Critique Wall.com

Brian Collins is executive creative director of the Brand Integration Group, BIG, at Ogilvy & Mather in New York, teaches at School of Visual Arts and among other things is an . He talked to the Orlando AIGA chapter about creating "brand experience".

During the College's pre-session we had a presentation on Outstanding Customer Service, Ritz Carlton Style, presented by Jeff Hargett from the Ritz external traning unit. It was interesting to me how strongly the attributes of good customer service correlate with the attributes of excellent Web usability and customer experience. I've always considered one of my job titles to be online customer service specialist and Hargett's presentation confirmed that role and challenged me to do it better.

Some of the highlights

Respect people. Respect especially their time. Make it easy to accomplish the things they need to do.

Interactions should be hassle-free: "Get rid of re-occuring mistakes. All mistakes should be new mistakes."

Provide personalized, genuine service, use the customer's name and ask "may I do something else?"

"Great service connects emotionally with the customer."

Know your market. Have we heard this before?

3 Steps of Service:

1. Warm sincere greeting
2. Anticipation and fulfillment of each guests needs
3. Fond farewell. Give a warm good-bye and use their name.

Everything speaks. Everything is a representation of your organization. The off-duty employee, the building, facilities, and I include the Web properties and published materials. It's our responsibility to make sure the trash is picked up in our Web properties. The Web site is likely the first impression many will have of our organizations.

Red Bull, the official drink of the caffeinated culture, recently moved into some new digs in London that include not only stairs, but a slide. Yes, that's right, a slide. For those that find it takes too long to walk down the stairs or even take the elevator, there is now a new three story slide to try. In addition to the slide there are loads of other fun looking features of this office that would certainly make going to work more enjoyable. Hey, inter-office emails, IM's and phone calls just might go down if you could use the excuse to take a ride on the slide! Hat

Olivier Gregoire had designed a toaster that is inspired by the work of Frank Gehry. Turn it on it's side, and you might think you were in a mini version of LA near the Walt Disney Concert Hall! View the Toaster.

I recently had the opportunity to visit California to present a workshop on usability for the Global Internet Evangilism Forum. The workshop was well received, and I hope it made a positive impact. One of the topics that was hot in this year's discussion was mobile technology. In places where the wired infrastructure is not in place, Internet access is exploding via mobile technology. We need to know a lot about design for mobile technology and quick.

While on the West Coast I was also able to visit two architecturally interesting places. The Getty Center and the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

The Getty Center was designed by Richard Meir. After the architecture guide explained Meir's grid system I was amazed how meticulous he was in sticking to it and still creating organic spaces. The entire complex is laid out on two 30 inch based grids. The grids followed the two ridge lines that the complex is sitting on. You can follow a grid line from a wall of one building down to the sidewalk across the plaza and into and up a wall in the next building. Yes, few words ago I said he used two layer grids. The second grid oriented about 35 or 40 degrees off of the first. If a building or a wall needed to be placed at an angle, it sat on the 2nd grid and made sense. I believe this is one way this modernist complex achieved an organic feel. It followed the natural grids of the environment it is occupying.

In the November 1984 special election issue of Newsweek, Apple bought all the advertising space and devoted it entirely to promotion of the Macintosh. The GUIdeBook has the entire collection of ads from that promotion online. It is quite a fun collection to look though.