The Experience Design Scout

Here are the summaries of the articles I enjoyed most reading last week. Sorry for the slight delay in sending through this wrap-up.

• Design Research Methods for Experience Design. An article by Michael Hawley talks about some of the alternative design research techniques, in contrast to the traditional ones like task analysis, card sorting, personas, and usability testing. ‘Storytelling and personalization’ is one and is executed to create unbiased insights into users’ needs by asking participants to describe designs and concepts with human characteristics. ‘Triading’ is another technique and focuses on finding the attributes or emotional aspects of the experience by asking participants to describe how one concept differs from other concepts. The final technique that is discussed is ‘Games’ where the objective is to stimulate participants to be more open in their responses.
• How Much Democracy Is Too Much – When It Comes To Branding. Branding (partly) sets the expectations around a customer experience. And it’s the expectations that are held against the real experience to evaluate whether the product or service was worth the money. This article is about developing a brand – and who gets a say in defining it. “If branding truly becomes democratic, there is a very real risk that people would vote down the best and bravest ideas simply because they are unfamiliar. A democratic approach can at best dilute a good idea and at worst, kill it off”. Read further at the Landor blog.
• 5 Design Decision Styles. What’s Yours? Over at User Interface Engineering, Jared M. Spool lists out the different design decision processes, illustrating it with a (very nice) comparison of two stores that had different ways of picturing a similar product on their sites – and the ‘research’ behind the choice of taking the pictures in that specific way. The five styles are 1) unintended, 2) self, 3) genius, 4) activity focused, and 5) user focused. UIE’s research found that “the most effective teams were skilled in all five styles, choosing the style that best fit the needs and goals of a project.” I still see a lot of projects with a mix of the first three styles, but the balance is definitely moving over to the right, as more and more companies realize the benefits of user-focused design processes.

Not a lot of customer experience articles coming out this week, but here are two worth reading:

• The one thing you need to know about creating a remarkable retail shopping experience. A strong brand experience is one that holds across channels. Bernhard at ‘The Customer Experience Labs’ talks about the (offline) retail experience. “Customers want to experience what it is like to own your products – your shop should be designed to help create these “product discovery experiences”. I’ve written a post about this a long time ago, just after I visited the Nespresso store in Paris. Although you can touch and try the product, it feels as if it is just a big store rather than a place where customers can learn more about the brand and its products.
• Banks face Customer backlash due to poor experience. Colin who runs beyondphilosophy’s Experience Clinic Blog demonstrates how emotions and opinions can clash with banks’ tag lines (as a  response) and other branding efforts. I’ve also written about this gap between customer worries and the way UK banks’ address these at their websites. Colin is right to say that banks should be ‘keep a low profile’ and be careful with putting ads on TV. The true solutions sit in the DNA of the firms, the way they operate and think – this needs to change, but it will take a long time before banks have transformed their customer experience DNA and act in the interest of their customers.

The blog posts I’ve enjoyed reading during week 2 of 2009:

• Employee Service is a Key Ingredient to Success. Judy at The Employee Factor posted an interesting read why firms should have employee service and ‘need to, in parallel with a focus on the customer, help their employees understand the desired experience, their role in delivering it and their value to the overall success of the brand’. She poses some interesting questions such as ‘Are the employees that understand your unique value replaceable?’
• 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design.  User experience is not user interface design, a step in the process, or just about usability. Whitney Hess does a good job debunking these myths. My favorite has got to be ‘user experience is not the role of one person or department’. Whitney says ‘Our greatest skill is that we [ux designers] know how to listen’.
• Business Empathy: 6 questions to connect experience with strategy. Brandon Schauer from Adaptive Path reminds us to uncover the an organization’s overall business strategy when designing an experience. Several basic, yet strong questions like ‘how does the business make money’ and ‘where do they invest in’ can make design teams a lot smarter about their client’s business they are designing for. Brandon calls this ‘business empathy’.
• ‘Design’ is not the answer to all our problems. ‘Design Thinking’ should not be turned into another managment fad. Idris Mootee over at Innovation Playground makes a great call with saying that ’Design-driven Innovation’ is more accurate and appropriate than ‘Transformation’. And ‘Design-driven Innovation become transformational when there are relentless pursuits of truth, beauty, balance and responsibility’.
• Brazil vs Argentina: Latin America Creativity. Ok, a much lighter post. This one is about typography in advertising. Who said Latin Americans don’t have humor?