The Experience Revolution
The experience revolution is already here. It transforms businesses. It transforms human interactions. It transforms us.
BookMarx - July 19th, 2008
Design thinking can transform your business. Tim Brown explains how on HBR.
Being a small business is not an excuse. I agree and think it is a tremendous opportunity to create a unique User Experience.
Insights from Starbucks marketing chief. They surely know how to innovate.
Technology is not the answer for everything. The super interesting case of Dabbawala demonstrates this.
BookMarx - July 6, 2008
Service design is an evolving field which clearly connects business success with design. Stefan Moritz has a great white paper about it.
Peter Coughlan video keynote from MX 2008, on how to strengthen UX design skills within an organization.
Customer satisfaction is a result of employee satisfaction. Ask Herb Keller from SouthWest Airlines.
Customer Experience is critical and this is an era of EBD - Experience Based Differentiation.
Prototyping of retail spaces to improve customer experiences.
An interview with Tony Hsieh - CEO of Zappos.com
There is a huge buzz around Zappos recently. I had some questions on my mind regarding the great culture of that company (which is clearly it’s competitive advantage). The main thing was whether this culture was born in lengthy strategy meetings or was it more of an evolution of the company. Tony Hsieh, the CEO behind this great culture tipped me about this in a short interview:
US: Have you ever held a strategy meeting, deciding on this great service culture you have as a competitive advantage, or was it a natural evolution of the company?
TH: We decided pretty early on that we wanted culture to be the #1 priority of the company. We believe that if we get the culture right, most of the other stuff (like great customer service) will fall into place on its own. It’s evolved more through a series of discussions over lunch (or drinks!), not through any formal strategy meeting.
US: A lot of managers are trying to create a unique company culture without success. What is your secret sauce? What are the best 3 tips you can give managers for creating such a culture?
TH:
- Decide on a vision that’s meaningful to employees that goes beyond just making money or being the #1 company in a certain industry.
- Decide on core values that you are willing to hire and fire based on. For example, if you get a really skilled applicant that can make a big difference, but they don’t embody your company’s core values, are you willing to not hire that person even though it comes at the expense of short term profits? Zappos core values are here: http://www.zappos.com/core-values.zhtml
- Be as transparent as possible, don’t be secretive.
US: How do Zappos employees know if they are getting their job done right? Do you have any special evaluation system?
TH: It varies by department, but it’s a combination of metrics for the specific job function and whether they embody the core values.
US: How do you decide on tweaks and improvements for zappos.com. Do you monitor statistics extensively?
TH: We ask ourselves “What would be best for the customer experience?” and make our decisions mostly off of that.
US: Have you ever held a user research to try and analyze their behaviors / expectations in the site, or get some new insights regarding future offerings?
TH: No, although we do receive thousands of phone calls and emails from customers every single day, and many customers offer suggestions on their own.
US: As a CEO, what are the main areas you focus on?
TH: Making sure that as we grow, that our company culture doesn’t go downhill (and in fact improves over time).
US: With so much going on at Zappos all the time, do you ever get to sleep more the 1 hour a night? How many hours do you work every day?
TH: We have a lot of great people at Zappos. With a great team, we can accomplish a lot together! For us, there’s no clear separation between work and life because we all really enjoy what we’re doing. So even if we’re hanging out at a bar, usually the topic of Zappos comes up!
US: What are the companies you personally drive inspiration from?
TH: There’s no one single company. I like meeting with people from different companies… I’ve found there’s always something interesting you can learn from anyone!
WeekMarx - June 20, 2008
The WeekMarx (after Karl Marx…) will include some interesting user experience, design and business links that I have bumped into in the last week.
So here goes:
Colleen Jones writes about the creation of better bills. The T-Mobile case study makes a point about the business value.
I really loved Affective Design’s iceberg analogy to explain the difference between Visual Design and User Experience.
Alaska Airlines is changing the Check-In user experience.
Dan Saffer on making better design decisions.
Wells Fargo is thinking about the users
ATMs have been here for a long time now. So it’s nice to see how Wells Fargo has made an effort to innovate and change the traditional interaction of those machines. They have hired a great design agency, Pentagram, and the results are sweet - a great and clear user experience. The banking and financial industry is a complicated market and we usually see how users fail to understand how things work.
By crafting this new experience with the ATMs, at least one bank/user interaction is solved.
You can read the full story of this redesign as written by Holger Struppek.
The experience hierarchy of needs
I really love Challis Hodge’s pyramid of needs. Reminds me of the famous pyramid by Maslow. This comes in a great timing. The web is buzzing about iPhone2.0. Talk about DESIRABLE.
Better employees = Better service. Zappos continues to innovate and change the rules. Sweet…
UX is good for your shareholders
Although a couple of months old, I thought it would be interesting to mention the Teehan+Lax’s UX fund experiment. On November 1st 2006, they have invested $50K in UX centered companies like Nike, Progressive, Apple, Netflix, Jetblue and more. They wanted to compare the stock performance of those companies with the general market performance.
The results are stunning. Those stocks gained 33% during a single year and have beaten the general market performance.
Conclusion: UX is good for your shareholders.
The Experience Revolution
Can you feel it? It seems that it is all around us these days. Firms are starting to understand the power of user experience. Disney, Apple, Starbucks, Zappos and Cirque de Soleil are some of the companies which identified this a long time ago. It is well beyond design and user experience practices. It is about business strategy now.
This blog is here in order to document this revolution.
