Great.cx
How to manage design to deliver great customer experience (CX)
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Design that matters is DaaD (Design as a Discipline)
24 January 2012
No generally-accepted definition of “design” exists (Ralph, P. and Wand, Y.)
There’s a world of confusion caused by the word ‘design’ and for user experience, the achilles heel is people’s first association with the design deliverable.
DaaD is an initiative to clarify design as how multi-skilled teams work to exceed customer’s expectations of a brand. DaaD is where the discipline of design (process, research, strategy) is how to increase the quality of the design deliverable. DaaD is design; verb, not noun.
This is why I’m advocating DaaD: ‘Design as a Discipline’ so we can pull how to design apart from design deliverable.
What do you expect Mum?
19 January 2012
BT only gave my Mum one choice when she expected to be able to make phone calls: the design classic you can see in the picture… it had no camera or OS but you could choose the colour. 
These days stuff’s so complicated we pay for magazines to explain what phones and computers can do.
For me, this demonstrates what’s changed. Making a phone call used to be a consumer need that was simple to fulfill with a big plastic phone.
But Mum timed her phone calls because they were expensive and she’d get mad when I was home late from the pub. Those expectations elicited behaviors that showed saving money on calls and quick, informal communication were important to her so she didn’t worry I was drunk in a ditch somewhere.
Could she have anticipated Skype or SMS? Could she have said ‘I need a text based message to be reassured my son is still alive?’ No.
But she expected things to happen and by understanding her expectations, and those of others like her, it becomes possible for new ideas to create better experiences for people that go way beyond what they need.
How to deliver customer centred work in a complex environment
5 April 2011
Recently at Sky, I led the experience design for our new Broadband solution which has had a marked reduction in inbound support calls because our solution is so much easier to understand and use (can’t disclose numbers but they’re very good!).
What made this project so different to others I’ve led is that the original insights shaping the design were unequivocally grounded in customer realities – we went out as a design team and spent quite a bit of time with customers to find the insights that aligned with “call drivers” into our call centre. We then upheld these insights through the design process without letting business or engineering constraints blow us off course.
So as the original customer insights we discovered travelled through the process, the team maintained and magnified them so the critical mass was too great to close Pandora’s box. This resulted in us focusing on solving the problems through design, rather than fearing the problems we were faced with and turning back to the way we’d done things before.
To do this, there were a few things that happened which really helped us succeed:
- We got the business and technology stakeholders involved in the research.
- We got clear, unequivocal buy-in to deeply understanding customers as part of the design process.
- We tested the new solution with customers iteratively, to observe whether the customer behaviours that were problematic had been removed.
- We operated as a small, nimble team.
- We did not create 3 options, we designed one solution we knew was right.
- We had clear leadership – I spent a lot of time saying no to distracting requests that weren’t going to help the customer.
Anything you can do to nurture the customer insights you know will add value to your product service and give them so much critical mass there’s no way they’re going back in the box, the more likely you are to succeed at delivering customer happiness. In turn, my team LOVED working on this project because they could see precisely how their input was helping to make customers happier – win/win/win for business/employee/customer.
Got any examples of great customer experience design? Feel free to share them in the comments.
What’s feeding the brains in Sky’s UX team?
