Service Design
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You’ve mastered UX. Where to next?
While User Experience is, like, at least six occupations rolled into one, it’s still possible to reach a point in your career when you’re asking yourself – “There must be more to it than this!” Time for a bit of a shake-up? 1. Carry on as usual but shift into a different industry While designing…
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User Experience Outside the Square
User Experience professionals need to get their heads out of the computer screen and look at the bigger picture.
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Gimme Good Service
Those companies who wrap a service around their product are doing a roaring trade.
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Tabatha the Service Design Goddess
Business owners, service delivery managers, business analysts and user experience consultants could learn a lot from tacky reality TV shows like ‘Tabatha’s Salon Takeover’. The straight-talking Ozzie, Tabatha Coffey lends her sound advice and styling expertise to help make over America one salon at a time in this new series (Friday’s, 9.30pm on TV3). In…
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Notes From User Experience Week 2008
A presentation from my archives – many of the points made in these slides are still relevant today. Notes From User Experience Week 2008 from Zef Fugaz
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People to the Power
The electricity industry is undergoing a revolution in New Zealand and overseas. Here’s a look at some of the latest activity…
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Stamps Licked?
You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get a stamp for a postcard in San Francisco. Getting a postcard is the easy part. But buying stamps? They should make it a new sport at the Olympics. The place that sold me the postcards told me to try the liquor store next door. But they…
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Flying like a Conchord
On my 12-hour flight to San Francisco, Air New Zealand offered a plethora of inflight entertainment including a grumpy hostess, movies, music and computer games. I’m one of those people who feels overwhelmed by too many choices when visiting a record store or bookshop. The Air NZ inflight entertainment system made me feel the same…
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Make that a double cona
Rex and I are off to the West Coast of the USA this weekend… I’ll be attending User Experience Week in San Francisco and Rex SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles. It might come as a surprise to our American friends, but the biggest concern we have about visiting the US is not the startling fact that…
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Quantum Theory Perplexes Information Hippies in Nelson
Brendon Ford and I have just returned from a miniature junket in Nelson to present the mechanics behind the award-winning intranet we worked on for the Ministry of Transport back in 06/07. Quantum Content During my presentation I briefly tried to compare quantum theory to CMS-metadata-driven content – which for me has its similarities in…
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Helping Airlines Cope with Children
Qantas and Air New Zealand could greatly improve their online booking process when it comes to children who need to fly unaccompanied. There’s many reasons why children need to fly alone. Their parents might live in two different cities; a child might be going to spend the holidays with their grandparents; a child might be…
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Make Qantas Smarter (and win!)
Qantas have a ‘thick’ online booking system. This came to light when I read an article in The Dominion Post this morning, which reads: A mother says she will never fly Qantas again after her two unaccompanied children were bumped off an overloaded Wellington to Sydney flight and sent to Auckland instead. And here’s the…
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Seeking User Experience Strategic Guru (E-Commerce)
Provoke has some exciting projects on the horizon and I’m keen to hear from (or about) any fantabulous e-commerce gurus out there (freelancers or full-timers). You might be the sort of person who could lead the research, strategy, requirements and information architecture of a large e-commerce and dynamic data-driven web site.
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Sitting on a Hybridised Bomb?
In my search for a fuel-efficient car I was amazed to learn that in New Zealand you can buy a Prius for around $5000.
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Starving on the main-trunk line
A few weeks ago I ‘treated’ my daughter to her first big train trip – on the Overlander – in what proved to be a scenic experiment in illusion and culinary depravation.
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I’m going off the rails
In an act of hypocrisy I’m abandoning electric rail in favour of a fossil-guzzling car. This was not a light decision, but the Kapiti-Wellington public transport system has literally driven me off the rails… For years I’ve been a staunch climate change warrior. I’d catch a bus from home to the Paraparaumu train station (20…
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Psychic Customer Service
For two weeks my fiance Sarah had survived without her purse. It contained her cash-card, VISA, drivers license, library card, sewing gear, lipstick (and all those mysterious things women lug around). It was not the first time she’d misplaced it. We’d turned the house upside down twice looking for it… but this time it looked…
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BankDirect vs Kiwibank
It’s one of those strange things about my world – every time I criticise a company or Government department the next day they’re nominated for an award (or even actually win something). It happened with Statistics NZ and the Online Census and now it has happened with Kiwibank. Kiwibank wins 2006 Sunday Star-Times Cannex Banking…
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Kiwibank’s Secret Formula?
For the last six weeks I’ve been working as an undercover agent – posing as a new customer for Kiwibank – New Zealand’s big little bank. Secret Spy Profile Having been a customer of several other banks in previous occupations, at first I found this assignment a cinch. The undercover role was surprisingly similar to…
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Insincerity Sucks
An article in the Sunday Star Times (‘Insincerely yours’, Oct 9 2005) claims that New Zealand companies “are robbing their customers, robbing their staff, and robbing themselves with an insincere approach to customer service”. The article goes on to say: The good experiences were powerful – but so were the bad ones: “Some people were…
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Thematics
My customer experience today at a ‘Theme Basics Store’ in Wellington… [ZEF] Hi, do you sell shower curtains? [TBS SHOP ASSISTANT] Yes – over there… (points) [ZEF] (looks over) They look great – can you tell me what length they are? [TBS] Hang on (finds a brochure) 180cm or 190cm – it depends – we’ve…
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Foto Blotto
It was my first exploration into the brave new world of ordering photo-prints online. I thought the experience would be simple… Visit a website Upload a bunch of photos I want printed Choose the size and format Enter my address and credit card details Then forget about it a for a few days… …until “viola!”…
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Trade Me Your Region
The Trade Me ‘change my region’ feature assumes New Zealanders are hermits – never leaving the comfort of their internet device, home, street or town. I live and work in more than one region.The purpose of ‘change my region’ is to allow people to search for goodies in ‘their region’ (or, alternatively, over the whole…
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Designing for Loyalty
Astute web designers do more than just design with your customers in mind- they actually design with your customers- in person. Zef Fugaz looks at ways to get your users on board, and looks at New Zealand success stories. This article originally appeared in Unlimited Magazine (June 2004) The dotcom crash taught the young web…
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