A Tale of Two Experiences...

Experience 1:
I approach my destination and am greeted by a concierge at the door, who politely asks for my name and checks my reservation details. I am directed to my seat. After an acceptable amount of time in which to arrange my belongings and get comfortable I am greeted by a service assistance who offers me a choice of beverages. It’s that time of day, and it’s been a big day, so I justify a glass of wine.

“Would madam prefer white or red? White madam, no problem. Would you prefer dry, medium or sweet? Dry, we have a very nice sauvignon blanc. Would that be ok for you?”

I sit and coif my wine. Before not to long the service assistant returns to inform me they will shortly be serving food and he presents me with a printed card and talks me through the options including the lite bit or the main course.

My meal arrives, served on white china. Small but sufficient and well presented. I’m given a small pack of personal condiments, including a linen napkin and toothpick. After finishing my main course I’m offered a choice of desert, followed by tea or coffee with a chocolate.

Within an acceptable amount of time my table is cleared and I am thanked for my custom.

Where am I?


Experience 2:
I approach my destination and find my own way to a seat. There are remnants from the last guests meal on the table and on the seat. I clean the seat with my hand, as there is no napkin on the table.

After a few minutes someone rushes by brandishing a pot in hand and asks ‘Any tea?

Sometime later that same person comes back and says ‘would you like anything to eat?’

I feel a little bit intimidated and am almost inclined to say no, but I brave it and ask,
‘What are my options?’ as I have no idea.
“Well we have crisps, fruit and sandwiches.”
I smile imploringly but am forced to ask,
“What sandwiches do you have?”
He hands me a piece of paper with a hand-scrawled description of two sandwiches. One chicken and cheese the other ham. I ask if either are on brown bread and he looks at the sandwiches to check. The chicken and cheese is on brown so I opt for that. He hands me a pre-packed sandwich and a paper serviette.

I discard the packaging. The sandwich is soggy on one side where it has been stood too long on one side, or else pushed up against the back of the fridge. I have hardly taken three bites out of the sandwich, trying to negotiate around the soggy side and he’s walking back to collect rubbish. He sees the empty sandwich packet and asks, 

“Are you done with that?”

“Errm no.” I say apologetically. I don’t want to turn over the empty packaging to the rubbish collector because I am using it as a plate. The empty package (and soggy bit of sandwich) remain on my table for some while after.

Where am I?


Have you guessed yet? If you thought experience one was in a mid to upper end restaurant and experience two was in a greasy spoon-type café, you’d be very wrong. 
Experience one was in ‘Premium Economy’ on the EuroStar between London and Paris.
Experience two was in ‘First Class’ on Virgin Rail between London and Manchester.

Given that both journeys take a similar amount of time (I think the Manchester train is slightly longer) the killer question which did I pay more for? Yes, you guessed it, experience two – First Class on Virgin Trains.

So the analysts tell me we are in the ‘Experience Economy’ where customer experience is the strategic differentiator. There is almost viral adoption of the metric system known as ‘Net Promoter Score’ which asks the ‘ultimate question’ “would you recommend this product/service to a friend or colleague?”

I would highly recommend EuroStar premium economy. The service experience far exceeded my expectations. Would I recommend Virgin First Class? I was left wanting by this service and would only recommend it if you need to get some work done and you get a discount deal. Do not pay full price expecting first class service, because you will be sorely disappointed. 

So I thought I’d check. The Virgin corporate machine claims:

“Virgin stands for value for money, quality, innovation, fun and a sense of competitive challenge. We deliver a quality service by empowering our employees and we facilitate and monitor customer feedback to continually improve the customer's experience through innovation.”

This is an open invitation to Virgin Trains, I’m happy to work with you and give you feedback to improve your customer service. (Actually while we're here talking about Virgin and customer service I'd like to extend that invitation to Virgin Media too, oh and maybe even Virgin Atlantic...)

