Prototyping Case Study: James Jefferson Furniture Company at Gizmos, Inc.'s Kiln

visual design - static and interactive look-and-feel, art
human factors - usability engineering, cognitive science, psychology
communications - written content from marketing, customer service, operations, etc.
computer science - network maintenance and plumbing, database programming, scripting, coding

David: nothing for about five years and then we'll be smarter and it will be cheaper.

John: whole hog now to build the corporate culture and expertise. It will pay off big time later.

Tim: basic website to start with, built in such a way that it is expandable for when we become older and wiser.

Synthesis: a minimal corporate site now and a multi-phase expansion with a flexible timetable.

primary audiences

1) JJFC's business partners: suppliers, distributors

B2B commerce: customer service (self-service)

task: make their jobs easier by communicating with JJFC in a faster and more focused manner.

priority: ease of use

complications: how deep and wide will we let others peer into our information? Following the Golden Rule, how deep and wide do we want to peer into theirs? How will our policies mesh with our partners'? For example, what if Zendar's boss sees it as a productivity loss to have the clerks peering as deeply and widely as they'd like to?

For JJFC, it will drive down costs, specifically paper and employee time spent on the phone and fulfilling requests.

audience members

Zendar, the tattoo'd 25-year-old receivables clerk at a lumber company who needs to meet his boss's monthly cash flow targets. What can the JJFC web do to help Zendar know whether JJFC will be contributing to this month's targets or next month's targets?

Hulda, the 30-year-old warehouse manager at a furniture chain who needs to keep inventory at a minimum. What can the JJFC web do to help Hulda tie her company's sales forecasts into her orders from JJFC?

2) home furniture buyer

B2C commerce: purchasing research

task: research big-ticket purchase

priority: richness of information

For JJFC, it will drive educated customers to our retail partners

audience members

Missy, the 20-year-old looking for starter furniture. She's trying to make her mother realize that she can make it on her own. She loves to shop, and she's not afraid to ask stupid questions. The I3: Insecure Innocent Ingenue

Brainerd, the 30-year-old comparison shopper looking to avoid a retail sales pitch. Having recently broken up with his longtime girlfriend, he's in the position of making a furniture-buying decision for the first time and he's not even sure what the parts are called. Brainerd is in marketing himself and the last thing he wants to do is sound like an idiot when he talks to a sales person. Ideally, he'd like to waltz into the store, point to what he wants, hand over his credit card, and waltz back out. The Immaculate Consumption.

What can JJFC do to turn Brainerd into a repeat customer by giving him as little contact with real people as possible?

secondary audiences

3) info seekers -- turning grazers into visitors into customers

institutional furniture buyers: Let's make a deal! What's the relationship of unit price to number of units?

investors (bankers): does the brand image this web site projects speak well of my investment in JJFC?

suppliers and potential suppliers: how can another company's marketing department learn whether or not to initiate or pursue a sales process with JJFC?

competitors: what can they learn about JJFC that will help them make a good decision? They define themselves.

community: the sixth grader looking for info on a report on wood furniture making. Her dad, by the way, needs a sponsor for her Little League softball team. The JJFC Jets?

4) employment

From job seekers to current employees who want to have pride in their website. "Their" website, not the "company's" website.

5) ???

The mystery audience we won't know is there until we start analyzing server logs and responding to emails.

tertiary audience

6) content stewards

John is very, very correct. However, while satisfying this audience is necessary, it is not sufficient. Backend is one of his special problems, as is visual design for David and usability and standards compliance are for Kerry, etc.

This part of the backend is called the content management system. It has specialized software cousins like CRM, SFA, etc.

Audience members

Tim, Chris, Kerry, and David, who just want to get their jobs done with as little cognitive distraction by the technology as possible.

metrics

ClickZ articles on ROI Marketing for interesting ideas that would also be relevant to JJFC's web marketing efforts

What's wrong with the 500-year-old way in which all companies keep their books? Just about everything, says Baruch Lev, who has proposed a new method for determining the value of the intangible assets that are at the heart of the new economy. ...

We are using a 500-year-old system to make decisions in a complex business environment in which the essential assets that create value have fundamentally changed.

During the agricultural and industrial eras, the main sources of economic value creation were tangible assets such as land, minerals, and factories. Knowledge (always essential) was not the key component of value creation.

