YouTube, Microsoft, Nokia and Apple are four companies that are well known for their innovative products and the focus they put on the user. Yet little is actually known about what these companies do to really ensure that their customers have a remarkable customer experience.

I would like to share with you some practices that companies apply when they are aiming to design and test new products that I have collected in the last months. 

YouTube: Why do users watch videos online?

YouTube/Google is not sharing much corporate information, but in a recent blog post they have shared some insights into their user testing process. YouTube has identified two distinct groups of users, one who just wants to watch movies and one who wants to connect with other people online. Here are mockups of what these different user groups expect from YouTube:

The design for each user group is different as they summarized in their blog post:

So what exactly is user research like at YouTube? Sometimes it means letting users design their ideal experience. For example, last year we used a method called FIDO (first utilized by Fidelity Investments) where we cut out different elements of various video sites, stuck them on magnets, and had users arrange their ideal organization of the elements (see below for an example). Other times we use a more standard research method called a usability study, which entails seeing whether a user can or can’t complete certain standard site tasks in a usability lab.

One of the most important findings has to do with the difference between the large group of users who are on YouTube simply to watch videos and a smaller, but very important, group of more engaged users — often uploaders. The latter group will, unsurprisingly, care about details like how to make communication with their audience easier and more effective, how to grow their audience, and even how to make money on YouTube. The former, on the other hand, want as simple of an interface as possible: "Just let me watch the video, please!"

Read the full article.

Microsoft: Inventing a new game of play for Halo 3

The designers of Bungie Studios, the company that is developing Halo 3 for Microsoft, are facing a tough challenge. They need to create an experience that is challenging enough to thrill the 15 million existing hardcore fans of Halo— yet appealing enough to lure in millions of new players. In their quest to make the video game a success the company is able to gather a lot of data that can be used to derive conclusion about the actual game play.

The lab also records video footage of every testing session and hyperlinks these clips to the individual progress reports. If the design team wonders why players are having trouble in a particular area, they can just pull up a few test games to see what’s going wrong.

 

Take what happened last March: A report noted an unusual number of "suicides" among players piloting the alien Wraith tank in an upper level. After watching dozens of archived test games, Griesemer spotted the problem. The players were firing the tank’s gun when its turret was pointed toward the ground, attempting to wipe out nearby attackers. But the explosion ended up also killing (and frustrating) the player.

To prevent this, Griesemer reprogrammed the tank so that the turret couldn’t be lowered beyond a certain point. The Wraith suicides stopped.

Read more about this in Wired Magazin or download a presentation from about tracking player behavior in computer games by Ramon Romero at the Game Developer’s Conference. (Direct link to presentation, 14 MB)

Apple: Why you can’t innovate like Apple

Ask somebody to name an innovative company and you will most likely hear Apple. One reason why there is so much mystic around Apple is that the company doesn’t talk about the process of developing radical new products.

Sometimes though, some individuals set out and try to collect all information that is available and put together a coherent picture that explains how things play together. Alain Breillatt has done this for Apple and summarized what he could find about Apple’s development process. Alain has written up an article presenting his perspective of Apples design philosophy. One of them is the 10 to 3 to 1 principle:

10 to 3 to 1. Take the pixel-perfect approach and pile on top of it the requirement that Apple designers expect to design 10 different mockups of any new feature under consideration. And these are not just crappy mockups; they all represent different, but really good, implementations that are faithful to the product specifications.

Then, by using specified criteria, they narrow these 10 ideas down to three options, which the team spends months further developing…until they finally narrow down to the one final concept that truly represents their best work for production.

This approach is intended to offer enormous latitude for creativity that breaks past restrictions. But it also means they inherently plan to throw away 90% of the work they do. I don’t know many organizations for which this would be an acceptable ratio. Your CFO would probably declare, “All I see is money going down the drain.” This is a major reason why I say you can’t innovate like Apple.

You can find the full article here.

