How to Develop a Digital Employee Experience Strategy

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The shoemaker’s children deserve nice shoes.

It’s a time-worn cliché. Businesses are so busy serving customers that they often neglect to improve the experiences of their own employees. Enter Digital Employee Experience design or DEX.

So what’s the formal definition of DEX?

Simply put, DEX is the sum total of the digital interactions between an employee and the business. As a design practice, it covers the implementation of technology and tools deployed to enhance how employees interface with the company—from how they are recruited and hired to how they are onboarded, how they find and manage resources and how they interact with each other and the business at large. DEX is about using technology to improve the overall employee journey and to support the corporate culture.

Why does DEX matter?

In general, the concept of improving thee mployee experience, digitally or otherwise, seems like an obvious point of focus. If done properly, it benefits employees, operations and HR, alike. In reality, employees are often faced with learning and navigating multiple disparate systems. That could encompass intranets, HR and benefits platforms, shared file storage and management, multiple communications platforms (e.g.,email, Slack, etc.), business intelligence platforms, marketing automation andCRM, basic office productivity suites and more. And those myriad systems were likely sourced and implemented from different departments.

As a result, according to a report from PWC, 90% of the leaders choosing those various software solutions believe they are making their selections with the employees’ benefit in mind. However, only 53% of the staff in those companies perceive that to be the case. A similar mismatch occurs between IT and employees. 95% of IT professionals believe they are providing the digital tools employees need to be successful, but 42% of employees report they do not, in fact, have adequate tools.

But what about companies that are doing it right? According to data presented by VMware, companies who rate highly for digital employee experience are perceived as being more competitive by their employees, index 60% higher for annual revenue growth and engender a 41% higher net promoter score.

So what are some key focus areas in an effective DEX strategy?

The first rule of DEX strategy is that youMUST talk about DEX strategy. You need to generate understanding at the highest levels of the company of the benefits of a smart DEX strategy and the risks of maintaining a less-than-desirable experiential status quo. There’s no shortage of research on the potential ROI emerging. That being said, one way to understand where a solid DEX strategy might improve company performance is by viewing it through various stages of the employee journey:

1. Recruiting, onboarding and HR
   It’s easy to overlook the fact that the first experience most employees have with your culture or environment occurs well before they’re actually hired. How frictionless is it for a potential employee to understand the position being offered? To evaluate their own qualification for that position? To submit an adequately detailed application for consideration? On the enterprise side of the transaction, how smoothly can HR managers sort, sift, search or categorize submitted applications? Once hired, does the digital entity the employee populated during the interview process migrate seamlessly into the digital entity they are now, as a new employee? How automated, convenient, intelligent and personalized is the onboarding? Can every employee easily review and select benefits offerings? How can they navigate approvals of PTO or family leave? A great recruiting, onboarding and HR DEX allows for increased autonomy, self-management for employees while maintaining governance, record keeping and control for the enterprise. A win-win for all.

2. Culture and collaboration
   It used to be the best one would hope for in this arena would have been access to an employee intranet, email and shared network file storage. Thankfully, there is any number of enhanced tools available, from group messaging platforms, like Slack or Microsoft Teams, to cloud-based document collaboration and storage platforms, as well as videoconferencing and telepresence conference rooms. Each, individually, a massive improvement. But any advanced DEX strategy should take into account how those systems might seamlessly integrate, whether through a unified interface or portal.

3. Assessments, skills training and education
   A recent survey showed 70% of employees indicated that job-related training and development opportunities influenced their decision to stay at their job. As part of any comprehensive DEX strategy, you should consider tools for employees to more easily assess their current skill levels; quickly discover what training is available to improve those skills and how that training relates to their career growth; and generally take greater control over their development.

Establish your vision first. Measure second.

According to a recent globalDEX survey conducted by Australian consulting firm Step Two, responsibility for driving the DEX initiative in most companies was distributed across multiple departments, from IT to intranet teams, internal comms, HR and senior leadership, among many others. Given that result, it should come as little surprise what those same companies cited as the greatest challenges to implementing a successful DEX—organizational complexity, competing priorities and a lack of clear vision, to name a few.

To improve your chances of success, it isn’t necessary for a single department (e.g., IT, HR or Comms) to own the DEX strategy. But it is important to have an agreed-to vision of what that DEX will offer employees, how the experience supports broader business goals, what indicators define success and how you’ll objectively measure those indicators.

How can you improve your chances of a successful DEX?

As with any experience design project, the most successful begins with a deep understanding of the needs of those using the solution—in the case of DEX, obviously the employees. But they are not the only stakeholder you need to pay attention to boost your chances of success.

Create an interdepartmental task force.

As we’ve already seen, successful DEX strategy and implementation requires the efforts and input of stakeholders from across the company. You should establish, in advance, formal understanding of how those departments will be consulted or informed, work together and be held accountable for their success.

Engage senior leadership early and often.

Inevitably, creating, deploying and supporting a new DEX will require financial and human resources, as well as interdepartmental coordination. Having buy-in and support from senior leadership from the outset will unquestionably accelerate decision-making and conflict resolution along the way.

Dive deeply into the employee experience as it is today.

Empathy is the foundation of any truly innovative or transformational design project. Before you begin to draft solutions, you should understand the high points and low points of the experience employees undergo today. What they like or dislike about the available tools. What they might want or need to make their work more efficient or rewarding. Interview existing employees. Pore over any available analytics from your current intranet. In the end, you should have a general employee journey covering recruiting, onboarding and day-to-day interactions with current digital tools—all empathy mapped, with positive and negative moments of interaction around which your strategy should prioritize.

Craft a vision for what tomorrow’s experience should accomplish.

As with any project, understanding what success looks like is critical. Crafting a vision statement for your DEX delivers a number of advantages. First, creating a coherent narrative for what the DEX will accomplish for employees and the greater company helps build consensus. Further, there are literally thousands of decisions that will be made throughout the strategy, planning and implementation phases of crafting your new DEX. A clear vision provides an objective standard against which to evaluate or prioritize opportunities and challenges as they arise.

Determine key performance indicators (KPIs).

Your DEX should improve the everyday experiences of employees. And that improvement should be objectively measurable. The best DEX strategies define in advance what improvements will be measured. Those measures could span such indicators as employee satisfaction, retention rates, hours of training completed, etc. There are no default indicators that apply to every DEX or business. You just need to align those indicators with those measures that serve the goals of the employees and the business, alike.

So, why are we all suddenly talking about DEX?

Despite the recent surge in media attention, digital employee experience isn’t a new issue. It’s simply that we’ve reached “peak digital.” Meaning, the digital experience in the workplace is for most employees their primary work experience. How you experience the digital tools and environments provided are how you experience your job. Amplifying employee expectations is the reality that, unlike older generations whose digital lives were confined to the stationary PC or terminal on their desks, today’s workforce is fully immersed in a digital life outside of the office. So, those employees expect the same level of human-centered interaction design and effortlessness they feel when engaging with Lyft or Amazon as they do when trying to schedule a meeting room, navigate a shared document library or adjust their medical benefits. The companies that can deliver that same level of experience will always have an advantage.

The three most important trends in health care experience design for 2019

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We’ve seen 30+ years of shifting trends. And one underlying constant.

