Inline, Online, Off

Future Pacing the UX Through Stories in Strategic Planning

Using future pacing techniques in the earlier stages of planning (whether that’s writing user stories or questioning your focus group or beta testers) is a great way to generate this kind of insight. There are plenty of therapy models that can work. 

shoutsandmumbles:

“Having a shared UX vision and experience design principles is the most critical element of the process of transformation, because it’s about giving everyone in the organization—from the CEO to frontline staff—a clear picture of the target experience, business and customer outcomes, and win/win behaviors. Deeply embedded customer experience design principles are hugely important in aligning an organization around how you want customers to feel about your brand. Future customer stories, which show customer outcomes in customer’s own language, are powerful in creating a tangible, shared vision.”

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“UX Strategy and the Age of Alignment” - UX Matters

This article has one very good point: large organizations need to align themselves around a singular customer experience. According to the author, UX strategists are the ones at the forefront of this. 

Now, this is where I think that the author is missing something. One group of people cannot be responsible for completely understanding an entire customer group and convincing a massive pool of stakeholders that they are right. The current methods and tools that many UX strategists have now are not complete and not always the most effective at providing the most insightful analysis of the current competitive and customer landscape. 

My major issue with this article is the line: “deeply embedded customer experience design principles are hugely important in aligning an organization around how you want customers to feel about your brand.” 

You can have alignment about how you WANT customers to feel about your brand, but you need to have better ways of understanding how they actually feel about your brand. 

reblogged from shoutsandmumbles

All of Tumblr this morning:

so true buzzfeed:

reblogged from buzzfeed

YouTube Makes Another Move In Shoppable Content

As per the Google retail blog: 

To shorten the path to purchase and translate video views to sales, today we’re introducing a new channel gadget on YouTube that will enable consumer goods brands to connect consumers directly with retailers throughout the entire YouTube experience. This new channel gadget will enable shoppers to seamlessly move from browsing how-to videos and featured products to finding which retailers carry them, check availability, compare prices and make a purchase, all with fewer clicks than today. 

Unilever has partnered with Google to highlight TRESemmé as the first brand to use this new YouTube channel gadget to showcase their line of hair care solutions. 

Here’s how the commerce gadget looks on the player page: 

While the video plays, you are presented with featured products below the playlist and upon selecting an item an affiliate link, which I have to imagine is powered by Google Shopping, lets you choose which online store and price point you prefer. That retailer site then pops in a new tab where you are free to transact, add-to-cart, or bail and keep watching how-tos. 

It’s pretty seamless and gives branded content makers more off-the-shelf content-to-commerce options than they’ve had before. I’d like to see conversion rates (or cost per action metrics) for these and have to imagine the retailers will soon opt for these channels over retailer-specific microsites. 

Customers Remember Experiences, Not Content

As I develop my team to include platform and content planners, I’m keenly aware that their expertise — and ability to be effective — will only work if the rest of the team remains focused on each part of the experience design system we have in place. This quote reinforces everything I believe about the importance of inclusion and who shows up every day, to every project, and what their responsible for. Love it. via jerrylieveld:

To solve the issue with content marketing, we need to start looking at content as part of a broader ecosystem, argues Ben Barone-Nugent, a senior digital writer & content strategist at TBWA, in a Digital Marketing special in The Guardian.

“If we define experience as the beginning-to-end engagement with a brand, then content is simply part of the spectrum. […]

Digital content needs to be supported by great user experience (UX), solid digital strategy, attentive channel management and smart technology. To reiterate – it must be part of a system.”

[shared from Putting people first]

reblogged from jerrylieveld