Carmaker BMW has published a study how customer feel and behave in their cars. It is a fascinating study which is a wonderful example of customer experience management and helps to understand the relationship customers can build with a product.

Among other intersting facetes of car-driver and car-passenger relationship my favourite article is about the cup-holder. It shows that you can make everything right but to really make a difference you need to have an eye for the details. Here are some statements regarding the importance of a cup-holder in the car:

“Outside of the satnav, the cupholder is the most
important thing in the car. That and the iPod holder –
because I spend so much time in the car, I’d go as far as
to say it was one reason for choosing the car. The BMW
cupholder is the best on the market for sturdiness – they
also have one on the passenger side, whereas mine is on
the central console.”
Male driver, 40, York

“I hate my cupholder – it’s not wide enough. It has been
such a disappointment. You buy a coffee, and the cup
will be wider than my cupholder, so the cup perches
on it and spills coffee down the audio console on to the
volume control. Parts of the volume control knob cycles
are very stiff or very loose. It’s probably not the greatest
piece of ergonomic design.”
Male driver, 35, South London (non-BMW driver)

“…what was the key element of safety when you were
a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was
warm liquid. That’s why cupholders are absolutely crucial
for safety. If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not
safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if
everything is round, if it’s soft, and if I’m high, then I feel
safe. It’s amazing that intelligent, educated women will
look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how
many cupholders it has.”

“I remember her getting it. It had full-spec top-of-the-range
everything, full leather interior, turbo, telephone all plumbed
in, the lot, but what she was really excited about was the
cupholder, because her old car hadn’t had one, and this
one comes out just right. It makes a lovely noise. We went
out and got a coffee and an almond croissant just to try it.”

The full report can be download from dezeen.

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FORA, the Danish Authority for Enterprise and Construction’s Division for Research and Analysis, has published the study “Concept Design – How to solve complex challenges of our time” which focuses on how design can be utilised together with other disciplines to create new solutions to the global challenges faced by public and private sectors.

Companies are shifting from asking themselves how products should be designed, how they should be produced and how they should be marketed to asking more fundamental questions such as what should the company focus on or what problems should the company’s innovations solve. Concept design is the discipline of creating concepts that provide answers to these questions and solutions for the identified problems.

The study provides an analysis of Danish companies offering concept design services as well as an overview of other international concept design firms. Dinesh Godburdhun, Senior Team Lead at Gravity Tank shares his view about this new industry:

“I think that what this new industry has in common is that there are complex problems out there. And clients don’t know who they should call to get them solved. Normally they would call their advertising agency, market researcher, design house or what have you, and today a lot of these people are handed complex problems by clients because it’s not quite clear who should be doing them.”

All in all an interesting study, and if you ever wanted to catch a glimpse into the offices of concept designers, check out the pictures included in the study.

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Once again a great talk at the TED conference by John Maeda, Associate Director of Research at MIT’s Media Lab, spreading his philosophy of elegant simplicity.

“The MIT Media Lab’s John Maeda lives at the intersection of technology and art — a place that can get very complicated. Here, he talks about paring down to basics, and how he creates clean, elegant art, websites and web tools. In his book Laws of Simplicity, he offers 10 rules and 3 keys for simple living and working — but in this talk, he boils it down to one simply delightful way to be.”

I especially like this statement from his talk when he defines what simplicity really means:

“Simplicity is about living life with more enjoyment and less pain”

This could be also applied to designing customer experiences since most people think of customer experiences as about “big-bang-fancy-firework” interactions when it is actually about “more enjoyment and less pain” for your customers.

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…that’s the name of a project that describes itself as a web-based news feed delivering must-know information if you are trying to sell to, connect with, or understand young people. threebillion is built from links to content on other websites.

They have produced a video on behalf of MTV Asia with the title: Thirty-six youth facts in one-hundred fifty seconds.

(found via PSFK)

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Microsoft announced today the start of Surface Computing. What is it? Basically it is a huge multi-touch display which opens up a range of possibilities for human computer interaction. A review of this technology by Popular Mechanics is shown below.

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