Experiences: Service Experiences

This is a sample chapter from Andrew Hinton’s new book, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture, in which he explores the principles and processes that shape and change context for users. Chapter 21, “Narratives and Situations,” is one of the chapters from the book’s final segment on “Composing Context.”

Chapter 21: Narratives and Situations

The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.—Muriel Rukeyser

People Make Sense Through Stories

Before composing something new we should understand what is already there. But we’ve already established that there is no stable, persistent “context” to begin with—that it emerges through action. So, how do we understand the current state if it won’t sit still? The key is in studying the experience from the points of view of the agents involved and how they think and behave. Those points of view provide the dynamic landscape—and the principles we derive from it—that puts everything else into perspective. These agents can be individual users, groups of them, organizations, and even digital actors. Let’s begin with how humans work—and how they understand their experience as narrative. Recall our working definition: context is an agent’s understanding of the relationships between the elements of the agent’s environment. Read More

Most people have experienced a moment when they are in the middle of a transaction on their mobile phone and considered whether it is really safe. Every banking application is built on user acceptance and trust. The answer to the question of trust does not always remain the same. In response to threats that didn’t exist six months ago, the safety of this software is continually emerging and being tested, discussed, and rebuilt.

Today, user trust requires a balance between factors that usually work well together: strict protection and a seamless consumer experience. Customers want the right to access their money, but every access factor must be locked and in line with regulators. Developers are under a lot of stress to get every element just right, so sometimes get caught between the two. Read More

When I talk to companies, customers, and colleagues about UX strategy and the importance of understanding the end-to-end customer experience, I often tell stories about seemingly trivial parts of an experience with a brand that can have huge impacts. Small things can have significant impacts on customer acquisition and loyalty—and companies often overlook or under-prioritize them. For example:

• The process of exchanging a pair of shoes to get the right size may be so cumbersome that you don’t even want to bother with it.
• A meal that you have at a restaurant leaves a bad taste in your mouth—not because it wasn’t delicious, but because the server was inattentive and rude.
• Navigating a company’s interactive voice response (IVR) system to speak to a real person on the phone becomes a test of rage restraint, because it’s so abundantly clear that they want to make it as hard as possible.

Read More