When you are creating a new experience for a customer or user, your business must follow some basic principles of marketing and design – listen to the customer and try to give them what they need.

However, where marketing focuses on strategic direction, design must deliver specific solutions to meet the demands of the marketing team and the strategies they set out for winning, keeping and growing the customer base.

Therefore, as designers, it’s our job to understand the customer better than anyone else, taking the generic flavour of direction set out by marketing, and bringing it into focus so the design can actually help people in their lives.  So as user experience designers, here’s an outline of what you need to create remarkable customer experiences:

Note how it’s a combination of internal resources, within the minds of the team, and the use of collaboration to find ways of extracting those internal resources and creating an environment of group flow  “…so named because during Csíkszentmihályi’s 1975 interviews several people described their ‘flow’ experiences using the metaphor of a water current carrying them along.”

If you are wondering about how to create this state of “group flow” fundamental to effective user experience design, they are listed in this Wiki entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

I’ll post up more on “how” but simply put, you must get teams responsible for designing customer experiences to actually witness the customers’ world and their messy reality, then find ways of creating “group flow” around that.  Without it, your efforts will not be well rewarded.

(credit to David Armano for helping inspire this thinking – his blog is http://darmano.typepad.com/)