August 7, 2019

The three most important trends in health care experience design for 2019

Justin Daab Customer Experience Design, Strategy, User Experience Design

Over the past 30+ years, Magnani has had the pleasure of working with clients across a variety of industries—from health care to hospitality, industrial equipment to medical devices, household cleaning products to sporting goods, dining cruises to the world’s most highly traded financial derivatives contracts, just to name a few. Each engagement has broadened our collective perspectives while confirming one underlying truth: Regardless of emerging trends, ongoing changes in technologies or the idiosyncrasies of individual markets, the fundamentals of human nature remain constant.

August 1, 2019

Digital Engagement (Don’t tell me. Show me.)

Michael Sauer Customer Experience Design, User Experience Design

Today, more than ever, keeping people engaged, interested and motivated is very challenging for brands and organizations. In an Uber-fied world, expectations are high for seamless user experiences with intuitive navigation and telegraphic content that gets to the point quickly. Yet, many companies continue to overcommunicate, drowning people in text-heavy content and clumsy digital journeys that require 10 clicks and 10 screens that read like white papers, putting a spin on the adage, would you prefer a picture or a thousand words?

July 29, 2019

What is ASMR? (And should your CX team care?)

Justin Daab Customer Experience Design, User Experience Design

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) refers to a tingling, or at least pleasant, sensation some people feel when they hear what can be best described as soft scraping, tapping or rustling sounds. Most commonly, those sounds are something like the gravelly sound of a whispering human voice, two sheets of paper slipping past each other, soft tapping on a something hollow, a plastic bag being crumpled or just about anything similar that is recorded through a microphone placed extremely close to the sound source. But ASMR can also be triggered by something tactile, like peeling the protective plastic off of a brand-new television screen, or visual by the movement of hands or lips.

July 25, 2019

The 411 on SEO

Magnani Podcast

Justin is joined by Andreas Mueller, of Bloofusion, to chat about the ins and outs of SEO, how it works and its history. They discuss the black-hat early days of getting found on the internet and how the tools, tricks and techniques for gaming the search engine system have evolved over the past 20 years.

July 17, 2019

5 reasons design thinking facilitation can amplify the success of your internal team

Justin Daab Customer Experience Design, Design Thinking

One of the great superpowers of design thinking is that it’s a methodology that anybody, or any organization, can learn and deploy, quickly and efficiently. As proof, one only needs to look at the growing numbers of organizations and enterprises building internal design thinking capabilities and teams. We have worked with some great internal teams who are embracing the methodology and positively transforming their products, services, processes and cultures.

June 27, 2019

5 ways to maximize the value of your UX research

Christy Hogan Hutchinson Customer Experience Design, Research, UX Research

Qualitative user research, in the form of interviews and observations, is an incredibly important aspect of UX design and experience design. It’s in users’ stories where you find true points of differentiation and previously unknown opportunity. Here are five considerations you should keep in mind to help ensure you’re getting the most from your UX research investment.

June 21, 2019

What is business design thinking (and why should you care)?

Justin Daab Business Strategy, Design Thinking

To those new to the concept, the term design thinking may seem like something that only designers could, or should, do. But nothing could be further from the truth. Business design thinking is the utilization of the traditional design-thinking methodology to conduct a more human-centered examination of a product, service or experience, to define what aspects of those things might be improved, to imagine and prototype solutions for addressing those improvable aspects, and to test and refine your solutions.

June 17, 2019

Changing Spaces

Magnani Podcast

Danielle and Justin discuss ways in which applying design thinking methodologies to change the experience of working spaces can have a dramatic impact on achieving desired outcomes. They explore the cyclical importance of storytelling and prototyping as part of the greater business planning toolbox.

June 7, 2019

Who should own the digital customer experience? Marketing or I.T.?

Justin Daab I.T., Strategy, UX, Web design

In a perfect world, every department within every company, and all of the incentive packages of everyone working in every department making up those companies would be aligned around delivering a seamless, amazing digital customer experience. But in our professional experience, there are frequent debates (some of them quite fierce) about what department or group “owns” it. That debate arises from a number of factors. The most common, as you may have guessed from reading the opening line of this post, is misalignment between budget authority, project accountability, and controls.