Human-Driven Experience

9The Value of Promoting Authenticity, Reputation, and Real Engagement

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it.

—Warren Buffett

Something I think that gets lost in the fray is spending a lot of time as marketers, as service people, as business leaders, extrapolating what we think people want. Unfortunately, we don't often make a real effort to walk in their shoes, meaning, going through the actual process as though you're the customer. And by the way, in our everyday lives, we often are the customer. Ironically, we seem to have a kind of convenient amnesia when it comes to this fact. We erroneously believe that we couldn't possibly be providing a terrible experience for our customers because we put so much effort and spend so much money in making the experience great.

But truth be told, the digital experiences we deliver to our customers, employees, and others are in many cases sorely lacking in basic human empathy. They don't allow for the things that we as humans get stuck on, get frustrated by, or simply desire. Instead, we deliver a lot of pain and frustration. That is all the more reason to apply empathetic design to our customer/employee-facing digital systems, humanizing the experience. Let's consider seven ways to do just that.

Be the Customer

If you haven't actually been a customer of the thing that you're trying to sell—a product, a service, whatever it might be—then you shouldn't start any new digital initiatives, especially large, complex, ...