The Johnnies have asked me to write a monthly column about culture and concerns as they relate to cross-border user experience (UX), in Europe and beyond. This is an honour for someone born in Texas, USA (me) but probably seems odd to most everyone else (you). Let me share some background.

My father was Austrian. My mother’s family was German. The “Old World” wasn’t just a place in the memory of an aging grandparent and we certainly didn’t worship our ethnicity (as third- and fourth-generation Americans are apt to do). We travelled extensively every year (Rome and Florence were almost always on the … »

Over roughly the last 10 years, China and India have given way to a huge rise in technology outsourcing. Jobs are outsourced from companies like Microsoft, Google, T-Mobile, Honeywell, and many others. In Microsoft I’ve worked with teams in both India and China developing software for a variety of uses. Having our headquarters in the US, I usually work with small satellite teams in these countries. I couldn’t help but wonder why these countries who had become huge in the area of software technology, struggled so much in the area of user experience and UI innovation. … »

If there is a future for designers and marketers in big business, it lies not in brand, nor in “UX”, nor in any colorful way of framing total control over a consumer, such as “brand equity”, “brand loyalty”, the “end to end customer journey”, or “experience ownership”. It lies instead in encouraging behavioral change and explicitly shaping culture in a positive and lasting way. … »

Organizations are tenuous phenomena; they can fall apart at any time. To navigate the landscape of organizational culture interaction designers need a set of practical tools, language & knowledge drawn from the world of cultural anthropology.
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“Every Thing Bad Is Good For You” is the title of the book Steven Johnson wrote in 2005. In this book he claims that “Against popular belief, pop culture is actually making us smarter”. And he explains this theory by using the term “The Sleeper Cuve” derived from the movie Sleeper by Woody Allan.

Johnson writes how TV shows have evolved from shows like Dragnet and Starsky & Hutch with a single plot line per episode to shows like The Sopranos and Lost with multiple plot lines intersecting and over 21 episodes. These new shows are challenging us to remember and connect multiple relationships over an entire season instead of just one show. This complexity was unthinkable 20 years ago. But in today’s society its different for we have been secretly trained to accept this complexity for the last decade. This is the Sleeper curve hard at work. … »