From a trends perspective I see the continual embracement of better design experiences. In the early 2000s we were seeing technology trump design. Brands were happy enough with giving customers functionality and customers were happy enough to stay loyal to the brands that gave it to them. Consumers don’t choose a bank because it has online banking anymore. They choose a bank that can do online banking better. Look around at all the lack luster sites out there maintained by big brands. There is a global effort going on to clean up these sites. As designers we were hearing a lot of people say “good enough”. Not anymore. Now technology is the price of entry, and the experiences are driving the functionality rather than the other way around. It was like we were building epic movies with state of the art special effects. They were cool, but the plots were lost. Brands are now looking to build better sites that listen to their customers, deliver on their expectations and give them what they are looking for more intuitively. Brands are attempting to know what their customers want before they themselves know what they want. The evolution has mashed technological enablement with creative design experiences built on a foundation of customer insight and brand.
Comments (2)
Couldn't agree more. Mash-ups among technology, design and service are hugely important. No longer is a site ever "finished." Whatever a customer can do on the latest site -- be it a social network site like Facebook or another brand's site -- they immediately expect to be able to do it on your site.
The worst is companies who say they're customer-focused but provide no way for customers to talk back on their sites, or don't promptly and personally respond to customers' comments, or make it easy for customers to share with other customers.
It's no longer about your site. It's about what the customer wants to do at your site, and as Matthew points out, good enough just isn't good enough.
Posted by Lois Kelly | December 3, 2007 9:25 PM
Posted on December 3, 2007 21:25
My guess is that as customers become more design-savvy on the whole, the market is one of the drivers behind the need for better design. This can be seen not only in interactive, but also in basic urban planning: the more educated a populace, the more intelligently its locale is design. It's what the market demands. Take, for example, Greenwich Avenue in Greenwich, Connecticut. It's a public street but it serves a very sophisticated clientele. Hence: no big boxes, strict design demands on the downtown, etc. Couple of miles away in Port Chester, New York (last census: officially 40% Hispanic; much lower socioeconomic background that Greenwich), the downtown's been decimated by a Costco/LNT/movieplex. The "customers" didn't demand anything better. They didn't know to.
Same thing could be argued for the web user of 2007 v. 2002. We didn't know any better back then; we do now.
(See also: fact that consumers will pay a premium for that which is well designed)
Posted by ANP | December 3, 2007 9:50 PM
Posted on December 3, 2007 21:50