In a piece titled “Sense & Drivability”, in the October issue or Fast Company, Jason Feifer broke down some of the subtle ways that Audi intentionally designs “delight” into every facet of their automobiles. Below, pulled from the article, is a list of some of their tricks.

Sight Team
COLOR TEMPERATURE

Headlamps are set at 5,500 Kelvin–the measurement of color temperature–because that mimics natural daylight, and therefore causes less eye fatigue.

Touch Team
BUTTON ACTIVATION

Audi and psychologists studied the depth that buttons must be pushed in order to feel “premium.” The answer: 4 to 6 millimeters. Any more or less seems cheap.

Smell Team
ODOR SCALE

Assembled cars are sniffed and ranked from 1 (odorless) to 6 (stinky), and pass with 1 to 3–but odorless isn’t optimal. People prefer that cars have a smell.

Hearing Team
DECIBEL ADJUSTMENT

People crank music to overcome road or engine noise, so Audi’s Bang & Olufsen system monitors for new noise, then auto-adjusts by up to 20 decibels to compensate.

A version of this article by Jason Feifer appears in the October 2011 issue of Fast Company.
Illustrations by Peter Sucheski

Audi understands that they are in the business of designing experiences… not just cars. They understand that it’s the details and the often overlooked minutia of the automobile design, that creates a transcendent product experience. It’s the little things that make a difference – but the little things are often the difficult things. These are the aspects of the design process that get de-prioritized, shuffled to the bottom of the deck, out out-right ignored. But these are also the elements of design that create the perception of value, comfort, performance, and delight. They’re the reason that branded experiences are more than just the sum of their parts.

The lessons that Audi teaches us in the design and manufacture of their automobiles are broadly applicable to almost every industry. But the software and technology industry might have the most to learn from them. Often times software companies are so fixated on functionality, pricing, and distribution of their products that the details, the ones that comprise great user experiences, get de-prioritized or ignored entirely. By paying attention to elements of a product that are typically taken for granted, such as error messages, in-line support, and often the entire user interface, software companies have a huge opportunity to differentiate their products, delight their customers, and grow their bottom line.

I manage a lot of bank accounts. I have personal accounts, business accounts, checking accounts, savings accounts, money market accounts, etc., and that doesn’t even include things like HSA accounts, brokerage accounts, credit lines, etc. The accounts are spread across several banking institutions in a handful of states. The one thing they all have in common is that they are all a source of ongoing frustration. On a good day, they are impersonal, faceless, corporate behemoths. On a bad day they are uncaring and even downright belligerent.

Since the House of Rothschild established European banking and finance houses in the late eighteenth century, the banking industry has been historically resistant to change. To be fair, there have been some successful attempts to drag the banking industry into the 21st century, by banks such as ING, Commerce Bank, and First Internet Bank, but a new player is really attempting to shake things up.

There has been a lot of buzz lately about a new banking startup called BankSimple. BankSimple is based in Brooklyn, NY and they claim to be creating a better interface for banking through the web and mobile apps. Their plan is to partner with financial institutions, which will hold the actual deposits. BankSimple is focusing on creating a better customer experience and simplifying the banking process by unifying all accounts into a single bank card accessible summary account.

Rather than making money from different fees, BankSimple plans to split the net interest margin (the difference between the rate they lend at and the rate they pay to depositors) with its partner banks, thus eliminating the incentive to push more confusing products at consumers.

BankSimple is attracting a lot of attention from the investment community as well. Current investors include a veritable who’s who of early-stage investors, including: SV Angel (Ron Conway), First Round Capital, IA Ventures, Village Ventures, & Dave McClure’s 500 Startups.

After spending some time on the BankSimple website, I decided to sign up for their beta launch. Signing up for the beta was a delightfully easy experience. I just filled out a simple, well-designed form, and was notified via email that I was on the list.

But what really blew me a way was the follow-up email I received later in the day.

Wow! They talked a lot about service on the website, but the fact that a real person (with a real name) sent me a note asking to hear my story and my opinions, before they had ever made dime off of me, really made an impression. Now let’s be clear, it was a form email… but who cares? It conveyed empathy and sincere interest in my opinions. It was the first touchpoint, after signing up, and it beautifully reinforced the brand’s promise of service and relationships. It’s a brilliant strategy for BankSimple. It costs virtually nothing and keeps prospects engaged during the waiting period before the beta opens up.

It’s the little things, the touches that don’t cost much, that make brands human and lovable. This same principle can be applied to virtually any business, but it’s especially important for web-based businesses. Web-based businesses need to exert more effort to be human, because customers rarely interact with actual humans.

The BankSimple website promises “No Surprise Fees,” and I hope that’s true. But I also hope that they don’t stop surprising customers with thoughtful and human touches like the ones I experienced.

@KristianIndy

I had the opportunity to be the final speaker at the 2010 Indianapolis Startup Weekend event on Sunday afternoon. For the uninitiated, I’ve included a bit of background from the Startup Weekend website below.

Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.

Founded in 2007 by Andrew Hyde, the weekend is a concept of a conference focusing on learning by creating. It is known for its quick decisions, ‘out of the box’ thinking (oh no, the buzzwords are attacking!), unique facilitation technique and letting the founders show what they can do. The program has already met with success in indianapolis, Toronto, New York, Hamburg, Houston, West Lafayette, indianapolis, DC and more.

The participants that attend a Startup Weekend decide what they want to tackle over the weekend and come out at the end with several developed companies or projects. Attendees are responsible for bringing the same desire and passion to the project and walk out of the room with the task at hand, in a short 54 hours. Sound intense? It is.

By all accounts the weekend was a success and the groups produced three strong concepts:

Zankit
http://www.zankit.com

GoBizSpeak
http://www.gobizspeak.com

NinjaButton
http://twitter.com/ninjabutton

You can view my presentation on “Designing A Startup” on SlideShare.

