TLF Gems Newsletter December 2024

Your monthly CX and insight newsletter from TLF Research

The gardener does not make a plant grow. The job of a gardener is to create optimal conditions.

Sir Ken Robinson

Two overlooked essentials in customer experience are details and context.

Details, because how customers feel about an experience very often depends on hundreds of small choices of design, tone of voice, timing, etc.

Context, because experiences rarely happen in isolation. What else are customers doing? Why are they going on this journey? Why now?

This is why you can't design effective experiences on paper. You have to understand how real people will react to the details in your experience, and you have to understand what else is going on in their lives.

Thanks for reading,

Stephen

Here are 6 things we think are worth your time this month

The UX of Lego Interfaces

Genuinely think this may be the best thing I've ever linked in this newsletter - a comprehensive analysis of Lego's surprisingly diverse range of interface panel designs. Fun, but also loads of UX insight here. "These iconic, low-resolution designs are the perfect tool to learn the basics of physical interface design."

Read: The UX of Lego Interfaces

Severe Weather Alert

I loved this post from Seth Godin about severe weather alerts. It teaches us a lot about what we, as humans, attend to and how we get used to living with things we shouldn't. Highly relevant for the climate catastrophe, but also many of the CX crises that organisations are far too comfortable living with. "Patterns are easy to ignore. We pay attention when the pattern is interrupted."

Read: Severe Weather Alert

Implementation Science

One of the enduring problems in CX and related fields is the "know-do gap": we know what the answers are, but making them actually happen is difficult. Via Erika Hall I've learned about the field of "implementation science" which is focused on this problem in healthcare, and I think there's a lot we can learn from this. "How do we get 'what works' to the people who need it, with greater speed, fidelity, efficiency, quality, and relevant coverage?"

Read: Implementation Science

LLMs in Qualitative Research Development

I'm extremely wary about the use of LLMs (which, let's remember, are basically predictive text) in research. This is an interesting article about some potential uses for LLMs in research development, although I sometimes wonder if we focus too much on reducing effort! "We found that ChatGPT could generate appropriate interview questions, craft key questions, provide feedback on protocols, and simulate interviews, indicating its potential to reduce time and effort, particularly when human resources are limited."

Read: LLMs in Qualitative Research Development

The Unbelievable Age

As a bit of a counterpoint to the link above, here's an interesting post from John Willshire about the value of doing things the hard way, of standing out through craft rather than relying on me-too spectacle. "...when a medium becomes full of creations which 'reach beyond the creator’s means', the things that become the stand-out pieces are the ones where people do something different."

Read: The Unbelievable Age

What I'm Reading: Fall of Civilizations

The book version of one of my favourite podcasts, this is about the civilisations through history that reached a pinnacle of success and then collapsed. And yes, there most certainly are lessons for us in that! "Every ruin in this book should thus be understood as a warning and a challenge: take nothing for granted, resist those who have mortgaged our future for their greed, and fight with every inch of your being for a better world."

What I'm Reading: Fall of Civilizations

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