On My Reading List

Alan Moore is one of the most famous writers for graphic novels and comics. The ones that I have read are  V for Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Batman- The Killing Joke. Incidentally, I haven’t been able to read his most famous work, which now is being made into a film, Watchmen.

I have high hopes of “Watchmen” because of
1. Zack Snyder- Watchmen is being directed by the guy who floored me with the movie adaptation of 300.
2. Alan Moore- When you read his work, you can almost feel the era in which the stories are set (he. The atmosphere is so complex and mysterious, yet so real. Watchmen is not one of the first comics which tries to show the “other” side of super-heroes, but it is certainly the most sophisticated and celebrated one.
I hope to read it asap! Meanwhile check out the trailer for the film!

Filed under: Inspiring

‘Good for the Soul’

With iPod’s fifth birthday around the corner, Steve Jobs discusses the MP3 player’s design, the cool factor and the impact on how we listen to music.

By Steven Levy

Oct. 14, 2006 – Oct. 23 marks the fifth anniversary of Apple’s iPod. CEO Steve Jobs reflected with NEWSWEEK’s Steven Levy (author of “The Perfect Thing,” a book about the iPod out this month) about the past, present and future of the device that changed Apple—and the world.

NEWSWEEK: During the iPod’s development process did you get a sense of how big it would become?
Steve Jobs: The way you can tell that you’re onto something interesting is if everybody who knows about the project wants one themselves, if they can’t wait to go out and open up their own wallets to buy one. That was clearly the case with the iPod. Everybody on the team wanted one.

Other companies had already tried to make a hard disk drive music player. Why did Apple get it right?
We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.

What was the design lesson of the iPod?
Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.

Some people say that iPod might lose its cache because it’s too popular—how can it be cool when Dick Cheney and Queen Elizabeth have one?
That’s like saying you don’t want to kiss your lover’s lips because everyone has lips. It doesn’t make any sense. We don’t strive to appear cool. We just try to make the best products we can. And if they are cool, well, that’s great.

What products, maybe outside technology, do you consider cool?
I like things that do the job and kind of disappear into my life. Like Levis. They just kind of get faded and disappear, and you don’t think about it much. If you look, you appreciate the design, but you feel something from them, too. A lot of quality is communicated through a feeling that people have. They don’t understand exactly why, but they know that a lot of care and love was put into the designing of the product.

Let’s talk about the iTunes store. How did you get the record labels, which had been resisting digital music, to sign up?
It was a process over 18 months. We got to know these folks and we made a series of predictions that a lot of things they were trying would fail. Then they went and tried them, and they all failed, for the reasons that we had predicted. We kept coming back to visit them every month or two, and they started to believe that we might actually have some insight into this, and our credibility grew with them to the point where they were willing to take a chance with us. Now, remember, it was initially just on the Mac, so one of the arguments that we used was, “If we’re completely wrong and you completely screw up the entire music market for Mac owners, the sandbox is small enough that you really won’t damage the overall music industry very much.” That was one instance where Macintosh’s [small] market share helped us. Then about six months later we were able to successfully persuade them to take down the barriers and let us move it out to the whole market.

Now people at some labels think that iTunes, with its dominant market share has too much power.
We’ve never once gone to them and asked them to lower their prices.

No, but you’ve asked them not to raise their prices, when some of them wanted to.
Our core initial strategy on the store was that if you want to stop piracy, the way to stop it is by competing with it, by offering a better product at a fair price. In essence, we would make a deal with people. If they would pay a fair price, we would give them a better product and they would stop being pirates. And it worked. If we go back now and we raise prices—this is what we told the record companies last year—we will be violating that implicit deal. Many [users] will say, “I knew it all along that the music companies were gonna screw me, and now they’re screwing me.” And they would never buy anything from iTunes again.

Do you think that it’s fair to the customer that the songs they buy from Apple will only work on iTunes and the iPod?
Well, they knew that all along.

At one point you were saying, “When our customers demand it, that’s when we’ll consider interoperability.”
Nobody’s ever demanded it. People know up front that when they buy music from the iTunes music store it plays on iPods, and so we’re not trying to hide anything there.

Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?
In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

IPods now have video, games, audio books and podcasts. Will iPods always be about the music?
Who knows? But it’s hard to imagine that music is not the epicenter of the iPod, for a long, long, long, long, long time. I was very lucky to grow up in a time when music really mattered. It wasn’t just something in the background; it really mattered to a generation of kids growing up. It really changed the world. I think that music faded in importance for a while, and the iPod has helped to bring music back into people’s lives in a really meaningful way. Music is so deep within all of us, but it’s easy to go for a day or a week or a month or a year without really listening to music. And the iPod has changed that for tens of millions of people, and that makes me really happy, because I think music is good for the soul.

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© 2006 MSNBC.com

Filed under: Copy+Paste, Inspiring

Personae- Great Article

Reconciling market segments and personae
Elaine Brechin, Senior Designer

Market segmentation and personas are two different techniques that are often perceived as conflicting methods, but they are actually complementary tools that organizations can use to design and sell successful products.

The value of market segmentation
The marketing profession has taken much of the guesswork out of determining what motivates people to buy. One of the most powerful tools for doing so is market segmentation, which groups people by their distinct needs to determine what types of consumers will be most receptive to a particular product or marketing message. These groups form a consumer model.

