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Customer experience and the importance of seeing
Years ago we surveyed our employees at Creative Good and found that the single most popular undergraduate major was, of all things, art history. Since then we've always given extra points to any job applicant with that major, since art history teaches people how to see. And knowing how to see is essential in customer experience work.
In a recent interview about his new novel The Same River Twice, author Ted Mooney described learning "how to look, and how to teach people to look":
If you stand in front of an artwork of even medium value, you really have to spend some time cleaning your mind of words utterly, and just begin to look, and keep yourself as blank as possible, for as long as possible, and you'll begin to see the relations of things, how they fit or don't, and eventually you'll be able to see the object whole, and then you can start letting words come in again, and they will be the right words. If you do the same thing on a street corner it works too, by the way.
One book related to this topic is Ways of Seeing, by John Berger. While I don't agree with all the ideas or politics in the book, it provides some good examples of seeing things in different ways. We've assigned the book to new employees over the years, with good results. Learning how to see is more important than learning a tactical method. One might even argue that customer experience work is mainly the exercise of seeing in a different way - that is, seeing from the customer's perspective - or, as a customer experience consultant, both the customer's and business's perspectives.
Notice also that Ted Mooney, above, encourages people to set aside language and judgment and preconceived frameworks and just experience what's around them. The language will return; analysis will come later. But during the moment itself, the important activity is just listening, watching, experiencing. This is a major goal of my Gel conference, incidentally - creating an environment where people can just experience for two days - then analyze later.
This can all be scary. Opening up to an experience means relinquishing control. I've often seen in listening labs (note the name!) the discomfort it causes for stakeholders to encounter the truth about the customer experience they create. But in the end, it's the only way to create change. A good first step to making something better is seeing it, now, exactly as it actually is.
See also:
• Ted Mooney's quote above is from the June 4, 2010 New York Times Book Review podcast (here's the mp3 download) - you can listen to the excerpt here.
• As I've written before, the Book Review podcast is a mainstay in my media diet. Find more Book Review podcasts in the archive.
• If you want to follow Mooney's suggestion and stand in front of good artwork to uncover the meaning and relations, look into Slow Art Day, run by my business partner Phil Terry. Groups in dozens of cities go to local museums to do just that.
As an ABD (all but dissertation) in Ancient Chinese Art History, I have to agree. My training in Art History was also excellent training for my skills in analysis of a larger problem, as well as synthesis of my observations and discovered patterns into a coherent explanation and set of insights. This is obviously invaluable for my work as a business analyst, or user experience analyst. The ability to observe, note and then analyze the observations is crucial.
Another resource that many of the readers of Good Experience may find interesting is the study of material culture. A great intro to this is the classic "History From Things: Essays on Material Culture."
Beautifully put. And thanks for the references to check out.
If I could add a suggestion, I would encourage Creative Good to also consider putting musicians high on the list--especially those who have played in bands, orchestras, or sung in choirs. Similar to the art history major, a musician in a group has to learn how to listen, to sing or play fully and beautifully, but in harmony with others.
I couldn’t agree more about the value of “learning how to see.” As an undergraduate Graphic Designer, twenty-some years ago (blush), I took a lot of Art History which absolutely is vital (although I didn’t know it at the time). But I was also “taught how to see” as part of the core graphics curriculum, starting with a simple assignment to “draw your phone.” This was pre-cell phones (blush 2X), so there was more—let’s call them “contours” to draw. Still, when all of us hung our night’s work up for critique, each and every one of us drew the phone from the same perspective—the one we normally observed as we looked down on the phone as it lay on our desks. This resulted in 23 similar and boring drawings (technique aside). The next night we were told to “look” at the phone, not as a phone but as a 3D work-of-art…and draw “it” again. The next day, we had 23 different, unique, and truly lovely pictures—I remember that one of us simply drew the cord! Learning to “see” goes beyond work. Learning to “see” is a one of the “freebies” of life. I keep a few “sees” in my head—I collect them. There’s one I’ve kept for a very long time—it happened as I was climbing up to a restaurant in Italy, around sunset—huffing and puffing and bitching because the only access to food was by cliff. About mid-way (mid-bitch) I happened to look up from the narrow path, literally, at just the right minute to SEE the color of the sky meld perfectly with the color of the Mediterranean SEA, resulting in the appearance of absolutely no skyline and the most beautiful blue I've ever seen. Ahhhh, that “see” was a keeper.
Ways of Seeing by John Berger is a fantastic book. His insights on art, political ideology and humanity are appropriately provocative and worth considering as we live out our lives.