The Experience Design Scout

Last Saturday I was in Paris and visited the Nespresso boutique on the Champs-Élysées. Nespresso started in 1989, but only recently started to grow strongly. (PS: interestingly, of total Nespresso sales, 48% comes in via the Web, 29% through boutiques and 23% by telephone.) Like many other flagship stores, the ‘raison d’être’ appears to be to lure visitors into the brand experience by choosing a top location and relying on impressive interior design . This got me thinking. Even though Nespresso nails these two elements - I like the way the walls are completely decorated with the coffee capsules – I still believe they miss some opportunities. And therefore my question would be: is money spent wisely?

In my view, successful experience stores:

• Leverage the brand’s heritage. One reason brands survive over time is because its heritage, or promise, is strong enough to attract a profitable group of consumers who are generally very loyal to the brand. Think Kiehl’s, Abercrombie & Fitch, or Ben & Jerry’s. Experience stores – especially those with a long history – should build on this and take people back in history to where the brand originates from, what the founders really envisioned, or how/why the product was invented. Nespresso unfortunately doesn’t do this while its brand image “a genuine experience that combines perfection and pleasure, simplicity and aestheticism” gives enough room to play. Even though the highest quality is a key trait, nowhere in the boutique we can really experience this. Where is the story told that the beans are of ‘highest quality based on sustainable practices’ or how ‘unmatched experts in roasting and grinding’ actually work? The closest we get is a section where we can smell the different flavors ourselves in front of a wall with difficult-to-read text with product promises.
• Collect additional consumer insights. Nespresso has 12 flavors of coffee, about 15 different machines, and just over two dozen of accessories, yet they managed to completely fill two floors with it. What if only a few square meters were dedicated to collecting new consumer insights in order to develop the Nespresso experience further? Maybe tasting sessions? Or observing how non-users try and make their first cappuccino themselves? Or letting people complete in-store questionnaires in return for a €6,00 free cup of coffee? It can be extremely useful to include these fans in your product development process.
• Share what’s coming in the near future. Might be tricky as you reveal ideas to your competition and loose the first-mover advantage. But, why is it that only the automotive industry – and not consumer electronics or sport goods – reveals concept models which sometimes don’t even make it to production? Managers of experience stores should try to share what new products are lined up to being launched soon, but also play the exclusiveness game by offering (variations of) products that cannot be bought anywhere else. This way you also keep the experience valuable to your brand fanatics.

In short: Flagship stores have way more potential than showing off the product portfolio through a prime location and excellent interior designs.

Just received the July TripAdvisor Update email with an interesting article: “Your Nightmare Hotel Stays”. The email shows remarkable pictures travellers have taken of the hotel combined with reviews and comments. It is amazing to see how some hotels get away with asking high prices while TVs are broken, carpets are dirty and tiny bathrooms. But, very interesting to see the direct approach TripAdvisor plays towards hotels in preventing consumers from having a bad experience. Great example of customer advocacy.

Most of us evaluate more than one offer when buying financial products. Product comparison and selection tools are therefore key to help consumers make product decisions and many companies put them on their websites. Designers of these online advice tools need to keep several things in mind, including customer goals (not product features), usability, simple workflows, and efficient error recovery. Just to name a few. But designers can do more and it comes down to understanding how consumers really research financial products. Here are my top three opportunities for financial services firms:

1. Product selection tools: Tie online tools to offline human-assisted advice. From research I’ve done a year ago it turned out that the main reason why online consumers don’t apply online for financial services products is because they want to talk to a person before they hit the ’submit’ or ‘apply’ button. Consumers need to validate their decision if the product will really fit their needs, or because consumers can’t find the necessary information, like fees and policies. Many companies try to bridge this gap with click-to-chat and click-to-call, but next-generation tools will evolve around customer-advisor collaboration. SNS Bank tried LiveAdvice which helps mortgage applicants get live, face-to-face help (skype + Macromedia Breeze).
2. (Dynamic) Comparison charts: Include the country’s ‘entire’ offering. Research shows that consumers don’t trust product comparisons at bank’s websites. The reason? Consumers think the bank only picks firms that are worse than themselves. To tackle this, banks need to look at TescoCompare.com – a price comparison website from the joint venture between Tesco and the Royal Bank Of Scotland – how it treats common questions related to objectivity and provider selection.
3. Advice tools: Offer what is best for the customer, not for the firm. A unique example is E*TRADE’s Cash Optimizer – a tool which shows how customers can reallocate cash held at E*Trade to earn more interest. Initially, managers were afraid that money would move cash into higher-interest products or out of E*TRADE entirely, but after a while it appeared that consumers enjoyed the honesty and grew their overall E*TRADE balance altogether.