Nokia: Breaking phones on purpose

How can you ensure that mobile phones are not breaking when customers use them? By breaking them early in the development process and ensuring that you are using designs that ensure that they withstand the daily wear out.

The idea is to simulate years’ worth of real-life product use in just a few days — individual tests last anywhere from a few hours to three weeks or longer — by pressing buttons, sliding sliders, actuating hinges, heating, cooling, wetting, drying, dropping, whacking, shaking, rubbing, bending, and generally defacing the phones in every way imaginable.

Once a phone finally breaks, they look for obvious reasons — cracked plastic, broken springs, and the like — but if that initial analysis fails, they’ve got a well-equipped lab on site complete with a scanning electron microscope and CT scanner for taking microscopic looks at failed components in both two and three dimensions; from here, they can find broken connections on chips, incorrectly-fabricated materials, and the occasional ant eye magnified a couple thousand times (it’s posted on the wall in the lab, and yes, it’s scary).

I have embedded two videos, this one from the Nokia Test Center in Southwood, UK

This one is produced by Engadget and shows their development facility in San Diego:

Microsoft: The Story of the Ribbon

This has already been posted here on the Customer Experience Labs but I still think that this is a valuable case study that shows how a product  was iteratively developed and how continuous user testing beginning in early stages is done.

The Story of the Ribbon is a presentation by Jensen Harris from 2008. He tells the story of the development of the new Microsoft Office 2007 user interface. There are great insights on how Microsoft solved the challenge of “menu clutter”, various methods to collect user insights and how to setup an iterative prototyping process to create a product that radically improves the users experience when working with a Word processor or Excel sheet.

You can watch the talk online or download it. Powerpoint slides are available too. Highly recommended.

Customer experience management can not just focus on customer service or branding because a company’s products and (core) services are ultimately the drivers of customer value and therefore essential for the customers experience.

When flying with a low-cost airline it is accepted to take the bus to get on the plane. Yet when you are booked on a business class ticket with a traditional carrier everybody expects to use the jet bridge to enter the plane. Customers can indeed have a great experience even though they have to take the bus because the price of their ticket is so much lower.

"The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine" is an article in Wired Magazine that applies a similar understanding of the elements that constitute a great customer experience.

Even though the business model was not successful, the founders of Pure Digital and creators of the now famous Flip Camera found out something interesting about customer expectations:

"Customers would sacrifice lots of quality for a cheap, convenient device. To keep the price down, Pure Digital had made significant trade-offs. It used inexpensive lenses and other components and limited the number of image-processing chips. The pictures were OK but not great. Yet Pure Digital sold 3 million cameras anyway."

The article continues and describes the success of the company’s next product, the Flip Ultra:

After some trial and error, Pure Digital released what it called the Flip Ultra in 2007. The stripped-down camcorder—like the Single Use Digital Camera—had lots of downsides. It captured relatively low-quality 640 x 480 footage. It had a minuscule viewing screen, no color-adjustment features, and only the most rudimentary controls. But it was small , inexpensive , and so simple to operate that pretty much anyone could figure it out in roughly 6.7 seconds.

The success speaks for itself:

Today—just two years later—the Flip Ultra and its subsequent revisions are the best-selling video cameras in the US, commanding 17 percent of the camcorder market. Sony and Canon are now scrambling to catch up.

The article presents some additional examples ranging from MP3, to unmanned aircraft to healthcare and closes with a statement from Pure Digital founder why Flip knockoffs from the likes of Sony have failed:

"I think it’s because we have a better product." What’s odd is that executives at Sony and Canon would likely say the same thing—after all, their models have far more features and often produce sharper images. But Fleming-Wood is using a different definition of "better." He now defines quality entirely in terms of ease of use—how easy it is to shoot and share the video.

So what is the essence of a great customer experience? It is not about the number of features and it is not about providing always more and more functionality and amenities (like in a Ritz-Carlton Hotel or with a Sony DSL camera).

