Samsung launched Beat 450, 3D surround music phone developed in partnership with Bang and Olufsen. Aamir Khan is the brand ambassador and though I am not a marketing guy, I understand that this is a phone aimed at youth and in that more of Urban.

The package of features, brand ambassador, mention of partners in crime is well packaged to elicit interest in the funky urban youth with spiked hair, goggles and fancy shoes. The next common thing one would do is to go the website to get a better idea of the phone.

As a general product enthusiast I just tried to check out the phone and realized that Samsung’s website is not updated with the product details and that there is no single Samsung link that points to the product when you Google.

How bad can it get? With increasing internet penetration, ‘aware’ urban youth being the target segment and ever increasing crowd at the mobile store, one feels very compelled to use the internet to find information about the product. And here you find that there is no update on the website at all, even months after launch.

Even when I researched through Google Trends, I found that information search peaks whenever there is a product launch or major refinement (See Image showing the trends for ‘Samsung Beat 450′ you can see sharp peak followed by decline). This combined with the nature of the product and its target audience reinforces the importance of having information available across multiple mediums. Unfortunate that someone in Samsung didn’t realize this.

Again, a search term can make an entry into Google Suggest, only if it has respectable traffic. Samsung beat 450i is an entry in Google Suggest. Yet!

This can cost quite a lot in terms of prospects, I personally feel. What could be the reason for this? It could probably be the absence of a business process and leaving these critical matters to the efficiency of marketing and IT team. That’s the beauty of a process I feel, reducing the chance on people yet giving them enough space to bring in their creativity and genius to the table.

We always find contrasting extremes in any aspect of our lives and this is no exception. Try this:

Steve Jobs is keynoting at WWDC as the climax reaches he launches iPhone 3G and simultaneously the Apple site is updated with the product details and booking form. Talk about simultaneous launch across all mediums. Impressive!

I experienced and observed a poorly closed system of IT and business operations with the Indian Railways, one of the richest ministries of the Government of India with USD 31Billion in revenue for fiscal year 2006-2007.

With the growing awareness of IT, many people though not much compared to the counter sales, have started using IRCTC’s website – Indian Railway’s online ticket reservation system. With the growing traffic, it is has become an accepted scenario on the part of users to encounter the following:

          Service Unavailable

          Unable to retrieve data, Communication Failure

          Page cannot be displayed

Irrespective of the nature of the flawed business scenario or technical error, one of the above messages is used to communicate to the user that something has gone wrong.

The IT system presents the user with the option to print out the electronic ticket at the time the booking is complete. Alternatively the user can visit later and print the electronic ticket by entering the proper credentials. Once the booking is over, user receives a mail with the details of the ticket called the Electronic Reservation Slip. This is not a substitute for e-ticket.

From the operations point of view, the user (now the passenger) needs to carry the electronic ticket along with the identification proof that he or she opted while booking the ticket. Lack of e-ticket would attract a fine from the ticket inspector.

Sounds like a fair design. Here is an unfortunate experience that I underwent. As a printer was not available when I booked the ticket, I decided to print it later. My train was in the night and from the morning I had not been able to print the ticket. Attempts made few days before the journey also failed. With no e-ticket in my hand, I decided to print out the Electronic Reservation Slip.

During the journey, the ticket inspector argued that it was not the e-ticket, which I acknowledged and tried to explain the fact that website was down. He repeated the same rule again and said that I would have to be fined. I told him that I am willing to pay the fine but he needs to realize that it was a genuine scenario. He was not bothered a bit and didn’t even want to hear the word website.

I was accompanied by eight other passengers in my coach who could not print their tickets as the website was down. All of them were fined.

Now what can a passenger/user can do in this circumstance? There has been no active thought to address such a user scenario and the user being penalized for no mistake of his.

Traditionally we have seen Business Strategy and IT not being in full alignment, but here the case is a very loosely coupled IT claiming to simply the life of passengers, only to cause more and more frustration.

Here is a even more foolish design. The reservations can’t be done between 2330HRS and 0600HRS. This is to ensure that internet users don’t have an undue advantage over the other passengers. However what, one needs to discover, on his own is that one cannot print the ticket that he has already booked between these timings. For my train that starts at 0500HRS, I returned from office late night and tried to print to figure this out. Yet again, I had to pay the fine.

