In the 9 minute long music video, I noticed over 9 different brands ranging from food companies, to fashion, to accessories. The video is flooded with product placements including Virgin Mobile, Diet Coke, Miracle Whip, Wonder Bread and even Plenty Of Fish, an online dating site.  While most of the products were paid product placements, a few were Lady Gaga’s idea and said to be a personal tribute to things she values.  One such example is  when Gaga uses Diet Coke cans in place of hot-rollers to curl her hair- she says she did this is honour of her mother who did the same thing back in the 1970’s.

The hit video also plays like a mini-film and ends with a “To Be Continued” message. Whats Next for Gaga? All I know is, Gaga if you’re reading this, Idea Couture should be among the things you love and featured in your next video.

Today, I’m waiting for a flight in Boston Logan airport. And for a change, I’m delighted. What is clear is that this airport has put a bit of effort into some thoughtful design. Armed with my trusty iPhone and an hour until take-off, I thought I’d share a few of the design elements of terminal E that have been pleasantly surprising.

1. Human Centered Seating
Generally speaking, seating in airports is terrible. We’ve all been stuck on old torn leather chairs in dehumanizing rows with uncomfortable leather arm rests designed to ward off delayed travellers looking for a rest. Well Logan has clearly thought about the design of its seating.

While those old friends with sharp arm rests are indeed present (and serve a necessary use), Logan clearly understands that travellers are humans, and humans interact. In addition to the uncomfortable classic, Logan has clearly examined the types positions people sit in at the airport. Ever put your feet on your travel luggage? Well they offer a slightly reclined chairs with a foot rest for the tired. Ever awkwardly sit to have a conversation with the person you’re travelling with? Well Logan has chairs in V formations that allow people travelling together to have a comfortable face-to-face conversation.

In an industry where everyone has to wait, this airport has thought about how to make waiting a little more comfortable.

2. Inviting Spaces
Travel presents a long period of maintained stress. Airports must be one of the lowest quality experiences for the money. A visit to the spa costs you a hundred bucks. Airport taxes aren’t that far off that price.

While an airport can’t necessarily fix all of the experience breakdowns of flying, Logan has created some opportunities for escapism. The airport features several spaces that allow passengers isolate themselves from other travellers to relax. Including these spaces (and offering rocking chairs) gave me the right kind of escape to work on this post.

3. Understanding the needs of the Modern Traveler
As a business traveler, I often look at the airport as my office. A few months ago, I flew out of the Buffalo airport on my way to Boston for some meetings.  As any business traveler flying in the afternoon would do, I entered the terminal and looked for the nearest plug to make sure I had enough juice for the flight. Upon further investigation, every potential outlet was covered in impenetrable metal. The only available outlets? A “Pay for Power” station offering me a charge for a charge.

Logan clearly understands that waiting is more pleasant with entertainment, and modern entertainment requires a plug. Everywhere I looked, there was a free outlet – no co-opted marketing angle, no sitting on the floor next to an outlet because there were no chairs around. Just an understanding of what people need.

4. Wi-Fi for All
In addition to the four letter words most regular travellers drop regularly while being dehumanized, we have a six letter word as well – Boingo. In a world that increasingly looks at the internet as a right not a privilege, the idea of paying $10.00 for 24 hours of Wi-Fi is insulting. Do your passengers a favour – give them a little internet access in exchange for their airport tax dollars.

Logan airport progressively offered me free Wi-Fi upon arrival (all be it, sponsored by Google).  The result? I could catch up on a bit of work and find enough time to jump on  Wordpress and offer the airport my compliments. When you have a good experience, you return the favour. If anyone is reading this – connect through Logan.

Airports with empathy
Sure, not all design changes lives. But we should never forget that good experiences certainly have the ability to impact them. Designing a decent airport experience is not rocket science, and a good experience at an airport could go a long way towards helping an industry notorious for experience breakdowns.

Logan airport was certainly not perfect, but what’s obvious is that it was designed with empathy. Somehow, they’ve managed to understand traveler needs and behaviours, and support them with the best design and features they can. Logan airport tries in an industry with a terrible reputation for under-delivering on customer experience, and I can’t help but leave with a positive perspective on my visit.

Have you had a great airport experience recently? Leave a comment and let us know what made it so great for you.

I’m not sure how your snow adventures unfold, but mine usually begin with a vain attempt to coordinate more than two carloads arriving at the mountain at different times, followed by a ride up a lift and a good long stare at the trail map at the top during which we try to memorize a way down, hopefully bumping into our friends without too much grief.

