It’s bad said the doc, case of business locked in, customer locked out.

  • Wednesday, 15 July, 2009
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The customer is the oxygen that keeps a business alive.  No. The customer is more than just the oxygen that keeps the business alive, (my mother was recently on a life support machine with Guillian Barre Syndrome; she was getting oxygen but paralysed, unable to move.  With that condition you see that life is more than just about breathing oxygen).  The customer is more than just corporate oxygen, it is the reason a business lives for.

Shareholder value means nothing if the organisation doesn’t provide value to the customer.  Yet  I see far too many organisations who fail to grasp  the importance of their customers.  They prioritise their internal processes and policies to the detriment of customer satisfaction.  They focus upon narrow propositions that represent organisational silos rather than meeting the broad needs of the customer.  Innovation is morphed into ‘requirements’ that are performed by ‘actors’ in multiple volumes of ‘use cases’.  To my mind, too many organisations are struck down by corporate Guillian Barre Syndrome.  The brain knows what is going on but is powerless to act.  It feels pain, it senses something is wrong but is paralysed, it cannot move.  Prisoner in its own body.

If that is the diagnosis, what is the cure?  There are many, but a starting point would be to place the customer at the heart of your design.  Don’t start any proposition without the customer experience at the core.  Create personas and walk through customer journeys.  Use scenarios to develop your thinking.  Broaden the scenarios to introduce what-if models.  If it is an internet offering, sketch out the screens, if it is a service, sketch out the touch-points with your people, processes and technology.  Don’t allow the proposition to be talked of in the abstract, work with the concrete.  Would a persona accept the experience your proposing? Would she accept that pricing model? Does that journey make sense? You do not need to spend weeks and months documenting the exercise.  A couple of days with the right people in the right room with white boards, post-it notes and business-speak banished from the proceedings should deliver far more fruitful insights than playing document-tennis with revision after revision after revision. You may even kill the proposition before you invest too much time on it. Or better still identify a better, customer-centric proposition waiting in the wings.

Fear of focus groups

  • Tuesday, 7 July, 2009
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I was recently talking to some IT professionals.  We were talking about customer journeys and understanding the customer needs.  They were second guessing these, making assumptions about what is important to the customer how how the customer would best interact with the application.

“How about running a focus group with customers?” I suggested.  Blank expressions.  “Not sure” came the response, “we’ve never done those before”.

But you have done that before.  Every time you run a workshop with the business, that is a focus group.  The listening skills are the same.  Effective facilitation, and using stimuli to promote debate, elicit opinions and test ideas- they are the same.   You just have a different audience and call focus groups something different.

IT should have no fear of talking to real customers, end users.  Getting them together in workshops is something that should come as naturally to IT as it does to the marketeers.  Let’s get focus groups into the vocabulary of any IT project.

Customer value proposition model

Customer value proposition model

  • Wednesday, 1 July, 2009
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There may be a niche in the market, but is there a market for the niche?

How do you create a successful proposition?  If the answer was obvious there wouldn’t be so many failures out there in the market place.

It is easy to commence on a journey of product development with a hunch and clearly there is no substitute for validating ideas in the flesh.  That something at ThoughtWorks we do; helping clients test and learn, rapidly building ideas into tangibles that can be piloted at low cost and low risk before investing in significant build and spend.  However, sometimes a little more rigour is required before you commit to commencing a project in earnest.

That rigour needs to be focused.  What often happens is this rigour turns into a research phase that turns into a project itself.  It need not be this way.  There are certain things you can do, certain questions to ask as you set out on the journey of creating a new, compelling customer proposition.  What follows then is a strawman customer value proposition model to help test potential propositions before moving forward with them.  There are three components to the value proposition model; the customer, the environmental context and the organisation or company.

All too often propositions are rooted in the organisation.  They make assumptions about the demand or usage. This model attempts to broaden the analysis and focus upon the customer and the why the proposition will be attractive to them.  The model supports questions that may be asked to help shape thinking, test hypotheses and validate thinking.

