When a small enterprise offers a lousy user experience, the person in charge learns about it, fast.
Customers leave, visitors bounce, complaints roll in. It’s expensive and it undermines the goals of the organization. Fortunately, in a small organization, the person with the ability to make change happen hears about it and can take action.
In a large organization, like my bank, the resources to make things better are dramatically bigger and largely underused.
That’s because the person who should take action has other priorities. Not only aren’t they exposed to the valuable feedback that frontline workers get (because the organization doesn’t reward ‘bad’ news), but they haven’t prioritized getting the user experience right.
It seems more important to please the boss, go to meetings and keep the numbers on track than it is to fix what might not feel broken.
Spend some time in the store.
Visit your own website to get work done the way a customer would.
Answer the tech phone calls for a few hours.
And figure out how to turn the user experience into a metric that’s as easy to measure as how much money you made last month.
December 4, 2020
Unlike natural phenomena like orbiting planets or geologic formations, there are no consistent and perfect laws of human behavior.
If we’re talking about groups of people, if we’re teaching, leading or trying to predict future behavior (all three are related) then we’re making a generalization.
And perhaps we don’t realize it, or aren’t clear that we are.
“In general, in many settings, most kindergarten kids have trouble getting through a long day without a nap.”
That’s not quite the same as, “all kids need a nap.”
Useful generalizations are essential to productive interventions and generous leadership.
Without generalizations, it’s almost impossible to begin to serve people.
And there lies the trap. If we stick with them too long, or insist that they are absolute, or fail to seek out the exceptions that all generalizations have, then we end up excluding or ignoring people who need to be seen. Which betrays all the work we set out to do.
We begin with a market or an audience, but we ultimately serve the individual.
December 3, 2020
How do you act when you’re not thinking about how you act? When no one is looking and when you’re just doing what you’re doing…
That’s the automatic self. No narrative, no second-guessing.
Now, here’s the real question:
Has your automatic self changed since you were a kid?
If it has (and I hope it has) then that’s all the proof we need that the automatic self isn’t a given, it’s not hard-wired and it’s not permanent.
In fact, it changes from practice. It’s a skill.
We can learn to be the ‘authentic’ version of ourselves that we’d like to live with.
It takes habits, learning and feedback. And the commitment to become a better version of ourselves.
December 2, 2020
Just about everyone over the age of fifteen, anywhere in the world, engages in the market in some way. We need things and we buy them.
That’s not what shopping is.
Shopping is the act of imagining what you might want. It’s the thrilling but risky exchange of money for something that you’ve never purchased before. Something that might be better than you hope, but it might not.
In some communities, shopping is so foreign and risky that it simply doesn’t happen.
Shopping is a cultural activity, with styles and approaches varying depending on who you are and where you live.
Shopping releases chemicals in our brain. In many cases, particularly with luxury goods, it’s this emotional shift that we’re actually paying for, not the thing we’re buying.
The trillion-dollar industries that are based on shopping as a sport (as distinguished from buying what we need) are relatively new, but have been around long enough that many of us take them for granted–normal activities that appear to have always been around.
Money is a story. Your story is probably different from everyone else’s. Our relationship with debt, savings and earning money is extraordinarily complex. Consumer credit has turned from a convenience and useful bridge into, for many people, a trap.
Gift cards, garage sales and self-storage units start to reveal just how many layers we’ve built up around our commitment to shopping.
In small doses, for many people, shopping can produce happiness. But it doesn’t usually scale.
More stuff might not be the substitute for the things that we truly want.
December 1, 2020
