Do Business Well

When your largest customer dominates its industry, you can expect to share in its good fortune. This is self-evident to the executives at Keystone Foods and J. R. Simplot, two privately held (hence unranked) companies that supply McDonald’s restaurants in the United States with, respectively, meat and potatoes. They are among the many suppliers whose fruitful collaborations with the fast food chain have lasted decades, after starting with nothing but a handshake agreement.

When customer and supplier interests are so intricately entwined, the concept of teaming up with customers assumes another dimension in addition to those we have discussed thus far. As a result, my fourth strategy for winning collaborator customers calls for more than specialized expertise and a close relationship. It entails a radical commitment—not easily reversed—to joint success. Here the primary emphasis changes to the physical and strategic interlocking of the supplier’s and customer’s businesses. Continue Reading »

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Our leadership roles in experience strategy have spanned the “new economy” boom and the “next economy” bust. In addition to specific constraints and opportunities unique to every organization, market conditions greatly affect the politics of usability. During the boom, many traditional companies and web startups hurried to get in on the action. Being ‘first to market” led to a rush to launch and became a mantra for e-business leaders and their venture capital founders. Working in “Internet Time’ meant that anything that could slow launch was often suspect. In some cases; that made attention to customer experience prone to be chopped, despite a few loud voices about the perils of ignoring customer experience Continue Reading »

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What do you do when called into a large scale project midway through web- site development? How can you transform imperfect situations into opportunities to teach internal teams about ideal 1-1C1 practices throughout the product cycle, while still delivering greater customer focus for your client?

At High Design, the obstacles were many — minimal precedent, considerable resistance from designers who were comfortable with earlier work processes, challenges with business development not adequately scoping our work, and demands from clients to rush web-sites to launch. The result was being called into projects after discovery and definition phases were completed, and being asked to “do something.” We responded with creativity, flexibility, and a long-term strategy for building an HCI practice. Continue Reading »

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