AIGA Portland‘s Career Tools breakfast series brought in Julie Beeler from Second Story to speak about “Defining user experience through interactive media”. Julie’s presentation focused on Second Story’s bigger projects for their major clients, mostly major museums and corporations. However, a lot of her insights (and thoughts they spurred) on customer experiences apply to organizations of any size.
Interactive experiences engage customers on an emotional level. We should aim to reach heads as well as hearts of our audiences; offering passive consumption of content no longer cuts it.
Customer experiences should be designed on two tiers. Wayfinding is the experience of movement through a location or website. It’s about navigation, progress, path taken. It’s mediated by technology. Storytelling is the experience of content. It’s about what people find at various stops on the way, what they take away, what they learn. Content should dictate the experience, while technology help bring it home.
The ultimate focus should be on creating a unified experience across the whole spectrum of media that organizations use to communicate with their audiences. For example, your website should be more than an extension or complement of your brick-and-mortar location; it should mimic the experience customers get when they walk in.
The entire experience people have with our brands should therefore be carefully planned, created, and calibrated for maximum intended effect.
