projekt202 podcast: Coming to Terms with Design Thinking vs. Customer Experience

In this conversation with David Lancashire, the chairman and CEO of projekt202 shares his perspective on why some industry terms -- in particular, "design thinking" vs. "customer experience" -- resonate better with the business community, and the importance of uniting user observations with clear business goals to solve customer challenges. Highlights from the podcast: -- There's a fundamentally new approach to design and development ... We're calling that 'experience-driven' design and development ... It's all about new techniques that have emerged that allow us to observe the users and customers in context. -- By gaining a much deeper and richer understanding of our customer at a persona level, we're able to design solutions that are able to really thrill and have them be much more enjoyable than was previously possible. -- With 'design thinking,' people ... feel it's this creative thing that they may or may not even be able to understand and appreciate ... Whereas, a buzzword like 'customer experience' is a lot easier for a business-oriented person to consume, because they think in terms of an experience they're delivering for their customer. It's just an interesting quirk: What is the right name to call something and whether it's really helping the industry as a whole. -- We need to help the rest of the world -- particularly the business community --understand that the essence and the frameworks that are behind these thoughts are actually things that drive real business value, real gains in market share, real gains in revenue growth ... How do these techniques -- these ways of understanding the customer in a more profound and detailed way -- potentially play into improving these financial metrics? They're very, very connected. -- The methodology of getting closer to the user through these new techniques out of behavioral science should be incorporated into modern American business in a really systematic way. Companies that are understanding and gaining this clearer insight of their customers and the problems that customers are grappling with ... these companies are ... able to get design teams focused on solving the right problems. -- There's a far more trustworthy, methodical, scientific program for incorporating ... this picture of what your customer or user really wants. It instills confidence. -- That's the great news: what we're talking about is ... a very clear approach of observing people in the context of their everyday world. Through this observation, we're able to see that there are different personas, people acting and thinking in different ways. -- projekt202 has a step-by-step framework for going through this process. You're empowering that designer to be focused on exactly the right thing, which means when the ideation process is in full swing, you're getting great ideas for solving these exact problems ... Our ability to tie these together is what sets projekt202 apart.