Had an engaging discussion with a big company exec about their early ideas for measuring a satisfying and delighted user experience. He relayed a CEO room discussion where the only answer they came up with, beyond "I don't know", was, the "absence of customer displeasure". Love it!
My initial reaction was to laugh, in part because it was being relayed to me with a laugh. It was clear that these execs 'get it', but didn't quite know how to do it.
After a bit of office banter on this new awesome usability metric, we thought this was likely spurred by a focus on customer support calls and cases filed. Those negative events tend to attract executive attention. This feels like a softball as we are tailor-made professionals to provide an answer to their problem with all our wondrous user experience and usability tools, metrics, and magic-wielding methods. Although, I can't help but feel compelled to invent a measure for, Absence of Customer Displeasure ™.
I have a feeling this client engagement will go quite well :)