Redesigning Design

Check out my article on 'redesigning design'

How poor system design impacts customer experience and compromises brand reputation…

Wired Magazine, established in 1993, has built it’s reputation on it’s ‘in-depth coverage of current and future trends in technology and how they are shaping business, entertainment, communications, science, politics’. It has a circulation of 50,000 in the UK alone. Where ever there is commentary to be said on technology or technologists, Wired is there. 

Having recently rekindled my relationship with Wired I decided to subscribe to ensure I didn’t miss a thing and that’s when I almost changed my mind. I went from the glossy, well-produced physical magazine (there’s still something about paper for me…) to the equally shiny wesite, to marketing driven yet uninspiring signup screen to hideous confirmation message.

Seriously? Wired magazine is built on a technological infrastructure that takes a week to update it’s customer database? You have to be kidding me? It made me wonder momentarily how I could trust anything they had to say! Sort it out guys, that’s embarrassing!

Continuous Design

Design was a discipline ruled by deadlines. Those hard and fast deadlines help to spur the mind. The deadline is the difference between the intangible and the tangible. It is the point when ideas, drafts, blueprints and prototypes are printed or manufactured. The designer used the time before the deadline to flex his creative muscles and to create and finesse the artifact to be produced, but once the deadline has past, the designer is done. Of course many designers berate the fact that there is never enough time, but secretly they will be relieved that their creative thoughts have taken on form and they can brush themselves down and say “Job done! (now lets head to the pub…)”.

In this world if we learn something new about the audience or the market for our product we start a new project, undertake the exercise from scratch and produce the next generation or a completely new version of the product. This all takes time but at the end of the new project the job is done. You can move on again.

This model was born in the Industrial era where large machines and production lines and production schedules were needed to produce these tangible artifacts. Why then do we try to apply the same working model to digital products in the digital era? It doesn’t make any sense at all.

One certainty in life, is change. Change is constant. Technology changes at the speed of light. Technology responds to human need. Human needs change with developments in technology and it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. Add into the mix social, environmental, political influences and the cycle of change is an indomitable force.

As ‘digital engineers’ we need to embrace change as the lifeblood of a digital existence. We need to stop fearing change, accept it and work it into everything we do. Now I might be sounding all a bit William Gibson here, (circa neuromancer) but as designers we need to jump on board. Technology is leading the charge for change and we are being left behind to choke on the dust.

What we need to do is open up the discipline of digital design. In this lightening paced world we can’t apply the traditional models of learn, design and test. We can never learn enough before change occurs; we can never design enough before change occurs… ad infinitum. We need to find a new way of working.

Here’s a suggested starting point:

·      Do ‘just enough’ learning to know who our (current) audience is, rather than months of in-depth research on an ever shifting target.

·      Utilize design patterns and tweak to fit, rather than reinventing the wheel every time.

·      Design no longer belongs to the designers. Collaborate on the designs with business, technology and customers to ensure feasibility, desirability and feasibility from the outset.

·      Focus on the ‘minimal desirable product’ and get that out to market as quickly as possible.

·      Refine and iterate the product through a continuous cycle of ‘test and learn’

·      Accept that design is never ‘done’ and embrace the notion of ‘Continuous Design’

More on this topic to follow…

XD across mulitple enterprise systems

Reposting from http://jasonfurnell.wordpress.com/  Thanks Jason...

ThoughtWorks has a healthy community of people who you can ask random questions… and generally get a pretty good response.
This response to the question “Experience with planning XD across multiple enterprise systems” from Lindsay Ratcliffe was no doubt off the cuff – but it’s a great summary of how to approach large XD problems. Here it is…. (thanks to Lindsay for letting me post it)
“Map out the existing customer experiences across all the touch points relevant to the systems that you are rebuilding. This scale of project can be somewhat daunting but is an excellent opportunity to really affect the total customer experience. Often when experiences are just looked at from a single product perspective the overall experience becomes disjointed and ugly because no-one is looking at the big picture.
Not sure if it’s on the same sort of scale but I was involved in a project at a bank where they did a review of their product portfolio and discovered majority of their customers only had 1.3 products (average metrics obviously). So they went on a drive to ‘increase a share of wallet’. ‘Products’ actually were as simple as:

• An single bank account
• Access to internet banking
• Access to telephone banking
• A card with their account (debit or credit)
• etc..

