When Thymes first contacted us in 2008 they were at a bit of a strategic crossroads. They had helped invent the Bath and Body category of products in the early 80’s with artful, handcrafted products and packaging.

After some years of declining sales, Thymes changed their approach to their product design and experienced a resurgence of sorts in the early part of the decade. Once again, the competition quickly followed suit. We were tasked with helping them architect their third major reinvention, with the challenge to introduce the company to new audiences while strengthening their connection to existing customers.

We conducted a deep competitive audit of the gift channel where Thymes products are largely sold. We quickly realized that the category broke down into two main types: brands that stressed efficacy but failed to effectively use design, and brands that were pretty, but not very effective.

One of the ways Thymes is unique is that they don’t compromise in either usefulness or beauty. They have painstakingly built their own in house lab that produces amazing formulations and fragrances, while retaining the drive to make each collection artful and beautiful in its own unique way.

Another truth about the gift channel is that is largely collection and seasonally-driven, in many ways similar to the fashion industry. For this reason, it is imperative that each collection has a different design, fragrance, and overall experience from the one released six months prior.

This is one of the ways design serves as a vital business driver for Thymes. We use newness, not only as a means of acquisition, but also as a means of retention. This culminates in a brand that feels in constant renewal, but that is anchored by the quality of the products and the core beliefs that unite the entire product line.

The design of each Thymes product is itself a marketing asset, using shelf presence to create a look and feel that directly reflects the unique product inside, and allowing it to stand apart from the competition in an increasingly cluttered category.

Over the course of two years, we’ve had the privilege of creating four collections which have managed to outpace sales projections in a down economy. We have several other collections currently in the works and are excited to keep collaborating with Thymes on the future of the brand.

Check out The Zeus Jones Archive for more Thymes and other recent work.

Moonflower by Thymes is a high-end bath and body line that features notes of mahogany, amber and cognac. The packaging reflects the mysterious, premium nature of the product with a dark color palette and detailed floral illustrations wrapping each product. Gold foil was used in the printing process to add an unexpected element of brightness to the mix.

Naia is a clean, crisp fragrance that activates the senses. The packaging highlights the fresh simplicity of the products by wrapping them in illustrations of translucent leaves and splashes of water.

The Ambersweet Orange fragrance line is a wholesome blend of orange blossom, yogurt, and humectant honey. The color choice echoes the product’s warm, enveloping quality while the illustrations convey the sweetness of orange blossoms and honey.

The Thymes Offerings line consists of 8 individually fragranced candles, each scented to evoke a particular emotion or sentiment. Symbols were created to represent each emotion, and colors were carefully chosen to match each fragrance. Handwriting was used to emphasize the personal nature of gift giving.

Photography: Tom Matre

Technorati Tags: design, packaging

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Last night I was watching the Winter Olympics coverage and was reminded of the brilliant job Red Bull does in building its brand in a modern way across many different communities. To promote the Men’s half pipe competition which airs tonight (7:30pm CT,) NBC showed a segment on Shaun White and his “secret” halfpipe.

For those of you who haven’t heard of this, Red Bull custom built a half pipe for White at a secret location in the middle of nowhere. They fly him out to the location via helicopter whenever he wants to practice. This allows him to invent new tricks away from the prying eyes of the press and his competitors. Both the pristine condition of the halfpipe and its secret location have allowed White to pioneer new tricks that he will debut tonight for the first time in Olympic competition.

To me, this is a brilliant embodiment of the Red Bull brand. Instead of just sponsoring an athlete they have brought their idea of “gives you wings” to life by giving White a distinct competitive advantage in the Olympics.

In another example of enabling its sponsored athletes to go above and beyond, Red Bull gathers all their athletes every year and has them pitch different stunts they want to do. This year Travis Pastrana “flew” a car on New Years and broke the Guiness World Record for the longest car jump.

However, you don’t have to be a famous athlete to participate in one of these experiences. Red Bull street teams create micro events for influencers across different communities around the world. Here in the arctic tundra of Minneapolis, they held a mountain biking race for around 20 riders in the skyway during the winter. They theory here is that if they can create an amazing experience for a small number of people in a community, those people will spread the word.

And they do spread the word. According to howsociable.com Red Bull has a visbility score of 2973. Pepsi has a score of 2240. Gatorade scores 919.

It’s not just extreme sports communities that Red Bull is engaging either. They are all over motorsports, the music scene, clubs and bars, events for computer programmers, the video gaming community, and the craft and DIY world.

They’ve done a great job of building a brand where no matter  if “doing more” to you means staying out later at the bar, pulling an all-niter coding, or spending an extra hour on the mountain, Red Bull is your drink of choice.

More brands should follow Red Bull’s example of how to create converstation and energy around your brand in so many different communities.

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I finished reading Jaron Lanier’s long awaited book – You are not a gadget – a few days ago and can’t stop thinking about it. He talks (more intelligently and from a much more informed position) about a number of different things that I’ve been interested in over the past few years. For a start, the foundational premise of the book is that we are shaping the Web in ways that are destructive to our humanity and individuality.

“We tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience not indirectly through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers  to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed. Therefore, crucial arguments about the human relationship with technology should take place between developers and users before such direct manipulations are designed. This book is about those arguments.”

