designing for experiences across channels
This is some early and raw thinking I’ve been doing about designing and delivering experiences successfully across many touchpoints. Organizations are channel-bound. Customers aren’t. This outlines components and practices necessary to deliver great customer experiences across more than a single channel. With the proliferation of new screens and new moments in peoples’ lives, it’s natural for businesses to conceive of great new customer experiences that are more desirable and scalable, and therefore much more valuable to everyone. However, organizations lack the simple practices to plan, deliver, and manage a customer experience across more than one touchpoint. I’ve obviously borrowed some ideas from business strategy, service design, brand strategy, and that wacky world of design thinking. The diagram shows some of the key concepts to define and manage. The top row plans for the experience predominately from the customer’s perspective. The bottom row is — while still customer centric — taken from the perspective of what’s smart for the organization to do. The middle is the important interaction between customers and organizations that forms the experience. The value column is key to ensure the experience is viable to the business and useful to customers. The flow column defines what the experience should be. And the change column captures the means by which you can move from current state towards a better and more valuable experience. To explain ‘evidence’ in this column: showing evidence of the future experience is often the best way of helping the organization change and move towards it. For easier viewing, you can see this diagram larger or in PDF format. Note: this is somewhat a re-post of what I originally shared on Flickr, which received some interesting feedback of where some improvements can be made.
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 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 4 experience hacks 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?
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.
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.”
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:
Peter focuses on experience with Businessweek
On of my favorite points from the podcast was on lessons learned from our recent Managing Experience Conference. Peter put together patterns he was hearing from design leaders like Cordell Ratzlaff of Cisco and Chip Conley of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, California’s largest boutique hotel company: “They both talked a lot about culture, and corporate culture… In order for an organization to successfully deliver great experiences, it’s a matter of mindset of people in the organization, that that is their orientation—to deliver great experiences. You need to have a corporate culture to do it.” Here’s the podcast, which you can also get through iTunes.
This week Peter talked with BusinessWeekreporter Matt Vella about Subject to Change and the approaches necessary for focusing on experience as the product you deliver to customers.
Don Norman’s “one perfect book”
We’re glad to see that Don Norman liked it to. After some grumbles complaining that we wrote a book that he couldn’t put down, he said Subject to Change is: “Short, but powerful. Easy to read, yet profound. I’ve been searching for just this book: the one perfect book that summarizes the essence of modern product design. This is it. The lessons are as powerful as they are simple: The product is NOT the goal. Successful products are systems. Focus on the experience. This requires empathy, agile product management, real understanding of the target audience. This book practices what it preaches. I will use it in my courses for MBA students. You should use it for, well, for everyone. Short, simple, persuasive, and powerful.”
Over the past year-plus, I’ve been working on a book with my colleagues Perter Merholz, David Verba, andTodd Wilkens. The result is an interesting take on how organizations can embrace both the emerging and the long-held concepts behind research, design, and agile development to become more nimble and prepare to succeed in an uncertain future. We called it Subject to Change.
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: 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.
Geek Squad takes creative where it isn’t
Geek Squad started with one college drop out, a car with a logo, and a lot of creativity. Founder and Chief Inspector Robert Stephens just spoke at “Customer Service is the New Marketing,” Sataisfaction’s one-day conference in SF. Robert dropped out once from tech school and then again from art school. But between the two he seemed to gain a deep appreciation of the difference between right-brain and left-brain thinking. He said (as closely as I could capture it), “Right and left brain struggles exist in most businesses… there’s what you do [left-brain] and how you do it [right-brain]. How you do it matters… When two companies do the same thing, what’s going to differentiate one company from another? Customers crave an authentic experience. Just delivering an experience isn’t enough. You have to deliver an authentic one.” Robert naturally considers service the means by Geek Squad differentiates. “Service is the intangible stuff, the stuff you can’t measure, and the stuff your competitor isn’t going to copy.” But it’s also interesting how much of his story and obsession is with the cars, uniform, and other livery that signify the brand. But he feels it’s the creative and cheap way to remind people of Geek Squad, calling it “time release marketing”. Police cars obviously inspired their cars (because the pattern could adapt to any vehicle). NASA mission control inspired the uniform. He recognized the value of going for the geek-style uniforms, noting, “[I realized] these are things my competitors are not going to do.” Overall, it was entertaining to hear from a founder that so clearly got how culture, trends, service, and referent leadership all fit together. On the topic of trends, he understood that technology in the home represented an opportunistic social shift: “now the most popular people in society seeking out the least popular people in society for help.”
The year in ideas — for UX, strategy, and fun
In the New York Times Magazine’s 7th Annual Year in Ideas I found a few interesting experience and strategy related ideas: Two-Birds-With-One-Stone Resistance Telltale Food Wrapping Zygotic Social Networking Rock-Paper-Scissors Is Universal Left-Hand-Turn Elimination And a few just-plain-fun entries that made the list: Fake Tilt-Shift Photography Mob Jurisprudence The Self-Righting Object
Multipurpose tools are less likely to be selected by people for real-world tasks. It’s explained that, “connecting one tool or method to multiple goals weakens the mental association between that means and any one goal.” So remember that iPod-speaker-slash-toilet-paper-despensor? Not such a good idea.
