From delicious food, to relaxing music or a beautiful painting, we all actively seek sensory pleasure. Customer experiences that delight the senses win our hearts and have us coming back for more. In this chapter we will explore what each sense has to offer to improve the customer experience.
We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them. STEVE JOBS
‘Can I help you, sir?’ the sales assistant asked. He’d been watching me for a while now with a slightly worried look on his face.
‘No, no I’m fine. I’m just trying to find a new kettle.’ Ten minutes earlier, I’d walked into the store and found myself faced with a row of 60 models, all of which I was sure were capable of boiling water. Decisions, decisions …
I started at one end and worked my way along, picking them up in turn to get a feel for the handle, then opening the lid to see how smoothly the hinge worked. Unfortunately the poor assistant had chosen to offer his services when I was barely halfway through, and now felt compelled to stand nearby, radiating awkwardness.
Five minutes later, we had a winner (or 59 losers depending on how you look at it). When I picked it up I could feel the quality immediately. It had a reassuring weight to it, and a subtle but striking stainless steel finish. ‘That’ll look nice in the kitchen,’ I thought. The handle had a lovely rubbery feel to it, and the ON button, a rocker switch conveniently placed where the thumb falls, made a suitably chunky ‘click’. I pressed the button to open the lid, and my eyes lit up like a child at Christmas. It rose before me, silent, graceful and precise, like the hatch opening on a spaceship. I smiled at my new friend, ‘I’ll take it!’
Design is often thought of as a ‘creative profession’ but to my mind it is more like a branch of applied psychology: to get the best results we need to work from the brain outwards, starting with what we want a customer to think, feel and do, then creating a solution to achieve these ends. Our senses are critical to this goal since they form the bridge between the environmental factors which we can control and the mind which we hope to influence.
Since every product or service is fundamentally a sensual experience, the way in which our senses are stimulated must always have an end in mind, and never be arbitrary or left to chance. In every interaction we recruit our senses to provide us with useful information. Think about a trip to the supermarket: we judge a product’s quality by the design of packaging, and infer freshness by smell. We squeeze avocados to see if they are ripe; we can tell how fresh a celery is by how crunchy it sounds.
Beyond the functional
One of my most cherished possessions is a 1954 Jaeger Le Coultre Atmos clock: one of the great masterpieces of design and engineering of the twentieth century. The clock is powered by tiny changes in temperature and atmospheric pressure, which allows it to run perpetually in an ordinary domestic environment with no batteries or winding: a temperature change of one degree is enough to power the clock for two days.
That these clocks first went on sale in 1936 is quite surprising to many, and the design and engineering evokes a time when things were built to last. Every Atmos takes a month to build by hand, followed by five weeks of adjustment before they can be shipped. They have graced the homes of John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill and Charlie Chaplin among others, and were often given as retirement presents to executives.
The Atmos clock embodies everything that I consider to be excellence in design: innovation, precision, thoughtfulness down to the finest details, longevity, environmental sensitivity, and beautiful form wedded to useful function. This clock also represents to me the antithesis of the planned obsolescence that characterises modern consumer goods and is all the more appealing because of it. They were originally claimed to have a 600-year service life; however, nowadays routine maintenance is required every 20 years owing to increased pollutants in the atmosphere. I certainly hope my Atmos is still running happily in 600 years.
From a purely functional perspective, the Atmos clock does not tell the time any better than the clock on my oven. However, when they see it, visitors to my home tend to gaze in wonder at it, make cooing noises when they see the tiny cogs spinning silently, and ask where they can get one.
The lesson from this story is simple: to create a great customer experience, the sensory characteristics of a product or brand must not just play a functional role in conveying useful information to us, they must also have aesthetic appeal. The Atmos clock tells me that the time is 12:01 which is good, but it also inspires me and makes me smile, which makes it great. There is no point arguing over whether ‘form or function’ is more important; you can’t ignore either.