I do not propose that this should become a major research exercise  (for example market sizing is a huge effort in itself), rather a tool for asking the right questions, and if the answers are hard to come by, maybe that suggests more thought is required in refining the proposition.

So here goes, a model that provides a framework for considering new customer value propositions.  It’s just an initial idea and I’d welcome feedback and suggestions.

Customer

Before you get too carried away with the proposition, a good starting point would be the customer.  Who are they and what do they do.  Let’s remember that your customer is not everybody.  Your proposition in unlikely to be appealing 24/7.  The challenge is to segment your target market and identify the triggers for action.

The persona: Who do?

Personas are a useful tool for bringing the customer to life.  Much has been written about them, but they are a useful tool for extracting broad data into specific stories that describe individuals. Realise that it is unlikely you will design for everybody. Start with the market that you are targeting, how large is it and what is its propensity to spend? Then within that target market segment the target customer base into different profile customers (personas). You need to understand which persona, which customer profile is most important – prioritise them and focus on the highest value.  This may mean deciding between high volume, low margin mass market and low volume, high margin niche appeal.  This decision needs to be made as early as possible to ensure the proposition remains focused and doesn’t try to be all things to all people, satisfying none.

Values, needs, wants and desires

People are not empty vessels waiting to consume and be filled with your proposition.  Their behaviour is driven by their values, needs, wants and desire.  These may be fundamentally rational (to satisfy a basic human goal) or emotional (to demonstrate status). They are cultural and time based.  Thinking in these terms helps you understand how the proposition will appeal to the customer at different levels.  Let’s take an example of this; a new mobile phone.

Before we think about what the product must do, what are the values that the persona associates with the phone. Is our target market a technophile or a technophobe? Jan Chipchase who works for Nokia includes ethnography in his research to understand how people use their phones; women carry them in their handbags, men in their pockets or their belts.

The basic need that the phone must meet to satisfy the customer, she must be able to make and receive calls.  If the product is unable to meet these needs it is not fit for purpose and the phone proposition will inevitably fail.

Just making phone calls meets the need but there are additional wants that should be satisfied for the product to be more compelling.  It’s a hassle to remember the number of every person she rings, the customer wants to be able to store numbers and see the number of the person who is calling.

Having the ability to see a photograph of her daughter as a screen saver on her phone is neither a need not a want.  The phone is useful and usable without that.  But the customer desires to personalise her phone by having a picture of her daughter on it.  Desirability is the key differentiator of the iPhone.  It doesn’t need to compete on features, it is a cool device that people talk about.  And here is a key decision you need to make on your proposition journey.  Are you looking to compete on parity or whether you want to make a difference.

Questions

  • What is the basic need that the proposition is trying to fulfil?
  • What counts as hygiene?
  • What does the customer need to be satisfied?
  • What does the customer want in addition to being just satisfied
  • What do other competive products do to maintain feature parity (if you feel you really need to compete on features alone – bad move!)
  • Few people would argue they don’t want simplicity and clarity in their interactions with products.  How could your product to make life easier for the customer?
  • What will make the customer feel good in themselves about owning the product?
  • What other products are “cool” or desirable to your target market.  How can you leverage the essence of those products?

Context

So now we are beginning to understand who the customer is, it is time to nest the proposition in terms of their context.  The old maxim that a half drunk bottle of water in a desert is worth its weight in gold, but on the streets of a city is worthless trash, should be remembered.  Even the best of propositions will deliver little value if they not only consider the customer, but also the context in which they apply: time, demand and usage.

Trigger

So the next step in the model is to ask why, when and how will the customer be attracted to the proposition. What is the trigger that drives the customer to move from awareness (assuming you have that) to action?  There is no point in a financial services company trying to sell me a car loan if I am wealthy enough to own my own car, or I do not drive.  Understand what triggers the customer to be interested in the proposition, when and why this happens.  How can your proposition be at front of mind when the trigger is set.

