Standing Out From The Crowd

I am proud to announce that Vox’s 2007 Automobile Insurance Mind Model Study is now available (this represents a considerable part of my work, so I better be proud ). 
Anyway, the study examines the online channel to determine industry-wide norms and discover why companies succeed or fail in attracting and retaining customers.
If you want […]

As expected, what really stands out about the new Apple iPhone isn’t the multitude of features squeezed into it, but rather its usability and the overall Customer Experience provided.
Apple understands the importance of superior usability to enhance the Customer Experience and has done an excellent job of this since rolling out the first Macintosh.  Their […]

Security has always been placed in the opposite side of usability.  By default, when you think about adding security measures to a website, you are talking about creating extra processes or at least adding an extra layer or complexity to existing process, so invariably the site usability suffers.  Several promising researches were conducted in the past […]

I recently vacationed at a beach resort in Mexico. Before leaving, I was stressed, tired and a little bored. I didn’t really plan the trip beforehand, so I just hoped to have a clean place to sleep and relax for a whole week.
Once in Cancun, I rented a crappy car and stayed in a crappy […]

Here’s a good lesson to everyone that deals with customer experience:
Learn from your mistakes.
I know it seems obvious, but people usually confuse “acknowledge a mistake” with actually learning from them.
Here are some examples:

The company recognizes that something went wrong but is unable to pinpoint the real problem
The company recognizes that something went wrong, […]

Today I’ve learned two important lessons:
1. Some habits are forced upon you and others are very hard to give up.
2. If you are doing something different from everyone else, you are either remarkable or just plain dumb.
 
If I’d knew that this morning, it would have completely changed my day…
Having lived my whole life in a […]

In my last post (”Welcome Back! Long Time, No See“), I commented on how face-to face interactions are being affected by the reliance on technology, subsequently missing real customer relationship development opportunities. After posting it, I realized that it wasn’t very fair. Technology and CRM tools can be useful for improving the Customer Experience in […]

For the past 4 months I’ve been helping to conduct a study about the Online Customer Experience on the U.S. Banking Industry.  The study is called “Mind Model” and is finally available for free download from Vox Inc at http://www.voxinc.com/banking-mind-model.htm.
The Banking Mind Model Representation is a general analysis of how Banking industry websites are represented […]

I still remember the first time I witnessed a user testing session.  It was a simple project, the type we were recognized for our expertise and could almost consider effortless.  On this one though we were very enthusiastic about some cutting edge functionalities that would, supposedly, make the site at least twice as easier to […]

With so much talk around Web Usability, it is easy to forget that Usability is a much broader concept and can be applied to almost everything.
 
By definition, Usability is the easy with which people can employ a tool or human made object to achieve a particular goal. 
Lately, this definition has expanded to include the effectiveness […]