Mass-effect or Micro-interactions?

One of the wonderful things about my online experience is finding so many wonderful opinions peppered throughout the world. I happened across a link reposted by Chris Brogan, pointing me to David Armano’s blog, Logic+Emotion. David details a story from Randy Pausch, author of The Last Lecture, as a young boy at Disney World.

At 12 years old, a young Randy Pausch was exploring Disney World with his family and he and his sister decided they wanted to show their parents their appreciation for the trip.  So they did what any other grateful children would do—they pooled their allowance money and headed straight for the Disney gift shop. …

… Minutes later, a mini-tragedy struck when Randy accidentally dropped the shaker, breaking it on impact.  A nearby adult suggested that they should take it back to the store and they did so hesitantly, not expecting a positive outcome.  To their surprise and delight, the Disney employee who had sold them the items apologized for not wrapping them appropriately and gave them a new set, no questions asked. (link to post here)

This underscores an idea being coined as “micro-interaction“, a belief that interacting on a micro-level can have a greater pull-through impact as well as secure a brand in the mind of customers – as opposed to a massive marketing ploy to entice people to buy.

In reading this article it hit me like ton of bricks, I often grade the impact of decisions based upon impact across the masses, attempting to streamline processes and systems – it is what I do for a living, and how my mind works: make something quicker, better, faster.

However, life is filled with the need for balance, and many engineering-minded individuals fall prey to extremes in the extension of the “mass-effect” thought process. The balance in this equation is to remember that it is the on-going and repetitive, small exchanges - the micro-interactions - that act as the mortar in the foundation of a healthy customer experience - one component a systems and processes driven engineer might overlook.

Part of making something better is often a process of identifying and supporting those small things that make up the whole. Many people often forget that it also takes a higher number of these micro-interactions to make a difference. However, each interaction builds a longer-lasting goodwill effect that is both directly reciprocated, through future activity, and indirectly reciprocated, as recipients share their experience with others, thus increasing the likelihood a non-customer will convert.

While the number of iterations of micro-interactions might need to be higher, there are several key factors that make this model much more sustainable than the “mass-effect” scenario:

1. Energy required for each micro-interaction is much less.
2. The impact is at the grass roots level, so a culture can be born and self-sustaining: the experienced training the beginners in “how it’s done”.
3. People can be better suited to maintain low to moderate levels of micro-interactions as their behavioral energy is more natural in this range of activity.

In a nutshell, micro-interactions are probably fairly natural to those individuals who are geared towards social interaction as opposed to those who are more engineering minded (how to fix something that is broken). I would share with you it was an important lesson for me to learn that these small exchanges make a difference in the world for us ‘normal’ people, and I still have to be reminded by stories like this of what’s important.

Incidentally, as proof micro-interactions work, Randy’s parents went on to spend more than $100,000 with the Disney brand over the course of their lives – all because of one micro-interaction with their son.

Now it’s your turn. If you haven’t read the blog post, I encourage you to do so. Now its our turn to pay it forward!

Image courtesy of TheGreenJ

Rand Paush’s video posted on YouTube!

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.