IDEA09: UX as a Crucial Driver of Social Business Design

by September 18, 2009

At IDEA09 in Toronto, Jeff Dachis discussed User Experience as a Crucial Driver of Social Business Design and outlined the considerations organizations need to leverage social software in their business.

  • 15 years ago we thought we were on the verge of changing commerce, communications, and culture. “Everything that can be digital will be” because it would be better, faster, and cheaper. If everything were digital, user experience would become the only value differentiator. In the digital world, user experience is the key definer of value.
  • Then the dot-com crash happened and a lot of these ideas fell out of favor. But now many of these early (lofty) ideas have proven out in modern online systems. User experience matters again.
  • User Experience Design has become more like business design –and designers have a seat at the table again.
  • In digital economy now need to consider all aspects of digital ecosystems: content, developers, products, commerce, cloud services, support services, applications, supply chain
  • User experience design needs to embrace these new considerations.
  • Social business design: determines how people and companies interact within a digital ecosystem
  • There are four archetypes that matter in a social business world: ecosystem, hivemind, dynamic signal, and metafilter.
  • Ecosystem of connections: Used to be that employees, customers, and suppliers connected separately. Why not connect them all together? Why not tap into potential employees, customers, and suppliers. All have a core and external need to be connected.
  • Be aware of others within the system, Actively seek or enable connections, Support identity and profiles, build reputation
  • Hivemind: a company’s willingness to share ideas and collaborate. Most businesses do not want to collaborate or share. Most information sits on desktops and is not searchable, findable, etc. Need to move from hoarding to collaborating. This is a cultural change.
  • Increase responsibility to contribute, motivate, reward, and incent participation
  • Dynamic Signal: communication as work not just for work. Encourage not only people to communicate but objects as well.
  • Metafilter: find meaning in all the noise. When everyone is engaged and participating, a lot get created. Takes a lot of energy to manage all the noise. Need to filter, tag, sort and make meaning out of it.
  • Define constructs for measurement, Define relevance, Amplify relevance, Simplify, Multiple presentation options (visual)
  • Why Social Business Design? Trends in the marketplace to can yield leveraged and emergent outcomes. Can create better outcomes based on size of ecosystems. Emergent outcomes can surprise you (things you did not know).
  • Customer participation, business partner optimization, workforce collaboration are areas where the four social business design archetypes can be applied. Ideally all these assets can be woven together.