Mark Boulton

A little over a year ago, we pub­lished my first book with Five Simple Steps. A small ripple in the pub­lish­ing industry, but a large splash for us. From that single tent­at­ive toe in the water, we’ve gone and dipped our whole leg in with the pro­duc­tion of six upcom­ing titles — ran­ging from Andy Clarke’s Hard­boiled Web Design to Brian Suda’s Design­ing with Data.

Today sees the ship­ping of Donna Spencer’s ‘A Prac­tical Guide to Inform­a­tion Archi­tec­ture’, and its promp­ted me write a little bit about how the work we did a year ago is now start­ing to pay off.

Donna Spencer’s ‘A Prac­tical Guide to Inform­a­tion Architecture’

Design­ing from one end to the other

I’ve said before one of the reas­ons I wanted to pub­lish my own books was because of want­ing to con­trol the pro­cess; from edit­ing through to design and pro­duc­tion. As time has gone on I’ve real­ised that the thing I get a kick out of is being able to con­trol — well, actu­ally, have an influ­ence over — is the entire cus­tomer exper­i­ence; from the moment they look at the web­site to buy the book, right through until they receive it in the mail. Being able to make that jour­ney con­sist­ently is incred­ibly chal­len­ging as ele­ments within the pro­duc­tion chain are always try­ing to take con­trol away from you. Let me give you an example; pack­aging and fulfilment.

There are many pack­aging and ful­fil­ment com­pan­ies across the world. They exist to help large and small com­pan­ies deal with ship­ping goods without the head­ache of hav­ing to store, pro­cess, pack­age and mail out the stock. They do it all for you and you pay for the square foot­age of ware­house space you use, together with a per order ful­filled charge. All good. One thing is com­mon amongst most large ful­fil­ment com­pan­ies, how­ever. They gen­er­ally like to use their own pack­aging. Using your own is more costly for them — so much so, some just won’t enter­tain the thought.

The Five Simple Steps books come in a bespoke box designed to with­stand a fair bit of knock­ing about. You see, due to the slightly heav­ier paper stock, these books weigh in at 1kg each. That’s a fair weight to be dropped onto its corner. The pack­aging also had to look attract­ive. We wanted to cre­ate some kind of unbox­ing exper­i­ence — receiv­ing and open­ing these books should be another step along that exper­i­ence jour­ney. It’s not the end of the line. This got us think­ing a lot more about the cus­tomer jour­ney with us.

Five Simple Steps pack­aging. At 1kg each, these books aren’t light.

This is roughly the jour­ney cus­tom­ers take:

Ini­tial contact

How did the cus­tomer come into con­tact with the book? Was it a refer­ral or ref­er­ence. Word of mouth? Google? Twit­ter? You need to under­stand where they came from and why? How can you make that first impres­sion a mem­or­able one, because those first impres­sions count.

Eval­u­ation

Is this pro­duce for me. Will this book make me a bet­ter designer/developer/IA/project man­ager? How does this book relate to me and my life?

Decision

How much does it cost? Is it worth it? 

Form filling

Nobody, nobody, nobody likes filling in forms. They’re always dif­fi­cult and riddled with poten­tial errors. How can you make it not just easy, but pleas­ur­able? Well, some­times just being easy is pleas­ur­able enough.

Ful­fil­ment

Now I’ve par­ted with my cash, what hap­pens? Do I receive an email? When? Are my books being shipped? When? 

The wait­ing

How do I know what is going on? Is my order just sit­ting on a shelf somewhere?

Receiv­ing and Unboxing

Receiv­ing pack­ages is always excit­ing. It’s not the hard­est thing in the world to make pleas­ur­able. But, with some care­ful atten­tion paid to pack­aging, labelling, lan­guage and mater­i­als and you can make open­ing a box more delight­ful than using the thing inside. Just look at Apple.

The diges­tion

The story doesn’t end with receiv­ing the book. Does it deliver on what you prom­ised? If not, how does the cus­tomer go about chan­ging that? 

Of course, what I’m describ­ing here is the pro­cess that’s been around as long as mail order has. It’s not rocket sci­ence, but it’s so, so easy to get wrong. We’ve only just begun on this path and, to be frank, there hasn’t been a week goes by that we haven’t learnt some­thing or screwed up in some way. But regard­less of the pain and frus­tra­tion a cus­tomer may exper­i­ence, there are some things you can put in place to help them for­get. Again, a side­ways glance at Apple.

Spikes Of Joy

When I describe this to poten­tial cli­ents, I talk about ‘Spikes of Joy’ — those tiny moments that bring a smile to your face. If you’re listen­ing to music, it’s the moments when you feel a wave of joy; when the right notes com­bine to cre­ate a phys­ical reac­tion. The same approach can be applied to design of all sorts. It cer­tainly applies to web design, but I’m not talk­ing about web design here, but some­thing more akin to Ser­vice Design. Through­out the Five Simple Steps cus­tomer jour­ney, we want to cre­ate spikes of joy. Small moments of pleas­ure. Sur­prises. Care and atten­tion. Love. And, you know what? It’s really, really difficult.

Mak­ing some­thing with care and atten­tion is easy. That will always shine through in a product. Authen­ti­city, truth and love is always easy to spot too. If product design­ers and man­u­fac­tur­ers care — every step of the jour­ney — you, as a cus­tomer, will be very sat­is­fied at the end of that jour­ney. BUT, it does not mean there will be moments of pleas­ure along the way. Sure, it may go without a hitch, but you could exper­i­ence it with a com­plete straight face. What’s hard is con­nect­ing the mundane pur­chas­ing jour­ney with moments of human pleas­ure. That’s dif­fi­cult to do. 

Books and Joy

I’ve always deeply loved books. I trained to be a book designer. I love their form, their smell and the know­ledge they hold. Mak­ing books joy­ful things isn’t too hard. Mak­ing pur­chas­ing books is. How do you make that pro­cess more than enjoy­able? How do you cre­ate spikes of joy?

I’d love to know what ideas you may have.