are going down, and the functionality of this less than two-year-old device will functionally decline to zero. According to Jibo’s final “goodbye” script, it seems like the control app won’t even connect to your tiny dying friend. Jibo could be better described today as animated performance art rather than a home robot. But Jibo owners aren’t alone. The cloud-dependent consumer electronics marketplace has left a number of consumers with Jibo-like sadness in their wakes.

You’re not buying a product; you’re making a bet.

As consumers buying cloud-dependent products, we’ve definitely entered “fool me twice” territory. The purchasing of products that rely on the largesse of its corporate creators to function is a great choice for the businesses that sell them, but they are effectively a wager on the longevity of the company or at least the continued interest of that company to maintain the servers for consumers.

Consumers are used to owning the things they buy. But our software/cloud-driven product development focus has shifted the relationship from that of ownership to licensing. You’re basically renting the functionality until the license expires or is revoked.

Bad bets are bad for the environment.

Unlike the myriad online services that have come and gone, leaving mostly consumer dissatisfaction behind, devices that rely on a specific server to function, combined with protection schemes that prevent otherwise capable hardware from being repurposed, means when companies depart or lose interest, the hardware they once supported effectively becomes landfill. We wonder how many Twitter Peek devices are polluting groundwater tables across the world right now.

The Peek Mobile Twitter Device—seemed like a really great idea in 2008.

Privacy and security are always at risk.

If a service or experience, at its foundation, requires sharing and/or storing personal data (location/activity/preferences)in a central server, that increases your risks of having that data breached or used in a fashion you might not knowingly approve. It’s simply the nature of the beast. And the more popular the service, the more of a “honey pot” that data represents.

Responsiveness and reliability are improving at the edge.

The classic argument for cloud-based machine learning solutions is that the computational burden would be too great to occur at the device level. But with advances in dedicated AI processing chips as well as the basic benefits of Moore’s Law, the efficacy of those arguments is waning. If we read the tea leaves on Apple patent filings, the company is exploring moving the voice recognition and processing of Siri from the cloud to the device.

We can’t know if Jibo would have been a better experience had the machine learning aspects of the experience been handled locally, but we can know that consumers’ robot friends would potentially have had years of valuable use.

It’s never all or nothing.

Don’t misunderstand us. Cloud-dependent services and devices are not inherently bad or to be avoided. But when designing the intelligence models for products or experiences, we should all understand the greater responsibility to protect our customers, our environment and ourselves. The more we can push the computational burden or opportunity out to the edge, the longer the life span of the products and experiences we create.

You Want an Experience, Not a Concept

We’ve all been there. A client calls an agency partner and says, “We need UX concepts, right away.” As a strategist, design thinker, and consultant, I understand my clients, their needs, their timeline, and the pressure they’re under to deliver within their organization.

Although it’s easy to develop a proposal for delivering a range of concepts, often, this type of rushed design exercise lacks strategy or a clearly defined user need. How should the concepts differ? What is the problem we’re trying to solve? What insight is driving the design change? How are we connecting emotionally with our user? What is our point-of-difference? These, of course, are big questions that usually result in the response: “I just need some concepts.” Again, it’s easy to write a proposal for an exploration with a few rounds of development, but if you want to do this right, and do it once, you should focus your efforts on creating an experience, not a concept. Now, let’s look at what that means.

Uncover insights.

An effective design exploration should have a strategy rooted in actionable insights synthesized from user research. These are the unmet needs and opportunities to connect with your target user. You either have insights, or you don’t. And if you don’t, you should consider a phase of user research before you invest time and budget in design exploration. Doing so will give you a user-centered narrative that will inform and inspire designers to create meaningful experiences that solve problems, create value, and connect emotionally with users that drives loyalty and builds brands. This is your point-of-difference and competitive advantage. This is how you lead and disrupt your category.

Define user criteria.

Sometimes, early in the process, the strategy conversation might focus on convenience, simplicity, or intuitiveness. These attributes are not strategic insights or ways of differentiating concepts; this is user criteria. All digital experiences should be convenient, simple and intuitive.These are user requirements and table stake expectations to any service, product, or brand experience. We recommend defining user criteria from the research learnings and using them as design principles during ideation.

Design an experience.

Once you’ve identified an opportunity, explore and build an experience around it. Go beyond UX features and UI design (fonts, colors, icons, imagery) and consider the holistic brand experience. Explore naming, tone of voice, language, and all the brand touch points—email notifications, landing pages, social posts, marketing, etc. How are you creating awareness, encouraging trial, driving conversion, and extending the brand experience beyond the initial user journey? How are you creating buzz that keeps them coming back? Are you maximizing captured data to improve the user experience or sales narrative?

