Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

I should have a voracious appetite for consuming competitive web design and researching Nielsen/Nelson/Nickleback usability 101s. How could I possibly do my job properly if I'm not informed about every subtle design nuance or web porn monetization strategy? In reality, my approach seems to have more in common with some kind morose, laconic, insular rock/pop group - "We don't, like, listen to other bands. They're all sh...".

I can only list about three web sites that I visit on a daily basis. One of those is Google Reader, so, from a pure design perspective, I'm not even going to count it (harsh, but fair). Which leaves me with two. One of those is just a terrible customer experience anyway, but it sell tickets to concerts where I live, so I don't care. Which leaves me with Facebook, which I only look at daily to see how unpopular I am, and is overrun with vampires. So really, I don't much look at any web sites these days. Is that a terrible admission? I just got bored of looking at stuff for the sake of it some time ago. I'm not one of those hunched-back, dribbling ex-engineers who delights in telling anybody who cares that I was designing web sites for NCSA Mosaic before anyone had even decided the Internet was just a fad(sm). But I was. Of course, back then it was pretty much just seeing what you could make blink with the blink tag, but it was customer experience design, nonetheless.

Fast forward fourteen years, and a lot of design has flashed before me (literally 'flashed' in many cases). Some of it went in, some of it didn't. Lots of it was rubbish, some of it was fantastic (I successfully unleashed a whole bunch of stuff categorized as the former). In many cases, the customer experience was truly innovative and inspirational to folks like me, just trying to understand customer experience as a design paradigm, so I thank whoever came up with those ideas. However, these days, when I'm immersed in a design problem, trying to map a customer journey, or support a customer interaction through design, I'm clearing my mind of the last fourteen years of clutter. I'm trying to reach customer experience nirvana and I can only do that if I reach a point where I know all that I have experienced online, am currently experiencing online and will experience online - my customer experience karma.

That's all nonsense, of course. As soon as Alex sends me a link to Robot Chicken Star Wars or something, I'll be off for a couple of hours, going "Whoa, that's so cool!". I'm easily distracted. The point is, it's often quite possible to design a customer experience that isn't a result of modifying an existing one. Innovate. It is wise to check out the competition, of course, but why try and leverage the best bits of their terrible experience? You should use the standards you have to drive the visual elements, but if there just isn't a standard for what you need, there isn't one - don't crowbar it into a component that was designed for an altogether different class of behaviour. If everybody does it that way, it might be that that's the best way - why would everybody do it that way otherwise? I'm hoping I don't even have to address that one on a Sun blog.

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