Objective

The objective of the project was to develop a service concept based on previous analyses of existing service sectors. The new service should either fulfill unmet customer needs, or address customer groups that are not explored yet within the service sector. The concept was to be presented visually as part of a presentation and wall chart, with a rudimentary branding. The new service offering had to be connected to one of two previously chosen and researched brands — in this case BMW and method.*

Goal

Based on previous research projects about the service sector of Temporary Housing for Families of Medical Patients (NAICS Code 624221), I intended to target unexplored customer groups — in this case people with temporary health impairments. Taking inspiration from method’s quirky and fun brand personality, I created a service concept focused on collaboration and encouragement.

Solution

Soothee is an online service targeting individuals with temporary health impairments that seek assistance to stay on top of their busy schedules. To keep with the quirky and fun personality, the brand identity was designed very bright and colorful, communicating the encouragement of mutual support within the community. To facilitate contact between community members, both an online portal and a smartphone app were integrated into the system as integral touchpoints.

The wallchart shows the two personas used to identify core user needs, a storyboard depicting the typical service experience, and a service blueprint, showing the important steps during the user experience and the corresponding touchpoints and processes. The presentation shows an overview and visual prototypes of touchpoints.

Time for the final development of the project was 1.5 weeks, including refined service concept, and the development of brand and personas, as well as identification and design of touchpoints.Click to view slideshow.

*method research done by Lindsay Vetell

Objective

Design a digital solution to a specific problem or task, either as a mobile or web application.

Goal

Help people overcome the difficulties related to that task with greater ease or in a shorter time.

Solution

BDGT is a mobile application designed to help students manage their budgets as they take their first steps toward financial responsibility.

An extended description can be found here.

Past week I had the opportunity to talk to some experienced colleagues, and then took the same conversation to some other friends at different points in their lives. The consensus was that none of them said it was important to have a plan, and the majority actually advised to not plan to far ahead. Their argument was that it would get you to narrow-minded. While intention drives focus, it also bares the risk of losing other opportunities out of sight. I was intrigued, because I never thought about it this way.

Finally, I had a great conversation with a friend who told me, that he saw it most important to have a passion for something, and work along the lines of that passion. It might not be a specific plan, but it takes you in a direction where you work on things that you enjoy and love — a lesson that Steve Jobs mentioned as well. I revisited my past article about finding your place and kept thinking to myself that it was a very helpful experience to work with people who are extremely passionate about their work, and saw my passion and could give me advice on what opportunities I want to look out for.

Ultimately, I learned that it is not a problem to not have a plan. With everything being in a constant state of flux there are so many unknown variables that planning to far ahead is similar to planning on winning the lottery: an illusion. The most important thing is to be passionate about something and following that passion. This is what people should really focus on, especially because finding your passion might not always be as obvious as you think it is.

I keep reading that truly successful design constantly has its ultimate audience in mind, its user. Design would be nothing without its audience. Its when a design gets used that it unveils its usefulness, fulfills its purpose. And many current discussions revolve around participatory design, which should include members of the target audience in the design process. Many celebrate this approach as a fundamental shift of paradigm in design, calling it the new way design is working, especially in the realm of graphic design.

Yet, not few are driven by a sense of competitiveness. Many still feel pushed by seeing other’s work, using it as a gauge for a level of quality they want to reach or, more often, surpass. I admit, I am very competitive myself and it has quite often steered me into a sense of bitterness, when I was not able to surpass a level that I set myself as the goal.

I came to the point where I am starting to realize, and current collaborative projects have been a great eye-opener for me, that collaboration and competition do not need to exclude each other. I read an interesting article about why the ’92 Dream Team (I’m speaking Olympics basketball, for the few who don’t get the reference) was so successful. They were fierce competitors, but yet with a lot of respect for each other, which led them to function so well as a team. And it is this respect that seems to be a missing ingredient in many collaborative environments.

Not too long ago, I used to work somewhat close with a fellow designer, bouncing ideas back and forth. Yet a lot of times, I did not treat the input I was given with the proper respect. Now that I work with people who I see as much more experienced — being an intern among established professionals — I have a more obvious reason to humbly accept input on my ideas. But it is not that I would not use their level of quality as my threshold, the standard I want to reach and surpass. It is more that I came to acknowledge that this collaboration might get us both there. Maybe an idea of mine will spark something for them, but their input will most definitely help me advance and grow.

The past weeks of collaborative working have had a greater impact on my learning than many of my mainly competitive projects in the months before. Now, I am still competitive and ambitious, but not to the point of being exclusive about my work, but about trying to be inspired to do better, together with those who helped me with my work.

