• Forrester’s 2010 Customer Experience Rankings [Customer Experience Matters] – # Retailers take 12 out of the top 20 spots. Most of the top rated companies on the list are retailers. Hotels also grabbed three of the top 20 spots. Interestingly, three financial services firms also cracked the top 20: credit unions, SunTrust Bank, and Vanguard.
  # Healthcare, Internet and TV services dominate the bottom. The bottom 11 companies on the list came from only four industries: five health insurance plans (United Healthcare, Medicaid, Anthem, and CIGNA), three ISPs (Charter Communications, Comcast, and Qwest), two TV service providers (Charter Communications and Comcast), and one credit card provider (HSBC).
• Can Design Change Behavior? [Stanford School of Engineering] – Because behavior can be influenced—not just observed—it provides an important opportunity for tackling complex challenges such as sustainability. That opportunity is perhaps best addressed with design…With this outlook, Banerjee says he is excited to be one of the principal investigators in a new project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy in which he is working with other Stanford professors who have expertise in behavioral sciences, communications, human-computer interaction, and behavioral economics. The team aims to create interventions that influence behavior to bring about significant reductions in energy use. But what designers understand well is that people are “predictably irrational” and influenced by emotional as well as rational criteria, Banerjee says.
• The Art of Asking the Question [UIE Brain Sparks] – Steve Portigal will show your team the art of asking the question. You might visit the user in their office or home, have them come to you for a usability test, or even have a chance encounter at a trade show or while waiting for an airplane. Do you know what to ask? Do you know what to listen for, to extract the critical detail of what they can tell you about your design?

  Steve will help you prepare your team for any opportunity, be it formal user research or less structured, ad-hoc research. He’ll also give you tips on how to work with your stakeholders and executives, who may also be meeting potential customers and users, so they know what to ask and how to listen—integrating their efforts into the research team. (Wouldn’t it be great if they understood why you’re doing what you’re doing?)

  Update: Use promotion code CHITTAHCHATTAH to get lifetime free access to the recording after the fact (normally a separate cost)

On January 28, I’ll be presenting a UIE Virtual Seminar entitled Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets.

Steve Portigal will show your team the art of asking the question. You might visit the user in their office or home, have them come to you for a usability test, or even have a chance encounter at a trade show or while waiting for an airplane. Do you know what to ask? Do you know what to listen for, to extract the critical detail of what they can tell you about your design?

Steve will help you prepare your team for any opportunity, be it formal user research or less structured, ad-hoc research. He’ll also give you tips on how to work with your stakeholders and executives, who may also be meeting potential customers and users, so they know what to ask and how to listen-integrating their efforts into the research team. (Wouldn’t it be great if they understood why you’re doing what you’re doing?)

I’ve also put together this quick preview to get you more of a sense of what I’m going to cover.

Sign up here for this informative event!

Update: Use promotion code CHITTAHCHATTAH to get lifetime free access to the recording after the fact (normally a separate cost)

I signed up for a webinar but was unable to attend. But I got a copy of the presentation, and although I’m sure it made a lot more sense when the presenter was explaining it, I had to laugh at this screen

The source is Productscan, so one can assume it has something to do with the success of new product introductions. But a product launch and an idea are not the same, are they? And how are they using innovative vs. not-so-innovative? And what’s the vertical axis, exactly?

Today we “attended” a webinar about innovation in services. The talk was to create some buzz for an upcoming IIR/PDMA conference about Service Innovation Design and Development and was presented by Jeneanne Rae from Peer Insight.

The slides and recorded audio may be forthcoming (although there was a lot of technical problems that really took away from the whole experience) but in the meantime, they’ve got a very detailed report from a study of the service innovation process available as a PDF here. The first few pages will give you a reasonable overview of the talk.

Some tidbits and thoughts:

1. Services are the dominant economic force in developed countries, but the buzz/mindshare/process is around the creation of products.

2. Some of the service companies described were surprising: i.e., Wal-Mart, Home Depot. Is retail a service business? Not in the same way banking is (although it’s interesting that they call their offerings products). Not in the same way hospitality is, either. Maybe this is a commonly understood distinction but it wasn’t clear to me.

Is software a service? If it comes in a box (i.e., Adobe Illustrator)? What if it’s on the web (i.e., Google Docs)? What if it’s tied to a product (i.e., iTunes)? Or resident on a device (i.e., Windows CE)?

3. The IHIP framework dates back to 1978 and is the classic articulation of what differentiates services from goods. IHIP stands for inseparability, heterogeneity, intangibility, and perishability.

• Inseparability – Unlike a product which can be taken home after purchase and used later, services are consumed in the same time and place where they are purchased.
• Heterogeneity – Although each product produced can be identical, the experience of interacting with a service is always going to be different from customer to customer.
• Intangibility – You can see and touch a product before you buy it; you can’t experience a service experience until you experience it.
• Perishability – You can count how many products you have on hand; you can’t taken inventory of a service.