Category: Foresight

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Foresight Product Design User Experience

Little steps, big leap

The process of product development comprises a variety of steps that each have their importance to understand and produce for the user. Every product is different with its purpose and output so the evolution stage will present with different challenges that might influence your approach. Designers shouldn’t be afraid when starting something new, it’s normal to doubt how some aspects of the process will turn into cheap shots making the work harder. This is normal and there isn’t a solution to this common issue, but rather a set of experiences that can build your confidence into reducing stress and help you along the way. Should you find a moment of weakness or doubt, pause and reflect to address your location on the map, this will help you strengthen aspects that are often discarded within the design community.

Consider the following when the need to create something new arises:

  • The research phase will be long and require more resources than you think: new products require you to explore new areas that you never had the chance to visit. You are going to spend more time looking for your topics than analyzing them to extract what you’re looking for. This requires you to balance resources so you don’t  spend too much time in your earlier stages.
  • Data redundancy will be constant: while collecting elements you will find similar data among your team that creates the tendency to expand conversation and time dedicated discussing the information. Everyone during the discovery phase feels compelled to provide their experience and findings increasing the data quantity and its repetition; pay attention to what information is essential to the existence of your product and leave the rest for later.
  • Create an early proposal: once you gathered enough data in the discovery phase you should create an early proposal to the stakeholder to understand if you are on the right track. This saves you time and budget because nobody is happy to find out they got it wrong after five months of work.
  • The product you’re developing is just the first step: this important aspect is often overlooked. You are not developing just a product, you’re establishing a practice method to build a longer path for you and your client to develop business opportunities. This encourages you to be open, to foster broader ideas, to plan ahead, and to increase client loyalty benefiting both parties. Foresight is a vital part of product development because within more complex environments, you will have to interface with System Designers, Compliance, Legal department, to make sure everything is safe and sound.
  • Team brainstorming is vital: it doesn’t matter if you are working in a small or large team, or if you are the only designer working on the project. The important thing is to brainstorm with other colleagues such as developers, product owners, tech department, to understand their point of view and how their input can enrich and assist your development process.
  • Increased focus on lo-fi testing is better: designers have the tendency to show the pretty interfaces so they can convey a richer sense to stakeholders by having hi-fi models. Take a step back and make the lo-fi or skeleton system work first like clockwork, it’s easier this way because your focus is on the basic working mechanics: before you can run you need to walk.
  • Stakeholders are your friends: as I mentioned a few lines earlier, sharing information with stakeholders allows to keep them in the loop and welcomed in the process. Empathy is your best friend and you will look like a considerate designer that can take care of people, products, development tasks, acquiring more awareness and important feedback.

Product development required the creation of an experience satisfying the user’s needs and client’s expectations. Remember to stay focused on who is the user and what are the essential key points to make your product viable first and scalable later.

Happy prototyping!

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Foresight

Neuromarketing, Metaverse, and the UX military applications.

I haven’t heard in a while the term “Neuromarketing” especially since we’ve been under the threat of Covid-19 over the last three years. When combining a medical term with an economical one, brands began investing in this new realm of discovery to better understand the engagement with the user and how to strengthen it. At the same time over the span of five years another term came to prominence spiking up the editorial tech headlines around the world: disruption. This term became the focus of great topics and research driving Silicon Valley onto a journey of constant reinventing.




Worldwide Google Trend search for “Neuromarketing”

In the very same time frame we’ve seen how the trend shifts for “Neuromarketing” having been on a declining rollercoaster in a six-month cycle over the years. This marketing application takes into consideration neuroscience and psychology to analyze the user reactions and the behavior in order to improve product positioning and sales. Users mount eye-tracking devices on helmets bearing sensors so it’s possible to track where the eyes are looking and where the head moves; at the same time heartbeat and brain activities are scanned to understand how the body is reacting. Crossing all this data we learn what product items are transmitting to the user, the reaction to specific colours, shapes, shelf positioning, how easy is to spot these goods, and eventually how to improve their sale. The ultimate mind and body hacking for brands to perfection store design and product placements. Neuromarketing almost stopped becoming relevant since the pandemic lockdowns forbid the user from experiencing traditional store shopping. Online vendors from Walmart, Amazon, Netflix, Deliveroo, Uber, answered the call assisting society in making out for the lockdown restrictions.

