Archives / May 2008

Lynda Resnick is the billionaire marketer who brought us Pom (the pomegranate juice in the strangely shaped bottle), Fiji bottled water, and other well-known brands. In the recent New Yorker article "Pomegranate Princess," she reveals her "secret" for consistently delivering products that customers want:

People say, 'She's a marketing genius, she just gets it' ... I really don't. I came up with this epiphany the other day: being a great marketer is synonymous with being a great friend. In other words, you have to listen. ... You don't have to be a genius. ... you have to see what people are watching. You have to listen to conversations. You have to pay attention.

You have to listen. You have to pay attention. That's pretty low-tech advice for high-tech marketers and product managers. And yet I can't think of a better foundation for customer-centered work. LISTEN.

Echoing this theme is another recent New Yorker piece, on sleight-of-hand magicians and their craft. One well-known practitioner, Jamy Ian Swiss, wrote that

magic was, in his words, "an experiment in empathy" - a contest of minds, in which the magician dominates by a superior grasp of the way the minds work. The spectator is not a dupe who gets fooled but a rational actor who gets outreasoned. ...

...the magician [must] imagine an audience to experience his effects: "From the very start, the moment a magician looks into his practice mirror, he is envisioning an alien awareness - a mind other than his own, perceiving an illusion that he is creating but cannot actually experience for himself." Only by a command of intellectual empathy can the magician lead the viewer down an explanatory highway ...

Empathy - the driving force behind good listening - is the number one requirement for anyone who wants to create a good experience. Not a long list of methods, not a scholarly knowledge of one's niche field - but empathy. Anyone can learn a method; but people who can listen, can pay attention, can see the experience from someone else's perspective, are rare and valuable.

Writing a book, for example, requires the author to constantly read and re-read the text from the perspective of the readers: will this make sense to them? Not to me, the author, but to someone who's coming at this fresh?

Creating a website, or application, or any sort of product, requires the developer to consider: what will the user think of this? Not me, the developer, but someone who's not me.

It's a difficult skill, and some people are better than others, but it can be developed. Listen. Pay attention. Think about the experience from someone else's perspective. That's the basis of creating good experience.

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References:

• "Pomegranate Princess: Lynda Resnick's eye for a product," by Amanda Fortini, New Yorker, March 31, 2008.

• "The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life," by Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, March 17, 2008.

Kevin Kelly: Poptimistic is super-saturated richness, hyper-realism, brightly lit in even the furthest corners, up tempo, and generally positive. Great word to describe an aesthetic I've always liked.

New research suggests that the experience of drinking wine is more about context (the people you're with, the food paired with the wine, the place you're in) than the quality of the wine itself. Should be no surprise: good experience is almost always contextual and integrated.

Greetings from Paris, where I'm taking a few days post-Gel to recharge.

Any place has its pros and cons, but one thing to admire about Paris is its insistence on high quality in things like food and wine. Standards, even top down, can be helpful! (Bottom-up has its place, too... the trick is to know when to apply each.)

What if I told you there was an industry that was committed to, even obsessed with, customer-centric business? An industry that conducts trade shows all about understanding the customer - meeting customers' desires - measuring success - and continually improving their operations? Wouldn't you want to learn from that industry?

This was the introduction I gave on-stage to Natasha Schull, a speaker at last week's Gel 2008 conference (see the recap). She's based at MIT and studies the "gaming industry" - specifically, the companies that design slot machines for use in Las Vegas, among other places.

While Schull's research is primarily sociological, it's strongly relevant to anyone who works in any experiential field - design, user experience, customer-centered business, you name it. In fact I'm not sure why other conferences aren't banging down her door to speak: she has uncovered a side of our business that most people aren't remotely aware of - or perhaps would rather not know about.

Now, I should note that "some of my best friends go to Vegas." I'm not writing a polemic against gambling. Plenty of people have good clean fun at the slots, at the tables, everything in moderation, ya ya ya. OK? No offense meant.

But the thing is, as Natasha points out, the language of the slot machine industry belies its ultimate aims. There's a term bandied about at the trade shows: "extinction." We need to design for extinction, we need to reduce time-to-extinction, and so on.

What's extinction? That's the moment that the customer - the gambler sitting at the slot machine - runs out of money. The wallet, or credit card, is now "extinct." Mission accomplished. (Now, if we could just achieve that a little bit quicker with an improved design...)

So the customer experience is really important: what games do customers want to play? What sounds will they best respond to? What physical interface is easiest to use? (Turns out push buttons are much easier than pull-handles.) By constantly studying customers and delivering what they want - in the short term, at least - the industry continually pursues a faster time to extinction.

Anyone who does customer-centered work should give this some thought. What's more important, the ends or the means? You may be the greatest user researcher in the world, but what if you're asked to apply those skills to an end you don't believe in?

This is part of the reason I write Good Experience and run Gel: to challenge people to look beyond their own narrow disciplines and fields, and past the methods, to consider the wider world. Good experience, in the end, is mostly about the outcomes we want to achieve, and the spirit we bring to our work.

Enjoy the recap.

-Mark