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Forgetful and happy

13/04/2009 //
1

I have been reading some interesting articles on how service designers have been using Behavioural Sciences to improve customer satisfaction and… to make more money.

Behavioural sciences have shown that customers have a short memory span and we should bear this in mind as we design and manage services. It’s not as evil and deceiving as it sounds – it is more about leaving the best to end. Some of the findings that are relevant to user-experience include:

  • We prefer progressive improvements. We can tolerate weak starts and decent middles if what follows is a good end (the concept of Beta services). But we are cruel and judgemental when services start well and disappoint in the end.
  • We prefer to resolve  unpleasant things early, getting them out of the way and taking our time with lighter/ fun things. Kind of obvious but it gives us the clear hint that if we need to ask the user to make an effort (e.g. registration) or to inform them of a limitation (e.g. availability, delivery policies)  it should be done sooner than later.
  • A positive end is the part of the experience that we remember the most.

This is a great endorsement to UX designers and clients who understand that they need to dedicate as much attention to homepages as to lower level/exit pages – knowing that any page can be an entry point and that they have little control over the user’s exit points.

Using some basic Behavioural Sciences concepts to improve business is no evil plot to control the customer’s mind. It’s about sustaining the quality along the whole user-experience and surprising the user positively at the end – whenever that is.

Read more:
Want to Perfect your Company’s Service? Use Behavioral Science
Richard Chase for Harvard Business Review


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Categories Product design, user experience

A company’s website IS the company

01/03/2009 //
2

So much is said about the Internet changing the face of advertising, but this quote (above in the title) from a customer we interviewed many years ago is so right and shows perfectly how the Internet has changed everything in marketing. And by marketing I mean all the Ps (product, price, place and promotion).

User experience (or customer experience) has gained so much weight in the corporate world, perhaps because it got to mean company experience. Even if an organisation does not sell anything directly on the web, it’s online presence alone has the power to add stars to its brand perception (to customers, partners, investors…) or to erode it.

No modern company can afford to consider it’s web presence lightly or just accessory as components of interactive marketing and customer experience become one thing:

A company website IS the company

What goes through your customers mind if you offer them a satisfactory  user experience:

Perception:  This company knows their business – They are smart, competent, trustworthy and aware of customer’s needs.
Result: Yes, I’ll buy your product, come back for more, tell my peers about it – thanks a lot!

What goes through your customers mind if you offer them a disappointing  user experience:

Perception: The people behind this company are incompetent and not to be taken seriously – They are clueless, clumsy, negligent and don’t value their customers enough.

Unless the company is a monopoly (which happens!), the result would be loss in sales, traffic, brand equity, whatever is important to the organisation’s bottom line.

Interactive marketing means much more than banners and search engine tactics. It is 100% intertwined with your customer’s experience and should be thought of as part of a long term business strategy.

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Categories marketing, user experience

Rojo’s new site and online art-store

21/02/2009 //
0

What a pleasure to see Rojo’s new website.  Rojo is a creative consortium supporting contemporary/urban art through the publishing of magazines, books and more recently through a network of exhibitions spaces in 22 cities across the globe.

They have just launched a brand new website, beautiful, simple and easy to navigate – which is not such an obvious thing when it comes to design/art themed sites.

The main new addition is the Artstore where you can buy unique pieces  from the likes of Boris Hoppek , Bruno 9Li (below), Sosaku Miyazak, Michel Ducourneau and Heiko Mueller online. Prices range from around 650 to 5000 euros.

Rojo Artstore

I’m seriously tempted by a couple of pieces. I wouldn’t do it just as an investment, but if you are into that there must be advantages over keeping you savings in the bank.

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Categories Friends, user experience

Sometimes the customer isn’t right…

09/02/2009 //
0

Taking a short break from being a customer champion… amused by Not Always Right via Stephen Fry

Categories Fun

Are we doing product or service design?

