"Design as a corporate asset" entries

Every (successful) company is a service company

Designers are helping to shape the businesses, products, and services in our changing economy.

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Register now for the O’Reilly Design Conference, which will explore the evolving role of design in business and society along with the tools designers need to shape the next generation of products and services.

Loosely defined, service is the relationship between consumer and company. There are traditional service companies, such as hotels and transportation companies, and their modern counterparts Uber and Airbnb.

Then there are companies that are changing their identities from product companies to service companies, with varying degrees of success: for example, IBM, morphing from hardware to services, and Adobe, moving its software model to a cloud-based, subscription-based service. Whether you’re new to the game or established, almost any product today must have a service aspect.

Why does this matter — and what does it mean for designers?

Tim O’Reilly wrote a recent piece on how the economy is being shaped by software and connectedness. He explained:

One way to think about the new generation of on-demand companies, such as Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, is that they are networked platforms for physical world services, which are bringing fragmented industries into the 21st century in the same way that ecommerce has transformed retail.

The evidence is clear: we’re living in an attention economy, with thousands of devices and companies competing for eyeballs. Our products are now connected and smart, and the consumer-product relationship is long term, with data fueling the courtship. It’s no longer enough to have a great product — it needs to be coupled with a great service. Service is at the heart of any user experience, and designers are crafting this experience, forging the connections between products and consumers. Read more…

Big questions, good data, smart designs

Spotify’s Rochelle King on designing with data for optimal user experiences.

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Download a free copy of “The New Design Fundamentals” ebook, a curated collection of chapters from our Design library. Rochelle King is the co-author of the forthcoming book “Designing with Data,” which is included in the compilation. King also is co-chairing our newly announced Design Conference — the call for proposals is open; the deadline for submission is July 20, 2015.


The best designers possess empathy for their users — and data is key to gaining this kind of understanding. I recently sat down with Rochelle King, vice president of global design and UX at Spotify, to talk about data, design, and user experience. King stressed the importance of understanding what the numbers in the data mean — and on staying focused on the real endgame:

“​I think a common misconception or misstep that happens is people just look at the numbers and they forget that they’re actually representing human behavior. That’s a dangerous cycle you can fall into — you can start to optimize the numbers for the sake of optimizing numbers rather than thinking about building an experience that helps to craft the best experiences possible. You start to focus on improving numbers rather than on making a great experience​.”

The benefits of data-informed decision-making are clear, but the process is far from easy. Read more…

Experience design is shaping our future

Design is transforming the way things are to the way they ought to be.

O'Reilly's design exploration is targeting experience design, the Internet of Things and design, and the interplay between design and businessDesign aligns humans and technology, it aligns business and engineering, it aligns digital and physical, and it aligns business needs and user needs. Here at O’Reilly, we’re fascinated by the design space, and we’re launching several initiatives focused on the experience design community.

Design is both the disruptor and being disrupted. It’s disrupting markets, organizations, and relationships, and forcing us to rethink how we live. The discipline of design is also experiencing tremendous growth and change, largely influenced by economic and technology factors. No longer an afterthought, design is now an essential part of a product, and it may even be the most important part of a product’s value. Read more…