A great customer experience can also be the result of a product that offers the core functionality in a way that is easy to use and in a quality that is just good enough and a prices that creates a remarkable value offer for the customer.

Read the full article in Wired magazine.

The best indicator that you – as a customer – just had a "Wow" experience is that you feel a strong desire to talk about this remarkable experience with your friends. And this is exactly what companies have to aim for: not just serve their customer but to wow them so that customers start to talk about your products, services and brand.

The Elements of Wow Experiences

Wharton School of Business has teamed up with the Retail Council of Canada to identify the elements that constitute a Wow experience and have identified five major areas:

• Engagement: being polite, genuinely caring and interested in helping, acknowledging and listening.
• Executional excellence: patiently explaining and advising, checking stock, helping to find products, having product knowledge and providing unexpected product quality.
• Brand Experience: exciting store design and atmosphere, consistently great product quality, making customers feel they’re special and that they always get a deal.
• Expediting: being sensitive to customers’ time on long check-out lines, being proactive in helping speed the shopping process.
• Problem Recovery: helping resolve and compensate for problems, upgrading quality and ensuring complete satisfaction.

The article also stresses the importance of selecting the right staff that is able to take basic information about shopper preferences and convert that knowledge to customized service. This is in my perspective the essential aspect for delivering remarkable customer experiences.

Delivering Wow is hard, but it can be done

When reflecting on these elements it is obvious that it is not “rocket science” that is required to deliver remarkable customer experiences. On the contrary, it is not  the most sophisticated strategy that will bring success but the discipline and committed of the organization and its employees to deliver “Wow” every day to every customer.

A "Culture of Wow", a commitment that is lived in the organization where every retail employee understands that it is necessary to Wow and not just to serve, is requires for organizations to achieve this.

References

• Getting to ‘Wow’: Consumers Describe What Makes a Great Shopping Experience
• Discovering ‘WOW’ — A Study of Great Retail Shopping Experiences in North America

One of the best indicators of a customer experience focused organization is the commitment from top-management not only to deliver ordinary products and services but to go the extra mile and surprise and delight customers with a company’s offerings. If top management wants to show real commitment, it has to experience the real customer experience in order to ensure that decision are made based on reality and not on a“virtual reality” based on product demonstrations in the boardroom.

Product Demonstrations vs. Experiencing the Customers’ Experience

In an article from “The Truth About Cars” I have found an interesting statement that described how top-management at General Motors experienced their products:

As you probably know, ever since GM was founded, its execs have either been driven by a chauffeur or provided with carefully prepared and maintained examples of the company’s most expensive vehicles. Of course, there are times when the suits must sign off on the company’s more prosaic products. Since 1953, this intersection between high flyer and mass market occurred at GM’s Mesa, Arizona, Desert Proving Grounds (DPG). The execs would fly into Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport, limo out to the DPG and drive the company’s latest models. The execs would fly into Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport, limo out to the DPG and drive the company’s latest models.

Our agent says that all the vehicles the execs drove were “ringers.” More specifically, the engineers would tweak the test vehicles to remove any hint of imperfection. “They use a rolling radius machine to choose the best tires, fix the headliner, tighten panel and interior gaps, remove shakes and rattles, repair bodywork—everything and anything.”

Did the execs know this? “Nope. And nobody was going to tell them . . . As far as they knew, the cars were exactly as they would be coming off the line. That’s why Bob Lutz thinks GM’s products are world-class. The ones he’s driven are.”

I asked Agent X if the GM execs would ever drive the cars again. Did he know if Wagoner or Lutz dropped in at a dealership to test drive a random sample off the lot? He found the idea amusing.

For a number of reasons, middle-management at General Motors decided that it might be better to deliver a staged customer experience to top-management instead of showing them the real customer experience of driving a GM car. Of course this behavior was probably induced by top-management itself. But for now the cause is not import, the impact this has had is much more important.

