• [from steve_portigal] ThatsMyFace.com – [Technology continues to trickle down, where image processing and digital printing previously associated with movie special effects and commercial printing now enable little businesses to crop up, offering fairly unique types of products] Gifts with personalized faces, including custom action figures, celebrity action figures, 3D portraits, masks, jewelry, papercraft, and ornamental heads.
• [from steve_portigal] How to Have an Idea [Frank Chimero] – [A little comic that amuses as it inspires and teaches, suggesting that creativity is tied to doing, not just thinking or (gulp) talking. Manifests so adroitly while we believe user research really comes alive when you use it to start generating concepts for things to make and do] No one crumples a blank sheet of paper.
• [from steve_portigal] The Medium – E-Readers Collective [NYTimes.com] – [A Kindle feature takes advantage of the inherently digital nature of the medium, but has consequences for the experience] But many writers don’t write aphoristically, and many readers don’t read for aphorisms. In a popularly highlighted world, we all may begin to. The dotted line, like the distinctive hue or underscore that signals a word is clickable on the Web, may be a new kind of punctuation that affects contemporary style. (Amazon's most heavily highlighted books include Gladwell’s “Outliers” and Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture”) Readers coming to e-books freshly purchased from Amazon might be taken aback to find them already marked up. Stumbling on a passage that other people care about, framed as though you should care about it too, can seem like a violation of virgin text. It’s bad enough that vandals have gotten to your “new” edition before you have and added emphases unendorsed by author or publisher. What’s worse is that they invariably choose the most Polonius-like passages.

• [from steve_portigal] The opposite of user experience design [Jorge Arango] – [I've experienced the bewildering confusion of bureaucracy in another country but have always assumed implicitly that for "those people" it was tenable. Jorge's tangible frustration and brilliant insight puts the lie to my ridiculous parochialism] One of the advantages of living in the developing world is that I am exposed to a wide variety of UX disasters. If you find it hard to define UX, try dealing with a Panamanian government office. You will quickly see what a lack of UX thinking looks like, and this will in turn aid your appreciation and understanding of good UX. A few weeks ago I had to go to the Panamanian immigration office to take care of some paperwork. When I got there, I found chaos…I’ve come to understand that the opposite of UX design is not shitty design, thoughtless design, or piecemeal design. It is anarchy. Only strong leadership with a clear user-centric vision can transform the organization’s culture and improve the experience of its constituents.
• [from steve_portigal] Please vote for our SXSW 2011 Panel – Mommy, Where Do Good Products Come From? (with Gretchen Anderson) – [Thanks for your vote!] Business case studies are the ultimate in reductionism: A complex business activity rooted in a specific context of people, company culture, time, and place is boiled down to a few key ideas. People confuse the terms innovation and invention; looking for breakthrough ideas sends companies into a frenzied search for "new" things not great or disruptive things. In this session, we will explore some different pathways to creating great product ideas. As designers and researchers, we're experienced enough to know that design research isn't the only approach or even always the best approach (a point of view that Don Norman vehemently argued in recent writings). For instance, design research wouldn't be sufficient to create a disruptive innovation like Gowalla. We'll outline a framework that looks at different approaches to idea generation, including corporate competencies and culture, customer needs and cultural context, and technological innovation.
• [from steve_portigal] Please vote for my SXSW 2011 Panel – Diving Deep: Best Practices For Interviewing Users – [Thanks for your vote!] The skill of getting the right information from users is surprisingly complex and nuanced. This session will focus on getting past the obvious shallow information into the deeper, more subtle, yet crucial, insights. If you are going to the effort to meet with users in order to improve your designs, it's essential that you know how to get the best information and not leave insights behind. Being great in "field work" involves understanding and accepting your interviewee's world view, and being open to what they need to tell you (in addition to what you already know you want to learn). We'll focus on the importance of rapport-building and listening and look at techniques for both. We will review different types of questions, and why you need to have a range of question types. We'll also suggest practice exercises for improving your own interviewing skills and how to engage others in your organization successfully in the interviewing experience.
• [from steve_portigal] The Minds Behind the Mind-Set List [The Chronicle of Higher Education] – [Freshmen in 2010 have never known a world in which a website can't get a book deal. Yes, the Mind-Set List book is coming] Mr. McBride, a professor of English and the humanities, says the list started on a lark back in 1997—some old college hands unwinding on a Friday afternoon, musing on how much freshmen don't know about recent history and culture. But such blind spots are to be expected, they had agreed, given the relative youth of the incoming class. They had concluded that professors should be mindful of how very different their students' life experiences are from their own. With colleagues, they had brainstormed about the cultural touchstones for that year's entering freshman class, whose members would have been born in 1979. That was the year of the Iran hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Three Mile Island. The resulting list was passed around and eventually found its way into the hands of a Wall Street Journal reporter, who subsequently wrote about it.
• [from steve_portigal] Beloit College Mindset List 2010 – [The annual list, in time for this year's freshmen, telling us older folks how our view of the world differs in key and/or bemusing ways]. For most of their lives, major U.S. airlines have been bankrupt. A coffee has always taken longer to make than a milkshake.

