One simple but helpful step is to stop thinking about your company’s operational documents as merely transactional tools.Every document your company produces is an opportunity to emphasize and clarify what your company is all about. Spec sheets, release notes,...
Customer experiences are almost always indirect. You don’t feel good because a company told you to feel good. You feel good because that company set up a scene that had the right feel-good elements.Every bank wants to think they’re “a different kind of bank,” yet...
Far too many experiences are designed around the assumption that people want to be engaging with them. It’s an easy mistake to make. If you’re designing, say, an ecommerce site, it would be natural to assume your customers have an internal drive to find a product they...
Inexperienced marketers tend to fall back on a benefit-focused approach, believing they’ll win customers by listing their virtues (better products, better customer service, technical improvements, etc.)Unfortunately, most practical benefits don’t address the issues...
Good design is good business. I spend pretty much all day obsessing about how to improve user experiences. I've observed a number of recurring software design problems over the years, and I thought I'd share a handful of them here for your consideration. Problem #1:...
You can’t solve your problems with a fresh coat of paint Let’s say a company comes to our firm interested in hiring us. We’ll call them SynergyCo. They make about $100 million/year in revenue selling a niche software product. They’ve had their market cornered in the...
I’ve worked on a lot of enterprise software projects over the years, and one of the common patterns I’ve observed is a surprisingly high tolerance for poor user experience.If you’ve ever worked in a cubicle farm, you’re probably all too familiar with the baffling HR...
Sometimes being "first to market" means you're doing all the hard work for someone else. Maybe it's time to slow down and reconsider. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout is undeniably a classic text and should be read by anyone in this...
To understand what's going on in your customers' heads, sometimes you have to get back to basic human psychology. Let's skip all the high-concept marketing talk, and get back to basics for a few minutes here. Branding and marketing isn't about fluff, or trickery, or...
Fictional views of a dehumanized future reveal a lot of insights into the frustrations your customers are experiencing every day. One of the most common themes in popular science fiction is the feeling of technology and/or corporations squeezing the humanity out of...
Are profits and productivity hiding right under your nose? Here's how to take advantage of scent marketing.Regardless of your work environment, it's usually obvious that its appearance (lighting, paint colors, etc.) and sound (background music, noise, etc.) can have...
When a company isn't catching enough fish (especially in a tough economy), the CEO's instinct is often to cast a wider net, hire more people to cast nets, or simply cast the net more frequently. Unfortunately, they seldom consider the most obvious solution: mending...