Insights
Joel Flom's place to pass on new design morsels, taste-test design ideas and brew up Elavision's latest concoctions using only the finest ingredients.
Bruce Temkin from Forrester Research has recently pointed out in his blog post, For More Sales, Design Better Checkout Experiences, that retailers are beginning to focus on improving their in-store checkout experiences, and that these improvements have a positive impact on their conversion rates (similar to recent advancements in online checkout design).
Temkin states:
Companies are recognizing that store design has a significant impact on customer purchases during a visit and on the likelihood of customers to return to the store. But the last place you want customers to have a bad experience is when they’ve got a product in one hand and payment in the other.
So companies need to take another look at the design of their checkout experiences. This means examining their queue structure (multi-line, single-line, etc), the queue environment, and in-queue merchandising. Technology offers new options for in-store experiences like self-service checkout kiosks and portable checkout systems.
Hannah Suarez, the force behind Brisbane Creative Industries (detailed listing of local creative events), has published a recent conversation we had about interaction design, as well as wider user experience design (UX) disciplines.
We also spoke about the role of IxDA Brisbane has in promoting and cultivating a design community in a growing city. I kicked off IxDA Brisbane over a year ago and I'm glad to see it enter it's second year with such a cool group of designers and developers looking to share ideas and taking pride in Brisbane's young, but smart UX community.
Follow to read conversation...
In his recent post, Listening is hard, Mark Hurst once again provides user experience professionals (well, anyone for the matter) with some timely advice.
It's a reminder of how vital it is to listen... really listen... to the all the people who will benefit from your design work: new customers, existing customers, customer support, internal teams, logistics, business leads, stakeholders, finance... the list is endless.
It's easy to soak in a few days worth of ideas, then lock in your plans. Yet, the conversation will continue throughout the project. Don't forget to keep the ears wide open:
The thing is, listening is DIFFICULT. I'm not referring to hearing, i.e., using an auditory nerve to detect sound waves. Having the tools says nothing about whether one has the skills to use them to some meaningful end.
Listening - real listening - is difficult because it requires a real investment: of focus, and empathy, and time. Worse yet, it's not even clear what the payoff is going to be. (You have to listen to find out!) It's easier to leave it undone and move on to the next thing.
Anyone who works at creating better experiences - for customers, or patients, or students, or readers, or viewers, or parishioners, or constituents - will tell you, or should be able to tell you, two universal truths:
- You can't create something better for someone unless you understand what it is they need.
- Finding out what they need - often by listening to them - is hard.