If this would have happened in the accounting departments, auditors might have discovered this lack of transparency and there would have been investigations about false accounting practices and false reporting. But in product development the only signs for misinterpretation through staged customer experiences are lackluster sales as well as a management board which is unable to explain them since they have only experienced the greatest products.

Experience is the best Teacher

It is essential for top management to experience the “real” customer experience first-hand. If you are not doing that it is just like looking at your balance sheet that is not audited but merely created to give an impression that everything is fine.

If you are working in a truly customer-oriented company, your CEO will spend time right where the company’s customers are. Without assistants, without a secretary and without his direct reports who ensure that everything is working perfectly. If your CEO is not doing that, you don’t truly have a focus on the customer and one might end up in a situation just like GM – wondering why nobody is buying your amazing products that have been presented in the corporate boardroom.

Read the full article: Inside GM: Mystery of Crap Interiors Solved

As a reader of this site I would like to invite you to join our presentation and experience the design process and the prototypes that our student design teams have developed for our corporate partners.

Our students and corporate partners

The course is based on the Stanford ME310 course that has been taught at Stanford University for more than 30 years and which has been adopted to meet the special environment and requirements at a business school. A team of students together with a corporate partner will work on a problem statement to develop a conceptual solution by following a methodology that focuses heavily on prototypes. This year’s corporate partners were BASF, Lonza and Swisscom and our students have spent the last 10 months to solve the given problem and come up with innovative solutions.

The project proposals

• BASF: Total Packaging Design for Printers
• Lonza: Harvest the creativity and the knowledge of the scientific community
• Swisscom: Services for Enabling Home Networking Adoption

The end of a exciting journey for this year’s class

At the final presentation the student teams are going to present their final conceptual prototype as well as the milestones that lead them to this prototype and the learnings and considerations that formed their decisions. Our students have been working long hours and many nights to find the most promising solution and they have once again shown the great results that a team of motivated student is able to achieve.

Join our presentations!

One month after the presentations and EXPE in Stanford, on Monday July 6th 2009 , the students will present their projects in St.Gallen. They will show their developed prototypes, insights, results as well as the design development process. After the presentation there will be an exhibition (EXPE) where visitors will be able to experience the different prototypes and talk to the student designers.

The event takes place at the University of St. Gallen in the Temporary Teaching Buildings (Lehrprovisorium, see campus map) on July 6^th. Reception starts at 12:00, presentations start at 12:30 and the exhibition is scheduled to start at 15:30. For detailed instructions please have a look at the campus map.

Please RSVP if you are planning to attend, you can reach me at bernhard@customer-experience-labs.com

Are users stupid?

The first reaction that one might get is that you should invest in educating people what a browser is (a piece software to navigate on the World Wide Web) and what options they have available (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome and others). But maybe a better approach is to ask “Why don’t they know what a browser is?”.

Most users just don’t care

The reason why people don’t know what a browser is, is that they just don’t care about the browser. And why should they? People care about Facebook, Google and Yahoo but how to get to these websites doesn’t matter. And if you are not one of those that are heavily using some browser plug-ins you probably don’t see any differences in using different browsers.

Browsers are a commodity and a better browser is not enough

The key to understand the dynamics in this market is to understand that the available browsers are basically interchangeable because they are only marginal different. Of course there are differences in speed and compatibility but only power users who spend several hours working online can tell a difference – the majority of internet user can’t tell the difference.

The key to success is in creating a differentiated internet experiences

So if user don’t care about the how to get to Facebook and Google, how can you create a remarkable browser that people care about? The key is in re-inventing what it is that a browser does. Focusing on surfing the internet is not enough anymore. Opera is taking a step into this direction with Opera Unite which offers a wide range of additional services and functionalities to the traditional browser concept. It is too early to tell, if the Opera way of differentiation will be relevant to users, but the core idea is the right one – reinventing the browser.

How can we reinvent the browser?