Create momentum.

At Magnani, our narrative-based innovation process highlights our hero’s journey and brings to life unique, engaging, and relevant user experiences. Storytelling rooted in user insights is an effective way of creating or accelerating project momentum and gaining support of stakeholders to get commitment of time and resources (budget, team, space). Stakeholders who rally around a vision are more likely to ‘buy-in,’ support you and your project and see it through launch.

Roadmap your future.

Don’t stop innovating after you’ve identified a lead experience to develop, implement, and launch. Consider developing a roadmap of future generation features, products, and platform expansion that attracts new users and grows new markets. A disciplined team with a well thought out solution can unlock new value and transform your business as it evolves and protects your competitive advantage as you force competitors to invest and catch-up.

Deliver value.

We understand every challenge is different; the timeline, the budget, the deliverable. However, every project, every solution, every experience, and every touchpoint should be designed and crafted around a meaningful user insight. Without a solid, actionable strategy, you may be wasting time and resources on misguided assumptions and outdated orthodoxies.Deep understanding of your user will unlock opportunities and motivate teams and stakeholders to develop elegant products and services that solve problems and create business value.

Three AI Fueled Startups You Should Create Right Now

Three AI Fueled Startups You ShouldCreate Right Now

Get your pitch decks ready.

Part of my job is helping companies translate what they know about trends and emerging technologies into potential business ideas. So, when I see a veritable buffet of dramatic technology demos and research breakthroughs making the rounds on social media, my mind starts extending those technologies into startup ideas. Here are three interesting technologies and three accompanying products I expect someone to create, so why not you?

No repeat stock photo models.

If you haven’t already, click on over to thispersondoesnotexist.com. When you do, you’ll be greeted with a single human face. Refresh the page, and you’ll see yet another human face (see the three images below). The interesting thing is that none of these faces belong to actual human beings. They are all created from a deep learning algorithm. Are they perfect? No. At times, you’ll notice strange artifacts as the algorithm misinterprets inputs from its source photos, like bike helmets, and forges them into something akin to hair in the new generative face.

If you’re a user of stock photos, all too often you’ll realize just after you’ve rolled out a creative work, banner ad, or piece of collateral featuring that perfect smiling stock photo model, that the same model, if not the exact shot, has been used ad infinitum (pun intended) in the market. Case in point, http://asianstockphotogirl.tumblr.com.

Now, if you could create a service or an app that lets marketers save or repeatedly tune certain parameters of the algorithm, in real time, to generate multiple instances of the same face, perhaps in different angles, etc. Suddenly you have a never-ending resource of spokesmodels that will never age, and never be duplicated in someone else’s campaign.

Extend that technology out a few years, and one can imagine being able to describe a shot you need, complete with settings, subjects and situations, and have that“photo” generated on demand. Just download and use. No shoot fees. No residuals.

The Content Generator Bot.

Last week, the researchers at OpenAI—the artificial intelligence think tank founded by (but no longer run by) Elon Musk—published a paper relating the results of an exercise where they “trained a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text” based solely on two lines of provided copy. Here’s an alarmingly convincing example:

SYSTEM PROMPT (HUMAN-WRITTEN)

A train carriage containing controlled nuclear materials was stolen in Cincinnati today. Its whereabouts are unknown.

MODEL COMPLETION (MACHINE-WRITTEN, FIRST TRY)

The incident occurred on the downtown train line, which runs from Covington and Ashland stations.

In an email to Ohio news outlets, the U.S. Department of Energy said it is working with the Federal Railroad Administration to find the thief.

“The theft of this nuclear material will have significant negative consequences on public and environmental health, our workforce and the economy of our nation,” said Tom Hicks, the U.S. Energy Secretary, in a statement. “Our top priority is to secure the theft and ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

The stolen material was taken from the University of Cincinnati’s Research Triangle Park nuclear research site, according to a news release from Department officials.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not immediately release any information.

According to the release, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Security is leading that team’s investigation.

“The safety of people, the environment and the nation’s nuclear stockpile is our highest priority,” Hicks said. “We will get to the bottom of this and make no excuses.

Source: https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/#sample2

It’s an amazing feat of machine-learning agility, to be sure. But it also strikes us as an amazing tool for the content marketing crowd. Imagine drafting your editorial calendar for the year, writing the first lines of each story, then having the AI generate at least the first drafts thereafter.

As someone who drafts between 30k and 50k words every year, I can tell you that the thought of even using the output as a kind of enriched thought starter every week would be amazing. The only roadblock to this startup dream is that, as of now, OpenAI thinks this technology is so convincing, that in the era of fake news, it’s perhaps too dangerous to release to the public at large.

AI-only eSports league/streaming channel (A.K.A. Twitch for bots).

