RnaLabs

Dan McKenzie has a nice post on how the mobile app phenom is a party Like It’s 1999 – Why Mobile is the New Internet

Mobile apps are an extension of your company’s brand

It’s no accident that brick and mortar companies like Taco Bell, Lacoste and Whole Foods have mobile apps. Mobile apps are another “touchpoint” for their brand where they can interact with their audience. Marty Neumeier in his book Zag writes, “Traditional advertising is in a death spiral”…”But the root causes for the death spiral are twofold: 1) People don’t like one-way conversations, and 2) People don’t trust advertising.”

So how do you extend your brand and not use advertising? One idea is to build a utility that your customers find useful…like a mobile app.

Sherwin-Williams designed ColorSnap for the iPhone to help their customers match colors they like with Sherwin-Williams paint color. Pizza Hut launched their iPhone app that lets their customers order their favorite pepperoni pizza in seconds. Pizza Hut promotes their app with words like “easy”, “fast” and “fun”. In short, they’re making it easy for their customers, and promoting their brand in a way that doesn’t come off as being intrusive or forceful. Best of all, their icon gets to live on the customer’s mobile device helping to establish a connection between Pizza Hut and their customers.

Chrysler Concept Imagines a Car Without Buttons – Wheels Blog – NYTimes.com by Azadeh Ensha

“You won’t see a single button on this vehicle from the doors to the interior to the infotainment system,” said Jason Monroe, a spokesman for Chrysler, while demonstrating Chrysler’s 200C concept, a four-door electric car.

Mr. Monroe helped lead the electronics development of the 200C’s iQ Power touch-screen system, first introduced at this year’s Detroit auto show.

The production-ready system was patented by the Nartron Corporation, which also owns the technology for the human-interface design used by other companies, including Apple. That may help explain the iPhone-inspired features behind iQ Power. “It’s what Apple did with the iPhone,” said Norman Rautiola, Natron’s chief executive.

Specifically, iQ Power lets drivers use any smartphone as a virtual key fob to control a host of functions, including locking and unlocking the vehicle’s doors and trunk and rolling the windows up and down. With their smartphones, users can also access a live interior shot of the vehicle as well as check on the status of their home’s security alarm, carbon dioxide and smoke detectors.

By touching and dragging a virtual trackball on the car’s curved dashboard, the driver and front-seat passenger can also control the vehicle’s music library, which replicates Apple’s album art cover-flow feature. The media library moves with the phone, so users can customize and take their settings with them.

The passenger side of the 200C deploys a UConnect tablet so passengers can access the car’s entertainment features and send recommendations to the driver. Passengers can also access the settings through a console-mounted passenger interface.

According to Mr. Rautiola, the 200C is expected to be released in 2012.

Metrics and numbers about design are just one way to understand the world, as an equal partner with our broader design understanding.  Quantitative data doesn’t account for many things.  Balance is always needed.  Sure usability can help you measure efficiency and satisfaction levels but does your product deliver happiness or joy?  There are lots of things numbers and quantitative methods don’t adequately account for.  “The data is simply an aide to my judgment. The data never tells me what to do”, Alan G. Lafley.

The innovation crowd makes a fundamental mistake: that a complex market problem can be solved by a good analytical design. If you build the “process” right, and put the right “validation” and “methodology” in place, using more technology with more investment in the “process”, you’ll get a better product–wrong!In reality, winning a market battle requires a very complex equation of advance performance, marketing insight and appropriate design. We use the term “look & feel” often when talking about the right design approach. Both “look” and “feel” can not be quantified or learned in engineering schools. These terms are intuitive to the knowledgeable and obtuse to the novice. In reality the “look & feel” of a good product is a nuanced, multi-faceted approach to technical constraints, target demographics and trend-forecasting combined with a special sauce–the designer’s talent and intuition.

Such a complex formula for design success can not be resolved by analytical methods. Time and time again I see metrics and focus groups fail in predicting the outcome of a design effort. Many times excellent design work is butchered by analytics (Think GM for a minute…). Human culture is ageless, and excellent design always brings technology and our cultural heritage together. The Sony Walkman made music, an essential human need, portable. The Kindle (especially the new one) may become the “Walkman” of reading. With that cultural quality both products are a triumph of design over innovation.

The question is essentially “how do we make decisions about design?” The answer is: “not by analytics alone!” The making of a good design–say a great mobile phone design–is so complex that the only way is by relying on the designer’s intuition in solving this nuanced formula. If the issue is the reliability of this method, the answer is the designer’s track record in resolving such challenges. Some people have more talent than others–that’s a fact of life.

Just Say No To ‘Innovation’ | The New Deal | Fast Company