Research has shown time and again that aesthetically appealing products are perceived as easier to operate, are more likely to be used and are more readily forgiven when errors occur.1 Despite this, designers of all disciplines find themselves working tirelessly to educate their clients, who are often dismissive. This is not only a gross misunderstanding of design as a discipline, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of human beings. The things we buy reflect our identity, and we are incredibly sensitive to how our individual values, tastes and aspirations are communicated through them.
Five senses – infinite opportunities
Each sense offers an abundance of opportunities to delight the customer. By carefully considering how the senses are stimulated we can do much to increase the appeal of our products and services, and create a more pleasurable ownership experience.
Unfortunately, to cover this topic in detail is far beyond the scope of this book. I have in my office nearly a hundred books that cover just visual design; to do the other four senses justice would require hundreds more. With this in mind, I will briefly cover each sense in turn with the aim of inspiring you to think about how you might put them all to use to enhance your customer experience, then finish the chapter by providing some more general advice to help you avoid some common mistakes I’ve seen over the years.
VISION
Sight is the sense that receives the lion’s share of attention during the design process. It is no wonder – the range of visual stimuli we can process is staggering, allowing us to discern motion, geometric properties and textures, not to mention colour, tone and brightness. The way a product looks is hugely important. You’d think that going out for dinner would be all about how the food tastes, yet how often do we choose our meal based on what looks great coming out of the kitchen on its way to someone else’s table?
Advertising, interface, product and packaging design all focus great attention on the visual stimuli, perhaps because we rely heavily on our eyesight to infer other characteristics of an object from a distance: we can usually say whether something looks heavy or soft at a glance without needing to touch it, for example. The most basic question to ask yourself when trying to establish how something should look is ‘What qualities of the brand or product must be conveyed through its appearance?’
Gü Puddings – dedicated to decadence
As anyone who has tried these desserts will testify, Gü Puddings are delicious and decadent in equal measure; but where they stand out is the excellent job they have done of expressing what’s inside the box on the outside of it. By setting their simple but bold logo and vibrant colours against a dark background, the result is eye-catching without being over-bearing. The glossy finish in the box oozes refinement and luxury. The packaging performs its role perfectly, seducing the customer into picking it up, at which point it’s halfway into the trolley.
TOUCH
Touch is the most intimate of the senses, yet also involves the most effort since it requires direct contact with the object. Our sense of touch allows us to explore an object in an amazing variety of ways: we can discern the shape, texture, weight, hardness, size and temperature of an object all just through touching it.
This makes our sense of touch an incredibly rich medium for gaining information about a product, and it also makes the tactile properties of a product a huge opportunity for differentiation. Research also suggests that touching an object in the shop results in a greater feeling of ‘psychological ownership’2 that makes a purchase more likely. This gives us three things to focus on when considering the customer’s sense of touch.
What does the customer touch? By identifying the parts of the product that the customer touches you can focus your attention where it matters. I’ve often thought that otherwise beautifully decorated rooms are often let down by light switches and power sockets that feel cheap and nasty. Anything the customer touches is an opportunity in waiting.
What qualities of the product must be communicated through touch? Should it be rough, smooth, warm, cold, soft, solid, rounded, angular, sleek or boxy, heavy or light? Each of these properties can be considered. We often associate quality with solidity; rounded edges lend a product an air of friendliness; clothing is often bought because it has a soft feel to the material. If something is to be transported, how can it be made lighter?
How can we seduce the customer into touching it? If the tactile properties of your product are part of its appeal, you must encourage the customer to touch the product in the first place. Don’t hide it away in a glass case or wrap it up in packaging. Have a demonstration model they can play around with; better still a knowledgeable salesperson who can point out all the effort you went to to get it feeling just right.