I couldn’t agree more with this, many of the basic building blocks of the Web like Pagerank and popularity favour mainstream information that’s less likely to be really new or innovative. In addition the increasingly digital nature of our communication is eliminating a lot of the subtlety and nuance that human communication typically includes.

Lanier also views the economic underpinnings of  our progress as equally damaging. We have created an environment where no one expects to pay for anything of value and are basing all of our development upon advertising being the primary revenue source for the entire Web ecosystem:

“If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists , and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless.”

His big thesis, however, is that we are excusing ourselves from taking responsibility for ethics and morality on the Web by draping everything with a banner of “open,” “free,” or “populist.” For example stealing music which we would never do offline, has been given a sheen of respectability online by spinning it into a form of protest against corrupt record labels. Or the fact that we regularly celebrate hackers who are able to break into corporate networks and bring down parts of their infrastructure. Or the feting we give researchers who spend two years trying to kill people remotely via their mobile phones. We have developed a different and skewed sense of ethics and morality that also contribute to the loss of our humanity.

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On a lighter note, you probably caught this analysis on profile pics done by dating site OkCupid which revealed some pretty interesting and very funny stats on the effectiveness of different poses and facial expressions on profile pics for men and women.

It’s clear our ability to measure more accurately is changing how we look at the world. That’s why I found this article about the fact that “Intel has launched an internally developed program it calls the Value Point System to measure marketing effectiveness online,” very interesting.

According to Nancy Bhagat, Intel VP-sales and marketing group, and director-marketing strategies and campaigns, “The opportunity that online represents for us is to be able to really take a look at numbers and data to help evaluate the value we’re getting.”

Given that Intel reportedly spends around $300 million on ads per year and that it had projected online in 2009 to be around 50% of its budget, that would make for a lot of really interesting data that they will be collecting and crunching through. It will be really interesting to see what they turn up and how open they are about sharing that information.

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“David Dalrymple, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,thinks human memory will no longer be the key repository of knowledge, and focus will supersede erudition. Quote:

Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends’ doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally.”

Originally I bookmarked this because I thought it was pretty insightful, but then later as I was trying to explain it to my wife, I realised it sounded like absolute bollocks coming out of my mouth. I don’t disagree that focus is an important skill, but to raise the ability focus and filter above other skills such as the ability to make non-linear connections or put things together in new ways feels a bit short-sighted to me.

Filtering and focusing are things that machines will inevitably be better at than humans so aren’t the important skills in the digital age things that make us more human, not more like machines? What do you think?

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The numbers are in and we’ve exceeded our goal! A sincere thanks to all of you who contributed.

A quick recap: Back in December we ran a fundraiser with our friends at Puny Entertainment to try to raise $7,000 to send the kids at Green Central school on a field trip.  Not knowing what kind of response we’d get, we built a website to tell the school’s story and offered three ways for people to contribute: donating money, shopping at the Box Tops for Education Marketplace, and collecting Box Tops for the school.

The results: We raised $6,170 in direct donations and Zeus Jones provided $2,500 in matching funds, adding up to a total of $8,670 for Green Central. It costs about $7,000 to fully fund a field trip for the whole school, and we’re thrilled to have raised more than enough to do that.

It’ll be another month or so before we can report on the Box Tops for Education portion of our fundraiser, but you can continue to support Green Central by doing your online shopping at the BTFE Marketplace.  And if you didn’t get a chance to donate during the Bus Drive and you’d still like to, give us a holler – we’re delivering a check at the end of the month so we’d be happy to add on your contribution.

Where the money is headed: We’re hoping to tag along as chaperones and photographers on the Bus Drive-funded field trips that Green Central students will take in 2010.  Stay tuned for updates and photos here on the blog.

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A year ago, when we started working on General Mill’s Box Tops for Education, we started our research by going out and talking to some of the coordinators who run the Box Tops program for schools in this area.

One of the people we met during those initial interviews was Jerri Henderson, a special ed teacher at Richard Green Central Park School in Minneapolis. Jerri is also the Box Tops coordinator for the K-8 school, at which 97% of the students live in poverty. She told us how participation in Box Tops had allowed some classes to take field trips that they could otherwise not afford. Our conversation with Jerri really helped bring into focus the strong cause component to Box Tops, and inspired much of our work throughout the year.

Flash-forward to October, we started discussing what we should do for our Holiday project this year. Last year’s Gift Guide was a hit, and we considered doing an updated version for 2009. But then the subject of helping Green Central came up. We decided we should put our design and cause-marketing experience to work for the school.

The last few years, the school has made enough money from Box Tops to send one class on a field trip, but most of the Box Tops collected actually came from sources outside the school. So we did some math and figured out that if we could raise about $7000 dollars it would cover bus and admission fees for a field trip for every student. We figured we could get people to help in 3 ways:

1. Donate money directly, and provide matching funds for some portion of the total. We figured this would be the fastest and most direct way to get money to the school immediately.
2. Sign up for the Box Tops Marketplace, an online affiliate program that generates money for schools on online purchases. We worked on massive re-design of the Marketplace this year, and we’re proud of how it turned out. The new version allows even easier access to the 100+ retailers who participate in the program. If we could get people to sign up and select Green Central as their school, it could generate ongoing donations.
3. Clip Box Tops. Anyone who has young children is probably already familiar with the tiny pink designs worth 10 cents each. But our goal was to also motivate people who don’t participate already to go check their cupboards for them.