Questions

  • What lifestyle / lifestage events will trigger?
  • Internal events personal to the customer; leaving school, getting a first job, getting married, moving house, retiring etc
  • External events that they have no control over (think about sports sponsorship and tying a proposition to that sport, or tying a proposition to a celebrity e.g. Michael Jackson..)

Environment

It is very unlikely that the proposition will be wholly unique.  What is the competitive landscape, what noise will it need to be heard above to capture the consumers attention.  Whilst you may review the immediate competitors to see where threats and opportunities lie, what can you learn from other, unrelated products or domains?  How can you fuse together concepts from outside your immediate focus to bring new innovation to your product?  Scenario planning may come in useful, playing out different outcomes for different timelines other than that which you plan for.

Questions

  • What is the competitive landscape?
  • What can you learn about similar but unrelated propositions?
  • Have you considered the political, environmental social and technical influences using the old PEST analysis?
  • Have you considered different scenarios and how your proposition would play out under them; what unplanned disruptors could get in the way, or how could your proposition done differently disrupt the market?

The experience engine

Enough of the customer and externalities, what will the proposition look like and why will the target customer go with it? There are three engines within the organisation that drive the proposition, the experience, delivery and value engines.  So…

Utility

To be any good, the product has got to offer basic utility.  It has to do what it says it is going to do.  Sadly, too many products and customer propositions end there.  A utility product will match the consumers needs.  This is where most enterprise software sits…

  • What are the key customer needs that the proposition must fulfil?
  • What is the basic core functionality that must be met, what are the features that must be offered to gain traction in the market place?
  • What features that are typical on competitor products that we could do without?

Quality

I could call this next box usability (as this follows the UXD model) but I think it goes beyond just usability.  What is the quality of not only the immediate interface, but also with the supporting functions?  For example, if you have a call centre to back up the proposition, how many layers of IVR are you forced through?

  • Have you considered usability?
  • Is the packaging aesthetically pleasing?
  • The “happy path” customer journey may be well framed, but what about the “sad path”?  What about when things go wrong, what about when customers don’t act in the way you expect of predict them to act?

Brand

It is easy to get carried away with a new idea before thinking about what it means to the brand.  Typically there will be a strategic roadmap and whilst the proposition may be attractive it may not fit into where the brand is going.

  • Is the proposition complementary to the overall brand direction or does it require a new brand and identity?
  • Does the proposition support / leverage the brand?
  • Does the brand already ‘do it’ under another guise (are you reinventing a wheel that has already been tried somewhere, sometime in the organisation’s history?)
  • How will it be marketed?

Community

Finally, what is the ‘buzz’ that the proposition will create, what will get people talking and sharing it and how will you create this buzz.

  • Is there a social network component built in that gets people talking and connected?  How will it get people talking in external networks?
  • What will cause people to recommend it to others?
  • How can customers become part of its evolution?
  • What of the proposition will get people passionate, what will drive them away?

Delivery engine

People

A successful proposition needs not only a talented, passionate and committed team to deliver it to market, it also needs a similar team to run it and support it when it is live.  It is a common failing for a rogue “skunkworks” team to emerge in an organisation and develop what appears a compelling proposition, only to have it knocked back and closed down by the “Business as Usual” processes inherent in the organisation

  • Who do you need to make the proposition successful?  What is the team?
  • Who will create the proposition and who will lead it?  Is it IT led or business led?
  • What are the cross-organisational boundaries that the proposition crosses and how will these be eliminated?
  • Who will take ownership of the proposition once it crosses over into the market?

Process

  • What are the processes that will be required to sustain the proposition?
  • If the proposition will require changes to the organisation, how will they be managed, communicated and rolled out?
  • How will the proposition be supported once it is let loose in the market?
  • How will it be communicated to customers?
  • How will you create new sales – sales force.