A very poor design where not all scenarios are not being addressed intuitively. Sure, it would take another thousand such cases before the message even gets to fall on the ear wax of a rusted, unaccounted official, leave alone correcting it.

That we are discussing about IRCTC’s website, I would like to share insights from my discussion with IRCTC’s chief architect. I asked him simple question on the necessity to have so many clicks to find out availability thereby reducing the failure points. His answer was ‘The process is costly’. This made me think as what is the trade off to a financially rich organization? Cost of a data fetch process or usability? Clearly the former in spite of so many glaring travel portals that are much user friendly.

Bad roads and poor infrastructure has been one of the persistent issues for Bangalore and BBMP has always been bullied by the public, media and the rusted government chairs. A drizzle is all that is needed to expose the quality of patch work and new roads.

I read an article where BDA were planning to turn tables on the contractors and penalize them, in cases where the roads laid or patched up opens up within the stipulated period agreed in the contract. Authorities believe this would make contractors accountable and contractors would hopefully pee in their pants and lay better roads as against paying penalty. This would partially help the rouge contractors do their job.

This is one of the good examples where a perfectly wrong and obviously solution designed for a problem that has several attributes.

I interviewed two such contractors from Chennai and Bangalore. Though the authorities and their work style vary between the two metros, one thread seems to be common. This is their story:

Once the government plans to lay the roads or patch them, a tendering process is initiated and lowest bidder gets the contract. When the contract is awarded in principle, the bidder needs to pay a commission to officials, authorities and all those involved in the bidding exercise including the helper who carries across the files. Failure or resistance to pay such debts would make the bidder’s life hell during the course of work.

Also to be noted is a transparent bidding is such a wonder that one would say Blue Moon is hardly one. The rust and lack of accountability makes even a higher bidder to get the contract through influence. Other contractors, who initially start out in a professional way are eventually forced to take such path because survival is at risk. This eventually leads to a subtle competition as whose influence is higher. Such influence points vary from heads of civic bodies, Members of Legislative Assembly, State ministers, Members of Parliament and of course one of the more influential factors is the political party in power.

Once the contracting process is over, a similar bribe package has to be distributed. This continues in multiple iterations, across the various phases of the project, till such time the actual work starts. And from where does the contractor pay the money? From the funds that are allocated for road laying. So with funds that are allocated for laying a 10-inch thick road and the funds distributed to keep chairs happy, all that is left help only in laying a 5-inch road.

And even if contractor is compelled to lay a 10-inch road, to avoid getting attention from any of the honest officials, contractor does that using materials of poor quality.

This precisely explains why even with such amounts of funds allocated from Centre to State to Districts to Authorities to Contractor, why we end up with such poor roads.

The design of accountability only shifts the blame on a player who can do very little from sustenance point of view. Guess it’s time to wake up and realize accountability has to be at the governmental level, which will eventually ensure that contractors do their work properly. 

Last week I saw one of house keeping guys (house keeping, helpers are quite common in India and in fact a good source of employment for those at the bottom of the pyramid) on the corridor and while exchanging pleasantries saw the new phone he has got – a 60$ iPhone. Yes! Made in our dear China.

One of the threats that national and international firms face in China and India is the duplication of product in the grey market often offering the same experience that the original product does; of course quality takes a beating.  But few care as long as they get to experience and show off the mock product.

It looks like this time around, they could not replicate cent percent both in design and usability. So they decided to settle for the second best.

They have used the white color to make it Applish. The wallpaper on the phone is  the  same as the one on the original iPhone – The clown fish wallpaper. The sticker screams iPhone and guess what? It has an apple logo! Check out the snaps!

I read an interesting article on Wall Street Journal about China and the infrastructure development for Beijing Olympics. I read it was common to find people selling a key chain with a bunch of keys. The key chain contains a car key, house keys for living and bed rooms for a car and house that exist only in ambition. A lot of construction workers by these and hang in from their jean as a prestige. Diversity in Economy.  

I was reading the 101 dumbest business moments released by the Fortune magazine. Number 51 caught my eyes.

