I launched my new course!

The course has been launched in Beta.

There are a couple of areas where it needs improvement:

Better quality film footage. I need to buy a camera (I thought the Apple Retina Cam would be good enough...I guess not.).
More material. Mainly, I need to add more examples and to expand the narrative - a great problem to have!

So more is coming soon.

If you are interested in checking it out, take a peek. If you'd like to be a beta customer and give me feedback, contact me directly and I'll send you a coupon code.

But for now, here's the trailer:

What inspired me to create this course?

I often talk to start-ups and organizations that need assistance creating unforgettable experiences. I find that most companies can get baseline work complete without much specialized UX help. Today, I think most everyone has some great baseline knowledge of what works and what doesn't based on what we experience online.

But it's that day-in, day-out UX practice knowledge that can be used to bring a site and organization to the next level. That's why it can be important to hire a UX expert, even as a contractor.

The obvious, and perceived cheaper, solution many organizations take to create great experiences is to copy competitor approaches - from functionality to content marketing. It always disturbs me that clients would want to do this, as if the competitor had all the answers.

I observed too many times that the competitor didn't have the right answer. Often, the competitor's solution was dependent on internal processes or system limitations. And it turned out being wrong.

I know that without competition you wouldn't have an industry. You and your competitors contribute to defining baselines, best practices, and parity. Competitors and customers establish what's minimally expected. But you can't strive to exceed those expectations if you are only looking at what your competitors offer in your industry.

However, it is difficult to influence an organization to consider an approach divergent from what the competition does. An organization's leader needs to see an alternative vision before they can justify to themselves and their team that there is a better solution than what the industry is doing.

Generally, organizations need a different framework for viewing competitors and their solutions. I was hoping to achieve that with this class.

I created this course series by working on the competitor section first, until I realized I had a much larger story to share. I did some work on value and worth for a blog, and quickly realized that content belongs in this course too. As did material about identity and branding. As did material about customer research.

I realized that I needed to use an analogy for people to think about experiences as dating to help describe what I'm talking and make my point clearer.

I wrote about the 9 characteristics of great customer experiences. I realized that work should be included too.

With all of this, I ended up creating a 5 part course - a framework - to look at and evaluate experiences.

I'm hoping that product managers and UX designers use this as an approach for creating an unforgettable experience.

Why did I choose to use the word "unforgettable" rather than "memorable"?

I usually don't like to use the negative version of words - like "not," "un-," "mis-," etc. I prefer to use the word itself. I find those types of words easier for people to remember and have a greater impact in speech.

Sure, unforgettable and memorable are synonyms, but they are a little different.

"Unforgettable" reminds me of the Natalie Cole song. It has a romance to it. In some ways, I think it's a stronger word than memorable. "Unforgettable" implies that a thought or memory is constantly front of mind of someone.

And that's what I enjoy creating - experiences that stay in people's minds all the time. Experiences that people like and want to repeat. That's what unique experiences are. The thought of that experience bring you back to have them again.

So what's included in this course?

This course includes 5 sections, which outlines a framework to think about experiences: