David King of the Topeka public library is keynoting COSUGI on "Making the Digital Experience Sing!"
Today, there's an expectation of good customer service and consumer choice is ubiquitous (in America, perhaps). What is differentiating organizations now is customer experience. Experience is a set of services and activities that surround a purchase or other interaction with a product. American Girl stores are an example of a compelling customer experience where the purchase is only one facet of the consumer's interaction with the brand or service. Harley Davidson cited as another experience where the initial purchase is only the beginning of the consumer's relationship with the brand and other products or services that it might offer.
How to design a digital experience? DLK offers three paths:
Structural: creating a better expereience by improving ease of use of a website. Allows customers to focus on their own goals rather than figuring out how to interact with the website
Jessie James Garrett: Elements of User Experience a good intro to the topic. Charts how to create a user experience from the abstract to the concrete, with focuses on both business and customer needs. David Armano's approach to creating experiences is a more marketing oriented approach, from broad (uncover) through definition of what the experience should be, to immersion (designers using the service in all its aspects) before design. 37signals.com also a good (free) resource on the topic that offers simplified guidance- such as "writing a story" about what you want the experience to look like.
At Topeka, there is a current redesign plan that involves a LOT of planning and focus groups. DLK is meeting with different groups within the library organization to ask what their desired features would be, will meet with consumers later- with a focus on ease-of-use. Want the website to be "as easy to use as a light switch"- a service that requires almost no insight or knowledge to use, but immediately gives the desired result.
The second path: the Community Path is a way of seeking input in a relatively informal way from users, and will harvest a tremendous amount of useful input. In the digital context, this can be emulated via blog commenting, offering easy feedback, review, and integrations to various third party and social media where conversations can easily happen. Consumers should be able to connect with the library AND each other. Libraries can use "content enablers" such as open questions posed in various media to kick off a conversation and solicit a relationship with patrons, using web tools and website features.
Tools lead to participation- without participation there is not a community. Offer services to enable users to participate and encourage them to do so- and follow up on the input that they do have. Users and consumers also want to feel like they are an active part in developing the institutional story. Topeka library uses twitter among other services to extend its reach into the community- telling stories about what is going on at the library as well as answering questions about library services and also questions in general where library input is appropriate.
Sportsclips is a barbershop for men that creates a user experience focused on watching sports while getting a haircut. Webkins is a company where the initial purchase, which is not a huge amount of money, is a portal into a brand extension that comes into the home through a feature-rich online presence.
What do Webkins, Harley-Davidson, and Starbucks have in common? Focusing on the staging experience to extend the brand into the home and the consumer's everyday life. The "post-show" is where most of the activity happens. In libraries, the post-show can be an ongoing book discussion group that occurs online, for instance with a "big-read" program. When people go online they don't necessarily want to interact with information, they want to interact with people with a confluence of interests that are indicated by the meaning of the purchase.
Customer Journey Mapping: people who buy a car don't usually start out at the showroom. First there's an indication that a car needs to be purchased! CJM investigates where the "touchpoints" are between a customer and product or service and how to make those interactions work in the customer's best interest and with the best most compelling experience.
In a catalog search, the example could be like this:
- Where is the customer?
- What platform are they using?
- Where can they find the desired service on your online presence
- Do the elements that you present to them make sense, or are they explained adequately?
Libraries can do a variety of simple customizations to help with the user experience, and can look for ways to "improve the ordinary" (the redesign of WD-40 is an example). For websites, figure out what the "ordinary" and the touchpoints are, and look at them with fresh eyes- most of us know how to work the systems and platforms- and how to work around the limitations. Because we've incorporated them into our daily routines we no longer see how frustrating some of these features are to use. Library users are having digital experiences with Amazon, Yahoo, Facebook and other services that are far more friendly than a typical catalog search.
Connecting the customer to the full scope of library services AND to other customers. The Work/Play/Experience blog is a useful source for information and ideas in how to create an Experience "Stage" online- and with conversations online becoming a pre-eminent tool in marketing, libraries need to learn the new language of online connection and conversation. Having a mediocre or at least adequate web presence is going to be increasingly unsatisfactory to the emerging generation.
No comments:
Post a Comment