We then approached our friends at PUNY about helping us create a brief video to explain the situation and help us make a plea for help. We wrote a short script and had Zeus Jones employees do voice-overs. Then we handed it to PUNY along with some basic design elements and they did amazing work bringing it all to life. The resulting piece is, I think, blowaway cool.

Zeus Jones / Puny :: Holiday Bus Drive from Zeus Jones on Vimeo.

That’s how we arrived at the Holiday Bus Drive.

As I write this post, many generous contributions have put us very close to our goal, but we want to aim higher. Every dollar counts for this school, so please consider contributing in one of the ways listed on the site. We have a few “incentive gifts” for donations, but consider doing some Holiday shopping online through Marketplace too. It costs the user nothing other than one extra click, but could have a huge impact for the school.

We would love it if you would go to the site, watch the video and help us out if you can.

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One of the highlights of Planningness for me was getting to see Grant McCracken present and spend time with him afterwards. I’ve admired him for a long time through his previous books and his blog. His writing is both erudite and incisive. He is no less impressive in person.

Even in speech he uses language in a very precise way. In our casual conversation he often said things that stopped me in my tracks and made me think about the layers of meaning he was conveying.

This is why one of the most memorable moments at Planningness was overhearing him respond with a surfer-like “totally (dude)” to someone. I was reminded of the time that Bob Dylan said that Smokey Robinson was “the world’s greatest living poet.” It was either deeply insightful, deeply ironic, or perhaps a little of both.

I just read (the Kindle version of) Grant’s new book – Chief culture officer – on (my iPhone) a flight to and from Seattle. It’s a compelling call to recognize and use the power of culture in business. Convincingly, Grant writes about the fact that culture and cultural references underlie huge shifts in business fortunes. I loved it. Here’s just one of the brilliant insights that I will reuse often:

“Culture was not caught in a downward cycle. There was evidence that a virtuous upward ascent had been set in motion. Smarter viewers encouraged smarter culture. Smarter culture encouraged smarter viewers. For Generations X and Y, this development had become a badge of pride. Being good at popular culture became a generational marker. For boomers, popular culture might have been a guilty pleasure. For younger generations, it was a rich, more complicated joy.”

I think this book is a must read, also check out the CCO network on Ning too. Totally dude!

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One of the things that makes BP and it’s customers unique is their commitment to personal style. The vast majority of popular teen stores really focus on selling a “look”, a specific image. Customers either buy into the image, or they don’t, but they take a very prescriptive view of fashion.

With BP, personal expression is always a part of the equation – and our goal was to enable that in way that also drove business for the department.

Our research uncovered two behaviors among BP customers that we thought were interesting:

First, we found that girls would bring their camera phones into the dressing room with them and take snapshots of outfits they tried on – to help with later purchase decisions.

Second, groups of girls would get together, do each other’s hair and makeup and take photos for their MySpace / Facebook profile pics – obviously big platforms for self-expression.

Our goal with this project – which we called BP Photobooth – was to enable these kinds of actions in the store, but with much higher quality output. The result is a system that allows customers to try on clothes, take professional quality pics (in flattering lighting), add custom graphics and art and then print or email their images.

Here is a video walkthrough of the entire process, with further explanation below:

The process starts inside the dressing room. A “magic mirror” with a camera behind it is activated by a touchscreen which prompts the customer to pose for 3 pictures. The mirror, camera enclosure and touchscreen application were done by VaryWell – an amazing Seattle-based company that specializes in interactive installations.

The pictures are then sent to the Editing Table – a Microsoft Surface device – for cropping, editing, customizing, etc.

We designed the overall look and feel of the application (which was developed by Identity Mine) and created an extended graphic language of icons, logos and borders that customers could apply to their images.

Customers can then print the pictures on stickers and email them to themselves, or to friends/family for help with purchase decisions.

Some example output.

The prototype of the BP Photobooth is installed at Nordstrom’s Bellevue, WA store.

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After a brief moment of shocked silence, we politely requested Zeus Jones be thrown into the mix of contenders.

From there, we competed against a veritable who’s who in the Interactive and website development worlds for the assignment. What set us apart from the crowd, and ultimately won us the work was the statement we opened the meeting with: “Although several of the partners have many years of experience doing interactive work, we don’t do websites. We aren’t an interactive shop.”

After that got their attention, we convinced them what they needed wasn’t a website, but a set of services across all their channels that created deeper engagement and relationships with their consumers. The website was certainly part of that mix, but we explained we saw the website as a vehicle to deliver those services, not the end goal in and of itself.

The Creative and Executive teams at Bobbi Brown ended up agreeing with our point of view, and ultimately awarding us the work. What then ensued, at our request, was a crash course in Bobbi Brown the individual, Bobbi Brown the brand, and the world of cosmetics.

