I suggested in a previous post that there should be a calorie mark. Recently a Michigan company has copyrighted and launched their suggested sarcasm mark. While I think their going about it the wrong way, I think they’ve identified a missing tool to address many of the text-based miscommunications we have. There are standards for irony marks (؟) and interrobangs (‽), but no sarcasm marks.

This is some early and raw thinking I’ve been doing about designing and delivering experiences successfully across many touchpoints.

Organizations are channel-bound. Customers aren’t. This outlines components and practices necessary to deliver great customer experiences across more than a single channel.

With the proliferation of new screens and new moments in peoples’ lives, it’s natural for businesses to conceive of great new customer experiences that are more desirable and scalable, and therefore much more valuable to everyone. However, organizations lack the simple practices to plan, deliver, and manage a customer experience across more than one touchpoint.

I’ve obviously borrowed some ideas from business strategy, service design, brand strategy, and that wacky world of design thinking.

The diagram shows some of the key concepts to define and manage. The top row plans for the experience predominately from the customer’s perspective. The bottom row is — while still customer centric — taken from the perspective of what’s smart for the organization to do. The middle is the important interaction between customers and organizations that forms the experience.

The value column is key to ensure the experience is viable to the business and useful to customers. The flow column defines what the experience should be. And the change column captures the means by which you can move from current state towards a better and more valuable experience. To explain ‘evidence’ in this column: showing evidence of the future experience is often the best way of helping the organization change and move towards it.

For easier viewing, you can see this diagram larger or in PDF format.

Note: this is somewhat a re-post of what I originally shared on Flickr, which received some interesting feedback of where some improvements can be made.

Can you significant improve a customer experience simply by following a few simple procedures? That’s what I’m going to explore for an upcoming talk at Failcon in San Francisco.

No it’s not ideal
No, I don’t think that you can simply follow a few recipes and create a mind-blowing customer experience. That takes culture, leadership, vision, and other through-and-through elements that go to the core of an organization. But let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Much of this attitude comes from some long held believes about user research. I’ve seen (an unfortunately personally executed) more research and analysis of customers than can be effectively used on a project. There’s nothing wrong with great research that can be drawn on for years to help shape an organization’s understand of their customer, but there is a problem when the time and budget for good design and execution is usurped by overly-sophisticated research efforts.

For organizations that have little or no qualitative insights about their customer, the value of simply seeing their customer in the wild for the first time can be a greater value — I’m talking dollars spent per actionable insight — than extensive, deep research efforts that extract tacit subtleties in the lives of customers. Proctor & Gamble may need to understand the interplay between masculinity and shampoo suds, but many young business simply need to see where their service, say, fits in a 5-minute window between finishing your work and turning on the TV.

But it’s practical
We may not be trained medical doctors, but with some simple CPR training, we can all dramatically improve a troubled person’s chance of living. We may not be gemologist, but we can follow the rules of the 5 C’s to evaluate what’s a good or bad diamond. Similarly, I’m working to propose a small memorable set of procedures to help teams get more out of the efforts by ensuring that their customer’s experience falls in the column of “mostly good” and not “mostly sucky.”

4 experience hacks
I’ve been looking at my own practices and thinking through the case studies of others to identify relatively low-cost and low-effort activities that can up your slugging percentage. While none of these are panaceas, I hope they can really help improve the chances of success. I’m still working on the exact language, but here’s where I stand today:

1. Get customer empathy into your business — see a handful of customers face-to-face, finding patterns of insights that tell you how to meet your business objectives. I think this can become almost recipe-like given the right picture of integrating business objectives and customer insights.
2. Define the experience you want customers to have — this is an obvious step that’s too often skipped. Beyond being freaking “friendly” and undoubtedly “easy to use”, what should the experience be like? Create some experience principles to guide every design decision.
3. Customer experience ideas are cheap. Have lots of them, but only execute the best handful. — Avoid the decision-making bias of primacy. Your first idea is rarely the best idea. Don’t waste development cycles and customer attention to find that out. Instead, have many ideas and use your insights and experience principle to vet them and find the best bets.
4. Return to the customer context. Often. — Working on a fast-paced design project we realized that we had become so engrossed in our own understanding of the business requirements that we lost the perspective of the customer. We didn’t have budget for usability testing, so we instead conducted a “dry-run-of-one.” We found a single representative customer, halted the design process for an afternoon, and walked the customer through our best paper-based simulation of the current design. We learned tons. It was such a good use of valuable time that we stopped and conducted other dry-runs-of-one at other points in the design process. It’s may not be as rigorous as full usability testing, but it was a great ROI.

