In 2007, Spanish bank BBVA engaged IDEO to rethink the way their ATMs worked. In 2009 the fruits of that labor began to see the light of day and the companies have done a really great job highlighting their insights and subsequent designs.
The average ATM experience is nothing special so the opportunity to innovate is there for the taking but few companies seem willing to put in the effort to really do so (BofA’s smart Enter button was one for me).
The IDEO/BBVA video’s got a few “how did it possibly take so long for someone to do it this way!?” ideas (the 90 degree shift in positioning of the ATMs and the “one slot to rule them all” stand out for me ). They also take a page out of Apple’s recent playbook of success in two ways: integrating the hardware + software from the get go and choosing to go full touchscreen to give them the flexibility to always provide the best interface to the user, no matter what they’re doing.
As devices like the iPad go more mainstream and touchscreen prices go down, I look forward to seeing more industries be forced to reconsider the interfaces that stand between them and their customers.
“A self-disciplined employee will have the patience to conduct routine business routinely, the talent to respond exceptionally to exceptional circumstances, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
– Richard Branson, founder of The Virgin group of companies
Amen.
Sounds simple but it’s very hard to find. If you’re lucky enough to find yourself working with or managing people that fit the bill, you better not take it for granted.
“We nail facts into students’ heads and there’s nothing wrong with it if the goal is to employ someone for 40 years in a Ford Motor Company Model A factory.”
“The A students work for the B students, the C students run the businesses, and the D students have the buildings named after them.”
“Never ever hire someone who had a grade point average of 4.0.”
I highly recommend you take 4 minutes and 12 seconds to watch/listen to the whole thing.
The team at Panic have rigged up this amazing (and beautiful) real-time display of the data immediately relevant to their team. Projects that fall in the cross section of dataviz and productivity really interest me. It reminds me a bit of the dashboard that Crispin Porter + Bogusky set up to visualize the health and status of their ongoing projects.
Here’s some info from the team at Panic:
What’s on the board?
The idea quickly grew beyond “Project Status”, and has become a hub of all sorts of internal Panic information. What you’re actually looking at is an internal-only webpage that updates frequently using AJAX which shows:
E-Mail Queue — number of messages / number of days.
Project Status — sorry for the heavy censorship — you know how it is!
Important Countdowns
Revenue — comparing yesterday to the day before, not so insightful (yet).
Live Tri-Met Bus Arrivals — when it’s time to go home!
The Panic Calendar
Employee Twitter Messages
Any @Panic Twitter Messages — i.e., be nice! They go on our screen!
I highly recommend you head on over to their blog and read all about it.
Love to see Experience Design fall at the center of People, Technology, Business and Story. Most people (and companies) instinctively gravitate to the first three but it’s usually the last one that ties it all together to make something truly memorable.
The team at Made by Many is building a neat little visualization tool for SXSW to give their readers a simple + visually compelling way to keep up with the team’s activities while they’re in Austin.
Not only is the mini-product idea itself clever but they’re also exposing their ongoing iterative design process to their readers as they build it. Great stuff.
As far as design and product development goes, how can this list not get you totally fired up. Pow! Nooka speaks of a world of the tomorrow that is happening right now. It seems gloriously unattainable but is here in the palm of our hands. It is optimism, it is progress, and it is our [...]
“The ProjectTicker is the real-time inventory of all of the jobs active in the Integrated department. It can be filtered by job due date, by account, by job-type (video, interactive, experiential, internal prods), by completion status, by CD or by producer. It also features a status bar that indicates the completion status of the job. [...]
Really smart stuff on the differences between tangible and intangible value and the often untapped benefits of the latter. Thanks to @mtbrady for the tip.
Volkswagen’s new viral video campaign, The Fun Theory caught my eye this week. “The Fun Theory” is a series of experiments, captured on video, to find out if making the world more fun can improve people’s behavior. Among the experiments: does turning a set of subway stairs into a real-life piano encourage people to use [...]
