David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

Designing the Digital Experience: the Foreword

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Designing the Digital ExperienceDavid Armano, the guy who writes the Logic + Emotion blog, was kind enough to write the foreword to my new book, Designing the Digital Experience: How to Use Experience Design Tools & Techniques to Build Websites Customers Love.

Want to see a sample of it? Here’s one paragraph: “So if you went out and bought this book, you’re heading in the right direction. The reason why social networks are such a big deal these days is that they act as both the great equalizer and amplifier. Customers who have a crappy experience with a company’s products or services now have a virtual arsenal of communication methods to be heard. Often times the search engine’s powerful algorithms (Google) finds their content and links to their complaints. When a certain “power consumer” couldn’t cancel his AOL account despite several pleas with the voice on the other end of the phone, he decided to take matters into his own hands and record the horrendous experience. What resulted was a PR nightmare for AOL that started online, gained momentum and was quickly reported on several national news stations. What starts digital becomes something much bigger, and it all starts with an experience.”

David has a bit more on his blog … so this is still a teaser – you’ll need to get the book to read the rest!

My New Book: Designing the Digital Experience

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Designing the Digital ExperienceI wrote a book! The title is: Designing the Digital Experience: How to Use Experience Design Tools & Techniques to Build Websites Customers Love. It should be out this October.

What’s the book about? Here’s a snippet from the Introduction:

“Visitors to an organization’s digital space don’t want to think about interacting with its website. They want to – quickly and easily – make a purchase, find information, or do research. It helps if they can be engaged and enchanted in the process. How can we facilitate this excellent experience? It’s all about intentional design.

Consider the concept of “experience design.” Nathan Shedroff describes it as designing the “sensation of interaction with a product, service, or event, through all of our senses, over time, and on both physical and cognitive levels.” Simply stated, experience design is “an approach to creating successful experiences for people in any medium.”

Designing digital experience is similar, yet unique. That’s because in a digital space, experience designers have to “compensate for the absence of a sales professional who stands ready to greet customers as they arrive [and] to cheerfully help them accomplish their goal.”

This book introduces digital experience design for websites. I have seen great information on parts and pieces of experience design. For example, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore’s book, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage, does a great job of exploring experience generally but really doesn’t focus on digital experiences. Other books are great at helping improve the user experience on websites but miss the broader picture of designing digital experiences. This book connects the dots. It explains how website structure, community, and customers are all parts of the total digital experience.” (Read the rest of the introduction).

Want more? There are a couple of places you can follow along with book happenings and thoughts related to the book:

Bear with me – I’ll be posting book-related updates (along with my usual posts) for the next couple of months. I’m excited about it! More later…

BIGWIG’s Social Software Showcase Presentation at ALA2008

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I am one of the presenters/conversation starters at BIGWIG’s Social Software Showcase at ALA2008. What is the Social Software Showcase, you ask? From the website: “The general idea for the BIGWIG Showcase is to highlight up-to-date technological innovations for libraries, while giving as broad an access as possible to the content and the presenters.”

So – I’ve created a screencast. Here’s what you do – watch/listen to my presentation, and then you have a few different options:

  • Come sit at my table during the actual Showcase, and we’ll chat! Show up on Saturday, June 28th at the ALA Annual Convention in the Marriott Anaheim Gold Key Rooms I-III from 1:30-3:30pm.
  • Comment now on this blog post (comment box found below)!
  • Comment on the Blip.tv version!
  • Comment on the YouTube version!

Description: Engaging your library’s local community is NOT an easy task. Engaging your library’s local DIGITAL community is even harder. This presentation introduces the concept of the experience economy and mashes that up with digital community participation and engagement. What’s that get you? A headache! No, wait… that’s the wrong answer. It REALLY gets you … Community Experience, aka the Conversation Economy.

So watch/listen to my presentation (if the version above is too small for you, go here for a 640X480 version)… and then come experience the conversation economy in action at my table at BIGWIG’s Social Software Showcase! Hope to see you there!