On the way down I frequently veer off onto the wrong run by mistake, sometimes even ending up in the wrong place altogether, annoying my riding companions in the process.

Mobile phones and two-way radios have gone a long way toward helping with these situations but there’s still room for more comprehensive ways to a) not get lost, and b) more thoroughly enjoy time on the mountain with friends.

This goggle concept pulls together a heads-up display, GPS/accelerometer technology, and mobile messaging. Available functions at any given time depend on whether they’re set to Stop or Go mode.

In Stop mode there are several things a wearer can do:

• Read incoming messages from friends as text, or voice converted to text
• Activate an interactive target marker to geo-locate spots on the slopes he wants to find again. Perfect while on the lift scouting terrain to hit on the way down.
• See which three runs are closest or most readily accessible from the top of the current lift or gondola

In Go mode, a wearer can:

• See his speed
• See which two lifts he can most readily reach from the trail he’s on
• Track his set targets

All modes show a compass, live trail map, time, temperature, altitude, current location (trail or lift), song selection, and the locations of up to five customizable friends who have the same goggles or GPS-enabled mobile devices. Any of these functions can be programmed to disable in either or both modes at the user’s discretion for skiers or riders who prefer less of an interface.

Goggle view in Stop mode, targeting

Goggle view in Stop mode, accessing message

Goggle view in Go mode

At first glance the numbers themselves may seem small, but keep in mind that these are two sites that have tens of millions of users per day. A tiny change in page rendering speed, can have a pretty significant impact over time, especially when your core business is search.

What can we learn from this?

• Speed matters (the obvious one)
• Costs of delay increase overtime and remain persistent (you’ve lost users)
• What you show a user, is more important then it’s actual size

The last point is interesting. What that essentially means is that, it’s important to consider how a page is rendered, and optimize or use techniques, that let you decrease the perceived loading time.

Performance optimizations are important. They are typically neglected, not budgeted for, or done as an after-thought, which can hurt in the long run. However, it is foolish to assume that a particular site can be fast just by doing a couple of tweaks. On the contrary, optimization is a methodical process, which takes small but several aspects into account, which together can bring faster performance and user experience responsiveness.

Thankfully for us, along came this humorous and useful upgrade chart to demystify the process. If only our friendly neighborhood carrier could be so transparent about the process – it would save a lot of folks a few hours on hold when calling in to customer service.

Thanks for the link @krestivo, care of @seanmcdonald

Service design is an innovative and emerging discipline. I am not referring to the older definition of it in the manufacturing and hospitality industries.  Today, almost every business is a service business. How service companies bring innovation to life largely depends on how they define themselves. Pure services cover a wide range and heterogeneous fields. These range from low volume retailing to highly interactive digital interfaces. Don’t dismiss the high volume retail environment and technologically enabled activities like telecommunications, utilities, banking and insurance.

An example would be ING. Trying to define what a virtual bank would look like was not a simple task for ING DIRECT.  How do you get wary consumers who expect vaults and teller cages to trust a virtual bank?  The key is to design for the mind and the senses. Today’s businesses need to consider their emotional relationship with their customers as a key component of their value proposition. Designing a compelling customer experience enables this relationship. ING DIRECT sells a unique (and super simple) range of products and engages the customer in a unique way, creating the opportunity for a trust engagement as well as, ultimately, customer acquisition. There were so many customer barriers to overcome and address.

Another example is LG. They make and sell appliances. Now you can drag your dirty laundry over to the hip Canal St Martin neighborhood to wash it at the LG WashBar. The concept is unique: buy a drink at the bar and get free access to the upstairs “apartment” where you can do your laundry—washing powder comes free too!—browse books from the library, watch movies, and check your e-mails at the two free wireless hotspots. It’s a great place to hang out. The feel is cozy minimalist design meeting a high-tech appliance aesthetic. There’s even a dance floor downstairs for DJ nights. Fresh clothes and Saturday night dancing?…sounds good to me. The plan is to open up 15 across France.

