Tomorrow at the IASummit I’ll be presenting on The Long Wow, a systematic approach for building great customer experiences that lead to real customer loyalty. It’s one of three approaches to practicing design differently that I outline in Adaptive Path’s new book Subject to Change. This is a talk that I have a lot of fun with, so I’ll looking forward to doing it.
The premise of these three approaches is simple: If we all practice design (or IA, or UX, or whatever you call it) the same way within organizations, then no design practice will be considered truly strategic. Strategic applications of design only exist when design practices are focused on the aspects of an organization that make it distinct. Otherwise you’re just employing best practices, and your executive leadership will only see you as a cost center.
I’ll work to get the presentation onto Slideshare soon, but until then, here’s some detailed notes on some of the references I made during the talk:
- My essay on The Long Wow
- Learn a little more about the Net Promoter Score and the corresponding research study from Bain & Company on “Closing the Delivery Gap“
- Here’s a brief review of the peak-end rule from Daniel Kahneman. Also, the very interesting book Paradox of Choice makes some references to the peak-end rule and how it applies to concepts like the experience of colonoscopy exams.
- For those not familiar with the often told story, here’s the history of OXO Good Grips and Sam Farber’s original inspiration
- TripIt is the travel organization service I referenced as a good example for finding a wide area of customer need that they can return to again and again for new inspiration
- Peter Merholz’s interview with the CEO of Zipcar
- And who can forget radiators.com!
- The flickr Color Contest outage message, and the winners
- Adaptive Path’s book, Subject to Change
And here’s where you can download a PDF of the slides (48.5 MB) from the talk. As a reminder, you can register for upcoming Adaptive Path events in San Francisco and Minneapolis for 15% off by using the code FOBS.
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April 13, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Pingback from Best of IA Summit 08: Day 1 : The 4th Stage
April 17, 2008 at 4:36 am
Pingback from Pleasure and Pain >> IA Summit 2008: Brandon Schauer’s “The Long Wow”
May 1, 2008 at 10:40 am
Johnathan
Hi Brandon,
In regards to your article “The Long Wow” I agree with several of your points, and somewhat the general conclusion.
Customer empathy: Yes we should begin to dive into customer experiences and actually understand what they do with our products/services. An often overlooked product that pioneered this approach in General Mills was Hamburger Helper. This program, which entailed observing mothers in their daily routine, generated a new understanding of their customer and helped spur a massive increase in Hamburger Helper sales.
Wow at every opportunity: Again, I completely agree with you on this point. We should strive to wow customers at every touchpoint.
Where I find myself disagreeing with you is in the disregard of Loyalty programs in favour of the points mentioned above. You mentioned Harley Davidson as a company that did not have a traditional loyalty program, when in fact HOG (Harley Owners Group) has been a pivotal program and key part of Harley Davidson’s growth. Another example is Harrahs Casino’s loyalty program (inspired by observing the customer in the field) - read the article Diamonds in the Data Mine.
Yes, we should look at wowing our customer at every touchpoint. Yes we should dive deeper into customer research so we can give the segment what it wants. But we mustn’t throw out loyalty programs and disregard them as cassette players. We must adapt these techniques and learnings to continually evolve loyalty programs that work. Harrahs Casino’s did it. Harley still does it.
I think this will result in scaled down programs, but more efficient ones.
-Just my two cents,
Johnathan
May 26, 2008 at 5:56 am
Eric R Ward
Brandon,
Excellent presentation and thanks for including and attributing some of my photography in your work…
Eric R Ward (aka a4gpa)