SCENT
Scent is the most evocative sense: a smell can immediately conjure long forgotten memories and trigger powerful emotions. I once came back from the kitchen to find a friend with his nose buried in the sound hole of my classical guitar; he said the cedar wood reminded him of his grandpa’s cigar boxes, and many people associate the smell of citrus with freshness and cleanliness.3
Despite its potential, scent is the most neglected of the senses, perhaps because there are few universally appealing smells; we also typically become acclimatised to a scent within 15 minutes4 or so, at which point it loses its effect, unless we leave the vicinity and return again. That this is still an emerging area should not put you off considering scent as an opportunity to add something more to the experience, just make sure you test any experiments thoroughly. Ask yourself ‘Could we incorporate a scent into the experience?’
Stefan Floridian Waters – the smell of Singapore Airlines
Singapore Airlines were quite far ahead of the curve when they had a unique fragrance created for them called Stefan Floridian Waters in the late 1990s. The scent, used in cabin crews’ perfume, in the hot towels and across their fleet of planes, was often immediately noticed by frequent flyers, making them feel more at home, and triggering positive memories of previous experiences with the airline.5
HEARING
We often have little choice over whether or not we hear something in our environment. We can close our eyes, of course, but closing our ears is pretty difficult. This can make sound one of the most intrusive elements of our environment. The implication of this is straightforward: if the sound is welcome or attractive it can greatly enhance the experience, but if not it may literally repel people. This is especially the case with music, which is not only a matter of personal taste, but can also strongly reflect our social group.
As a fan of classical music I was somewhat saddened to learn that the masterworks of the great composers are being piped into hotspots of anti-social behaviour to deter gangs from loitering. At Elm Park underground station, robberies dropped by 33 per cent and assaults on staff by 25 per cent within 18 months of the musical strategy being implemented6 – a somewhat depressing, but potent example of how powerful people’s tastes are in determining their behaviour. Ask yourself ‘What kind of music appeals to our customers? How can we use music to enhance the customer experience?’
Starbucks – coffee and music
Many shops choose the music they play carefully, as a way to build their credibility with customers. Starbucks have taken this further than most, by selling a range of eclectic artists that they feel match their customers’ tastes. Writing for Business Week, Stanley Holmes concludes, ‘Starbucks has never been primarily about the coffee. Its pell-mell growth … has always been about selling an experience.’7
As with all the other senses, we use the sound a product makes to infer its qualities. Legendary ad man David Ogilvy used the absence of sound to emphasise the quality of Rolls-Royce cars back in the 1960s, using the line, ‘At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.’8 By way of contrast, the loud crunch of a potato crisp is often considered as a good indicator of its freshness. Ask yourself ‘How might we use sound to convey the qualities of our product?’
To hear requires the least effort of any sense, and since technology is always progressing to reduce the burden of effort, it is no surprise that voice activated devices are slowly creeping from science fiction to reality. Audiobooks are already extremely popular, requiring less effort to ingest the contents than reading. When conveying information to the customer, ask yourself ‘Might communicating using sound reduce the effort required on the part of the customer?’
TASTE
There are very few social occasions which do not involve some kind of food or drink. Eating, drinking and socialising are all but inseparable: very few people like to eat at a restaurant alone. Food and drink are also commonly used to show appreciation. When invited to a friend’s for dinner you might bring a bottle of wine, or offer to bring a dish.
Wiggle – an unexpected pleasure
I recently ordered some cycling kit from online retailer Wiggle. When I opened the packaging alongside my order were two small packets of Haribo sweets. It’s often nice, unexpected touches like this that can make the experience that little bit better, and stop customers straying to the competition.
In the context of a customer experience then, food and drink can not only add a pleasurable social dimension, it can be used as a token of appreciation, or as a way to make customers feel welcome.
MULTI-SENSORY EXPERIENCES
Having given a brief summary of how each sense can be used to enhance the customer experience, I’d like to conclude this section with examples of how two very different businesses have succeeded by creating a compelling multi-sensory experience.
