Recently in Design and usability Category

The daddy, Groupon, trading since 2008

Groupola, one of the many copycat services (note even the video copy and content is virtually identical)

A bunch of group buying sites have started and failed but Groupon's particular mix has struck a chord and it doesn't look like they're going anywhere soon.

Interesting vid of my old boss talking about a theme we uncovered in a "what's next" project.

The first 5 minutes are rough going but when he defines "life with impermanence" in terms of three service design prompts "mesh, morph & swarm" it gets really interesting (also, knowing what came before, it's really interesting to see how he synthesizes across industries, audiences, needs etc--he does a really good job of defining a vision for potential change. I'm less bought into the idea of creating a "vocabulary" to spread the word in a corp. environment but nice work).

At Vodafone I worked on a number of transactional prototypes based on the "impermanence" concepts and while these may seem a bit wanky fartsy bollocks they're actually happening all around us and will increasingly colour how we compete in the marketplace.

If our ecommerce platform used mesh thinking we might be completely distributed across Europe and be resilient enough to withstand peak without going belly up.

If our website architectures were based on swarm thinking we could be adapting in real time, from displaying products or groups of product areas on the basis of local, current needs and be more likely to convert some of the huge numbers of Currys visitors.

Actually, I'm hoping the Rich Relevance dynamic product recommendations we're testing in January will take us a little bit closer to a swarm-driven experience.

Also, re new stuff, if we experiment with ways to involve the crowd and the cloud in merchandising (group buying, price negotiation and transparency, individual deal structures etc) we could probably do worse that thinking along the lines of the Mechanical Turk (imagine the Turk scanning for price matches and returning value estimates of the items customers propose for swap or part exchange--could be very cool).

(for those that are curious I've uploaded the PDF of the "themes for 2012" document that was our team's contribution to "life with impermanence")

I had an idea to increase promotional aspects of the sites.

We could set up a COP for each staff member with a short into introducing their Christmas Wish list.
Allow each staff member to add any products they wish to their page.
Allow them to promote it anyway they wish; Facebook, Twitter, Word of mouth.

The winner is the staff member who can promote and make the most money through the site.

Neil's Page

Lovely infographic from getsat (Get Satisfaction) re Gen-Y purchasing behaviour:

James has a great new post on the management of innovation in business and the obsession with the new. He calls it Shiny Shiny Syndrome

Companies and brands who in the morning were waterboarding their above-the-line media agencies in a vat of latte to drive their TV spots harder, spent the afternoon launching an application into the AppStore, ignoring the fact that none of their customers own, or maybe have even heard of, an iPhone.

I'll keep that in mind next time someone asks me when we launch our iPhone app...

Thinking some Hemel Visual and UX folk might enjoy designjamlondon.eventbrite.com tickets go on sale at 13:00 today (in 6 minutes)

This person's work totally made me smile:-)

Are you guys already familiar with De Bono's "6 Thinking Hats"? The process is great for brainstorming, ideation etc, particularly when you get all participants to wear each hat in turn. Loved this graphic i found on Flickr.

Worth a Google search if you're into new concept development:-)