We seldom discuss mediocre experiences with our friends. The ones which do get mentioned are the exceptional - both great and bad.

A bad experience is one where:

• My needs and desires are not provided for.
• The product itself doesn't deliver as promised or is confusing / hard to learn.
• The interaction (at POS and afterwards) is confusing, patronizing, inflexible, or unusable.

A great experience is one where:

• The concept is utterly relevant for me.
• The product itself exceeds expectations and allows me to focus on the task in hand.
• The interaction (at POS and afterwards) is simple, fast, accessible and structured appropriately for me.

Countless online communities & blogs have built up around recommendations and many ecommerce sites have integrated a recommendation network into their shopping experience e.g. Amazon. Many books have been written about the power of recommendation in marketing including The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and Buzzmarketing by Mark Hughes. Terminologies have developed around the roles individuals play in such recommendation networks (Connectors, mavens & salesmen in the Tipping Point). If you want to know more you can get the books... suffice it to say that recommendations work best the closer the source is to you... or the most highly respected the source.

The power of a recommendation is undeniable - it creates buzz which is the marketing holy grail.

The first step in getting recommendations is to create outstanding experiences. In designing any product or service the 3 key questions are:

1. Is the product/service relevant for the target market? Does it address the real needs and desires and will it fit effectively into the context in which it will be placed?
2. Is the product/service marketed effectively to enable customers to fully understand its potential whilst retaining clarity? Is it intuitive, accessible and enjoyable?
3. Do the sales and post sales processes support customers' behaviour? Will they allow them to engage in the optimal way to ensure a great experience?

As a producer of such experiences the only way to ensure you are getting this right is to involve the end users throughout the design process from concept development through functional specification and visual design to marketing and post sales. See the Flow case studies for numerous examples across different industries and product types.

It's great to hear people being positive about something which went right to such an extent that they make conversation of it. Let's learn from some of the positive experiences out there. Please add a line or two on your great experiences.

Thanks to Pierre Lenfestey for the use of his artwork.

Even as online retail struggles, you can keep sales figures alive by optimising the site you have. One area to look at is improving what happens to your customers when things go wrong.

A classic and expensive error

During my previous life as a developer, I lead the prototyping for enhancements to a clothing and home wares website. Like any sensible UCD practitioner, I wanted to get measurements to help me understand where customers were going on the current and revised site.

Just one error message

When it came to errors, the need for more detailed measurements was particularly urgent. We didn't know which pages or processes were throwing up errors. We had no detailed analytics and only one error page for the whole site: "An error has occurred. Press Continue."

I knew that we needed to write individual, polite messages which would reassure people enough to carry on, but we didn't even know yet what those errors were.

Once the analytics were up and running, we could quickly see which pages occured before and after the error page. This let us identify the user journeys where the errors were triggered. So we were able to write custom messages, things like "We're sorry, we've had a problem processing your order. Your card hasn't been charged yet. Please click checkout to try again." We also provided a customer care number together with a code for continuing the transaction offline.

Return on investment

Within a month the percentage of completed purchase journeys increased a modest 0.5%. Putting it in some perspective that 0.5% was worth £27,000 a month on average - or over £250,000 per year.

And all this was hypothesised, diagnosed and implemented over 2 weeks, at a staff cost of approximately £8,000. That's a great return on investment from paying attention to the detail of the customer experience. Each one of those customers had a chance to complete their purchase, and to remain a loyal customer with a chance of purchasing again in future.

6 error message tips

If I've inspired you to revist your site's error messages, remember these golden rules as you go:

• Be polite: Don't make your visitor feel like they've done something wrong; accept responsibility for the problem, say "sorry", "please" and "thank you".
• Use plain English: Remember that the people visiting your site aren't developers, and don't know Java from JavaScript or 404 from 500 (unless you're writing error messages for Slashdot or the MSDN that is).
• Reassure: Especially when the visitor's money is at stake, it's important to make sure that people understand that nothing catastophic has happened.
• Make it brief: Your visitor isn't interested in the exact whys and wherefores, be succinct.
• Help people recover: Provide them with a clear path out of the woods - even if that means calling someone on the phone.
• Tag them: Track where people go and what they do before and after experiencing an error on your site, and track what happens as you make changes.

Optimising is just one of three design-based strategies for beating an economic downturn:

• Innovate
• Optimise
• Cut costs by improving the customer experience

It's World Usability Day on 13th November, and the theme is transport. User- and customer- experience design for public transport is a huge, multi-facetted topic, and one which we're fascinated by at Flow. In fact, Flow is sponsoring the UPA's London meeting, so that people can talk about it over a beer.

For the blog, though, we'll just confine ourselves to a simple report about the customer experience of a Eurostar trip from one of our UX consultants, Simon Johnson. Happy World Usability day!

Cramped queues at eurostar check-in

Fellow travellers,

Has anyone noticed how poor crowd management is at Eurostar?

The instructions for which line you should stand in are positioned at the wrong end of the line. It's not until you join a queue and proceed to the front that you are informed that you are in the in/correct line. Of course this causes all sorts of tension as people realise they need to move over into another queue - committing a social faux pas by now being forced to get in front of others.

The whole experience is littered with insufficient staff, lack of clear guidance, ad-hoc A4 print-outs with make-do instructions, broken ticket machines, stressed people. At both ends there is no system for separating those booked for immediate departure and the hundreds of punters who have arrived early for the later train.

The coach numbers printed on the platform are so worn out so it's difficult to read them. It won't be long before they have disappeared altogether. The coaches are numbered in dark grey on a muddy LCD grey backgrounds in small text.

A great deal of the overcrowding is due to the fact that Eurostar allocated so much room for after-check-in shopping. However, the opportunity to buy anything is zero, as they only allow you to check-in when your train is ready to depart. As a result, the retail area is empty of customers, while the waiting area is crowded with unhappy customers. Mais alors!

In the 21st century with years of breakthroughs in ergonomics, logistics, psychology, usability, crowd management, human factors, etc. and €billions, couldn't Eurostar have foreseen these problems? Moreover, now this problems are horribly evident, why aren't they being addressed tout de suite? Wasn't the Eurostar team packed with 'experts' touting university degrees from esteemed colleges? Quite frankly my mother could have done a better job, no kidding.

Simon

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Take a look: Flow has made a real difference to the experience of planning and booking travel for companies like EasyJet, Transport for London, and National Express East Coast, Lastminute.com and Hotels.com.