ExperienceCurve

It may be over but the artifacts, interviews and videos captured during this summit make for some interesting exploration for anyone interested in design, strategy, and business.

INDEX: The world arena for future design and innovation

A great post from Creating Passionate Users, it is basically a guide to creating a bottom up “user-focused employee guide” for when you are working in a “huge company”, I’m sure it would work as a “customer-focused employee guide.”

Creating Passionate Users: Subvert from Within: a user-focused employee guide

This post is a great example of trying to institute cultural change or “change management” from the bottom up. Achieving change in a company is extremely hard, and although this guide was written for people who want to use guerilla tactics from the bottom up, this guide is equally useful for executives that want to try and make there large company more user focused. No top down mandates are going to change the culture, only consistent messages, stories, symbols and action is going to affect a cultural change.

Here are some examples from the passionate users guide:

An ex-vianteer colleague of mine, Richard Anderson, has recently asked the, seemingly perpetual question in the UX, XD, CX, usability, user engineering, user centered community

It’s been famously quoted, i think by Tufte, that the only industries to that calls its major contituents “users” is designers and drug dealers.

I’ve chosen the term customer experience because I’m trying to think like a marketer, and I believe more companies will be interested in “customer experience” than they will be in “user experience”, customers just spend more money than users
In many ways its an issue of branding and positioning, in the seminal book “selling the invisible” the point is made, that positioning your business to be all things to all people is suicide, and in the end you need to pick a positioning the marketplace. In some ways all the designers fretting about this term are like small business people fretting that if they “commit” to a particular service they will lose out on the lucrative side projects that are not covered by there “narrow market focus.” In ‚Äúselling the invisible‚Äù it gives the fantastic example of an airline, SAS I think, that decided that it was going to mold itself into the “business peoples airline”. Well you can imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth, of people saying “what about all the tourist business we will lose, no one is going to fly for pleasure on the business peoples airline”. Well as it turns out SAS did very well as the business peoples airline, and successfully sold all the profitable business class seats, which enabled them to discount the coach seats, and they ended up with a successful airline that catered to business and tourist travelers. In essence, the “business persons airline” benefited from a halo effect where by doing one thing well they were able to serve another area very well.

Just because I talk about customer experience, doesn’t preclude me working on intranets.

Interesting side note, here’s a post from Peter Merholz on a similar topic Whither user Experience and credits Don Norman in the early 80’s with coining the term “user experience”