Supervillain strategies for persuasive design

In an old post I just happened across, Scott Berkun writes about a user experience challenge he was involved with at Adaptive Path’s MX conference. His team’s goal was to plan the future of design at a fictional corporation.

Pretty dry so far, but check out step 2 in his approach. I have to try this in our next account planning meeting… what would Blofeld do?

The center of our work was to pitch a plan to the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer). The team I facilitated did 3 things:

1. Dissect the brief. We made a list of assets and liabilities from the brief, including questions we wanted answered that the brief did not tell us. (e.g. who made the personas? Were they BS or was there any data? etc.)
2. Tactics inventory from dangerous powerful people. We made a list of possible models to list, but settled on four: P.T. Barnum & ShamWow!, Genghis Khan, Machiavelli, and 007. For each we made a list of tactics or techniques they would use and put them up on the wall.
3. Divide and conquer. We split up the work into three piles: Work before the pitch, the pitch, and work after the pitch. And then split into three teams that came up with a plan for each one.

References

No holds barred tactics for UX in organizations

Hulu, Boxee, and the threat of user experience

I’ve been following the developing Hulu/Boxee situation closely because I believe the real issue here is one of user experience. In case you haven’t been following along:

…two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it.

Full Post: the Hulu situation

That good faith didn’t last for long:

Early this morning, Boxee rolled out a workaround that let Boxee users watch Hulu shows again, which they haven’t been able to do since last month when Hulu pulled its shows off Boxee’s browser. Late this afternoon, Hulu squelched that workaround.

Full Article: All Things Digital

If you are in the business of serving web video content, why block one particular browser, one that could potentially be your largest channel? Because, when it comes down to it, Boxee provides a superior user experience for watching internet TV, superior, quite possibly to watching regular TV. In fact, Boxee, and it’s brethren could very well be the tipping point in the great public switch to internet television. The networks apparently agree:

Why does the TV industry need to keep Web video off your big-screen TV? Not because it hates technology. But because it hasn’t figured out how to make money off Web video yet — and needs you to keep watching TV on your TV.

NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker all but admitted as much in a keynote this morning: “What we’ve lost in viewers and advertising dollars on the analog side isn’t being made up for at all on the digital side. We want to find an economic model that makes sense.”

Full Article: Silicon Alley Insider

Television is being tivoed all over again.