Bridging the expectations and experience gap
Par Sandrine Prom Tep, le 22 mai 2009
I remember back to my Master’s school years at the LRCM studying Bastien and Scapin’s ergonomics criteria (a class worksheet version in French), and being taught that all criteria are crucially important but are never all at work at once!
Flexibility–complexity is the classic arm-wrestling example of two incompatible criteria. Smart phones are not just intelligent, they are complex to use (and please don’t throw in the iPhone as counterexample…).
“How to target the right trade-offs then?” At this precise point of wonder, the numerous top 10 quick-and-dirty usability checklists are useless and start unveiling their deceit promise…while the first wisdom lesson begins for the true believer, the user interface’s wrestler…
Get ready for Ergonomics lesson 2.
The second lesson the ergonomics student struggle with is to discover that experience is often considered best when it fits a mental model. Toilet paper rolls on a restaurant table as napkins substitutes can do the job and appear ‘cool’ once - but can never be reconciled with a restaurant mental model…
Ok, I agree, this one implies gross visualization but I saw it for good in a restaurant…and the truth remains: some trial-outs work up your mental model and some JUST don’t. Still, along with (or thanks to?) timely trial-and-errors, our interaction experiences keep evolving, and we always end up reconciling some evolutions with the basic scripted models to mold them anew.
And that’s exactly what I am getting at for interface design ergonomic trade-offs: to make them efficient, the right balance between expectation and experience ought to be striken in your Web site pages – way beyond the toilet paper rolls’ reductive metaphor for a restaurant’s experience innovation failure…;-)
But how to strike that slight interface expectation–experience gap when you redesign a Web site? Feel no worry, I will not pull out another 5-point design checklist to shoot an answer, I already mentioned it’s useless beyond working out attractive titles for readers to click on…What I’d like to introduce you to, is the CEM vs CRM table.
CEM vs CRM or the gap between expectations and experience
As a graphic excerpt from the article ‘Understanding Customer Experience’ by Christopher Meyer and Andre Schwager (in the HBR, Feb. 2007 issue), this table lists the differences between Customer Relationship Management and Customer Experience Management. The WHAT, WHEN, HOW, WHO and WHY differences of the two types of customer data CEM and CRM tackle and collect.
Here is my extreme shortcut to a thorough analysis of this CEM vs CRM table. CRM comes after the EXPERIENCE and CEM works hard on anticipating it. Let’s compare the WHAT difference for instance: CEM captures and distributes what a customer think about a company, while CRM captures and distributes what a company knows about a customer. And now let’s check for the data collection points/moment, or according to the CEM vs CRM table, the WHEN difference as the former approach relies on customer interaction/touch points VS interaction records for the latter. I am not suggesting to quit CRM, but can CEM bridge the expectations – experience gap left by CRM?
Put differently, where would you like to situate your experience approach: leading or lagging customer experience?
If you wish to dig the topic further: here is a related post on how to measure experience.
Sujet : Commerce électronique, Consommateur, Ergonomie et utilisabilité |
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