In 1995 I published my first paper on customer experience design in the journal Human-Computer Interaction. Titled Delivering Competitive Edge, discussing the way in which usability could give competitive edge to products, services and companies by developing closer collaborations between human factors and marketing practitioners.
We discussed how user-centred design practices could complement those in marketing, explaining how our Human Factors department had:
…adopted an approach we call ‘designing the customer experience’. At its heart was a programme of research into human needs. By bringing together Marketing and Human Factors with more radical perspectives such as semiotics and anthropology, creative and visualisation skills, and rapid technological advances, we have generated an environment for user-centred innovation.
The subtitle of Customer Experiences with Soul is A New Era in Design. There are a number of aspects of our approach which I have never seen in any other book on customer experience design, the main ones being universal human values, the transition of consciousness, collaboration vs ‘knotworks’, an extensive range of Brazilian case studies and Latin American culture, a focus on being, and finally the development of a new design tool we call the holonomic circle which is based on the philosophical practices of phenomenology and hermeneutics. Continue reading “Deepening our Approach to Customer Experience Design and Design Thinking”