• The Americanization of Mental Illness [NYTimes.com] – Mental illnesses have never been the same the world over but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places…“We might think of the culture as possessing a ‘symptom repertoire’ ­ a range of physical symptoms available to the unconscious mind for the physical expression of psychological conflict."..Those who minister to the mentally ill inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate…For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world…we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders ­ depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them ­ now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases.
• The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s [NYTimes.com] – They theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.

  “People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

  Those in the Net Generation spend two hours a day talking on the phone and still use e-mail frequently. The iGeneration spends considerably more time texting than talking on the phone, pays less attention to television and tends to communicate more over instant-messenger. The newest generations will expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with

• Electric Literature Magazine Offers Fiction in New Media – The founders of Electric Literature, a new quarterly literary magazine, seek nothing less than to revitalize the short story in the age of the short attention span. To do so, they allow readers to enjoy the magazine any way they like: on paper, Kindle, e-book, iPhone and, starting next month, as an audiobook. YouTube videos feature collaborations among their writers and visual artists and musicians. Starting next month, Rick Moody will tweet a story over three days.
• French Government Offers Free Newspapers to Young Readers – Under “My Free Newspaper,” 18- to 24-year-olds will be offered a free, yearlong subscription to a newspaper of their choice.

  “Winning back young readers is essential for the financial survival of the press, and for its civic dimension,” the culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, said.

• Survey Says Baby Boomers Think Playing With Your Blackberry During A Meeting Is Rude – The 'tude in the blog entry about the survey is as interesting as the 'tude the survey's creation and content point to. Social norms shift and that gets introduced and changes the way people interact gets put through the social norm filter: is it rude? Is it distracting? Should other people stop doing it? Or should we get over it? This just points to the transition we're going through rather than offering any clear sense of what's going on. Full disclosure: I'm a Gen-Xer and I bolted from a boring presentation a few weeks ago when the person behind me tapped on the shoulder and asked me to stop using my iPhone as she found it distracting [I was discreetly using Google Reader in my lap].
• Gartner's Hype cycle – a graphic representation of the maturity, adoption and business application of specific technologies – Hype cycles characterize the over-enthusiasm or "hype" and subsequent disappointment that typically happens with the introduction of new technologies.They also show how and when technologies move beyond the hype, offer practical benefits and become widely accepted.

  Five phases of the hype cycle
  1. "Technology Trigger" —A breakthrough, product launch or other event that generates significant press and interest
  2. "Peak of Inflated Expectations" — Frenzy of publicity typically generates over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations; There may be some successful applications of a technology, but there are typically more failures
  3. "Trough of Disillusionment" — Fails to meet expectations and becomes unfashionable
  4. "Slope of Enlightenment" —some businesses experiment to understand the benefits and practical application
  5. "Plateau of Productivity" — benefits become widely demonstrated and accepted

========================================================
FreshMeat #16 from Steve Portigal

               (__)
               (oo) Fresh
                \\/  Meat 

FreshMeat? Well, thank you kindly, I’d love some!
=========================================================
All dolled up, with someplace to go.
=========================================================

American Girl Place is an astonishing retail environment
in Chicago, a destination for the many fans of the
American Girl dolls. Over 5 million of the 18-inch,
slightly cartoonish American Girl dolls have been sold by
the Pleasant Company (started by Pleasant T. Rowland in
1986, and if that isn’t proof that name equals destiny,
I don’t know what would be) who were acquired by Mattel
in 1998.

