When you design products, services and systems to influence people at scale you’re necessarily talking about the intersection of CX & UX. And when you’re talking about those particular topics, it pays to listen to the thinkers in those arenas. I was able to go one better when I got a chance to sit down with Andrew Hogan of Forrester. Andrew is a Principal Analyst at Forrester focusing on their CX practice, but his writings betray an affinity (maybe a concern, really) for design and designing for customer wellbeing.
Conversations with TheCustomer – Andrew Hogan, Principal Analyst at Forrester from TheCustomer on Vimeo.
We talked a lot about ethical marketing, ethical data and ethical design but it’s really easy to get tripped up by the word “ethics” and the policies it seems to proscribe. Besides, there are too many good things you can be doing with design before you need to get too deep in the weeds with things like nomenclature.
What I found most fascinating about this conversation, and what I think you will too – is how much opportunity there is for organizations to differentiate themselves by creating things (products and processes) that create customer wellbeing. We talked about the growing movement to question customer relationships that are solely focused the transaction and therefore miss the opportunity to develop deeper, more meaningful brand loyalties based on trust and care.
- Is more engagement necessarily a good thing?
- Is engagement even a good metric for quality-focused relationships?
- Are there healthy, productive and profitable ways to encourage less engagement?
These kinds of questions aren’t often brought up in marketing circles but there is growing evidence to suggest that they should be.
We talked about some of the ways people are doing that now as well as how their respective audiences are responding to them. Kaiwei Tang is one such person. He and his company are out to prove that less is actually more with their Light Phone (You can catch our interview with Kai here). We also talked about USTWO, the interactive agency / studio behind the Monument Valley phenomenon and how their use of ethical design practices has vaulted that game to the top of charts.
