Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Dmitry Dragilev, the lead marketer at ZURB, an interaction design firm whose clients have included Facebook, eBay, Yahoo, NYSE, Britney Spears, and Zazzle. They are also behind the Web notation products Notable and Bounce.

Ever read a great book? What do you remember about it? Maybe a few dramatic moments, some wild story twists, and most definitely the ending. Your product is just like a book. You’re telling a story to your customers and they’ll remember only a select few moments from what you tell them. What are these moments? Can you use these moments to plant a memory in a customer’s mind?

There are millions of books, courses and talks out there about building great products online. An awful lot focus on “user experience” as a silver bullet to delighting customers and driving revenue for businesses. Everyone gets caught up thinking it’s user experience they need to worry about, but it’s what they remember about their experience that’s critical. Their memory is what they’ll draw on to tell other people about it. Their memory is what they’ll project into the future. We should focus on making experiences happen that plant memories in people’s heads, like in Christopher Nolan’s film Inception.

It turns out there are three different kinds of moments in your story customers remember: transitions, Wow moments, and endings.

How to plant a memory

There are three particular kinds of experiences capable of turning an ordinary moment into a memory that will stick in your customer’s head. Focusing attention on these three experiences will help you create memorable products.

1. Transitions

These are similar to those surprising plot twists in a story. Giving customers one sensation and then transitioning to another causes a change customers will recognize and are surprisingly likely to remember. Transitions need a clear end and a new beginning, which will trigger the right-to-left-brain transition and form a memory. Here are some examples of memorable transitions that reinforce the core value of each product:

● Ever Skype with your grandparents in a remote village in the middle of nowhere? Remember how their still image turned into video for the first time? That’s hot! You’ll anticipate this every time you Skype now.

● Have you tried to use Facetime on the iPhone yet? That initial call transition to the high quality video of the person on the other side is extremely memorable. This is something you’ll be mentioning to your coworkers the next day.

● You know how when you type a city into Google Earth and watch the globe spin around to the country it is in and then zoom into the city? That transition is what you probably mentioned to others when you first described the app.

2. ‘WOW!’ Moments

Ever have a moment when you just can’t put down the book you’re reading? You’ve got to finish the chapter you’re on. The same happens with a product. Very little of what you create for a customer will ever be remembered by them. They will only remember the peak experiences they have and refer back to them to sum up their feelings about your product. Here are some examples of peak moments that give customers a great story to pass along to their friends:

● Ever trip over your MacBook Pro power chord? Remember how the magnetic power cord came out from your laptop without bringing it crashing down to the floor? “Wow! Thank you Apple!”

● Do you remember the first time you won an auction on eBay and got your favorite gadget for half the price it would cost you in the store? Do you still tell this story to all of your family and friends?

● Ever find that awesome movie from your high school years on Netflix and stream it right away? Were you surprised at how good the movie looked?

● I’m continually impressed each time I open Google Maps on my iPhone and Google something in the area, then hit directions and it fills in Current Location > Search Result and just gets me there, by car or walking.

● Remember the first time you used Picasa? The first promise Picasa had was: “Find all the photos you forgot you had.” The first run experience delivered exactly that for a disorganized user like me. I rediscovered all sorts of ‘lost’ photos, like an unexpected walk down memory lane.

3. Endings

If you’ve read a novel you probably remember the ending. But how often do we worry about how our customers’ experiences with a product ends? That last impression turns out to be very important. Endings can put a positive spin on a negative experience or take a positive experience and ruin the whole thing. People remember endings. Here are a few examples of what we’re talking about:

● Good ending: Becoming a Mayor in Foursquare. What an awesome ending to your hard work of check ins. Folks get excited about this.

● Bad ending: You’ve been checking in for months and have not received any messages or earned anything for doing it. You’re sick of competing with others without any reward and so you give up.

● Good ending: You contact the tech expert on Crossloop and get your computer virus removed in 10 minutes. You’ll definitely be telling others about this experience.

● Bad ending: You contact a tech expert to resolve a problem and you get no response for days. By that time you’ve given up on the service all together.

● Good ending: You click Google Docs Save and Close button and know that: “Certainty I won’t lose my doc!”

● Bad ending: You click the Close button on a cloud app doc and are not sure if your changes were saved.

● Good ending: Flickr’s Contact updates provide a never-ending ending, a continual positive spin on our initial investment of putting our own pictures in there

● Bad ending: You keep putting pictures online and don’t hear about any responses to your pictures for months.

These examples above form memories in customers’ minds that sell these products over and over again. If you want your product to sell you’ve got to start with focusing on transitions, Wow moments, and endings to make it stick in a customer’s mind. How sure are you that your customers will tell others about these moments versus another one you’d rather they forget?

