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Conversation design, explained
UX’s newest buzzword is the future for building meaningful relationships with customers.
A few weeks back I was listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos (P.S. I highly recommend checking it out if you get the chance.) The podcast is based on the most popular class taught in Yale University’s 300-year history, a psychology course about the science of what makes us happy.
In this episode, Santos had begun discussing Donald Wetzel, the man who invented the ATM simply because he hated waiting on long lines at the bank.
Santos describes a pretty painful process Wetzel went through in getting his idea to the right people after continuous rejections from those who, for whatever reason, thought no one would want to trust a machine with handling their money. But the strangest thing about Wetzel’s invention was that in all of its years of operation, his own wife has never touched an ATM.
Her reasoning? Eleanor loves to interact with people, and thinks no machine can replace the happiness even the smallest conversation with a bank teller provides her. She’d wait on line all day if need be.
