Sadly, we skipped a week last week (did you miss us?). But now we're back.
Domino’s Pizza: Be Inspired By Your Harshest Critics
(contributed by Angus)
Whitney Hess has a great post about a Domino's video campaign promoting a new pizza they apparently created in response to user feedback. Includes video excerpts from the campaign. While it's easy to be cynical I agree with her the customer reactions in the video seem authentic and demonstrate the benefits activities like design research and user testing can give an organisation if they take on board and act upon what is discovered.
While the cynic in me sees their Pizza Turnaround “documentary” for what it is — a marketing campaign — there are still many customer experience lessons to learn from their story.
Designing for experiences across channels
(contributed by Angus)
Brandon Schauer has created a single page diagram on designing multi-channel user experiences. Lot's of new to me terminology which I think will prove useful.
Organizations are channel-bound. Customers aren’t.
This outlines components and practices necessary to deliver great customer experiences across more than a single channel.
Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment
(contributed by Angus)
Anthony Colfelt on how User Centered Design and Agile processes can be reconciled. Good overview of the positives and negatives of the two processes and some advice on how to get the best qualities from both processes by adopting "Agile UCD"
Remember, Agile does not mandate how to define concepts or overall design direction, but it is a great way to execute on solid design research and well laid plans. UCD needs to be flexible enough to respond to the reality on the ground when the implementation team encounters issues that mandate a different design solution. Document only what is needed to get the message across and co-locate if at all possible, because cross-disciplinary collaboration and face to face communication are vital. Working a sprint ahead of the development team is helpful in allowing the design team enough time to test and iterate. If these rules of engagement are followed, the two approaches can work very well together.
Forgotten passwords an overlooked problem for subscription based revenue models?
(contributed by Angus)
In a long, colourful rant titled "Subscriptions are the New BLACK" about business models for startups, Dave McClure touches upon a user experience issue that apparently caused PayPal a lot of problems:
PayPal was one of the classic stories of viral growth, however in this instance we also experienced viral growth in customer service: at one point more than 2 in 3 employees worked in customer service. And i'm guessing somewhere between 10-20% of first-time customers never used the service again, primarily because they forgot their password.
He suggests that this misleadingly small problem will cause subscription/digital product based businesses problems & that the only way around it is to create services that people need/want to use frequently
... as we transition to a Startup Ecosystem driven by direct payment & subscription business models, I want to make it clear how IMPORTANT it is to make sure users don't forget their passwords. If they forget their password, and/or can't recover it, then guess what MoFo -- YOU DON'T GET PAID.
Which means you don't get Laid, you don't get Acquired, and you sure as friggin' hell don't get to Go IPO.
So listen up & i'll share a little secret with you -- there is one very simple way to avoid forgotten passwords. Basically, it's this:
Make a Frequent-Use Product.
But perhaps authentication services like Facebook Connect will help alleviate the problem this time round.
