Retailing an Experience

In an article found here IDEO turns it's focus on retail and the future of the physical store. So much talk these days is about how brick and mortar stores are disappearing and becoming obsolete with the rising of internet purchases and consumer shopping habits. As this article suggests in is probably very premature to assume that that consumers are completely over physical stores and transactions. People like to connect with people and from a branding stand point and engagement with consumers the store still leads the way, and probably won't be replaced anytime soon with a digital alternative. So what things should be considerations for the stores of the future? This the article goes on the explain, is where a store needs to evolve to the new needs and expectations of consumers.

Considerations include.

Design stores that are more than places to buy stuff.
People still visit stores, people still go out at weekends and shop around, even if they ultimately do not buy from the store they are wandering and touching real products. Stores can use this to their advantage, making casual browsing, enjoyable, the goal should be brand experience.
Employ brand enthusiasts
Today more than ever, people share their opinions about things they buy, people love reviews and ratings. Stores should be hiring brand enthusiasts that are like evangelists to the products. These are people that care about the products they sell and want others to join their joy in ownership.
Target existing users of your product
People that are already consumers of your brand, have most likely bought into the dream and vision. Building in-store experiences that focus on education, trials and membership to these users of your product are going to build longer term relationships, and advocates. It's much more about open relationships than before.
Make shops into R&D labs
If one thing differentiates a physical store from a digital store it's the physical face-time with the consumers. This is an opportunity to speak directly with people and gauge honest feedback on new initiatives or products. This allows the physical space to become a feedback loop directly with customers.

Nice article and some interesting value adds to physical stores of the future. The internet has certainly empowered the consumer, but really people still want those physical interactions and feelings of belonging that brands promote, these ideas are definitely inline with those thoughts. These future stores could add huge brand value and loyalty, and I think Apple stores already show the way and how well it works.

Personality Traits

When working on a project it is not uncommon to produce a persona, a persona is like a generalization of a group of people that can be reflected into one character that exhibits those common traits. It is often the result of user research. that looks at many working individuals in a specific task and considers what is common to them all. What things they share in motivation and emotional feeling in performing a task is important for user experience design. This can be very useful for planning next steps, for product or software development, as it helps to evaluate a feature or service against a list of people that might use the system. It can also help when rationalizing user experience design concepts, and bring the designs empathetic mind inline with the target user, when creatively conceptualizing. Personas are a very useful tool in the discovery stage of a project, especially if the project is going to move into the hands of a creative type that will need to empathize with a potential consumer or user.

When working on a persona, and when studying people for projects it is useful to think about personality traits and psychology has produce many fascinating studies in this area, that give a good foundation of knowledge to have in mind when working on products and concepts for people. Personality can greatly influence the way you might approach the problem. For example, making a product for an extrovert is vastly different than an introvert personality type, and if something requires any social interaction, then care must be taken to cater to the right crowd of personalities. The level of public display and private information people are willing to share and talk about will differ depending on target users and what the goal of the service or application is. People and their personalities are valuable information for any designer to understand.

A couple of my favorite summaries of personality include Myers-Briggs and OCEAN(the big 5).

Myers-Briggs breaks people's personalities up as follows:

Extraversion (E) -	(I) Introversion
Sensing (S) -	(N) Intuition
Thinking (T) -	(F) Feeling
Judgement (J) -	(P) Perception

These types can be combined into 16 possible combinations. Each would exhibit different personality traits and reflect a different type of person.

The other is the OCEAN, which stands for openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The idea behind each of these classifications is that most people can be evaluated against these traits and from that you can make assumptions about how that person may behave under certain conditions and in in certain situations. Narcissists and extroverted people are good examples of extreme cases of personality types, that can be designed against.

Each of these classifications covers a broad set of people and all though of course everyone is an individual and will respond in context and situations differently, these documented personality types real help form a good impression of key personality types and help designers empathize with someone whom might be using their design.

These are only tools and in design of course we don't always want to restrict our end design to one type of person, but if you are looking for insight into behavior and characteristics then these two evaluation approaches really help.

For example, lets say we are designing for an extroverted personality type then here are some of the key characteristics they might portray versus an introverted personality.

• Extraverts are action oriented, while introverts are thought oriented.
• Extraverts seek breadth of knowledge and influence, while introverts seek depth of knowledge and influence.
• Extraverts often prefer more frequent interaction, while introverts prefer more substantial interaction.
• Extraverts recharge and get their energy from spending time with people, while introverts recharge and get their energy from spending time alone.

extraverted people tend to think and say things like

• I am the life of the party.
• I don't mind being the center of attention.
• I feel comfortable around people.
• I start conversations.
• I talk to a lot of different people at parties.

These notes would be very helpful in designing a product or service for people that exhibit very extroverted personalities. Or if you wanted to encourage more extroverted behavior from people then these would be important features to add to the experience to enhance those types of experience and personality types.