In the information era, the source of value of products such as computers, cellular phones, pharmaceuticals, even branded consumer products, has shifted from physical content to knowledge content. Corporate investment in intangibles, such as R&D, franchise and brand development and human capital enhancement, is growing at a substantially faster rate than tangible investment throughout all developed economies. They may be the primary contributor to the earnings power of an enterprise.

Intangible assets are present in every business enterprise, yet only tangible assets and intangible assets purchased in an acquisition appear on the company's balance sheet.

The green-eyeshade gang isn't measuring what really matters to investors. Some far-out thinkers plan to change that. ...

The Financial Accounting Standards Board, the profession's vestal virgins, says that accounting's fundamental purpose is to "provide information that is useful ... in making rational investment, credit, and similar decisions." By that standard, it flunks.

We're not talking fraud here--we're talking irrelevance, with the result that investors are in the dark and managers operate by guess and by gosh. At the very least it reduces prosperity.

advertising

After dropping 11 percent last year, the Internet ad industry is showing signs of strength again. As brands return to the Web, they're finding a vastly different landscape and a whole new set of rules.

New online ad formats are whirling, shaking, popping, and tilting all over the Web.

CNET started it, with giant rectangular ads that ran smack-dab in the middle of news articles. Then Yahoo, NYTimes.com, and a handful of others weighed in with full-screen video promotions and interactive gimmicks like animated cars that tore across their homepages. Before long, it seemed that every major site was experimenting with some new, increasingly attention-grabbing ad -- all in an attempt to woo jaded advertisers back to the Web. Herewith, a look at the new ad types and what's working.

Ads.com -- "All of the ads. None of the shows. ... virtually any current network commercial."

Enter a zip code and learn more about the lifestyle of the people that live in that neighborhood! This exciting feature is based on your selection of either PRIZM or MicroVision lifestyle segmentation systems, both of which classify people by demographic and behavioral characteristics into "Clusters."

pay television -- The networks will discover the real worth or market value of their programming. They will have to start providing programs that the consumer will be willing to pay for. Now, all they have to do is convince a sponsor to advertise during a program the network says the consumer really wants based on their polls, focus groups, and internal politics.

content management

open source web portal software. JJFC could use it for the type of idea Kerry came up with last night -- building a community of people interested in interior design.

ClickZ articles on search engine optimization. If JJFC pursues Kerry's community idea -- community of people interested in interior design, for example -- what can you do to make the site more accessible to that community via search engines?

community-building sites

What are other industries are doing with something like Furniture.com or what are other companies are doing for community-building sites, for example:

task-oriented sites

Chapter 1: The Task-Centered Design Process of
Task-Centered User Interface Design
by Clayton Lewis and John Rieman

The above link is to the table of contents. For now, read just the first chapter. Learn more about the nature of the gap implicit in our 4 to 1 vote on Monday night.

Alan Cooper promotes goal-centered design, which he defines a little differently than Lewis and Rieman define task. Learn more:

Getting a Clue

In the news ...

By his own proud admission, Avi Adelman is an irrepressible muckraker.

As the proprietor of BarkingDogs.org, a "proactive" news website that unearths political malfeasance in and around Dallas, Texas, Adelman has been, as he loves to say, "a thorn in the side of a lot of people out here."

And for all his digging, he has faced more than a few scrapes. Once, the city actually tried to shut down his site. They failed.

Now Adelman is locked in a battle against the Belo media corporation, owner of The Dallas Morning News, which sent him a legalistic letter this week demanding that BarkingDogs.org remove all "deep links" to the DallasNews.com site. ...

"As you may know, the Belo content (various news articles) is protected by copyright laws of the United States," the company's legal letter states. "Accordingly, we must request that you cease and desist. ...

"Any proper links to the Belo content should be directly hyperlinked to The Dallas Morning News homepage located at www.dallasnews.com." ...

Belo says that those links "can result in a viewer not understanding that the content is on our client's site" and, more importantly, "allows the viewer to avoid the advertising, etc., on the homepage (which places our client in a bad position with respect to its advertisers, etc.)."

For cable subscribers, Internet service may be an afterthought. But to cable industry executives, high-speed Internet is the new ballgame.

"We just finished ploughing billons of dollars into the ground so we have a fat, two-way pipe to the home," said Christopher Bogart, president of Time Warner's cable business. "Now we need a return on that capital."

