Well where to begin. There appears to be a lot of these being worked on at the moment, and whilst they flex and change to meet each individual projects requirements do we really have a handle on what fundamentally makes a good customer journey map.

Thinking about info graphics, one of my criticisms has been that we don’t spend enough time thinking about the organisation of the information in our finished design. We tend to place it all down in one go. This often leads to congested designs that aren’t easy to scan or navigate. I came across this graphic which I quite like, but I think its doing a few things really well.

Continue reading ABC Design Info graphics →

The Vodafone M2M portal created one access point for the entire life cycle of their M2M SIMs. From supply, through instillation to status monitoring during usage. Vodafone have changed their approach to developing the M2M Portal so that it is now centred on user needs rather than on functional requirements. We 
helped the Business Products Team to drive this new user centred design approach. The ambition has been to build on existing interactions and functionality from current products such as GDSP and Service Navigator, and also design new experiences specically for M2M. 

An 8 week discovery phase used a rapid, iterative design process focussed around over 200 use cases and user stories.

Ran detailed workshops with key stakeholders from all of the Vodafone teams, including Group Technology, Service and Support, Programme, and Business Products Marketing.

Iterated design solutions for the key areas of the M2M Portal, SIM Management, User Access Management, Billing/Invoicing, Reporting, Ticketing, and Trial.

Created visual design templates which capture the full look and feel of the site.

These example screens have been selected from the 111 wireframes and show a detailed level of visual design.

These are my notes on design strategy in order to clear my head of them. They are not a coherent argument, they are ideas and concepts arranged in a long list.

Chipping away slowly at the M2M coal face, we are finally going to have a first draft of most of the wire frames after two weeks. Pretty good going as three weeks ago no designer in the office new anything about the portal. One personal concern is have we had enough time to question the overall GUI paradigm. We have been very reliant on two existing pieces of software GDSP (version one, seren built) and Visual Navigator (which the Netherlands have built) which may be limiting our GUI ideas.

Another chatty post from the coal face. Rather serendipitously I came across this blog post whilst looking for the very famous tree swing problem. Which is a great internet meme/illustration of how your deliverables go wrong.

Well as we start another ‘massive’ project and the pressure mounts, I hope we have all the safeguards and checks and balances in place, so the jobs a breeze and we all enjoy it. There is alot of romanticism in design, and thats why I love it, but it also generates an idea that projects ‘fail’ . Now I am really guilty of this. Complaining that it wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be, I can’t believe I worked so hard and the end result is awful.

Today, I committed the classic Seren mistake all over again. It happened on ITV when we delivered a perfect billion page analysis, it happened when I worked all weekend to deliver the perfect user journeys storyboards only for the client to change the names into Chinese to make the vendor laugh, I tried to deliver the perfect competitor analysis. Guess what it’s OK but its not perfect, it’s also late.

Vodafone has a wide range of iconography used across their various platforms from VOIP phones with their simple dot matrix LCD displays, to their website and mobile devices and back to Mobile Wi-Fi’s some of which have a simple monochrome screen. Vodafone had developed a really rich visual style. I conducted an audit and then provided a framework to bring consistency to the iconography. I was also interested in rationalising the use of symbols within a single icon.

For the VBS Icon framework, the icons represented applications. An application has a broad range of functionality and are therefore quite complex ideas. Often this leads to having to use two symbols to represent the application icon. I am not sure how successful this is.

The design team at Seren delivered a simple guideline that outlined the principles that should be used to create the icons and worked through a number of examples to test them out.

Project Canvas, (rebranded YouView) is a partnership between ITV, Channel 4, BBC, Arqiva, BT and TalkTalk, to provide catch up TV, video on demand, and regular TV through a set-top box. Seren was asked by ITV to investigate its users viewing habits and based on this research provide recommendations and concepts for the Canvas platform.

It was my introduction to service design at Seren, and made me very aware of the power of visual analysis in the tools and processes of service design.