• Matt Jones (founder of Dopplr.com)
• Scott Berkun (author of The Myths of Innovation).
• Todd Lefelt (Director of User Experience  at Huge)
• Microsoft (sponsor) with the Interactive Surface tabletop.
• The Cocktail (sponsor) introducing Iwannagothere.com, the travellers social network born in Spain.
• Complete list of speakers, sessions and registration at businesstobuttons.com

When and where: 11-12 of June in Malmö, Sweden

Short bios:
Garr Reynolds, Associate Professor of Management at Kansai Gaidai University in Japan, is the creator of the most popular website on presentation design and delivery on the net: presentationzen.com. He shares lessons and perspectives on making remarkable presentations that are simpler, visual, engaging, and effective. He is the former Manager of Worldwide User Group Relations at Apple Computer, and spent most of the ’90s at Sumitomo Electric Industries in Osaka.

Scott Berkun is the author of bestselling books “Making things happen” and “The Myths of Innovation”.  At Microsoft from 1994-2003 he oversaw projects such as Internet Explorer (v1-5 of), Windows and MSN. He has taught at the University of Washington, regularly contributes to Harvard Business Digital, and has featured as an innovation and management expert on MSNBC and on CNBC. He writes frequently on his popular blog:  scottberkun.com

Matt Jones is a founder and lead designer of Dopplr.com, a service for frequent travellers. His previous positions include Director of User-Experience Design at Nokia Design, and creative director for Sapient in London. In the late 90s, he was creative director for the launch of BBC News Online. He has spoken at events such as Reboot, Ars Electronica, O’Reilly’s Etech and FooCamp. He now blogs at www.magicalnihilism.com.

Todd Lefelt is the Director of User Experience  of Huge, where he oversees research and interaction design for projects including Audible.com, Nickelodeon and The Warner Music Group. Todd has over 10 years of experience leading the definition of scalable interactive media strategies and user friendly experiences.  www.hugeinc.com

Iwannagothere.com is a social network dedicated to travel, an off-shoot of The Cocktail. During the conference the people behind Iwannagothere will be showing how they have used the Effect Map methodology in the development of the service and will be launching their mobile  service, co-designed by The Cocktail and InUse.

About the conference

From Business to Buttons is the most important European conference on Design for Business. It’s third edition runs between 11-12 of June in Malmö, Sweden.
For whom: designers, business strategists and user experience professionals.
Organisers: InUse, Ergonomidesing, Malmö University – Sponsors: The Cocktail (Spain) and Microsoft.

I prefer the definition which says a product is something we own whilst a service is something we can use temporarily. The difference between buying and hiring a dinner jacket.
This definition seems useful, so I’ll try to apply it to a few real life projects (the output of which I would have called generically Product in the past):

An e-learning platform – Definitely providing an education service
An online newspaper – An information service
A software-as-a-service online shop – Can provide a similar service to a sales assistant offering expert advice and guiding the customer towards  a suitable service package.
A mobile mapping application – A tricky one. I have downloaded the software (so I own it), but for it to be useful at all I need data provided by the mapping company (a service) facilitated by my network operator (also a service).
A multinational corporate website – Essentially a marketing and communication tool between company, customers, investors, press, etc. At the same time you can consider it as a provider of self-customer-services.

Why is this differentiation relevant to interactive projects?

It is pretty clear that many online projects will generate hybrid product-service offerings, just as in the physical world. But I think we (practitioners) are developing more services than we imagined, yet treating them mostly as products.

Services usually involve longer or repeated engagements with the user and perhaps we can contemplate that more efficiently.  It would be really interesting to start using rich design tools such as service blueprinting in addition to content maps and prototypes.

Let’s see how it works in practice.

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Some interesting reading: Better than owning

It’s a bit like delivering a baby and hoping the parents will be  responsible and caring. Because good user-experience  and ultimately the success of a website or an interactive product depends hugely on its management, perhaps more than we would like to admit. A couple of examples:

> In a content-rich site we (consultants) often have no control over the quality of incoming content.
> On an e-commerce site, we don’t determine pricing, delivery policies and fulfillment.
> A well designed, user-friendly corporate website can improve the image and perception of a traditional brand, but it can´t change the corporate culture by itself, which is ultimately what governs the relationship with their clients.

I think it’s important to differentiate  usability, user experience and customer experience in terms of expectations whenever we are to be made accountable for results and ROI.  There are many definitions – this is my understanding:

The good news is that there are several ways to extend our scope of influence so the final customer experience is closer to what we had conceived initially:

> Design flexibly to scale – sites tend to inflate in content, sections and functionality with the time.
> Speak to stakeholders during the project (marketing, customer care, IT…) – understand their requirements,  advise  on realistic resources they should plan for.
> Write a set a recommendations for post-development UX management, e.g: Fulfillment best-practices, focus areas for customer care, privacy policies, advertising and editorial guidelines, etc.

It’s great to be the product midwife but it’s much better to be the godmother!