Usually, we have a tendency to welcome those who overachieve. Think of Apple’s “one more thing”. We celebrate the extra element, that surprises us, doing so much more than we imagined.

As part of the aforementioned class, I did some research on simplicity and came across John Maeda’s great book “Laws of Simplicty, which has since then be a great help to keep interfaces streamlined and manageable. And even in this book, Maeda mentions how customers appreciate a small thing that is big on delivery. The element of surprise makes the artifact more likely to have a positive impact on its user. Yet at the same time it is important to keep things manageable. And this is where a lot of interfaces and applications are at risk. They want to serve every possible scenario that its users could come up with, even if this means including functions that are hardly ever going to be used by the majority of users. This leads to interfaces that are cluttered and extremely complex. The feeling of pleasant surprise might still be there at the end of an interaction, but to get there, a user has to overcome the daunting feeling of being completely overwhelmed and lost in a myriad of buttons, clickable links or other calls to action.

One of the best lessons I took away from both Maeda’s book and my class was the division between important features and a wish list. My professor insisted that we wrote down our problem, our goal and our objective. And then plan our features accordingly. If something adds value to accomplishing the goal, it is an important feature. When we moved towards the description of our users, writing a summary of their lifestyle and personality and the way they would use our application, we added a list of things that they would really wish to see in the app. Each of these wishes was then compared to the end goal, and if it made it a lot easier, it was considered to become a feature. If it was more a nice thing to have, it got thrown out. A very helpful rule in this was to never justify getting rid of something, but to always justify keeping something. This way you ensure that you only keep the things that really matter.

In our time, where mobile devices fulfill a myriad of functions, our networks are a connection of countless nodes, it is the easy interfaces with a specific focus that engage users, giving them a feeling of being able to master the application at hand. Overwhelming interfaces don’t make users feel like they are in control, but rather they cause the anxiety of simply going through the motions.

You only need to look at the popularity of applications such as Twitter — focussed on the communication of very short messages — or Instagram — focussed on sharing photos, no videos, no audio. And then compare it to the constant outcries about changes to Facebook’s interface. Its users no longer feel like they understand how to manage the immense complexity of the site.

What interface and application development really need, is more consideration of their users’ needs, and less about fancy additional features. In our hectic times, focus and simplicity help us navigate our environment. The world is already complex enough without additional interfaces to further complicate our lives.

Today’s article is not even about my wisdom, it’s about a great find that I came across. I had a very similar post in mind and had started to take notes, when I found this gem. It is the very wonderful Startups, this is how design works by Wells Riley. It is extensive and a valuable research that provides some understanding that design is so much more than a “beautiful logo” or a “fancy business card”. It’s about a mindset and an approach to solving a specific problem. And a good designer is identifiable maybe more about his way of thinking than about the amount of pins of vintage typography on his Pinterest boards (yes, I am guilty of that one myself).

So I would like to invite you to take a look at this wonderful collection of insights and research that Wells has compiled — in a visually very appealing way.

Between my stay in Venezuela, my studies abroad in Spain, my current studies in the US, and of course also my home in Germany, it is difficult to find the place where I feel like I belong. I made friends along the way who are spread all over the globe from Australia and the Far East to Eastern Europe, South Africa, Scandinavia, people all over Latin America, and now more and more all over the US. And I am caught somewhere in between. While there is of course a connection to my hometown that I keep sacred, I wont deny that I have a hard time picturing myself going back. And that leaves the question unanswered where my place is.

The same goes for the search for a profession. Brought up pursuing my creative endeavors in the realm of music it was not that easy to realize that it might not be the most promising path to follow. And that’s when a ton of people came with “advice” on what I should do. I have a thing for languages, so everybody told me to study languages. Only that nobody could tell me what to do with that, except teaching it or translating books or documents, neither option really sparked my interest. As I love reading about politics and will hardly ever shy away from an argument, some people suggested I should study law and either do that or go into politics myself. Ultimately, I ended up studying Digital Media, a mix of computer science and some design classes, only to realize that the computer scientific part was not fulfilling me as much as I hoped. And I went on to get my graduate degree in Graphic Design (which is what I am currently doing).

But even here I met people who had their ideas of what I should do and how I should do it. Which to some degree is part of teaching — the offering of guidance and orientation. But unfortunately even classmates had their ideas for where they saw my strengths and weaknesses and added their own recommendations. And in all honesty: I appreciate that they all looked out for me and gave me ideas.

Now that I am doing an internship and getting another more specified glimpse into the professional world that is waiting for me, I get advice from people who are in the kinds of roles that I would hope to be in one day. And these people see me do what I do, ask questions about what I like doing, and can tell me if it matches the requirements. And I am glad that I am finding these kinds of mentors, for there is one thing I have learned already: even if I might not have found my place, it helps that some people show me the path to get there.

