UX Week 2008 Early Bird Pricing Extended
UX Week is in San Francisco next year, August 12 - 15, at the Palace Hotel. And you can still snag your spot on the cheap. We have extended the early bird pricing (half the normal cost) until November 10th.
Early Bird Registration Ends November 3 for UX Intensive Vancouver
Early registration for UX Intensive Vancouver is ending on November 3. This is your last chance for discounted registration for our four-day workshop series on Design Strategy, Design Research, Interaction Design, and Information Architecture.
Register for all four days or choose a la carte registration and design your own workshop by cherry picking from the four topics. As always, use discount code “NEWS” for 15% off of the registration price.
Making the Most of a Design Engagement by the Adaptive Path Team
Recently, a client asked us how they might make the most of our design engagement. We started a staff e-mail thread and came up with these tips that organizations should know to create truly innovative products with an external design firm. As we told our client, innovative products come from companies with one important characteristic — willpower: The perseverance and committed resources to see a breakthrough product launched.
Here are Adaptive Path’s tips for our clients — or yours.
- Effective clients figure out quickly what the vendor/partner is good at, focuses them on that work, and then keeps the quality bar high. They clearly prioritize what’s most critical for the project’s success, and then clear a path downstream.
- Don’t lose sight of the core concept or design principles when solving implementation and operational details. The experience wanders and quickly becomes a ghost of its former self.
- Some clients try to ensure they get the most value by pushing for more wireframes, more scope, more whatever — all quantitative indicators of value. Instead, clients should be pushing hard to get better quality products. Spend your consulting dollars on design work, not just communication (explaining the process and what’s going on to the rest of the organization).
- Provide your consultant with proper resources: Time, information, money, people, passion. Don’t set arbitrary deadlines or withhold crucial information or stakeholders…
Read the rest of our essay on “Making the Most of a Design Engagement.”
Check Out Brandon’s Latest Essay: The Long Wow
Brandon Schauer, design strategist and UX Intensive speaker, cogitates on creating long-term customer loyalty through user experience.
The Long Wow is a means to achieving long-term customer loyalty through systematically impressing your customers again and again. Going a step beyond just measuring loyalty, the Long Wow is an experience-centric approach to fostering and creating it.
First, A Little Context
Businesses have begun to realize that the lofty goal of customer satisfaction might in fact be a red herring. A satisfied customer isn’t necessarily a loyal customer; today’s satisfied customer might find even more satisfaction in your competitor’s offerings tomorrow. And so we’ve started to see the rapid diffusion of tools like the Net Promoter Score which try to quantify loyalty. Such measures are popular because they track behaviors that create economic value: a customer recommending your brand to a friend, or a customer returning to buy from you again. But measuring loyalty doesn’t create loyalty.
Loyalty Can’t Be Manufactured
It’s no surprise that the MBA-knee jerk reaction to a loyalty problem is to create a loyalty program, but you can’t manufacture loyal customers by issuing them bronze, gold, and platinum ID cards. Such shallow solutions don’t resonate deeply with customers. Instead, these artificial attempts at loyalty create extra overhead in the customer relationship, they deliver pseudo-benefits the customer never needed, and they may event create barriers, resentment, or revolt.
At Adaptive Path, we’ve observed this superficial nature of loyalty programs first hand. When talking to customers of a well-known financial institution who were enrolled in a loyalty program. We found multi-millionaire, “platinum-level” customers that didn’t know (and didn’t care!) about their special status and benefits, even though the company considered that program an essential advantage and an attractor. The customers simply wanted the good products and services they were paying for in the first place…
Read the rest of Brandon’s essay, “The Long Wow.”
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