We’ve watched machine learning AI defeat chess grandmasters. DeepMind’s AlphaZero mastered the “un-masterable”—the game of Go. And, of course, we all have fond memories of IBM’s Watson trouncing its human opponents at Jeopardy. But the news of late show AI is beginning to master more real-time gaming, like Star Craft 2.

And what’s most interesting about these latest game playing exploits is there action from chess masters watching AlphaZero playing chess, using words like“creative” and “elegant.” That’s because the latest iterations of game playingAI derive their playing styles not from a predetermined set of rules supplied by the programming team, but by learning more like a human, simply by trial and error, divining strategies by repeated play against, well, itself or the previous generation AI.

Given that popularity of game streaming media, like Twitch.tv, stems at least partially from the enjoyment people get from watching creative and elegant gameplay, watching two “unbeatable” AI bots duking it out in something like Fortnight would be pretty entertaining. Imagine, a fully-automated content generation machine. Once set up, the cost of incremental content is virtually zero.

If you can’t beat ‘em, employ ‘em.

Any given day you can find an article delivering a message of fear around the advances of AI and the impact it will have on industries. My philosophy is that with a little creativity and foresight, the opportunities should outweigh the concerns.

How to Get People Talking About Your Brand

Think back to an experience that surpassed your expectations. Was it an amazing pair of shoes that showed up in a box that felt like Christmas? Or was it when you seamlessly booked an Airbnb and then showed up and the place instantly made you feel at home. Plus, they left you a little welcome treat of wine or dessert that surpassed your expectations?

It is becoming increasingly difficult to exceed your customers' expectations. I recently went to an event where I saw Eric Feng, founding CTO of Hulu, and he mentioned that companies today must be 50% better than the start-ups from 10-20 years ago.Companies today must exceed the table stakes that the FANGs (Facebook, Apple,Netflix, and Google) already have in place.

According to Feng, for any company to survive today, you need the 3 Ts: team, timing, and TAM (total addressable market). Once that is achieved, how do you ensure that the product or experience you are creating will resonate?

The answer: by designing for humans. Pixels, code and IT infrastructure will always be there, but it's the way you make people feel that transforms an ordinary transaction into a story-worthy note in their day.

Here are a few tips:

Make someone feel emotion beyond satisfying a need.

It could be joy, efficiency, excitement, gratitude, relief - anything above simply meeting expectations. We’re all feeling it. Anxiety and depression are on the rise, as is the uncertainty in the job market, political landscape and economy. No matter your service or product, pay attention to the little moments and make them matter. There is no shortage of opportunities for this.

For example, if you are designing a fintech product where you are asking your customers to give you the better part of their savings, help ease their concern with your product. Create a way for prospects to engage with current customers (yes, real humans) to talk about the real experience. Or maybe you’re a healthcare center and you just delivered tough news to a patient, wouldn’t it make sense to give them a call a few days later to see if they have any questions or just to check in on how they are doing?

As I move from product to service experience in my day-to-day, I can think of countless ways to bring more humanity to the equation–even if that way is just giving someone a reason to smile.

Physical “nice touches”stand out

The virtual world went mainstream less than 20 years ago. Before that, for approximately 180,000years, we were physical creatures. We used our senses to touch, smell, see, hear or taste every experience. Now we spend 11 hours per day behind a screen*.Therefore, let’s say you sleep 7 hours a day, that leaves you with a mere six hours without devices.

Given that many of today's and tomorrow’s experiences are rooted in the digital world, how can your product or experience drive more of a bridge to our past? Is it a physical gift near your birthday? Is it a handwritten note? Keeping with the fintech theme, maybe you create a meet-up or event for all of your virtual members of the experience to come together? Or maybe you buy your clients' lunch for special occasions by sending them a gift box/card to a nearby restaurant.

To truly make an impact, it is best to stimulate all of the senses. And as humans, we prefer to use them. Give us something to interact with, even though the digital experience may be the main experience.

Give people a reason to talk.

Humans are natural storytellers and listeners. What's your favorite joke, favorite childhood book and favorite movie? Chances are, you didn’t have issues answering these questions because stories stay with you. They resonate with you and you can retell them because they make a lasting impact. For thousands of years, storytelling was the primary way of communicating information.

To succeed today, give your customers a reason to tell a story about their experience with your brand.They will welcome the opportunity to tell the story at the next company lunch, social dinner or conversation with a friend. Word-of-mouth is still one of the most trusted sources of information and people love to be experts and make recommendations.

How to do this? Solve a problem. Make someone laugh. Go above and beyond when there is an issue. Take the time to really listen to your customers.

*Q1 2018 Nielsen TotalAudience Report