Contextual clues about the safety of our food can be conveyed on the packaging that surrounds it anyway. Best news is that the biological detectors can be applied to the packaging via ink-jet printer. Would love to design packaging that intermediates between people and their food.
Using DNA to establish your social network — because everyone’s related genetically to someone, so everyone shows up online with an instant friend-base.
The different strategies of rock (smash ‘em!), paper (sneak up and smoother ‘em!), and scissors (divide ‘em!) seems to be baked into competitive lizard mating strategies, bacteria, and perhaps the corporate world. I’m not sure I buy that all strategies can be boiled down into a rock-paper-sissors metaphor, but something seems right about there always being a second and third strategy for any situation.
Large scale change of tiny behaviors: U.P.S. has further limited the number of left-hand turns its drivers make: not for the time savings but for the energy savings. It turns out idling in the left-hand lane is a small wasteful practice that has big impact when the behavior is changed across the entire fleet. I can imaging more UX and service design being applied to these types of mass-greening solutions — we’re already talented about getting people to switch channels, adopt new services, and other behavior modifications.
Flickr’s Tilt-Shift Miniature Fakes group made the list too.
The New Zealand police force posted the 1958 Police Act online for wiki-style revision. One of the superintendent’s favorite suggested revisions was submitted by a user who requested that the name of the police force be changed to “The New Zealand Yum-Yum Teddy Bear Strike Force Z.”
Two scientists mathematically proved and then manufactured a self-righting object. Called the Gömböc, it’s an object that no matter how you set it down will always turn over and rebalance itself to the same position. See the animation. Two cool observations: (1) It’s similar to beetle shells and other naturally-occuring evolutionary adaptations that first reach the design through trial-and-error; (2) It’s a physical proof of a mathematical problem.
The long wow — experience as a strategy for customer loyalty
But even though it’s become much more simple to measure customer loyalty, it obviously isn’t simple to create it. This contrast is probably what led to Orbitz Chief Marketing Officer Randy Susan Wagner to quip, “If you want loyalty, get a dog.” Rewards cards, frequent-whatever-programs, and other popular attempts at loyalty are artificial and just get in the way. Instead, engaging customers in more meaningful relationships over time is what builds true loyalty. And that’s where great experiences can play a big role in creating loyal customer relationships. In the essay “The Long Wow,” I lay out an experience-centric approach to fostering and creating loyalty by systematically impressing your customers again and again. I’m curious as to what you think of it.
Customer loyalty, the idea that a customer will return to you again and again, is a hot topic these days. It’s enjoyed plenty of focus ever since Fred Riechfield shared a simple calculation to measure the loyalty of your customers.
Netflix talks
NetFlix is continuing to differentiate itself from Blockbuster, this time by shutting down its email channel for customer service and prominently displaying its toll-free number on their website. The increase in call volume is a conscious choice to improve service. They chose to put their call center in Oregon, because people seem to be more empathetic there and you don’t see the high turnover in other call center hot spots like Salt Lake City. Empathy — that’s something that Blockbuster will never try to compete on.
NetFlix is facing increasingly stiff competition from Blockbuster as the fee-loving behemoth attempts to copy NetFlix’s mail-based DVD rental service. The growth of NetFlix’s customer base has slowed, which might cause most organization to take cost-cutting measures in preparation for pricing wars. Thankfully, that doesn’t appear to be how NetFlix is thinking.
Why i heart ClearRx
I’ve known about the story of Deborah Adler and the design of the ClearRx pill bottle for a couple of years. In my mind, it was another design feel-good story that didn’t have much in common with my everyday design work. But that changed a few months ago when I happened across a BusinessWeek podcast of Deborah talking to one of her past professors Brian Collins. The passion and perseverance of the ClearRx story kept my attention, but it’s the way it changed Target’s pharmacy strategy from the outside in that really got me excited. Since then, I’ve blogged about it, I’ve included the story in many of my public presentations, and I interviewed Deborah as a lead-up to her presentation atUXWeek. What gets me so excited is that Deborah understood that the healthcare system wasn’t meeting basic needs of people who relied on it (SAFETY!), and so she designed and prototyped an obviously better solution that anyone could look at and appreciate. And that’s exactly what Target did. Seeing the promise of the design, they bought the patent from Deborah and redesigned their IT, printing/labeling, training, and marketing around the vision of the new pill bottle. Deborah showed how things should be, creating a picture of how target could be play a more meaningful role in the lives of their customers. Target built backwards from that vision, reorganizing their capabilities. Target immediately increased their pharmacy customer base, and had something truly valuable to offer their customers rather than hard-to-keep promises of nicer service. The ClearRx story exemplifies experience strategy — working from the experiences with the user back through the organizational systems that support it, to create something useful, human, and valuable. Thanks Deborah for keeping me inspired!
