Humanity drives loyalty

By · 1 Comment

“Are you safe?  Are you in a warm place?”

No, this is not your mother speaking.  You’ve just been in an accident in your Zipcar, and this is how they answer the phone.   Wonderfully human, isn’t it?  Beats “May I have your Zipcar number, please?” by a mile.

As Leslie Mottla, V.P. of Product and Experience at Zipcar explained at a recent design conference in Boston (Design Means Business), Zipcar reimagined the “accident recovery conversation” to address the customer’s real-time experience, which could well include full-throttle emotions.

She described the service recovery paradox, whereby customers become more loyal if a company handles things well when something goes wrong.  In the case of an accident, it’s not the company’s fault.  And accidents may well happen more often for Zipcar, which rents to much younger drivers than most companies, always in urban areas.  But Zipcar’s marvelously empathic view of how to handle a situation no one wants to be in is extraordinary.  Makes me want to rent a Zipcar, in fact.

Micro-wizardry helps preserve more than health

By · Add Comment

Being ten years old is hard enough, without having to deal with a life-threatening chronic illness. But if you’re ten and you’ve just found out you have juvenile diabetes, the news is bad on too many levels to count.

Until recently, the choices to manage diabetes were pretty grim: giving yourself lots of shots every day or wearing a pump on your belt, according to Chris Michaud, COO at Continuum, speaking at the recent Design Means Business conference.  Yet despite numerous medical advantages to the pump, only 15% of kids chose it.  The vast majority opted for shots.  Why?  Shots could be handled privately, while a pump announced to the world: I’m different.

Working with Insulet, Continuum designed the OmniPod, a revolutionary system that features a tiny, disposable pump with a 3-day insulin supply regulated by a wireless handheld controller. It makes doctors and parents happy because it keeps kids healthy.  And it makes kids happy because they can hide it under their clothes—or decorate it to the hilt, if they’re so inclined.

Kids are not the only ones who don’t want to announce to the world that they have a chronic medical condition.  Just imagine a job-seeker, for one.  The insulin pump was a remarkable, life-saving invention. But the OmniPod takes it one brilliant, human step further, helping kids and others preserve not only their health but their dignity and privacy as well.  Sweet.

See more at Continuum.

A disarming invention for growth

By · Add Comment

If you’re a homeowner, there’s a good chance you have one lurking in some dusty corner of your basement or garage. A caulking gun, with a partially-used tube of goo. Love it?  Doubtful. But until fairly recently you had no other option if you needed to patch the caulking in your shower or elsewhere.

As Colin Raney, Business Designer at IDEO explained at a recent conference (Design Means Business), the caulking market was aimed at contractors. These are folk who love those guns and tubes  —and they know what to do with them.

A couple of years ago GE wanted to grow its silicone caulk business (apparently 70% of the market wasn’t quite enough), and they came to IDEO for help.  IDEO steered them away from yet another flavor of the current same-old.  Instead, they helped GE understand what real people have known for a long time: the current offering was a messy, wasteful, expensive pain.

Their solution is a thing of beauty: GE Caulk Singles, a single-use disposable packet that can be used without caulking armaments.  By looking at real people in their everyday lives, they reframed the user as a homeowner.  In so doing, they rescued countless homeowners from dismal struggles with unwieldy goop guns.  And in the process GE created bountiful topline growth through a new high-margin business.

See more on the IDEO site.

Hooray for design!

By · Add Comment

If I ever start to feel a little discouraged about the possibility of companies embracing whole-brained thinking, it is always cheering to peek at what folk in the design world are doing. Good design is a right-left brain marriage, coupling a creative, intuitive and human-centered perspective with hard-nosed practicality and eagerness for measurable impact.

A Twisted Family Tradition ~ The Lime Jello Brain“Designers are blessed or cursed with empathy” according to Colin Raney, Business Designer at IDEO. To me, it’s a true blessing, and the benefits of empathic design were amply showcased at a recent conference, Design Means Business on October 7, 2010, sponsored by DIGMA (Design Industry Group of Massachusetts).

In the next few posts I’ll share some highlights from the conference about instances where focusing on real people and their experiences helped create new business opportunities or improve existing ones.

The Design Means Business conference didn’t only make an excellent case for design thinking. It also presented compelling evidence that Massachusetts is the go-to place for innovative design. New York and San Francisco: watch out!