Lately I learned that those whose work I find the most impressive are the patient ones. The people who are patient enough to take their time to refine things, or to further develop certain skills, to be able to accomplish something they might not be capable of yet. And people who are persistent at pushing themselves and their work.

So while creative people sometimes tend to jump from one project to the next, constantly searching for new input and new challenges, truly great accomplishments take patience and persistence.

As I have mentioned in previous articles, I believe I work with extremely skilled people, but even they need their time to come up with the great ideas and solutions. I have not yet met someone who can just create on the highest level of quality in an instant and naturally. Even if some people are that skilled, it is because they have patiently developed this skill set, working on it persistently.

Another thought that came up while discussing these realizations with people close to me was the following:

“When people give up on you, you should try to prove them wrong instead of following their lead.”

When I uttered this as a side-note in a conversation, I did not yet realize that it was what drove me through the beginning of my time at SCAD. Although people had not given up on me, I felt like most did not have me on the radar, as there were some very skilled and talented people around me with more experience in the field. But I somehow always saw it as a challenge to prove my own worth. And to this day, it is one of the things that keeps me pushing a little further every time.

And this lesson can be applied to any area. If there is something that is not right, it only means that it is not right yet. But by working on it patiently and persistently, a lot of great obstacles can be overcome and turned into great opportunities. And sooner or later, I will be patient with myself as well.

Recently, at my internship, I have the opportunity to work in a team with some pretty amazing people who have been a great inspiration so far (whether they know it or not). Especially conversations that extend beyond the project we are working on have been the most insightful and helpful to me. Because they were teaching me valuable things about myself, work ethics and the main ingredients that lead them to realizing great work: passion and positive thinking.

I witnessed two of my team members in a casual conversation while both working on their own things. Suddenly, one of them asked if there was an easy solution to find information about their topic of discussion. As soon as the other one admitted not knowing about any, I could tell that he immediately had this spark in his head, thinking about how he could contribute to making this a little easier for everyone.

When I asked him about it later, he admitted that he just passionate about bringing the special knowledge or talent out in people, and connecting them to the right audience. And passionate he is. I could tell, and I was captured by the energy with which he explained this to me.

Another thing that I come across constantly is his ability to somehow remain extremely positive about all the things going on. Now that is something, that I originally found quite irritating.

Since coming to the states in september 2010, more than a handful of people have commented that I should be more positive and not beat myself up over things. I used to think that it was my motivation to keep working harder on something next time. But I came across multiple events where it was more of a block, something that paralyzed me, instead of pushing me harder. Since then, I make it an effort to take every criticism, no matter how defeating it is, and take something positive from it. I admit, it’s not always working  — especially the last couple of days I am not very successful at it. But I have noticed that trying to remain positive has allowed me to be less afraid of failure, and I was even able to pick up a few things I had on my backburner for the simple fact that I found them too difficult to tackle, or too daunting to even begin.

Now that I am finally allowing myself to be positive about certain events (hey, I am not saying I am an overall optimist, and I am not sure if I ever will be, but I can try), I do get the feeling that I see a lot less barriers on my way. Now I just need to do a bit more listening to my inner self to fully decipher my passion. But hey, even the longest journey begins with the first step.

I was wondering what he meant, considering that I usually try to be friendly and mostly somewhat positive in my published content (unless I get caught up in some major sports event, like the current Euro 2012 and germany is playing). He explained that it refers more to a certain pushiness.

A lot of users on Twitter seem to use the medium as a channel to simply blast out their content, with no interest in interaction. A lot of material is published automatically, comments from readers are consequently ignored. But the power of these new media is the ability to have a dialogue with users, to engage them in the conversation about your content, your products, your brand.

I realized that I was in some ways not living up to my own expectations myself anymore either. During my thesis research, I actively participated in discussions on Twitter with a few people that were of great help to me with the insights they provided. But as I moved on — and my studies in Graphic Design don’t involve that much research around social media anymore — I became more passive, and most of my content was just published without any form of engagement with its potential audience.  And yet, here I am, complaining about big corporations who don’t answer questions on social media portals, or about somewhat established or well-known designers who hardly ever answer messages (unless another well-known user contacts them).

These somewhat new media are not only called social because they let almost everybody publish content, and such democratizing the media in general. The real social aspect are the interactions with people. We have moved away from monologic one-way publishing to dialogues, exchange and collaboration. And by simply blasting out our content into the social media sphere, we are not participating in these dialogues, we just adopt old publishing strategies for these new media (because now we too have access to publishing channels).

Let’s put the social back in social media and not be … well, you get the message.