Technology

  • What is the technology that will underpin the proposition?
  • Is it possible to test the ideas using rapid languages such as Ruby on Rails before committing it to the enterprise Java stack?
  • What integration is really necessary and what can be worked around?
  • How can you deliver a beta version in the shortest period of time?
  • How will you avoid heavyweight frameworks and develop incrementally to deliver value early and often?
  • How performant and scalable must the innovation be?

Value Engine

At its most simplistic, how much will the proposition cost and how much revenue will it generate?  Does it offer cost saving opportunities?  Are there intangible benefits that will be accrued?  Ultimately is it a viable proposition that is worth pursuing, or will the cost to develop and run outweigh the value it will add?  Building out a financial model can take time, in the first instance this should be a napkin analysis, a wake-up call to make sure there is value in the proposition before too much time is invested in it.

Cost

Every day someone is working on the proposition it is costing you money.  The quicker you can get something to market the faster you will start seeing a return on your investment, similarly the sooner you can “get something out there”, “test and learn” the sooner you can kill a proposition that does not fulfill its promise.

  • How quickly can you get a beta to market?
  • How many people, how many days?
  • What will the cost be to develop the infrastructure?
  • Do you have the skills in house or will you need to go external?

Benefit / Revenue

At its most crude, how will the proposition make money, but there may be more to what we wish to achieve.  Is the proposition actually going to cut costs, a result of regulatory pressures or a CSR initiative?
What are the benefits that will be accrued – both tangible (e.g. financial) and intangible (e.g. social, environmental etc)

  • If you are selling units are you going for high volume low margin or low volume high margin?
  • If it an on-line proposition “advertising” is often seen as the source of revenue.

There are two additional components to the model…

Implementation

Having a compelling proposition is one thing, it is another to successfully communicate it and roll it out to target customers.

  • In a crowded market place, how will the proposition stand out?
  • What are the brand values it will communicate?
  • What is the story that customers will hear and how will they hear that story?
  • How will customers interact with the proposition, what channels will you use to take it to market?
  • What is the roll out strategy?

Retain and grow

Winning customers is only the first step.  A successful proposition will maintain a long-term relationship with its profitable customers, maintaining the warmth they have to the original proposition and cross-selling and up-selling new ones.

  • How will you retain them and turn them into repeat customers and passionate advocates of the proposition?
  • How will the proposition grow lifetime customer value?
  • What can be cross-sold or up-sold?
  • What can you bundle?
  • How will the proposition deal with churn?

OK, so it’s not a perfect model and by no means complete.  There’s some duplication in the thinking and many questions missing, but as any model it can be used to guide and prompt thinking and ensure there are no elephants left in the room when the first line of code gets cut.  I’d welcome any comments on its usefulness, utility and direction.

If you say Log out, log me out

  • Tuesday, 30 June, 2009
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You’ve logged into your on-line banking checked your balance, paid your bills.  What do you do now?  Click on the logout button?

What do you expect will happen now?  Well given that you have actively chosen to log-out (it’s not something you are likely to click on my mistake), you’d expect to do exactly that.  Logout.  The next screen you get will probably be something that thanks you for on-line banking, with a cross sell for a product or two.

That’s what I assume most customers would expect.  So what are Alliance and Leicester thinking about with this screen?

The customer has clicked log-out but they are still logged in?

Why?

“You are still logged in to Internet Banking – before you go have a look at Your offers.”

Excuse me, I logged out, I don’t need to be logged in for you to show me offers.

Worse: “Are you sure you want to log out?”

OF COURSE I WANT TO LOG OUT!!! Why else would I have clicked the link.

Alliance and Leicester fail here in a fundamental usability rule, that of managing the customer’s expectation. In an application where security isn’t paramount this would be an error, in an application where customers expect their action of leaving their secure accounts will do exactly that… but doesn’t, is inexcusable.

