Talks

Invite Karen Holtzblatt to excite and motivate your managers and product development teams. Karen can enhance your thinking about how to design for innovation. Each 1.5 to 2 hour talk can be followed by one-on-one discussions with specific projects about how they can leverage the Cool Concepts.

What Makes Things Cool?

Introduce your organization to the Cool Concepts. What do they mean for innovative design of your products? Karen presents a compelling and interactive talk spelling out what cool can mean for your market. She motivates discussion to uncover unique insights and practical applications of the concepts to your business. You can see Karen in action here.

Practical Innovation

What does it really take to ship a game-changing product or experience? Karen unpacks the history of the movie Avatar and the iPhone to reveal the core drivers of practical innovation—the kind of innovation that both transforms a market and produces highly successful offerings.

Karen discusses the central role of a company’s business mission, the depth of their understanding of their customers, and the state of the market and technology needed to ensure real success. You can see Karen in action here.

Courses

Bring the Cool Concepts and good design practices into your design process with classroom training. We are known for our powerful courses introducing new design concepts and practices. Take away real skill and knowledge in just 1-2 days.

The Cool Concepts: An introduction

Immerse your teams in the details of each Cool Concept and how to apply the principles to design. How do the Cool Concepts shift design thinking? How does understanding these concepts inform and drive design decisions? Infuse a new approach to design thinking with our training.

This 2-day course introduces each concept with examples and exercises in analysis. Then we ask each person to do a mini-analysis of their own product and share it with the class for deeper learning.

Designing a touch interface that works

Not everything cool is about touch—but we all know that touch is a new way to design—and is a big part of a really cool app. This course introduces the key interaction patterns currently being used in touch interfaces and reveals how tested and new interaction design principles can be used to make best–in-class touch interfaces with known technology.

Ask us about our courses in field research techniques and interaction
design—as well as Contextual Design, our signature user-centered design process.

Workshop: A Deep Dive into the Cool Concepts

Immerse your managers and product teams in real field data about what makes things cool. Start your key players thinking about what the Cool Concepts mean for your products.

This 2-day workshop introduces the Cool Concepts, combining the depth of our own research with the specific field data from your domain. You gain an understanding of people’s motivation and behavior as they use products they consider cool—and generate ideas relevant to your projects. Then we’ll help you apply the Cool Concepts to your business through facilitated, structured exercises.

Before the workshop, we collect data from 6-8 people using your products to understand what cool means in your context. Then, combining that data with our own proprietary data, we prepare a unique workshop experience for you.

Market Research

Do you know how your customers experience cool? Is it the same as consumers? What is cool in the workplace—or in your specific market niche? What are the lives of your customers like and how do you fit into the unstoppable momentum of their lives? We work with you to tailor a research project with your targeted customers and activities.

Field Research

In this service, we build a field research plan to collect data on your customers’ overall experience of what’s cool. We are recognized experts in collecting field data, having invented the Contextual Design user-centered design process 20 years ago. We are also the originators of the Cool Concepts, so we bring a unique perspective to your project. You get an understanding of your customers’ experiences of cool, their lives, and the issues and opportunities for your business—something available from nowhere else.

We deliver the research to you, including the data structured into models. We facilitate an ideation workshop with your management, product designers and other key stakeholders—building buy-in across your organization.

You can participate as much or as little as you wish in the research. You can also leverage our long history of teaching design skills by having us train your team.

Survey

Following the field study service, let us construct a survey to further understand your customers’ experience of cool and the nature of their lives. Augment the qualitative data from field interviews by showing its scope and impact. You’ll have quantitaive data about the issues we uncover: your market’s perception of cool, their attitudes toward cool technology, key personas, and the most valued activities you could address. Build an informed basis for your business plans.

Product Evaluations

How are your products doing? Are they addressing the areas that could make them cool?  How could they be improved?  With our evaluation services we take a look at your product from a fresh perspective—how does it measure up against the Cool Concepts?

Heuristic Review

We start with 3-4 field interviews with users of your product to understand the specific experience of cool for your users. Then, using our cool heuristics, we analyze your product in key areas. We identify what you are doing now that is cool and where you’re falling short. We score you against consumer products in your industry and tell you how you stand. We wrap up our findings and recommendations in a detailed report showing how well your product does against each of the Cool Concepts and suggesting specific opportunities for improvement.

Field Evaluation

Beyond heuristics, we go to your customers to understand where your product stands on cool in real life usage. We work together to identify the key customers to interview, talking with 12 or more as appropriate. We understand your customers’ experiences with your product from the cool perspective, including measuring cool with our assessment instrument at the end of each interview.

The field data and measures combined with our heuristics produce a more detailed and pointed set of insights and recommendations—including future directions in which you can expand your product offering to increase its coolness.

Full Design Service

With customer data from our market research in hand, we work with you to design your mobile apps, products, or web offerings. We apply our Cool Concepts and our user-centered design process to define, validate, and deliver a design specific to your target customers. You receive an actionable design that you know will be successful because it has been developed and vetted with users.

We deliver validated wireframes, visual design comps and specs, and for a mobile application, even a first cut at code. And if you’re using Agile Development, we can help you write your User Stories too.

As with our Market Research services, you can participate as much or as little of the work as you’d like—and get trained as well.