So that’ my list. And I hope to reduce them down to some pretty basic tactics for execution. What would be on your list to help someone else easily but meaningfully up their likelihood of customer experience success?

California recently passed a law requirement restaurants with more than 20 chains to post the calorie content of their food on menus and interior menu boards.

It’s a smart law, but it brings up an interesting issue: there’s no simple symbol for the calorie unit. This will clutter up boards and menus with “Cal.” listed all over the place. It seems like there’s a growing need for a calorie symbol. Here’s my rough suggestion:

From looking at other symbols like the at (@) or the pilcrow (¶), it seems important that the symbol be able to be handwritten as well as flexible for different typefaces. I thought the simple dot inside the upper case C implies eating or gestation.

Of course, we could fully adopt the International System and have to start all over with Joules.

One of the patterns I keep seeing in customer experience management is the importance of delivering efficiently on the right things, not every-thing.

The Corporate Executive Board reports, “Leading financial institutions do not try to create customer delight. Rather, they develop a rightsized customer experience management strategy that delivers the organization’s value proposition at the lowest possible cost.”

This is very similar to the second “D” of Bain & Company’s three D’s of customer experience. Researching the companies that customer believe deliver superior experiences, Bain found that:

• They design the right propositions for the right customers.
• They deliver those propositions at the lowest system cost.
• And they develop the institutional capabilities to do it again and again.

Low cost doesn’t mean threadbare and cheap. It means choosing the right moments to excel at, the ones that win and keep the right customers. IKEA doesn’t try to excel at face-to-face customer service, they excel at a self-guided shopping experience. So the question is, what conscious trade-offs are you making?

We’ve all heard JFK’s goal to send an man to the moon within the decade. At workplaces, we use goals to set targets and motivate each other. I myself am very goal oriented. But the Wharton School of Business has a great review of a new paper by Lisa D. Ordóñez from the Eller College of Management and Adam D. Galinsky of the Kellogg School of Management titled, “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting.”

An excerpt from Wharton’s review:

In early 1969, just as the U.S. was preparing to reach John F. Kennedy’s lofty goal of sending Americans to the moon, the famed Ford executive Lee Iacocca gave a similarly ambitious mandate to his team of engineers.

Faced for the first time with competition from low-cost, high-mileage foreign imports, Iacocca set a specific target: Ford would design a new automobile that weighed less than 2,000 pounds and sold for under $2,000, and it would be on the showroom floor in time for the 1971 model year. What resulted was a mad dash to create the Ford Pinto.

It seems many of the worst blunders in business can be said to be in-part due to the poor use of goals: Sears overcharging for car work in the Nineties, Enron not evaluating the actual profitability of the deals its salesforce made, and maybe even No Child Left Behind. Like pain meds for talk radio hosts, goals have be over-prescribed in organizations.

The review goes on to quote past MX Conference keynote and organizational behavior expert Chip Heath of Stanford University, who “found that people tend to think that other people need extrinsic rewards more often than they really do…. To us, our work is interesting and meaningful, but we tend to think that other people come to work because of money.”

This is one reason I like when organizations focus on concrete things. Prototypes, pictures, whatever tangible thing they want to focus on to make happen in the world. Things make it easier to consider consequences and make results visible to everyone in the organization. Prototypes and other things certainly may not address every situation (e.g., sales targets), but I think they move groups of people closer to the intrinsic reward that is both interesting and meaningful.

[photo by chadmiller]

My friend Sean Savage pointed me to DIYcity, a group that asks,

“How can [aggregators, social software, mobile apps, etc.] be applied to transform urban spaces, changing them from the centralized, hard-coded things they are today into finely-tuned, fluid, user-operated systems that are efficient, sustainable and fit for life in the 21st century?

It’s a noble cause and probably timely. I think the real challenges here aren’t the technology or the infrastructure. It’s this: motivation.

What’s going to motivate enough people to participate on a wide enough scale to have a real overall impact? (Considering the 1% rule and similar behavior patterns.) Either contribution has to be absolutely frictionless, or it has to deliver some benefit in return. The benefit could simply be a heightened sense of altruistic pleasure or personal status, but the benefits have to be very pronounced to be effective.

However, the benefits might also be economic if you knew the right areas to look. DIYcities reminded me of a great episode of This American Life on Mapping. Give the first 90 seconds a listen.

The prologue begins with Ira Glass following a group on a city street hired to canvas New York City and to map every crack in every sidewalk. It’s explained that,

“…under New York law, if you trip on the sidewalk and hurt yourself, you cannot sue the city unless somebody had informed the city beforehand that there was a problem with the sidewalk… And so years ago a group of attorneys simply decided to hire a map company to go out each year and chart every foot of sidewalk in New York. They turn the maps into the city, which makes it possible for injured New Yorkers to do what nature apparently intended for them to do, which is take their city to court.”