Even if nothing else is making money online, at least porn sites can be counted on to make a buck, right?

Not quite.

The easy money is gone. These days, purveyors of online adult fare are grappling with rapid changes in the technology and economics of their industry.

``People get the idea that you can walk into this business and make millions,'' said Lee Yarbrough, who runs an adult trade show called CybernetExpo. ``It's not going to happen.''

Viewers, not reluctant broadcasters and programmers, should get to choose if they want the super-sharp pictures of high-definition television, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell said Tuesday.

"When I go to Circuit City, I don't see everybody over by the 13-inch black-and-white," Powell said. "They're all over in that dark room" watching HDTV.

In addition to sharper pictures, viewers are starting to get more control over program times, Hendricks and other programmers said. Video-on-demand technology and set-top digital recorders will allow viewers to toss out their TV Guides and watch programs whenever they want, forcing big changes in the television industry.

"Web accessibility" is a hot topic today. You may also be familiar with other phrases like the W3C Web Accessibility Inititiative (WAI) or U.S. Section 508 guidelines. Many countries have Web accessibility guidelines that apply to their government sites. Now private companies are also realizing the benefits of creating accessible technology. The demand for accessible sites is growing, but Web workers, like you, are often unclear how to make sites more accessible. Designing an accessible site isn't necessarily harder, but it involves unique limitations that make you approach design from a different perspective.

How a former has-been kicked its old habits, got open-source religion, and regained its status as one of the biggest, baddest tech companies on earth. ...

Last June, IBM's revenues from services such as systems integration, product support, consulting, and website hosting surpassed computer hardware revenues for the first time in the company's 91-year history. And while software -- now almost entirely open-standards-compatible -- accounted for just 15 percent of IBM's revenues in 2001, it contributed a third of gross profits.

Good usability is critical to the success of a website. Traditional usability engineering techniques can be difficult to apply to web usability evaluation because the users are heterogeneous and geographically dispersed. Also, website software development cycles demand quick turnaround.

The objective of the NIST Web Metrics Testbed is to explore the feasibility of a range of tools and techniques that support rapid, remote, and automated testing and evaluation of website usability.

Advice for managing wannadots

The Ten Deadly Mistakes of Wanna-Dots
by Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Harvard Business Review, January 2001, p. 91.

1. Make a major company-wide push to link and integrate your online presence.

2. Commit resources, both staff time and appropriate leadership.

3. To start, do something ambitious; rebrand the organization or change a core process.

4. If you must out-source the project, choose a vendor who knows your business and can work with your off-line brand.

5. Be prepared to question whether anything you do off-line will work on-line and be prepared to reinvent processes if not your whole business.

6. Break the rules if you have to, including the traditional corporate metrics, hierarchy, and standards of cost controls, quarterly accountability, human resources, and purchasing.

7. Integrate your online presence even if it means integrating your offline presence. That is, let the internet drive your organizational architecture.

8. Anticipate competition from insurgents, both start-ups and those from seemingly other industries.

9. Allow for changes throughout your organization and include lots of ongoing training.

10. Make your online presence an opportunity to listen better to your customer.

There's a good chance that the screwdriver or steel tape measure in your house was made by Stanley Works.

Stanley has been the toolmaker heart of New Britain, Conn., and arguably of the country, since 1843, when Frederick T. Stanley began his hardware factory. For years, Stanley Works was a paternalistic hometown company, where whole families worked for years.

But earlier this month, at the annual stockholders meeting, Stanley's CEO, John M. Trani, raised the flag of Bermuda (figuratively) in a plan to join the parade of companies reincorporating overseas to avoid US taxes on income generated overseas. (The flag-raising was halted the next day in the face of legal action.) When Mr. Trani declared the meeting finished, a man in a business suit stood up and shouted, "I hope you fall flat on your face."

The capacity crowd, many of them retired Stanley employees, bristled with anger. Their reasons were fiscal, patriotic, sentimental: The reincorporation would require shareholders to exchange their current shares for "Stanley Bermuda" shares, making them liable for capital gains, which could be onerous, since Stanley shareholders typically hold their stock a long time. The company has confirmed that shareholders will be paying the government about $150 million in capital gains taxes.

The patriotism issue was strong.