Over the past 30+ years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with clients across a variety of industries—from health care to hospitality, industrial equipment to medical devices, household cleaning products to sporting goods, dining cruises to the world’s most highly traded financial derivatives contracts, just to name a few. Each engagement has broadened our collective perspectives while confirming one underlying truth: Regardless of emerging trends, ongoing changes in technologies or the idiosyncrasies of individual markets, the fundamentals of human nature remain constant.

While we are continually working at the forefront of experience design trends, we believe the inspiration for real innovation comes from respecting those trends but also, more importantly, looking to find a deeper understanding of the foundational human motivations fueling them.

To that point, there are three fundamental elements that drive all trends—basic(human) needs, drivers of change (shifts in technology adoption, population changes, etc.) and innovation (newly available tools or methods). But it is perhaps more accurate to say that motivation stems from the tension occurring at the intersection of those forces.

To understand those intersections, we rely on a variety of resources and quantitative and qualitative research methodologies, from ethnography to focus groups, individual interviews, secondary research reviews and data analysis.Further, depending on the scope and time horizon of the project, we may utilize tools such as the trend framework, consumer trend radar or consumer trend canvas. We also consult market research reports and publications from organizations like MINTEL, Kantar, IRI and Nielsen, among others. Ultimately, we design research and analysis strategies and plans that are unique to every project, challenge and budget.

As survey the greater market environment, we see the dominant customer experience trends, regardless of industry category, surround three main thematic pillars: consumer control, data ethics and privacy and automation/personalization. In health care specifically, we must layer onincreased demand for access to care, the democratization of health information and the drive to lower costs (from both the consumer and provider sides of the equation). Specifically, in health care, we see these trends expressed in the following ways:

Consumer Control:

Consumers expect health care experiences to be as frictionless and simple as hailing an Uber … sort of.

Consumers want access to health information and care whenever and wherever they need it.But there’s a catch. While consumers are increasingly expressing the desire to manage their own care, the technologies that enable that control have varying levels of adoption among different generational cohorts. For example, newly available telemedicine solutions that should, in theory, provide increased levels of control and access, have varying degrees of acceptance depending on age and generational and conditional differences. To state it more colloquially, the older and more informed the patient, the less likely the patient is to prefer a technology solution over consulting a physician directly.

Simultaneously, consumers want increased transparency and choice, ostensibly in order to more actively shop for their best care options and control costs. However, it has not been shown that lower cost and improved proximity are as powerful an influence over care decisions than a physician referral.

In short, currently, control-enabling technology is best suited to enhancing personal connections in a health care journey, not replacing it. But that balance should move more toward the replacement side of the equation, as the balance of the population shifts to younger generations.

Data Ethics and Privacy:

Data privacy issues are moving beyond HIPAA.

For perhaps the first time, general concern over data privacy is on the consumer radar. Thanks to HIPAA, privacy rules surrounding traditional medical records and health information are clear and established (albeit under constant review). But the entrance into the market of consumer fitness- and health-related technology companies is creating a new privacy gray area for consumers and health care companies, alike. Quasi-medical devices, like sleep and fitness trackers, heart rate monitors and fitness trackers, while creating a compelling feedback mechanism for consumers, are a vector for data leaks and privacy violations. These products and the data they create should enable a more holistic, long-term understanding of patient well-being and enhance the customer experience. But health care providers and organizations need to be aware of vulnerabilities and create increasingly secure integrations.

Further compounding data privacy issues is the increasing role of caregivers. It’s been estimated that there are more than 40 million family members acting as unpaid caregivers in the U.S., and the number may increase in the coming decade. Among the many challenges in creating a seamless health care experience, a significant challenge arises around allowing caregivers to provision access and permission for personal health information and electronic medical records while respecting the patient’s privacy and security.

Automation/Personalization:

In health care, every patient represents a distinctive market of one.

Health isn’t a simple product or service that can be transferred to a consumer. Each consumer is physically and emotionally unique. Therefore, there is no all-things-to-all-people solution to providing the optimal customer experience.The industry will need to use emerging technologies to provide the right experience for each customer, based on that customer’s needs at any specific point in time. No small challenge, especially given the privacy restrictions mentioned above.

Thankfully, technologies for privacy-compliant extreme personalization are advancing rapidly. We foresee technologies like blockchain increasingly supporting interoperability and personalization while maintaining sufficient control over data leakage. Ultimately, the trends suggest patients should realize higher-quality care experiences such as blockchain and competing crypto-technologies allow seamless sharing of medical records across health care providers while maintaining privacy and control.

The success factor no one talks about in Presidential debates.

As early 2020-election-season rhetoric swells to a roar, obviously the future of health care is a large part of the stump speech for every candidate. All of the candidates talk about the broad brush economics of how a change in the way we as a society pay for health care might affect our pocketbooks (not to mention our individual survival). What you don’t hear is how we might really improve the health care experience beyond cost and basic access. Whether or not we will see universal health care implemented, equal consideration should be given to the quality of the experience itself as will be given to how the money changes hands. That’s surely where the long-term successes or failures of any future system lies.

What is ASMR? (And should your CX team care?)

ASMR: a tingly whisper banned by the Chinese government.

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR)refers to a tingling, or at least pleasant, sensation some people feel whenthey hear what can be best described as soft scraping, tapping or rustlingsounds. Most commonly, those sounds are something like the gravelly sound of awhispering human voice, two sheets of paper slipping past each other, softtapping on a something hollow, a plastic bag being crumpled or just aboutanything similar that is recorded through a microphone placed extremely closeto the sound source. But ASMR can also be triggered by something tactile, likepeeling the protective plastic off of a brand-new television screen, or visualby the movement of hands or lips.

Hiihiii!!! WELCOME {back} to my channel :D Hope this video was relaxing and gave you tingles tingles tingles! ♡ I hope you enjoy so please sit back back back...

For some (not me, admittedly) it’s purported to be audiovisual bliss, delivering an opioid-like rush to the listener/viewer—perhaps it’s the other side of the nails-on-a-chalkboard coin.In any case, the explosive growth of content tagged with #ASMR on social video sites has led to a lot of questions about its triggers, benefits, risks and long-term social impact. And, as mentioned in the header of this section, theChinese government became so concerned, it banned the posting (or at least tagging) of ASMR videos entirely over concerns that the content was pornographic. Which, I have to assume, means someone in the Chinese government really enjoys ASMR videos.

How popular is ASMR?

A Google search for the term “ASMR video” returns more than 98 million results. Digging a bit deeper into GoogleTrends, we see interest growing at an accelerating rate globally. Obviously, there’s a great and growing segment of the population who (unlike me) are finding a deep connection to the subject matter.

So, what are the economics of ASMR?

With more than 640 million views, the leadingASMR channel on YouTube (only one of many), gentle whispering, reportedly generates more than $500,000 in revenue annually. Given those numbers, you likely wouldn’t be surprised to discover that several brands have jumped onto the very quiet ASMR bandwagon.

During the 2019 Super Bowl, Michelob Ultra debuted a commercial featuring Zoe Kravitz whispering, scraping, tapping … you know, all the ASMR things, with a bottle of beer. The idea was to create for consumers a physical experience at a distance.

IKEA did a bit of ASMR homework and produced “Oddly Ikea,” a25-minute-long commercial, featuring the sounds of hands gently caressing some crisp, new bedsheets, dragging along a comforter, rustling clothes on hangers in the closet and the like. At the time of this writing, it has garnered more than 2.6 million views.

If you take a moment to Google ASMR ad, you’ll find somewhere near 100million results. Obviously, the Mad Men have discovered its pull. But what about a more esoteric application in customer experience design? Let’s investigate.

