Experience by Design

Issues of racial equity, and institutionalized discrimination, have long been at the center of customer experience, and the right of people to be seen as customers. Today’s podcast is a recording of an event from the end of July on ‘Inspiring Racial Equity: How CX Professionals Can Guide Their Organizations to Tackle This Urgent Issue.” The event was a joint effort of the Boston and Atlanta chapters of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. There was a tremendous team of folks from both chapters who worked together to put on this event. Most of the folks involved, including me, would be considered to be ‘allies.’ By that I mean people who may not have to suffer the daily indignities of structural racism and discrimination, but see it as a malevolent force that needs to be directly confronted and addressed in whatever quarters possible. For this group, the field of engagement is the organization, and what can customer experience professionals do to change these internal dynamics, which hopefully will contribute to a broader social change. The panelist, who include Sandy Mathis, Stephanie C. Harris, and Thomas Houston, all bring a range of professional and personal experience on this topic. Join us in learning from the panelists regarding how to help inspire racial equity in organization, and deliver better experience for diverse audience. 

Higher education’s imminent demise has been long forecast, with a number of factors contributing to this terminal condition. The cost of higher education in the United States is unparalleled in the world, with the average in-state cost of even public universities increasing 63% since 2008. This growth has outpaced all other price indices by far. The fundamental model of higher education has also been called into question. The concept of domain-specific expertise and apprenticeship has been accused of being out of pace with a world where people will change (and lose) jobs many times over. Advances in technology similarly call into question the necessity of human instruction, with artificial intelligence and other new forms of communication and education potentially threatening the traditional centrality of professors. These concerns have been amplified in recent years by a growing chorus of business leaders declaring that “you don’t need a college degree to be successful’. And, of course, the COVID-19 era is now an additional factor in this equation, with students suing their schools for going online midsemester, and institutions facing massive budgetary shortfalls with the spectre of broad scale distance learning in the fall.And yet: social institutions have remarkable resilience. Is the death of higher education greatly exaggerated? Are we witnessing the steady demise of this cornerstone of the American dream, or just witnessing its transformation? What will higher education look like in 5 years? How can the glacially-paced higher education world stay relevant in an agile world?Listen to our panel of experts explore these topics in a fun and free-wheeling conversation about the death and re-birth of higher education.

Looking at the Life Celebration website, you might be surprised to discover that their business is funeral memorial services. But with the bright colors and designs comes a philosophy of elevating memorial experiences to another level. The realization that funerals had become too routine (and, well, lifeless) led our guest Jim Cummings on a quest to not only provide unique experiences, but also learn from Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore and receive Experience Economy Expert Certification. In this episode, we talk about how funeral directors are really community organizers, and how funerals are in many ways an opportunity to bring people together. We also discuss the cast of characters that he has met in his experience design journey, and what he has learned from other industries. We explore how his journey started with a couple of guys from Philly starting trouble, and how that has expanded to a national network of funeral homes working with Life Celebration. 

During the pandemic, people have been trying to find ways to fill their time, often by pursuing hobbies they always wanted to pursue. One such hobby is learning how to play guitar. Who better to talk about teaching guitar online, as well as designing online learning experiences, than Justin Sandercoe, also known as JustinGuitar. Justin is one of the top 10 YouTubers in the United Kingdom through his online guitar instruction forum. Justin’s site has had triple the traffic during the lockdown with people of all kinds trying to fulfill their guitar dreams, reaching almost one million unique visitors in one month alone.We dig into the experience of creating engaging online learning experiences and teaching to guitar students of all levels, and talk about his blanket as a transitional object and now a key feature of his brand. We also discuss how having a ‘beginner’s mind’ is important for any teacher, and how learning left-handed gives him greater empathy for beginners (and with luck more empathy for left handed people).

Megan Burns has been involved in analyzing organizational efforts to create better customer experiences for over 20 years. From her early days at Forrester, to now with her own consultancy called Experience Enterprises, Megan knows how to approach an experience ecosystem, and importantly how to help organizations change to reach their experience goals. In 2014, she developed the Customer Experience Index to guide organizations across many industry benchmark and improve their own customer experiences. But more than that, Megan helps organizations transform their cultures to put both customers and employees at the center of their missions.In this episode Megan talks about how a self-proclaimed ‘word nerd’ gets organizations to understand how words and terms can drive the wrong messages without even knowing it. We also explore how the human brain is the ultimate legacy technology, as well as how to upgrade your brain without it crashing. Finally, we talk about how companies are in an ‘experience race,’ and how many should stand down to focus on what customers and employees actually want.Overall, it is about identifying those Moments of Change™, and how organization can put themselves in a position to take advantage of them to create better experiences.Megan Burns on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganburns/Experience Enterprises - http://www.experienceenterprises.com Intro Music - The Tall Pines - “The Key”Ending Music - Ketsa - ”Dreaming Days”

We live in an experience economy, where experience channels abound in business. Whether customer, user, patient, employee, or something else, we are facing expanded opportunities to create and design experiences. Given this emergent reality, why are not more colleges and universities developing programs in experience design?To explore this question, Neil Lundberg and Mat Duerden visit the Experience by Design studios to talk about how their program in Experience Design and Management started at the Marriott School of Management, located at Brigham Young University.We discuss the origins of the program in transformative leisure experiences, and how whitewater rafting trips helped to establish a foundation in experience design. We also examine what kinds of content should be part of a program in experience design, and what skills and perspectives do students absolutely need to know. Finally, we look toward future growth of experience design programs, and the need expressed by employers to hire graduates of these programs.

