Of course a lot goes into the experience BUT the fact of the matter is that experience counts for pretty much the whole enchilada

So whether we are professors or burger flippers we need to be thinking about the product we are dispensing in terms of the experience and not just the content.

Of course we probably get the experience right 1/2 the time if we are lucky.

Why is experience a 50/50 shot in the dark?

1. we don’t listen.

2. we are too self absorbed.

3. poor feedback from customers, who may be students.

4. no training in experience thinking

5. failure to give what we would expect

If you aren’t reading Mark Hurst, the man behind Good Experience then you are doing yourself a massive disservice!

Want a leg up on the experience game to come? Think mobile! Are many of us even on the 1st rung of the mobile ladder when it comes to our enterprise, and that may be teaching! No.

But as Mark points out there is clear and definitive evidence that mobile connections and all that goes with it will be a force to be reckoned with, so get in early, now!

Here is Mark Hurst’s last post and it contains a lot to think about.

Lessons from a trip to southeast Asia

Somewhere in the great novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the story of a man who is shown the size of the entire universe, just so he can grasp how tiny and insignificant planet Earth actually is. (Die-hard Douglas Adams fans, please correct me if I got the details wrong.) The lesson: A change in location can transform your view of your own day-to-day surroundings.

I just got back from a long trip throughout southeast Asia, including visits to Hong Kong, several cities in Indonesia, and Singapore. The entrepreneurs and businesspeople I talked to have changed my view of my own surroundings – the US market, and to some extent my hometown of New York. While admittedly this was not an exhaustive research study, I thought I’d share some of what I learned.

• Asia rising: It’s hard to overestimate the feeling of energy, expansion, investment, and activity that pervades the region. As the US economy stagnates, money has flooded into southeast Asia trying to find better investment yield – and the aggressive work ethic of the region (long hours, highly competitive, focus on results) has been happy to make use of that investment.

• The U.S. who? Multiple times people told me, in effect, that they just don’t pay much attention to what’s happening in the US – or Europe, for that matter. Asia is taking the lead in the world economy and while the US has some good ideas worth studying (and perhaps borrowing and improving upon), it is not considered the leader to be followed. Asia will grow just fine on its own, no matter what happens with the stagnating Western economies.

• Mobile, mobile, mobile. Everyone from the banking executive to the fried-rice street vendor carries a mobile device. Depending on the city, Internet access may be slow or unreliable, and mobile devices are best suited to occasional bursts of low-bandwidth activity (texting, emailing, simple apps or Web lookups).

• BlackBerry rules. Past a certain modest income threshhold, BlackBerry is the preferred device, with iPhones relegated to the wealthy – and then mainly used for music, photos, and other media. Many people carry multiple devices. I saw only a few laptops and almost no iPads.

• Customer experience isn’t yet a focus. Whether because of Asian cultural norms or the recency of business expansion there, customer experience is not yet taken as a strategic imperative. It’s coming – long-term focus on customer needs will always determine winners, in the long run – but we’re not into the long run yet there. For now, there’s not much talent even in the tactical usability and user experience realms… let alone the strategic customer experience. (Some global brands are doing good customer experience work in Asia, which I know because Creative Good has been doing project work there – but these companies are generally headquartered in the West.)

• Don’t ignore Asia – or mobile. Today is still early in the growth of Asian business, just as it’s early in the mobile era. But the future of customer experience lies, in part, in both of these locations. Don’t forget to consider Asia, and mobile, in any strategy for your future development. (And drop me a line if Creative Good can help.)

Let me know if you have your own opinions – and Asian readers, let me know what I missed or got wrong!

Mobile like WEB2.0 offers a wealth of possibility that is just waiting to be applied!

There is a lot of noise out there today and too much of it revolves around innovation that is not innovation at all.

Mark Hurst of Good Experience spends a lot of time looking at the experience we have in a retail and even education environment and has tapped into 3 examples of innovation on the cutting edge.

• Sal Khan runs the world’s biggest school, and it’s completely free. The Khan Academyis a collection of 1,600 instructional videos, all posted on YouTube, all designed, illustrated, and narrated by Sal himself. Anyone with an Internet connection can learn math – from “one plus one” all the way through advanced calculus – or various topics within biology, history, and finance – just from watching Sal’s videos.

• The Gregory Brothers are creating hit music in a brand new way, by auto-tuning popular news clips they find on YouTube. Their Auto Tune The News project recently spawned two songs that made it onto the pop charts - Double Rainbow and Bed Intruder.

• Louise Sacco helps run a Boston museum spotlighting “bad art” - called, yes, theMuseum Of Bad Art. Sacco and her fellow curators pursue a mission of “bringing the worst of art to the widest of audiences.”

Only very few people have the stomach for innovation, the speed, time and risk involved seem to weed out the leaders from the followers.

What we need in our University environment today are pockets of encouraged education innovation where those who have the stomach for it can cut lose and make things happen, or not.

As we address the change around us we often think about cuts, re-deployment, product delivery, those things we tend to be able to monetize.

I think we are being distracted from the one thing we can deal with, change and develop, the experience we have in commerce, politics, education our lives in general.

Mark Hurst, the author of Good Experience does a great job of reminding us how important the experience we have is on a weekly basis.

For Mark, this week, creating a good experience on the web, in a shop, at a conference all comes down to listening to those who are consuming what you have to offer.

Now sit back and think, think hard, how well do you listen and when you are listening do you actually use that information to develop the experience you are delivering?

Exactly, we need to listen and we don’t.

Shame on us!