In the Immersion phase of all our client engagements we almost always uncover an underutilized or underperforming marketing asset. This case was no exception.  During our meetings with Bobbi and all the members of her staff and team, we were amazed at how complex and dynamic Bobbi Brown (the individual) was on so many levels. We were blown away by her amazing philosophy and approach to beauty, her hands on work elevating the practice of professional makeup artistry, and her broader advocacy around health and beauty issues for women of all ages. None of this was being fully utilized across any of the brand’s marketing channels, and least of all on the existing e-commerce site.

Also, as part of the Immersion phase we spent time at a Bobbi Brown makeup counters.The experience at a  Bobbi counter is very different from that of other brands. When you walk up to a Bobbi Brown counter you don’t have the color of the month thrust into your face. Core to Bobbi’s product design and overall philosophy is the notion of individual beauty. For Bobbi, the best color is the color that looks best on you, and that brings out your natural beauty, which is why many women hear things like, “Wow, you look incredible. What’s different?” after they’ve had a consultation at a Bobbi counter.

Bobbi also believes that all women should be empowered to be their own makeup artists. As Bobbi artists are consulting with a customer they demonstrate all of the techniques you will need to complete everything they are doing at home. They also arm consumers with take-away materials like Bobbi’s 10-Step process and Face Charts that they can refer back to.

Despite all of our “We don’t do websites” talk, the first part of our assignment was to tackle the website, since it was lagging behind the rest of the channels, and also had the most upside potential.

So how do you create a website that is at once a streamlined e-commerce experience, but also communicates the personality and passions of Bobbi, helps consumers place themselves in the product line, and empowers them to be their own makeup artists?

We decided to create an experience that has three distinct but interrelated “layers” of engagement.

First we tackled Shopping. We needed to create an experience that welcomed users that were unfamiliar with the product line and helped them easily discover products, but that also allowed loyal Bobbi customers to quickly replenish their favorite items.

We accomplished this by streamlining the navigation and allowing users who knew exactly where they wanted to go to dive deep into product categories in a single click. For the uninitiated, we created category landing pages that were rich with content and tools to help consumers get a better sense of how best to use a product line, and find those products that are right for them.

At any point during the shopping experience, a customer in need of help for advice can access the second mode of the site, the Consultative layer. This layer takes advantage of one of the other underutilized assets we discovered in our Immersion phase, the Online Artists. Unlike many other brands with online chat support, the Bobbi Online Artists are fully trained makeup artists, some of whom were among the first artists Bobbi ever hired. These Artists provide real time consultation and advice to consumers shopping on the site. As part of our work, we raised the profile of this service, and made it more available contextually throughout the site.

As another part of the Consultative layer of the site, we created an interactive version of Bobbi’s famous Lip System. To use the Lip System, a consumer selects a shade closest to their natural lip color, and then is shown an entire “lip wardrobe” of different shades and finishes that have been hand selected by Bobbi to look great with their skin tone.

The third layer of the site is the editorial layer. This was the area of the site where we infused Bobbi’s teaching, philosophy, and personality into the experience. The content in this section is as varied as Bobbi herself. A few of the items you’ll find there include: detailed tips and how-to’s, behind-the-scenes videos of Bobbi working runway shows at Fashion Week, details of her charity work with Dressed for Success,  beauty guides for both teens and women over 50, and a list of her personal favorite fashion, health, and fitness products.

As I mentioned before, the three layers are all connected and interrelated. We architected the site so that they weave together seamlessly and play off each others strengths. Consultative supports and reinforces the shopping experience, Shopping is present in Editorial so you can easily buy the products from a how-to you are reading etc.

We worked for many months bringing the site to life in close collaboration with both the Technical and Creative teams at Bobbi Brown, and you can see the preliminary results for yourself at  bobbibrowncosmetics.com.

We set out with a very ambitious scope for the site, that was somewhat tempered by the realities of the development process. We look forward to phase 2 where we roll out more of the Consultative features that we’ve designed for the site. And who knows what phase 3 will hold…

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The interactive revolution is challenging the inertia of this system by repositioning the relationship between the public and the institution. Ironically (albeit predictably – if you are a McLuhan follower), the very mechanisms of this revolution are still catching up with their own ideology. Mass culture naturally applies old methods to the new medium until it has figured out its true potential and meaning.

Thus the early days of the Web saw a proliferation of brochureware, taking the stuff we already had and just presenting it in a different medium. Today we see a proliferation of what I call broadcastware – and let’s face it, pushing video through an interactive channel is not so different from pushing a billboard. These engagements don’t utilize the true potential of adaptive, social technology. To tap the potential, we must open the platform and provide mechanisms and personal tools rather than messages. And to do that, we need to ask users for a deeper engagement early in the process. As Albert Einstein said, “information is not knowledge.”

There is no lack of conversation about the importance of early engagements in site experiences. Registration forms, sign-ups, and the like qualify for this kind of interaction. Initiatives like OpenID  are underway that hint at a possible future where the dreaded registration process becomes less painful by consolidating your online identity. RFID technology and other ambient recognition will go a long way toward creating deeper relationships without much input required. But there will always be a need for dialogue, and if we are to have a meaningful conversation with our users, we have to facilitate the conversation with an interface that welcomes them with open arms.

