We can see businesses as we see people too – with certain characteristics, behaviours, quirks, problems, questions and backgrounds. It’s a good way to bring a brand personality into shape. But how can we easily maintain a brand personality across channels and contexts?
In my profession as an experience designer, every project is something unique. No client thinks or acts the same way, no setup in a team or condition within a company is comparable, no briefing is about the same goal or based on the same problem. All of this and much more make designing experiences challenging and exciting. Patrick Newbery of Method wrote about experience design and its essence in this article. It’s about finding out where people find value in. In fact, it’s about relationships and how relationships help to make positive experiences happen. …
Change processes in organizations might take a very long time – or take up a large amount of energy. Anyone who goes through the cycle of change and learning will also be able to guide change processes in companies and organizations. It’s important to be aware of some principles that allow an ongoing, successful management of change.
In the master’s degree study programme Content Strategy at FH JOANNEUM, in which I participate in, we recently discussed the elements and laws of change and how to handle – and actually manage – change within organizations. While doing research and reading on…
How to map a journey from the view of the audience.
Mapping a user journey, customer journey or buyer journey — there are many ways to call it — makes whole processes transparent, understandable and transformable. Journey maps for specific target groups (or more suitable: audiences) are a powerful tool to break down experiences into sequences of steps that help you to put yourself in the shoes of another person — and never slip out of them again while thinking in their experience.
Break down the experience
It can be challenging for organizations and companies to put themselves in the perspective and emotional world of their target audience or their customers. In many cases it…
A simple framework for effective team collaboration on complex products
Since a few weeks, I have been reading quite a lot about the Scrum framework and its characteristics. My fellow students and I at the Content Strategy master’s degree programme at FH JOANNEUM also got in touch with it during a session by Stefan Pollach on Agile Project Management. Find out about the aspects and roles of Scrum and how it affects collaboration within a team in this article. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences!
Imagine this situation: Projects have been planned and times are set that unfortunately cannot be kept. This leads to frustration on every…
A review of Denise Henkel’s approach to community growth
Recently, I came across CMX, the hub for the community industry, because CreativeMornings, a monthly breakfast lecture series for creative types taking place in more than 200 cities worldwide, was nominated for the Community Industry Awards organized by CMX. I am part of the organiser’s team of CreativeMornings/Vienna and partly responsible for our (online) community management.
While browsing the CMX blog as a task in the Content Marketing & Community Management course at the Content Strategy master’s degree programme at FH JOANNEUM, I stumbled upon Denise Henkel’s article “4 Secret Ingredients for a Vibrant Community” (read it here). As we…
An easy way to resist distractions and increase productivity
The Pomodoro technique is a way to break down to-do’s into small tasks of 25 minutes, taking a 5-minute break after each chunk. I recently got introduced to this time management technique by a colleague of mine, Dominik Berger, who slightly adapted it for is work needs. The approach seems to be something worth trying, especially because I always have the feeling that there’s a better and more productive way to use time while working on tasks. In this post, I describe the technique at a glance and try to inspire you to use in your workflow.
Background
Some lines about learning and improving with reflective writing
Pausing, reflecting a bit and putting thoughts into words help us to look back at events that took place. It could be something delightful, inspirational, strange, awkward or even bad. We can learn from those events for ourselves. Looking back on purpose and in a structured manner, a retrospective, is a valuable opportunity to learn and improve. Within the following lines, I sketch out my process of writing and which questions I ask myself while doing it. Enjoy and feel free to share your approach!
In our busy, fast-moving lives, we only find little time to really think about how…
Learnings from working as a self-employed designer, studying and doing 1000 other things
I have never been a big fan of juggling but I’ve always admired – or rather envied – people who were juggle pros, even as children. My fear of failure also regarding fun things (such as juggling) have been enormous, so I haven’t even tried to juggle in a proper way. When reflecting what happens in my professional life nowadays, the picture of juggling balls and seeing them drop on the floor regularly comes up in my mind quite often. …
Back in 2013, Jeremy Keith gave a talk at Beyond Tellerrand, a conference about web design, development and creativity. He spoke about having a look over the edge of the plate as he got inspired by the English translation of the German expression Tellerrand. I really like Jeremy’s way of drawing the lines between topics and ideas, and connecting the dots to inspire others. It was also a pleasure to meet him in June 2019 in Brighton as part of the 2019 excursion of the master’s degree program Content Strategy at FH JOANNEUM I participate in.
Everybody is talking about being fast and agile. Every day we are challenged with new situations – at work, on the go, with new technologies, with trends, with opinions, with problems, at home, with the family, with friends, even alone. Sometimes we are able to live up the speed in our lives, sometimes we cannot keep the pace.
What does this mean for design- and brand-related challenges? Which methods and formats do we integrate to achieve better results in a shorter time? What is our take on collaboration and co-creation with clients? Why is it important to think and act…
Emanuel Jochum
Experience designer, aspiring content strategist, humanist, world citizen, traveller, mountain hiker, Cuba Libre aficionado, fairness advocate. www.ejochum
