Service Blueprints – Going Beyond Customer Journey Maps

Where customer journey maps define your customers – prospects through advocates – touch points with your brand, products and services; service blueprints define the the behind-the-scenes people, processes and technology that supports that journey. Where creating a customer journey maps requires you to “walk in the shoes” of your customer and see your organization through … Read more

The Power of Product Thinking

In his blog post Why Product Thinking is the next big thing in UX Design: Life’s too short to build something nobody wants… Nikkel Blaase shares: “When thinking of User Experience, we often think of a simple, beautiful, and easy to use feature-set of a product, that makes the user’s life easier. But as a … Read more

A Focus on User Experience Increased Conversions by 350%

  Skinit was ranked #25 by Forbes in 2011 as a Most Promising Company. They make personalized adhesive logos and other artwork for consumers to stick onto cell phones, laptops, digital cameras and other electronic gadgets with distribution partners that include Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft and works with sports teams and entertainment firms like Disney to … Read more

User Experience encompasses all aspects of Your Customers interaction with Your Brand

memorable experiences

User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products. It is an approach that puts the user at the center of the design process and incorporates user concerns and advocacy from the beginning. User experience includes everything that the user can experience – the visual appearance, interactive … Read more

System Response Time and Feedback Guidelines

  There is no industry standard for application response time1. How long someone is willing to wait is only relevant in the context of how important the task is to them. For example, how long someone is willing to wait to view their family’s online photo album versus how long they are willing to wait … Read more

Design Thinking is a Misnomer!

Design Thinking is more than thinking and meetings. Design Thinking is about doing and making. Experimentation is at the core of Design Thinking. Developing prototypes and iterating on ideas is not just to validate your concepts but is an integral part of the innovation process where you build things to think and learn. When you … Read more

Contextual Design

Contextual Design is a process that includes methods to: collect data about people in context of their intents, desires, and drivers; interpret and consolidate that data; use the data to create prototypes; and iteratively test and refine the prototypes with the target audience it is intended to help to ensure delight. Contextual Design is based … Read more

Learn, Anticipate and Simplify the Customer Experience across Channels with Predictive Analytics

memorable experiences

We are at the intersection of three maturing technologies: mobile devices, cloud services and big data analytics. Experience Makers collect, correlate and analyze data from their customer interactions across channels to learn, anticipate and simplify the experiences they create for their customers. In the Forbes.com post, Using Big Data and Machine Learning to Enrich Customer Experiences, Kurt … Read more

Personas, Actors, and Roles

Personas, actors, and roles have been around for a long time. In Greek theater, the persona referred to the “theatrical mask” – a role played by an actor. The Romans expanded the term to indicate a role in a court of law where personas assume roles with legal attributes such as rights, powers, and duties. … Read more

Behavioral Data Insights Drive Personalized, Contextually Relevant Experiences

Customer experiences must be contextually relevant, personalized, and synchronized across the channels that they frequent. Organizations need to go beyond demographic, psychographic and geolocation segmentation and capture, analyze and execute on behavioral data about their customers. Smart organizations deliver the right message or offer at the right time through the right channel to the right … Read more

Affective Engineering

Affective Engineering is akin to Emotional Design rooted in Kansei. Kansei is a Japanese word that roughly translates to sensitivity and sensibility. It links the customer’s emotional responses to the properties and characteristics of a product or service. Customers purchase products based on qualities like brand, design, impression etc. People want to use products that … Read more

Multisensory Experience Design Research Methods

Experience design as a discipline runs the gambit from human factors to fine arts. We experience reality from a variety of senses. As experience designers, we map out the affect of each cue along our audiences’ journey with the five senses – sight, sound, touch, taste, smell – the more senses engage, the more memorable … Read more