To develop these models, marketers classify consumers according to a set of demographics and geographic variables such as age, race, education, and location. More sophisticated consumer models also include psychographic and behavioral variables like attitudes, lifestyle, values, ideology, risk aversion, and decision-making patterns. Other classification systems such as VALS segmentation and PRIZM clusters can add greater clarity to these models by predicting consumers’ purchasing power, motivation, self-orientation, and resources. These consumer-modeling techniques are not only able to forecast marketplace acceptance of products and services, they can also be powerful tools for convincing executives to build a product. After all, if you know X people might buy a product or service for Y dollars, then it is easy to evaluate the potential return on investment.

However, understanding why somebody wants to buy something is not the same thing as actually defining the product—what it is, how it will work, and how it will be used. Market segmentation is a great tool, but it’s not an all-purpose one, and when segmentation is used to solve product definition problems, the results are often suspect. For example, one of our clients spends a lot of money every six months on user research (which is both unusual and commendable). At the beginning of our project, ten reports were thrust into the team’s hands with the expectation that somehow we would be able to design the product using only the data in the reports, without conducting additional user research or analysis. The problem was that the reports contained statements like “a third of all baby boomers loved the idea” and “less than 33% of users over fifty would buy it in the next two years.” This kind of information may be valuable from a marketing perspective, but it isn’t specific or detailed enough to determine exactly which features or information to include in the product, or how to prioritize their accessibility. For example, market segmentation information might suggest that a particular e-commerce site appeals to the needs of consumers on a tight budget. But then what? How do you design the site to meet the needs of those consumers?

What is needed is a product definition tool that takes the guesswork out of the process—a tool that provides insight into what motivates people to use a product, so that well-grounded decisions can be made about features and how they are presented. The tool must be every bit as effective in determining the definition of a product as market segmentation is at forecasting market acceptance.

The value of personas
Cooper has found success in defining products by creating user models we call personas. Personas are a set of fictional, representative user archetypes based on the behaviors, attitudes, and goals of the people we interview in our research phase. Personas have names, personalities, pictures, personal backgrounds, families, and, most importantly, goals; they are not “average” users but specific characters. A persona is a stand-in for a unique group of people who share common goals; at the same time, persona characteristics encompass those of people in widely different demographic groups who may have similar goals. (For more information on crafting personas, see Kim Goodwin’s article, Perfecting your Personas.)

For example, people across all demographic boundaries have similar goals when using an ATM: to get cash quickly and to complete other transactions with as little hassle as possible. These goals can guide a design team responsible for developing a new ATM by helping to determine appropriate functionality, prioritize the feature list, design the interface, refine the scope of the target audience, and even uncover new market niches for a technology. Personas bridge the gap between market segments and product definition.

How do you select the right personas? At the beginning of every design project, designers conduct qualitative research that includes reviewing the client’s market segmentation and demographic data. Designers also interview stakeholders, customers, and users, in order to gain insight into the product domain and user population. This information feeds directly into the types and characteristics of the personas.

An example
Personas and market segments provide different kinds of information. Market segmentation provides a quantitative breakdown of the market, while personas provide a qualitative analysis of user behavior. These two techniques also serve different purposes.

Market segmentation identifies attitudes and potential buying habits, such as those illustrated in the following example:

In a survey of 150 people, participants were asked about Rear Seat Entertainment (RSE) systems. It was found that most respondents believed it was a “lifestyle” purchase for parents trying to entertain or distract their kids while driving. Most felt that the system was appropriate for children between the ages of 4-15yrs, as children needed to be old enough to use headsets as well as some form of remote control. Among the high quality brand names mentioned were Sony, Hitachi, Magnavox and Nintendo. High system prices were cited as a barrier to purchase in the next two years. However, many expected prices to fall significantly over the next five years.

Example survey chart

Personas, on the other hand, reveal motivations and potential usage patterns. A consumer’s motivation is what gets them interested in using a product. For example:

Kathleen is 33yrs old and lives in Seattle. She’s a stay-at-home mom with two children: Katie, 7, and Andrew, 4. She drives the kids to school (usually carpooling with 2-3 other kids) in her Volvo wagon. Kathleen is thinking about buying the Sony rear-seat entertainment system she saw last weekend at Best Buy to keep the children occupied on the upcoming trip to see family in Canada.

She doesn’t want to be distracted by the noise from the videos or games so wants to make sure she can set the sound to be heard only in the back seat. Kathleen also wants to make sure her kids are watching appropriate programs; therefore she wants some channel controls close at hand, but she thinks Katie should be able to control the system most of the time so she won’t be distracted.

From this example, the designers can ascertain that Kathleen does not necessarily want her kids to be wearing headphones for an entire journey, as she likes to talk with them on their trips, and that she may want Katie to have some control of the entertainment system from the back seat.

Both market segmentation and personas provide useful information; one informs the other. Using the appropriate tool for the task at hand without bending, adding, or removing from either can provide a rich, complementary set of user and consumer models, that can ultimately create a useful and more successful product definition than either could in isolation.

Filed under: Copy+Paste, Inspiring