February 20, 2017
I have been reading a lot about Millennials, this new breed stemming from the digital age.
Were these Millennials so much different?
I, as a GenX, could easily relate to what I was reading and did not realise the real gap until I had the opportunity to directly compare the ways of thinking, the value systems, attitudes, and mental models, of Millennials and Baby Boomers.
The opportunity came through some workshops I facilitated to explore how customers felt about brands and their experience as consumer and shopper.
I decided to run the workshop using Lego Serious Play, a facilitation method that asks participants to build metaphorical models with Lego bricks to answer specific challenges and questions.
The method is based on narratives and storytelling, and participants are the only one who hold the interpretative keys to decode the metaphors and stories kept in their model. After building their model to answer the question, participants share their stories and their models with everyone, explaining the meaning of their models and sharing their views and perspectives on the issues I was investigating.
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May 20, 2016
The relationship between business and design has gone through deep changes in the past years. We are assisting at a convergence between business and design lead by the formalisation and adoption of design thinking and the revelation that good design is good business: many approaches from design have migrated into business and management enhancing the potential of business focused companies.
But there is a very special case of a method that was developed as an answer to a business need that has successfully migrated to design practices.
This is the case of Lego Serious Play: developed from the ’90s to improve the quality of strategic development meetings it has now been adopted by design companies to enhance creative processes, collaboration among different department, promote co-creation and participative design that includes customers, users, designers, and stakeholders.
Presented at #CassCreativity Seminar series on May 4th 2916, you can watch the whole Storyfy from this Link.
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March 7, 2016
Markets are conversations (C) P. Bertini
One of the biggest challenges today, is to deliver meaningful experiences that create value to brands and are valuable for the users. As UX and CX professionals we are today responsible for the value generation processes, because an experience is created by the understanding of what does value mean for all those involved in the experience: the brand and the users.
I recently gave a speech at UX Denmark 2016, the theme was trust & emotion. If trust is the willingness to take risks, where does trust come from and how can it be useful in the UX field? Trust is generated by interaction, there is no trust unless the parts have had – or are in the conditions of having – an interaction that can build and support a relationship that generates positive emotions.
Interaction generates trust and relationships, and relationships generate experiences, and experiences are the real value in the experience economy.
Therefore, if relationships are the (metaphorical) places where value is generated between the interacting parts, then the only way to be in a relationship is through an EXPERIENCE.
Experience is generated by experiences, and the design of future experiences requires imagination and the understanding of the perception of the present experiences through narratives and storytelling of the past.
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February 12, 2016
Recently I have spent time reading and considering the future of UX and how recent research are affecting our understanding of our cognitive experiences and our perception.
I still had no chance to organise my thoughts into a decently structured article and explain what I see happening in the future. But if you are keen to know more, Marek Pawlowsky, the man behind MEX, invited me to talk about what’s boiling… And the result is a long chat (approx from min 40′) about Lego Serious Play, principles of embodied cognition and evolving research methods for the next generation of digital experiences.
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July 5, 2015
Unleash playfulness
Lego bricks are a fascinating tool. Mostly considered a creative and engaging toy, they are much more than that. What is a toy that enhances children’s creativity and imagination, becomes a tool to enhance understanding and explore opportunities in business.
There is an increasing interests in anything that is LEGO: from the business case of a company that employed co-creation and changed a negative trend in the ’90s into a global success.
And there are an increasing number of applications that are exploiting the simplicity of systemic bricks that can be combined in countless ways and gain a number of different meanings based on individual narratives and stories.
Bricks are natural story maker tool: children imagine adventures while playing and building objects. And so do adults, although they may need some help.
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June 6, 2015
Cocreating experience: the power of collaboration
This is an excerpts from Co-Creation: Finding The Cubed Factor For Customer Experience (CX).
UX has helped global organizations to think and take into consideration how their users and customers interact with brands and companies through interfaces, digital services and the whole ecosystem. UX has also brought users closer to brands by involving user opinions.
However, when UX is in action, brands often leave UX to manage the conversation. UX researchers, consultants and designers often act as the man in the middle, interpreting both the brands’ goals and the users’ expectations. As much as UX accomplishes, global organizations are still not engaged and are still not talking with their customers.
This missing exchange is crucial. It has become clear, in fact, that customers are more focused on the experiential elements of a product and a brand than the product itself. As J. Pine and Gilmore put it, “An experience occurs when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event.”
The key to bridging the conversation gap between Global companies and their customers is “co-creation.”
Read the rest here.
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March 29, 2015
[Thoughts after Mex15, Slides at the end]
Markets are conversations
It was back in March 1999 when a group of forward thinking people published a revolutionary book based on 95 thesis that explained that the old business models were disrupted by internet and technologies. They said that markets were conversations,they explained that it was time to start listening to the consumers and to engage in conversations.
The book, The Cluetrain Manifesto, was a revolutionary and visionary text that clearly saw the direction technologies were taking society and the business. Internet and technologies dramatically changed in these 16 years, but every change reinforced the thesis of the Cluetrain Manifesto, proving how old business models were obsolete and could lead companies and business into a quick obsolescence.
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December 21, 2014
Cocreation brings together individuals
[Excerpt. The full article is available on UXBooth. Many thanks to Marli Mesibov].
“In the past decade, new technologies ranging from Twitter to customer service chat-windows have led to an increase in the quantity and quality of interactions between people and organizations. But listening to user feedback isn’t where the company-user interactions end. Today more than 50% of Fortune 500 companies have made co-creation an integral part of their innovation strategy, as Andrew Welch—Chief Executive Officer of Y&R reports.
Yet in user experience design, most organizations take a traditional approach to user research and design, using a researcher to act as a middle-man between users, designers, and business stakeholders. Users are consulted in the process, but not given creative control over solutions.
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August 9, 2014
cocreation & UX
In the past few years, we have assisted to a sort of divorce between users and organisations: technology has bought in a wide range of new behaviours and opportunities that companies are not always able to follow or predict. Most innovative projects fail because it’s difficult to fully understand what’s in the users’ heads (Leadbeater 2008) and the big changes society is facing, with a shift from products to experiences makes traditional UX approaches difficult, time-consuming and less effective.
To reduce complexity and make the overall internal and external process simpler and leaner, UX today can take advantage of collaborative approaches that involve and engages stakeholders, users, and designers in a creative and participative activity, namely co-creation.
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July 19, 2014
The road to change – © P. Bertini
Markets are ever more conversations and the role of the user has dramatically changed in the past decade, shifting from a passive unknown being, into active part of the conversation.
We live in convivial times where technology has enhanced new practices and new opportunities for organisations and users to talk, to understand their mutual points of view and share knowledge, meanings and values.
Nevertheless, there has been a divorce between users and organisations and much of those conversations are today limited to the final stage of product and service design. Rather than taking fully advantage of the potential of co-creation, and engage users in conversations and creative exercises, today users are involved only in the very final stage, when it comes to validate an idea that has been developed using traditional approaches.
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