• Business cards
• Correspondence (including letterhead, envelopes, and so on)
• Social media accounts, tweets, posts, blogs, and so on
• Physical locations (such as stores, kiosks, service centers, headquarters, showrooms, and so on)
• Packaging and labeling
• Advertisements (such as magazine, in-store, billboards, in-air, mailers, product placement, TV, and so on)
• Websites and online venues
• Television and radio (programming, ads, sponsorship, and inadvertent mentions, and so on)
• Signage
• Events
Top-Down
In this kind of interaction, the company doesn’t give you any choice in how things go. From the DMV example, you might think this is always a bad idea, but that’s not necessarily the case. When you’re watching a movie, you don’t want anyone asking your opinion on the climax. If you go to a symphony, you don’t want the conductor to ask if you want to step in on the oboe or if you’d like more timpani. Few choose-your-own-adventure books end with the same sense of drama and dénouement, at least for adults. You almost always have a much better experience of a concert, film, or book if you turn the control over to a master.
Many times, a company has no choice except to make a particular touchpoint top-down. Every digital storefront, for example, needs a shopping cart and checkout process. The customer has no say in creating or designing that interaction. Most of the time, this interaction doesn’t result in a valued experience. But it can also affect you in a good or bad way. The Apple Store, for example, already had a great purchase process when it, like most retailers, stored your credit card information and required only a password for you to buy something. Then it added Apple Pay and a pay-by-fingerprint feature, and the resulting interaction became (for a time) remarkable.
Co-Created
In a co-created interaction, you and the organization both bring something to the table. Wikipedia is a great example of this, where users actually create the content and Wikipedia serves as a facilitator. Reddit is another example: individuals post and edit content, whereas the site merely facilitates the interaction and selects the moderators. One of the easiest ways to create a valuable relationship is to allow people, where appropriate, to contribute to its creation. We simply care more about the things we invest our own time in.
You can also find an ambiguous middle ground between top-down and co-created. The Android operating system allows for a lot of customization. You can greatly affect how it interacts with you, but there are always rules and limits to what you can do. Some Levi’s stores have a machine that takes your measurements and then lets you specify how the pants flare out, their color, and so on. Still, it eventually makes a pair of pants, not a fruit salad. In this case, Levi’s is enabling customization but not full-on co-creation. It’s an invitation to customers to work within parameters but not one to do whatever they want (or to ask for things that aren’t possible).
For example, consider an unusual art gallery, the now-closed Feature Gallery in New York.
In an interview for this book, its late owner, Hudson (he went by one name), described how curators typically design visitor experiences. They usually organize galleries so that people see the least impressive work first and most expensive and famous at the end. In other words, they create a building narrative that rises to a climax.
You might wonder how this is possible if a museum has an open path that allows people to walk wherever they want (as opposed to some exhibits that have only one path through). After all, if visitors have choice and control, how can anyone shape those choices and paths? This is an important concept in building relationships with customers. Overall, people are remarkably predictable, and most will have the same experiences from your offerings. Most people who enter supermarkets shop for produce first. Most people who browse a website do so in similar patterns, so much so that companies have developed algorithms that can predict, with reasonable accuracy) what you will need or do next, whether or not you’re in a hurry, or when to offer customer service. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of responsiveness and customization. Indeed, if it weren’t the case, we would be much more frustrated, and companies would have to develop separate paths for each person in order to serve them comfortably. These typical responses to choices and stimuli are what allow all of us (museum curators and web designers, alike) to design satisfying experiences for more than one person (see the section on triggers in Chapter 7, “Discovering”).
In the case of art galleries, it turns out that almost all people turn right when they enter. Although some stray from the path, the vast majority will walk through a gallery in exactly the same pattern. That allows curators to draw them through an experience that unfolds much like a narrative, even though everyone officially has permission to go where they like. Typically, a museum or gallery uses this fact to build a predictable narrative based on a chronology of the artist’s works: early works in the front, later works at the end.
However, Hudson believed that this approach belonged in the past. Instead, each visitor should not only be able to improvise his or her experience, but also be encouraged to do so. To make this a reality, he didn’t use the usual organizational principles in his gallery. Instead, he broke conventions, juxtaposed works in new ways, and organized the gallery space to lead the visitor in unusual directions. In this way, Feature disrupted everyone’s expectations and delivered fresh experiences that forced them to concentrate much more on the work than they would have done otherwise. The organization of an experience changes how easily different stories can be told or discovered. If you want to tell a unique story about yourselves, your organization, or its offerings, you can’t expect to do so in the same format that everyone uses.
And lest you think this led to its downfall, it didn’t. Feature was an iconic gallery that introduced many famous artists to the world. It closed simply because Hudson died, and it was too difficult for others to replicate his vision and process.
Improvised
In improvised situations, the company responds directly to what a customer says or does in a freeform way. This type of interaction offers a much more human sense of give and take. That’s why improvised interactions offer the greatest potential for success and, needless to say, for failure.
Starwood Hotels, for example, treats its best customers to a concierge service. This is a single person whose phone number you have. You can call that person whenever you like, even if you’re just in the planning stages of your trip. Your special person helps you with whatever unique needs you have, hopefully producing a valued experience. The things she suggests you do on the road also can help you have a great experience. Most importantly, however, she gets to know you over time and can serve you better as the relationship continues. Such a service is improvised because it responds to your unique inputs and grows in its ability to help you.
Improvisation has a long history within various kinds of storytelling, especially in music and theater. The principles that jazz musicians and improvisational actors use may go by different titles but share important similarities:
• Accept all offers (an offer is a prompt or action on the part of one character). Denying an offer by ignoring it kills game play and creates an unresponsive experience. Accepting an offer moves the story forward collaboratively.
• Rather than trying to devise an offer, assume one has already been made (by a customer’s actions or an event in the environment). Act on those offers. In other words, don’t wait for your customers to do something or be explicit about their desires; engage them proactively.
• Use what’s already there. Rather than specifically creating new material that may be erroneous or take too much time, use what’s already present in