I haven’t seen many deployments incorporating these concepts. If you have other examples, please let us know.

PUNDO3000.com took pictures of 100 different packaged food products in Germany. One picture from the entire package (left), one close-up of the product on the package (middle), and one picture of what really is inside the package (right).

Conclusion: make sure you manage the experience gap between packaging imagery (the expectations) and reality.

Here are some of my favorite ones:

Conference title: Experience Design 2008.

Registration fee: Eur 0,-
Location: Your office.
Date: Whenever it works best for you.

Who Should Attend?
- Ad agencies, full-service agencies, interactive agencies
- interaction designers, UX professionals, customer experience managers
- interactive marketers, brand managers, eBusiness pros

What questions will be answered?
- How do you create engaging customer experiences?
- What role does design play in the customer experience lifecycle?

Agenda:

08.45 – 10.00 Emotional Design, Don Norman at From Business To Buttons. His book Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things marks the transition from usability to aesthetics. The emphasis should be on a well-rounded, cohesive product that looks good, works well, and gives pride to the owner.
In his latest book, The Design of Future Things, Norman offers a consumer-oriented theory of natural human-machine interaction that can be put into practice by the engineers and industrial designers of tomorrow’s thinking machines.

10.00 – 10.30 Break

10.30 – 10.45 Showcase: Philips Electronics “Live Simplicity“

10.45 – 11.30 Designing For Engagement, Kerry Bodine, Forrester Research . Why do so many customer experience efforts fall flat? What are “desirable” customer experiences — and why do they matter to marketers? How can firms start to focus on ‘desirability’? (Forrester.com)

11.30 – 11.45 Showcase: Club Penguin The features of Club Penguin, one of the most successful virtual worlds aimed specifically at children, may defy logic – and gravity – but they represent the new frontier of children’s entertainment, where the whimsy and colour of traditional kids TV blends with computer game-style tasks, and the networking power of the internet. Told by an 8-year old. (The Times)

12.00 – 13.30 Lunch

13.30 – 14.00 Classical Music With Shining Eyes. Benjamin Zander at TED 2008. Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it — and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections. (TED.com)

14.00 – 15.00 Subject To Change, Brandon Schauer, Adaptive Path . The way most organizations think and work on products and services isn’t suited to the unpredictable world we live in. Instead, companies need new ways of thinking and working to adapt into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations who creates great products and services. Three authors of Adaptive Path’s new book, Subject to Change, share a handful of breakthrough ideas for succeeding in a future that you can’t predict.

15.00 – 15.30 Break

15.45 – 16.00 Showcase: Umpqualab, Umpqua Bank. Umpqua Bank invested lots of time to understand their customers better, specifically how they use branches and technology. On this site, you can see the outcome of their branch redesign efforts. It is fresh way to look at the role of bank branches.

16.00 – 16.15 Q&A between Bruce Nussbaum (Business Week) and Frank Tyneski, executive director of Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA). The conversation covers the trends in the design industry, design strategies and how the industry is moving from styling to usability to experience design.(BusinessWeek.com)

16.15 – 16.45 Concept Models: A Tool For Planning Interaction, Dan Brown, founder and principal at EightShapes, LLC, at IXDA Interaction 08. Maybe you’ve done personas. Maybe you’ve got a stack of requirements. Maybe you’ve got nothing. All you know is that you need to design a set of interactions around a complex information structure- lots of variables, lots of permutations. It can be difficult to know where to begin. Concept models- a means for representing elaborate relationships between information- are ideal starting points for the practicing interaction designer. (ixda.org)

16.45 Back to your email.

See you next time. Hope you liked it. Please report any broken links or send in any suggestions.

Compelling experiences always start with understanding users and their needs. Interviewing and ethnographic research are effective methods to get these insights. Watch this video from the IIT Institute of Design if you want to know more about this.

In short: Intelligence about your customers and their behaviors is not always expensive to get.

Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer from Gabe & Kristy on Vimeo.