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Bonding with the Customer

After reading a recent post on the blog her Nature his Nature titled “Take Your Customer To Work Day”, I couldn’t help but think about it’s similarity to the concepts of Participatory Design & Field Research all leading to an informed Design for User Experience.

In the article, author “shazell” highlights the importance of providing a level of clarity & transparency to the customer about how your business works and cares for their use of your companies products and/or services. As the article also points out, this could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the business and, of course, how the company treats their customer.

In the world of Participatory Design, much of the same is true. Its effectiveness is highly dependent on the clarity and perspective a business has towards their community of customers. If they truly care about how they serve and provide products or services for their customer, then this mode of research is incredibly effective. The basic principle is to allow the customer to have an active voice in the design of products that your company is ultimately designing for their user or consumption. The idea behind this is, from a marketing perspective, that you have the potential to limit your risk of poor market penetration.

On this same note, Field Research has many of the same effects, but almost in reverse. Field Research provides a design team the opportunity to experience how a customer uses the product or service they are designing for. Never conducted in a lab, the intent is to allow the designer (or researcher) into the daily life of the customer, essentially giving the designer the opportunity to “live the brand of the customer”.

What I find most interesting about this idea of “Take Your Customer To Work Day” is that in a few cases, this is actually happening. Take Etsy as an example. The online marketplace for all things handmade, has been building incredibly tight bonds with their buyers and sellers by inviting them into the Brooklyn headquarters to produce their goods. Pretty friendly, huh? And bringing a whole new meaning to the term “User Experience”.

And in some way, entrepreneurial gem Threadless is opening their doors to the customer party, though in a fairly different manner. The online community retailer of t-shirt designers and buyers has redefined what it means to be a company. The company has completely blurred the line between customer & consumer in a marketplace, and one might say they see themselves hardly as an intermediary, but instead, truly a participant in the community.

So in closing, as we see more and more creative uses for Social Media tools, our perspectives on the topic of User Experience evolve, finding new ways to connect to each other, and find new ways to share experiences between business & consumer.