The Place itself is a three-floor department store located
just off of Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile. It truly
is a destination retail setting, doing much more than
simply vending the products, it takes the whole concept
even further, with such amenities as a salon, and a cafe.

It is somewhat difficult to separate the wonders of
American Girl Place from the wonders of the American Girl
products, so I’ll describe them together.

The products are extremely well-organized, and highly
structured. The lead offering is The American Girls
Collection: a series of dolls that are each branded
is a consistent set of products (i.e., books about
their adventures and period-appropriate costumes).

For example, Addy is a courageous girl of the Civil War,
from 1864 (Addy – 1864 – A proud, courageous girl – stories
of freedom and family). Josephina is an Hispanic girl of
heart and hope, from 1824. Kit is a bright spark in the dark
depression, from 1934. There are 8 dolls in all, ranging
from 1764 to 1944. In the lower level of the store, they
are each presented in gorgeous museum-like dioramas around
the perimeter of a large room, with product pull-tags
placed directly below. The whole room reeks of heritage,
legacy, quality, and the better times of our past.

The balancing act here is how they depict parts of US
history that were difficult (or oppressive, or racist)
through the eyes of their Girl, without being revisionist
about the past. I don’t know if they succeed in that
balance. I have a gut reaction when I see a smiling doll
who had to deal with slavery, or economic challenges.
“Wait a minute – that was a terrible experience – why are
they celebrating it?” – but I do eventually realize that
there are many stories to any experience. People will
smile, care for a child, fall in love, or whatever,
regardless of the larger circumstances. Wasn’t this one of
the many lessons from The Diary of Anne Frank?

I was fascinated to see that their latest offering is
called “Girls of Many Lands.” It is possibly a response
to 9/11, in the increasing awareness within the US that
understanding the rest of the world is vitally important.
On another level, the text indicates that these girls
are finding their place in a changing world, a reference
to the uncertainty of 2002, and the uncertainty of
pre-adolescence: “As you get older, the world seems both
bigger and smaller at the same time. It’s full of
opportunities – and questions, too. How do I fit in? Who
will I become? What is life like for other girls my age?”
The dolls themselves are smaller, intended for display, not
play, and include Neela from India in 1939, and Spring Pearl
from China, in 1857.

The second major product line is American Girl Today. The
American Girls Collection (described above) times out in 1944,
and is based on specific, fixed backstories. In contrast,
American Girl Today dolls are ready for personalization. The
set of dolls is displayed in a glass case, all dressed in the
same neutral school uniform, posed as if for a class photo.
They all seem completely alike, but upon closer inspection,
one sees the variation in hair, eye, and skin color. Looking
at all these near-identical, smiling, staring dolls was pretty
darn creepy.

The dolls are available in a range of combinations of pigments
(i.e., GT21F hass light skin, curly honey-blond hair, hazel eyes,
while GT2F has medium skin, dark brown hair, and lightbrown
eyes). Rather than defining the backstory, they are creating
a neutral backdrop for the customer to build upon, further
served by identifying the doll with a model number such as
GT3F rather than a name like Kit. The tag line is “What kind of girl are you?”

There are a huge number of outfits available for the Today doll
including: cheerleader, baseball player, soccer player, skier, and baker.

In one of the few product line inconsistencies, there is a
Today doll named Lindsey. There is no obvious reason why
they’ve created a character within this product line. Oh,
and what do these dolls cost? For $135, you can purchase
Lindsey, with the Lindsey book, a scooter, a laptop and
laptop case. This is a $15 saving versus buying each item
separately.

There are also a few supplementary product lines such as
Angelina Ballerina (a mouse), and Bitty Baby.

A number of electronic gizmos (for a person, not for a doll)
are available, including a PDA, a digital video camera, and
an MP3 player. Of anything they sell, this was the least
integrated product line – they all were clearly not your
mother’s Palm, with lots of pink plastic and fun buttons
and so on, but it didn’t seem like they had a complete idea
as to what their design language was for electronic goods.

There are also books, about feelings, school, boys, and
babysitting. My personal favorite was a series of books
about Amelia, who carries around a notebook that she fills
with interesting facts and observations. She was the only
character who’s hook was that she was smart. She seemed
reminiscent of Harriet the Spy, and her products seemed to
be ignored by shoppers during my visits.

