In The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences, Matt Watkinson provides a very practical guide to customer experience design and management, backed with a range of examples from different industries (mostly UK based). I particularly like the way that the author focuses on the ‘qualitative’ aspects of experience, including the sensory and psychological elements, arguing that these cannot be measured quantitatively through standard metrics. As he puts it, “it’s not what the features and functions of the product or service allow us to do, it’s how it makes us feel”. He also focuses on ‘individuals’ rather than ‘customers’ as many significant experiences with a business are likely to happen before someone is a customer. Read more »
Scarcity is the idea that things become more desirable when we perceive them to be more difficult to obtain if they are in short supply or available intermittently. Scarcity is a reliable way to move people to action, as when ideas or opportunities become scarcer, then they also become more desirable, and even those people who are less interested may be motivated to take greater notice. Scarcity can act as an indicator of quality which works in conjunction with the human interest in keeping options open and also the drive to avoid loss (loss aversion). This principle acts across a wide range of behaviours from sexual selection to negotiation strategies. Read more »
Inattentional blindness is the failure to mentally process a stimulus that is in clear view, leaving the observer without any awareness of the stimulus. It is a psychological lack of attention that typically happens when other tasks demanding attention are being performed. Read more »
Observation is a fundamental skill for designers and researchers, requiring focus on hearing and seeing human behaviour, environments, events, artifacts and social interactions. Observational methods are often described in terms of their degree of formality and the level of structure designed into the observations and recording methods, as well as their intended use. Read more »
Cognitive dissonance is a feeling of discomfort on holding conflicting ideas, values, opinions, beliefs or emotions at the same time. This leads to a tendency to seek consistency by changing the importance or quality of one or more of the ideas, values, opinions, beliefs or emotions.The phrase ‘cognitive dissonance’ was first coined by Leon Festinger in 1956, inspired by his work studying a UFO cult, and which he later developed into a full theory in his book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. This is one of the most influential theories in social psychology, and one of the most extensively researched. Read more »
The brain science of marketing
In his recent book Brainfluence, Roger Dooley shares 100 tricks for persuading and convincing consumers based on a wide range of evidence from neuromarketing and many other fields such as psychology and behavioural economics. The examples are well documented and overall this is a much more practical, structured and sound guide to brain science of marketing than many other books (including notably Buyology which is less structured and poorly documented). Read more »
The circle of life
All products progress through a sequence of four stages of life, from introduction (birth) through to growth, maturity and finally decline and death. Firstly the product is envisioned and developed; after launching (if lucky) popularity will grow, although ultimately sales will plateau and finally decline. Each stage has specific implications and priorities for designers and marketers, as the demands will evolve and change over time. The classic work on product diffusion models is Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers, which follows on from and builds on the original Bass model of product diffusion which continues to be the basis of most new product forecasting. Read more »
Four Ways to Relate
In Structures of Social Life, Alan Fiske outlines four forms which can be used to construct all human relations. He argues convincingly that these four forms are sufficient to describe all possible forms of human relations, as well as social motives and emotions and social morals. Although the details of the models differ from culture to culture, the underlying structures are consistent. Read more »
Tired of too much choice?
In the last post I wrote about the effects of decision fatigue, and its bad effect on the quality of decisions that we make in life. Hick’s Law is a common principle of design, and is the design consequence that the time it takes to make a decision increases as the number of alternatives increase (a common sight in today’s retail landscape). The law itself is used to estimate the time it will take someone to make a decision when presented with multiple options. Although this has everyday consequences, outlined clearly and sympathetically in Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice, it also has very serious consequences in emergency situations. For example, when a pilot has to press a particular button in response to an event, then the decision to select the correct button will take longer when there are more options. Read more »
The New York Times reports some interesting findings on the phenomenon of decision fatigue in a recent article which is well worth reading for those who are burdened by a continuous stream of data, meetings and decision making. Not only is this bad for you and your brain, it means that you end up making really bad decisions which are not in your (or your business’s) best interests! Read more »
