Friday, April 03, 2015

This Week in EID - Episode 48



For innovation Monday this week, we talked about the Japanese design concept of kawaii (the syrupy cuteness you associate with products like Hello Kitty) and how Line (Japanese app developer) used it to convert a simple messaging app into a worldwide phemon.  This is a great example of taking an unmet, indirect user need and turning it into a billion dollar business strategy.  This is a great piece to read if you are involved in any kind of design work.  Whether you use kawaii or some other design attribute or feature, you never really know what will take off.  Twitter never thought of hashtags and those are perhaps the major source of its growth.

We covered a Supreme Court ruling on workplace accommodation on Tuesday. This is not just relevant for pregnant workers, gender equality, or even workplace accommodation.  As we see with the huge public todo over Indiana’s RFRA law, discrimination, equal opportunity, and equal access issues pop up all over the place.  Business to business, business to consumer, business to employee, state to citizen, state to business, etc.  Understanding the nuances behind these decisions can save you a lot of heartache.

Wednesday’s topic is a personal passion of mine – overprotecting kids.  Whether the over protection is from parents, schools, governments, or social shaming through Twitter attacks, it degrades the child’s development of important personal strengths like grit, persistence, and resilience.  And I would suggest that these qualities are even more important than the topics covered on standardized tests!

Finally, Thought Provoking Thursday gave you something to chew on for the weekend.  Where is UX going? We linked to some predictions that I personally thought were kind of weak, with the intention of getting you to add some more meat to our imagination of the future.  Have you added yours yet?  You have all weekend to think about it.