Experience Matters

Where’s Your Resolve?

We’re ten days from another year-end. Another 365 days have passed since this time last year. That’s 8760 hours. We’re talking 525,600 minutes of procrastination. But I’m not talking about your typical New Year’s Resolutions. Not to-do’s like losing weight. Or exercising. Or reaching out to old friends. Or reading a new book.

No, I’m thinking about resolutions around improving customer experiences. How do we work differently? Think differently? Act differently? How do we lead clients differently? And how much of a difference can we have in the customer experience?

Get out from behind the desk. The more we observe consumers in their environment, the more enlightened we become. We can discern behavior and connect the insights to create better experiences. Let’s commit that every project includes time for observation before we start crafting a solution. Timelines are tight and budgets are limited. But we can focus more time on truly observed behavior and the insight we can glean from it.

Prototype early and often. We watched IDEO’s Nightline video on creating a better shopping cart this past week at an office lunch-and-learn. In the 20 minute video, they rethought the shopping experience. You can purchase the video here. What’s interesting is that they went from start to finish in five days. And on day two they were already prototyping. We can learn a lot from exploring and building earlier in our experiences.

Reach broad, and go deep. Get the broader team involved early in experience planning. Technologists. Ethnographers. Analysts. Customers. Core stakeholders. Other agencies. We just completed four rapid design labs with a client over three days. We had multiple client stakeholders and agencies all focused on core business problems. We achieved better alignment. And total ownership of the ideas across the team. And the team is energized against a common problem.

Do not pass go. Frequently we kick off a project with a client and they don’t have crisp objectives. They’re in a rush. Integration has to happen. Deadlines are approaching. But it’s hard to solve problems without a clear diagnosis of what we’re trying to fix. Clients sometimes ask for “buzz” or “big ideas” or “competitive difference.” We need to push them harder on real objectives with more quantifiable goals. That’s usually where we do our best work.

Optimize. The pace of change often results in quickly moving from project to project. We’ve tried some recent initiatives where we reserve a percentage of budget for post-launch optimization. It’s a simple idea, but it’s a mind-shift that new doesn’t always mean better. Think about a percentage of budget to launch and tweak rather than launching and moving on to the next priority.

Live in beta. We work in an imperfect world. We have tools at our disposal to try more, fail more frequently, and innovate more quickly. We need to recognize that the core benefit of digital is not perfection, but continuous progress. That comes from living in beta. It’s a mindset shift. But I’m convinced that the startups are prepared to fail at a faster rate than many established companies who are seeking perfection. That’s why they can innovate more quickly.

Watch, listen, and take action. Analytics and low cost usability tools enable us to observe what is happening at a much faster rate than ever before. Online usability tools, path analysis, and even lightweight in-person tools like Morea place observation within reach for a very small cost. So there’s no reason not to understand how well the experience really works.

Those are a few of my resolutions. The good news? 2008 is a leap year. So I have another day. Another 24 hours. An extra 1440 minutes to deliver against these resolutions.

Which resolutions will you deliver against? I’d love to hear them.