The standard way of inviting people to the conversation is with a carrot and a stick, hiding the most important parts of the conversation behind sparkly objects and hoping that the users really really want to talk to us. This requires us to clearly spell out what is commonly called a value proposition (the carrot). Already, we find ourselves slipping into our bad marketing habits. We are back to our old tricks, telling instead of showing. We’re like that guy at the party who only listens to you until he can return to talking about himself, sending a clear message that you are not important – you are interchangeable with anyone else who will endure his greatness. We have long been treating conversations with our customers as transactions, withholding the goods until we have a signed prenuptial agreement with the user. Where’s the romance in that?

Let’s skip the paperwork and get straight to the romance. When I have an experience online that invites me into an open conversation, it reveals itself to me and teaches me about how to use it with every interaction. Now I’m sure you can think of a hundred reasons why this is a bad idea. Especially if you’re a corporate lawyer (no offense). But as consumers, we are living in the world of what is, not the world of what if. Our time is valuable and our attention is overwhelmed by the saturated media space. So if you make it easy to talk to me, I will immediately be a lot more likely to keep talking.

A great example of conversational interaction design can be seen in the registration process on tumblr.com. There is no sales proposition – the first page you see beckons you to start using the tool. If you really want to, you can go see the 21 reasons why you’ll love tumblr. But you don’t have to. You can just dive in.

This idea is carried through into the smallest parts of the interaction. The example text in the URL input field shows you immediately that you’ll have your own web address with your username as the sub-domain. The label on the button shows you that you’re doing this so you can create a blog post, reassuring you that you are moving toward your goal.

Next thing you know (literally), you are being prompted to create your first blog post. By simply starting the conversation, you have begun creating content and taking ownership of your actions.

Uploading an image, continues teaching you how to use the interface by focusing your attention on a real interaction rather than an instruction manual.

And now that you have some content posted on your new blog, you are prompted to name it and personalize it.

You can then easily follow other people you know who may have a tumblr blog.

Tumblr puts the actual interaction with their service front and center. They turn the registration process into a learning process where users learn by doing what they came there to do. So the question becomes, do you give people fish, or teach them to fish? Human psychology has shown us definitively that learning by doing produces the deepest imprint on our memory and behavior. It is far and away the most engaging way to teach, and this kind of interactive learning produces knowledge rather than just information. And knowledge, not information, creates a feeling of ownership. By asking users to engage on a personal level, we are creating a relationship based on shared ownership of knowledge and value. And best of all, it doesn’t feel like work. Actions really do speak louder than words.

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(This isn’t true on Wordpress as the FB Connect widget removes the nofollow tag, unfortunately, if you’re like me and you have implemented FB Connect through Disqus, you are screwed.)

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This space, combined with the transitory nature of wabi-sabi, resonates with the idea of adaptive interfaces that change along with the user and her environment. The wabi-sabi approach seeks to minimize the ego and any personal branding, focusing rather on drawing out the natural qualities of the piece. So it is with great experience design, where the user is pleasantly immersed in an action and free to discard any conscious thoughts of the interface. Just as wabi-sabi style tea cups encourage a more intimate communion with the experience of drinking the tea, the user of a well designed experience should be liberated from the mechanisms of interaction.

The form of wabi-sabi expression is drawn from the “properties of the material used and the function it provides,” and this holds equally true for creating usable design. The more I learn about wabi-sabi, the more I feel it is another excellent directional filter for experience design. What do you think?

Sources:
Juniper, Andrew. Wabi Sabi:The Japanese Art of Impermanence.
Koren, Leonard. Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers.

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It’s the quality of the products, services, interactions with an organization that builds an authentic brand character. If this sounds radical, or if you’re still using marketing to try and manipulate perception, you are walking on thin ice. For your consumers and observers, there is no such thing as a “brand experience,” only a human experience which may be associated with a brand. The meaning of the interactions themselves must be addressed.

Take, for example, the notorious private security firm Blackwater Worldwide. Their stated mission is “empowering a talented collection of seasoned professionals from a wide range of disciplines, directing them to develop cost efficient and operationally effective solutions for the US Government and other clientele.” But after employees were accused of using excessive force resulting in the deaths of innocent Iraqi civilians, the company lost their U.S. government contract to operate in Iraq. The response? Blackwater rebranded itself under the new moniker Xe, an identity that Wired’s Noah Shachtman aptly calls “inscrutable and opaque.” Yet the lawsuits continue – families of seven more Iraqi civilians have filed suit against the company just this week.

Curated perception has long been a free-for-all land grab aimed squarely at focusing the attention of a market. Because information is now instantly and freely shared, those brands with the largest gaps between fabricated perception (traditional marketing) and the authentic character of their actions (products, services, human interactions) will be the quickest to sputter and implode. This is true no matter what new platforms are employed to manipulate awareness, or what tools we use to examine them. Brand experience is an illusion, human experience is real. The problem is not perception, but rather the consequences of human behavior. The solution is found through trying to change perception, but through creating more constructive human interactions and positive, authentic experiences.

Shakespeare’s message is more true today than ever – “the truth will out.”

