Category: Uncategorized

The Pitch gets us over a hurdle. To change the audience’s actions. Give money or support, buy something new, or do something different. We make a pitch by establishing common ground with our audience, stating a common problem that we all recognise, and then providing a new solution that fixes, eliminates, or leaps past the…

The explanation shares knowledge: “Show me how.” With an explanation, we share our audience’s knowledge or abilities. Training Course. Presenting a paper. Introducing a process. Self-help seminars. Legal trials. Sales training. Any explanation takes us to a new level of understanding (a stair case). A great explanation makes it effortless (an escalator). Great explanations smoothly…

Reports are the most frequent presentations we make. They are also the most likely to fail. A report presents the data for the fastest insight and greatest retention! A nearly fool-proof way to do that is to use ‘6-Mode Thinking’. 6-Mode Thinking is the cognition model that says that we can break almost any idea,…

An extract from Tim Brown’s Change by Design. Many notions have been proposed to explain what differentiates human beings from other species: bipedal locomotion, tool use, language, symbolic systems. Our ability to tell stories also sets us apart. Mostly we rely on stories to put our ideas into context and give them meaning. It should…

The difference between an ordinary product and a captivating product is emotion. People, your customers, have emotional desires as well as the need to perform tasks. This book attempts to provide an argument and a how-to guide for how to make emotions flow from your product — from the ground up. Emotion based opportunities exist…

Stephen Anderson, author of Seductive Interaction Design, created a tool called Mental Notes to help designers build better products through heuristics. Check http://www.getmentalnotes.com/cards#. The cards are available to order. Each card describes one insight into human behavior — a cognitive bias — intended to spark product team conversations around how they might utilize the principle…

An extract from Tim Brown’s Change by Design. An organization that commits itself to the human-centered tenets of design thinking is practicing enlightened self-interest. This is simply the most reliable source of long-term profitability and sustainable growth. It is no longer possible to think in adversarial terms of a “buyers market” or “sellers market.” We’re…

An extract from Tim Brown’s Change by Design. Business thinking is integral to design thinking. A design solution can only benefit from the sophisticated analytical tools — discovery driven planning, option and portfolio theory, prospect theory, customer life-time value — that have evolved in the business sector. The unforgiving world of business can help design…

An extract from Tim Brown’s Change by Design. When we sit in an airplane or shop for groceries, we are not only carrying out a function but having an experience. That function can be compromised if the experience attending it is not designed with the same mindfulness a good engineer brings to a product or…

An extract from Tim Brown’s Change by Design. The job of the designer is “converting need to demand.” If it is that simple, why are there not as many success stories like the iPod? The answer is that we need to return human beings to the center of the story. We need to learn to…