1 April 2011
Here at Sky the UX team are a pretty passionate about user (and customer) experience – feeding that passion, and for your delectation, are some great online resources and links…
Online and offline user experience magazines + interesting UX blogs:
http://www.uxmag.com/
http://www.wired.co.uk/
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/
http://wireframes.linowski.ca/
http://johnnyholland.org/ (collaborative online mag about Experience Strategy)
Putting People First blog (about people centred innovation and experience design)
LukeW (curated articles and presentations from the world of experience design)
Small Surfaces (covers interaction design, experience design, research and many other areas of design thinking)
http://konigi.com/ (inspiring ideation)
http://findability.org/
http://usabilitythoughts.com/
http://www.uxmatters.com/
http://www.uxbooth.com/
http://designmind.frogdesign.com/
Design Thinking:
Tim Brown is the champion of Design Thinking, this is the blog
Infographics and Design Patterns:
http://infosthetics.com/
http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
http://ui-patterns.com/
http://patterntap.com/
http://patterns.endeca.com/content/library/en/home.html
Flickr pattern library by Peter Morville
User Experience models:
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000029.php
http://userexperienceproject.blogspot.com/
http://www.redbeard.org.uk/2010/08/01/ux-in-a-venn-diagram-nutshell/
http://alexaitken.net/business/venn-and-the-art-of-overlap-maximization.htm
BBC Global Experience Language (very nice):
www.bbc.co.uk blog on global visual language
http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/gel/
Service design resources:
http://servicedesigntools.org/
http://www.servicedesigntoolkit.org/
Useful UX design applications:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ44S17mHO4
http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigraffle/
http://www.axure.com/
Sketching related tools, agencies and templates:
http://www.uistencils.com/
http://webdesign-sketchbook.com/
http://www.ugleah.com//ux-team-of-one/ (from the brilliant Leah Buley)
Live scribes – you speak, they sketch
UX documentation
UX, Usability, User Research & UX Strategy Agencies:
http://www.flow-interactive.com/
http://www.foviance.com/
http://www.adaptivepath.com/
http://www.semanticstudios.com/
http://www.userfocus.co.uk/
http://www.amber-light.co.uk/
Product design and innovation Agencies:
Frog Design
IDEO
What If
Podcasts:
Boxes & Arrows podcast page
Peter Day’s Wold of Business
Copy writing:
http://www.copyblogger.com/
Comic related:
http://scottmccloud.com/
Why do so many Marketing people have no idea about design?
1 April 2011
There’s two things about marketing that I’ve encountered which I want to share:
1) Marketers see themselves responsible for a wide remit of activities: http://www.systemicmarketing.com/marketing-definitions/
2) Many marketers often view Design as an outcome.
The thing is, design isn’t just an outcome and as a discipline it’s progressed leaps and bounds. Just look up design thinking, design strategy, design research (such as ethnography), service design, design management and you’ll see that design offers tools needed for understanding and changing the customer experience in a way that Marketing can’t. The two disciplines ought to be great bed fellows but often as the budget holders, Marketing have the upper hand and this imbalance leads to bad design.
Which brings me to the question – “where does the future lie for Marketing and design?” because in an “experience economy” the proper application of design is where the big money is… it’s also more fun working for companies that employ marketers that “get it” so you’re more likely to attract the best talent and get your agency’s “A team” working on your stuff.
Here’s a few companies that get design’s role in creating great customer experience:
- Lego
- Honda
- Apple (obviously)
- Gore
- Proctor & Gamble (interesting article in Fast Company about design & innovation at P&G)
- Moo.com
- 37signals
- Zappos
- Threadless
- Nike
Feel free to add more!
You have to know this: you don’t know a lot
31 March 2011
You and I are limited to the grand sum of our life’s experiences, we can’t know what we don’t know and often what’s important to customers can be outside the boundaries of our current knowledge.
A self awareness of where your knowledge stops and assumption starts is really important, otherwise you risk designing for yourself without realising.
The way round this constraint is by doing design collaboratively leveraging the experience of a wider group of people, preferably including those you’re designing for. Just make sure this is underpinned by a good design process and excellent user research to keep brains pointing in the same direction and help avoid procrastination.
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Supporting content to communicate this idea (please check copyright):
Links to Antonio Damasio a neuroscientist who can explain how your life is a sum of (and is limited to) your experiences:
http://bigthink.com/ideas/23021
http://counsellingresource.com/features/2010/05/27/damasio-on-self/
“Not a lot of people know that” images:
Unknown unknowns image – read the comments below the image as well, very interesting!:
![rumsfeld [unknown unknowns]](http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5167/5281425098_f32c197abc_b.jpg)
Let’s just get over the “it’s a challenge, not a problem” problem!