THE METAVERSE

The Metaverse is also responsible for the slow disappearing of Neuromarketing as more VR and AR tools don’t require the user to reach a physical store, moreover, the Metaverse will likely be the disappearing of Neuromarketing or at least the removal of interests from brands by removing their interested from investing into it. While people still believe the formula Metaverse=Facebook=bad, this term already existed before Mark Zuckerberg decided to do something about the post FB era; in fact, VR and AR had already found applications within the industry from vehicle production to real estate showcase. The Metaverse is not about avatars and character customization, those are just the first step before entering into a behavioral playground for users and brands to build a whole new digital dimension of business models involving the gamification process.

MILITARY UX

War is bad, war sucks, but unfortunately, it’s here to stay. The market for weapons is growing each time a country is invaded, therefore producers are going after the latest digital miracles that can facilitate the use of missile launchers, tank interfaces, radar UI, to reach their goal, and hopefully it’s against the invader’s forces. UX will be looking after the simplification process of weapon usage with everything having a digital display: an easy use is an easy sale and an easy victory. There’s a realm of radars, control rooms, anti-aircraft, screens being used by resistance forces in Ukrain fighting against the invading Russian forces; so the case for the military forces of the west and their weapon maker is for equipment ready to be used by non-expert ground personnel having only weeks or days of training time. In the near future: a young soldier sealed inside a bunker insulated from the rest of the world while wearing VR equipment, he/she is within the digital environment of a true battlefield happening over the heads, but there aren’t people inside tanks, vehicles, aircraft. Just like a game if you’re defeated you immediately jump inside another land or air unit and continue the fight. No coins required.

IN THE END…

Why have I written about three different topics? They aren’t, they are and they have been connected for a while. Research on human brain activities have been done for decades to understand the depth of our mind, to this, the application towards a profitable result in term of economy or military was just about to be reached. Combining the study of the brain with its reaction and behavior, plunging it into a virtual reality-verse where UX and UI are the assisting technology to craft the next experience, capable to serve a militaristic purpose is the next frontier for the next 10 to 15 years of major governments.

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Brands Foresight

Metaverse

Facebook has changed its company name into Meta and established a network of platforms and services to leap forward into more innovation. FB, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Quest, are part of this digital realm and are the backbone of Mark Zuckerberg’s new project called the Metaverse.

What is the Metaverse? This has been a common question posted and asked throughout the web from articles to videos, many don’t know and many others don’t want to guess because are biased towards FB and its founder. The Metaverse is a digital realm made of virtual reality, augmented reality, blockchain, cryptocurrency, together hosting a new entertainment/commercial/financial environment.

The Metaverse will play a crucial role attracting different brand areas to invest in new forms of business. Four major areas were found to be suitable for Meta to open up to new opportunities:
–entertainment
– social
– banking
– commerce

Let’s enter the Metaverse by taking ‘entertainment’ as an example. Here we have a wide corridor for brands to invest by creating fresh products/services or simply transferring in the Metaverse what’s already available. Videogames, movies, shows, gambling, will play an important role in shaping this virtual world by connecting with e-commerce platforms and various payment systems, this will create a whole new digital economy reforming the markets.

Here we can see an in-depth view of how videogames will change the markets once they enter the Metaverse. The user will play a significant role competing in the market of digital content making, this will prompt new methods of commerce and money-transferring and for many users it will open to professional opportunities to explore.

A more structured view of the Metaverse can be seen here below with the user at the center of everything. The closer elements and brands move towards the user, the more personalized the experience will be and at the same time its digital factor will increase.

