Users are not Designers and Designers and not Users

Users are not designers. You can ask them what they want but they can only give you insight into the incremental improvement that they are concerned with their immediate needs. They do not have your aggregated insight that you have across your customers and new technologies. Designers are not users. They may guess what users … Read more

What is Important is the Entire Experience

In an interview for June 2000 interation magazine, Dr. Donald Norman stated: “I don’t like the term ‘usability,’ and I don’t want to be called an ‘HCI expert.’ I believe that what’s really important to the people who use our products is much more than whether I can use something, whether I can actually click … Read more

Customer Journey Maps, Customer Profiles and Touch Points

Customer journey maps are a diagram that illustrates the steps your customers go through in engaging with your company, its products and services. The journey map is a tool to measure your customers’ satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy to create sustainable long-term revenue. Consumer behavior is driven by the innate human need to satisfy identifiable as … Read more

Designing Great Customer Experiences with the Power of A/B Testing

“Over the past decade, the power of A/B testing has become an open secret of high-stakes web development. It’s now the standard (but seldom advertised) means through whichSilicon Valleyimproves its online products. Using A/B, new ideas can be essentially focus-group tested in real time: Without being told, a fraction of users are diverted to a … Read more

The Power and Financial Value of Designing a Great Customer Experience

Great designs create elegant and meaningful experiences for customers. And the design-oriented organizations understand the financial value of this:  “Apple, the epitome of a design-led organization, now has a market capitalization of $570 billion, larger than the GDP of Switzerland. Its revenue is double Microsoft’s, a similar type of technology organization but one not truly … Read more

Inspire the Creation of Great Experiences

There’s work and there’s your life’s work. The kind of work that has your fingerprints all over it. The kind of work that you’d never compromise on. That you’d sacrifice a weekend for. You can do that kind of work at Apple. People don’t come her to play it safe. They come here to swim … Read more

The Next Generation of Customer Experience Leaders

“This is the best business book in years! Bean and Van Tyne do a brilliant job of analyzing what winners do to create a world-class customer experience. They spell out the winning steps so you can implement them in your business. If you want to increase sales and customer satisfaction and, at the same time, … Read more

Companies that delight their customers outperform their peers

According to Larry Tesler, “Companies that delight their customers outperform their peers.” We should listen to Larry because he knows what he is talking about. Larry was one of the researchers at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated) back in the 70’s. PARC, if you didn’t know, has been responsible for such well known and … Read more

At the Heart of Experience Design are the Designers and Testing

If you are designing experiences for services then you will need service designers. If it is a space or counter experience then it may include training, architecture, interior design, display design, wayfinding and more. If you are designing experience for a product and that product is a device then you may include industrial designers and … Read more

Order is Everything when Designing Experiences

When iteratively designing and evaluating experiences, the order in which you do this is very important. It starts with content – you must have the content to design the information architecture. I remember learning this lesson when, at one company, Marketing was looking for our Art Director to start creating comps for our next generation … Read more