background on ‘the long wow’ at the IASummit

Tomorrow at the IASummit I’ll be presenting on The Long Wow, a systematic approach for building great customer experiences that lead to real customer loyalty. It’s one of three approaches to practicing design differently that I outline in Adaptive Path’s new book Subject to Change. This is a talk that I have a lot of fun with, so I’ll looking forward to doing it.

The premise of these three approaches is simple: If we all practice design (or IA, or UX, or whatever you call it) the same way within organizations, then no design practice will be considered truly strategic. Strategic applications of design only exist when design practices are focused on the aspects of an organization that make it distinct. Otherwise you’re just employing best practices, and your executive leadership will only see you as a cost center.

I’ll work to get the presentation onto Slideshare soon, but until then, here’s some detailed notes on some of the references I made during the talk:

• My essay on The Long Wow
• Learn a little more about the Net Promoter Score and the corresponding research study from Bain & Company on “Closing the Delivery Gap“
• Here’s a brief review of the peak-end rule from Daniel Kahneman. Also, the very interesting book Paradox of Choice makes some references to the peak-end rule and how it applies to concepts like the experience of colonoscopy exams.
• For those not familiar with the often told story, here’s the history of OXO Good Grips and Sam Farber’s original inspiration
• TripIt is the travel organization service I referenced as a good example for finding a wide area of customer need that they can return to again and again for new inspiration
• Peter Merholz’s interview with the CEO of Zipcar
• And who can forget radiators.com!
• The flickr Color Contest outage message, and the winners
• Adaptive Path’s book, Subject to Change

And here’s where you can download a PDF of the slides (48.5 MB) from the talk. As a reminder, you can register for upcoming Adaptive Path events in San Francisco and Minneapolis for 15% off by using the code FOBS.