An innocent and enthusiastic nine year old, who apparently loves her iPod Nano, sends a letter to Steve Jobs putting her thoughts as how the product can be improved. In a typical case, most companies would ignore such mails. Companies claiming to have customer focus would probably have an automated server spewing ‘Thanks’ email, of course with no follow-ups.

But Apple maintaining its legacy goes one step ahead and earning its place of number 51 in Fortune 101 Dumbest Business Moments.

One, two, three, four, we’ll sue you if you send us more

  

Clearly Apple shooed away the girl with a stick.

I am sure we will not start doing Boo to Apple henceforth. We all love their products. However this is something of a concern.

This is a classic example of what most of the organizations face today – ‘Getting their act together to focus on the customer. As for the legal counsel, they just did what they are supposed to do – Protect the legal interests of Apple. Interestingly, I learnt that Apple had an internal meeting to review its corporate policy. However this was not for revising its stand on any ideas coming from its customers rather how to deal with kids. 

Most of the departments in any organization are hardly briefed about customer focus and its policies. Finance Department, HR, Legal though act as support functions should have the primary mandate of customer focus. 

With hours to go for 2008, lets hope that, in the new year, companies forge new fool proof programs to make every interaction a delight. . 

In the last blog I was mentioning about ‘Design Irony’ with design gap of wordpress spell check engine as the case. I was playing around with this scenario in my mind and was analyzing the circumstances that could have brought this up. I would like share my analysis on this:

A company or team is formed with the motive of creating one of the best blog platforms. The task is daunting. Imagine creating a platform where some half a million users post their thoughts. When building such a complicated system, the team would be busy focusing on the business aspects, technology aspects, usability aspects, wow features etc.

Team has definitely worked hard; the statistics and user base speak for themselves.

However at the end of the day a user has found a gap in the screen which he/she views and uses the most. Is ‘blog’ being pointed out as a wrong word by the spell check engine a real showstopper? Of course not!

The specific observation that I would like to bring about is at the end of the day the end user caught the flaw and there is some change in perception about wordpress. It can’t be quantified. But there is a change.

What in the good work and dynamics of wordpress missed this? Why do so many ‘over the web’ and ‘physical world’ organizations end up in this situation?

The team at wordpress, like any other team in the zillions of organizations around the world, was dead focused on the getting the task done. So deep into the hole that making sure that spell check is on dot (and many other things which are yet to be caught) is the least of ‘least priorities’.

The end user however is absolutely defocused and doing what he is supposed to do. Not much effort needed from the user. His space (interpret it as the scope of regular things he does in wordpress) is pretty clean and serene, relative to what the team in wordpress had to live in.

So how can organizations make sure that they can catch such trivial things which are quite something to the end user or consumer?

They could have probably caught this if they had put themselves better into shoes of user. What is the psychology of the end user? What little nig – nags would get the attention and how can the team catch that? Is this feature really important? Where does the eye of the user go?

Such nig nags go beyond the obvious usability considerations, which the organizations do focus on.

Organizations can consider going to Smart User.

I would define ‘Smart User’ as a loyal user of organization’s services who is devilish and scouting on gaps in details. He/She is an evangelist of the service rendered and is very keen to ensure that the service quality is nothing less than excellent and as a consequence make sure that the organization rendering the service is nothing less than excellent in the marketplace.

‘Smart User’ usually doesn’t expect any rewards for his/her efforts in championing the service. However a responsible organization, which never compromises on any details should reward and encourage such users. I would ideally expect this to go beyond the regular gifts that are a part of any focus group study. The model should encourage every user to become a smart user and the onus is on the organization to develop quality metrics to ensure that there isn’t any dilution in the Smart User base.

The process doesn’t stop there. Organization needs to ensure that feedback from ‘Smart Users’, after qualifying them, should be tightly stitched with the research and development team or the core team responsible for wysiwyg. This is so critical, that without such an organizational operation model, the smart user’s efforts go waste; for a true smart user would be more interested in seeing a perceivable change or understanding the reasons for it not being changed as against being happy with the rewards he/she got. Organizational roles, responsibilities and rewards should be tied to this as well so that no employee at any given point of time fails to recognize the value of smart users.

