4 experience hacks

Can you significant improve a customer experience simply by following a few simple procedures? That’s what I’m going to explore for an upcoming talk at Failcon in San Francisco.

No it’s not ideal
No, I don’t think that you can simply follow a few recipes and create a mind-blowing customer experience. That takes culture, leadership, vision, and other through-and-through elements that go to the core of an organization. But let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Much of this attitude comes from some long held believes about user research. I’ve seen (an unfortunately personally executed) more research and analysis of customers than can be effectively used on a project. There’s nothing wrong with great research that can be drawn on for years to help shape an organization’s understand of their customer, but there is a problem when the time and budget for good design and execution is usurped by overly-sophisticated research efforts.

For organizations that have little or no qualitative insights about their customer, the value of simply seeing their customer in the wild for the first time can be a greater value — I’m talking dollars spent per actionable insight — than extensive, deep research efforts that extract tacit subtleties in the lives of customers. Proctor & Gamble may need to understand the interplay between masculinity and shampoo suds, but many young business simply need to see where their service, say, fits in a 5-minute window between finishing your work and turning on the TV.

But it’s practical
We may not be trained medical doctors, but with some simple CPR training, we can all dramatically improve a troubled person’s chance of living. We may not be gemologist, but we can follow the rules of the 5 C’s to evaluate what’s a good or bad diamond. Similarly, I’m working to propose a small memorable set of procedures to help teams get more out of the efforts by ensuring that their customer’s experience falls in the column of “mostly good” and not “mostly sucky.”

4 experience hacks
I’ve been looking at my own practices and thinking through the case studies of others to identify relatively low-cost and low-effort activities that can up your slugging percentage. While none of these are panaceas, I hope they can really help improve the chances of success. I’m still working on the exact language, but here’s where I stand today:

1. Get customer empathy into your business — see a handful of customers face-to-face, finding patterns of insights that tell you how to meet your business objectives. I think this can become almost recipe-like given the right picture of integrating business objectives and customer insights.
2. Define the experience you want customers to have — this is an obvious step that’s too often skipped. Beyond being freaking “friendly” and undoubtedly “easy to use”, what should the experience be like? Create some experience principles to guide every design decision.
3. Customer experience ideas are cheap. Have lots of them, but only execute the best handful. — Avoid the decision-making bias of primacy.Your first idea is rarely the best idea. Don’t waste development cycles and customer attention to find that out. Instead, have many ideas and use your insights and experience principle to vet them and find the best bets.
4. Return to the customer context. Often. — Working on a fast-paced design project we realized that we had become so engrossed in our own understanding of the business requirements that we lost the perspective of the customer. We didn’t have budget for usability testing, so we instead conducted a “dry-run-of-one.” We found a single representative customer, halted the design process for an afternoon, and walked the customer through our best paper-based simulation of the current design. We learned tons. It was such a good use of valuable time that we stopped and conducted other dry-runs-of-one at other points in the design process. It’s may not be as rigorous as full usability testing, but it was a great ROI.

So that’ my list. And I hope to reduce them down to some pretty basic tactics for execution. What would be on your list to help someone else easily but meaningfully up their likelihood of customer experience success?