Razorfish have just released their consumer experience report for 2008 and it makes interesting reading. (Link)
The first thing that hits you is the focus upon the importance of social networking. I read this report just after reading a BBC news article “Bosses should embrace Facebook”, (link) in which Demos report on how companies are increasingly having to relate to employee use of social networking solutions. Razorfish, based upon their own user studies, conclude that social networking forms a major part of our online lives. Demos note however that companies are concerned that employees “waste” their time on social sites, without seeing the potential it gives for innovation within the organisation. It seems to me that companies are trying to not see the facts, and are therefore missing out on considerable innovation potential, both within their organisations and in the services they provide.
The second thing that hits you is the total focus upon consumer experience throughout the report. For Razorfish, experience design is based upon a combination of a thorough understanding of customer needs, wants and desires, together with a solid understanding of company brand and offering. It is this I find most interesting, because I think together, this understanding is a strong springboard for creating relevant and powerful experiences for customers. It also coincides with three of the AT-ONE letters; Need, Offering and Experience.
Finally, two other important observations. First, the power of gaming, with some good advice and examples, particularly the Lipton game (link) which shows how engagement can be created from something as humble as a tea-bag. Secondly, the importance of visualisation.
Visualisation might suprise you, but I think that this is an overlooked area in online service-design. The examples they give might wake you up to the fact that the web has quickly evolved to become a visual medium (from a text medium) and that companies have buckets of transaction data that can be useful once visualised. Banking is a great example. It seems that online banking has really focussed upon putting offline banking services (ie. paper based) online without thinking of the added value that can be given through visualisation. This is one of the lessons from AT-ONE – each touch-point has its own unique potential, and the idea of cross-publication without considering these potentials, will lead to a lowest common denominator solution – i.e. text-heavy without the experiential aspects. And thats just something customers don’t want.