What we can expect from the Metaverse is a multi-layered digital reality that will span across different forms of communication, content, devices, and Meta will use the already existing owned platforms to build and connect both vertically and horizontally. However, we should be aware that much like the internet in its early commercial days, the Metaverse will begin resembling the Web 1.0 in its initial stages and progressively have its users build by taking the shape they want.

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Brands Companies Foresight

The Covid-19 and the infinite retail sadness

On the question “Should my company be on Tik Tok?” the answer is pretty clear “Who knows?”, this is because there are several business practices that are layered according to market needs. A fancy word to state that not all businesses are the same.

Over the last ten or so years the retail sector across Canada and the US has suffered plenty of setbacks due to two major changes that even large brands cannot control: people and technology. As shopping centers have seen drops in foot traffic, new generations with new wishes came along moving away from the suburbs into the city. Online shopping has happened and it fortified its position during the pandemic.

The death of Block Buster, Sears, and other big brands, was one important alarm that retail points were about to enter a long period of suffering. Some like Cadillac Fairview mall in Toronto wants its shoppers to come back and they are using the social platform Tik Tok as marketing tool to lure back people, and especially their young ones since it’s a platform with a specific demographic, therefore not the consumer segment with disposable income ready to spend.

The third element that has recently added to the uncontrollable element is the disruptive nature of Covid-19 and everything related. Most likely we won’t go back to pre-pandemic normality until 2025, the reason is the general and ambiguous nature of politics and its self-preservation nature of keeping parties’ popularity as priority number 1, while people’s safety is at number 2 with catastrophic consequences on vaccination delays and digital traveling passes.

The infinite sadness of retail continues because people have changed the way they shop, they do it by browsing comments and product ratings to see what the community has to say about your next hair drier or pair of sneakers. But also, Consumers have been hit with a slap at their face by the 2008 financial crisis significantly weakening its ability to spend without worries; now we count pennies in the jar.

So, let’s briefly recap the situation:

  • shopping malls are vanishing because new generations cannot afford to live like their parents in suburbia with a McMansion and three cars; they moved downtown spending more of their money and quality goods.
  • the real estate market for important cities like New York and Toronto is on a nose dive, after having gentrified old ‘mom and pop’ shops on a crusade to tear down and rebuild entire city blocks we found out large brand have left.

Vacant premises are left without commercial tenants due to the expensive leases building owners are asking. E-commerce platforms like Amazon have grown like never before during the last two years because of lock downs and social restrictions; everything is digital but large retail brands still struggle to acknowledge it and adapt.

To the question “Should my company be on Tik Tok?” the only answer is another question “Are you digital?” to which any decent and smart CEO can answer him/her self. Time is running out, but hope is eternal; I read somewhere.

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Foresight

A problem from the source

Millions and millions of plastic containers that each day are purchased and discarded for single-use are polluting the planet. We are overwhelmed by petrol-based byproducts within the food industry, we grew accustom to them and many generations don’t know any better or can’t imagine any alternatives.

Over the last twenty years countries across the globe managed to change their attitude on plastic waste and other forms, by enacting recycling programs from their municipalities to reduce garbage disposal as a whole singular entity. We are reaching optimal levels of recycled materials from our household usage, but at the same time we are constantly purchasing plastic to wrap our food and meals, turning our homes into busy disposal urban centers that have little power to stop plastic pollution.

The problem is at the source and it’s there it must be tackled first. Food and beverage companies directly affect the production of plastic containers with their high demands. Each time you cross a vending machine there’s plastic, each time you go groceries the majority of the isles shelves are topped with plastic bottles or plastic containers.

Imagine tenfolding the daily quantities of these bottles for each city and nation.

Each time we buy plastic we dispose it in the correct bin where that object will get recycled but at a cost: more energy required and more pollutant in the environment. It’s a dog chasing its own tail without an end to the problem. What alternatives do we have? But most importantly, why do we hope change will come from buyers and not from producers?

