9 experiences for 2009
by Brandon SchauerTiming is everything. Take Flickr for example, a photo sharing service that successfully emerged in 2004 not just because of good design, technology, and leadership, but because of the coincidental mass adoption of camera phones and affordable high-quality digital cameras. A good idea becomes a great idea if its time has come.
So as we start off in a gloomy looking 2009, I’ll put on my hunch-hat and share my nine ideas of experiences who’s time has come:
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Enabling behavior change — Whether it’s to extend your paycheck or conserve your energy, there’s plenty of reasons for people to change how they behave this year. But behavior change is a complex thing. It’s an experience that needs to be carefully thought through from the human perspective, from the depths of the cognitive psychology of motivation to the breadths of incremental change across weeks and months. People won’t substantively change their behaviors simply because of clever marketing campaigns. To change consumer behaviors we must design motivational experiences that push, pull, and ease the pathway to adopting new habits. |
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Feeling the wealth of health — The U.S. stock market dropped almost 40% in 2008, making the phrase, “you always have your health,” more true than ever. Yet investing and participating in your own health and wellness is complex, clinical, and confusing. People and healthcare providers need to engage in simple but sound experiences that foster good decision making, good outcomes, and good feelings. Better experiences that design for the medical, physical, logistical, and emotional experience can make healthcare humane and something we all personally want to invest in. |
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Visualizing value — We’ll all be looking to get the most out of a dollar/euro/yaun. The trouble comes when we try to access the true value we’re getting our of a product or service. Experiences that help people find and get the most value out of a product/service will be the winners. The challenges are in revealing the value—especially the non-financial value—and reminding customers of it. Progressive Insurance might help people find value, but few organizations also help people appreciate it the way ZipCar does. When it comes to value, all customers are from Missouri: show-me, show-me, show-me. |
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Throwing a party for the third party — Traditional customer-centric product development meant finding customer needs, selecting the most marketable needs to design for, and creating a product to address them. But new approaches can turn this model on its head by opening up organizational capabilities to passionate customers and third party players who can participate in and design solutions that your business wouldn’t or couldn’t consider. Threadless proved this approach interesting. The iPhone app store has proved it real. So what aspects of your experience will you open up to pragmatic third-parties and what experience will you design to support them? |
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Uniquely mobile — Mobile is here and it’s been here. What’s changed is we’re no longer trying to shoehorn desktop metaphors and desktop interactions onto mobile devices. What’s changed is that opportunities are opening up for more people to design experiences for mobile devices. As a result, we’ll see many more mobile experiences emerge that are only possible and only compelling on a mobile platform. |
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Solid clouds — Cloud computing may be a hot meme, but outside the tech bubble the real world could care less. People will move to the cloud when the experiences offer something tangibly different and better than the desktop. Working more fluidly with a team is one such successful experience, but there will be more. But to find these experiences, we have to pull our heads out of the clouds and find solid on-the-ground benefits to people’s everyday lives. |
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Long wow experiences — Yep, I’ll throw in my personal favorite: The long wow is an approach to customer loyalty based on systematically impressing customers again and again rather than simply (and naively) issuing them a loyalty card with an identification number stamped on it. The relationships that customers will keep before, during, and after an economic downturn are the strong relationships with brands that deliver moments of noticeably exceptional service—moments when the service delights, anticipates the needs of, or pleasantly surprises a customer. |
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The elegant upgrade — Consumers have already started hanging onto hardware, such as mobile phones, for a longer period of time. This trend could be seen as a positive for the consumer, the environment, and smart business. Software upgrades, add-ons, and other modifications mean new and better experiences for customers. For businesses, it means additional revenue after the original purchase in a positive economy of scale. What has to be created are more elegant customer experiences for upgrading and augmenting products. Such products will be recast as services. |
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Chorded services — Multi-channel services typically delivery cacophony, not harmony, across the various channels of customer interaction. The opportunity is to define a songbook of chords that your organization can play as great customer experiences—as noted by Kate in her recent virtual seminar. If businesses start simple and learn to play the chords well, they can coordinate multiple touchpoints to delight customers and support behaviors that results in both savings and positive revenue. Today a business can deliver just about any service over any channel, but by using the lenses of experience you can define what services are valuable when and where. |
And here are a few more experiences that didn’t quite make the cut:
- Tween experiences — new businesses that fill in experience gaps between others (e.g.,TripIt)
- Customer servlets — simple service protocols that your business can excel at on specific channels
- Managing personal presence — relating ‘me’ to ‘we’ and ‘where’
- Gaps in personal expression — blogs may have peaked, but there are plenty of other ways to express ourselves
- Markets for talent — if the world is becoming flat, it’ll need more places where people can showcase and sell their talent to pragmatic buyers through a trusted third party
January 5th, 2009 at 6:03 am
[...] also the following articles on the same topic: – by Michael Bierut – by Brandon Schauer 3 Responses to “People-centred design in times of frugality” 1 [...]
January 5th, 2009 at 9:51 am
I love the concept of the Long wow. Time and again our research into Customer Loyalty has shown that relationship strength is the most important predictor of long term loyalty. In our experience, relationships are driven by consistent, thoughtful, and deliberate actions that happen not once, but over and over again.
January 5th, 2009 at 10:39 am
In all, an excellent post, Brandon. The “long wow” resonates with me most here.
Not that brands must pull “Oprah-like” wows such as sending everyone home with a surprise new car, but as brands become more social they must engage their audience as a “friend.” Surprise gifts, parties, promotions and consistent dialogue that gets hyper-local and more personal will be the ingredients that keep the crowd returning online and offline. Do unto others….and brands will realize champions, loyalists and evangelists.
January 5th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Thank you. “The “long wow” just blew my mind! Great post and happy 2009!
January 5th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
I love that you included cloud computing in this list! I think it’s only a matter of time until the majority of the population realizes its benefits.
Meg
January 5th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
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January 6th, 2009 at 11:21 am
“Feeling the wealth of health” extends beyond western health care into other forms of self care. In a downturn, people tend to reflect on and move toward the things that are most important to them. Often this is family/friends/social life, health, altruism, spirituality, creativity, and meaningful work.
This might mean things like these become really important:
* alternative economies – services that support resource sharing, swapping and trading services
* local communities – services that support small local communities (of practice, of interest, of spirit, of affinity) off-line and on-line. Think salons, meetups, play groups.
* creative frugality – socially supported financial management (like wesabe or zen habits)
* communication simplification – pay attention to that feeling of being overwhelmed by communication and information (blogs, phones, e-mail, RSS). In our industry we feel it most keenly, but folks outside of the industry are starting to feel it, too.
January 6th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
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January 8th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
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January 11th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
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