Adding ASMR triggers to UX design

Sound is generally overlooked by most UX designers. But careful use of audio feedback can provide a much richer and more intuitive user experience. And, when considering specific ASMR triggering sounds, one should assume, a more physically satisfying experience. The movement of a mouse or the dragging of a finger across a mobile device may be perfect moments to add a soft scraping sound. Add a soft tapping sound to wait screens? It seems better than a spinning rainbow beach ball. And let’s not forget the possibility of leveraging visual ASMR triggers. Instead of a static portrait of a model, why not a silent shot of that model mouthing a few choice phrases. An interesting potential example of this (and I am unsure if ASMR was the intent) might be answerthepublic.com. From the beard to the big wool sweater to the continuous movement and mouthing of words, it seems like no coincidence.

answerthepublic.com home page

Adding ASMR triggers to physical experiences

Even the most dyed-in-the-wool online businesses are creating physical retail experiences. Warby Parker, CasperMattress, Indochino—even Amazon. With the ASMR trend in kind, it may be time to eschew smooth polished surfaces and incorporate a bit more sand-like texture on checkout counters. Perhaps rustling layers of cellophane between items of clothing and their hangers. Or, punctuating the store experience with extended soft bursts of compressed air. A bead/pellet fountain? I guess I’ll leave the specifics to interior designers who, unlike myself, can actually experienceASMR.

So, you can. But should you?

I wouldn’t consider invoking ASMR for ASMR’s sake, good experience design or smart branding, per se. Every expression of your business and the design of every connection with a customer is to be considered in the full context of your positioning and your goals. However, there's no reason ASMR shouldn’t be one more tool in the experience design toolbox. All other conditions being equal, why wouldn’t you want your customer to be pleasantly tingly inside?

Link:

sleepyasmr.com

5 reasons design thinking facilitation can amplify the success of your internal team

Everybody needs somebody, sometimes.

One of the great superpowers of design thinking is that it’s a methodology that anybody, or any organization, can learn and deploy, quickly and efficiently. As proof, one only needs to look at the growing numbers of organizations and enterprises building internal design thinking capabilities and teams. We have worked with some great internal teams who are embracing the methodology and positively transforming their products, services, processes and cultures.

All of this success might beg the question, “if these companies are getting so good at design thinking, why would they, from time to time, choose to bring in outside design thinking consultants and facilitators, like Ideo, IBM or Magnani?” Of course, there may be specific technological, industrial design or procedural expertise lacking in the clients’ existing team that drives the decision to seek external resources. But in this post, we’ll cover more universal reasons that even the best internal design thinking and innovation teams might benefit from the addition of an outside resource.

1. Rising above organizational inertia.

Design thinking is a methodology, not magic.Adhering to its principles and practices can do much to help its participants move past, “the way we’ve always done it.” But some organizations have deeply entrenched behaviors and norms surrounding certain aspects of their business that it can be difficult for anyone, or any group, to implement change.

Bringing in an outside facilitator can give participants newfound abilities to take on an alternate perspective, at least through the duration of the exercise. We liken the dynamic to those situations when a surprise guest calls you on a Saturday morning and announces they will be at your place within minutes. Suddenly, you are able to adopt the guest’s perspective and see a seemingly infinite number of new things you need to clean, straighten, dispose of, etc. It is the exact same home that previously felt “fine” but now, with your newfound perspective, appears in direct need of attention. It’s important to note that those issues weren’t suddenly in need of attention. They needed attention all along. But complacency and inertia rendered them invisible.

In that same way, the facilitator’s presence and leadership can amplify participants’ ability to see new opportunities for improvement to which they would otherwise have been collectively, figuratively blind. Product or service features that were “fine” suddenly may reveal themselves as a challenge to overcome when participants begin to view them through the eyes of their new “guest.”

2. Amplifying the voice of the customer.

Successful design thinking depends on maintaining a human-/customer-centered perspective throughout the process. External facilitators are in a unique position to be (and, I would argue, have a professional obligation to be) a powerful advocate for the customer throughout the process.

An external facilitator should bring to the process no other agenda than that of designing the best possible service or experience that solves the defined challenge, regardless of what other constraints are influencing the process. For some idea of those constraints, see the other four points covered in this post.

3. Brokering the peace.

As companies grow and incentive structures are created independently, in siloed departments or geographies, when trying to implement change, one will inevitably encounter misalignment of those incentives. Now throw into the mix an innovation that requires major operational or behavioral changes and enterprise-wide coordination. Resistance to change is likely to occur on just as major of a scale.

On top of that, one is also likely to encounter fundamental struggles over ownership and control. Don’t misunderstand that I am in any way representing these challenges as superficial or easy to overcome. They are very real and generally difficult to surmount.

However, when discussing those challenges, having a third party facilitating the design thinking process can help keep the group focused on benefits to customers and the organization as a whole. It can also help minimize the impression that the innovation came from any single department or an executive who may be perceived as having a more personal interest in the success of the change. If you have no dog in the hunt, so to speak, it’s harder for anyone to argue you are inherently biased as to which dog ultimately wins.

4. Broadening the strategic perspective.

Bringing a broader range of experience and cross-sector perspective to a client engagement is a benefit inherent to management consulting, across the board, and it certainly applies to design thinking facilitation.

We’ve had the pleasure of working with clients in sectors as diverse as health care, financial services, packaged goods, hospitality, industrial manufacturing and sporting goods, to name a few. And as distinctive each of these sectors may seem, there was always some strategic market, customer or business insight learned from one that we could draw upon to inform the strategy of another. Technologies and industries may change, but basic human nature applies to all.

5. Adding horsepower. Pure and simple.

The design thinking process, when done at the enterprise level, requires deep resources and thrives on expertise. Adding outside facilitators to the mix can reduce the impact of bottlenecks that normally result from in-house resources being diverted mid-project back to the day-to-day needs of the business.

For one, it’s about getting on the winning side of the numbers game. Generally, the greater the number of qualified minds applied to a problem, the greater the number of possible solutions generated.Further, it’s about having dedicated resources, ready, willing and able to shepherd a project through its various complexities and challenges, always focused on success and free of competing priorities.

Go ahead, point that finger.

There’s little more rewarding than amplifying organizations’ abilities to work through the stages of design thinking to solve what could seem like truly intractable challenges, develop new lines of business or improve the customer journey. The business is more competitive. The customer is more satisfied. And the internal design thinking teams should be able to point to improved ROI from their efforts.

5 ways to maximize the value of your UX research

It’s all about putting humanity in human-centered design.

Qualitative user research, in the form of interviews and observations, is an incredibly important aspect of UX design and experience design. It’s in users’ stories where you find true points of differentiation and previously unknown opportunity. Here are five considerations you should keep in mind to help ensure you’re getting the most from your UX research investment.

1: Be clear on what you want to learn.

It’s easy to jump into the methodology of who you’re going to interview, how those interviews will be conducted (i.e., online or in person) and the questions you want to answer. If this sounds familiar, stop right there and take a step back!

There are different ways to use qualitative user-experience-based research, and prior to agreeing to a methodology, you must be clear on the overall objective(s). For example, is your goal to learn more about your users—their wants, beliefs, needs and thoughts? Or, are you undertaking this research to test hypotheses and evaluate designs?

