Experience Design

Have you ever called customer service only to find they can’t see what you just did on their website? Or clicked on a display ad that takes you to a home page rather than the product you were looking for? If so, you know how fragmented customer experiences can be. You’ve experienced it from a customer perspective.

In 1966, Walter Mischel, a social psychologist then at Stanford University, conducted the now famous marshmallow study. Individual preschoolers were taken into a room with just a desk, a chair and a tray of snacks including marshmallows, cookies and pretzels. They were told they could have one treat immediately, or, if they could wait while the experimenter went out of the room for a few minutes, they could have two treats when he returned. Most of the children could hold out for three minutes or less and some ate the treat immediately. But about a third of the children were able to wait for up to fifteen minutes in order to receive the double treat. These children were able to distract themselves by playing under the table or even hiding their eyes. By directing their attention away from the treat they were able to exercise the self-control necessary to delay gratification.

I recently spoke at a conference on digital publishing, talking about the user experience and eBooks, journals and reading applications.

Books are not what they used to be! In 2007, the advent of Kindle and iPhone, rocked the publishing industry. Suddenly, physical books were in competition with digital books. A series of gentler, but nonetheless disruptive aftershocks has occurred more recently. Content authoring tools have become more plentiful, storage is abundant and content can be disseminated in a range of formats. These changes have implications, consequences, and opportunities. The Society for Scholarly Publication brought together librarians, publishers and developers at a conference November 8th and 9th to discuss some of these implications. Participants gathered to share insight and knowledge around one critical issue: what do readers want in the current environment?

Luke Wroblewski has a “small” idea. Design for mobile first. In his latest book, Mobile First, he makes a strong case for designing for the small screen before designing a desktop website. The reasoning goes like this:

Volkswagen just reinforced the image of its already iconic Beetle by launching a new multichannel campaign using augmented reality (AR), leveraging billboards, downloadable apps from the VW web site and the iPhone and iPad. These are the channels consumers use but the multichannel aspect goes far beyond that, as we will see. Smart Germans.