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Showing posts from August, 2010

From Online Service to Mobile App

Service companies use branches, phone, kiosks and web as direct channels to customers. In recent years service companies added a new channel - the smart phone application. Smart phones differ from PCs in screen size, ease of typing and input, connection speed and use context. Keeping these changes in mind, mobile apps shouldn’t be a replica of their online counterparts. One difference is that the mobile app has to be leaner. Another difference is that mobile apps should have unique features, such as location based features, taking advantage of mobile capabilities. As a case study, I compared the online website and mobile app of Citibank ’s card services. As shown below the mobile app has fewer pages (17 vs. 84) and has fewer levels (4 deep vs. 6 deep). Companies rushed to create iPhone and android apps often not doing it “right”. Mobile operation system defragmentation and rapid market changes make doing it right all the more challenging. That may be the reason why Citibank’s iPhon...

SDM featured in “The Upside of Irrationality”

Dan Ariely a behavioral economist from Duke mentions System Design and Management in his new book “The Upside of Irrationality”. In his book, a sequel to the New York Times bestseller “Predictably Irrational”, Ariely intertwines research with personal stories including stories of his time as a “lowly assistant professor at MIT”. The story begins with “here is a story of a time when I lost my own temper” and describes a dispute between Ariely and a revered professor of finance, a former dean of Sloan, code named Paul, over a scheduling conflict of SDM classes. SDM students are described as curious and, reportedly, Ariely enjoyed teaching them. This story is just an anecdote used as a preface to a chapter on fleeting emotions followed by impulsive acts. Ariely and his fellow behavioral economists construct amusing research to expose how we humans continuously fail to behave rationally. In these experiments subjects fold origami frogs, build Lego robots, put their hand in close to b...