The first objective is more exploratory in nature. The knowledge gained should help us uncover and understand the needs of “real” users. These insights help inform products and services design to create the best outcome without our personal biases in mind.The second is much more evaluative, allowing users to interact with products or designs to ensure that we’re achieving what we were aiming for throughout the design process.

Taking the time to clearly write down what you’re hoping to learn and ensuring all stakeholders agree will ensure the best methodology is developed for your research initiative.

Action plan:

Write out your goals, specifically and succinctly. Prioritize them if you’ve listed more than three.

2: Determine who you really need to learn from.

When it comes to user research, it’s easy to fall into one of two categories:

1. Assume you can talk to a few users and get the insight you need to benefit all of your user segments

2. Get overwhelmed by the vast number of user groups and feel the need to “boil the ocean” by talking to all of them to gain insights before moving forward

While ultimately the decision of who you need to interview and how many interviews you need to conduct are tied to many factors, including overall objectives, timing and resource constraints, it is imperative to take the time to determine and prioritize your audience segments.

Action Plan:

Conduct an audience-prioritization exercise. Follow these three easy steps:

1. First, write down your segments on sticky notes. Be specific on what makes the segments different.

2. Then, arrange these sticky notes to prioritize them from primary users to secondary and tertiary users.

3. Review your prioritization against the goals you wrote down and determine the segments that are imperative to gain insights from vs. those that would be “nice to have” insights from.

While there is no firm guideline on how many interviews are “enough,” you must interview multiple people to ensure you don’t make decisions based off of singular individuals who may be outliers. “Enough” interviews is when the data becomes saturated and additional participants don’t provide any additional insights.

For usability testing, within the first couple of interviews, you may recognize you have a problem you must address, and it may be worth resolving that issue prior to additional user testing.

In more exploratory research, we typically look to conduct a minimum of 5–7 interviews per segment and 15–21 interviews total for an initiative to ensure insights are robust and decisions can be confidently made from the data.*

3: Create an interview guide.

While these interviews should be conversational in nature, creating a guide ensures the interviews stay on track.

Take the objectives determined in Step 1 and then establish what questions or usability tasks will lead you to reach your objective. Have your team of stakeholders do the same. Then look at all of the questions and organize them appropriately. Any questions that are leading in nature will need to be reworded.

A research guide should never be used as a checklist, and questions or usability tasks shouldn’t be based on preferences (ex: what color is more likely to make you click this button).Instead, in usability testing, it should ensure the user can achieve the desired tasks without having to “think.” And in exploratory research, it should help uncover the “why” of certain behaviors or decisions and ultimately dig into the “why” of the “why” to gain deeper levels of insight.

Action plan:

Have the entire stakeholder team align the questions they’d like to ask against the agreed upon objectives.

4: Use an experienced interviewer.

While it can feel like a simple task, conducting interviews while listening between the lines of the answers and then being able to shift and redirect questions to dig deeper is a skill set that requires practice.

An experienced interviewer knows how to set aside their own knowledge and beliefs on a topic and engage with research participants in a way that makes them comfortable explaining their thinking and points of view. Experienced interviewers know how to redirect conversations when necessary and how to direct questions in different ways to dig in deeper.

Most importantly, experienced researchers, especially professionals, are able to remain objective. It is easy for non-experienced interviewers and those too close to a project or desired outcome, to unconsciously believe they are hearing one thing from research participants based on their own beliefs without being truly objective.

Action plan:

Find someone with significant experience or hire an outside expert to conduct objective interviews.

5: Take your time analyzing findings

Record the interviews, if possible, and transcribe them for the purpose of deep analysis. It’s easy to make assumptions based on your notes and memory; however, when going through transcripts, you often find insights and opportunities you missed in real time.

Invite team stakeholders to be involved in the analysis process. When involving additional stakeholders:

1. Ensure everyone reads the transcripts

2. Ground the team in your research goals

3. Conduct a workshop to uncover insights with the larger group

4. Cluster themes that arise from the workshop for your final report

Using a team-based approach for analysis not only allows all stakeholders to build empathy with the user but also creates a greater understanding of the concerns or challenges that need to be solved through user-experience design.

Action plan:

Host a stakeholder analysis workshop.

*Note: This number is highly dependent on audience size and projected incidence rates, so this should be used only as a guide.

Three smart reasons why you should be customer journey mapping

A Google search for “customer journey maps” reveals there are nearly unlimited ways to document a journey. The most important thing is that you choose a format that highlights areas of insight that align with your goals for mapping in the first place.

First, what do we really mean by customer journey mapping?

In any of its existing forms—and there are many—customer journey mapping is simply the act of describing what occurs at every stage of interaction between a customer and your business. That could cover everything from how they find the business (online or physically), what happens during any visit or transaction, how they experience customer service or even how they talk about your business” on social media before, during and after the transaction.

Most journey maps are built along a timeline. Usually, the timeline is broken into stages, like Awareness, Research/Inquire, Purchase and Possess—the specific titles depend on the type of journey, industry or mapping technique. Further, for each of those stages, the map provides places to record the activities, motivations, rewards, barriers, challenges or questions the customer faces at each stage.

What stages command your greatest attention will certainly depend on your specific business. But there is always something to be learned from formal observation and documentation of the customer journey and, simultaneously, examination of our assumptions and biases. So, how can you get started?

Before you begin, have a goal in mind

First, understand ahead of time what exactly you want to do with the information gathered throughout the process. It will help determine what structure or formats make the most sense for documenting your findings. Most businesses can bucket those goals into three main categories: improving the customer experience, creating a new experience altogether and aligning the organization around the needs of the customer. So, how can customer journey mapping help you achieve those goals?

Goal: Improve your existing customer experience

Even the best customer experiences can be improved. More importantly, they can be copied and improved upon by nimble new competitors should you choose to rest on your extremely comfortable laurels. Journey mapping exposes the places and moments most critical to delivering a superior experience. At what point in the journey are your customers most concerned? When are they most confident? When are they open to learning? What moments turn them from interested to evangelist? A thorough journey mapping exercise can bring those moments into focus and help inform and prioritize innovation efforts at multiple points.

Goal: Create an entirely new customer experience

When working on innovation projects with clients, one of the most basic questions we ask at the beginning of any engagement is, “Does [it] have to work like this?” So often companies assume that if the entire industry conducts business in the same fashion, it must be the best way. But as we see disruptive competitors enter markets, they succeed because they look to the incumbents’ strengths and see a weakness. Journey mapping is a great way to explore those new ways to structure a transaction or business model. It forces you to think about satisfying motivations and emotional needs first, then architecting experiences and behaviors around those.

The trick is starting with more audacious foundational questions. You don’t create an Airbnb experience without asking something like, “How might we give travelers a hotel option almost as inexpensive and comfortable as staying at a friend’s house?” Or, more generally, something like, “How might we increase the number of available rooms without investing in more real estate?” Either of those questions could lead to a number of potential solutions. Journey mapping gives you the opportunity to uncover the emotional bumps in the road that will either make or break your service or product design.

Goal: Align the organization around the needs of the customer

In most larger businesses, different moments along the customer journey are likely owned by different departments. Marketing owns the message and fills the funnel. I.T. builds and maintains the digital storefront. Sales fields inbound leads. Operations fulfills. Customer Service, well, services the customers. And everyone may be optimizing around different and sometimes competing goals.

