Wednesday February 28th 2007, 12:05 pm by Steve Portigal
We’re looking to bring on a Director of Business Development. If you are interested, let us know. If you know someone else who might be a good fit, please let them know!
About the Job
Portigal Consulting is preparing to enter a new stage of growth and needs people who can bring the right set of skills to guide that growth. As with many small consulting firms, the key abilities we have in-house revolve around the consulting work, not the business of the firm. Indeed, we are asking for a combination of sales and marketing and business development, related but often separate job functions.
Although responsibilities will be customized to the strengths of the candidate, they will likely include a mix of (in descending order of priority)
* lead generation
* sales calls
* evolution of service message
* proposal writing
We envision a 3-month contract, with the possibility of extension or full-time, depending on results and interest.
Location is not an issue.
Qualifications
* Experience in a professional services setting (creative services such as design a plus)
* Experience in generating new business
* Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal
* Excellent organizational skills
* Comfortable with Internet communication tools (email, IM)
About Portigal Consulting
Founded in 2001, we are a boutique agency, based in the coastal community of Montara, CA, 25 minutes from San Francisco, and 30 minutes from much of Silicon Valley.
Our clients come from a range of industries and include both B2B and B2C programs. Recent clients include: Avaya, BIC, Bosch, Chevron, France Telecom-Orange, GE, Hewlett-Packard, Nestle, SC Johnson, Shure, Sony, and WNBA.
Portigal Consulting brings together user research, design and business strategy to help innovative companies discover and act on new insights about their customers.
We conduct contextual research with target users in order to uncover their unexpressed needs. We then develop a suite of concepts that can address those needs. We also work with organizations to help them introduce or expand their customer-centric design and development processes, including training and facilitation.
Applying Send a resume to hr AT portigal DOT com. Important: include a cover letter about yourself, your relevant experience, and what you would like to bring to the role.
Wednesday February 28th 2007, 10:18 am by Steve Portigal
A screenshot from the My Itineraries page at United. I’m trying to cancel a flight. Their FAQ suggests you can do it from their site, but I had all sorts of trouble on Friday and ended up sending them an email (nicely enabled from that part of the site, with automatic form filling with my ticket number and all that good stuff). It’s 5 days later and they haven’t canceled it or otherwise responded. So now I’m in limbo. Today I went back to check what itineraries they were showing for me. And here’s what I find – button and other interface text is replaced by labels in the code, probably variable names instead of their values.
Neither the bad service nor the poor attention to detail gives me a great feeling about United.
Wednesday February 28th 2007, 9:05 am by Steve Portigal
Last year Nicolas Nova blogged about element of public space that restrict usage – specifically skateboarding, and as one commenter suggested, lying down. Without remembering his post, I took these pictures the other day:
It’s still ugly, but there’s an emotional component (“cute” – “fun” – “neat”) created by the whimsical shapes that counteracts that reaction quite strongly. Many of the anti-sit installations appear as an afterthought, a post-design, without any integration into the original vision. These were probably added after the original design but there’s some attempt to retrofit, conceptually or visually. I’m sure the original planners and architects are horrified, but it kinda mostly works.
Tuesday February 27th 2007, 8:38 pm by Steve Portigal
One of our recent clients, MediaMaster just launched their product, that “lets you store all your music on the internet and play it from any internet-connected device.”
Their path from idea to launch has been a fascinating one (and I don’t know most of it, I’m sure). They came to this with a hand-coded technology to rip (via a CD jukebox) many albums in sequence, sort of a mass-scanning technology for CD ripping. But if you are going to rip the same albums over and over again, it’s time- and cost-effective to simply already have a copy of them already ripped and rather than rip, why not just check liner bar codes for proof of ownership and download the songs already on hand? And since the songs are already online, why not tie it to purchase of a new CD, and why not keep the music online permanently?
They dealt with a crazy mess of technological afforandances, changes of behaviors, retail and other partnership challenges and on and on. We did an online survey with some concepts, and then took concept boards out into homes to talk to different types of hypothesized target customers.
The product development process deals with a lot of moving targets, but startup folks deal with an excess of that challenge, collating input and constraints from so many quarters, it must make them crazy.
I’m excited to see the product launch, and to see where they’ve ended up with it, given where we were at during those rounds of research. I don’t know their business model, since the service is free right now. It’ll be fun to watch what happens with it and see if they make it succeed.
[Another guest post to the Sessions Design School blog] The New York Times writes about Andy Warhol’s grave located in quiet Bethel Park, PA. Imagining the design of memorial marker for any famous artist seems like a worthy conceptual activity (or at least a feature in MAD Magazine), but something about Warhol’s work itself seems to almost demand he be given an parodic (at worst) or referential (at best) headstone. Although Warhol did arrange for his grave to be maintained, if he designed his own headstone, it’s certainly unlike his other work. Fans, however, evolve and build upon the headstone, by adding items such as soup cans and (inexplicably) pocket change. More on his grave here.
A community in Massachusetts designs and prints and uses its own local money. The edges of the system are still rough, but the experiment seems to reveal the costs, challenges, and benefits of a local alternative system.
Thursday February 22nd 2007, 3:15 pm by Steve Portigal
Last night was San Francisco’s Pecha Kucha night. I showed 20 slides, at 20 seconds per slide, on Unconsumption.
The slides are below.
And this widget will play the audio.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
There were some problems with the projection at the beginning so it’s not immediately obvious where we go from slide 1 to slide 2, but hopefully by slide 3 you’ll have figured it and can follow along.
And for better visual quality, I’ve put the slides up on flickr..
The Broadcasts will soon be turned into an official iTunes/podcast/RSS whatever thingie, and I’ll also post the link at that point so you can subscribe and get all the auditory goodness as it happens.
(via DesignObserver) This could be more dictator chic as we’ve talked about here before, but the article is pretty serious and (understandably) one-sided.
Wednesday February 21st 2007, 12:21 pm by Steve Portigal
You can (with a single download) get 739 mp3s by 739 artists from the SXSW festival. That’s a lot of music. As someone points out on MetaFilter that’s over 37 hours of music. Someone else bemoans the organizational task that will create (I’m about to do that task myself).
I downloaded about half as many songs last year, and I really enjoyed them, but it’s an intimidating-if-wonderful gift.
Our digital technologies and the massive capabilities they afford us still continue to exceed or at least push the edges of our capacity as consumers. Indeed, the word consume may hold a clue. Do we consume music? Eat it up, digest it, and excrete/delete when we are done, or are we collectors, accumulating more and more? I imagine many of us are in straddle positions, not being ready to delete an MP3, or many MP3s, because we already possess them.
Update: am slowly working through listening to the songs…some real quality control issues with their distribution. One track with a skip in it, and about two dozen that are seriously truncated.