Okay, so the attorneys might have been more motivated by greed than altruism, but in the process the city gets a free map of every crack in every sidewalk. This isn’t an example of an ideal solution for DIYcity, but a good example of how economic benefits can motivate us to map our cities.

When you find a city-ware solution that aligns low barriers to contribution, altruistic motivations, and economic benefits, you’re probably onto something powerful.

Here’s the deal: Register for an Adaptive Path event before January 1 and you’ll get it MUCH cheaper than you’ll ever get in 2009. And use the discount code FOBS and you’ll get another 15% knocked off the price.

I’m really excited by the line-up of events we have at Adaptive Path in 2009. Scott McCloud at UXWeek, Scott Berkun at Managing Design Products, and several great virtual seminars. But there are two events that I’m intensely enthusiastic about:

The MX Conference: Managing Experience Through Creative Leadership
This is the event that Henning Fischer and I have designed and programmed for our own education. Managing experiences is a tough job: convincing others that experience can be practiced strategically in an organization, building an leading a team to do the work, and then persevering through it all to get great experiences out into the world.

This event has a killer line-up of the people I want to learn from, thought leaders and real-world managers who know how to get it done, even in a down economy:

• What does it mean to be a Designful Company? Marty Neumeier, author of one of my favorite books, ZAG, will explain.
• Bruce Temkin from Forrester Research will be sharing his unique insights on how organizations can/are getting the most value out of user experience.
• Professor Sara Beckman of Berkley’s Haas School of Business will reveal the connections between design thinking and business value.
• Dan Roam, author of one of BusinessWeek’s best innovation books of the year, will show us how to draw to solve big problems.
• David Butler, VP of Design at Coke will share how he’s made design a strategic force at Coke.
• Margaret Schmidt, VP of User Experience Design & Research at TiVo is sharing how TiVo made experience the differentiator of their successful service.
• And back again will be last year’s most popular speaker, Margaret Gould Stewart, manager at Google, with her one-of-a-kind perspective on effectively managing and inspiring creative teams.

Plus, we’ve mixed in hands-on workshops in this years program so you can try out new tools and techniques for solving hard experience problems. I can’t wait.

Good Design Faster: High Value Experience Design
I’m passionate about reinventing the toolset that designers use today for experience design. Today’s decrepit common toolset (WUSS: Wireframes, Use cases, Sitemaps, and Specs) is horribly outdated and inappropriate for taking on the problems we face. Good Design Faster is a hands-on 2-day guide to new tools and methods to supplant that last generation toolset with fresh new approaches that, yes, get you to good design faster.

We’re creating a studio environment where you’ll get inspiration and instruction, then immediate apply what you’ve learned to exciting test cases. By the end of the two days, you will have been through a new approach to experience design, taking your raw ideas for a solution and making them real.

I believe that soft science is on the verge of a swell of new findings and data, driven by the increase in online activity and the ubiquity of sensors. More behavior is being observed. And no doubt, someone will eventually compile and analyze the trails of data generated. It’s exciting for soft science, as it suddenly has the empirical evidence of hard science. In short, it’s possible to study soft science with hard science techniques.

The New York Times article, “You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?,” shares multiple examples of tracking behavioral data, calling the emerging field, “collective intelligence.” Some examples of data being collected (note that the article focuses on the more spooky cases):

• social network activity
• spoken search queries for Google’s 411 service
• GPS units in cars and phones (think rental cars)
• shopper movement in retail stores
• employee communication and collaboration
• and San Francisco taxicab GPS data

Errors?
Take the San Francisco taxicab data for example. Using this data Sense Networks found that “middle-income people — as determined by ZIP code data — tended to order cabs more often just before market downturns.” Now, I’m sure Sense Network’s work was statistically robust, but I worry about how frequently we’ll look at the available data and come to conclusions that aren’t true. We’ll see patterns that really aren’t there
— what’s known as a type II error. I also worry we may often mistake correlation for causal relationships.

Back to Privacy
If you or your business collects data, it’ll be increasingly important to think about the data you retain and how you manage it. Because one day the customer may want (and be able to get) their data back. In the UK, the Data Protection Act already guarantees this right, which was creatively demonstrated by Chris Downs who compiled all the data organizations had collected about him and then sold it on eBay.

Dr. Alex Pentland, of MIT and Sense Networks, suggests the follow guidelines:

• that people have a right to possess their own data
• that people control the data that is collected about them
• that people can destroy, remove or redeploy their data as they wish