I think it is still unbelievable that we are seeing such a strong growth of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter yet there seems to be no integration into existing browser. Instead there is a range of companies that are developing desktop applications that integrate into these services and provide a differentiated social networking experience.

It is time that these services get stronger integrated into existing web browsers and instead of bribing users to download the new Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft should work on a tighter integration of social networking and deliver a different experience of surfing the internet. Now they have a real use to justify their investment in Facebook.

The question is as well, whether we really need to reinvent the browser or if it will become obsolete? What if social networking clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic will see continuous growth in the future and will become the main entrance point for users when they access social networks? You think that is a crazy idea? Remember, only 8 percent know what a browser is.

How do you see the future of the browser and the future of people accessing the Internet? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

The tremendous growth that Twitter has experienced in the last months clearly shows that the service has traction and is increasingly attracting not just early adopters but also the average Internet user. Below you will find a comparison of traffic between twitter.com and cnn.com.

Since Twitter has a more open platform than Facebook, this increasing adoption opens up significant opportunities for businesses to tap into the online conversations of their customers and initiate micro-interactions with them.

Based on my close observation of Twitter (I wrote my first article about Twitter in March 2007), I have identified five use cases that demonstrate how businesses can use Twitter. Additionally, you can now follow the Customer Experience Labs on Twitter at   www.twitter.com/cxlabs.

The five use cases that I have identified are:

Voice of the Customer

When customers are talking, companies should listen, and while this has been difficult in the past, Twitter allows to listen to these conversations through various tools that allow to monitor online conversations. The easiest starting point is using Twitter search to search for conversations that include a certain term (i.e., your brand name). Popular brands such as Apple have a large volume of conversations, but there is probably somebody talking about your brand as well. Just open Twitter search, type in your brand name, and listen to the conversation. A more sophisticated tool for monitoring Twitter is monitter.com which allows to monitor three keywords at the same time.

Proactive Customer Service

After starting to listen to online conversations, the next step is to react to these conversations. While it is easy to say thanks to positive statements about your brand, a much higher impact is possible by providing proactive customer service when customer are complaining online. Here are some examples of customers complaining on Twitter:

AT&T…horrible service, not receiving e-mails on Blackberry, and their customer service is horrible. Oh well! Looking into verizon

I called Rogers customer service, couldn’t help me. Don’t even know if an existing customer can buy one at all, let alone price.

Intuit – What kind of customer service is that?

Acting on complaints like this on Twitter is extremely important because the nature of the system is to start conversations that in the case of complaints lead to negative word of mouth. Monitoring when customers express their negative experiences with a brand and initiating proactive customer service can restore customer satisfaction. All you need is to create a Twitter account, setup Twitter searches for relevant terms, and be ready to act when customers complain.

Recruitment

The social network and messaging features on Twitter not only allow to talk with customers but could also be used to find potential employees. Especially if you are working in a media or technology-related industry, Twitter provides an additional proactive recruitment channel and could help you find your next employee. Research In Motion, the company that develops the BlackBerry smartphone, has recently started to actively recruit employees via Twitter. Two recruiters tap into the conversations and try to identify potential candidates on Twitter. To get an impression of how this is done, you can take a look at @BB_Recruiter and @eloisewalsh and see how they publish job opportunities and interact with potential employees.

Customer Feedback

Once you have established a sufficient followership on Twitter, you can use this channel to collect instant feedback about new products, services, and ideas. Twitter allows you, through its nature of near real-time conversations, to collect instant feedback about your organization’s activities. Here is one example of a survey done by Gillette:

uncrate: Do us a solid and take this Gillette/Uncrate Answers survey http://bit.ly/MxrUo

Of course, this feedback doesn’t need to be collected openly as a Twitter conversation. Inviting customers to give feedback through a web-based survey tool like SurveyMonkey or Google Docs Forms has become really easy.