05/02/2009 //
0

Sometimes when you try to decide if the output of an interactive project is a product or a service, things get blurry. Traditionally products are defined as tangible goods as opposed to services which are defined as intangible goods.  Not so helpful… What is that tangible on the web? Perhaps the interface, but not much else.

I prefer the definition which says a product is something we own whilst a service is something we can use temporarily. The difference between buying and hiring a dinner jacket.
This definition seems useful, so I’ll try to apply it to a few real life projects (the output of which I would have called generically Product in the past):

An e-learning platform – Definitely providing an education service
An online newspaper – An information service
A software-as-a-service online shop – Can provide a similar service to a sales assistant offering expert advice and guiding the customer towards  a suitable service package.
A mobile mapping application – A tricky one. I have downloaded the software (so I own it), but for it to be useful at all I need data provided by the mapping company (a service) facilitated by my network operator (also a service).
A multinational corporate website – Essentially a marketing and communication tool between company, customers, investors, press, etc. At the same time you can consider it as a provider of self-customer-services.

Why is this differentiation relevant to interactive projects?

It is pretty clear that many online projects will generate hybrid product-service offerings, just as in the physical world. But I think we (practitioners) are developing more services than we imagined, yet treating them mostly as products.

Services usually involve longer or repeated engagements with the user and perhaps we can contemplate that more efficiently.  It would be really interesting to start using rich design tools such as service blueprinting in addition to content maps and prototypes.

Let’s see how it works in practice.

——–

Some interesting reading: Better than owning

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Categories Product design, user experience

Usability, user experience or customer experience?

30/01/2009 //
0

Product development practitioners have little control over what happens after they hand over a project deliverable.

It’s a bit like delivering a baby and hoping the parents will be  responsible and caring. Because good user-experience  and ultimately the success of a website or an interactive product depends hugely on its management, perhaps more than we would like to admit. A couple of examples:

> In a content-rich site we (consultants) often have no control over the quality of incoming content.
> On an e-commerce site, we don’t determine pricing, delivery policies and fulfillment.
> A well designed, user-friendly corporate website can improve the image and perception of a traditional brand, but it can´t change the corporate culture by itself, which is ultimately what governs the relationship with their clients.

I think it’s important to differentiate  usability, user experience and customer experience in terms of expectations whenever we are to be made accountable for results and ROI.  There are many definitions – this is my understanding:

usability, user-experience, customer-experience

The good news is that there are several ways to extend our scope of influence so the final customer experience is closer to what we had conceived initially:

> Design flexibly to scale – sites tend to inflate in content, sections and functionality with the time.
> Speak to stakeholders during the project (marketing, customer care, IT…) – understand their requirements,  advise  on realistic resources they should plan for.
> Write a set a recommendations for post-development UX management, e.g: Fulfillment best-practices, focus areas for customer care, privacy policies, advertising and editorial guidelines, etc.

It’s great to be the product midwife but it’s much better to be the godmother!

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Categories Product design

Looking up

23/01/2009 //
0

Despite a morbid compulsion to follow the free-flowing bad news on the economic downturn, there are definitely some good ones to cheer things up a bit.  So here is a compiled list of things which do BETTER in times of crisis:

Food and drink which benefit from hard times:

  • Chocolate – sugary candybars in particular
  • Takeaway and convenience meals
  • Pizza delivery
  • Pasta, rice and pulses (instead of grills and salads)
  • Pasta sauces
  • Frozen foods
  • Beer
  • Tap water

Changes in Health patterns:

  • “People are physically healthier in times of recession,” according to Christopher Ruhm at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. “Death rates fall, people smoke less, drink less and exercise more”.  People have more time to prepare healthier meals at home.
  • Heart attacks go down. Back problems go down.
  • Sales of laxatives go up – constipation problems increase in stressful conditions.

