CX Wrap-Up: January 19 – 25, 2009

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.