I’ll admit it – I’m a recovering design process deliverables junkie. Historically, the generation of process maps, usability audits, wireframes, site diagrams, application flows, mental models, task-level scenarios, user stories, standards documentation, conceptual frameworks, content audits, navigation maps, and countless other examples of design ephemera, were so central to the work that we created for clients that we began to view them as the work we were creating for our clients. In reality, as important as many of those deliverables may be, they are just means to an end. The end – is a finished product that customers want to purchase and use and a solution that meets or exceeds the clients expectations.

So before I start a holy war about the importance of research, process, and planning in User Experience Design (UX), let me be clear – all of the steps and deliverables mentioned above are, in many scenarios, important and useful elements of the design process. But as time has gone by, and we’ve continued to refine our own approach to design, we’ve begun to realize that by over-emphasizing their importance we’re doing a disservice to our clients and ourselves. Sometimes, some (and very rarely all) of, these deliverables are critical to delivering a winning design solution. But trotting them out in front of clients in an often vain attempt to either impress them, overwhelm them, or justify your fees often has the inverse effect.

In a brilliant post, titled “An Open Letter To The Design Community“, Marty Cagan at the Silicon Valley Product Group details some common traps that designers often fall prey to. In particular he extolls the virtues of getting to the real product, via Hi-Fidelity prototypes, as quickly as possible.

“Please people, if you want to succeed at your company, just remember this rule: the only thing that works to explain your design to execs and stakeholders are prototypes, the higher the fidelity the better.  Do yourself a favor and keep the sausage making within the design team.  Some execs will want to know how you got from here to there, and that’s okay, so long as you start with them understanding where “there” is.”

Do yourself a favor and keep the sausage making within the design team.

We’ve discovered a much more liberating way to engage our clients, do away with a ton of busy work, and deliver better design solutions in the bargin. In short, it’s about getting to the point. You can’t cut corners or entirely abandon the development of design support materials, but you can get much smarter about determining what design deliverables are essential to the projects success and which ones are only part of your process because you feel they have to be. I can promise you, at least in our experience, that most clients don’t care and aren’t nearly as impressed by many of the process-oriented deliverables that we, as designers, have come to hold sacred.

We’ve discovered a much more liberating way to engage our clients, do away with a ton of busy work, and deliver better design solutions in the bargin.

I’m not suggesting that you can go from a back of the napkin sketch to a fully functional product design without going through the painstaking process of researching user needs, mapping complex interactions, and creating comprehensive design specifications. What I am saying is that, that’s the stuff in the kitchen that you darn well better know how to execute on and that getting to something worthy of presentation in the dining room is where your focus should be. The faster you can get to a “real world” manifestation of the final product the happier your client will be and the sooner you’ll be able to begin the process of refining the design solution.

We’ve started by pulling together a list of all the tech-oriented startup in Indy. Currently it’s an incomplete list. If you are a founder of an Indianapolis-based startup or you are aware of one that is not our list, please go here and submit it. There are lots of really great young companies here in Indy, but for the time being we are predominantly focusing on technology and technology-enabled businesses in the web space (software, web-apps, etc.). For the time being, we’re not focusing on advanced manufacturing, life sciences, or service-based businesses – but that will come.

Once we’ve got a good handle on startup landscape in Indianapolis, we’ll begin to flesh out the other side(s) of the coin… infrastructure, support services, funding, etc. We’ve begun to detail some of that already, but its a work in progress. We’re using a really cool application called Mindmeister to create a mind map of the ecosystem. You can check out a truncated view below, or click through to see the whole thing. One the infrastructure and services tip we are really looking for businesses that specialize in working with and for startups. We’re really looking for businesses and organizations that are focused on the Indy startup space. Indianapolis is achieving critical mass in the startup infrastructure space and that is what we want to highlight.

If you have a startup or a technology/web-based startup to recommend or would like to ask a question, hit me up on Twitter @kristianindy and let me know about it. But take a look at the mind map we’ve set-up first so that you can get an idea of what we’re looking for.

Note: Regarding “stages” (e.g. seed, growth, established, etc.) These are pretty fluid terms, but you can use the following brief descriptions for context.

Early/Seed Stage – Building the product and proving the concept

Growth Stage – Growing the business and becoming self-sustaining

Established – Profitable, stable, managed growth

Once the mapping process is completed, we’ll publish the entire Indy Startup Genome Project online for public consumption.

Warning: This is a work in progress. There will be errors and omissions. If you find an error or omission, let us know in the comments.

William Poundstone has written a great book on pricing practices called – Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value. For anyone interested in crafting brand experiences pricing strategies should be an area of deep study and reflection.

We’ll try not to get into the habit of posting blog posts that point to other blog posts, but The Most Relevant Identity Work of the Decade, as chronicled over at Brand New is worth a gander.

Online retailer Zappos has figured out how to actually productize their culture and market their business model to other retailers. It can be yours for just $4,000.

Andrew Chen makes a pretty compelling argument for the virtues of Low-Fidelity prototyping.

In this thoughtful post, Karri Ojanen tells ad agencies to make the User Experience Designer your Creative Director.

Finally, check out UXFIND, a mashup that uses the Google Custom Search Engine and Google App Engine to provide a search tool specifically tailored for User Experience professionals.

Brand You : Personal Branding

View more from kristianandersen.

Let me come right out and say that I think the term “personal branding” is pretty lame, but there does seem to be some common understanding as to what the term means. So in the interest of fostering continuity and establishing a shared vocabulary, that’s what I’m running with. I hope that in 10 years, I will still be using Evian and Starbucks as brand examples. I’ve been doing it for 10 years and it still has legs.