X: The Experience When Business Meets Design

Brian Solis

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118456545
• eBook ISBN: 9781118526804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Welcome to a new era of business in which your brand is defined by those who experience it.

Do you know how your customers experience your brand today?

Do you know how they really feel?

Do you know what they say when you re not around?

In an always-on world where everyone is connected to information and also one another, customer experience is your brand. And, without defining experiences, brands become victim to whatever people feel and share.

In his new book X: The Experience When Business Meets Design bestselling author Brian Solis shares why great products are no longer good enough to win with customers and why creative marketing and delightful customer service too are not enough to succeed. In X, he shares why the future of business is experiential and how to create and cultivate meaningful experiences.

This isn't your ordinary business book. The idea of a book was re-imagined for a digital meets analog world to be a relevant and sensational experience. Its aesthetic was meant to evoke emotion while also giving new perspective and insights to help you win the hearts and minds of your customers. And, the design of this book, along with what fills its pages, was done using the principles shared within.

Brian shares more than the importance of experience. You'll learn how to design a desired, meaningful and uniform experience in every moment of truth in a fun way including:

• How our own experience gets in the way of designing for people not like us
• Why empathy and new perspective unlock creativity and innovation
• The importance of User Experience (UX) in real life and in executive thinking
• The humanity of Human-Centered Design in all you do
• The art of Hollywood storytelling from marketing to product design to packaging
• Apple's holistic approach to experience architecture
• The value of different journey and experience mapping approaches

The future of business lies in experience architecture and you are the architect.

Business, meet design.

X

1.0

THIS IS X

EXPERIENCE IS THE NEW BRAND. EXPERIENCES ARE THE NEW BRANDING.

THE FUTURE IS EXPERIENCE.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

—Albert Einstein

CLOSE YOUR EYES FOR A MOMENT AND THINK ABOUT THE LAST TIME YOU TRULY HAD A GREAT EXPERIENCE WITH A COMPANY AS A CONSUMER, AN EXPERIENCE THAT CAPTURED YOUR HEART, MIND, AND SPIRIT.

WHAT ABOUT IT WAS SPECIAL?

LET’S CALL IT “X”—THAT JE NE SAIS QUOI THAT MAKES SOMETHING SO SPECIAL.

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT X, CREATING SUCH MEMORABLE MOMENTS FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS THROUGH EVERY ENCOUNTER THEY HAVE WITH YOUR BRAND—ALL DAY, EVERY DAY.

What is X?

In math, x represents a variable to be solved for. In business, the x we must solve for is the experience we want to give our customers. Of course, the idea that businesses should focus on customer experience isn’t new. But we’ve entered a new era in experience creation, and businesses that don’t learn to craft much more satisfying experiences for their customers have a great deal to lose.

In 1998, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore published a controversial essay in the Harvard Business Review heralding the era of “The Experience Economy.”¹ They put forward the idea that businesses should creatively orchestrate memorable events for their customers, and those experiences, and the memories they instilled, would become part of the product and brand. Pine and Gilmore defined experience this way: “An experience occurs when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event.”

They used two great examples, which are oldies but goodies, showcasing how Chuck E. Cheese and the Discovery Zone were pioneers in productizing experiences. Both companies created complete ecosystems that enchanted children, and equally as important allowed parents to become heroes for having taken their kids there. They both, however, stopped trying to compete for relevance as consumers changed and, as such, the experience becomes dated.

Since then a great deal more has been written about the value of offering customers superior experiences. Apple showed how to do so masterfully with the launch of the iPhone in 2007 and its rich experience ecosystem, built right into the product. Yet few companies have followed effectively in Apple’s footsteps even though everyone talks about doing so. So many still choose to increase profitability or tolerate mediocrity at the expense of the experience, even though it’s been clearly demonstrated that consumers will pay a premium for a better experience.

We know that giving our customers delightful experiences is important, and as consumers, we know the quality of experiences we want. So why is it that when we get into work, we lose this customer perspective?

Part of the problem is that how to go about creating truly meaningful experiences for customers is still so little understood. Who in business hasn’t heard the mantra, “Customer experience is the new competitive advantage?” But has anyone actually told you how to design experiences, or articulated exactly what the standard for a good experience is? People in different silos of a company will give different answers about how to deliver on experience. Product managers will say, “Design great products.” Customer relations managers will say, “Make customer service matter again!” Those in marketing will focus on creative campaigns and branding.

This book introduces a transformative approach to customer experiences by design: human-centered experience architecture. This approach defines customer experience as the sum of all customer engagements in each touch-point and every “moment of truth” throughout the customer lifecycle.

Experience architecture is the art of engendering desired emotions, outcomes, and capabilities throughout the customer journey. It is the process of strategically designing and strengthening a customer’s entire spectrum of interactions with a product or company.²

Creating a great customer experience used to require that companies merely present information and functionality in a usable, efficient, and enjoyable manner. But this is no longer enough. Customers are placing greater demands not just on products and services, but on the ongoing experiences that their interactions with companies offer. If they can’t get what they want, they’ll hack their way to it.

Experiences are more important than products now. In fact, experiences are products. They’ve also become a lively topic of consumer comment for all the world to hear. People increasingly share their experiences with companies and products in our connected economy, and we can either be active participants in creating and nurturing desired experiences or spend more and more time trying to react or make up for bad experiences. What’s more, consumer demands continue to evolve. We’re just getting started.

In order to be competitive, brands must get better not only at understanding and satisfying customers’ wants and needs but at anticipating them, even before customers know what they want and need. This type of experience design is referred to as creating proactive experiences, and these are quickly becoming the new standard.³

For example, Google’s Nest home thermostat understands the consumer’s comings and goings, both in leaving the home and in moving around in the home during the course of the day and night. It proactively sets room temperature accordingly, saving users money. And over time, it keeps getting smarter. Nest creates an experience that becomes almost invisible and yet is delightful.

Bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• 1.0: THIS IS X
• 1.1: CX = $
• 1.2: MEDIUM = THE MESSAGE
• 1.3: THE GIFT OF PERSPECTIVE
• 2.0: NATURE VERSUS NURTURE
• 2.1: SKEUMORPHISM
• 2.2: BUSINESS MEETS DESIGN
• 2.3: MOMENTS OF TRUTH
• 3.0: CIRCLE OF RIFE
• 3.1: CX REDUX
• 3.2: THE GRID
• 4.0: DIGITAL FIRST
• 4.1: DESIGN FOR HUMANS
• 4.2: BX + UX + CX = X
• 4.3: HUMAN ALGORITHM
• 5.0: MAPS R US
• 5.1: JOURNEY MAPPING
• 5.2: EXPERIENCE MAPS
• 6.0: HOLY PERSONA
• 6.1: STORYTELLING
• 6.2: STORYBOARDING
• 7.0: EXPERIENCE FLOW
• 8.0: X IS ALIVE!
• 8.1: APPLE’S UNIVERSE
• 9.0: THIS IS WATER
• End User License Agreement