Each product was built in a seperate legacy system and so as soon as you started to draw out the experience that a new customer to go through just to open a single bank account you immediately saw the pains. Seperate forms for each ‘product’, having to repeat personal information on each form, dependancies between products, lags opening some products, different ID requirements for different products. Urrgggggh it was just all too hard, which actually meant that it was then quite easy to make what seemed like small improvements but that had massive positive impact.
So start with the usual stuff:

• Looking In: undertstand the end customers – sketch out personas that include wants, needs and desires
• Make a list of customer goals – what are the customers trying/desiring to achieve during their interactions
• Map out the existing customer experience – identify where/what the pain points are, where the moments of truth/happy moments are, where the waste is, where the opportunities are (this can be done collaboratively. Do it with the business and get their perspective. Do it again with customers and get their perspective, especially as they won’t give a hoots about technology.
• Looking Out: look at the competitors and other organisations who may not be competitors but have a similar structure and see what the customer experience is like there.
• Analyse the findings from both looking in and out to find out where the true insights are
• Use the as-is state and the insights as a spring board for ideating around the ideal state (again do this collaboratively to get the best results)

The deliverable doesn’t have to be anything more complicated than a big map of the ideal customer experience across the products and systems. This provides a vision of success and a framework for rebuilding that is based on value to both the end customer and the business.

Haste makes waste

I watched “The Killer in Me” a couple of nights ago and I’ll save you time that you’ll never recover by saying don’t bother. IMHO it was pretty awful. However I will give it credit for the title of this blog, "Haste makes waste," as it summarises perfectly what I want to say here.

I was privy to a large debate about new features and enhancements for a critical internal application. One user-friendly person offered up the suggestion that instead of just collecting a bunch of features and requirements that someone should take the time to do some quick wireframes and then do some guerrilla-style testing with a handful of users. Seemed like a sensible idea to me. However it was met with the following (paraphrased) response:

‘I beg you not to design and test before coding – get coding as quickly as you can and if it doesn’t work change it. The idea of UX before code is outmoded and needs to change…’

Actually what is outmoded is building software that is bloated with features that are either not used, not wanted or are so unusable that they are not used. Coding from a bunch of business requirements without considering the overall experience produces exactly this kind of ‘bloatware’. I do subscribe to the notion of getting to code as quickly as possible and that big-up-front design is wasteful but answer me these two questions?

Question 1: How much time would it take to build a working application (even in Ruby-on-Rails or the like) with fifty or so fairly critical features?

Answer 1: from a random poll of devs, the finger in the air answer was 2 x 2 pairs of dev (4 people) 6 weeks for the minimum critical features.

Question 2: How much time would it take to rapidly, or even better, collaboratively, sketch the application and get some quick feedback on what’s working and what’s not?

Answer 2: from a random poll of nearby UXers the finger in the air answer was 2 days to collaboratively sketch out the UI/user experience with users.

So If I follow the first path 1 I will have working software within six weeks (which IS cool, no doubt) but it will likely contain a whole bunch of stuff that when people see it will then say “ahh actually I didn’t mean that”,  “nope now I’ve seen it I probably wouldn’t use that feature”,  “I’m not quite sure how that (feature) works”, “now I’ve seen it I realised there is another feature missing that is far more important”… Which is all good feedback and allows us to iterate through the product development process. I have no problems with that at all.

What I do have a problem with is the muda, the waste. Why build stuff you don’t need, don’t want or doesn’t work?

In contrast if you rapidly and collaboratively sketch out the application in 2 days we get that same feedback 5 and half weeks of 4 developers time earlier and then when we start coding on day 3 we are much more confident that what we are building is not only the right thing for the users, with the right feature set but it also has a cohesive user experience, which is usable and useful.

Don't just deliver; delight!

On Tuesday 28th September I'll be presenting with Marc McNeil at the ThoughtWorks Quarterly Briefing (QTB). We'll be talking about how it is possible to create great customer experiences in an agile environment and how we don't believe that projects start at development...