Adaptive Path Blog

Lou Carbone has been one of the business world’s foremost advocates for the value of managing experiences. He was coauthor of the seminal 1994 article that introduced the marketing world to the idea of customer experience management. Through his consulting firm, Experience Engineering, he advises companies on how to deliver value to customers through experience.

His book on customer experience management is entitled Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again. Lou Carbone will be delivering the keynote address on day one of MX East, Adaptive Path’s conference on management experience through creative leadership, being held October 21-23, 2007 in Philadelphia.

Jesse James Garrett: How did you get into this area of customer experience management?

Lou Carbone: It’s really very fascinating. I began to observe companies. I’d come out of an advertising background originally, and observing companies as they managed value and the experiences that they created, and I was amazed at the lack of rigor, discipline and methodologies around the lining of clues in the experiences that people have, and ended up believing that managers in companies basically left experiences very, very haphazard and that they weren’t very well managed or purposefully designed and executed. I became fascinated by the opportunity to really manage the clues and align the clues in an experience that an individual has.

JJG: Explain what you mean by clues. This is a core concept in your book, I know.

LC: Yes, it is. In all of the experiences that we have, we are doing what we refer to as “clue math.” Unconsciously and consciously, we are processing all of those things that we perceive in physical experiences. Those include humanics, which are the human elements in an experience that are emitted by humans in the experience, and then there are clues that we refer to as “mechanics,” which are all of those physical signals that we take in through our senses.

The other area is what we refer to as “functional” clues. Those are the goods or services that actually function and do what they are supposed to do. And so in any experience, we are simultaneously — consciously and unconsciously — processing all of these clues, which creates a feeling that we have that emotional connection, which is built on how the experience makes us feel. Therefore, all of those clues become very powerful when they’re aligned and working toward creating this emotional connection with customers.

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The recent relaunch of CNN.com has a lot of people talking — and wondering just what went into such an ambitious step forward for an established brand like CNN.

We’re excited to announce that Lori Adams and Dermot Waters of CNN.com will be joining us at User Experience Week 2007 to present the inside story of CNN.com’s relaunch. Join us in Washington, DC August 13-16 to find out firsthand how CNN put it all together.

When Google acquired Measure Map from Adaptive Path last year, we were sad to see our team go, but we were excited about what they might be able to do with Google’s ever-growing portfolio of interesting products.

It took some time, but it was worth the wait: Our team’s thorough rethinking of Google Analytics has finally launched — check out the demo of their new design. Congratulations to the Measure Map team, and we look forward to seeing what you’ll do to top this one!

The latest addition to our jobs page is an open position for a marketing manager:

Adaptive Path is looking for a Marketing Manager who can help us build on our thought leadership position and continue to develop our brand. A successful Marketing Manager will thrive in a highly decentralized, dynamic and collaborative creative environment.

As Marketing Manager, you’ll need to think strategically, work tactically, and keep an eye on both marketing and public relations. You will have to be able to balance marketing for our consulting and events lines of business, and to work independently yet collaboratively. Industry experience a plus but not required.

As part of your role you will:

• Articulate and guide a focused marketing and PR strategy
• Develop and manage a budget for marketing initiatives
• Find appropriate writing and speaking venues for our staff
• Produce case studies of our consulting projects
• Manage development of online and offline promotional materials, including our website and email newsletter
• Organize and host industry social events

Please email marketingmanager AT adaptivepath DOT com if you are interested in this position.

One of the most satisfying things about being at AP is having the opportunity to work with lots of smart people on a wide variety of challenging projects. But as the company has grown, we’ve hit some inevitable limits: any one of our designers or strategists might work on, at most, half a dozen projects in a year, and each of those project teams is likely to comprise only three or four people. As a result, some of us go a long time as colleagues without ever actually working together.

We’re fighting this through a practice we call open design sessions. We have a couple of standing meeting times during the week that are reserved for project teams to open up their process to the rest of the company. Anyone can attend and participate, and by having the sessions at regular times we allow people to easily plan this participation into the rest of their work schedule.

These sessions can go many different ways. Sometimes teams gather up the toughest design problems they’ve got and ask for help cracking them. Other sessions simply draw the group into whatever problem the team is facing at the moment. Sometimes we’re trying to poke holes in research analysis, other times we’re using multiple whiteboards to explore design possibilities.

We often do collaborative work sessions with our clients in the course of our regular project work. When we’ve combined these with open design sessions — bringing together the project team, the client, and the rest of Adaptive Path to collaborate on solving a problem — we’ve seen enormous benefits to everyone involved.

For project teams, open design sessions give them the opportunity to solicit a fresh perspective on their challenges, and maybe break some of the assumptions they have about their constraints. For others, the insights from these sessions can be carried back to their own projects, suggesting either new design approaches or new methods for reaching solutions. For everyone at AP, they enable us to learn from each other, as well as allowing us to talk from first-hand experience about the work we’re doing, rather than relating second-hand information overheard around the office. And for our clients, it’s a chance to benefit from the talents of our whole company, not just the few we’re able to dedicate to a project team.

Are you opening up your design process? Share your experiences in the comments.

We’d like to congratulate our friends on the Super Deluxe team on hitting one million users in just their first month of operation. We’re proud to have helped create such a successful new product!

One of the challenges of focusing on experience strategy — a long-term product vision created to last beyond a single design iteration — is that sometimes you have to wait a long time to see your work pay off. There are always the little changes that can happen right away, but it can take time for organizations to get all the pieces in place for a big strategic shift. So we were very happy to see the experience strategy that we created a while back for Crayola.com take a big step forward with their recently launched redesign. It’s fun to see our exploration of what a compelling brand like Crayola could do in the digital medium come to fruition, and it’s even more fun to know the innovations they still have up their sleeves for future releases.

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve been invited to join the American Chemical Society.

Rebecca Blood passes along this interesting challenge: If all knowledge about your field were about to wink out of existence, and you could offer up one sentence that would survive, what would it be? What’s the one most essential and useful thing you could say about experience design? Leave your suggestions in the comments.

With the rise of “unboxing videos” on the Web, product manufacturers are jockeying to create the most telegenic out-of-box experiences.