The well-intentioned mobile company took that on board and prioritized their product development with renewed confidence. A few months later, they launched their wap portal with lots of useful services.

The design and product teams watched traffic stats anxiously, looking to validate their hard work. But the stats were just weird. People were not accessing train times and news as expected. Instead, they were going crazy for things like nude, awful quality animated gifs (this was long ago) and clunky apps like mobile chat, which defied usability and common sense at the time. And yet, the revenue was coming from those.

What’s the moral of the story?
Customer/design research cannot make all the hard decisions for you or eliminate risk totally.  Innovation should be user-centric, but for it to happen there has to be some experimentation and the will to go out of your comfort zone with some calculated risk.

Often the best test ground for innovation is life and not the research lab. Traditional quantitative and lab qualitative research is useful, but for innovation purposes it might mean testing within what we already know or suspect, and having interesting insights filtered out through what users pre-judge as being important. I’m more convinced by the minute that observational and contextual research techniques like ethnography, where you observe people in action, in context and their environment, has the potential to surprise and shows us opportunities which would not be otherwise be articulated in a lab.

But we should pick these insights to inspire and differentiate, and not just to cover ourselves. A bit of courage often pays off.

But wait, I forgot to mention that my friends and I are a generation apart – and it shows. Whilst most of my social ecosystem grew under zero influence of the internet and is therefore agnostic to online social codes, to my friends there is no such clear line. Their online and offline personas are bundled together, and increasingly their cultural codes, references, brand preferences (and prejudices) are generated online.

Fair enough, my girlie lunch friends and I all work in the internet industry and thus are fickle early adopters. But from the research we do I get the impression that this is getting more widespread. What do you think?

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:

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.

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.