It’s no secret customers wants their product in better and less polluting containers, we all know this is what too many businesses have ignored in order to keep making profits by using cheaper materials. Yet we all desire glass to make a come back as container for our food items like milk bottles and soft drinks, their unit consumption are a significant influence in the production of plastic and derivatives.

Mushrooms can be turned into biodegradable packaging and containers.

Alternatives are out there to assist the environment. We have several options to choose and implement for packaging instead of plastics:
-cloth made of natural fibers;
-platinum silicon;
-stainless steel;
-beeswax-clothed cloth;
-recycled paper;
-wood;
-bamboo;
-mushrooms;
-pots.

The majority of these materials have been used for ages to wrap food and other items, until the ready availability of cheap plastics of the mid 20th century became popular beyond believe amidst a surge in oil production in the west. These products are not meant to fully remove plastic from our existence, but they can gradually be used starting from food production to reduce waste and especially plastic pollution.

“One word… plastic!” The mantra of the 20th century embodied in one single frame.

Behavior is key to a successful environmental change, we need to sacrifice the comfort of single-use plastics in order to use containers made of sustainable materials until it becomes natural for us to do so. However, major shifts must happen from the source rethinking their business and environmental strategy for a cleaner future.

How to achieve this? Government bodies ought to directly interact with businesses consortium and large-scale producers/distributors to address the change. Large corporations producing soft drinks and bottled water should be involved into opting out of plastic through quota, this in exchange of tax cuts or government financing to shift from plastic use onto more sustainable manufacturing options while training or retraining their work force and minimize negative social impacts.

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Foresight

Tricks of the trader: being “overqualified” and the tale of two interviews

During a hot July in Milan in 2009 I was scheduled for two job interviews in one afternoon three hours apart. I still remember that day because of the heat exhaustion I got along with the stress of performance for trying to land a job, those types of meetings can really dissect you on the spot giving you no room for poor choice of words when asked a question. 

You are nervous and afraid of making a bad impression because in the back of your head you know the person interviewing is x-raying you, paying a lot of attention to your speech and the way you sit and move. They want to know how you behave under certain quality of questions, there’s a script they are following to obtain specific answers and reactions from you for their right profile to hire.

The first interview took place downtown Milan in a very fancy and historical building, one of those places that are a few hundred meters away from the Duomo cathedral, near pricey lawyers studios that only assist large corporations and bill by the thousand per hour. I was around 25 years old at the time and without the confidence I have today at 39.

I sat in front of this lady who was in charge of interviewing candidates for a sales position and foreign client relations. One of the major requirements beside the standard ones for the position was good written and spoken English and I knew I had it, I also fit the profile. So I sat in this large office with a tall ceiling and the interview began with the usual questions: my education background, my previous job experiences, and so on.

As the interview developed I managed to catch a glimpse of the time gone by through the clock on the wall without looking at my wrist watch for obvious reasons. We were twenty minutes in and yet no questions to test my English proficiency, the set of questions of the interview was more of an interrogation than anything else, there was no goal to what I was supposed to work for if hired and the lady wasn’t interested in understanding my skills but rather to let me know the terms of the contract weren’t flexible, the pay for a full-time job was €800 gross per month. Gross.

Such nefarious low wage has been proposed in Italy fifteen-something years ago when government implemented new rules and new contracts under the false pretense of “contract flexibility”. A whole new ‘rebate strategy’ had been used to save money by hiring overqualified candidates willing to accept full time positions for a part time salary. No holidays and no benefits of any kind. Recruiters would prey on the candidates’ desperate conditions of being unemployed for long times or being their first job, so they would sign these type of below minimum wage contracts out of desperation.

