-
Making magic
Where does she want to go? And what does she need to get there? If I said I was writing about Cinderella, then you might already know the answer to those two questions. And what if I said that the story wasn’t about Cinderella, but about your customer… Would you know where she wants to […]
-
Foreshadowed is forearmed
You are creating expectations for people. There’s no way around it. Every interaction, and every lack of interaction contributes toward an expectation, a prediction of what it’s like to interact with you. You have no choice in whether or not to create expectations for people. But you do have a choice as to the direction […]
-
Play to keep playing
One of the most important jobs of your business is to stay in business. Sure, there are a number of other jobs-to-be-done, but if you don’t stay in business you can’t do any of those other ones. And when we recognise that everyone makes (or claims to make) great products, and everyone delivers (or claims […]
-
The story you tell yourself, is it working?
We all have stories we tell ourselves. We’re either justifying who we are, or we’re shaping who we will become. Your business is the same. It has a stories about the industry you’re in, and the way things get done. And those stories shapes your customers’ experiences. But is the story working? Or is the […]
-
Manufactured authenticity
In The Practice Seth Godin contrasts Steely Dan with musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, and Aretha Franklin: “Steely Dan continues to sell records and stream near the top of their niche… they created and performed their work in a studio… and then spent months or years polishing the recordings to a bright sheen… But […]
-
Many moments, many iterations
Great experiences don’t come into being all at once. They’re both a daisy chain of small moments, and a culmination of small iterations. You don’t just sit down and create a great experience for your customers. That’s not how it works. You sit down and you pay attention to the moments that already exist. And […]
-
It’s fake, and that’s great
It’s fake. Of course it’s fake. And that’s ok. In fact, it’s often better than ok. It’s often great. If all your experiences were always 100% true beneath the surface, then almost all of your experiences would be on a scale from ‘meh’ to ‘bad’. The statistical odds of the serendipity required for great things […]
-
Watch and learn
But not like Buzz Lightyear… Once you recognise the value of the experience economy, and you’ve decided to start adding experience design into your interactions, at some point you’ll need to try something you haven’t tried before. In fact, that’s the definition; everytime you try something new = something you haven’t tried before. The difference […]
-
Ordinary people creating extraordinary experiences
You could kid yourself and try to hire “great” people. People who are always on form, who never have a bad day, who are Jedi-zen-emotional masters. But they don’t exist. Instead you could design interactions so that everyday people like you and me can consistently create great experiences. That means designing them. That means asking […]
-
The authenticity of manufactured moments
Some people have a concern that manufactured moments aren’t going to be authentic. It might be true that manufactured supawood isn’t so-called “real wood”, but experiences aren’t supawood. Experiences don’t work like that. It’s easy to think about an example; in the middle of an argument, we can recognise that sometimes feelings might arise which […]
-
Time to grab your surfboard
Experience Design is all around us, it’s just not widely recognised, and that might be because good experience design is invisible while the obvious attempts aren’t good experiences. And so if someone hasn’t encountered the concept of the experience economy before they look at me like I’m completely nuts. “You can’t manufacture emotions in people […]
-
A surprising experience
Some people love surprises. Others hate surprises. Clearly we have a distinction between types of people… Wrong! We have a distinction between types of surprises. A surprise is a deviation from what was expected. When reality deviates from our expectations our dopamine system trains us. If the deviation from expectation resulted in something better than […]
-
The experience of fairness
Humans have an innate sense of what is fair, and our sense of fairness is apart from where we grow up, or how old we are, or what we believe. When you behave in a way that’s counter to our intuitive sense of what is fair you create a terrible experience. We suffer an offence. […]
-
Chase your audience
I read classic crime fiction, and James Hadley Chase is one of the best known crime thriller writers of all time. From 1939 to 1984 he wrote 90 titles, 50 of which have been made into films. His books are page-turners. People love them. And yet I have 15 of his books sitting on my […]
-
Stepping stones to serendipity
It’s true that great experiences can be truly serendipitous, that they can happen entirely by chance. But chance doesn’t scale. You don’t have a great experience at Disneyland by chance, you have a great experience at Disneyland by design. We seem to value serendipity though, the feeling of discovery, of stumbling upon something great. And […]
-
The telos of experience
Experience design seems to be a consequentialist act. Of course our intentions matter, but it seems likely that success or failure of an experience will be judged by the outcomes rather than by the intentions. We can imagine a case in which we’re at a restaurant, and something goes wrong… perhaps we take a mouthful […]
-
Re.Mark.Able
The ideas that spread are the ideas that win. The businesses that people eagerly want to tell other people about are the businesses that win. What would it take for your business to be the topic of conversation that someone eagerly tells people about at a dinner party? When someone says, “Hey Sam, how was […]
-
Create great experiences
We live in an experience economy. If you look around your life you’ll know it’s true. Everything is star rated, and if it’s not 4/5 or higher nobody’s interested. Everybody promises a great product, great service; and if everyone does it then it’s not the basis for competition. The corporate culture at the place where […]
-
How To Win In The Post-Service Economy
Service has become commoditised. We expect our food will be prepared quickly, and we expect that the food will be great, because great service is the new minimum expectation. We only go to the restaurant / hotel / mechanic / insert-your-business-here if it has 4 or 5 stars. Only 3 stars? Meh … Great service […]
-
Scaling A Personal Services Business Through Experience Design
I was chatting to a physiotherapist this morning; she’s in the process of opening her third practice. One of the challenges she faces in scaling her business is that physiotherapy, like other personal service businesses, is frequently built on personal brands. Her clients like her. They don’t want to be treated by another physio in […]