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christianbriggs
"Co-founder of BigTreetop.com, occasional questioner of its name, PhD candidate at Indiana University and resident of a swing state...."
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Bloomington, IN 47401 [map]
30 Total Friends
Bloomington, IN 47401 [map]
Blogs
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Is Human-Computer Interaction Design the Same as Marketing?
by christianbriggs on Wednesday, January 14, 2009 8:30 AM EST
I've had more than a few in-person and email conversations now with folks who were wondering about the differences, if any, between HCI Design and Marketing.
Here is the first of two answers that i sent to a colleague on the question :
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As i currently understand it (i say this because there are at least two definitions for each of HCI and Marketing), i would say that the aims of considering "experience" are different within Marketing than they are within HCI. It is perhaps helpful to begin with the current definition of "marketing," which was approved in 2007 by the American Marketing Association:
"Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."
So marketing has to do with value, and most anyone who is familiar with Starbucks as a business case will agree that it is just one of the millions of businesses which are part of what has been referred to as "The Experience Economy." (Pine and Gilmore, 1999) HCI's notion of experience also deals with value of course - and values (not going down that rabbit trail here), but here is the crucial difference, i think:
Marketing deals with experience as a part of the equation which is all about the creation of value which is ultimately (and it is perhaps most concerned with this aspect of the equation) exchanged for some sort of gain (usually financial) as part of some sort of transactional arrangement within a market-driven world. So to use Erik Stolterman's language in the paper he recently posted, marketing-oriented experience design "serves" the user and the designer/company as part of a market, where HCI-oriented experience design "serves" the user and the designer/company as part of society, or a work process, or of play, etc. They are therefore not totally different, since a market is part of a society, but i think they are different enough to be separated.
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And here is the second that i sent, after realizing that the first answer could probably be simplified:
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Perhaps as a more simple answer, any type of "marketing" deals with the connection between a product or service and it's eventual exchange for something else (usually money). we might alternatively call it Human-Computer-Money Interaction. and while this might sound mercenary, i would suggest that marketing holds a whole series of valuable considerations for those of us who plan to design products (and most of them will in some way) whose ongoing production and existence depends on the money being part of the equation. on the other hand, HCI deals with this same equation, but excludes the "money" (exchangeable value) part.
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What do you think?
Tags: HCI, design, marketing
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Gas Station Excellence
by christianbriggs on Wednesday, December 3, 2008 11:38 PM EST
On Sunday night we were driving back from Chicago and made a late night stop at a very small, very out-of-the-way gas station in northern Indiana.
There was only one woman working the counter. Mid 30's, rail-thin, and looked as though she had lived at least two lives already - neither of them easy. Each one of the patrons she served - perhaps 6 of us - was clearly just stopping by on our way to somewhere else, probably never to visit that small station ever again.
But despite the obviously transitory nature of her customer relations that night, the thin woman with the over-bleached hair and cigarette wrinkles was very graciously greeting each customer with a warmth that seemed out-of-place in that road-grimy room. She complemented the girl ahead of me on her fancy manicure, asked where she got it done, then looked her dead in the eyes and wished her a "good night now" which had not a trace of "fake" hidden anywhere within 100 miles of it. She then proceeded to ring up my purchase, and wish me a similarly good night.
By any account, there was little to no extrinsic, career-related motivation for excellent customer service at that gas station that night. Unless i've read the situation wrong, the woman's motivation had to do with personal kindness and a desire to be excellent in her job no matter the reward (or lack of it), which is rare, and conspicous, and wonderful to behold.
Tags: customer service, travel, excellence
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Death of the Academics
by christianbriggs on Tuesday, November 25, 2008 11:31 PM EST
It occurred to me while watching a documentary late last night that efficient totalitarian governments usually imprison or impale academics pretty early in their process. Germany, China and others have followed this fairly effective path. This of course brought two unrelated, but nonetheless interesting thoughts to mind:
1) My newly-chosen profession in the academy might someday (albeit painfully) mean that i won't need a retirement account
2) When a people or a nation begins to show signs of anti-intellectualism, it may be especially vulnerable to the eventual deprivation of liberty
Tags: democracy, government, academicsAdd Comment
HCI and Systems Long Lost Cousins?
by christianbriggs on Monday, November 24, 2008 4:11 PM EST
In some recent research i came across an interesting set of branches in the intellectual family trees that suggest that HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) and Systems Theory are cousins, and that IU Informatics represents the site of a potential family reunion. I made this quick diagram to illustrate (click on the image to expand it).
Note: this is a very quick generalization, not a definitive map, but i think it suggests the possibility of some interesting future collaborations.
Also Note: the top of the diagram is older than the bottom. Allende was deposed and reportedly killed himself in 1973.
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Tags: systems, HCI, Indiana University, InformaticsAdd Comment
Of Newspapers, Content and Community
by christianbriggs on Saturday, November 1, 2008 9:28 AM EST
It has been well-documented that newspapers as we know them are in a major freefall in their ad revenues.
Sometimes the deeper value of something to its community of advertisers, readers, consumers, etc. is not obvious – particularly when that something has been around for a very long time. As an example of this problem, Marshall McLuhan once pointed out that IBM for many years assumed that their value was in making office equipment and business machines. It almost sunk them, until they finally realized that their real value was in processing information.[1] Unless I’m mistaken, newspapers have operated for years on the assumption that their value to readers was in great news content. I wonder, though, if their value was instead all along in giving people a sense of community – both geographic and interest-based (political, industry, etc). In 1835, Sociologist Alexis DeTocqueville wrote of America that
“They need some means of talking every day without seeing one another and of acting together without meeting. So hardly any democratic association can carry on without a newspaper.” [2]
Newspapers really took off in the late 17 and 1800’s – a time in the U.S. where the states were trying to make sense of their new found, loosely-knit country. Newspapers were really the only medium which could do that efficiently – to facilitate national communities of interest (what Tocqueville called “associations” like the political parties, etc.) as well as local communities (townships).
Perhaps what has been hurting newspapers of late (and I’m probably not the first to say this) is that they assumed that their value was in their news content, which as Esther Dyson[3] and others might say is an infinite good – producible and reproducible by anyone with a computer and a camera – even more so when there are groups of them, which happen to include experts in their midst, who are now empowered to publish at the press of a button.
Perhaps what newspapers need is to really get back to their deepest roots, where great content was only one part of their role in facilitating community-building, which is what people really paid for. I’m not exactly sure how they will do this, but i have some ideas which may be food for another post soon.
[1] McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: the extension of man. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
[2] Tocqueville, Alexis. [1835] 1988. Democracy in America. Ed. J. P. Mayer. New York: Harper Perennial.
[3] In 1995 Esther Dyson predicted that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”
Tags: newspapers, communityAdd Comment