Dave Wiskus explores the history of interaction and interface design, from the keyboard and mouse to multitouch, and beyond.
Every
day, people all over the world are clicking, tapping, typing, and
touching and dragging things on glass screens. Our ability to use all
this fancy technology with ease didn’t happen overnight. So how did we
end up here?
My
thanks to Jason Snell, Brent Simmons, Nick Arnott, Joe Cieplinksi, and
Ryan Nielsen for fact-checking and copy editing. If I’m wrong about
anything, blame them.
And an extra special thanks to the wonderful people who support the show on Patreon:
Ryan Nielsen Abraham Vegh Orta Therox Curtis Herbert Zach Kahn Samuel Strickland Daniel Cacace Kevin Korpi Joshua Ouille Jordan Cooper Pat McConnell Klaas Pieter Annema Bernd Goldschmidt Garrett Allen Matt Oram Ben McCarthy Brian Alvey
What every CEO needs to know about creating a user experience practice with Dr. Eric Schaffer. For more Information on HFI; http://www.humanfactors.com/uxsetup/i...
CEO's are going through a transition that just has to make their heads explode. It used to be that success was about getting powerful hardware in place or efficient software or great marketing offers.
But today things are suddenly very different. In 2012, Forrester found that 97 percent of
companies surveyed considered customer experience as the top strategic
priority, and 28 percent considered it the primary priority.
Seventy-five percent of companies hope to make customer experience a
competitive differentiator.
Today, hardware and software and
offers are undifferentiated. Marketing devolves to offering customers a
four-slice toaster to convert. But then the competition offers a
six-slice toaster, and the margins get vanishingly thin. So we
differentiate today on customer experience. We roll that buzzword around
a lot, but what does it mean.
For an executive, experience in
hardware and software and offers and toasters, it might not be clear.
Sure, in the physical spaces, we make stores with nice appointments and
attentive staff, and we train our call center folks to be empathetic,
but most of the customer experience challenge today is in the digital
channels. And what does it mean there?
There's a profession
called usability or user experience engineering, which focuses exactly
on this topic. There's a billion dollars' worth of research on how to
optimize human computer interactions. There are graduate degrees and
training and certifications and methods and tools and standards, and a
load of folks who put up a sign to say they do user experience design,
but they actually specialize more in something else. User experience
engineers systematically create designs that are efficient, accurate,
self-evident, fun, and compelling.
You can measure the impact
and business results, like throughput or number of calls to the call
center or conversion rate. But if you're a CEO who understands the
importance of customer experience, you have one big scary challenge. You
won't know how to set up a practice in customer experience design, and a
lot of what you learned from hardware and software and offers won't
work.
You might make motivational speeches about customer
experience, but motivation is not the problem. No one is trying to make
online banking hard. You might set clear goals with your team, and the
result is often a scrum of executives all trying to own customer experience without any idea what to do with it. You might buy some training, but
the training staff come out into an environment that's not ready, and
they soon forget their skills as they get no chance to use them.
So
you hire a super strong expert in customer experience design. But while
they're great at designing experiences, they don't know how to set up
an industrial strength practice for designing experiences. Then you look
for a consultancy that claims to do user experience design, but you
actually get a graphics firm that makes lovely pictures that are very
impressive but doesn't get you where you need to be. But before you give
up, recognize that a sustainable customer experience design practice
can only happen with a set of things in place. It's just like a
hospital. It happens because of organizational structures and standards
and surgeons and pipes. You hire an expert in setting up hospitals. You
need a consulting partner that will help your company to set up a
serious sustainable industrial strength practice.
