Service Design and the Customer’s Journey

Call it by other names – multi-channel service design, customer relationship management, cross-channel experience design, customer experience. We’re talking about how people interact with a whole system, over time.

Metadata, Taxonomies, Vocabularies - Do What?

Imagine standing in front of a wall of cubbies filled with parchment scrolls, and not being to find the Tractatus you know exists in there. Or no – make that try to find the right health insurance claim form on your corporate intranet. Your predicament is as old as civilization itself. And content classification structures, including tools like metadata and taxonomy, were invented thousands of years ago to deal with it.

Technical: Web 3D and Telepresencing

Shared 3D virtual environments like Second Life can be used for group meetings. I know of three basic approaches. Each requires significantly more infrastructure than the last.




The simplest approach is just to meet in Second Life. This enables you to talk, share slides, and do things together.

The next most complicated approach is to augment a real life meeting with some Second Life participation using Skype as a streaming server. This can be done using items found around the home, but provides an awkward connection.

A true mixed reality event links all locations together fairly well. It requires more equipment and more setup, but allows participants to see, hear, and speak to one another from either real life or Second Life.

An argument for using Web 3D for telepresencing, and some tips on how to do it, are in my slidedeck Using Gaming Platforms for Telepresencing.

Technical: Real Life/Second Life Event

I moderated a panel discussion on Information Architecture in Second Life at the IA Summit in March. It was a joint Real Life/Second Life event, and it worked rather well.