Viral Marketing

The social network features on Twitter provide a potential channel to build viral marketing campaigns. The essential point is NOT TO USE Twitter for your viral marketing campaign but to INTEGRATE Twitter into your viral marketing campaign. This means that a business should not just try to run a campaign and spread the word through Twitter but actually integrate Twitter as a channel in the campaign. If you are doing an online campaign, you can simply create a link through to Twitter with a link to Twitter that includes a certain message.

This can be done by creating a link to Twitter that includes the status update and looks like www.twitter.com/?status=Check out the Customer Experience Labs at www.customer-experience-labs.com. This presets a Twitter message and makes it easy to spread the word with your campaign. Once your campaign spreads on to Twitter and you have Twitter integrated as a campaign channel, your campaign is ready to go viral. An example is the integration of Twitter into the streaming music service grooveshark that allows listeners to share their music on Twitter. Below is a screenshot that shows the Twitter link in the lower left corner.

Some Companies that already use Twitter

The following Twitter users are companies or represent companies that use the service to interact with customers. All of them are confirmed; you can also find a complete list of major companies on Twitter.

BBC http://twitter.com/BBC

British Airways http://twitter.com/BritishAirways

Delta http://twitter.com/deltaairlines

Intuit QuickBase http://twitter.com/IntuitQuickBase

Siemens PLM Software http://twitter.com/SiemensPLM

Capgemini http://twitter.com/Capgemini

Honda http://twitter.com/Alicia_at_Honda

Vodafone Ireland http://twitter.com/VodafoneIreland

Vodafone Germany http://twitter.com/Vodafone_de

Getting Started

The steps to get active on Twitter are simple and can be done without much effort. Simply register on Twitter and you can start to follow other users. If you don’t want to start with your company’s brand name, you can simply use your own name to see how your use of Twitter evolves. If that works out well, you can switch to an account that represents your organization. Nevertheless, registering your company name now is a good idea to ensure that nobody else can use it.
Finding users to follow can be done through the integrated user search or by doing a Twitter search with your brand name and following the users who are talking about your brand. Additionally, you can set up the auto-follow functionality based on certain keywords through services like http://www.twollo.com/.

In order to work with Twitter efficiently, you can install a desktop client like TweetDeck, which offers a lot of functionality (i.e., user search, keyword search, URL shortening) and makes Twitter really easy to use.

Spread the word

If you like this article and find it helpful, I would appreciate it if you spread the word tweet about this article.

Not your typical student project

The cooperation with corporate partners gives students the opportunity to work on real-world problems while learning how to successfully run their own design and engineering consultancy. The results are definitely interesting and inspiring; the following video resulted from a project with Nokia in 2006/2007 which showcased the future of “Open Internet Communication Culture”.

Another great example is a prototype that was built in 2006/2007 that re-imagined the center-console of a car as a massive touch screen. Some pictures of the prototype, the Pangea Interface:

Too futuristic? Not really. In March 2009, a similar concept was introduced in the new Tesla Model S, the much anticipated electric car.

If you would like to have a glimpse at the future, you are invited to the join us at Stanfor Design EXPE09. More information and registration is available at http://expe.stanford.edu/The preliminary program for the day:HSG310: Design Thinking & Business Innovation, University of St. Gallen

• BASF: Total Packaging Design for Printers
• Lonza: Harvest the creativity and the knowledge of the scientific community
• Swisscom: Services for Enabling Home Networking Adoption

ME310: Project-Based Engineering Design, Innovation & Development

• AUDI AG: HMI 2020 in collaboration with TKK (Helsinki, Finland)
• Autodesk Inc.: Exploring the Opportunities for Collaboration between architects, manufacturers, and contractors in collaboration with UNAM (Mexico City, Mexico)
• Foundation of Finnish Security and Safety Industry Development: Intelligent Fall Protection in collaboration with TKK
• Naked Green: Leveling the playing field for Alternative Fuel Vehicles in collaboration with TKK
• Panasonic: Making Dental Care More Fun & Effective in collaboration with HPI (Potsdam, Germany)
• Panasonic: Supporting Social Bonds and Friendship with Wearable Technology in collaboration with PUJ (Cali, Colombia)
• Robert Bosch GmbH: A Sensor System for 3D Measurement and Reconstruction in collaboration with UNAM
• SAP AG (Germany): Innovating the Work@SAP Experience in collaboration with HPI
• Telefonica (Germany): Mobile Pursuit of Vital Signs in collaboration with PUJ