The Fat Duck – a multi-sensory experience like no other
What makes The Fat Duck such a special place is chef Heston Blumenthal’s belief that eating is a truly multi-sensory experience. Often working with psychologists and scientists, his passionate curiosity has led him to craft a culinary experience where each sense has been considered with unparalleled rigour. Explaining his philosophy Heston says, ‘Of course I want to create food that is delicious, but this depends on so much more than simply what’s going on in the mouth – context, history, nostalgia, emotion, memory and the interplay of sight, smell, sound and taste all play an important part in our appreciation and enjoyment of food.’9
This approach has not only led to innovative dishes like the famous bacon and egg ice cream, but also to playing sounds to diners through headphones, and dispersing evocative aromas with dry ice. The results speak for themselves: crowned the best restaurant in the world in 2005 by Restaurant Magazine, and the best restaurant in the UK five years in a row by The Good Food Guide, The Fat Duck currently holds three Michelin stars. Heston himself has received honours as varied as an OBE from Her Majesty the Queen in 2006, and GQ Magazine’s Man of the Year in 2004, 2010 and 2011.10 The message is quite clear: concentrate on delighting the senses and the world will beat a path to your door.
Toni&Guy – a multi-sensory experience
Hairdressers Toni&Guy have clearly worked hard to provide a great multi-sensory experience that extends beyond just getting your hair cut. Lying back to have my hair washed I quickly noticed the TV screens angled down from the ceiling that play music videos on their own channel Toni&Guy TV. After a head massage, you return to the chair where you are offered a choice of drinks to enjoy while you have your hair cut. The experience therefore includes sight, sound, touch and taste. It even includes smell if you opt to buy one of their many haircare products. It’s obviously working: in 2011 Toni&Guy was voted as a SuperBrand for the fourth time. They now have over 420 salons across the world and employ over 7000 employees. In 2008 Toni Mascolo was awarded an honorary OBE.11
The rest of this chapter provides some general guidelines to consider when trying to improve the sensory experience:
Compensate for sensory deprivation
We seldom consider how critical our senses are until we find ourselves unable to use them. As we get older our senses may not be as keen as they once were, and many are affected by sensory disabilities. Don’t sweep this problem under the carpet: there are great opportunities out there for those who can make their products and services accessible to everyone. You may even find that by making your products easier to use for those with a sensory impairment, you make it better for everyone else too. I have heard countless people praise the Kindle e-book reader because they can enlarge the text size to make it easier to read. Do not treat accessibility as an afterthought. Ask yourself ‘How can we make this product or service work well for those with a sensory disability?’
OXO GoodGrips – accessibility is good for business
The company OXO International was started by entrepreneur Sam Farber in 1989 to develop a range of easy-to-use kitchen utensils inspired by his wife’s arthritis. The GoodGrips peeler, for example, had a thicker handle to make it easier to hold. They quickly found that tools designed to be usable by those with limited dexterity were also more comfortable and attractive to everyone else: OXO now sell over 850 products, they have won over 150 international design awards,12 and grew sales at an average of 27 per cent from 1991 to 2009.13
It is not only disability that can deprive us of our senses: it happens whenever we go online. Our inability to touch, smell or taste an item when shopping on the web can hinder decision making, especially when buying tactile products like clothes or groceries. Surprisingly few have made progress in this area, I suspect because of the cost of compensatory measures, like close-up photography that reveals the texture of objects, or compelling verbal descriptions. I believe we will see great progress in this area over the coming years. Why not make fuller use of sound and video clips to compensate for a loss of touch? Marketers have successfully done this with television advertising for years. When faced with a situation where senses are ruled out, ask yourself ‘How can we employ the other senses to compensate?’
Offer a time-out
At times it is easy to feel like our senses are under assault. On the street music blares from shop fronts and leaks from headphones. Adverts on every surface compete for our attention. At the office many receive hundreds of e-mails, instant messages and phone calls a day, set against the background hum of machinery and chit chat. This not only ruins our ability to concentrate, it can leave us wanting time out.
