I was reading Purple Cow by Seth Godin while I was setting up the strategy for some new ventures I’m working on and found it key to make a remarkable experience for my users as this is the only thing that will finally drive us to success. Being Remarkable for me is not just being different, but being better and delivering WOW! Users need to be in love with your product or service, but they need to be in love with them for the right reasons and following the right process. I’ll outline this in the following paragraphs.
The right reasons for being remarkable are making the user better at something. The iPhone makes the user better at keeping in touch with his friends and family and taking the web experience mobile, Google reader makes us better at keeping up with multiple posts and tracking our progress in reading. So, we should aim to make the user’s experience remarkable. I use the word experience because that is what counts, even if we’re selling a product we need to make the experience of using it remarkable, not the product itself. Making the experience remarkable also covers not only the product, but the organization as a whole. You need to make the product or service use experience remarkable, the customer service experience and every interaction the user has with you. The reason for this is simple if you fail to make it remarkable in one front it will affect the overall experience with your organization and all the other fronts will be related to that. For example, let’s say you have the iPhone which is excellent and makes your life so easy and then you need to contact Technical Support for a hardware failure, if the customer support department treats you badly you will immediately grow to hate the experience you had with Apple and probably look for other alternatives when shopping for a new phone.
At first when I thought of being remarkable I thought that a good thing to do was to get the users to say that my product was so amazing or that my blog was so good to read. But that strategy is all about me and not about what the users feel. While working I showed some friends a Kathy Sierra presentation on FOWA in 2008 , in this presentations Kathy explains on how making the user think better of themselves is what makes the experience remarkable in the long term. For this post let’s talk about a blog for computer programmers. In this case to make the experience remarkable the blog needs to take care of lot’s of points, but all have to aim to make the user become a better computer programmer or enhance improve his experience programming by making something easier for her.
Remarkable means it delivers something of value to the user. This blog example will be remarkable if it gave insights on new languages, tutorials on how to do things or how to make things better. In this case all this aims to make the user better and that will make the user recommend the blog to other programmers like her. Remarkable means it makes you better at something, you’ll return to a restaurant that makes your learn on the history of the food and the wine, because then you can share that with your date or friends. Users will fall in love with your company/organization/you if you make them better at something, then users will love you because they know you care about their growth and not only about their money.
So to make it remarkable make sure to make the user talk about themselves or how you make them better.
How to make it remarkable?
For that you need to get into consideration how your product will make your users life better, easier or make them look nicer. In short you need to make them gain whuffie by using your product. Gaining whuffie or social capital for yourself is not the main goal, but make your users earn it for them.