CS210: Project-Based Software Design, Innovation & Development

• Microsoft: Making satellite imagery available for climate modeling
• Yahoo!: Improving the Internet Search Experience
• Facebook: Making the Facebook platform a more viable option for the enterprise
• John Gardner Center: Identifying opportunities for and implementing software to improve after school programs for youth

As you can see, these student projects from around the world are definitely not your typical student project. A large part of my activities at the University of St. Gallen are around a course called “Design Thinking & Business Innovation” that we have setup in a cooperation between Prof. Larry Leifer, Director at the Stanford Center for Design Research and Prof. Walter Brenner, Director of Institute of Information Management. Our students will be there as well, presenting their conceptual prototypes

Let’s get in touch!

If you are planning to visit the Stanford Design EXPE please drop me an eMail at bernhard@customer-experience-labs.com . Together with Sushi Suzuki, Ph.D. student at the Stanford Center for Design Research, we would like to give you a behind the scenes look of the design research and teaching at Stanford University. You should also have a look at the new course website at http://me310.stanford.edu/

Bill Buxton

I highly recommend his talk to everyone who is involved in experience design (which are a lot of people even though they are not initially aware of it) because he clarifies once again what experience design is all about and shows practical examples with a focus on developing software applications.

I have summarized some statements of his talk below, the video of his talk is embedded below as well, enjoy it.

On experience design and the current economic situation

You couldn’t be in a better profession in the current economic climate because by getting the experience right you get this return on investment which will not you let survive but drive economic development.

On the novelty of experience design

Is experience just a new name? Same old stuff in new clothes? No, it’s a refocus of attention, it is what successful products always had but we never called it that.

Industrial designers very often talk about the things but when it’s actually the experience that is induced by this thing that is the true product of you. It’s not the screen, it’s not the graphics – it’s what they prompt.

On the focus of experience design

Any product, service, online thing or object you make – you have to know what is the nature of the grin, or the adrenalin or the smile or the love that you are trying to provoke from your users.

For a better viewing experience you can use the full screen feature or watch the talk at the MIX09 website.

I am sure that in the next 18 – 36 months we will increasingly see that large corporations use the web to drive down costs for customer service  while at the same providing the same or an even improved customer service experience.

One approach to provide online customer service are online communities. These have emerged around companies and their products together with discussion forums have long been a source for customers to get answers to their questions without the need to interact with the company directly.

One example is crackberry.com, an independent site about the BlackBerry smartphone that has already 30% of the visitors that the original Blackberry.com site has (see compete.com statistics). From my own experience the crackberry.com forum is a really valuable and helpful source for customer service.

While many of these sites are independent and do not represent an organization, companies increasingly understand the potential of online communities to offer customer service. 

The New York Times has published an article titled “Customer Service? Ask A Volunteer” which explains the story, motivation and success factors of a online community for customer services that has been created by Verizon.

Mr. McMurry is part of an emerging corps of Web-savvy helpers that large corporations, start-up companies and venture capitalists are betting will transform the field of customer service.

[…] Verizon needed to find a smart way to try to tap into that potential resource for customer service.

In talking to people and surveying the research on voluntary online communities, Verizon concluded that super-users would be crucial to success.

There is also a statement from Verizon about the success of the experiment.

At Verizon, Mr. Studness says he is pleased with the experiment so far. He calls the company-sponsored customer-service site “a very productive tool,” partly because it absorbs many thousands of questions that would otherwise be expensive calls to a Verizon call center.

Read the full article “Customer Service? Ask A Volunteer” in the New York Times.