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These users are geographically disconnected but share a common desire for a particular product. Why shouldn’t the public benefit from the same purchasing power once reserved for the distributors who cozied up to – and even pushed around – the manufacturers? Swarm is another example of the socialization of a business process flowing from the democratizing impact of network media. From a business perspective, the test of success may be the bottom line, but from a user perspective, putting the potential for price-pressure in the hands of the people is a great step forward. It will be interesting to see how it catches on.

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In the context of design, experience should mean the same thing as it means in reality, which is not tied to any platform or mechanism. It is simply a series of perceptions and interactions; independent of channel. Not only should the experiences we design consider all human aspects of the interaction itself, they should work within the context of the user’s life. This is where strategic disciplines can inform the approach of the UX designer. In essence, it doesn’t matter how perfect the articulation of the interaction, or how elegantly the experience is structured; if it does not address a human need or desire, it is destined to decompose in the ever-more-crowded graveyard of traditional advertising (RIP).

Now that I have that out of my system, I’ll share the definition of UX that I’ve come to embrace.

Experience Design is exceptionally well positioned to address the problems we face in the Era of the Fox. I would love to hear other perspectives… Please add, subtract, concur, rebel, or submit below.

Technorati Tags: design, ia, interactive, ixd, UX

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Image via:http://www.flickr.com/photos/sekihan/

In case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve been doing a little improvement work around here on the main site. As a part of that we’ve also upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress. I’m not sure I see any differences but it makes me feel better nonetheless.

I’ve also done some other cleanup, apologies to subscribers, I finally got round to deleting the old blogger version of this blog and I may have accidentally deleted some of your subscriptions as they weren’t all carried over by Feedburner. Hopefully you’ll continue to see value and re-subscribe. On that topic, I’m now redirecting all Wordpress feeds through Feedburner too. I’m crossing my fingers that this won’t screw things up even more but you never know with this stuff.

In other news, I’ve finally figured out FTP and have been going crazy with plugins. Most notably, you can now subscribe to comments via RSS or email and also I’ve added Facebook Connect which our site designer @orangetrulo will despise because it puts a huge ugly button on his nice layout. I’ve also added a nice, related posts plugin too. If there are any others you’d find helpful let me know in the comments.

As always, thanks for reading

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Christian Erickson, Chad Hancock and Greg Wurm

Hi, Christian here with only my second post ever to the blog. Back in January, I wrote about us participating in the Minneapolis regional PhizzPop competition. As a result of winning, we moved on to the national final at SXSW in Austin to compete against the winners of the other regional competitions.

There were a couple differences in the rules this time around. First, we were given 2 weeks instead of 3 days. Second, we were asked to present our solution in 7 minutes instead of 8. But the core concept was the same: a 3-person team conceives, designs and presents a solution to a fictional brief in front of a live audience and a panel of judges. As with the local challenge we were grateful to Sierra Bravo for lending Greg Wurm to us as our developer.

We started by looking at the winning presentations from the other 4 regional PhizzPop challenges. Each region had a completely different brief, so the solutions were also varied. Vectorform won the New York contest –  the theme was K-12 education – with a great-looking Microsoft Surface-based app. The Chicago brief was about driving public support for an Olympic bid, and Manifest Digital won with a custom social media application. In Los Angeles the challenge was about the music industry (I had actually hoped that would be the theme at SXSW) and Archetype won with an application that worked for both fans and industry professionals. The Miami challenge was more forward-looking, focusing on commercial space travel. Phenomblue won this one with a really awesome idea for creating a 401k-style investment that would help you save for your ticket to space while also investing in the development of the technologies that would enable it.

Compared to the Minneapolis brief, the Austin challenge was much more straightforward and expressed very clearly: Help the citizens of Austin live more sustainably using currently-available technologies. Although that sounded at first like a simple request, we started to get more nervous when we researched what was going on in Austin. The city is universally recognized as a leader in the area of sustainability and green-building practices. And everyone in the community is involved: the utilities, the government, local businesses and individuals.

As with the Minneapolis challenge, we treated this as a real pitch. And one of the worst things you can do in a pitch is boldly march in and tell a client that they should do something that they are, in fact, already doing (I know you know what I am talking about, it happens). So we knew we were going to have to bring something – an insight, an overlooked opportunity – that wasn’t already being covered.

Most people see the concept of sustainability as being about consuming less. But the accepted definition of the term, created by the Brundtland Commision in 1989 is a bit more far-reaching: “[to meet] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

This sparked a thought: no matter how much we conserve or sacrifice, we are all sitting on a huge pile of possessions that really don’t get used most of the time. And that is an area that no one in the green/sustainability area seems to talk about much. If I buy things because I believe they have a low carbon footprint, that’s great. But if I don’t make use of those things then it’s a waste no matter where it comes from.

So our idea came from the idea that instead of focusing on using less – something that is important, but well-covered by others – we should focus on doing more with the resources that we already have. And to distance it further from the traditional thinking around sustainability, we gave it a provocative name: USEMORE.

Rather than go into to much detail about how the concept worked, I recommend watching the 6 minute video of the idea. You can see how we translated the thinking into something that is actually do-able right now with existing tech. We got excited enough about it that we’ve discussed the possibility of continuing to develop it and try and pilot it somewhere – maybe even our hometown of Minneapolis.