The store features a salon, where there are options between
$10 and $20 that include brushing out the doll’s tangles, a
misting, styling, and a hair accessory such as a barrette.
There are also books for sale that give styling tips for
the doll’s hair (and for your hair).

There is a cafe with a parodic Art Deco look, thick black
and white horizontal stripes run around the room, with lots
of hot pink and enormous “buttons” serving as drapery
clasps. The menu is a prix-fixe affair, offering a 3-course
lunch, and a similar tea. It’s the ultimate “ladies who
lunch” environment, for young ladies, of course. A poster
outside the store advertises the cafe, showing the empty
restaurant, with just a doll sitting at a table, alone. This
was definitely a disturbing image.

In the basement is a theater, with live performances of
the second American Girls musical, “Circle of Friends.”
Soundtrack CDs are available for purchase. The soundtrack
to the American Girls Revue includes “The American Girls
Anthem” in which the characters declare their intention
to be the very best that they can be.

Overall, a key here is how they have created multiple
customers, all experiencing a different vicarious
experience, yet all of them compatible. The dolls are
rooted in the past, suggesting an authenticity and history
akin to an original Teddy Roosevelt bear (versus a modern
day Gund or Beanie Baby.) The store plays host to young
girls with their mothers, and their grandmothers, each
taking this in from a different perspective. Grandmothers
remember their childhood, and raising their own children,
mothers can continue a legacy, and the girls are into
something tuned just for them. The extra dollop of genius
is in the next step of recursion: the child can play
mother to her doll through these products (certainly,
allowing a young girl to play at motherhood has been part
of the appeal of dolls forever, but American Girl taps
into that incredibly well, for example the Dress Like
Your Doll department with matching girl-sized and
doll-sized outfits). The result is three-and-a-half
generations of customers!

Playing this game further, near the front entrance is a
rack of souvenirs available for both girls, and their
dolls. There are girl-sized and doll-sized umbrellas as
well as caps, t-shirts, and jackets that read “American
Girl Place.” My doll went to American Girl Place and all
she got was this lousy T-shirt?

Or consider the photo studio, where shoppers can get
their own copy of American Girl magazine, with their
photo on the cover. Which begs the question – who do they
suggest the American Girl actually is? The doll? The girl?
Or, both? American girls buy American Girls. Another subtle
but powerful play with identity.

So what are some of the lessons here?
– Understand the multiple players in a purchase process,
and ideally sell to them all
– Organize and structure your products consistently
– Create products that tell stories
– Create accessories and product extensions that tell
more stories and help your customers tell stories
– If you want to create a destination retail for your
brand, don’t do a “theme park” – take the core
experience you offer further

Of course, this is nothing but a first pass. Observation,
and analysis, and all of it IMHO. There are several
obvious next steps:
– look at the actual customers to test these hypotheses
– understand other aspects of doll culture (consider
collectors as a “lead user” community, for example)
– consider American Girl Place as a metaphor, and being
to apply the lessons learned from the process to other
business situations beyond selling dolls.

As a final thought, we always find it horrifying to see a
company being effective in marketing to a target, especially
if that target is a child. I was prepared for that (ridiculous and
personally hypocritical) reaction myself, but I think it’s relevant
to look at the overwhelming positiveness of their message, and
how sincerely and consistently they present it.

Update:

Dolls as Role Models, Neither Barbie Nor Britney
By STEPHEN KINZER

Published: November 6, 2003

CHICAGO, Nov. 5 – Surrounded by exuberant girls, including her own 8-year-old, a Wisconsin resident named Jean Carter seemed positively thrilled as she paid $650, more than twice what she had planned, at American Girl Place here.

To start, she had bought two of the store’s $90 dolls, each representing a character from a different era in American history, and then novels about each doll’s character. Then came high tea, the musical theater show and finally some of the endless stream of tie-in merchandise that has made American Girl a huge marketing success as well as a cultural phenomenon.

“It’s a racket, but it’s a good racket,” Ms. Carter said. “The kids get strong historical role models and stories that teach them a lot about life. You actually feel good spending the money.”

Update:

The Baffler, #15, an article by Terri Kapsalis that offers up some of the same observations of the American Girl Place (does she read FreshMeat?) but brings in an interesting comparison to the way prospective mothers interact with the catalogs of sperm donors.