SOA, architecture without foundation

  • Monday, 29 June, 2009
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Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) is something that is easy for the lay person to understand.  (Try getting a techie to explain REST and you will see the attraction of SOA to the business person – it’s understandable!)  Understandable, in my non-techie hands, is dangerous.  I am entirely unqualified to pass judgment on it, but there are a couple of  things I’ve observed and have been on my mind when I’ve seen SOA nastiness going on.  So excuse me whilst I wax lyrical.

Problem 1. IT haven’t got a clue.

My (lay) understanding of SOA: IT build ‘services’ that can be consumed by different applications.  SOA enables us to remove duplication and build the foundations for a scalable architecture that will accommodate changing requirements as the business evolves and grows.  Herein lies the problem; IT build ‘services’, second guessing what the business actually needs from said service.

Exhibit One:  Customer Details Service. It exposes details of customers to any application that will use information about customers.   It was designed by the architect in isolation based upon what IT believe a Customer Details Service will be required to do (e.g. the nature of the fields, the domain etc).  This is even though no application has been built, yet alone specified for (“we just know we are going to need customer details”).  It’s putting the cart before the horse.  But IT go ahead and build the service anyway, because they own SOA.   At a later date the business articulate requirements for a new downstream application that requires Customer Details.  It’s the Corporate Business whose domain is Corporate Customers.  But what happens?  The service doesn’t quite meet their requirements.  The fields are wrong.  The Customer Details Service fits the domestic consumer model but not the corporate customers model.  What gives? More likely than not the downstream application.  The corporate customer has to be shoe-horned into the domestic customer service. I’ve seen this done.

Lesson 1. Don’t build SOA in a void.  Get out of that architectural ivory tower and engage with the business (if you can get them to listen – see next point). Better still engage in Guerrilla SOA.

Problem 2. The business haven’t got a clue.

One of the sad realities of the corporate world is that walls that have sprung up and created internal silos that are difficult to bridge.  As the business, the consumer of technology, I want IT to deliver to my requirements, no more, no less.  If I am in the domestic consumer part of the business, frankly I don’t care about Corporate customers.  I’m fighting for my budget, and hell, if this SOA thing is going to cost more than doing a closed application that fits only domestic customers, that only I can use I don’t care.  I’m not going to pay for a “Customer Details” service that does anything except give me what I need to know about my customer.

Lesson 2. The architects should facilitate the discussion.  SOA is as much about your business vision as it is technical architecture.  Unless the business grasps what you are trying to do, drives the solution and requirements are both local and global, before long you’ll see some grand services that few use in the core and chaos is the periphery where the real business is done.

Bottom line?  All too often architects fail because they tend to focus upon the architecture part of SOA rather than the services.    Unfortunately, because of the siloed nature of so may organisaitons, unless it is driven by the architects it is unlikely to gain traction.  If there is a maxim that should be followed when considering SOA in an organisation, it is probably instilling the notion of ‘think local, act global’.

What time does the meeting start

  • Tuesday, 16 June, 2009
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Lotus Notes is a gem of a product for usability howlers. Barely a day goes by without me cursing or swearing at it.  Here’s an example of its dumbness…  Without thinking, what time does the meeting start?  I mean, what time do I, in the UK, need to dial in to the conference call?

Does this train go to Bangor?

  • Tuesday, 2 June, 2009
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Over the loudspeaker comes a garbled message “…this train divides at Chester.  Customers for Bangor must travel in the front four coaches of the train”.
There was a group of women behind me talking loudly, one of them picked out part of the message and was worried.  The train guard (sorry, Customer Revenue Protection Officer) walked by.
One of the women got his attention, “Excuse me, we’re going to Bangor?” she said.
“Oh” said the guard.  “You need to get out at Milton Keynes and walk to the front of the train”.
“What? We need to change trains?” the woman replied.
“No, it is the same train, just the front part of it.”
“Is it on the same platform?” Asked the woman.
“Yes, just walk up a little” replied the guard.
“We don’t need to cross over to another platform then?”
“No, it is the same platform, the same train”
“So why can’t we stay on this train then”
“Because this part of the train divides at Chester?”
“But we’re not going to Chester, we’re going to Bangor”
The guard was getting frustrated, “when the train stops at the next station, you just need to get out and walk up the platform, in fact to the next carraige and get on the train there”
“So why can’t we walk through the train to the next carraige?”
“Because it is a different train”
“but this train is going to Bangor isn’t it?  We are on the right train aren’t we?”

