The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Design

Cool design

  • Welcome. Coffee?

    2015-08-06 11.00.05

    This is not a coffee shop – this is the reception at one of our clients in Denmark.

    They can greet you, get you a visitor’s badge and notify the employee your meeting with. And while you wait for them to come meet you, they can also whip up an excellent cappuccino or a flat white.

    Employees can also have informal meetings in the café and buy coffee cheaply using their ID cards or an app on their phones.

    I saw something similar at the Coca-Cola HQ in Atlanta.

    I like this kind of thing because it breaks down the formality of the reception area and makes it more welcoming and interesting. It gives visitors a better first impression and provides employees with a more relaxed setting.

    Does your workplace have something similar?

  • 10 seeeeeriously cool workplaces

    office

    Physical space matters. It’s easier to be productive, creative and happy at work in a colourful, organic, playful environment than in a grey, linear, boring one.

    And I’m not talking about the outside of the building. Many companies have buildings that are sleek, modern, architectural glass-steel-and-cement sculptures on the outside – and cubicle wastelands on the inside. These companies need to remember that most employees tend to work inside the building.

    With that in mind, here’s some eye candy from 10 different innovative, well-designed workplaces.

    (Also check out my post on 12 Ways to Pimp Your Office).
    (more…)

  • BMW sez: bureaucracy sucks

    Bureaucrat

    The latest BMW ad campaign has very little to do with cars and focuses instead on the corporate values of the Bayerische Motoren Werke.

    One version of it says:

    We say no to:

    Compromise
    Complacency
    Bureaucracy
    Red tape
    Lowest common denominators
    Middle managemet
    Second guessing
    Herd mentality

    So we can say yes to good ideas.

    BMW fights bureaucracy. This is cool. Why is it cool?

    1: Bureaucracy kills happiness at work
    Bureaucracy saps people’s energy and motivation. If you don’t believe me, read Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon Mackenzie. It’s an excellent book about how to thrive in organizitions plagued by red tape.

    2: Branding through good corporate identity rules
    BMW are choosing to brand themselves not through their products or technology but through how they run their business.

    3: Branding that matches products rules
    This campaing works only because the corporate identity they are expressing happens to match the products. BMW’s vehicles (I’m the proud owner of one myself) are innovative and exciting matching the (mildly) revolutionary message of the ads.

    It’s great to see companies making a stand against bureaucracy and It’s even better to see companies making bold, positive identities and standing by them.

    It just struck me though: Is anyone else surprised to see such an anti-authoritarian message… from a German company :o)

  • CC-licensed PowerPoint-Free Zone logo

    PowerPoint-Free ZoneI’m with Edward Tufte and Kathy Sierra on this one. I never use PowerPoint in my presentations because it:

    • Limits interaction and spontaneity
    • Focuses people’s attention on the slides rather than on what’s happening in the room
    • Often requires dim, snooze-inducing lighting

    There are great uses of PowerPoint too, but why risk it when doing your presentations “live” makes them:

    • More fun
    • More interactive and dynamic
    • More interesting

    So a while back we got our excellent designer to create a cool logo to celebrate the fact that out presentations are 100% PowerPoint-free zones.

    We’re now releasing this logo under a Creative Commons license, so go ahead and use it if you want to go PowerPoint-free too.

    The logo is available in Danish, Swedish and English and the CC license allows you to change it to your language if you’d like to.

    Get the logo here:

    PowerPoint-Free Zone PowerPoint-Free Zone PowerPoint-Free Zone
    English
    jpg | tif    		 Danish
    jpg | tif    		 Swedish
    jpg | tif

    Creative Commons License
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

  • Open Source Car

    The OScar Project is an attempt to design a car using an Open Source, web-based approach. Anybody can contribute to the concept and design at the website.

    I loved this quote from the site:

    You can’t treat a car like a human being. A car needs love.
    – Walter Röhrl

  • Why features don’t matter anymore

    The success of the Apple iPod should serve us all as a reminder of this fact: Simple is good.

    And in case we forget, there’s this excellent article by Andreas Pfeiffer who formulates it very succinctly using 10 simple rules. Here are some examples:

    10 fundamental rules for the age of user experience technology:

    1) More features isn’t better, it’s worse.

    Feature overload is becoming a real issue. The last thing a customer wants is confusion-and what’s more confusing than comparing technical specifications, unless you are en expert? Only nerds get a kick out of reading feature lists. (I know – I’m one of them.)

    2) You can’t make things easier by adding to them.

    Simplicity means getting something done in a minimum number of simple steps. Practically anything could be simpler – but you don’t get there by adding features.

    3) Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker.

    Confuse a customer, and you lose him. And nothing confuses more easily than complex features and unintuitive functionalities.

    Which reminds me of the time Mark Twain wrote a letter saying:

    I apologize for writing you a long letter but I didn’t have time to write a short one.

    And then there’s this wonderful quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes:

    I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

    And that is what we must seek in business: We must seek complexity and then try to discover the simplicity beyond complexity. If you only know enough about your product to present it in a complicated way – one that makes everybody think you must be really clever – then you’re not ready to sell it.

    When you can present it in a way that makes everybody realize they’re as clever as you are, then you’re good to go. And that’s when you can create breakaway hits like the iPod.

  • Sure you can!

    Great new website; nice, simple execution: Can I crash?

    Patricia and I already put ourselves in there.

  • VW’s sci-fi car plant

    Solange de Santi’s excellent book Life on the Line about her experience of working under cover (she’s a journalist) for 18 months in a GM van plant gave me the sense that car factories are noisy, dirty, dangerous places.

    Apparently they don’t have to be – they can also be amazing, beautiful, friendly, ergonomic and high-tech. Check out these amazing pictures from the Volkswagen plant in Dresden. I think I could live comfortably and in high style inside that building :o)

  • Olive solitaire. Olitaire?

    This made me laugh. Clever.

    Via BoingBoing.

  • Death to PowerPoint

    Creating Passionate Users is the best blog I’ve found recently, and Kathy Sierra’s post on how not to use PowerPoint is very funny and smart.

    Sometimes the best presentation is… no presentation. Ditch the slides completely. Put the projector in the closet, roll the screen back up, and turn the damn lights back on!

    Especially if the slides are bullet points. Or worse… paragraphs.
    …
    The second you dim the lights and go into “presentation mode” is the moment you move from a two-way conversation to a one-way lecture/broadcast. It’s hard to be interactive when you’re behind your laptop, at a podium, watching your slides on the small screen.

    Read it!