We are well aware that several companies of the internet age use Smart Users. Google started off by select invitations to Gmail and since then have followed the approach. They expand the user base as the offering gets clean. So do many software companies with their Beta releases. The Apple Safari browser is a great example of the beta release mechanism with its integrated tool for logging bugs. However the majority of observations here are not about the Over the Web organizations but about the several thousand organizations that interact with customers in the physical world. 

Is there a way an organization can fix some of the trivial details before it’s opened to the user base? I could think of only one solution: Develop the art of focusing and Defocusing. Just like a sculptor chiseling the stone at close proximity. After every few chisels sculptor quickly taking two steps back and stares at the evolving sculpture; Just putting on the shoes of the million people who might look at it.

This is not something easy to develop. Each and every employee at all levels – from the levels of researcher, developer to Director, CEO must consciously develop the ability to: 

 Focus, defocus and refocus at will

This is what I would like to call as a ‘Design Irony’.

That me blogging for the first time and that too on wordpress, I was just exploring the formatting features. The spell check icon just got my attention; so just went ahead and tried. Irony I guess, the spell check engine of wordpress, one of the dominant blog platforms, alerts me that ‘blog’ is a wrong spelling! Just clicked on it to see what the other recommended words are and realized that blog is not a valid English word according to wordpress.

Blog – WordPress – Thanks for blogging – blog – start your blog – search blog – blogroll all being dominant terms in www.wordpress.com, It’s just a design irony to see that the engine considers blog as a wrong English word.

Interestingly though, the spell engine of my Apple Safari browser acknowledges blog as a word used in human language, which otherwise would be highlighted with red dot underline.

I am sure there are plenty of such design ironies.

What do you think? 

With the theme for my blog decided, I singed up with wordpress.Now comes the choice of blog topic. More than getting a rhyme I was more interested in something that has a message.

D’focus. 

Ecosystems of business, technology, usability and more importantly society are driven by various dynamics. Dynamics dictated by nature, collective psychology, group behavior, voice of the majority and consequences of players’ actions.

I believe that many dynamics are logical results of decisions made by us. When the ecosystem is well designed, defined and smartly placed, factor of dissatisfaction and destruction goes down. Essentially if we design the ecosystem with all the aspects covered, world can be a better place.

It’s obvious? Yes but no.

Why?

Simply because we are busy with our own part in the ecosystem. All of us are part of multiple ecosystems and depending on the various characteristics, we play varying roles in different ecosystems. So busy with our role that we mistake ecosystems as social classification of existing beings. If we step back a little, Defocus from our roles, we can make a change.

This blog attempts to De-focus and have a Design Focus on ecosystems.

Defocus for ‘D’esign Focus.

As for the Z instead of S, Well domain was not available.

Here I am with my thought space. At last. 

So what now? Where does the Inspiration come from?

Scene 1

Just in one of those ‘lets talk about world’ chats that started off with our friendly baker’s decision to extend the menu with noodles, I ended up listening to my colleagues questioning the purpose of my existence. There were two reasons for that claim of theirs: One, I haven’t read DaVinci Code. Neither did I make an honest attempt to watch the movie. Second, I didn’t have a registered blog under my name. With no mind to start off with their first claim, I went ahead with the second. The point my colleagues were putting across was that the life of a man in the current Internet world isn’t complete without a blog. Well anything else? No that says it all. It’s a statement. You better have a social networking id and a blog id. Else you are from Stone Age.

Scene 2

I was reading the first edition of Innovations from MIT press. Diego and Doug were invited to contribute the lead article. They write about Innovation and Leadership in a Networked World. They explain in depth about the way organizations and ecosystems collaborate in Web 2.0 era for a faster innovation cycle. The case of Steve Johnson’s Myelin Repair Foundation is fantastic and comes as a real teaser for Universities swearing believe in ‘Hide and Seek’. MRF’s model showed a three fold increase in output per one million dollar invested. Diego had provided ‘Behind the Scene’ details of the article, as how Doug and he collaborated for the article, in his blog post. Both the article and his blog are classic examples of Collaborative Innovation through Collective Intelligence. Blog by virtue becomes one of the essential collaborative tools

Two scenes, two perspectives, two players but the later wins my inspiration.