Service principles guide customer experience

Principles in general and design principles in particular are great beacons.

“When people in an organisation have different interpretations of what really matters to customers, the customer experience falls apart. The difficulty is to align business units and individuals to do the right things – and do them consistently. Strong principles are a powerful way to unite teams to deliver better customer experiences.”

(Anne Meijer and John Holager ~ live|work)

Surveying the big screen

And what about wall-size screens or future iTVs?

“(…) by embracing large screens, designers have the opportunity to work within a larger fold, presenting the user with more content simultaneously, lessen scrolling on longer pages, and create a richer, more expansive user experience. And by using the same practices we developed to adapt layouts to smaller screens and identifying some common patterns for large screens, we need not necessarily introduce extra cost or time to our projects.”

(Mike Pick a.k.a. @mikepick ~ A List Apart)

Un-sucking the touchpoint

Touchpoint as device, product or channel is not specific enough. Conversations build from stories, dialogues and interactions might be.

“The touchpoint has been around for a long while, particularly in thinking about brand marketing and service design. But as design disciplines and approaches collide – from customer experience, to service design, to experience design – and we start horse trading terms, methods, and outputs, some of these concepts are given new life. For me, the touchpoint has become a central way to view designing moments across increasingly complex journeys. Whether it’s an expanding digital product ecosystem, a cross-channel retail experience, or a complex, intangible service experience.”

(Chris Risdon a.k.a. @chrisrisdon ~ Adaptive Path)

Classification and its consequences

Creativity is connecting two existing things in a new way. I would connect it to Glushko’s TAO.

“We see this Linnean mentality often deployed all over our information spaces, and its consequences still produce scaffoldings that simply expose internal structures, be those the enterprise’s, the organization’s, or the university’s, with no concern for actual usefulness. The move towards cross-channel experiences is turning this into an even more complex scenario, where the different nature of the channels themselves (staff at a store, a mobile phone, a kiosk, signage) introduces one additional dimension to an already layered problem space.”

(Andreas Resmini a.k.a. @resmini)

Systemic design

Designing with a system in mind is just an important hygiene factor.

“Planes, buildings, automobiles, software. On the surface, one of these things is not like the other. But at a recent talk at the Warm Gun conference in San Francisco, our UX Developer Federico Holgado connected the systems of manufacturing and app development. The rapid iterations and MVPs inherent to software already exist in the assembly of products much bigger and more complex. What Federico points out is that a ship, a building, and a car are merely collections of components. Components are manageable and flexible. So long as the components join together seamlessly in the end, modularizing the pieces translates to flexibility, speed, and paradoxically both independence and collaboration.”

(MailChimp ux a.k.a. @MailChimpUX)

Nine ways to get the most out of Design Thinking

DT is a mindset, not a silver bullet.

“Design thinking is a slightly murky concept that means different things to different people. At heart, though, it is about fusing the creative and open-ended with the analytical and operational, combining very different ways of thinking and acting. This is, of course, easier in theory than in practice. How do you get children’s book authors and chemical engineers to click into something greater than the sum of the parts — rather than devolve into warring camps? Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way as CEO and rules we all try to adhere to at Lippincott.”

(Rick Wise ~ Fast.CoDesign) ~ courtesy of riander

User experience debt

Many products and services suffer also from UX deficits.

“UX debt is the quality gap between the experience your digital product delivers now and the improved experience it could offer given the necessary time and resources. Put another way, UX debt measures the number and magnitude of potential product enhancements that would improve the user experience.”

(Andrew Wright a.k.a. @andrewjwright ~ nForm)

Soldiers & Hessians, Ronin & Ninja

Challenges for UX managers and their teams are mounting.

“When UX’ers talk, they tend to talk about process, but the ability to deliver an innovative user experience starts before kickoff and lasts after the launch. Repeatable success in UX depends on the right culture. This is particularly important in enterprise scale organizations, with long-lasting relationships.”

(Stephen Turbek a.k.a. @StephenTurbek ~ Boxes and Arrows)

Responsive typography

Online typography, typefaces and fonts get mature, finally.

“With the chaos of different screen sizes and a new generation of web browsers, the design paradigms of layout and typography have shifted away from static layouts and system fonts to dynamic layouts and custom web fonts. But screens have not just changed in size but also in pixel density. In other words: maybe we do not just need responsive layouts, we might also need responsive typefaces.”

(Oliver Reichenstein a.k.a. @iA ~ Fronteers 2013)

The changing nature of service and experience design

There is no field that’s stable. High levels of dynamics require repositioning and reframing all the time.

“Designing service experiences is a multidisciplinary affair. You need people with business management, psychology, and social sciences experience alongside designers and developers of all flavors. A key skill that trained designers bring is the ability to make ideas tangible in some form, through diagrams, sketches, and prototypes. That takes the business idea out of the spreadsheet, which is a poor vehicle for understanding human experiences, and turns it into something that people can look at and interact with. Then they can make informed decisions about the concepts.”

(live|work)

Fritz Kahn: The little-known godfather of infographics

Every current field has its longtime history. You should only look for connections, inspiration and influences.

“Around the time when Austrian sociologist, philosopher, and curator Otto Neurath was building his ISOTYPE visual language, which laid the foundation for pictogram-based infographics, another infographic pioneer was doing something even more ambitious: The German polymath Fritz Kahn – amateur astronomer, medical scientist by training, gynecologist by early occupation, artist by inclination, writer, educator and humanist by calling – was developing innovative visual metaphors for understanding science and the human body, seeking to strip scientific ideas of their alienating complexity and engage a popular audience with those essential tenets of how life works.”

(Maria Popova ~ Brainpickings)

The intersection of user experience, customer experience and corporate strategy: The holy grail for 21st century business?

In the end, it all depends on the execution. Like always.

“UX and CX advocates and practitioners would do well to have a few beers together and explore how they can work to the common purpose of increasing customer uptake, loyalty, and advocacy across the entire ecosystem of their business’ interaction with their target market. And, senior executives need to lead that collaboration, if not mandate it. Their competitive position in the marketplace and future profitability may be at stake.”

(Chris Allen ~ HFI Connect)

Using personas for executive alignment

The customer is not who you think it is, shareholder, stakeholder or stockholder.

“(…) there was an unspoken goal to bring design thinking, gamestorming and traditional UX practices into the executive suite. We wanted to see how it would fare and how the team would react. It was our hope that this would give UX an even stronger foothold at the executive level then it enjoys today. Given the feedback received, the team enjoyed the exercise and saw value in it. Whether we’ll get invited back will be answered in time.”

(Jeff Gothelf a.k.a. @jboogie)

Utilizing patients in the experience design process

Contextualized version of the UCD process: Health.

“(…) there is much to be learned from typical patients as well, and observational research might be particularly favored in such cases. Unfortunately, whether you are talking about ePatients or most patients, patients continue to be the most underutilized resource in the badly needed redesign of healthcare and the patient experience.”

(Richard Anderson a.k.a. @riander)

UX and the civilizing process

Computers start to evoke all kinds of human reactions, including civil ones.

“The concept of a person is arguably the most important interface ever developed. (…) As software becomes increasingly complex and entangled in our lives, we begin to treat it more and more like an interaction partner. Losing patience with software is a common sentiment, but we also feel comfort, gratitude, or suspicion. Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves studied some of these tendencies formally, in the lab, where they took classic social psychology experiments but replaced one of the interactants with a computer. What they found is that humans exhibit a range of social emotions and attitudes toward computers, including cooperation and even politeness. It seems that we’re wired to treat computers as people.”

(Kevin Simler a.k.a. @KevinSimler ~ Ribbon Farm)