29 March 2011
I don’t get it when people need immediate closure on a problem, “Markus, that’s not a problem it’s a challenge – so what’s the solution?” Honestly? I have NOOOO idea right now and I’m really comfortable with that.
That fear of the unknown leads to a hop and skip over detail that would lead to a better design. The fact is that customers don’t have just our brand to think about, they’re exposed to 1000s of brands every day, so let’s not hastily grab hold of an immediately obvious solution to a poorly explained challenge – leave the lid off a juicy problem for a while, let it fester a bit and share it with others, the ideas will be much more powerful than anything you can come up with to overcome a “challenge”.
I think we should love problems: design them, mould them, shape them and never fear them. A well shaped problem is much more likely to find a great solution than a vague challenge conceived in haste.
Here’s some images about problems for use in presentations (check copyright) – let’s celebrate them!
http://tinyurl.com/4nk8kwh
http://tinyurl.com/6zdsm9s
http://tinyurl.com/6958wxx
http://www.flickr.com/photos/donnagrayson/195244498/
Why is Henry Ford an excuse for poor customer engagement?
20 October 2010 — 1 Comment
My greatest failures happened on projects where there’s a fear to engage with the customer on the grounds that “we know what’s best for them”.
Surprisingly the rationale given on 3 separate projects for lack of customer involvement was the same: Henry Ford, because he said “if I had asked people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses”. Thing is, Ford didn’t invent the solution that replaced horses – Karl Benz did about 10 years earlier. In fact, the very first car was steam powered with 3 wheels and was created before Karl and Ford were even born.
Anyway, what Ford did that was remarkable was to improve the experience of the car by making it affordable, easy to use and easy to fix whilst organising his resources better than anyone before him. He did this spending some 12 years perfecting his design, selling “guinea pig” models for “experimentation and development” to quote Charles Sorensen one of his close co-workers.
Certainly Ford didn’t ask the customer what they wanted, he made sure he understood what they needed better than they did by prototyping cars and collaborating with others like Edison and the Dodge brothers.
So I can agree that Ford didn’t ask the customer what he wanted, not because he didn’t engage the customer but because he sought to understand the customer.
And here it is, the reason why most companies aren’t customer focused: Because too many employees believe they understand the customer with the depth that Ford understood his customers. Yet in most cases they don’t even know the story of Ford, how talented he was, his customer led design approach and the risks he took to fulfill his vision.
To clarify then, Ford was successful because he engaged customers in refining his vision, not because he knew what was good for them. The question to ask those who cite Ford as their excuse for not engaging customers is “are you the visionary entrepreneur taking the risks or are you employed to fulfil someone else’s vision?” Those who confuse the two risk confusing themselves with someone else’s greatness.
What is the mother of invention?
30 December 2009
If you’ve spent your life creating a new invention, whether it’s the TV, lightbulb or any other new technology, I am pretty sure it’s been a rocky road you’ve followed.
Plagued with the possibility of failure whilst dedicating 1000s of hours of your life and most likely staking your house on the idea, I’d want to ask Edison or Ford “what motivated you in the pursuit of invention?”
Is it money, fame or success? Or is it the belief that your invention is going to make a difference?
An inventors motivation is what bridges the gap between the safety of technical knowledge and the application of that knowledge in doing something meaningful – and ultimately creating something that will be financially successful.
Is it not demeaning to inventors to say that technology comes first?
Technology is easy: it’s something we can see, we can learn about and play with. But when it comes to who is really going to use that technology to break through with the next “big thing”, the question an inventor wants answering is “who is going to use what I’ve made?”
Consider that great inventors are also great investors. They don’t invest their life on building something if they don’t have a good idea of who they believe they’re doing it for and why.
