User Experience: Peter Merholz

Last week I was at a MIMA salon regarding user experience. The featured speaker was Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path. The subject of his talk was “Designing for an Uncertain World.” Outside of the technical difficulties with his Mac crashing (and they say Macs don’t get sick), it was a great presentation. The big ideas from his talk have implications for user experience, brand, and symbolic identity. Peter says the experience is the product. I agree. I feel that the desired experience for your customer should serve as an organizing hub. Mixing my metaphors, that organizing hub becomes the compass or star to guide you in times of uncertainty. It helps you understand, communicate and ground your symbolic identity. It helps you remember who you are, as an organization, and can prevent you from getting caught up in a features/functions commodity game. This applies to the customer experience across all channels and media. Your customer rarely makes a purchase decision in one channel – make sure your channels positively reinforce each other providing for a smooth customer experience.

While this won’t do the talk justice, here are some other take-aways from Peter’s presentation:
* Work from the user experience in (experience, features, data), rather than data out. What is the experience you want your customer to have? From there work backwards to see what it will take to make that happen.

* Big experience breakthroughs come from working on problems others consider solved. Some examples provided where one-button cameras, MP3/iPods showing the possibilities of mobile music, and TiVo showing us what is possible when it comes to recording television programming.

* The concept of working on problems others consider solved was utilized by Steve Jobs when describing the Mac in the early to mid ‘80s.\

* Don’t be all things to all people. That’s a recurring theme on this blog and I’m glad to see it applied to areas other than brand identity.

Unfortunately, the presentation is not online yet. It should be on the MIMA site in the near future. Other MIMA stuff of note, Jason Fried of 37 Signals will be a keynote speaker at the October Sumit.