The ‘Naked Streets’ of Drachten – psychological traffic calming
How do you decrease congestion while improving road safety? One approach that has been a great success in the Netherlands, and now in the UK, is to remove as many signs and signals as possible. This counter-intuitive approach works because instead of just following the signs, the ambiguity of the surroundings forces drivers to slow down and concentrate on what’s going on around them, making eye contact with other drivers and looking out for pedestrians. The town of Drachten in the Netherlands, which first adopted this approach, has removed all its traffic lights despite having over 22,000 cars a day travelling through the town. They saw the number of accidents at one junction fall from 36 over four years to just two in the last two years. Similar results have been seen in Denmark and in the UK, where research showed a 35 per cent drop in accidents on roads where the centre-line was removed.14 This is a fascinating example of how removing a stimulus from an environment can aid concentration and direct behaviour in a positive way.
In an environment where we are constantly over-stimulated, experiences that soothe are always welcome. It may be that less is actually more. By reducing the intensity of the experience, or eliminating some sensory intrusions, the experience might be greatly enhanced. Ask yourself ‘Should we stimulate or soothe the sense? What could we eliminate from the environment to make it more relaxing?’
The Beetle and Wedge – mobile tax
This peaceful restaurant by the river near where I live has a fun scheme to prevent the annoying intrusion of mobile phones: anyone who answers a phone is fined £5, anyone caught making a call at their table is fined £10. The money goes to charity.
Aim for consistency
Most companies I’ve worked with use a large number of different freelancers, design agencies and in-house teams, depending on the size, complexity and nature of the brief. The result is that the look and feel of their products and services can resemble a patchwork quilt. We even see pages of the same website having different stylistic treatments, which can lead to no end of confusion. A consistent look and feel across all products, services and media at every stage of the customer journey is important. It helps to make the brand recognisable, and reinforces the message you are trying to communicate.
Vivobarefoot – consistency across media
This brand of shoe is quite unlike most others on the market. Vivobarefoot believe that the best design for a shoe is one that allows our feet to move as if they were barefoot: allowing our toes to spread and our feet to feel the surface we are moving across. Doing so discourages a heel-striking running technique and so can reduce the likelihood of injury. To achieve this, the soles of the shoes are necessarily very thin, but must be tough and puncture proof too. Vivobarefoot are also proud of their ethical stance: the shoes are made using eco-friendly materials and production techniques.15
By printing their business cards on a material called Tyvek, which is not only tear-proof, but also incredibly thin, light and 100 per cent recyclable, they have managed to communicate all of the qualities of their product as well as their contact details. Most cards I get are filed away for safe keeping, but this one has managed to linger in my wallet for a while. I’ve shown it to quite a few people too.
Bookend the process with briefing and testing
In order to create a sensory experience that satisfies both the functional and aesthetic requirements across every stage of the experience, the briefing and testing phases are absolutely critical. To produce a result that is at once usable and attractive is a real skill and in most cases requires a professional designer. The clarity of the brief that the designer is given not only determines the quality of their work, it also directly affects the eventual cost: a woolly brief can cause costs to double simply through endless amends. Furthermore, without thorough testing we will not know if our goals have been met. In my experience, during the rush to bring something to market, the brief is sacrificed in the urgency to ‘get on with it’, and the testing is compromised in the urgency to launch. I implore you to consider these phases not as peripheral, but central to the process. Once your stuff is out in the world it’s too late.
Summary
- Every product or service is fundamentally a sensual experience, so the way in which our senses are stimulated must always have an end in mind, and never be arbitrary or left to chance.
- Every sense should be considered: they all offer abundant opportunities to enhance the customer experience and differentiate a product or service from the competition.
- Experiences are multi-sensory in nature: the senses must not just be considered in isolation, they must work together, and special consideration is required when the use of our senses is restricted.
- Intensity is an important consideration: our senses are continually bombarded from the moment we wake. Opportunities lie in soothing as well as stimulating the senses.
- Consistency is key: a common design language should apply to every interaction to communicate the message unambiguously.
- The final design must be the result of carefully considered action: a thorough brief and rigorous testing are essential.