“Finally”, as pointed out by my source, HBR hosts an overview about design thinking from Ideo’s Tim Brown (nb: complete version available online for free). The post from Victor Lombardi includes a nice, compact synthesis.
Monthly Archive for May, 2008
Interesting, critical reflections about how it should not be taken for granted that the openness typical of the Internet (or most of it) is going to dominate its mobile extension: “I don’t think there is anything wrong with mobile or with some of the great new mobile applications and devices, but we have to be careful to remember that most mobile networks that actually work are built on infrastructure that is operated by a small number of mobile operators who use a lot of regulated and closed technology”. The post includes some references to the Japanese environment, but most of the reasoning applies to a global level. I guess that worries about excess of regulation, risk aversion and insufficient competition are just even more serious for Europe (although we all know that there are huge differences among say highly dynamic, tech-savvy Nordic countries and, say, Italy).
Drawing explicitly from UCG intended as User Generated Content, the idea of UGS-User Generated Services put more emphasis on the role of the user as the one being able to create and manage services; in other words, this is about offering users appropriate (i.e. easy to use, enjoyable etc.) technical means not only to produce, publish and share content, but services as well. Among others, the SPICE project (where we at Neos are partner) supports the workshop on UGS to be held in Madrid next July on the initiative of the OPUCE project.
The full program is already available (see it on Scribd) and attendance is free to registered participants.
Working with Neos on a mobc3 solution developed for a major retailer (details are confidential). As in other cases, manual sketching on a very basic mobile phone interface template proved to be really useful to translate or better shape high level requirements into more concrete anticipations of the application behaviour, to be elaborated then as detailed interface and navigation specifications.
Sketches are seeminlgy quite much appreciated by the developer guys to quickly get an idea of what the work is going to be (perhaps yet another sign of Powerpoint fatigue…)
