The Drip Edition 6

It’s FRIIIIIDAAAYYYY!

I’m in an exceptionally good mood today, mostly because it’s finally not raining in Cape Town, and the weather is perfectly crisp and still.

This week I stuck to my promise (mostly) and journaled every day. It felt super productive and helped me organise my thoughts in a clear and structured way, and focus on areas of my life that I have possibly been neglecting (such as personal financial health check-ins).

I also did something that I NEVER do, but have promised I would do more of, and that was pick up two magazines in the slow lounge to read on the plane rather than working or reading my kindle. When I was at Ogilvy, one of our senior partners from New York gave a talk to our London office about doing things differently. He said that in order to be better at his job he always tried to keep away from being stuck in a routine, and this has always stayed with me. He would often read magazines on different topics and take a different route to work on a random day, just to see what ideas the new sights and sounds might spark.

After a lot of research on this, I’ve found a number of resources that support this notion. Experts say that when we do things differently, we often have to pay more attention to the task, and this can create new pathways in our brains. Taking a different route to work, writing with your left hand and reading publications you would never read can jolt you out of a rut.

Not only does it give you insights into other industries, but it also gets those neurons firing in different ways. A few more ideas to spark creativity:

• Sleep on it. As Dali said: “All of my best ideas come from dreams”
• Borrow ideas from people who are better than we are
• Make mistakes – taking risks means learning from those risks. “Move fast and break things”
• Combine opposites – connect things that you would never dream of connecting, like
• Keep an ideas notebook
• Try something new – find a new hobby and play, or go for an early morning swim during winter.

Ok, enough about that.

In this week’s newsletter, you can look forward to reading about Earth overshoot Day (dun dun dun); how designers can make better hospitals; and the health clinic that started as an Invision prototype!

On with the newsletter!

Earth Overshoot Day:

Last week marked Earth Overshoot Day, and that is not a good thing, in case you were wondering. It essentially means we are using up earth’s resources faster than the planet can replenish them (greedy people).

How are we doing this? Basically, by consuming too much.

“Earth overshoot day is the day when humanity will have used nature’s resource budget for the entire year, and it’s only a little over halfway through 2019. Compiled by the Global Footprint Network, the day has moved up by two months over the past two decades, getting earlier every year aside from a brief respite in 2009.

By arriving today, it means that humanity is using up resources 1.75 times faster than our planet’s ecosystem can generate, with this demand becoming increasingly visible through deforestation, soil erosion, biodiversity loss and the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere.

If we are to look at it from a country-specific perspective, Ireland has an unsustainable consumption rate, with our ‘overshoot day’ having already occurred all the way back on 27 April, along with Slovenia. The worst offenders, however, are the small nations of Qatar and Luxembourg, which overshot on the 11 and 16 February, respectively.”

What can you do about this?

Track what you consume. Be aware of the footprint you leave.Eat less meat. Walk instead of drive when you can. Carpool. Use less plastic. Recycle. Travel less. Buy fewer clothes of higher quality, and donate those you don’t use to charity.

You can’t do everything but you can do something.

For those of you who want to shame yourself into action, here is a website that shames you based on your flying patterns.

Designers Make Better Hospitals:

Nic sent me this incredible article about how designers can make better hospitals. it’s all about data validation, making assumptions and understanding users, and is right in our wheelhouse. UX and consumer insights are critical to everyone who works in marketing and advertising, because understanding consumers and what motivates them and their behaviour is the key to unlocking how to react to that behaviour.

There are endless design opportunities in healthcare – not the design of the chairs we sit in, although those are “designed”, but rather the design of the experience we have in a hospital. From walking in, to the first interaction we have with nurses, to navigating floors and finding doctors’ rooms, the whole thing is part of a user journey.

An excerpt:

“I’ve worked to improve the clinician experience of reading and writing inpatient clinical notes in the Electronic Health Record (addressing what they call ‘note bloat,’) which resulted in a new type of note template that makes it more efficient for providers to get clinically-relevant information. On another project I helped improve communication to parents staying inpatient with their kids; through a printed guide, we helped parents and families understand all of the resources available to them and how things worked on the inpatient unit. This helped them get more consistent information and reduced the burden on staff. On a third project, I held a workshop to gather information about the emotional experience of cancer patients so that we could create more patient-oriented, emotionally-sensitive materials for newly diagnosed patients. The result of this work is a guide for newly diagnosed patients that gives ‘just enough’ information; patients love it and tell us they’ve never seen anything like it.”

Read more here.

Unilever Shifts To Data-Driven Marketing

Unilever is making the move to shift all of its marketing efforts to be automated and data-driven in order to improve ROI. Brand comms are moving towards deliberate and audience-focused segmentation and a programmatic approach to media buying.

The one pitfall? They can’t find enough people to run all of it. Why? Because setting up complex automated marketing requires skilled people to manage it. Oh, the irony.

This shift is also directing all of its content and influencer marketing efforts, allowing them to target super-niche audiences such as vegans and fashionistas, based on real-time data, to “interrupt less and converse more”. Brilliant.

Adapt Or Die:Casper is a mattress company that was nominated as company of the year in 2017. Their business model is simple – mattress that you order only that fold-up and are delivered in a box. (this bed in a box trend is something that has taken off massively globally).

“The New York City-based online mattress retailer launched three years ago on the premise that a single mattress design-one with a “unique combination of high-density foams,” according to Casper’s website-could be perfect for everyone. It quickly gained attention with its online-only, direct-to-consumer, mattress-in-a-box business model.

But now they are changing their business model. They have added two more mattress designs and a brick and mortar store.

Why?

Because traditional competitors in this space are coming after them. And with brick-and-mortar stores to give competitors an edge, they have to adapt or die.

This is a lesson to all – you cannot keep doing what you are doing because it worked in the past. You have to evaluate and make decisions based on the data, and move forward.

Read more here.

Chrome Extensions For Designers:Everything a designer might need to make their lives a little easier.

You’re welcome.

Find them all here.

World Friendship DayI’m not crying, you’re crying.

This heart-warming story about two friends who live next door to one and have know one another since childhood is a reason to feel good today.

This Health Clinic Was Developed From A PrototypeTia started first as a healthcare app developed to help women answer simple questions about healthcare for women based on common questions asked, such as “I missed my birth control, what do I do?”. The founders worked closely with medical professionals to answer these questions and translate them into ways that women felt comfortable with.

What started as a chat app moved into an app and then evolved into a physical space that people could connect with. The space has plants and designer furniture and even sex toys are displayed in a light space that people (particularly women) feel at ease. The goal was to make women’s healthcare more human.

An extract that really spoke to me (find the rest here):

“Healthcare is a three-sided marketplace, a precarious balancing act between patients, providers, and insurance companies. And as anyone that’s attempted to receive medical care can tell you, the patient’s needs are increasingly overlooked.

For designers, Tia is a stress test of product design principles. Can user testing, research, user experience design, and all of the tools in our digital product design toolbox work when applied to something as complicated as healthcare? And how can Tia assure its community of users that the company has earned the right to be trusted with something as sensitive and valuable as women’s health?”

The founders’ advice?

Prototype first, build later. Seems simple, right? Right.

That’s it for this week!

As usual, if you have any thoughts you want to share or anything you ‘d like me to include next week, please send me an email! Would love to hear from you 😊

Have a wonderful weekend!