TibetanTailor

At the newsstand this morning I got a WSJ and they gave me a Fresh Nap to clean my hands from the black ink.

I read about this in this months People en Espanol. I’m looking forward to this being on TV July 19th. A mobile library, on a donkey.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/biblioburro/

“Why CMOs Must Learn to Understand the Customer-Experience Ecosystem” – By Kerry Bodine

Three main points

1. Tunnel Vision – Organizations are placing too much emphasis on web and social media. That said, I think future CEOs MUST have spent time in the user experience group if they want to see things from a “customer experience” POV.
2. There is no more “back-stage.”The difference between front stage and back stage is disappearing, and with that disappearance all of your employees are able to both help and hurt your customer experience.
3. Ecosystem Mapping – To break out of tunnel vision organizations need to take a different perspective. She calls for understanding it from the customers perspective and to map it out. I was involved with that on some early 2000 work with Ford. A key to it’s success was that we made it circular, so that everyone could easily see opportunities to influcence repurchase (even before a customer explicity asked for it.) The ecosystem mapping that most consultants do though is too heavy on the process mapping and light on other aspects. I recommend setting analysis such as I did for My Ford.

References & See Also

Customer-Experience Ecosystem by Kerry Bodine

My Ford Setting Analysis

Growing Future CEOs: Time in a user experience group will be manditory

I’m willing to accept my job as being harder, if it makes my customer’s job easier. It might take more effort for me to organize a navigation or make labels more clear, but I will willingly accept that if I know that many users or customers will each have an easier time.  It makes sense that an hour more of effort on the design side can result in hours, days, or more of accumulated time savings on the customer/user side.

Its getting harder to impress me with a cool website. Now a cool new food or dessert, that’s something completely different . ..

I was assigned the cooking duties for the weekend. Each child got to choose 2 meals. My middle child was thinking about what he wanted. I asked him what were his favorite things.

He thought about it and said “soup.” And then he said “pizza.”I said, lets make “pizza soup”. He got very excited and screamed “YES! Pizza Soup!”

So he invented a way to make pizza soup (with cheese soup, tomato soup, and pizza bread rolled up), we bought the ingredients, cooked it, and we  and ate it. He was very proud of himself and coming up with the idea. I think he was really delighted about having those two things combined.

I was proud of him too. I didn’t realize how powerful the story was until last week I was talking with my youngest, who is just 4 years old. We had a really hard problem to fix with a model rocket that burned part of the parachute. And as we were talking through how to fix it, he said “We can make it like pizza soup” which I guess is now shorthand for inventing something new and good. What a great story they are telling themselves.

See Also

Innovation, UX, and time

Here are 2 photos of the ceilings at Isaac’s Deli. These would be great ceilings in any design studio, yet we find them in a restaurant.

“I do not trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.” — Maya Angelou

Mark Schraad blogged “Should we treat our bosses like we treat our kids?” (06062011). He wrote “Teaching them to love themselves is key…then and only then can they find happiness.”

As an advocate of customer happiness, how does this relate? How can we teach our customers to love themselves?

And how do we keep it real? How to we not let it enable narcissistic disorders.  More than just people loving the image of themselves, but actually love themselves.

In Facebook you can like your own posts.  On twitter you can favorite and reply to your own tweets. But that just keeps yourself as an object and image. What  could these organizations be doing to help people grow?

How can social media help people who might be empty on the inside, grow a real Self to bring to their relationships with other people? “Interesting” offers a good direction. People developing and pursuing interests is an important part of growing a real Self.

What else?

References

Mark Schraad’s Blog

Liking is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts. (NYT May 28, 2011)

“Interesting” is the new like

Happy Customers

This “Intro to Digital Practice” by Mark Waldo is an article that melds digital planning with UX from the perspective of an ad agency. If Mark presents this in person I’d sure like to be in the audience.

Top Ideas

• Bringing “the skills and needs of business planning together with customer insights.”
• “…each team starting with client services adds more resolution to the product with each deliverable. Each discipline’s deliverable becomes a better and better prototype of the final product.”
• “Digital strategy is something that is lead out of a team not pushed at them.”
• “Great strategists know how to bring the right people together . . . think with others on the team.”
• “Methodology … reflects a studio’s soul.”

Reference

Intro to Digital Practice

Using Mobile Phones to Capture Customer Experiences

Their two main conclusions are 1 Track your customers brand experience in real time and 2 Capture all touchpoints.
A thought on how to execute . . .

Have it impact your designs in “real time,” so have the real time feeds (activity streams) be viewable on large monitor in working areas or hallways of your company. Or have them be appended in 2s or 3s onto the bottom of email messages (like signatures, but from these customers) so that they offer a customer voice on on going projects and conversations.