Xperience This!

The concept of addressing people’s emotional needs in experience design has been around for quite a few years in the consumer world.  Companies like Apple, Disney and Starbucks have become well known for driving intense customer loyalty by infusing their customers’ experiences with a personality to which their customers can relate or even aspire. Interact with your customers on an emotional level and they won’t just become loyal customers; they’ll become your advocates.  As A.G. Lafley wrote in The Game Changer (2008), “Good design is a catalyst for creating total experiences that transcend functional benefits alone and delight customers. It is a catalyst for moving a business from being technology-centered to one that is customer experience-centered.”

So why not apply this same principle when designing your employee experience? After all, employees are essentially your organization’s internal customers. Often companies will focus their internal efforts on improving performance on processes and new tools/technologies, but that misses a big part of the picture.  Process improvements and new tools won’t have their desired impact on your bottom line if your employees don’t embrace them. Simply announcing such changes won’t ensure your employees are aligned with your business goals; and it certainly won’t turn them into advocates.

Design your employee experiences to make an emotional connection, and you change everything. When designed to delight your employees, new processes become something they follow because they want to, not because they have to. New tools become those things they’ve been asking and waiting for to help them do a better job. More »

The definition of functional requirements for a website or a business application is a critical phase in the development process. Aligning those requirements with the needs of your target audience is a prerequisite to launching a tool that will be quickly adopted and meet business expectations for ROI.

Prototyping is an excellent technique that enables your development team to get valuable audience feedback and address issues pertaining to functional priorities and usability before they become costly downstream problems. Prototyping provides the additional benefit of allowing the team to share its vision and begin building a fan base among your audience members. These fans can become powerful allies in driving adoption of the completed tool.

Despite its benefits, prototyping and early stage audience testing can be perceived as slowing down the development process and creating unnecessary front-end costs. We believe that when done correctly, prototyping’s benefits far outweigh its costs. Here are a few things we’ve learned along the way to help ensure the process is efficient and effective. More »

Seven (7) tips to help you ensure your business and customers are getting demonstrably valuable designs from your agency

No doubt you are aware of programs that were elegant, motivating experiences for their target audiences and returned compelling business results. The question is how can you ensure that the work your agencies are doing for you will result in such experiences? Do you know what good looks like when you’re watching it develop? 

If you’re not even thinking to ask that question, then here’s

Tip #1: Ask it

After all, something about this headline intrigued you, right? Whatever industry you work in, you have the responsibility to question what it is your agencies are creating and why. And not just questions like, “Are you using the right treatment of the logo?” Rather bottom line questions like, “Will I ever see a quantifiable or qualifiable benefit of that $80,000 Flash video you suggested we put on our site?” or “That 55-e-mail communication stream…how will we know it is working for us?”

Some agencies are questioning themselves. Take David Berkowitz and his Inside the Marketer’s Studio blog where he recently ‘atoned’ for sins on behalf of marketers and agencies. Included among his confessions was, “We have killed ideas that were spot on in favor of pet projects that we wanted for our portfolios.” If you’re not lucky enough to be working with an agency that has developed this level of self-awareness and self-evaluation, I’ve provided some tried and true tips for ensuring your agency is gives you good design. More »