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Insights & Blog_In Here and Out There

Our observations of the world around us

  • Jim Couch joins Lextant as new VP by Chris Rockwell on August 07, 2008

    I’m happy to announce that Jim Couch is our new vice president of business development.  Jim brings a wealth of design and management expertise to our senior team, and will work on our front line, identifying opportunities to help our clients reach their design objectives. His experience in product development, interaction design, process innovation, and design research will help our clients get the most strategic value from their investments with us.

    Jim will hit the ground running. He is a former general manager of Fitch Inc., and his design work has been honored by the BusinessWeek/IDSA Industrial Design Excellence Awards and I.D. Magazine, among others. He has served as a keynote speaker at design conferences and on the Board of Directors of the Industrial Designers Society of America. I’m very excited to have him on board. He’s not a bad blogger either.

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  • Chris Rockwell interview on IDSA website by Jim Couch on August 07, 2008

    If you get a chance, take a few minutes to visit the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) website, which includes a new interview with Lextant founder and president Chris Rockwell. It’s a great read – Chris expands on some of the ideas that make Lextant unique, and what he sees are the greatest challenges facing designer in the next two years.

    You can view the interview online here, which appeared in the IDSA’s Design Perspectives magazine.

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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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