Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World

Understanding and Affecting Experience

Business management is obsessed with attributes that can be measured and improved: return on investment, share of market, productivity. Even the notion of quality has been defined and converted into formulas so that businesses can better manage this subjective attribute.

Experience sometimes fails to gain traction because it's tough to quantify, and you can't point at it. Yet "great user experience" always appears as a bullet in the PowerPoint presentation for every new product and service that gets pitched to upper management. Few organizations move beyond the bullet point because a great experience is difficult to plan for, and almost impossible to spec.

Good Experiences Require Systemic Coordination

Organizations may find a system view far more accessible than an experience view. After all, systems need organizing, and infrastructure demands management. But even within a system view, organizations still have considerable difficulty planning and executing systems across channels and organizational silos.

The functional dependencies of systems are well understood, and organizations generate reams of system architecture diagrams. Rarely do they create such maps from a customer perspective, even though it's imperative that companies know what happens to customers who are trying to piece together a couple of touchpoints into solutions for their individual situations.

By definition, systems are composed of multiple components. To deliver value to the ...