Durell Coleman has for a long time been interested in how to create inventions and entrepreneurial opportunities to create social change. With an early interest in engineering, sparked by working on cars and home improvement with his dad, Durell followed that passion to Stanford University. Connecting an engineering degree with sustainable design through the famed d.school, Durell has followed that path from the forests of Nicaragua to the criminal justice system of the United States. Through his company, DC Design, Durell and his team have worked with an impressive array of clients and projects, including “governments, foundations, non-profits, companies and those they serve to shift entrenched systems toward paradigms that function better for everyone. He has worked to redesign aspects of the foster care system, develop new approaches to criminal justice reform, reimagine healthcare service models, create apps that connect communities, and develop new educational models for the 21st century.”In our conversation, we dig into what is social design, and how everyone can be a part of designing for a better world. Durell tells us how he deals with the challenges of systems design when you have different groups that don't necessarily have the same goals. Through his work on wind turbines, we explore how design can be used to not just to create a product, but create an infrastructure where people acquire the skills and tools to manage and sustain change themselves. During a time where a lot of discussion is being had around social change, Durell's work shows us a way forward in using design thinking to create opportunities for social impact.

Given all the challenges we are dealing with as a society right now, talking about bikes might seem unimportant. However, in fact, the topic of cycling, exercise, and inclusive environments is exactly on topic for this moment. Today’s guest is Lindsay Goldman, who was a professional cyclist as well as Director of Marketing for USA Cycling. Since our conversation, she has moved on to become the Director of Marketing at Eliel Cycling, as well as Wattie Ink. Linsday also was the Owner and GM of Hagens Berman Supermint Pro Cycling, a  professional cycling team.While recorded before the pandemic and protests for Black Lives Matter and against police brutality, many of the themes we cover have resonance with the larger discussions going on right now. We explore the structural challenges toward getting women involved in cycling, and efforts to change that. Do women feel safe cycling in public? Is the broader cycling ‘community’ a welcoming environment? How are female athletic bodies viewed in culture and society? How do we make roads safer for cyclists? What role can a national organization like USAC play in that, and to what extent do we also have to be the change? These are just some of the questions we could ask around this topic of how to increase diversity and inclusion of women in cycling.

Friend and colleague Mike Goldberg comes by the Experience by Design studios to talk about his career in design. Mike’s career extends back a long way, with 27 years teaching graphic and web design at the college level, and 37 years of professional award winning graphic and web design experience. Some of his past clients include marketing and advertising campaigns for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Major League Baseball, IBM, Fidelity, and The Wall Street Journal.Beyond that, and for those old enough to remember video games like Frogger and Qbert, Mike was on the team that turned those arcade games into video games for early home gaming systems. Mike also was there to work on Lucas Film games like Return of the Jedi in an 8x8 pixel environment. Mike also has innovated in areas of experiential learning, creating an in-house design company at Bentley University, called IDCC Design House Studios, where students work on projects to create web and graphic design for clients. His own design story centers around how one mentor made a difference in his life, and he’s definitely paying it forward with his students today. On today’s podcast we hit the following points:-From whence does creative come, and how to create a culture of innovation;-How circuitous career paths can be much better than linear ones;-How to innovate experiential learning and curriculum design to improve student and faculty experiences;-And finally, how the important element of teaching design is to give students permission to be creative, and make them believe in the process.

Patient experience is an ever-expanding area of work as hospitals, especially in the US, try to compete for higher patient scores to not lose valuable reimbursement. It is perhaps understandable that a lot of attention in the patient experience is directed at the point of care, and what happens when a patient is receiving treatment. However, such a view is dangerously myopic. There is a lot more that goes into the patient experience than what happens when seeing a doctor a nurse. There is the entire patient journey from symptoms to schedule to arrival to appointment to diagnosis to payment and many many more steps in between all of this. And even that doesn’t capture the whole story. Along with patient experience are the employee experiences of those who work in the healthcare context. Thus, rather than just thinking in terms of a patient experience we are really thinking of a healthcare experience that encompasses an ecosystem as complex as the healthcare institution itself.To help untangle this, we have on today’s podcast Steve Koch, Senior Vice President and Co-Founder of Cast and Hue. Cast and Hue is a consulting company that focuses a lot of its business in the healthcare space. They describe themselves as integrating “empathy, observation, behavioral psychology, and technology” to “cast a light on the people you serve and gain a deep understanding of their perspectives.” Using human-centered design methodologies, Cast and Hue seeks to co-create solutions with their clients to help them better understand their complete environments and then design approaches to develop better experiences.