Method

Our newest 10×10 piece, Who’s the Chief Experience Officer?, has launched! Written by Principal Reuben Steiger, this piece explores what it means to marry a brand with its products and services to build an engaging and thoughtful customer experience.

Having joined Method earlier this year, Reuben leads marketing and is one of our thought leaders in business development and brand experience. In Who’s the Chief Experience Officer?, Reuben offers insight as to how organizations can effectively think about and manage architecting effective relationships and experiences with their customers. How do you orchestrate a brand and its products and services to deliver the greatest possible customer experience? And who’s job is it to help facilitate building that experience?

Read “Who’s the Chief Experience Officer?” at 10×10.method.com.

Principal Marc Shillum, author of our Brands as Patterns 10×10, talks to World of Business Ideas on the three keys to renovating brand strategy and achieving relevance that endures.

Watch the video below and catch Marc on Twitter at @threepress.

Designer/maker/seller of good design for the home, Heath Ceramics launches an all-new, redesigned website! Method worked with Heath to create a new online visual language and back-end structure that brings Heath’s brand offering and story into a cohesive online experience.

Focused on lifestyle and curating beautiful, as well as functional products, Heath needed to translate the essence of their company from their retail environments to an ecommerce experience that retained the same brand value.

Method saw an opportunity to integrate the stories and inspirations behind the products to create a digital showroom that would educate, inspire, and guide visitors. Method Design Lead, Adam Weiss adds:

“Heath Ceramics represents a lifestyle dedicated to creation, sustainability, and timeless classics. The Heath brand is larger than just ceramics; embracing this fact, Method updated the typography on the site and created a visual structure that complements – rather than duplicates – the eclectic and personality rich product and lifestyle content.”

The result is an all-new modular system that is organized around use cases as well as product categories. The site focuses on highlighting the aspects of Heath that speaks to their appreciation for lifestyle, aesthetic and functionality. Placing what Heath makes at the forefront of the web experience, the new site reiterates Heath’s look and feel, giving its customers the opportunity to explore and discover in a delightful and simple ecommerce platform.

Our 10x10s are featured over at The Five, a great digital saloon for delightful reads on everything from pop culture to business strategy. Check in weekly, as they’ll be posting each of our pieces for a revisit of our entire collection of 10x10s.

This year’s Aspen Ideas Festival showcased a number of speakers discussing ideas and challenges crossing various industry verticals. IDEO founder David Kelley was in attendance, hosting a talk on creative confidence and highlighting its importance in the context of collaboration. During his discussion, he touched upon the culture of prototyping, speaking to its necessity in the innovation process as a step that allows teams to collectively discuss and refine ideas into potential products.

IDEO's David Kelley on the Culture of Prototyping by FORAtv

As David Kelley touches on, prototyping is a necessary and important step for successful innovation. In a recent 10×10 piece, “Rapid Prototyping: The Wright Way to Fail,” Method’s Lead Technologist Jeremy Jackson discusses why an iterative design process that allows for testing and refinement early and often must be embraced. Prototyping – and consequently initial failure – is integral to designing a successful product, service, or experience.

“Creating something innovative is indeed a risky undertaking. To do it, you have to crash often before you are able to fly. Famed inventor of the Dyson vacuum, James Dyson crashed frequently over the 15 years it took for him to craft 5,127 prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner.”

Read the full piece here.

Verizon will soon be carrying the iPhone 4. So, what does this mean for AT&T?

Today’s OSX update brings us a Mac App Store for desktop apps.  I’ve already fallen in love with it because it provides a centralized source for all of my app purchase / download history from here on out.

A small team at Method worked on the design of Link TV’s ViewChange.org back in the very beginning of 2010. We are excited that the site is recently launched out of beta. ViewChange.org is a platform for social and global action and is the latest extension of Link Media’s mission engage, inform and inspire viewers to become involved in the world. The website was both socially rewarding and interesting for Method to design. The main challenges in designing the user interface were encouraging discovery of content that was still related to topics of interest and also inspire users to take action at every step. We worked closely with the main stakeholders, involving the client in participatory workshops and design ideation sessions intended to bring their vast expertise into the design process.

The 21st Century is on fast forward, and never has there been a more important time to demonstrate the value of brands and marketing. Consumers are taking control and pushing back, touch points have exploded, control is lost and differentiation is tough in the face of new faster global competition where brands are organizing globally for social media and local interaction. Breakthrough innovation that customers will care about requires removing barriers between brands and the end user experience. Today’s article in the Harvard Business Review on “Branding in the Digital Age: You’re Spending Money in All the Wrong Places” succinctly explores the options for customer decision journey driven strategies.

Have you ever seen a clever solution to a problem and said to yourself, “why didn’t I think of that?” There are clever solutions to age old problems all around us, and even more opportunities to design better solutions to problems that most people may never even uncover. One reason for this is that humans are inherently really good at adapting to our surrounding environments. I would argue almost too good. As a result, we often accept existing solutions and overlook the obvious opportunities to create better solutions, or subconsciously create operational work-arounds to mitigate existing inconveniences. While many of these work-arounds tend to be clever, they generally obey the same rules and are constructed with the same set old constraints and mental models set forth by “the way things have always been,” and generally only provide a small, incremental advantage over their existing solution. Point being, these clever work-arounds haven’t really solved the underlying problem. The importance of understanding “the why” behind a problem, decision, solution, or action, can drastically change ones perspectives and therefor drastically revolutionize possible outcomes for possible solutions…even our clients.