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 »

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 »

I was pleasantly surprise to have a packed room for my UPA International Conference presentation, Designing with a Service Perspective: A Bronx Tale. For details on the talk’s content, see Dave Roth’s post.

The attendance validates that the virtual buzz about service design carries over to the analog world.  User experience professionals wondering, “What is this new shiny object?” My presentation only scratched the surface of the potential impact the service design field can have on typical experience design work. I’m eager to continue the conversation with a focus on these aspects:

• What are effective service design methods and approaches?
• What does it really mean to “do” service design?
• Who should own service design?
• Given SD is still predominantly an academic endeavor, who is most equipped to be “practicing” it?
• How can practitioners effectively evangelize SD in organizations?
• SD is still aspirational for many, so when it’s time to put those methods into practice, how can you prevent it from failing before it begins?

These are among the topics I’ll be exploring in upcoming months, so please follow and contribute to the conversations:

• http://www.twitter.com/ServiceDesignLK
• UXMatters
• http://www.linkedin.com/pub/laura-keller/3/728/b6a
• http://www.servicexd.com/wordpress/

In order to provide a successful product or service, you need to know who your audiences are, what they want, and how you can help them get there. Performing both qualitative and quantitative audience research is an integral part the experience design process – whether for physical products, digital offerings, spatial designs, professional services, or a combination of all of the above. The challenge frequently put to us is, “How can we integrate research into our project cycle without breaking the bank?”

Your objectives will ultimately drive the types of research you choose to conduct – interviews, focus groups, natural observation, journals, card sorting and so on. But when the budget is tight and every piece of a project is under the financial microscope, you can use some of the following guerilla research tactics to gain an actionable level of audience understanding. More »