Designing For Market Units Of One

There is a great passage from the book Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company that reminded me that creating a total experience for a customer isn’t only about how the end product look or functions.

Successful businesspeople in all fields endeavor to understand that they are in the business of designing a total customer experience. We call this the customer experience supply chain. The physical product or service is a central part but, alone, not a sufficient part of the equation for lasting success. Design is everyone’s job. Doing good design takes more than good designers. It takes a commitment from everybody in the company soup to nuts, end to end.

What wisdom does this passage hold? It tells me that you will have to take a human centered approach to problem solving and that your product or service won’t be judged by the end result alone. Consumers are gravitating toward vendors who understand that how it looks, how it is sold, how it is delivered, what it does really means a lot to them. Perhaps more important however is that only the customer will decide what meets their needs and how they will interpret the experience.

When I was living in Austin, we decided to have a patio put in so that we would have an area where we could sit, and so that I wouldn’t as much grass to cut during the summer (I know that sounds lazy but it really was a reason). After outlining a 20×20 sq ft area I hired a contractor to come in to pour the cement and place the pavers that would outline the patio. When he was done, we had our patio but it wasn’t nearly what I expected. The cement was three different shades because he mixed three different batches of cement. There were streaks in it where he tried to smooth it out – in short it was a mess. When I asked him about it he said “Well, you paid me to pour the cement, if you want me to fix that you can pay $300 and I can see what I can do…” Needless to say I was a little peeved because this guy didn’t understand that I didn’t hire him to “pour cement”. As a vendor he didn’t care about (and failed to explore) the reason I called him in the first place. He was only interesting in meeting the specs of the deal. The moral of this story isn’t that the vendor should have sucked it up and fixed the cement. The moral is – in the future vendors like this probably won’t survive because consumers are starting to prefer vendors who understand that we aren’t buying the service or product they sell but rather we are interested in the desire that service or product is supposed to solve.

Your company, how your business is structured and your rules will only make them angry. Consumers really don’t care about that. They are care about doing their tasks and achieving their goals.

Most companies are failing with designing total experiences because they have a difficult time seeing that nearly everything we do is now a commodity. Search Marketing? Commodity. Web Design? Commodity. Super cool product that no one else thought of? Commodity. Social Media? Do I really need to say it? Most of us are taught that skillful sales & marketing, flashy advertising and promotions can make up for design shortfalls, or that an occasional well-conceived campaign will float what is ultimately a bad experience. Designer Yves Behar defines exactly how design and business can mix:

“The simplest definition of design is how you treat your customer. If you acknowledge their intelligence, and treat them well from an environmental, emotional, and aesthetic standpoint, you’re probably doing good design. Few CEOs come close. They just don’t know how hard it is, and what it will take on their part. There’s pain in transformation, pain when you have to do things differently.”

So where do you start. To help I put together some things you should be aware of when thinking about the total experience.

• Remember vendor means you too. Not just sales, Not the service team, not just the designers, not the senior managers. Everyone is responsible for designing the experience. When I was waiting tables there were a few times when the manager would come up to say “the kitchen made a mistake”. I can clearly remember standing there thinking to myself “This guy doesn’t care about the kitchen. As far as he is concerned we all messed up”. You can’t divorce yourself from the environment you depend on and expect it to flourish
• Forget about your time tables and processes. You can’t force customers to fit into your process or your timetable on demand. You have to consider changing what you do to meet their individual needs. That doesn’t mean reacting to every little request, but it does mean that they should feel like your goal is to help them.
• Don’t get stuck arguing or obsessing over tangible deliverables. The customers will frequently be less interested in the tangibles of the deal (the product, who decided what, the specs, the actual service rendered) than the intangibles or the original motive and desire for purchasing the service in the first place and the extent to which those motives/desires are met.
• They may not be able to articulate it, but they know they are looking for experiences. The customer will decide what those intangible desires are, the customer and only the customer will determine what their impression of the total experience is. People are taking their experience seriously.

We all need to understand that in general clients are going to be less patient with rules, specs, “how we do things around here” and and will use vendors who understand it’s not about buying and selling services anymore. It’s about delivering the intangibles.