I dropped in on Barefoot Coffee yesterday to enjoy one of their fabulous Cubanos and noticed they had remodeled. It still feels cozy there, but it lost a bit of its independent spirit. I’m going to miss their quirky chairs. But, they still pull a great espresso drink and they still create nice latte art. And that, with a number of other touches, make Barefoot one of those sanctuaries that you seek out when you want a great cup of coffee that doesn’t come from the faceless corporate chains. I have a similar experience in one of my favorite dark little coffee houses in NYC, Caffe Reggio (image in this post). The funny thing is, I will go considerably out of my way to visit these places, when I could simply grab a drink at a place like Starbucks. Easy enough, since there is one within every quarter-mile radius.

Got me to thinking: How could this be extended to other products and services? Definitely easier with a local business, where you can create an atmosphere for your clients. Can also be more easily extended to services, where you can create that sense of comfort and trust through a personal connection. Much harder with other products and online services, but not impossible. Consider the latte art example. They don’t “need” to do that. It takes extra time. And they actually practice so that they can create some pretty incredible art and even enter competitions. It’s really about investing that extra time and, yes, costs to add delight and elegance to your product or service. Apple does it with their packaging and new buyers delight in the unpacking process. Heck, they even take photos and create videos of it to share.

Don’t you wish your customers did that? I’m sure you invest considerably in marketing and advertising, or you should be. Take some of that investment and roll it instead into making your product surprisingly delightful. Turn those customers into a grassroots channel whereby they are sharing their positive stories on Twitter and Facebook, uploading photos to Flickr, and sharing videos on YouTube.

The next time you’re streamlining and reducing costs, think really hard before you cut those delightful features and experiences or don’t even invest in them in the first place. View your product or service with “fresh eyes” or hire a research team to do it for you. Answer the really hard and sometimes intangible questions: Are you delivering delight? Do you add those extra touches that make someone smile? Are you creating a sanctuary from the chaos of your customers’ lives and the world around them, so that they feel comfort and pleasure in using your product or service? If you truly are, they are going to go considerably out of their way for you and pass right by your “Starbucks”, whoever that may be.

When I attended the IA Summit a few months ago in Vegas, one interesting theme captured my attention: A number of my user experience (UE) colleagues were busy founding their own product or service companies. Mind you, UE professionals have been running design agencies and consulting companies for a long time now. However, these UE professionals are founding new businesses that offer products and services outside the traditional realm of design and research.

Folks often talk about 37signals as the poster child of a design firm that morphed into a product company. But, I’ve been in Silicon Valley since 1993 and watched the boom and bust and boom. Most of the startups were founded by engineers and MBA’s. UE professionals tended to only be brought in much later to make it “pretty” and clean up usability messes. So, I find it quite refreshing and interesting to see UE professionals as successful founders and I think it bodes well for our profession and the industry. Why? Because they understand the power of fulfilling user needs with compelling and useful experiences. It will be interesting to see if they track to similar success as 37signals.

Luke Wroblewski over at Functioning Form describes what he calls “The Shifting Role of Design“. In essence, the roles of design and design thinking are becoming increasingly critical for success in today’s shifting economy. He states:

When Markets mature faster, function is increasingly assumed and no longer a core differentiator. As a result, design becomes a key differentiator sooner.

Let me wrap up with sharing some examples of startups that have been founded by UE professionals recently:

Rashmi Sinha, one of the founders of SlideShare, has a well-known reputation in the field of User Experience. What is SlideShare? Basically, it is a great web application and service for hosting and sharing presentations. One of the biggest benefits is that this means no more sending (and receiving) those monstrous emails with PowerPoint presentation attachments. TechCrunch had a nice writeup on it last year.

Lou Rosenfeld, founder of Rosenfeld Media, is another well-known figure in the UE community. Lou spent most of his career as an information architecture consultant. Rosenfeld Media is a publishing house dedicated to developing short, practical, and useful books on user experience design. One unique aspect of Rosenfeld Media is that they have opened a nice 2-way dialog with readers by soliciting ideas for books, how to improve the books being published, and even how to improve the company itself. Boxes and Arrows has a good interview with Lou from last year.

Last, but not least, Christina Wodtke is one of the founders of Cucina Media, a web software company focused on collaborative publishing. Christina is also a very well-known UE professional in the industry. PublicSquare is one of their first products “created out of the need for a multi-contributor publishing environment”.

Facebook held a press and developer event today to officially launch their Facebook Platform. CNN Money has a pretty decent summary of the implications. Supposedly, these are screenshots on SplashCast of some sample applications on the new platform.

Basically, imagine adding a social layer to any online experience in a way that makes it more useful or more enjoyable, since that layer is composed of people that you know and presumably trust more than some random stranger.

• Shopping – What laptops do the people in your social network own and recommend?
• Concert tickets – What concerts are your friends going to this weekend?
• News – What stories can you trust?
• Video – Not just watching funny monkeys, but actually using video to communicate with friends.
• Money – Negotiated lending and borrowing in your network.

By becoming the central social platform for using these services, Facebook places itself in a very powerful position. The key is that they aren’t just acting as some sort of portal for launching into online services. They are opening up access to developers to redefine these services with the addition of a social layer that will completely transform the experience. No longer will you have a series of fragmented social interactions with strangers as you buy a book on one site, tickets on another, and read product reviews on yet another. Your personal social network will be omnipresent and accessible through all of these experiences, much like real life.

If this succeeds, they will truly transform these services. Sure, each of these businesses could certainly add a social layer to the experience on their own site and many do. However, recreating or importing your social network over and over again rapidly becomes tiresome. By opening itself up as a real social software platform for developers, Facebook has dramatically increased its utility and appeal.

Sunset in Santorini,
originally uploaded by Larry Cornett.

So many of us love a cup of coffee in our favorite cafe, but I don’t think many would call that a “transformational experience”. However, having a cup of coffee in a small cafe on the edge of the caldera at sunset in Santorini? Yes, a transformational experience that created a memory that I will never forget. What price do you put on such a cup of coffee?

The book “The Experience Economy” briefly mentions a key example that helps explain how a simple good can be economically transformed into an experience for which a customer is willing to pay one thousand times more. The following table outlines this transformation for the simple coffee bean.

We all know that a cup of coffee prepared at home is much, much cheaper than buying a coffee drink at your favorite cafe. Yet, every day so many of us are willing to stand in long lines and pay much more to have that drink prepared for us. Why? In some cases, it is for the service. Replicating the perfect cappuccino at home is no easy task. However, often people are seeking the experience provided by having that cappuccino in the cafe atmosphere. Enjoying the music, watching people, and meeting new friends are all part of the experience you quite willingly pay for.

Starbucks certainly understands this and that has been a key component of their amazing success. In the book “The Starbucks Experience” Joseph Michelli describes 5 key principles for creating a business that delivers an extraordinary experience for its customers:

1. Make it your own
2. Everything matters
3. Surprise and delight
4. Embrace resistance
5. Leave your mark

On page 11 there is a section that captures how important they realized a holistic experience was in converting a loyal customer:

“…the ambience of the store must be inviting; the store must be a place where a person will feel comfortable hanging out alone or with friends. This setting, often reffered to by Starbucks partners as the ‘third place,’ must capture a unique warmth that sets it apart from the first two places in most people’s lives: work and home.”

Consistently offering customers positive (and sometimes even transformational) experiences has been a big part of what makes Starbucks work. Even if you aren’t a fan of the chain, you have to admit they have had phenomenal global success. They get it.