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Our observations of the world around us

• Experienceability by Katie Kimble on October 24, 2008

  Sri Putrevu & I will be presenting at World Usability Day in Miamisburg, Ohio next month.

  Time: 3:00-4:00 PM, 13 Nov, 2008
  
  Place: World Usability Day- Lexis Nexis in Miamisburg, OH
  
  Topic: Experiential Heuristics: Moving Beyond Usability
  
  Description: Products that truly resonate with consumers are certainly usable, but more importantly, these products create an emotional connection with users that keeps them coming back for more. How can that emotional connection be quantified and analyzed? This presentation discusses “Experienceability”, the combination of user experience and usability testing. Utilizing the experiential heuristics that the user brings to the table as a quantifiable means of measuring a user’s emotions, engagement, and overall experience with a product, service, or environment providing a predictive measure of a product’s acceptance and success yields designs that are richer in experience, easy to use and increases return on investment for businesses.

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• The Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, Part 1: Anticipation by Leah McDougald on September 02, 2008

  We are eagerly anticipating the arrival of the newest addition to our data collection and analysis quiver: the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen.  And just in time, as Justine and I headed into the field (Raleigh, N.C. and Denver, Colo.) to learn about the new home buying and customization process. Our primary task will be ethnography: lots of observation, inquiry, video capture, and note taking, all within limited spaces. The challenge, as always, will be making sense of the pages of notes during observation. We’re hoping the Smartpen makes it a little easier.
  
  The Smartpen is just that – a writing instrument that does much more than put ink on paper. It helps give context to all those scribbles.  Here’s how USA Today described it recently: “[It] writes in ink like any ordinary pen. But your Bic can’t perform clever stunts like this. You can record audio while you sketch or scribble, then play it all back through a built-in speaker with a tap of the pen…”

  In the past, we’ve had success using other text analysis tools. One of my personal favorites is Concordance, an app that allows for proximity searches and high frequency word analysis of transcript text documents. I love the results and even more so love the casual tone of the messages you receive throughout such as “This is a very large file and will produce a huge concordance. Proceed anyway?” (You’ve gotta love R.J.C. Watt, web pioneer and the author of the app.)
  
  But this next project has an aggressive timeline and we ‘re hoping for a quicker way to “relive” the experience without having to use Concordance or go back and watch video to sync it with our notes. Chris Rockwell came across the Smartpen and ordered it for us. We can’t wait to discover the data analysis goodness we hope it will bring. For starters, we hope it will:

  • Keep us from having to track time codes while we are busy observing.
  • Give us good quality audio without having to carry around a separate piece of technology.
  • Help us to better make sense of our messy notes—and faster!
  • Attach quotes to images/words stimulus chosen during the participatory exercises.
  • And, of course, let us be the first in the office to use such a cool new device. (Professional rivalries here? Nooo…)

  Stay tuned for our follow-up post, “The Livescribe Pulse Smartpen: Part 2: Judgment Day.”

  

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• The mathematics of brand satisfaction by Chris Rockwell on July 30, 2008

  Design Management Institute Review has published an article I wrote recently that looks at the interplay between brand expectation and experience from a mathematical perspective. We believe it can reveal important ways for designers to strengthen brand touchpoints.

  The big idea is this: Consumer satisfaction with a product or service interaction is a function of the experiential outcome and the expectations brought to the interaction. The outcome of each interaction eventually defines the brand. Cumulative brand satisfaction then can be thought of as the sum of these interaction experiences across all brand touch points.

  When a customer has a high expectation but a poor experience with a product or brand, the expectation makes the feelings left by the experience all the worse, creating especially low satisfaction and a failure to deliver on the brand promise. Alternatively, if a customer has a low expectation but a great experience, the net effect is amplified to produce a very high satisfaction level and a positive entrenchment of the brand in the consumers mind.

  Where the experience matches a positive expectation, you have status parity – effectively a solidification of the brand though a promise kept in the consumers mind.

  In the end then, the customer determines a brand’s meaning and value, which we can represent as a mathematical formula. A company must understand the customer’s measuring stick (expectations and ideal experiences) when designing for the multiple touch points of a brand experience. Effective experiential design research is the key to successfully understanding and designing for the underlying mathematics of satisfaction.

  Want to learn more?  Download a free reprint of the complete seven-page article. (240K PDF)

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