Here are my slides from my Designing the Digital Experience presentation… enjoy!
digitalexperience
Sarah Long, Director of the North Suburban Library System, interviewed me a couple weeks ago about my book, Designing the Digital Experience: How to Use Experience Design Tools & Techniques to Build Websites Customers Love on her Longshots podcast series (part of the Library Beat blog).
Give it a listen!
My book has been reported in the wild! Someone told me via twitter that she’d received my book, Designing the Digital Experience: How to Use Experience Design Tools & Techniques to Build Websites Customers Love, from Amazon a few days ago – so that’s cool.
What else is cool? How about giving you chapter 1? Here’s a snippet:
Chapter 1: Welcome to the Experience Economy
“What’s my daughter playing on the computer this evening? Oh, she’s on the American Girl site, and she’s playing Kaya’s Catch of the Day. She also sent an American Girl ecard to her cousin and looked at this year’s new doll. We receive American Girl catalogs and magazines in the mail and check out the latest books from the library. We even visited American Girl Place in Chicago last winter as a birthday surprise (the girls and mom watched a musical, had ate a party, and shopped, while my son and I checked out the science museum and LEGO Store).
What’s going on here? Why is my daughter so into this stuff? Because American Girl is all about the experience. It focuses on the fun of exploring and living as a girl in America’s past. The American Girl people are engaging their market in creative ways - specifically targeting grade school and middle school girls. They know how to delight their customers. I know – I’ve seen my daughter’s smiles. As we continue to think about experience, let’s consider the experiences of a trip to an amusement park and the purchase of a computer.”
Want more? Here’s the rest of chapter 1!
Many of us work on listening to our user communities. In the library world, we listen at the reference desk and the circ desk. We hear about the library when we’re at the grocery store (and get asked questions, too 
and at the local board meeting.
But how do you listen to your local digital community? How do you hear what your online customers are doing / saying / liking / or not liking about your library? Here are some possibilities, from the late 1990s – early 2000s. We’ll call these …
Traditional Listening Tools:
- email: providing an email link and/or an email address on each page of the site, usually in the footer
- An Ask Us page – can go to email, can also be the ask a librarian service point
- a digital comment box (this was fancy back then!)
I’m calling them “traditional listening tools” because there are many more interesting ways to listen now. Check these out …
Shiny New Listening Tools:
- Google Alerts – finds blog posts, newspaper articles, local media mentions, etc.
- Technorati alerts – finds blog posts about you
- Twitter searches (was Summize) – captures twitter conversations (more on Summize/twitter search in the next post)
- Youtube alerts – do a search, then subscribe to the corresponding RSS feed.
- Flickr alerts – subscribe to a tag related to your library
- Subscribe to local blogs and local twitter feeds. This captures conversation in your community, by your patrons.
When you listen using both the Traditional Listening Tools and the Shiny New Listening Tools, you hear very different things. Traditional Listening Tools pick up specific conversation that is purposefully directed at you – via email. Someone has a question or comment, and sends that comment to you.
Shiny New Listening Tools help you discover actual conversations taking place. Those conversations are not necessarily directed at you – but they can certainly be about you. Listening in on Twitter, for example, might find things like this: “The comics section at the Seattle Public Library is f**king STUNNING.” (actual tweet from today). And this type of tweet is a golden opportunity to START a conversation. Let’s pretend this comment happened at the reference desk for a sec – how would you reply? Possibly with something like: “gee, thanks.” That’s a polite response… some of us would probably go one further, and say something like this: “Cool – thanks! So… WHY do you like it? How could we improve it?” This type of response continues a conversation, and pulls out useful info in the process.
DO THAT SAME THING IN YOUR SHINY NEW DIGITAL SETTING.
Again, more on that in my next post… but you get the idea. When you’re eavesdropping on conversations, you have the opportunity to chime in – correct wrong info, add to conversations about the library, and generally help humanize your digital branch by “talking back.”
Wow David – That Sounds Time-Consuming!
Does all this listening take a long time? No – not really. The set-up (doing the searches and subscribing to the feeds) takes the longest amount of time. But once your feeds are set up, it really doesn’t take much time to quickly scan through the results, looking quickly for questions, praises, suggestions, and conversation.
Start participating with those customers using your digital branch. If you do this fully, your listening experience can be transformed from one of eavesdropping to what amounts to a shiny new service point for your library. One that’s called Community Manager in the corporate world.
Your customers are already talking – are you listening?
I actually wrote a book! I can’t believe it… but I’m pretty psyched about it! Here’s the info for the book:
Designing the Digital Experience: How to Use Experience Design Tools and Techniques to Build Websites Customers Love
ISBN 978-0-910965-83-5/$24.95/208 pp
CyberAge Books/Information Today Inc.
Publication: October 2008 (that’s coming up soon!)
So – it’s coming out this fall, and it’s all about designing digital experiences (long-time readers will recognize that topic – it’s a common one for me, both on my blog and in my presentations). I’ll be posting more about the book as it gets closer to the release date. But for now, here’s a wordle teaser (click through to the larger version in my flickr account if interested)… a tag cloud version of the introduction to the book!