And so on until a fellow passenger jumped in “when we get to Milton Keynes, I’ll show you where to go” and at Milton Keynes he led them all off the train to walk past the train divide on the platform and I’ll assume they made it to Bangor in one peice.

The point of this narative is that not everybody “gets it”.  Just because you think something is straight forward or obvious doesn’t mean that your customers will.  You are not your customer, be wary of making assumptions on how people will use your Great New Product.

Innovation through the recession

  • Thursday, 30 April, 2009
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Two men were running through the jungle chased by a lion.  One of them stopped, took off his backpack and took his trainers out.  The other man turned around. “Why are you putting your trainers on?” he asked, “They won’t make you run faster than the lion”. To which the man replied “I don’t need to run faster than the lion…”

In the current market conditions just blindly running won’t get you ahead of your competitors.  And standing still is not a sustainable option.  Those that succeed won’t be the ones that batten down the hatches and retreat to the trenches, history shows it will be those that continue to innovate and cultivate ideas.  During the 1990-91 recession, according to a Bain & Company study, twice as many companies leaped from the bottom of their industries to the top as did so in the years before and after.

“Even though we’re in an economic downturn, we’re in an innovation upturn” said Bill Gates at the time.

In the 1920’s Post and Kellogg’s went into the recession head to head. Post cut back, it reined in expenses and slashed advertising budget.  Kelloggs meanwhile maintained their marketing spend and pushed their newly launched product, Rice Krispies.  Today Kellogg’s are a household name.  Where are Post?

IT organisations are retreating to core, keeping the lights on and holding off any “non-essential’ projects, innovation included.  This is a shortsighted viewpoint, but not entirely unexpected.  With project life cycles taking so long, innovation traditionally takes significant investment and time to see results.  Modern lean and agile approaches to IT are a challenge to this entrenched view.  It is possible to innovate at speed.  It is possible to take an idea and turn it into something tangible in weeks rather than years.  Let’s start with the idea.  Where does it come from?  You could get the brightest minds from expensive management consultancy firms, but they take time. And in uncertain times, what do they really know? (I speak with experience having once been a customer strategy management consultant).  Alternatively you could harvest ideas from your customers.  That’s what IdeaStorm does for Dell.  And Mix does for Oracle (built by ThoughtWorks by the way). Don’t restrict this to your customers, building an internal ideas engine in the enterprise yields great results.

So once you’ve got the idea, how do you nurture it from a vision into a proposition that has legs?

Product innovation is all very well, but do you have the capability and the attitude to really do it?  In the current ecomomic climate, unless product innovation is in your DNA, chances are it will need to be accompanied by process innovation.  Why? Because most organisational processes are slow, cumbersome and hinder the agility required to really innovate.

In 2009, if there’s one thing that organizations need, it’s agility. Our economy and the business environment are a steady stream of ups, downs and rapid change; in such an environment, the ability to sense, respond and react are true survival skills!

At ThoughtWorks we do both these things for our clients all the time, helping them introduce aligity into the whole product development lifecycle; product innovation through process innovation.  It starts with helping them rapidly distill their vision into something concrete, then prirotising and estimating what is important before building it at speed with quality to get innovation to market; fail fast or succeed sooner.

Recession doesn’t make the market need disappear. Andrew Rezeghi in this great paper (which is abound with stories of companies who have innovated through recession) argues you should invest in your customers, now they need you most, loyalty hangs in the balance.  Whilst the market may be driving down prices, now is the time to focus on experience based differentiation.  How can you use digital channels to engage with your customers in new and compelling ways?  How can you harness social media and new interaction paradigms to delight and engage your customers?  Ho can you innovate at speed? Go beyond your product and grow roots for lifetime value when the good times return.

