Customer Experience is Customer Perception

When you are designing a customer experience you not only have to look at what customers want but most critically, what they *perceive* you are giving them.  The customer experience mantra that you need to create ‘user-centric’ design has much more subtlety than many people realise.  The value of a customer experience is primarily determined by psychological perception.  

The importance of stressing this issue of perception is that people have great trouble putting their perceptions into words, not to mention identifying their full range of perceptual experience and how it impacts the value they ascribe to your product.  Perceptions also cover every aspect of a person’s experience at a given time, beyond the particular activity you are considering.

The most skillful user experience practitioners I have come across were often separated by their finely tuned ability to uncover and analyse perceptions.  Next time you are running user research, positioning a brand, mood-boarding a design, solutioning using personas etc. etc. be sure to examine and reflect on the perception filter that customers will bring into the equation.  

To give fair dues – this note was inspired by Bruce Temkin’s excellent customer experience blog: http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/

Filed under: creative delivery, method, user-centred , bruce temkin, customer experience, design, mood boards, perception, personas, user-centred

Web Without Words Reveals Clutter Overload Is Still Common

I just came across this site which is doing a very interesting experiment in web UX analysis:

Web Without Words

When I look at these block schematics of high profile websites I’m horrified at how cluttered and complex they are.  It reinforces the manifesto I’ve previously put forth: customer experiences should not be this complex and intricate. Yet it’s a design approach which is sadly still very common.

Filed under: folly, presentation, style, trends, user interface , clutter, information architecture, schematics, web design, web without words

Has Social Media Really Taken Over?

I’ve recently been reviewing recording artist websites for a couple of reasons (beyond just personal interest), and I’m struck by the struggles of different artists and websites to address community.  Commentators looking at the most successful online communities have proclaimed the victory of social media over ‘traditional’ websites, but from what I see there’s a handful of success stories and many more sites that are working really hard to build vibrant communities.  High activity and community shouldn’t be mistaken for the same thing either: Communities are self-supporting, self-managing, constructive groups, whereas there’s a lot of high traffic sites that have been named communities that don’t have those key attributes at all. Rather they are borne out of large numbers of people arriving for some other reason and giving voice (take all those comments on YouTube for example).  I’m not saying Social Media is a fad or about to be replaced by the next big thing – I do think it’s here to stay – but don’t expect it to replace media/sites that have served well in the past and will continue to.

Filed under: general, trends , community, fad, social media, youtube