User Experience is Everything
We used to be obsessed about user experience at Yahoo! in the old days. We had the same attitude at Blurb, and still have. Great user experience is everything. It used to be called putting the customer in the center, being client oriented et cetera but these all miss the mark if you’re not obsessed about your consumer.
My Time Capsule (TC) died this week and I lost about 500GB of music, movies, TV-shows and applications. You mig argue that I should have had backup on my media server but I didn’t. So I emailed Apple about the precarious situation and they replaced the TC and gave me access to the 785 media files I’ve downloaded over the past few years - for free. That makes Apple not just a hardware and a software company but a services company. It makes them awesome.
Zappos has also figured out that they are in the service industry, offering two-way shipping. I feel the same about United Airlines, being an elite member. Las Ventanas resort in Mexico is in the same league, going the extra mile to deliver superior experience. Farm Fresh to You is another example with delivered organic food that blows me away every time I open the box.
The future belongs to these kind of companies that are obsessed about delivering an amazing user experience - not ownership or accessibility but real user experience. As a consumer you should not settle with anything less.
