You can spend hours, days, months iteratively designing, tweaking and testing a website or a product but all that effort can be for naught if you ignore the overall experience.
I recently provided my partner with some advice about customer experience design for her photography business and got her to look at the bigger picture, the whole end-to-end experience. It’s not just what happens in the studio but starts before that from the very first time a customer makes contact with her brand right through until the processed photos are delivered and the last invoice paid. Clients might have a fantastic experience in the studio but the overall experience might be poor if their needs are neglected leading up to and follow on from the shoot itself.
When designing an experience for a product or service it’s not just for the duration of the actual and physical customer contact with that product or service but from the moment the brand enters their mind, and not just the brand of the product but the organisation responsible for it; the two need to integrate.
Too often things are looked at in isolation. There is no strategy or brand inheritance. Everything is developed as if in a vacuum.
Let’s look at a couple of examples with forms.
Recently my partner who works for local government needed some time off work and had to lodge a leave request form. She printed off the appropriate form, filled it out, got approval from her supervisor and then from her director and submitted it to HR.
HR then responded and advised the form was out of date, obsolete and could not be accepted.
Doesn’t matter if the form was well designed. What wasn’t well designed was the process for distributing newer versions of the form and handling exceptions such as people submitting old forms (I’m sure they could have accepted the form if someone had written a policy authorising them to. In the absence of instructions, reject).
Another form example: My partner also had to apply to renew her visa last week. Went to the Department of Immigration website, downloaded the form, printed it off, filled it out and took it into Australia Post only to have them reject it because the contrast of the form was insufficient – the grey background on the form fields wasn’t visible, thus apparently rendering the form invalid. What can she do about it? If the printer at work is running out of ink and Australia Post can’t provide the form then makes it a bit difficult.
Doesn’t matter if the form was well-designed, the process and experience from the time a customer learns they need to renew their visa right through to receiving a new passport was not well designed. All Australia Post could do was reject the form without offering any solutions. Not acceptable.
Look at the bigger picture. Consider the entire lifecycle of the experience from the very first exposure with the customer through to the very end – although really once a brand touches a customer’s mind it stays with them for the rest of their life. Guess that’s why it’s called a “brand”, like the red-hot iron used to mark cattle.
The one small part of the chain you focus on might be brilliantly designed and provide a fantastic experience for customers but that can be utterly negated by an overall poor experience, let done by neglecting what happens before, after and around their direct contact with what you build.
// purecaffeine.com: user experience design, social experience design, social media, Gov 2.0, design thinking and service design blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