Somehow I knew there was a trap along this meeting like there always are. With that salary I wasn’t able to cover any rent and so I had to delay moving out from my parents’ home. That sum didn’t reflect any of my skills, time spent learning them, commuting costs, and so on. I politely made the case for a higher salary highlighting my experience abroad, my high level English, to no avail, the recruiter was impassable and I knew that moment they were hiring on rebate to save money rather than investing on their employees to grow.

I thought they would invest in me, or at least partially, to build the skills they required in order to have the right candidate by training. I was wrong, they were looking for some ‘pick and choose’ candidate as if they were choosing a product off the shelves, as if they were selecting their snack in front of the cold glass of a vending machine.

The second interview was more disappointing with the recruiter in front of me asking generic questions and eventually closing the meeting in the most unprofessional way: he admitted he didn’t have any opening available yet they were setting up interviews yet I was there investing my time in the hope for a position. I went back home tired, almost getting a heat stroke and while sitting on the train thinking about the day, I felt disappointed because of the poor quality of job recruiting done by people who had no idea how to invest in candidates to improve their companies. It wasn’t the first time I sat through that kind of interviews and my fear was that this had become the new norm, the new standard, the way things are after the 2008 financial crisis struck and that’s how it was going to be.

I had the hunch things weren’t going to get better from there on with companies posting constant losses throughout Europe, and an unstable political landscape that gave little hope for the job market to get back on its tracks in the best of shape. However a bad day has always something to teach you, it was clear I had to shake the disappointment off quickly and focus back on the next interviews. I didn’t mind not getting the job, but it would have been worse getting it with a bad company who is there to exploit you asking you way more than they’re paying you without leading or inspiring their workforce in the wight direction.

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Foresight

The Value Zone

The difficulties between yesterday’s and tomorrow’s business models continue to exist in a struggle to find a balance. Companies who found their comfort zone are clashing against those who seek new horizons through innovation, but the disruptive element is still worrying old-school business models who found self-validation surviving through the Covid-19 pandemic.

A company works best balancing their services/clients ratio in a value zone that allows them to find fertile land to thrive. On the other hand, there are two danger zones to consider and also to avoid at all costs: A) too few services and many clients, B) too few clients and many services.

Case A starts with an old school imprint of business core decisions where the enterprise has been coasting for years, more likely over a decade where it found a cozy comfort zone that is in fact a danger zone. As markets and economies shift faster and faster, having only one or just a few services or products is harming any business activity. No restaurant offers one dish and one drink, so why should companies do that? Yes, some might claim “location”, yet until a competitor spawns right next to you, then your days are numbered.

Case B is where a company sets to make a difference too fast and too energetically forgetting to build first a solid and basic line of clients. Companies doing this are just showering their few accounts with too many services that will appear distracting to them, but more importantly, remove any focus from their business core. Despite the need of adapting to new scenarios, companies ought to develop one important primary asset to satisfy and make clients happy.

How to achieve the value zone? This target is not a precise point that requires unfathomable resources or time to obtain. The value zone is first accepting the fact there are danger areas to avoid, places to which are often taken for comfort zones. Once you raised awareness the following step is to admit mistakes were made, where the best solution to this problem is to accept the fact new strategies must be taken:
1) Do I have few services and many clients? Expect such service to be taken away from you by some competitor with better prices; or, expect the next economic turmoil that pushes politics and markets to pull the rug from beneath you.
2) Do I have few clients and many services? Expect such clients to run away because the lack of focus brings up the lack of experience and confidence; therefore you will provide average to below results as your energies and resources are spread on too many fronts. Less is sometimes more.

In the end, we can identify the value zone as a place where companies understand their potential through team work, being open-minded, but most importantly acknowledging times are changing faster and faster, that there no room for inside politics, pride, or ego.

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Foresight

Opportunities

The Corona Virus crisis has provided important insights about our society and economy we took for granted until a few months ago. Now more than ever countries must invest by improving the digital experience of their citizens by building new tools for tomorrow; tools that will prevent the many mistakes we are doing today which are costing us in terms of human lives.

