One Giant Experience

source: Seattle Municipal Archives

This article “Short course in customer experience” from Good Experience managed to boil down the fuzzy big buzzword Customer Experience to two points:

• Your customer/user/visitor is a human being.
• Your customer only sees and evaluates your service as one giant experience.

As a software developer and a tech geek, I often pay more attention to the technology in many services that I touch everyday: online banking, iPhone apps, point card at grocery stores and gas station, security issues…etc. Sometimes I would look very closely to the visual design as well. This article reminds me not to over analyze the individual parts, but try to feel the whole experience as one holistic package.

Also, from the experience designer/provider point of view, instead of just focusing on the technical implementation, it is more important to be empathetic to your user or customer.

Patient Experience

Bridget Duffy, the former chief experience officer of Cleveland Clinic, shared her experience of being a real patient herself after breaking her leg and being immobilized for three months. She discussed about things she’ve learned during her recovery as well as other inspirations in her life, and how these experiences translate to into her career on experience design.

Bridget Duffy at Gel Health 2009 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

Source: http://vimeo.com/7669131

Empathic Design

IDEO is a well-known design company that advocates empathic design. During the design process, designers are encouraged to walk the lives of the target audiences, eat and work with them, take video documentation, and try to see the world from the target audiences’ perspective.

During my short visit to Shanghai in November ’09, I attended to a local volunteer session from Design for the Disadvantaged (D4D), which is a volunteer group that aims to improve the quality of life of the unprivileged group in China through design and innovation. The initiative is sponsored by IDEO. During their research period, the volunteers went to the street vendors, try to communicate with them and understand their needs.

source: Flickr

If resources permitted, it would be even better if the researchers can spend a few days or even weeks working and living with the street vendors, just like how Bridget Duffy could truly experience the joy and pain of the health care system by being a real patient herself. But for the rest of us who cannot afford such in-depth experience research, should at least bring some focus back to the human factor from technical implementation, and try to be more sympathetic to the target audience.

Wiki page of Empathic Design: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathic_design.

Header image source: Seattle Municipal Archives