Like the author of a book, you are not just making a product or providing a good user experience, you are giving people a story that will plant memories, and those memories will drive their behavior in the future. Make sure they have good ones.

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I hope this is one of those resources you print out pin to your desk, and share with others. This is the core theme of this blog, the balance needed for successful web endeavors in organizations.

I originally posted this diagram in 2006, then updated it in 2007, and it%u2019s time to revisit the core structure of the goals and challenges of a Web Strategist, especially as I reset as I change roles.

Who%u2019s a Web Strategist? In a company, they often are responsible for the long term vision of corporate web properties. At a web company where their product is on the web, they%u2019re often the product manager or CTO. Regardless of role, the responsibilities are the same, they need to balance all three of these spheres, and make sure their efforts are in the middle of all three.

1) Community Sphere
To be successful, the Web Strategist must understand (by using a variety of techniques and tactics) what customers and prospects want. Stemming from, ethnography, analytics, brand monitoring and primary and secondary research the end result should be a web experience profile and mental model.

Specific skills needed: Ability to understand and implement research, strong understanding of user experience which would include usability, information architecture. Ability to synthesize content from a variety of real time locations such as web analytics, customer feedback from support and surveys and communities, and an ability to be empathetic to customers. Above all, this strategist should be able to predict where customers will be in coming years %u2013not just understanding of previous or current states.

Key Recommendations for 2009-2010: Focus on brand monitoring of customers in the social space. We%u2019ve seen an increase in consumer adoption of social technologies which has caused a shift in where customers make decisions (not just on your corporate website). This is an opportunity to quickly identify who they are, what they want (and don%u2019t want) and understand the language they use in order to reach them.

2) Business Sphere
Yet understanding customers alone isn%u2019t sufficient, the Web Strategist must be able to achieve measurable business objectives. This leader must be able to first identify key stakeholders within an organization, capture their needs, prioritize, and balance into a plan that meets both their needs and the community. This delicate dance requires the strategist to balance the needs of a variety of internal teams, offset daily fire drills, yet meet the needs of the company. Many Web Strategists fall short here, they meet the goals and objectives of internal stakeholders yet fail to balance the needs of the community. The end result? A website where users rarely visit, and go elsewhere to make trusted decisions.

Specific skills needed: Ability to communicate within a company, understand and prioritize emphatically the needs of multiple business stakeholders and prioritize. This leader will also need to be a mediator and must defuse the assertive business stakeholders will cool logic and business acumen, as well as ensure the web team operates in an efficient operation. Management skills are critical here: project management, human relations, communication, and the ability to define clear concise goals based on dates for content and technical teams. Lastly, the core of the role includes skills in marketing leadership, advertising, media, product management and marketing.

Key Recommendations for 2009-2010: In many cases, the recession has clamped budgets down to operations with budgets coming from campaigns and business units to innovate. Where budgets are limited, learn how to use inexpensive technologies like community software, blogging, or status update tools internally %u2013yet have a long term plan for how they work. On the external front, provide guidelines and resources to internal teams to use social before it cascades to many areas of the company without common framework %u2013fragmenting the customer experience and wasting business resources.

3) Technology Sphere
Lastly, the Web Strategist should be an expert in their own realm of internet technologies. They%u2019ll need to know the capabilities and deficiencies of their current arsenal of tools as well as adopt new technologies that are ever emerging. Leaders in this space often become complacent configuring current systems and forget to plan into the immediate roadmap new technologies that widen the breadth and width of what can be done. If the Web Strategist is performing the Community sphere correctly, they are already watching how the use of customers technology adoption is changing.

Specific skills needed: Ability to understand the workings of web architecture in the internet field. While they are not technical experts they should be able to understand the impacts of these technologies to the business and community. They should also be watching for emerging technologies and devote a percentage of resources to research and development for new technologies %u2013never falling behind. The strategist should demonstrate skills of innovation, and experiment and practice with new technologies as they emerge first hand %u2013but by keeping a focus on long term business objectives.

Key Recommendations for 2009-2010: Web Strategists need to prepare for a new set of connected devices that are quickly emerging. While social caught most companies off guard, mobile technologies within and outside of your company will impact how information is quickly shared. Start by analyzing related applications and mobile social networks in rich mobile devices such as Blackberry, iPhone, and Palm Pre.

To be successful, the Web Strategist must balance all three of these spheres. Becoming a master in each of these spheres requires incredible dedication, so the leader must rely on their team for input, actively seek out education, attend workshops, and read books on the various subjects.  Also, if this helps to shape your career, or you%u2019re a hiring manager for this role, I hope it helped to define what to look for.

Translations
The community sometimes translates my posts, I%u2019m thankful and am happy to highlight them here:
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This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 4:26 am and is filed under Career, Web Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.