Adaptive Path talk

OK, so this post is a little on the late-side, however, I figure better late than never.

I attended a talk at AP with 2 talks, "The Long Wow" by Brandon Schauer, and "Street Hacks" by Jan Chipchase and Duncan Burns. This possibly was a way of getting key influencers in front of the new AP book, Subject to Change. The book looks to be a good way of approaching design by user experience rather than traditional functional drivers. This book definitely goes on my Amazon Wishlist.
[Street Hacks will be in a later post]

The Long Wow - Brandon Schauer
In my opinion, this talk is one amongst many important conversations that helps codify a new design thinking in a highly competitive, agile, and globalised market. Design is an evolving process as culture and people change. It didn't stop in the 70s with the introduction of CAD, new methods such as spiral design or agile development grew out of our technological advances. I think we're closer to emotional design, where design is a multi-faceted approach to meet customers' needs, wants, and desires.
Brandon's talk focused on 4 main things to develop a stronger relationship with your customers:
1. Know your platform for delivery
2. Tackle a wide area of unmet customer needs
3. Create and evolve your repeatable process
4. Plan and stage the wow experiences

1) Knowing your platform may seem like a no-brainer but it may easily be forgotten. For example, the company Fry's is one of the top electronics companies in the bay area yet if you go to their online site, it's a complete mess. While a mess does (at times) capture the store experience, if their primary touch point is their brick and mortar store, the online experience should help support it, rather than hinder.
Brandon brought up an example of Nike+ iPod as a great platform for launching a great experience. My company recently helped launch a new product called MiCoach (by adidas & Samsung). This is one product that works as a great comparison, MiCoach has a similar and competing platform that one-ups Nike in terms of functionality and the ability to deliver these "wow" experiences. If anything, I think the marketplace will be better to have these 2 competing products to continue to provide outstanding exercise user experiences and the choice of products to match more customers.

2) Unmet customers needs can be one of the more challenging aspects of design. Brandon's example was an OXO measuring cup that accounted for a steep angle of viewing to the cup. So instead of having to lift the cup to eye-level to look at how much liquid you had, you could look down and see it.
As a design consultant, it's often hard to devise such solutions. Most often a client will come to me and say build me a website that does X. When really they should be asking, "I need to do A, B, & C, show me the best way to do it." It's sometimes a bit of a pipe dream to always engage strategically, but ultimately, it's what clients should be asking of their consultants. If you want something built, you can find some people to do it in a less expensive country. Come back to me when you want solutions.

3) Create and evolve your repeatable process is fantastic when you can do it. I particularly like AP's mental model process. Using a design process that brings in direct and indirect research, includes clients, and considers your users/customers holistically is a great way to identify problems & needs; essential before you start building.
Of course I've got my own tricks of the trade such as a customer lifecycle analysis (a slimmed down version of mental model). Persona development is another key tool. There are many others that should be done early & often in an experience-centric design methodology.

4) Plan & Staging wow experiences was one of the hardest things for me to wrap my head around. I completely understand why you would want to manage expectations in such a way. If you think about Cosmopolitan Magazine, they draw people into their content as a way of teasers that reward you for exploring more.
Being a consultant and thinking beyond one turn of the design circle is really hard because the money tends to run out after the first delivery. But without this kind of thinking, you're taking a roulette spin every time you re-design. Brandon certainly nails it with his example of Weight-watchers. You can go to the classes, or learn about dieting on the web, but their launch of On-The-Go services provides a continual Wow that you can use in-context of sitting down to eat (or diet).

My key takeaway from this talk is to direct people to the notes from this talk when we start getting bogged down with user-centric design and to get people thinking more about experience design.

Trashing Comcast

An interesting phenomenon is the squeaky wheel getting the oil. Michael Arrington of Techcrunch blogged about his Comcast going down.

I've had these problems with Comcast many times this past winter with poor performance or just plain outages in internet connectivity. Many complaints hit brain-deadening muzak or voicemail that never gets returned.

When a person like Michael Arrington complains, we can see that the powers that be at Comcast actually listen and go out to fix his problem. His internet status certainly lets him squeak far louder than I can. I wonder if we can democratize this easily so that us nobodies can collectively squeak too.

There's one option that I know of called Get Satisfaction. You can connect to communities and business to have your customer support needs answered. But sometimes it takes a more heavy-handed approach. I recently switched from AT&T to T-Mobile, after being a customer for 5 years. Large issues with customer service and network performance really prompted that switch. Now, if I had a large bullhorn (or was famous), I could have probably worked out some deal. However, if we can network some people in to shout at the same time, this could have the same effect.

There's a facebook application called Causes that lets you support a particular cause. Perhaps there's enough ire towards companies that this application can be cloned or co-opted to rail against companies that abuse their customers. Especially in monopoly situations such as Comcast cable.