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The flip side of customer experience
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.
(Update Feb '09: Watch Natasha Schull's video from Gel 2008.)
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.
-Mark
I'm from Colorado, where the small bit of legal gambling is in three mountain towns (plus two reservations). Two of those towns are close, but one was closer to the highway, so the other one built a new road to get there. They had to blow up a few mountains to do it, but they did it.
So, it makes sense that they would also do whatever they can after they've gotten the gambler to sit in front of a machine.
Also, Scott Adams had a funny post about this, about how the casino's really need to work to eliminate the totally unneeded labor of having gamblers have to move from an ATM to a slot machine.
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/11/urge-to-simplif.html
Anyway, great post.
Mark, thanks for the post.
Are you suggesting gambling a metaphor for consumerism? Isn’t there a bit of Vegas in any commercial endeavour? So we call it share-of-wallet rather than extinction, what’s the big? Essentially, how many pulls of the handle, how many pairs of shoes, or how many beers before I feel good about myself? Perhaps a topic for discussion is, “should we be researching need identification or need creation?”
This goes back to one of your popular authors, Barry Schwartz: http://goodexperience.com/2005/01/interview-barry-schwartz-autho.php
There is an interesting line to be drawn here. You don't want to wipe people out too quickly. If you do, many won't come back. They don't need to go home up all the time (or even anytime) as long as they feel that it is possible.
Mark,
The gaming industry has been keyed into customer experience longer than most. Some of the most interesting variants of its use in the industry that I've seen revolve around customizing the customer experience to the lifetime value of the customer.
Larry