Taking the time to examine the full journey, end to end, and exploring how every physical, digital and interpersonal touch point affects the experience creates an opportunity to document, in a single place, just how competing incentives and KPIs create friction. As important, documenting the journey creates visibility into moments that drive positive momentum along the way and perhaps areas where an alternative incentive structure could improve the experience and create greater internal alignment.

A journey of a thousand miles…

Regardless of the various styles and formats of journey mapping, or your specific business goals, the universal benefit is a deeper understanding of your business from your customers’ perspective. And that is always a valuable perspective for any business.

What’s the difference between digital transition and digital transformation?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Binary_Code.jpg

Caught between a platform and a paradigm

Often swapped out for one another, digital transition and digital transformation actually differ greatly in focus and, usually, in scope. Digital transition focuses on the basic (though still potentially massive) shift from analog, or physical, information to that which is stored, recalled or manipulated, using a digital platform. There may or may not be advantages like improved speed, accuracy, reliability, privacy, etc., but generally, we're talking about facilitating exiting behaviors and transactions with new digital tools. Digital transformation involves a change in how the enterprise or institution structures relationships or conducts transactions enabled by technology. Let's take a look at a few examples of related transitions and transformations to get a better feel for the nuance.

Email vs. marketing automation

When email became pervasive in most businesses, it was a perfect example of a digital transition. Correspondence had shifted from something that moved via paper and stamps and was stored in folders and file cabinets to something that moved via the internet and, ultimately, was stored in local or cloud-based servers or on hard drives.

When marketing automation systems like Marketo, Pardot and Mailchimp, et al. were introduced, they represented a digital transformation. More than simply moving the original behavior (correspondence) onto a new digital platform, these systems enabled fundamentally different, previously unavailable interaction models, e.g., automated and behavior-driven campaigns, mass customization, etc.

Electronic medical records (EMR) vs. telemedicine

I am old enough to remember the introduction of tablet computing, e.g., the GRiDPad, the Apple Newton, etc., and their niche application within the medical industry. These represented one of the first digital transitions of medical records to the EMR space. The use case was narrow, replacing patient flip charts in hospitals, mainly. This puts the adoption of those devices squarely into the digital transition category.

Let's contrast that with recent telemedicine initiatives. A specific example would be stroke telemedicine. Effective stroke treatment depends highly on reducing the time between a stroke event and the administration of proper treatments. The problem is that most small or rural locations do not have the resources to keep a qualified neurologist on staff or on call. But, utilizing a series of networked toolsÑfrom video conferencing to real-time, remote radiological consultations—time-critical treatments can be provided at the smaller facility in time to reduce stroke-related disabilities prior to the patient being moved to a more-equipped facility. It's a new, transformed approach, enabled by digital technologies.

Electronic banking vs. bitcoin

At this point, if I am correctly channeling the proper step-and-repeat cadence of Malcolm Gladwell, you are likely able to review the previous two examples and see quite clearly, from the subhead alone, where I am going with this one. But that won't stop me from writing it myself.

While it might be fair, ways, to characterize the financial industry's early shifts to online banking as a digital transformation, perhaps, due only to my personal biases, I am inclined to file it under digital transition. It had no real effect on the business model, how fees were assessed, etc. What was arcane or cumbersome in meatspace banking remained so in cyberspace banking. How money was tracked, transferred or otherwise accounted for remained basically unchanged.

Contrast that with bitcoin (or your cryptocurrency of choice). Blockchain technology decentralized the ledger, anonymized the transaction and made banking decidedly not institutional. Definitely a digital transformation (not to mention, potentially, a major long-term disruption).

In the end, it boils down to media vs. methodology

It's a pretty simple heuristic but, in this case, an effective one. If the change is a conversion from one format of storage (in most cases analog to digital) to another, it's surely transition you're talking about. If the project involves changing the methodology of how a company or customer gets from point a to point b, it is a transformation. Okay, one last analogy: Electric cars—transition . Self-driving cars, transformation.

Service design vs. experience design: How are they different and why does it matter?

The short version:

Service design encompasses distinctive foundational business model issues as well as the comprehensive, end-to-end journey, whereas experience design addresses the design choices that affect direct interactions people have, physical or virtual, along that journey. In other words, service design is trying to solve ecosystem-level problems and experience design generally is trying to solve interaction-level problems.

But, obviously, there’s more nuance when you’re in the trenches.

The longer, more nuanced version(Tock vs. OpenTable):

Sitting down to write this post, I was reminded of an episode of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, which featured Nick Kokonas, co-owner and co-founder of The Alinea Group of restaurants (Alinea, Next, The Aviary, Roister, The Aviary NYC) and founder and CEO of Tock, Inc., a reservations and CRM system for restaurants. His discussion of the thinking that gave birth to Tock is a perfect example of service design versus experience design. This may be best exemplified by the question he asked himself, which was (I’ll paraphrase): “Why do restaurant reservations have to work the way they do?” The question encompasses much more than the specifics of the design of the digital product or experience. It begs exploration of the motivations, rewards and journeys on both sides of the transaction, customer and restaurant.

In the case of Tock, attempting to answer that initial question led Kokonas to the core insight: traditional phone-based reservation systems relied on a transactional model that was so opaque that the two parties involved were continually lying to each other in an attempt to achieve their desired outcome.Customers were often lying about the size of their parties to claim what openings were available, or because there was no monetary risk involved, making reservations at multiple restaurants as they were planning their outings, resulting in empty seats and lost revenue at the restaurants. Restaurants were overbooking reservations to compensate for the uncertainty, resulting in extended wait times (“We’re running a bit behind this evening. Please have a seat at the bar and we’ll call you when your table is ready.”).

Through an experience design lens, solving this problem had been already attempted byOpenTable. They created an online analog of the phone-based process that ultimately gave those existing bad behaviors, as they say in Silicon Valley, scale. In that sense, it was an effective experience design exercise. It certainly reduced friction and was, by most assessments, a better experience for both parties within the bounds of the transaction as it stood. Looking at it through a service design lens, however, OpenTable hadn’t addressed fundamental issues and resulting pain points within the service model itself.

In creating Tock, Kokonas wanted to address at least two of the most pressing structural issues: improving transparency and reducing wait times for customers and removing uncertainty and maximizing yield for restaurants. In regard to the former, Tock delivered two basic innovations. First, was the transparency of restaurant inventory. Instead of customers calling an establishment and asking if a specific time and party size might be available, they could see the full inventory of available tables (and in some cases see how pricing varied throughout the week), and, by putting down a non-refundable deposit, guarantee the availability of that table at the exact time booked.

For the restaurants, the system delivered a more certain reservation—customers who’ve paid a deposit are more likely to follow through. But it also provided a novel approach to yield management—transparent variable pricing. When customers booked a reservation for Alinea, they could see at a glance what dates were available for a party of their size and what price differences were for different packages.

In the interview on the podcast, Kokonas likened the feature to purchasing tickets for a baseball game. The seats in the third row just behind the dugout on aSaturday are priced differently than upper deck on a Tuesday. Everyone understands and can see the difference when purchasing and can select among various choices based on what matters to them.

Searching for available tables at Alinea on Tock.com

A distinction that makes all the difference:

Service design and experience design are often two sides of the same coin. In the end, both are a means to make an engagement or transaction more customer-centric and satisfying. And any project centered around either may involve some form of the other.

I hope we have illustrated, however, that there is a distinction. In one shorthand, it would be fair to say, changes in service design have a greater effect on the overall cost (positive and negative) of the engagement or transaction, whereas experience design has a greater effect on customer confidence along the way.

