Experience by Design

Whitney Quesenbery has had a long and influential career in user experience. The author of three books on UX, Whitney has been involved in a lot of projects aimed at making things more usable. But perhaps none of her work is as important as her co-founding and co-directing the Center for Civic Design. Whitney talks about her unintended introduction into the world of experience design through a theater class,  her early work in UX as being user-centric, and how a committee assignment through the Usability Professionals Association led to her life's work on civic design and voting experiences. Listen to her talk about the UX tragedy of the 'butterfly ballot' in the 2000 election, how big experiences come from simple changes, and what people can do to help design better elections. 

Bill Fleming stops by to chat with Adam about branding, marketing and design. Bill is a Boston-based Independent Brand & Marketing Strategist, and Business Consultant for Designers.

On this episode we talk about what brands are, how the cultural work of branding has changed in recent decades with the advent of new and easier to use technologies, and how we can think about brands as conversations - not just between businesses and customers but also between businesses.

Billfleming.com

Bill on Twitter

Ideas and Articles we reference

https://www.commarts.com/columns/the-sensitive-anthropology-of-branding

https://raleighgreeninc.com/blog/2011/07/31/an-anthropologists-approach-to-branding/

https://lippincott.com/insight/b2b-brands-in-the-human-era/

This episode is brought to you in part by This Anthro Life, a sister podcast hosted by Adam Gamwell. Life is complicated, but we love simple answers. AI and robotics are changing the nature of work. Emojis change the way we write. Fossil Fuels were once the engine of progress, now we're in a race to change how we power the planet. We're constantly trying to save ourselves...from ourselves. This Anthro Life brings you smart conversations with humanity’s top makers and minds to make sense of it all. We dig into truth and hope in our creative potential through design, culture, and technology. Change your perspective.

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Emily Guendelsberger, author of the book “On the Clock: What Work Did to Me, and How it Drives America Insane,” was a journalist who, upon her newspaper closing, decided to work at a variety of jobs. Her choices included an Amazon fulfillment center, to a call center, to a McDonald’s. As our conversation shows, the book explores what it means to work today, where deskilling, automation, technological controls, routinization, and stress all come together to create an employee experience that can not only be demoralizing, but physically debilitating. At a time where there is a larger conversation about how to create better employee experiences through meaningful work, what about those lower wage jobs for those that may not have many choices? How can we make the modern workplace more humane? Or is the situation just going to get worse in a race to the bottom?

Liliana Petrova, formerly the Director of Customer Experience at JetBlue, and now Founder and CEO of The Petrova Experience, describes herself as an “Organizational Culture Evangelist.” The airline industry might seem like an odd place to plant your flag to keep love alive, but if you are going to carry forward the gospel, you need to go to dens of evil. And there is perhaps no place as evil as the airline experience. . How can you convert a whole organization of people to adopt a ‘culture of centricity,’ whether it be customer-centricity, employee-centricity, etc? Are we really talking about being a cultural missionary? Trying to instill in the natives a sense of belief in a higher power, overturning their traditional culture for something that is believed to be more enlightened? 

Enter Liliana’s work at JetBlue, where she was Director of Customer Experience for almost 8 years. If there is a feature of your JetBlue experience that you enjoy, odds are that Liliana had a hand in it. In describing her role, she once wrote “As customer experience director at JetBlue, I feel pride and responsibility to meet the high expectations of our customers and am passionate to keep the love alive as we grow.” Listen to Liliana talk about how she keeps the love alive in her work as a customer experience evangelist.

Today's episode is sponsored by Missing Link Studios.

Are employees like customers now? For example, does an employee's capacity to leave feedback on social media or employment sites like Glassdoor tip the balance of power in the workplace when employees are unhappy? How are mega companies like Amazon changing their approach to employee experience and helping other companies wake up to coming back to the fundamental point of starting with the human? As Ben says, its not just about what you create and contribute to the employee experience, a lot of the value your company creates is also in the negative things you prevent from happening for your brand. The takeaway: Be good to your people because we're all people. 

Ben is the Chief Experience Office at World Employee Experience Institute. 

https://www.worldeeinstitute.com/about

Ben's Book Employee Experience: Develop a Happy, Productive and Supported Workforce for Exceptional Individual and Business Performance

Ben's website

If you like the show, please share it with a friend or colleague! This is the best way to help us all spread these conversations and get the good word out about experience and the need to intentionally design for good. 

The new year, and the new decade, means that we are now officially in the future.  Of course, any discussion of the future has to include a discussion of technology, and how it is shaping our future. This makes for a perfect time to welcome our next guest to Experience by Design, Vice President of Artificial Intelligence Rick Britt of CallMiner. 

The path to VP of AI would seem to be paved with engineering school, or maybe computer science. But as we will hear from Rick, the path to VP of AI is not predictably linear. It is a story that involves trading derivatives, call center management, and a new technological frontier of sentiment analysis. Rick and I talk about how the technology factors into the contemporary workplace, the road to richer interactions, technology as a tool versus a determinant, and creating computer-aided authentic moments. 

This episode is sponsored by Missing Link Studios

Anyone who has ever received a medical bill in the mail knows the experience of trying to understand the costs. Stories abound about making sense of the codes, line items, services, and treatments that are part of the pages of billing that we can receive. This makes the financial aspect of getting treatment often the most painful. Jayson Yardley and Avadyne are trying to change that. Hear how Jayson and Avadyne are looking to the Black Eyed Peas, comic books, and AI to try to make the patient journey more healing. While getting your bill in the mail may never be a positive experience, it doesn't have to be so awful. And if the smiling faces on Avadyne's webpage are any indication, it might just be enjoyable.

Professor of Philosophy Axel Seemann has long been interested in how people create a common understanding of social spaces and experiences. In his recent book, The Shared World, Axel explores these topics, arguing that it is our ability to communicate about our experiences that gives us the ability to share them since on their own they will always be unique. This raises questions regarding how we conceptualize and measure experiences, how we boundary them as discrete entities, and how we go about intentionally designing them. From thinking about bat-consciousness to his work as a management consultant, Axel has contemplated a lot of factors related to experiences, and we explore many of them in this episode.

This episode sponsored by ethno-analytics.

A 2019 article in The Economist proclaimed that “The escape-room games industry is booming”, Today there are over 2,300 in the US, and probably more than 10,000 around the world. But why are they so popular? Ultimately, escape rooms sell an experience. Not only is it an escape from a room, but from reality as well in this totally immersive experience. This is a team sport, with some teams precisely treating it as such. Red Bull (who else?) has an Escape Room World Championship. As the business and pop culture awareness has grown, so has everything that goes along with a growing business and pop culture success. There are escape room trade publications, escape room blogs, scholarship on escape rooms, movies about escape rooms, and yes, this podcast on escape rooms.

Today's episode is sponsored by ethno-analytics.

Diane Magers has a long career in customer experience. From humble beginnings in a basement business to the Interim CEO of the CXPA, and now her own company Experience Catalysts, Diane discusses what drew her to customer experience in the first place. Always fascinated with human behavior, Diane applied her clinical psychology degree to understand what customers want, and what employees need to deliver that to them. Hear why it is hard for companies to make that leap to change who they are to be more customer-centric, and how they can be helped along the way. Finally, listen to how customer experience has evolved during that time, where it is at today, and where it needs to go in the future.