You are a weary business traveler at an international train station. And you have one pressing problem: you are hungry. Luckily, you spot a baguette chain store and decide to take a closer look. Their baguettes look amazing, especially that one on the right; fresh tomatoes and mozzarella in a crusty French baguette. Yes, that is it. You want to buy it, but no one behind the counter seems to be paying attention to you. “Hello, excuse me?” But there is no response. The staff are ignoring you. “Hello”, you raise your voice, “can I have this baguette please?” The guy behind the counter looks at you, and without a word, grabs the baguette you pointed at. “Anything else – tea, coffee, juice?” replies the guy, evidently annoyed that you bothered him, and hands you your baguette wrapped in a paper bag. “No, thanks, here’s the money. Bye.”

One transaction complete.

You walk away with the precious paper bag in your hand, looking forward to devouring that wonder of a baguette, while trying to forget about the unpleasant guy behind the counter. After all, you got your baguette, so it is all good. You board the train, take a seat, and realise that the baguette looks significantly less mouth-watering than the one you saw just a while ago. It is all squashed and looks as tired as you are. You start unwrapping it...oh no, it is stuck to the paper bag. You wrestle with it for a few minutes. Pieces of the paper got torn away and glued to your baguette. And why is the bag so ill-shaped anyway? Has anyone actually considered how people will be eating the baguette on a train? No. It turns out that the fancy paper bag is completely inappropriate in this situation.

At this point you are rather disappointed with your baguette and all the hassle it has caused you. But it looked so good in the store! Anyway, you decide not to buy this baguette again. What is more, you actually also decide not to buy from this chain’s store again.

More transactions? Unlikely.

What we can learn from everyday interactions

You might be thinking this has nothing to do you and your online business. But it does. Regardless of whether you are selling baguettes or monthly subscriptions to a Software-as-a-Service online CRM platform, you need to consider the same things to create a positive customer experience and build a base of loyal customers that keep coming back.

There are a few lessons we can learn from this baguette fiasco:

• Don’t focus just on your product, but also on how you are delivering it.
  Even the best product could be ruined by a poor purchase and post-purchase experience.

• Don’t ignore customers, however subtle their interest in your product.
  Have customers phoned your call centre to get help because they failed to buy your product through the website the day before? Have they still not bought your product a week later? Then you should be following-up with them.

• Don’t try to up-sell and cross-sell, at all costs, all the time.
  Pick your battles wisely and focus on the most susceptible moments. Customers might not be ready to buy another product right after buying the first one. They might want to learn more about the first product before buying another product from you.

• Don’t assume everyone will use your product in the same way.
  Learn about your customers, their preferred ways of doing things, and their context of use. Then design your product so that it could be appropriated for multiple situations that are likely to occur.

• Don’t design just for the product’s peak usage moments.
  Think also about the moments when the product is not being used, or when it is being shut down. Or thrown away. Let your products disappear from the scene gracefully.

Next time you experience a pleasant or unpleasant interaction with a service or product in the physical world, think how it would translate into the digital world. And vice versa. Both worlds are a great source of inspiration for each other when designing.

Upon reaching the departures hall, a male assistant (picture below) reminded me that certain items are not allowed on board aircraft. Later in the security check hall, another female assistant informed me that liquids should have been placed in transparent plastic bags and laptops were to be taken out of bags.

I was queuing for the security check for just a few minutes but the messages became very repetitive. What had been a useful reminder, quickly became rather annoying noise. I noticed there was a human operator standing not far from one of the automated assistants, telling passengers which queue to join. After observing this guy for a while, I asked him whether he found the automated assistants a little bit irritating. (A leading question, I know!) Almost instantly, as if he had uttered it for a hundredth time that day, he replied, "You tune it out mate. You just tune it out!" He also told he had been working there with the new ‘colleagues’ for two weeks then.

The way he replied instantly made me realise that work shifts with the non-human colleagues are probably not very popular with the airport staff. No wonder, imagine a colleague of yours repeating the same line for the whole day. For the whole week.

Automated Virtual Assistants are an interesting invention. They surely get much more attention than a boring notice board on the wall. However when designing a customer journey within a service, it is essential that all stakeholders are taken into account. In this case, while virtual assistants might be fulfilling the short-term business needs by reducing costs and speeding up the queue, their implementation means that neither the customer’s nor the staff’s experience is improved. On contrary, they might be potentially causing friction. In the long term this may damage the brand, affect traveller’s choice of airport, and would make staff more likely to quit their jobs.

Service design needs to address the customer experience holistically, and any potential knock-on effects need to be considered. Subtle changes could make all the difference. All airport customers follow the same route which makes careful positioning and Directional Sound a possible solution. This would ensure the message gets heard in context without becoming just annoying noise.

Sponsored by SapientNitro and Foolproof  / Flow, Lightning UX brought together eight speakers to present their thoughts on various user experience matters. The rules? Eight presenters with five minutes each. I can say for myself, and others I spoke to, that Lightning UX, January 2011 was a big success.

The talks

Boon Chew opened with the story of his life. He explained how he ended up in the UX game; starting as an aspiring comic artist in his college days, through a senior developer role, to a UX Designer. He credited Alan Cooper and his books for making him realise that building products without a clear vision of the users and their needs is simply wrong.

Second presenter, Jonathan Kahn, spoke about the importance of Content Strategy. He reminded us that it is not just about the content factors (where Information Architecture currently makes the biggest impact), but also about the ‘people’ factors, such as publishing workflows and governance.

Cennydd Bowles took to the stage afterwards with a thoughtful rant titled ‘The Dip’, and urged the user experience industry to reflect on its direction, re-gain more humility and focus on results.

Next, the importance of modularisation and the benefits of using design patterns in the design process were illustrated on an example from the automobile industry by Tyler Tate.

Harry Brignull continued the parade of inspiring ideas with a short case study about a company trying to put lipstick on a pig by hiring Search Engine Optimisation consultants to fix, what was actually, a much deeper problem the company faced due to a missing Customer Experience Strategy.

The last three talks kicked off with Alex Horstmann’s performance (a presentation is too weak a word for his captivating rhetoric). Alex drew on a few Ghost Busters metaphors and spoke about the importance of talking the business language when advocating user experience. And we agree! We are all about Sales Process Optimisation, and also know that applying User-Centred Design is good for the business. As a bonus, Alex also gave us tips on defeating the big marshmallow man!

Lucy Spence stressed the essential role of research in customer acquisition and retention initiatives. She also mentioned that sometimes it takes a brand new concept or idea to move a product forward, despite not knowing the outcomes upfront.

Finally Rory Hamilton concluded with an awesome talk using the Uncanny Valley theory from robotics science to demonstrate how to optimise customer interaction touch points in a service design lifecycle.

If you want to know more, you can have a peek at sketch notes by Lucy Spence, and short videos of Tyler’s talk and Jonathan's talk.

All in all, a rapid-fire of excellent short talk and tons of ideas to mull over and digest.

Huge thanks to Lee McIvor for organising this.

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.

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