So how does service innovation happen? It begins with gathering insights including goals and paths, prototyping the working experience and evidencing. Next, is service blueprinting. It all comes down to three things: Creating compelling user benefits, optimize based on the separability of the service nature and making sensible automation/human trade-offs. Develop Compelling User Benefits. Understand what type of benefit/value a service innovation can provide. Is this innovation an important core benefit or a new way of delivering an existing benefit? Examples are Cirque du Soleil (new core benefit), Netflix mail order DVD rental (new benefit), Blockbuster’s self-destruct DVD in 48 hours (new benefit) and Ford’s latest use of radar-based active safety technology linked to satellites (new benefit). Optimize based on the separability of the service. Is this innovation for a service that is produced and consumed simultaneously? Examples are Telemedicine (create separable services), Blackberry (mostly inseparable services), Enterprise Car Rental (create inseparable services) or iTunes (create inseparable services).

Model the service economics and making trade-offs. Customers are expensive. Dealing with them costs money. Putting them through a speech recognition application to offload calls saves money but lowers the quality of the experience. Each year, call centers implement new technologies that can take over the functions previously handled by people. Why then are customers so unhappy, if we expect call centers to implement technology that will make customers happy and provide them faster service? Simple, because technology does not equal quality customer service.

Take Nintendo Wii’s Glucoboy as an example. A game compatible with the Game Boy Advance or DS Lite, was launched in Australia on World Diabetes Day. The Glucoboy makes monitoring and achieving blood sugar goals fun. Whenever a user performs a glucose test, points are awarded which allows the user to unlock games. More points are awarded if the user’s blood sugar falls within the specified goals. The points may be spent in the game or on the GRIP online community. Users post their scores to the GRIP community to see who has the best scores in a town, country, and in the world. Nintendo has plenty of opportunities to create new benefits (and revenue) through service designs.

The Nintendo idea was created by Paul Wessel who noticed that his 9-year-old son would constantly lose his glucose monitor but not his Game Boy. Mr. Wessel states,  “That moment, five years ago, design was about the creation of beautiful and usable objects. Human has a similar project, using service design, when they pioneer the use of games for health industry. The idea is to create ways for people of all ages to improve their health and well-being through the use of video game technology. Expect to see more service design innovation when healthcare and gaming crossover.”

Today, it is additionally and increasingly thought to be a valid approach to problems related to, well, anything – be it global warming, poor transportation or social issues. What differentiates the designers’ way to solve societal problems from that of other professionals’? The essence of design still lies in the quest for aesthetic, functional as well as sensorial experiences, that appeal to and help societies. To design is to make the problem-solving a matter of the heart as much as rationality. While engineers can make banks efficient, designers can make customers happy. Efficiency and happiness are not mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, many businesses today act as if they are. They will be surprised who service designers can change that.

Image Source: http://www.yankodesign.com/2009/02/27/how-to-not-put-on-your-earrings/; http://www.linkdesign.nl/assets/Image/P_ING/ING_WEB_01.gif; http://trendwatching.com/trends/brand-spaces.htm; http://www.spbwhatsup.com/images/cirque.jpg; http://reviews.cnet.com/i/bto/20080227/Wii.jpg

But what is innovation?  First, we must remember that innovation is not invention. Invention is the creation of a new idea and its reduction to an application. Innovation is the commercialization of an idea. Innovation is often mistaken for research and development. R&D is a component of innovation, but it is only that, a component. Innovation is really about an economically valuable novelty. It is about new products, processes and experiences and all the scientific, technological, organizational and, financial activities that produce them.  Innovation is an emergent event; it happens when practitioners “on the ground” have worked on something enough to have discovered a new approach in the messy variety of practitioner effort, tons of conflicting quantitative research data and unfocused conversations. Innovation only occurs when there is sufficient variety of thought and action; it works more like natural selection, which requires lots of mutation. Innovation is, by its nature, unorthodox.

If you dig deep underneath the veneer of any innovation success story, and you will find lots of trial and error before the (sometimes accidental) eureka moment occurred. And even after that eureka moment, the only reason we think of the outcome as an innovation is because it found traction and really worked. Yes, innovation often sprouts from the messy, trial-and-error efforts of practitioners in the trenches. But there are ways to make purposeful innovation more manageable, there are so many half-truths and myths surrounding innovation that have made it sounds more complex than it is. In the next few weeks I will share my thinking on many of the myths and half-truths with clear steps on how to manage and organize innovation in any company, business unit, nonprofit organization, or government entity.  I will cover ideas on how to maximize your company’s Return On Innovation (ROI) by integrating the different types of innovation (business model, social, experience, marketing, process) and creating a diversified portfolio of innovations.

Image Sources: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barryslemmings/315915865/; http://dvice.com/pics/The-Evolution-of-the-iPod-Nano-2.jpg