Zeus Jones Phizzpop SXSW Finale from Zeus Jones on Vimeo.

Net result: we won the PhizzPop final against some really hardcore competition. All the companies were great at design and great at development, but it was this key insight that appears to have put us over the top. It was a lot of work, but great fun to do.

Comments welcome.

Photos from the event up on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zeusjones

Technorati Tags: microsoft, phizzpop, silverlight, sxsw

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If you have a moment, we’d love it if you would vote for the Gift Guide in the SXSW People’s Choice award.

Voting is easy. Just quickly register to vote. When you receive the code in your email, input it in the same form where you entered your email, and you will be taken to the voting page.

You can vote once a day until March 5th. We’d appreciate any support you can give us!

Thanks.

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Wow. What’s it been, a decade of buying books from you? That’s amazing. You are probably the only brand with which I’ve had that long and consistent of a relationship.

All things considered it’s been great. So great that I was among the first in virtual line on Monday to pre-order a Kindle 2.

However, when I look back at my last ten or so years of buying books from you, surprisingly little has changed.

I know it’s easy to criticize in a vacuum, but I love books so much that I can’t help but offer a few thoughts and suggestions.

With the entire book industry going through layoffs and generally just falling apart, you have a huge opportunity on your hands to not only evolve how people buy and consume books, but how books come to market and authors promote themselves.

I follow many of my favorite authors on Twitter. I also read their blogs. Why? Because I’m hungry for more information about what is going on in their lives and what’s in their heads. A lot of my interest is related to news regarding new publications and releases, but I also want to know what other authors they are reading. When they post their reading recommendations I buy them religiously. Usually from your site.

I know that you’ve tried things like author videos for book launches in the past, but I think they were too few and far between to create awareness and habit among your consumers. A few high profile authors posting videos on a site that contains hundreds of thousands of books isn’t the way to usher in a new paradigm for book launches. The chances of someone stumbling across one and being interested enough to watch it is too slim.

Instead what if you created an integrated platform for authors to communicate and interact with their audiences? You’ve already begun creating “author pages” for some of your more popular selling writers. Instead of having this just be a page with all of their releases, why not open at least part of this page up to be a communication platform for writers?

Why would authors participate? Authors have already embraced new ways of promoting themselves and their books. Their audiences have shown they are interested in interacting with them. Certainly author blogs and twitter feeds haven’t hit the mainstream, but that is in large part an awareness problem. With the built in traffic you have coming to your site, these self-promotional efforts would be greatly amplified immediately. Your site has the power to make these author/audience social interactions mainstream.

What’s in it for you?  Besides the obvious advantage of having authors create content for you and promote their own books, authors like George Pelecanos have shown they would discuss a lot more than just their own books. As I’ve previously said I  (and I’m sure plenty of others) consider my favorite author’s recommendations solid gold. Pelecanos is great at providing a running list of whatever he is reading, but also frequently recommends music and movies as well. Can you imagine having authors cross sell not only books, but also movies and music for you?

Which brings us to the larger issue of how books are recommended on your site.

Certainly you’ve mastered the whole recommendation engine thing. There are few sites, if any, that do it better. However, algorithmic recommendations have become less and less relevant as social media has come into prominence.

Listmania has for a long time been your version of peer recommendations. Listmania was great when it first came out, but now it has devolved to something I consider closer to spam. There are so many lists compiled by so many anonymous people whose opinions I often don’t trust or disagree with that they have basically become useless to me.

What I would find more meaningful is getting recommendations and inspiration from a smaller set of people. More like a social shopping model, or the Netflix Friends functionality, I would like to have a few trusted people that have extremely similar buying habits that I can then “follow” and interact with.

Once, about five years ago I accidentally clicked into a feature where I could browse the entire purchase history of an anonymous fellow shopper whose buying habits were similar to mine. That functional door quickly slammed shut, probably for privacy reasons, but the glimpse of it that I had showed me the power of delving deeper into the shopping habits of my peers and left me wanting more.

A social shopping/friends functionality like this could work in concert with the “Customers Who Bought This Item also Bought” functionality you already have, but take it a level deeper. The “Customers Who Bought” feature is useful to a certain point, but often recommends books that are too close in, i.e. books that I already know about or have, or offers up recommendations that stray outside my area of interest. Allowing me to more closely align myself with users that have a stronger connection to my own interests would certainly get me spending more time on your site and buying more books, music, and movies.

Continued in Part 2: More Thoughts on Community & Wishing for a Better Wish List

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Last week we participated in Microsoft’s PhizzPop Minneapolis event. The concept behind the contest is simple: agencies field 3-person teams who get trained in Microsoft’s design and development tools and are then given just a few days to create something that answers a brief. The event is regional, and in previous versions the brief has ranged from reinventing K-12 education to helping Chicago win their Olympic bid.

Because part of the challenge is to actually build a prototype, the teams are typically made up of a combination of designers and developers. Our team was myself, Chad Hancock and developer Greg Wurm of Sierra Bravo.