Healthcare will dominate the next decade because this crisis demonstrated the flimsy quality of hospital services and how their readiness is underperforming. We will probably see Apple and Samsung shift their tech ambitions more into tools for doctors, nursing staff, patients, by competing against General Electric, Siemens, Johnson & Johnson, among the top names in the field. Internet Of Things will be the best field to innovate by providing assistance to those who cannot be hospitalized for the lack of available beds. So smartwatches, smartphones, tablets, computers, thermostats, security devices, will be tools used by hospitals to stay in touch remotely and monitor patients from their home, where doctors can assist people and issue prescriptions that will be delivered to them.

Since we will be living the next year or two in a condition where the virus will still affect our lives, hospitality can strive by implementing new methods of services. Restaurants will invest more into touchscreen technologies instead of having their customers risking contagion while getting their food over the counter; this also means seating will be limited and rearranged where possible. At the same time restaurants have the chance to venture into ecommerce platforms for take-out and pick-up orders strengthening their customer loyalty along with secure revenues; however, delivery companies like Just Eat, Zomato, Uber Eats, Deliveroo, will expand their territory and service capabilities redefining metropolitan logistics.Also self-driving techs will help this transformation.

Manufacturing capabilities are weak in the west if Europe and North America are scrambling for face masks and respirators to be sent from China. Politicians of the west will have to reconsider many of their priorities if they do the smart thing: creating jobs at home in the healthcare industry would be a win-win situation for the economy and for political votes. When a crisis such as this one strikes we cannot depend on the mercy of Asian manufacturing output during a pandemic. Governments are stopping and sequestering medical supplies in their dockyards to secure facemasks for their own citizens, and we have seen European countries doing that as well as the recent events between Canada and the US taking place.

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Foresight

The tech race for the next economy

The last four weeks gave us a sad panoramic of the bad preparation state western countries are living in. Despite the wide availability of technology we suddenly discovered this invisible wall affecting the healthcare sector, and no country in Europe or North America had the contingency to get ready for this pandemic.

We are not talking about the lack of expensive medical equipment, but the simple things like those face masks doctors are in dire need just to go by their simple tasks. Then we also seen the need for respirators so companies are scrambling to convert their production lines to meet the new demand. Virgin Orbit did so and surprisingly we can see a simple and cheap mechanism that can help patients, yet too many hospitals are in short of.

While Apple already ventured into healthcare with user information being harvested via their devices, we will now see companies invest into the medical field with a great emphasis seeking new growth and new profits. This will be driven by a new demand for hospitals, universities, and labs, to acquire new personnel and students with an interest in immunology and infectious diseases. The great demand for vaccines, machineries, and AI, will propel the global economy to the Industry 4.0 moving away from older production practices and affecting the labor force

The tech race for the next economy will venture into more data-gathering and its elaboration to provide more accurate information. With the implementation of AI in the healthcare sector to improve cognition and analysis of medical data, we can expect significant investments in the digital realm influencing global markets to head towards that direction. This has the possibility to affect doctors’ behavior in delegating more responsibilities of diagnosis towards AI, thus changing this role into a more managerial function applied to direct nursing staff and other hospital personnel. However I wouldn’t exclude banks from entering the healthcare industry business with a heavy foot.

Another important field that will reshape production sectors are the 3D printing technologies applied for small and large scale projects. In March an Italian engineer managed to help patients in intensive care in northern Italy by printing in a few hours the much needed oxygen valves for the hospital. In case small hospitals should be built during emergencies we can rely on 3D concrete printing for fast solutions; using more printers in one site it’s possible to raise a safe and durable structure with better qualities than the traditional brick method.

These technologies are already here and have already delivered so much in recent years. Companies can access this tech realm without having to resort to big capitals to invest, this mean small enterprises can innovate their sector and themselves. This pandemic and consequential economic crisis will trigger this race for survival, pushing more into the digital world than ever before.