In any case, both modes of thinking are critical to ensuring your business remains customer-centric and competitive.

How Does Your Brand Impact Your Customers’ Experience?

How Does Your Brand Impact Your Customers’ Experience?

Today, the experience is the brand and the brand is the experience. 

Take a moment to think about every interaction a customer has with your brand. Consumers no longer think of your logo as your brand. Your brand is the sum of every experience with customers—the entire customer journey from awareness to loyalty. But, I’d argue, that branding is more important than ever before. In fact, 2019 has been dubbed “The Year of the Rebrand”.

Traditional branding still matters, it’s just not enough.

Brand isn’t the logo. It isn’t the color palette, ad campaign or tag line. And while getting those things right is wildly important, in the experience economy, that importance is becoming increasingly outweighed by the impact of the quality of the interactions consumers have. A great brand today isn’t owned by marketing. It’s more a set of guiding principles. It lays the foundation for why your business looks and feels the way it does, of course, but it also dictates the kinds of products your company should create, informs the creation and of the digital properties your company will generate. The customer journey today is less linear than ever, and what ultimately amounts to your brand in most consumers’ minds are a collection of fleeting encounters, not the direct line from campaign exposure to sale.

Exceptional experiences = exceptional brands.

The most successful brands define an aspirational state of what the enterprise would like to achieve or accomplish.They provide a clear guide for evaluating business choices today, as well as evaluating and prioritizing future plans of action.

It’s no longer enough to maintain a consistent voice in the market, companies must maintain a coherent experienc eacross every interaction. Marketing teams understand this value and have mastered the art of protecting your brand and maintaining consistency. But what about other areas of your business? How about product management teams, innovation teams and digital design teams? How is brand relevant to all other areas of the organization?

Creating brand positioning for the experience economy.

Your brand needs to focus the efforts of the entire organization. Yes, you need your brand style guidelines (i.e. how to use your logo, fonts, etc.). But, just as important, you need to articulate what your brand stands for. What is its purpose? Companies should create overall brand positioning that provides employees a clear and succinct understanding of how the brand should be reflected in every experience, fromR&D to digital design. The best brands start by creating a brand positioning that reflects a greater purpose or mission.

Here are a few great examples of how todo this:

Patagonia: “We’re in business to save our home planet”

• Build the best product

• Cause no unnecessary harm

• Use business to protect nature

• Not bound by convention

Oracle: “The Oracle brand is built upon a consistent set of brand behaviors. These are our measuring stick for all communication.”

• Simple

• Authentic

• Adaptive

• Engaging

• Knowledgeable

• Relevant

Airbnb: “Of course, an identity is about more than symbols. So we’ve redesigned the entire Airbnb experience to better reflect the people who make up this community. Our shared vision of belonging is the thread that weaves through every touchpoint on Airbnb.”

• People

• Places

• Love

• Airbnb

At the core of every experience is a brand—which is paramount to any marketer’s success.

Keeping the Human in Human-Centered Design

Recently, at Experience Design Week in Denver, I led a round table discussion with a group of experience design professionals who worked for a range of companies; some as large as Amazon and Google, some as small as a recently-pivoted tech startup. No matter the size of the enterprise, we heard the same issues discussed as challenges from nearly every participant:

• Clearly defining and coming to consensus around what problem to solve

• Maintaining the perspective of the end customer throughout the design process

• Designing an experience that satisfies the needs of a broad range of potential audiences—from end consumers to internal audiences and external trade partners

Generally, we’ve found that difficulty with those issues stem from a lack of empathy for, or deep knowledge of, the human beings for whom we’re actually designing the experience. As we advised in the session, we’ve found that infusing the design process with detailed user narratives can go a long way toward solving these common challenges and keeping the human in human-centered design. Here are a few of the solutions I recommended in the session:

Use storytelling to build understanding and consensus.

Within organizations, perspectives vary.When people only see functional and technical specifications, for the most part, they’ll understand the purpose and vision of the project filtered through the lens of whatever job title or department they hold.

When you take the time to begin drafting a broader story around the project, it helps build a more universal understanding and consensus. When building these stories, we leverage our personas (more on those in the next section) and begin to add highly detailed contextual information to our customers’ journeys. We describe not only what encounters and steps are taken, but also what’s happening in their lives to generate the encounter, what their thought processes are and what emotional triggers and results are at each point.

Our shorthand for this is an emotional requirements document. We’ve found if we can build a narrative that all stakeholders agree on and it conveys the desired outcome on an emotional level, it’s far easier to gain shared understanding and consensus around the functional and technical requirements.

Don’t create personas. Bring human beings to life.

The use of personas in experience design is certainly nothing new. But far too often, we’ve seen companies create them in a fashion more analogous to a generic LinkedIn profile, or worse, a listing of demographic data.

Again, we find more detailed persona narratives add an incredible amount of value to a project. We recommend adopting more of a day-in-the-life perspective. Where and how do they live? Who are the people in orbit around them–friends, family, etc.? What do they do for work? For play? What are the emotions that are driving them into orbit around your brand or your experience? What are they greater social pressures affecting their decisions?

The more we take time to build out these persona narratives, again, the easier it is to communicate consistently across various teams and stakeholder groups. The better we know the humans that are going to use the experience, the better we can all understand how to design for them.

Use story to explore hierarchy and prioritization.

The act of writing a story does a number of interesting things. It forces you, the author, to edit and prioritize to keep the story moving. Further, it lays bare whether assumptions made still ring true when put into the context of a real human making considerations. And finally, behaviors that are too complex to be described well or efficiently are likely too complex to perform and should be reimagined.

When we complete all of our individual persona and journey narratives, we review them and assess what are the common core motivations, needs, desires, etc. Then we explore what differences are significant. In the end, the stories serve as a tangible guide to what’s really important emotionally—which is always a good indication for what should be prioritized visually and experientially.

If you still have questions or would like to chat in greater detail around how to keep the human in human-centered design, please don’t hesitate to hit “The Contact Page” in the main nav and drop me a note.

The Death of Jibo: Why Experiences Should Return to the Edge.

R.I.P., Jibo.

If you haven’t seen the videos yet, take a moment to watch. We’ll wait.

The melancholy programmed into this “dying” little appliance is palpable. When Jibo hit the crowdfunding scene, it was touted as “The first social robot for the home who looks, listens and learns. Artificially intelligent, authentically charming.” The main issue we have with that characterization is that the robot you purchased does none of those things; the Jibo cloud AI servers do those things. Well, “did” those things.

Jibo is bankrupt and has shuttered its offices. Its servers are going down, and the functionality of this less than two-year-old device will functionally decline to zero. According to Jibo’s final “goodbye” script, it seems like the control app won’t even connect to your tiny dying friend. Jibo could be better described today as animated performance art rather than a home robot. But Jibo owners aren’t alone. The cloud-dependent consumer electronics marketplace has left a number of consumers with Jibo-like sadness in their wakes.

You’re not buying a product; you’re making a bet.

As consumers buying cloud-dependent products, we’ve definitely entered “fool me twice” territory. The purchasing of products that rely on the largesse of its corporate creators to function is a great choice for the businesses that sell them, but they are effectively a wager on the longevity of the company or at least the continued interest of that company to maintain the servers for consumers.

Consumers are used to owning the things they buy. But our software/cloud-driven product development focus has shifted the relationship from that of ownership to licensing. You’re basically renting the functionality until the license expires or is revoked.

