An Experience Design Definition Statement

One of the Apple Guidelines for developing applications is to create an application definition statement early in your development effort to help you turn an idea and a list of features into a coherent product that people want to own. A definition statement is a concise, concrete declaration of the main purpose and its intended … Read more

Your Product’s Personality Can Create Meaning, Trust and Loyal Customers – or Not

In their recent post, Emotion Communicates Personality, Forms Relationships and Creates Meaning, Trevor van Gorp and Edie Adams share with us that: “Regardless of whether you intentionally give your product a personality, people will perceive a personality.” Not surprising, van Gorp and Adams’ research find that we tend to purchase products that seem to have … Read more

Lessons From Apple: Schedule-driven release produces half-baked products and kills innovation

In the October 29 post by Om Malik, From inside Apple, the Scott Forstall fallout at Gigaom.com,Om shares: “Unlike in the Jobs era, when the company would ship features when they were ready for primetime, a culture of schedule-driven releases has become commonplace. The time-based schedule is one of the reasons why Siri and Maps … Read more

Commit to the Customer – not the Technology

One of our greatest challenges in designing the best experiences for our customers is not letting the technology limitation determine the customer experience. When organizations commit to the technology instead of committing to the customers – everyone loses. In this age of the experience economy, this can mean the end for organizations that do not … Read more

Outside In

Determining, developing and delivering your customer experience is an Outside-in process. Too many companies make the mistake of thinking that they know what is best for their customers. Oftentimes they may think that by asking their customers for input  they will no longer be perceived as being the expert. As the experience leaders know, these … Read more

The Holistic Experience between Brands, Products and Services

“Apple has been held up as the definitive example of how to integrate a brand and its products and services to create an extraordinary company. The stock market, the ultimate arbiter of American business success, now places more value on a design-driven company…”  – Reuben Steiger, Great Brands Are About Fusing Product And Service. How Do … Read more

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

Five Design Principles to Make a Great Customer Experience from Citrix

Citrix Design team put out this great video, Why Design Matters to Me – Using Design to Make a Difference, where they explain five design principles to craft the total experience that your customer has with your company: Make it Simple by reducing the amount of information that people have to deal with and create … Read more

The Secret to Success to Creating an Excellent Customer Experience

Whitney Quesenbery, author of Storytelling for User Experience and Global UX, says about The Customer Experience Revolution:  “Van Tyne and Bean explore case studies of some of today’s most successful companies. As they look at their business, marketing and product design, it becomes clear that the secret to success is to put the entire organization … 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

Customer Experience Satisfaction, Loyalty and Advocacy Questions

When measuring your customer experience, there are three questions that you may ask your customer that will give you insight into their satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. The standard “How satisfied are you with…” is always good way to measure basic satisfaction. When compared to “How much do you value…” – you gain tremendous insight. If … 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