Going up in business and education

  • Online shopping (global bargain hunters)
  • Cost-councious food retail
  • White label anything
  • Repair services (clothing, computers, etc)
  • Specialization courses and higher education, free, subsidised or low cost

Changes in behaviour and personal preferences

  • Marriage – The number of divorces go down – People need to work their issues out as they can’t afford expensive lawyers or to live in separate homes.
  • More creative activity – More people have the time, and there is a tendency to do more meaninful things…
  • Music preferences: People tend to switch to “longer, slower and more meaningful themes” during downturn periods according to a study by Terry F. Pettijohn II, a professor of psychology at Coastal Carolina University, who analysed Billboard No. 1 songs from 1955 to 2003.
  • Bunnies:  Playboy’s Playmates tended to be more mature looking, heavier and taller at hard times compared to the good times, according to the same study – also showing that people look for reassurance.

Good news for the environment:

  • Less driving, less traffic (less CO2 emissions)
  • Tap water instead of bottled (less plastic waste)
  • Less waste in general: energy, food, packaging…

A couple of the articles that inspired this post:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/weekinreview/19lewin.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/14/credit-crunch-high-street

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Categories Uncategorized

More customer research, bolder decisions

27/08/2008 //
3

I have been a fan and advocate of customer research in interactive product development for many years .

For us product designers and marketers, knowing what customers want and need can be highly inspirational and often a well deserved kick in the butt. And both (inspiration and kicks in the butt) are triggers of innovation. Real insight can  help us making bolder product decisions, moving from the realm of redesigns to the one of innovations.

When I’m totally comfortable with this argument the famous phrase from Henry Ford kicks in to disarm me: ‘If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.” I usually stammer something about good moderators and the wise use of data in response. But I have lacked some punchy response to this so far.

But Mark Hurst has formulated a very nice one in Exceptions to listening to customers

I’ll quote his last couple of paragraphs:

“… nondirected customer research is applicable, and helpful, when it’s time to create a game-changing new product or service. And it doesn’t require asking customers to invent the thing.

After all, a good lab moderator won’t ask the customer what product they want … rather they’ll simply try to understand the customer’s unmet needs and pain points, so that they can (back at the company) innovate the right solution. Customers, important as they are, are not designers”.

Thanks for the argument, Mark!

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Categories Product design

Taaz.com: A fine example of customer centric online marketing

01/07/2008 //
0

Taaz.com is a virtual makeover website which allows you to upload a photo of your fine self and test what you would look like risking a new make up direction, a new hairdo or a collagen enhanced pout.

Once done with the transformation you can go social: use the result as your new facebook avatar or let the Taaz community comment on your hard work (going public is optional).

But the real beauty here for me is the natural and unobtrusive way they managed to fit brands at the core of the service.

Brands like Stila, Clinique and Revlon do much better than just sponsoring or bothering us with banners – they are a seamless part of service.

Instead of browsing through individual brand “counters” searching for the ideal lippie as you would in a department store, you browse through colour pallets slapping them onto your photo. Found the dream shade? Voila, it happens to belong to a certain brand. Product = 100% relevant info.

Besides, it is quite a laugh.

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Categories marketing

Things I wish I could find around the corner…

20/06/2008 //
0

\When you move to a new country you miss unexpected things from the place you left. But soon enough you will adopt new consumption habits that you just can’t live without. You move on, the nostalgia list fattens up.

Import/export entrepreneurs in Spain, you would have a definite customer if you brought here:

  • Sainsbury’s fresh ready made curries (all 50 varieties ) from the UK
  • Sausages from Simply Sausages (UK)
  • Marks & Spencer deli/convenience food
  • Selfridges – the whole shop (UK)
  • BBC and Channel 4 (it sucks that you can’t access the online service from a foreign IP)
  • Treacle tart (UK)
  • Rio juice bars: 100 varieties in strange personalised combinations (Brazil)
  • Sonho de Valsa bombons (Brazil)
  • Havaianas flip-flops at 4 euros (Brazil)
  • Live samba bars (Brazil)
  • Brooklyn Industries stuff (haven’t really lived there, but who cares…)
  • Decent bandwidth internet access for a decent price.
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Categories Uncategorized
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