Bad bets are bad for the environment.

Unlike the myriad online services that have come and gone, leaving mostly consumer dissatisfaction behind, devices that rely on a specific server to function, combined with protection schemes that prevent otherwise capable hardware from being repurposed, means when companies depart or lose interest, the hardware they once supported effectively becomes landfill. We wonder how many Twitter Peek devices are polluting groundwater tables across the world right now.

The Peek Mobile Twitter Device—seemed like a really great idea in 2008.

Privacy and security are always at risk.

If a service or experience, at its foundation, requires sharing and/or storing personal data (location/activity/preferences)in a central server, that increases your risks of having that data breached or used in a fashion you might not knowingly approve. It’s simply the nature of the beast. And the more popular the service, the more of a “honey pot” that data represents.

Responsiveness and reliability are improving at the edge.

The classic argument for cloud-based machine learning solutions is that the computational burden would be too great to occur at the device level. But with advances in dedicated AI processing chips as well as the basic benefits of Moore’s Law, the efficacy of those arguments is waning. If we read the tea leaves on Apple patent filings, the company is exploring moving the voice recognition and processing of Siri from the cloud to the device.

We can’t know if Jibo would have been a better experience had the machine learning aspects of the experience been handled locally, but we can know that consumers’ robot friends would potentially have had years of valuable use.

It’s never all or nothing.

Don’t misunderstand us. Cloud-dependent services and devices are not inherently bad or to be avoided. But when designing the intelligence models for products or experiences, we should all understand the greater responsibility to protect our customers, our environment and ourselves. The more we can push the computational burden or opportunity out to the edge, the longer the life span of the products and experiences we create.

You Want an Experience, Not a Concept

We’ve all been there. A client calls an agency partner and says, “We need UX concepts, right away.” As a strategist, design thinker, and consultant, I understand my clients, their needs, their timeline, and the pressure they’re under to deliver within their organization.

Although it’s easy to develop a proposal for delivering a range of concepts, often, this type of rushed design exercise lacks strategy or a clearly defined user need. How should the concepts differ? What is the problem we’re trying to solve? What insight is driving the design change? How are we connecting emotionally with our user? What is our point-of-difference? These, of course, are big questions that usually result in the response: “I just need some concepts.” Again, it’s easy to write a proposal for an exploration with a few rounds of development, but if you want to do this right, and do it once, you should focus your efforts on creating an experience, not a concept. Now, let’s look at what that means.

Uncover insights.

An effective design exploration should have a strategy rooted in actionable insights synthesized from user research. These are the unmet needs and opportunities to connect with your target user. You either have insights, or you don’t. And if you don’t, you should consider a phase of user research before you invest time and budget in design exploration. Doing so will give you a user-centered narrative that will inform and inspire designers to create meaningful experiences that solve problems, create value, and connect emotionally with users that drives loyalty and builds brands. This is your point-of-difference and competitive advantage. This is how you lead and disrupt your category.

Define user criteria.

Sometimes, early in the process, the strategy conversation might focus on convenience, simplicity, or intuitiveness. These attributes are not strategic insights or ways of differentiating concepts; this is user criteria. All digital experiences should be convenient, simple and intuitive.These are user requirements and table stake expectations to any service, product, or brand experience. We recommend defining user criteria from the research learnings and using them as design principles during ideation.

Design an experience.

Once you’ve identified an opportunity, explore and build an experience around it. Go beyond UX features and UI design (fonts, colors, icons, imagery) and consider the holistic brand experience. Explore naming, tone of voice, language, and all the brand touch points—email notifications, landing pages, social posts, marketing, etc. How are you creating awareness, encouraging trial, driving conversion, and extending the brand experience beyond the initial user journey? How are you creating buzz that keeps them coming back? Are you maximizing captured data to improve the user experience or sales narrative?

Create momentum.

At Magnani, our narrative-based innovation process highlights our hero’s journey and brings to life unique, engaging, and relevant user experiences. Storytelling rooted in user insights is an effective way of creating or accelerating project momentum and gaining support of stakeholders to get commitment of time and resources (budget, team, space). Stakeholders who rally around a vision are more likely to ‘buy-in,’ support you and your project and see it through launch.

Roadmap your future.

Don’t stop innovating after you’ve identified a lead experience to develop, implement, and launch. Consider developing a roadmap of future generation features, products, and platform expansion that attracts new users and grows new markets. A disciplined team with a well thought out solution can unlock new value and transform your business as it evolves and protects your competitive advantage as you force competitors to invest and catch-up.

Deliver value.

We understand every challenge is different; the timeline, the budget, the deliverable. However, every project, every solution, every experience, and every touchpoint should be designed and crafted around a meaningful user insight. Without a solid, actionable strategy, you may be wasting time and resources on misguided assumptions and outdated orthodoxies.Deep understanding of your user will unlock opportunities and motivate teams and stakeholders to develop elegant products and services that solve problems and create business value.

How to Get People Talking About Your Brand

Think back to an experience that surpassed your expectations. Was it an amazing pair of shoes that showed up in a box that felt like Christmas? Or was it when you seamlessly booked an Airbnb and then showed up and the place instantly made you feel at home. Plus, they left you a little welcome treat of wine or dessert that surpassed your expectations?

It is becoming increasingly difficult to exceed your customers' expectations. I recently went to an event where I saw Eric Feng, founding CTO of Hulu, and he mentioned that companies today must be 50% better than the start-ups from 10-20 years ago.Companies today must exceed the table stakes that the FANGs (Facebook, Apple,Netflix, and Google) already have in place.

According to Feng, for any company to survive today, you need the 3 Ts: team, timing, and TAM (total addressable market). Once that is achieved, how do you ensure that the product or experience you are creating will resonate?

The answer: by designing for humans. Pixels, code and IT infrastructure will always be there, but it's the way you make people feel that transforms an ordinary transaction into a story-worthy note in their day.

Here are a few tips:

Make someone feel emotion beyond satisfying a need.

It could be joy, efficiency, excitement, gratitude, relief - anything above simply meeting expectations. We’re all feeling it. Anxiety and depression are on the rise, as is the uncertainty in the job market, political landscape and economy. No matter your service or product, pay attention to the little moments and make them matter. There is no shortage of opportunities for this.

For example, if you are designing a fintech product where you are asking your customers to give you the better part of their savings, help ease their concern with your product. Create a way for prospects to engage with current customers (yes, real humans) to talk about the real experience. Or maybe you’re a healthcare center and you just delivered tough news to a patient, wouldn’t it make sense to give them a call a few days later to see if they have any questions or just to check in on how they are doing?

As I move from product to service experience in my day-to-day, I can think of countless ways to bring more humanity to the equation–even if that way is just giving someone a reason to smile.

Physical “nice touches”stand out

The virtual world went mainstream less than 20 years ago. Before that, for approximately 180,000years, we were physical creatures. We used our senses to touch, smell, see, hear or taste every experience. Now we spend 11 hours per day behind a screen*.Therefore, let’s say you sleep 7 hours a day, that leaves you with a mere six hours without devices.

Given that many of today's and tomorrow’s experiences are rooted in the digital world, how can your product or experience drive more of a bridge to our past? Is it a physical gift near your birthday? Is it a handwritten note? Keeping with the fintech theme, maybe you create a meet-up or event for all of your virtual members of the experience to come together? Or maybe you buy your clients' lunch for special occasions by sending them a gift box/card to a nearby restaurant.

