In a user centric world, while the digital “e” is already naturally taken for granted, the shift to the user centered “I” is reshaping relations and the power balance between users and providers. From building product identities, such as Apple’s Iphone, Ipad,… through marketing campaigns that emphasize the product/service direct benefits to the user, and up to tailored personalized offerings and information strings around personal interests – all create a real user centered digital world that reframes traditional values and assumptions on provider – user paradigms, be it with commercial entities, information organizations or egovernment systems.
The internet today is truly personal. It’s about the individual “I”. The self sovereignty and natural sense of entitlement of users is expressed by their intrinsic motivations to get what is most relevant to them, anywhere, anytime, and speak up their mind and wishes. This is the source of users’ power, that puts them in the driver’s seat in their web based interactions. It creates personalized fragmentations that force providers to dedicate more extensive efforts to target, reach and satisfy their potential users, and even greater efforts to preserve their loyalty without using captivity methods that immediately bounce back as they only motivate users to reject the offering or provider.
Taking an Icentered approach, customers clearly specify what they would wish to have, evangelize what they find useful, annoying, and bring up ideas for product/service improvement and better suitability to users’ needs. Mostly, such expressions of needs, wants, dissatisfaction or praise are independent, targeting their own social networks. Furthermore, users seek to trust those they interact with. They express their degree of faith and demand transparency, ethics and engagement from their providers.
Therefore, the voice of the user should become a compass to providers in defining new systems and crystallizing their offerings, relations and even corporate identity. In a user centered world, listening to that independent voice of the customer, is priceless not only in usability design, but in defining, acting upon and creating brand identities and conducting an engaging dialog with customers. All this translates to relevance, usability and increased user satisfaction from both the product/service and its supplier.
User centricity is gradually maturing from a being a term coined as a lip service from the Petri dish of digital marketing CRM culture, to become fundamental in digital relationship. User centric systems, tailoring offerings and information strings to specific user demands, giving users independent access options to endless choice in a long tail economic model, personally modified offerings that the digital economy empowers, create a new power balance.
In a way, users’ powers of selection and expression liberate providers from taking all the responsibility on what to offer, and turns users into real partners to the whole process – from design, manufacturing, marketing and up through very transparent user satisfaction feedback.
Providers try to humanify their offerings, give it personalities. But even this is not always enough, as we, users, want more from our providers than just get our attention with their offerings, because it’s relevant. We want to trust them, identify with what they stand for. In the new digital marketing discourse, users own the conversations, manipulations are rejected and social media empower immediate feedback. A new discourse, attitudes and power balance will reframe the current paradigm to create a more balanced, trustworthy digital sphere.