Mike Davidson points to the launch of Blue Flavor, a new web design studio in Seattle. Actually, they’re “an experience design company with a focus on new media.” Naturally, a firm such as this will prominently feature their blog. On the Blue Flavor blog, Nick Finck, Director of User Experience, waxes poetic about the brand experience company’s hope to offer their customers.
When I started creating sites in 1995, the only experience we were concerned about was if there would be an online experience at all. It’s been quite a long time since those days. Today, most companies are interested in what kind of experience a person is going to have when they visit their site. Now, I am not just talking about pretty logos and cool colors with some fancy interaction. I am talking about the holistic online experience.
In this day and age of the experience economy its not simply about why you’re better than the competition, it’s about how you make yourself better than the competition. I feel that the next big factor to extending the experience economy and adopting this new approach is the return of the personal human touch. This is to say moving beyond the sterile brochure copy of business practices of the past, and putting a human face on your product. A person that your customers can trust and can establish a business relationship with.
Ask yourself this: when was the last time you purchased a service or product where the salesperson remembered your name? And I am not talking about reading your name off their computer screen or your credit card. Think about that for a moment. Do you remember that experience? Was it memorable? Is that little step something that set that business aside from the rest in your mind? That, my friend, is part of the experience economy.