This time around, the problem was retail, and the brief was pretty far-reaching. It laid out the business situation of a fictional big box retailer and asked the teams to create a presentation to the company’s board that could ease their fears about the current business situation by pointing a way forward.

Each company that participated approached the brief from a slightly different angle (something that Microsoft intended) and seemed to bring what they do best to the solution. Moov showed a Surface-based kiosk that was integrated with Microsoft Tag. Hanson focused on giving people tools to shop within their budget. Space150 brought amazing-looking design and some cool ideas for making the store more experiential. Finally, Colle+McVoy also used the Surface and showed how it could be used to bring online-style shopping to the store environment.

Our approach was to first try and define the business problem more succinctly and then make an honest assesment about whether their business was viable in its current form. Our presentation was really about re-inventing Indigo for the future, and using technology to drive a new business model.

We were named the audience favorite, and the winner, and will be going to SXSW to participate in a national “final” in March. I’ve put the slides from our presentation up on Slideshare, including screen shots of the application we were running up on stage.

©.

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From all of us at Zeus Jones.

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Then I got burnt out and decided to quit. 

I sold my level 70 Paladin character, Zeusjones, for $325. Officially, selling a Warcraft character is against game policy. So what you technically sell are the hours you’ve invested to level a character. Selling him was my first big step towards quitting. A few months after I sold him, I cancelled my account. 

Recently, the Wrath of the Lich King expansion pack came out. Among Warcraft players, this was a highly anticipated event. I didn’t pre-order it. I didn’t have the date marked on my calendar, or like others I used to play with, schedule time off work so I could level my character(s) to the new level cap of 80 as quickly as possible. The launch date for the expansion passed uneventfully for me. 

Then the IMs and phone calls started. 

Everyone I used to play with in the game wanted to let me know how great the expansion content was. They regaled me with detailed descriptions of how cool it would be to ride together on mechanized mounts and battle with siege engines. One of the people I played the most often with put it simply: “All I’m gonna say is, remember how much fun we used to have?” 

So I caved in and bought the expansion. And I discovered a few interesting things.

First, there is a new “organization” in game called D.E.H.T.A., which stands for “Druids for the Ethical and Humane Treatment of Animals.” An obvious P.E.T.A. spoof, D.E.H.T.A. is a group that penalizes you in a certain area of the game if you kill the innocent creatures that are running around. 

Many of you will recall that a year and a half or so ago we here at Zeus Jones released a viral Warcraft video in which an imaginary group called T.E.T.A.A., or Toons for the Ethical Treatment of Ambient Animals, lobbies World of Warcraft players to stop the slaughter of the innocent creatures running around in the game. I can’t say if Blizzard, the creators of Warcraft, were influenced by the video, it could just be coincidence. If they were inspired by our video, I think that is awesome. 

One of our goals at the beginning of Zeus Jones was to influence pop culture, and even though Warcraft is far from pop culture, its been around for about five years and is around 10 million players strong. If someone from Blizzard reads this and can comment on the origin and inspiration for D.E.H.T.A., I would appreciate it.

The next thing I discovered was related to online identity. After installing the expansion, I quickly proceeded to the new area of the game with my level 70 Hunter. Until I sold Zeusjones, my hunter was what was referred to in the game as an “alt.” An alt is an alternate character who you spend less time playing. Many people play alts when they are bored with their main character or just want to try out some of the other character classes in the game. 

However, my alt had become my main, and he wasn’t named Zeusjones, which I found out messed with all my friends heads. It turns out that for many of the people I’d become friends with in the game, I was Zeusjones. A few of them told me, “I don’t care I’m still going to call you Zeus.” One of them started calling me by my real name instead of my new character’s name, which no one every does in the game. That even weirded me out.

So after discovering my Warcraft identity was firmly entrenched as “Zeusjones”, I did the only thing that I could. I got a new main.

I paid to transfer a character that I had left discarded on a sever I no longer played on. Then I paid to rename him Zeusjones.

I felt a collective sigh of relief from my Warcraft social network. I was greeted with lots of “He’s back!” Strangely the reception I thought I would get when I renewed my account didn’t actually come until I’d taken the extra step of renewing my old identity as well.

We see more and more in the news these days about the seriousness of people’s online identities. People are charged in Scandinavia for theft from and harassment of people’s online personalities. A couple in the U.K. who met and got married in Second Life are now getting divorced because she caught him having sex in the game with another person. Who better to understand that virtual cheating is really cheating than someone who forged their relationship in that same virtual world in the first place?

So am I glad Zeusjones is back? You bet. It is fun. It is like it used to be. At least for now. Who knows what type of character Zeusjones will be in his next incarnation? Maybe even an Alliance character.

Nah, I’d rather fight than switch.

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It’s been a tough year for everyone. We know that many of you are likely to buy fewer gifts this Holiday season, which makes finding the perfect gift that much more important.

That’s why we’ve created the Zeus Jones Holiday Gift Guide. All the staff at ZJ scoured the internet to find unique and interesting gifts in order to help you appear more insightful, more hip and more thoughtful.

We hope you find the Gift Guide both entertaining and inspiring.

Happy Holidays (and Happy shopping!) from everyone at Zeus Jones.

http://gifts.zeusjones.com

Technorati Tags: holiday gift guide

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