I’ve been thrashing through mockups the last few weeks, and was frustrated with my initial versions of form designs, they seemed to take a few reviews before they were at a good starting point I felt would be easy to use. A friend of mine Peter Grearson pointed me to Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski and it was fantastic.

The book is well structured, getting to the point with explanations, visual references, and references to previous studies, tests performed for the book and clearly stated when drawing on personal experience and preferences.  This is great as i tend to get frustrated with authors which rant their personal preferences but don’t cough up any concrete evidence that their opinion is remotely valid when tested against real people.

I’ve since gone back and touched up a few forms but really happy that most of the design decisions that i’d worked on were inline with the recommendations on those specific situations.

This book doesn’t tell you all forms should be designed “X” way. Its funny that the author answers this question with “it depends”.  Which when i first read the line, i thought; ‘you bastard, i’ve just bought this book and your not going to have an opinion at all’. But reading further on your provided with a number of example situations and research to backup which solution tested provided certain results. e.g. allowing you to assess if accuracy or speed (or a healthy balance of both) is more appropriate for your frame of reference.

Go check out the table of contents, read the first chapter if you want, but if you have to design a form, build a form, or in any way influence the creation of a form i highly recommend this book. It might just save me some time and pain filling out another crappy web form in the future, or even better save some lives in a hospital CRM system.

After reading a book on Buckminster fuller I came across this video it’s a full hour, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN_ODfUBGeY

Lean Thinking
Too many fascinating things to list, but an underlying principal of “doing more and more with less and less” for the benefit of man is fantastic, and it’s always great to change your frame of reference to zoom out a little more, for me I was relating the concepts to Lean Thinking as a vehicle of improving the quality of life for humanity, it’s the rudder at the back of the boat which can shift our overall direction.

Design Responsibility
At 1:09: 45 to 1:10 50, I really enjoyed his rant he gave to a class of architecture students, about the responsibility we have as designers. Specifically their concern with how pretty it looks, and asking them to stop concerning themselves with this and instead work on the function and in an economical way that its realizable, how pretty it looks will come out if you have solved the problem properly, like a rose is beautiful, or sunset, something we all know as experience designers. Put in the reference of “responsibility”, it makes me think of the alternative which means concerning yourself with aesthetics first is negligent.

Iterative and zooming out
My favorite part was at the end when he was talking about the dome being used for covering cities with a dome and its economic benefits, then transitioning to his next iteration of making cities obsolete by producing little black box’s that you could create your own ecosystem, offering quality of life that can be packed and carried away anywhere you want to go along with your paper dome that lasts years for shelter. The solutions come back to his big picture view of our earth as a spaceship, he is a futurist (or nutter) but we have this technology now, you can get free eBooks on creating your own bio sphere, they’re not yet compactable into a suitcase, but it is possible to be completely self sufficient.

It’s my random reference of inspiration this month but hope this prompts some new ideas by zooming out a little and changing your frame of reference, what’s the equivalent of spaceship earth in your company, group, industry, zooming out might help you find next year’s solution. By thinking lean and zooming out, is the problem you are trying to solve/improve really needing a long term plan to make obsolete?

When I started reading this book I had only just been introduced to the coined term Service Design. I was seeking to understand what was generally expected and what approach was generally taken in Service Design. 

To help me grasp the overall concepts and get an understanding of how other service designers approach their jobs, this book was great. It is beautifully designed, and presented, I was also pleased that the author approach writing the book as a service design project, and not an author/designer locked in a studio.

I had naturally been doing co-creative, user centered and visual approach to Customer Experience Management, so I was pleased to see some of this in the principals of service design thinking. Examining the title you should notice it says “This is service design thinking” and not “this is service design” which realizes that many professions are already doing service design thinking in their specific roles.

Fields of Service Design:

• Product Design
• Graphic Design
• Interaction Design
• Social Design
• Strategic Management
• Operations Management
• Design Ethnography

Defining service design, and service design thinking was also described in the book and it was interesting that there are allot of attempts, and not yet an agreed definition as service design is very young as a term.

A definition I liked from the book was:
“Service design is all about making the service you deliver useful, usable, efficient, effective and desirable. “ (UK Design Council, 2010)

Also the 5 principals of Service Design Thinking:

1. User Centered
2. Co-creative
3. Sequencing
4. Evidencing
5. Holistic

Overall I would recommend this book for anybody wanting to understand and get started with service design.

To get others opinions I attended a book club in Melbourne which recently reviewed the book, one specific points was a few people felt co creation did not fit as a tool, and why it was also duplicated as a principal. It possibly should be left as a principal and removed as a tool.

Additionally the tools were extensive but didn’t go into specific details e.g. a process of how to use them, overall though we agreed this would have been difficult to achieve without the book being twice as long and it at least gave you direction to seek more information.

I asked the group: “on a scale of 0-10 how likely are you to recommend This is service design thinking to friends and colleagues”

The responses were:

2 x Promoters (9,10)
2 x Passive (7,8)
3 x Detractors (0-6)
Note: nobody marked less than 5. 

I also asked do you think its worth reading unanimously it was yes.

This is a simple story that reveals some truths on how we react to change. As the story unfolds you can relate and see in others how they are playing out the story in their own reactions to change.

This great thing about the story is that you could attempt to explain all the lessons literally but this tiny book would end up as a novel. Great work guys in succinctly getting the point across in so few words.

My take from the story is at the end of the story the character hem isn’t revealed as making it through the maze to the next cheese station (experiencing change), and rightly so sometimes people just don’t want to change, and no matter what you do you just can’t change their mind. Sometimes you need to let go of those wo don’t want to change.