Xperience This!

Or How Diapers.com Changed How I Shop by Remembering Four (4) Basic Aspects of Excellent CX Design 

Normally when I write a customer experience (CX) related blog post it is about something that went very wrong. After all, I’m just like most people. Something goes right I tell my husband and a couple of friends. Something goes wrong, tell the world! This time, I want to talk about the impact even a small great experience can have on brand loyalty – and how it can lead to changing hearts, minds and behaviors.

Believe it or not, despite all the multi-touchpoint experience design I do, I am 100% an in-store shopper… or I used to be.  The ability to see and touch the actual products I am going to spend my money on is very important to me, as is the money I can save on shipping. (Hey, that extra $10 can lead to an even nicer pair of shoes!).  All of that changed, of course, with the arrival of my daughter a few months ago.  What used to be long afternoons of wandering the mall for a great bargain have turned into wondering the halls of the web for…oh, say the cheapest deal on baby formula.  Sigh…

All during my pregnancy people were telling me to get ready for the world of online shopping.  I insisted that while I might break down for formula and diapers, NEVER would I be “one of those moms” who does all of her personal shopping online.  That said, towards the end, hitting the mall was not so much of an option. Resignedly, I opened up the Mac and went online.  And I hated it – with one exception… Diapers.com.   More »

The industry of higher education is under intense pressure to continually adapt to the advances in technology that its primary audience – students – have already integrated into their daily lives.  Consider that as recently as the 1990s, the textbook still ruled. Students didn’t have desktop computers in their dorms, and the web was yet to be born. By 2000, students had desktops, sometimes laptops, broadband connections to the Internet, and wireless access was on the rise. By 2010, students had multiple computer devices, often mobile, their own high-speed cellular 3G/4G connections, and hundreds of applications to accomplish their work anytime, anywhere.

In my 10 years in the field of IT at a large state university, I saw firsthand how the institution struggled to keep up with and meet students’ demands while maintaining the university’s core principles and commitment to quality. Many systems and applications were conceived, completed and deployed to meet these demands, but often with minimal involvement from students. Speaking from my personal experience as both a student and staff member, I can say that the results of many of these projects missed the mark, were overly complicated, or did not address the primary needs of the students. From an experience design perspective, they simply failed to start at the beginning – Who is the audience? What do they want? How do we help them get there? More »

MISI XD Account Director (AD) and strategist Jerilyn MacLaren-Hall co-presents a webinar with Morris Museum Executive Director Linda Moore. The topic: creating a great customer experience by first working with the museum’s employees to learn from them and to help them understand how they can contribute to a memorable museum experience. Based on her work with the museum and many other companies intent on improving their customer experiences, Jerilyn writes a white paper. The topic: how to create a great customer experience by first creating a great employee experience.

MISI XD AD and strategist Lisa Woodley leads a workshop at a Life Sciences Commercial IT Summit. The topic: how to prepare internal teams for the changes to come and create internal advocates when a company implements new technology solutions. Based on her experience helping companies understand and manage cultural change, Lisa writes a white paper. The topic: The Dawn of the Era of iT - how new trends in information technology are forcing IT organizations to be more customer-centric, with their “customer” being the employees they serve.

I travel to Moscow to present a keynote at UX Russia 2011. My topic is Beyond the Interface to the Interaction. I organize the presentation around three of MISI XD’s 10 Immutable Truths of XD. One of the truths I focus on is #6: XD Acknowledges that Employees are People Too. Among the points I make in my presentation is that companies have come to recognize that employees are customer experience professionals’ secret weapon. They experience the customer’s issues, they generate real world improvement ideas, and they build the links between the company and the customer experience.

Customer Experience (CX) - the idea of designing the end to end, multiple touchpoint, multi-modal experience as a whole as opposed to a series of discrete interactions – has been maturing as a discipline for many years. More companies are appreciating the power of CX to differentiate their products, services and/or brands in the marketplace and to create loyalty. Titles like Chief Experience Officer or SVP of Customer Experience are becoming more common. And new CX maturity models – measures of how committed an organization is to a strategy of customer-centricity – are being introduced into the marketplace by a variety of practitioners. What has not gotten as much play as we believe it should, is the role each employee plays in contributing to the desired outcome of a great, loyalty-inspiring customer experience. As Jerilyn writes in her white paper, “If you or your colleagues don’t buy into the value of your product, your brand and the customer experience you are seeking to create, you won’t be able to live that promise when working with your customers.”

No surprise then that Employee Experience has been a major theme at MISI XD in recent months, and will continue to be as the results of our work with our current clients develop into additional insights to the power of individual employees to make or break the customer experience.

Three is a powerful number. When events happen in threes I tend to pay attention. They don’t have to be momentous events, like revolutions, earthquakes and hurricanes. Sometimes it’s simply a message or theme that repeats itself until you realize there’s a there there. Last Friday one of MISI’s account directors sent a congratulatory email to her account team for a job well done. It struck me as having a theme similar to two other notable events: 1) Liam Bannon’s cover story for Interactions magazine on the evolution of HCI; 2) Steve Jobs resignation as CEO of Apple. These three events shared a theme that – particularly for those interested in experience design – is worthy of our attention: In a world increasingly transfixed by and dependent on technology and technologists, the voices of humanists are on the rise. More »

How to Give Your Audience a Voice in Their Ever-changing World

In 2004, in a Scientific American article titled The Tyranny of Choice,  Barry Shwartz  posited a counterintuitive argument about the effects of having too many choices (e.g. do we need 38 different kinds of milk?).  He questioned why “people are increasingly unhappy even as they experience greater material abundance and freedom of choice? Recent psychological research suggests that increased choice may itself be part of the problem.”

I count myself among those who struggle with choice.  I am virtually paralyzed when handed the phone book sized menu at The Cheesecake Factory.  The only place I find an easy time eating out is at a wedding (i.e. Meat, Chicken or Fish works great). 

This idea of the tyranny of choice got me thinking about a similar phenomenon that occurs with rapid innovation and change.  The speed at which new products, interfaces and services are introduced is generally something to admire and celebrate as “Good”.  But it is as daunting as it is impressive, and there’s not always a positive experience for the customers or employees faced with all this change. More »