…Because hands know more than you know!
Many organisations think that spending and investing money into new technologies is enough to grant a successful Digital Transformation. Yet, despite the exponential increase in technology spending, only 1 in 8 companies are getting digital transformation right.
Why is that?
UX is a mindset that connects strategy and design through the understanding of what is valuable and meaningful both for the users and the organisations. And in such a scenario, research is the link that allows organisation strategies to become experiences.
In an experience economy the value of a product or a service is not anymore limited to a price tag, but it is determined by the quality of the experiences delivered. This implies that organisations need to shift their focus from the product to embrace the intangible experiential elements and shape those elements to support the wider strategy through an effective and meaningful engagement with the users.
Cocreating experience: the power of collaboration
This is an excerpts from Co-Creation: Finding The Cubed Factor For Customer Experience (CX).
UX has helped global organizations to think and take into consideration how their users and customers interact with brands and companies through interfaces, digital services and the whole ecosystem. UX has also brought users closer to brands by involving user opinions.
However, when UX is in action, brands often leave UX to manage the conversation. UX researchers, consultants and designers often act as the man in the middle, interpreting both the brands’ goals and the users’ expectations. As much as UX accomplishes, global organizations are still not engaged and are still not talking with their customers.
This missing exchange is crucial. It has become clear, in fact, that customers are more focused on the experiential elements of a product and a brand than the product itself. As J. Pine and Gilmore put it, “An experience occurs when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event.”
The key to bridging the conversation gap between Global companies and their customers is “co-creation.”
Read the rest here.
[Thoughts after Mex15, Slides at the end]
Markets are conversations
It was back in March 1999 when a group of forward thinking people published a revolutionary book based on 95 thesis that explained that the old business models were disrupted by internet and technologies. They said that markets were conversations,they explained that it was time to start listening to the consumers and to engage in conversations.
The book, The Cluetrain Manifesto, was a revolutionary and visionary text that clearly saw the direction technologies were taking society and the business. Internet and technologies dramatically changed in these 16 years, but every change reinforced the thesis of the Cluetrain Manifesto, proving how old business models were obsolete and could lead companies and business into a quick obsolescence.
Cocreation brings together individuals
[Excerpt. The full article is available on UXBooth. Many thanks to Marli Mesibov].
“In the past decade, new technologies ranging from Twitter to customer service chat-windows have led to an increase in the quantity and quality of interactions between people and organizations. But listening to user feedback isn’t where the company-user interactions end. Today more than 50% of Fortune 500 companies have made co-creation an integral part of their innovation strategy, as Andrew Welch—Chief Executive Officer of Y&R reports.
Yet in user experience design, most organizations take a traditional approach to user research and design, using a researcher to act as a middle-man between users, designers, and business stakeholders. Users are consulted in the process, but not given creative control over solutions.
Co-creation in action
Co-creation: who should be involved?
When saying all stakeholders we do not refer to the largest majority of users available, as they can be reached with crowdsourcing initiatives. It’s not about quantity, but quality. As several studies from early ’90s have demonstrated, involving lead users, who are those individuals that have needs that are advanced with respect to an important marketplace trend and expect to benefit significantly by obtaining a solution to those needs (Herstatt & Von Hippel 1992) can have a significant impact on the results, proving that quantity is not synonymous of quality.
Prill’s crowd sourcing campaign
Media & Co-creation
Looking into the media, we find a number of articles claiming that companies are applying co-creation; yet, looking closer would reveal that those initiatives are something slightly different.
Coca-cola is said to be using co-creation a lot, but as David Moth (2012) on e-consultancy writes: “When Coca-Cola’s ad agencies ran out of ideas for a marketing brief, the company decided to turn to an online community to crowdsource some ideas”. So, what Coca-cola did, was an open call for ideas, asking the community to share individual ideas from where the company can dig for future inspiration. Coca-cola had over 3.600 submissions.
LegoViews 