On Tuesday, the Librarian of Congress rejected proposed royalty rates that webcasters say would have caused them to go bankrupt and would effectively shut down Internet radio.

Digital cameras and computers are revolutionizing moviemaking not necessarily for the better. ...

Lucas is disappointed that most people will watch his digital movie in analog.

"Poor picture and sound quality have been a thorn in my side ever since I got into this business," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. Digital flimmaking makes, "cinema a more painterly medium.

"It offers filmmakers a whole range of possibilities (but) technology has nothing to do with art itself. It merely gives the artist more freedom. Artists constantly bang up against the edges and limits of technology."

Staggernation's applications using the Google API: GAPS, GAWSH, and GARBO. See their respective Read Me pages for more information.

Microsoft Corp. is aggressively lobbying the Pentagon to squelch its growing use of freely distributed computer software and switch to proprietary systems such as those sold by the software giant, according to officials familiar with the campaign.

In what one military source called a "barrage" of contacts with officials at the Defense Information Systems Agency and the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over the past few months, the company said "open source" software threatens security and its intellectual property.

But the effort may have backfired. A May 10 report prepared for the Defense Department concluded that open source often results in more secure, less expensive applications and that, if anything, its use should be expanded.

Fear: Microsoft Takes on the Pentagon (article will be archived soon; please let me know so I can update the link)
by Art Jahnke
Darwin magazine, May 27, 2002

Talk about your war games: A Pentagon report has said that
open source is often more secure than proprietary software.
Microsoft begs to differ.

Telling the Telecom Story (article will be archived soon; please let me know so I can update the link)
by David Weinberger
Darwin magazine, May 24, 2002

What's the technological argument for fighting the incumbent telecommunication companies?

Let's just agree that the Internet is the best way our species has ever come up with for spreading free speech and free markets on a global scale. Screwing this up would be an epochal mistake. And, we want to make sure that Americans don't lock ourselves out of this arena, repeating the mistakes we made in, say, the auto industry. So, what do we do?

Analyzing teenagers' attitudes and desires has long been a crucial strategy of the fashion and entertainment industries. Get it wrong and your product can fall out of favor, like Levi's jeans. Get it right, like the clothing chain Hot Topic, and you can build a successful company on teenagers' buying power.

Now, as Wildseed's focus-group session demonstrates, cellphone manufacturers are maneuvering in that same tricky terrain, with the goal of making cellphones that are designed expressly for teenagers. Some companies are retooling existing phone models, adding features and looks that appeal to young users. Others, like Wildseed, are designing phones for teenagers from the ground up.

More than half of all U.S. Internet users regularly download commercial software without paying for it, but only 12 percent see such actions as ``piracy,'' a new industry survey concludes.

This site is for anyone who wishes to explore realistic alternatives to Microsoft software. Our aim is to provide accurate information about, and analyses of, non-Microsoft software and to discuss the benefits and problems you are likely to encounter if you adopt it instead of a Microsoft solution.

Linux, the open-source operating system with an outsider mystique, is now proliferating on powerful government computer systems in the United States and abroad with technology giants increasingly providing support.

At a Tokyo trade show on Friday, IBM Corp. was announcing the sale of more than 75 Linux-based computer systems to U.S. agencies including the Air Force, the Defense, Agriculture and Energy departments and the Federal Aviation Administration.

Overseas, Linux systems help keep order in Germany's parliament as well as China's post office, France's culture, defense and education ministries and other federal agencies in Europe and Asia.

In an interview with [INSIDE] Magazine, Turner Broadcasting CEO Jamie Kellner voiced this opinion on the issue: "[T]he ad skips . . .. It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming."

When prompted, Kellner did admit that "there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom."





Showroom information design	Playroom interactivity design	Research Lab usability design
Workbench web design applications	Kiln digital development process	Toolkit digital technology guide


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modified: June 5, 2002 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/gizmos/kiln/casejjfcsp02.htm

JJFC Case

MBA 604 - Spring 2002

the team

primary audiences

1) JJFC's business partners: suppliers, distributors

audience members

2) home furniture buyer

audience members

secondary audiences

3) info seekers -- turning grazers into visitors into customers

4) employment

5) ???

tertiary audience

6) content stewards

Audience members

metrics

advertising

content management

community-building sites

task-oriented sites

Getting a Clue

In the news ...

Advice for managing wannadots