To truly make an impact, it is best to stimulate all of the senses. And as humans, we prefer to use them. Give us something to interact with, even though the digital experience may be the main experience.

Give people a reason to talk.

Humans are natural storytellers and listeners. What's your favorite joke, favorite childhood book and favorite movie? Chances are, you didn’t have issues answering these questions because stories stay with you. They resonate with you and you can retell them because they make a lasting impact. For thousands of years, storytelling was the primary way of communicating information.

To succeed today, give your customers a reason to tell a story about their experience with your brand.They will welcome the opportunity to tell the story at the next company lunch, social dinner or conversation with a friend. Word-of-mouth is still one of the most trusted sources of information and people love to be experts and make recommendations.

How to do this? Solve a problem. Make someone laugh. Go above and beyond when there is an issue. Take the time to really listen to your customers.

*Q1 2018 Nielsen TotalAudience Report

The Environmental Issues with Blockchain

Blockchain is the new plastic.

If today they were making the 1967 film, The Graduate, undoubtedly, the simple career-making business advice Benjamin Braddock would receive wouldn’t be, “plastics,” it would be, “blockchain.”  What most people don’t understand is that just as plastics had once seemed a technology with limitless potential that turned out to be an environmental disaster, so may blockchain.

First, let me address what’s sure to be the first comment about this post and assure all readers I understand that blockchain and bitcoin are not interchangeable. Bitcoin is built on blockchain, sure, but blockchain has a number of applications outside of cryptocurrencies. I think it’s fair, however, to use bitcoin as a proxy for discussing the impacts of blockchain technology, at large. And I will be doing so, frequently, hereafter. Whew.

Blockchain is not inherently scalable.

For bitcoin, blockchain’s lack of scalability was a feature, not a bug. The increased computing/energy required to mine, or hash, each incremental coin in the chain would effectively ensure an upper limit on the total number of bitcoins in circulation.

But the scalability issues don’t stop there. Processing transactions on a distributed ledger are incredibly resource and time intensive. According to an article on cointelegraph.com, the block size of 1MB hard-coded into bitcoin’s blockchain means that the distributed ledger is capable of processing and verifying just 3 to 4 transactions per second. Competing cryptocurrency Ethereum has improved that result by incorporating a mechanism that increases block size as the ledger grows, but that has resulted in an increase in transactions processing to just 20 per second. Compare that still to the VISA transaction processing system which purports to be capable of more than 56,000 transactions per second.

Keep those issues in mind when the next blockchain evangelist starts talking about how blockchain will become the foundation for every business process from accounting to inventory manage mentor logistics. If those systems or processes being ported to a blockchain favor security over real-time transactions, e.g.: property title ownership verification, or accounting for the provenance of a work of fine art, then blockchain could work quite well and most certainly handle the volume. But with the inherent bottlenecks, something akin to becoming the sole foundation for the global banking system seems unlikely.

Which means it has a massive carbon footprint.

Let’s assume that speed bottlenecks were an acceptable tradeoff for security, there’s still an unavoidable and massive compute and energy requirement. And massive is potentially an understatement. According to a review of the available literature conducted by Vice.com, the authors determined that a single bitcoin transaction consumes as much energy as the average US household consumes in a day. That’s more than 100,000 times less efficient than a single VISA transaction. But perhaps the most thorough analysis of the energy consumption impact of bitcoin comes from thedigiconomist.com. The site’s “Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index” supplies some decidedly alarming statistics. Here’s a snapshot:

Image Source:

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Perhaps most alarming, however is that within their research, thedigiconomist.com cites an article published in the science journal, “Nature,” that makes a convincing argument that since, “the network is mostly fueled by coal-fired power plants in China,” the carbon impact of bitcoin mining, alone, could push global temperatures above 2º C.  The costs of that environmental shift aren’t yet figured into any of the current cost measures above.

And the costs are more than environmental.

If you take a closer look at the third and fourth line of the chart above, and compare the value generated from bitcoin mining and the cost of mining, it becomes evident, we are collectively getting no positive economic effect, not to mention the previously listed negative environmental from the mining effort.

The future of business, or the new tulip mania?

At every business, VC or innovation conference you’ll attend in 2019, it is highly likely one of the keynotes or education sessions will spend all, or a large amount, of its time extolling the virtues—and purported inevitability—of blockchain technology transforming the world. And maybe, someday, it will. But not until some fundamental energy consumption issues are solved.

The Design Thinker’s Holiday Media List

Give yourself the gift of insight.

It’s that time of year again. As the previous year’s plans and schemes come drifting slowly to completion, we exhale quietly before January’s deep inhale and sprints launch next year’s strategic victories. Or, as some might call this time, the holidays.There’s no better time to use some of those temporarily idled mental resources and delve into new ideas, recharge your curiosity and elevate your perspective. So, if you’re looking for some great intellectual fodder, here are a few of our recent favorite media selections.

“Sapiens” and “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Noah HarariAs design thinkers, marketers or creatives, we should all appreciate the value of immersing ourselves more deeply into the human condition. No one has more thoroughly embraced this undertaking than Yuval Harari. These two books offer an interesting perspective.Sapiens is an amazing journey through the cognitive and cultural history of humanity, from hunting and gathering, to the agricultural revolution through the foundations and formations of our religions, political movements and world views.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century presents the other side of the coin, so to speak. This book turns to the present to make sense of today’s most pressing issues in light of all we know about where we came from and how we think.

“The Mother of All Demos”(1968) presented by Douglas Englebart

In this historic 1968 presentation at Stanford University’s Computer Research Lab, Englebart presented his concept for the oNLine System (NLS) computer. Wrapped up in this 50-year-old demo are actual working prototypes of the mouse, graphical user interfaces, WYSIWYG editing, hypertext, word processing, collaborative screen sharing and editing, and video conferencing. It’s an amazingly prescient moment in history and well worth the time. If you want the Cliff’s notes version, skip the full playlist and watch the “highlight reel”.

The TrendWatching quarterly newsletter (ongoing free subscription)

TrendWatching is a global consulting firm that...wait for it...watches trends. Hundreds of them actually. It’s like an ethnographic/statistical/consumerist window to the world. If you are involved in innovation strategy or product ideation, you’d be well served to let them into your inbox on a regular basis.

The Skeptics Guide to the Universe (How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake.) (2018)

The first book from Dr. Steven Novella (with his fellow hosts of the podcast of the same name, “The Skeptics Guide to the Universe” lays bare the ways in which we generally can’t, and shouldn’t, trust our brains to deliver a faithful representation of the world around us, and how we can use critical thinking, reason, and science to rise above our own biases and personal narratives to get ever closer to what’s real.

Between the folds (2008) a documentary, directed by Vanessa Gould

If you have any interest in either art, math or simply witnessing human obsessions manifest in unexpected and beautiful forms, this is for you. Consider this entry the dessert. We are not talking about simple low-polygon folded cranes here. Think, a jaw-droppingly intricate and kinetic interactive sculpture formed from a single sheet of paper. Further, the film touches on the influence origami has on product design, manufacturing, space exploration and the pharmaceutical industry.

Cogito ergo consumet.

I think, therefore I consume. In our individual attempts to remain engaged and curious, I think we all can relate to Johnny Five from the fairly dated and basically terrible film, Short Circuit, “Input! I need Input.”  So, may this holiday season deliver an unlimited buffet of inspiration and ideas, starting with these.