Designing for emotions and experiences

The goal of customer centric design is achieving customer delight.
 
Designing for an emotional end state like delight means you need to answer for identity (who to delight), measurability (what is delight) and specificity (how to deliver delight) in the brand experience.

A. Identity (Who to Delight):

1. Identify the High Value Audience: The economic value of a customer retained over a long period of time far outweigh the costs undertaken to delight them. However, not all customers are created equal and organisations have to think about monetization while identifying ‘who’ these valuable customers are. Data sources can be transaction data, direct response mailing lists, web site visits, app user profiles etc.. Two methods that help choose ‘high value audience’ segments:

• ‘Recency, frequency, monetary’ (RFM Method) : Works on the 80/20 Pareto Principle that you derive most of your revenue from a small sub-section of your customers. Commonly used as a direct marketing tool but can also be used to help isolate the pocket of segments that show extreme behaviors (High Vs Low Recency-Frequency-Monetary combinations) and the difference in the segment behaviors will point to design improvement opportunities.
• Customer Lifetime Value :  Useful when the business depends on recurring revenue from the same customer and gaining new customers is expensive (Subscriptions, memberships, accounts).

2. Map Consumer Journeys: Understanding this high value audience journey is the next step. Empathy for the pain / pleasure points and identifying key trigger-points (that lead directly to conversion) where we could create frictionless journeys helps us create a template for the ideal consumer experience. This audit, done with deep inputs from multiple departments that are consumer facing, covers processes/ offline-online/ rules & procedures/ inter-departmental prioritisation and requires transparent data sharing internally. The entire organisation should have the capability to ‘walk in the customer shoes’ and contribute to making changes that will improve the customer experience in every way.

B.  Measurability (What is Delight) : What are the right metrics to measure design goals that are consumer emotional end-state resulting from their overall product-service experience ? In order to arrive at simplicity in goal definition the brand needs to have derived customer motivations- need states- expectations –task completion episodes. This leads to the emotion that the brand wants the consumer to have when it has solved for their need.

When Airbnb defines its goal as “To make people feel that they could belong anywhere” they are trying to solve for people who want to travel without feeling like a tourist. They would like for their ‘guests’ to feel at home, in a stranger’s home. This a simple, specific but inspiring design goal and begins to point towards the changes that need to be made in order to meet the goal. From educating hosts and training them on how to personalize the experience and helping guests live ‘like a local’, expanding the list of locations, matching for host-guest ‘tastes and preferences’ Airbnb is operating with the design goal in mind.      

What are the right metrics that help measure delight? Examples of a few metrics :

1. Satisfaction: Basic but works very well across industries. Surveys can be short and effective (Satisfaction, Task Completed, Reasons for Incomplete Tasks)
2. Customer Effort Score: if complexity is a key pain point in the category (Banking/ Insurance/ Automobile/ eCommerce) measuring how much effort was needed by the customer to complete their goals is a relevant metric.
3. Net Promoter Score: when the human component of the service is a large part of the consumer experience (Hotels, Restaurants, Retail)

 
C. Specificity (How to design for Delight) : This part of the actual design is iterative and will involve ‘design-prototype-test-design’ steps. Think of the design solutions with the specific goal in mind and through the following filters:

1. Eliminate ‘Pain Points’ : Where, when and how can these be eliminated ? Introducing simplicity, seamlessness, bite sized information and customer control of the experience helps address many of the pain points in the customer journey. People training, internal process simplification and use of technology combinations are required to standardize the design changes. Example : In September 2017, Ikea bought-over TaskRabbit (marketplace for 60, 000 workers who perform household repairs-fitting-handymen tasks) in an effort to eliminate the pain felt by consumers post-purchase of Ikea’s products. It has introduced a VR Platform (Ikea Play) that helps customers see how their furniture will look ‘in situ’ in their homes eliminating a pain point felt by customers who find it difficult to use their imagination to do so.
2. Elevate ‘Pleasure Points’: The moments of true delight should be retained or enhanced when making the design changes. In fact, building the design from the ‘pleasure points’ outwards helps to highlight the core differentiator of the brand.
3. Trigger Points : Points during the customer journey that lead directly to a conversion. ‘Buy Now’ button, ‘can we help you’ chatbot, ‘fix an appointment’ / ‘sale’ sections, ‘1 click ordering’, ‘Dash Buttons’ (Amazon) are examples of triggers. Ensuring that customers have full access to the ‘triggers’ at all times in their journey and that there are no distractions surrounding the triggers is extremely important.

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