Test Driven Design

  • Wednesday, 29 April, 2009
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I recently worked with a client where one of our deliverables were wireframes that illustrated how pages would be laid out and how the UI would work.  We were quite pleased with the results, there was some quite complex AJAX based functionality that provided a really immersive, goal orientated experience that looked like it would make finding products easy and enjoyable.  Testing the initial wireframes with users was an enlightening exercise, and demonstrated that the wireframes we had developed were not yet ready – users were not able to fulfill the goals they were set.  More worrying, some of the complex functionality we were introducing just did not work (some of the navigation, filters and sorts were confusing, just presenting information on a single page would suffice).

Usability testing often gets discussed and is a good intention but all too often budgetary or time constraints mean it never happens.  The user testing I refer to here impacted neither.  We did our testing in a meeting room, the customer sitting at one end with a facilitator, and the team watching on the projection screen in the same room.  We used a talk-aloud protocol walking through the static powerpoint wireframes that were linear in their presentation according to the ‘happy path’ to realise the customer goal.  Someone took notes as we went through the wireframes (in the notes section at the bottom of the PowerPoint deck).   It was quick and dirty but produced results.  After a couple of sessions things that we, too close to the design, had missed.  Changes to the wireframes took a few hours and allowed retesting the following day.  Indeed we made some quite significant changes to the user interaction model.  When we re-tested the wireframes the improvements were evident.  The feedback was more positive; there were fewer blank faces, less confusion and “I’ve no idea what to do next” was never uttered.  This was true iterative design in cycles that took a few hours.  Compare this to the days if code was involved.

Where does this fit into the agile way of delivering software?  In the agile/ lean zealot’s passion (and impatience) delivery, and their (dogmatic?) assertion that anything but code (working software) is waste, they loose focus upon what is really important, that of overall product quality.  Product quality is not only zero/ minimal defects and meeting the business requirement, but also delivering something that is usable and delightful to use.  Developers may do Test Driven Development, but this is based on assumptions that what they will code is right.  TDD should start earlier in the process, Test Driven Design.  It takes time to write your tests up-front, but we know it to be a good thing.  So why not design the user interface (wireframes) and test that up front?

Using stories to sell products

  • Tuesday, 28 April, 2009
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Dolls are girls stuff.   I don’t count Action Man (Which I had a few of as a youngster) dolls.  But being a Daddy of two girls, dolls start to be part of my world.  Wandering down Michigan avenue in Chicago on Saturday I stumbled across American Girl. Not only have they have elevated the doll beyond a product and into an experience, they have created an experience around the buying and owning of their dolls.  The product, the doll, is almost secondary to the narrative.  Every doll has a back story,  indeed they come with a paperback to describe this story.  Books build on this story, as do DVDs computer games as well as the dolls clothes, furniture and accessories all extending the product experience.

Wandering around the store I passed the doll hair salon (dolls sitting on doll-sized hairdressers chairs with their hair being plaited, braided, styled, blow dried…), the hospital (fixing broken dolls, returned to the owner wearing a hospital gown and discharge certificate), the historical doll museum (dolls representing children from different eras)… Walking into the American Girl I had no intention of spending any money there.  I ended up buying two dolls and clothes, I bought into the experience and took home to my girls not just presents from Daddy’s worldwide travels but also a story to tell.

Dolls are a product that it is (arguably) easy to create stories, narrative and experience around.  It is easy to provide this as a case study, but harder for a completely unrelated industry (such as financial services) to learn anything from it.  Harder, but not impossible.  Look at comparethemarket and the way they are building a story with Aleksandr around what is a pretty dull product.  As you develop a new product or application, can you build a narrative that supports the product?  Once you start telling a story, what new insights come to mind? How can you build an experience beyond the immediate product?

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