If I had one wish for our user experience and design team here at Bolin Marketing, it would be to spend the rest of the year (and quite possibly the next) focusing on how we could extend beneficial online customer experiences that extend beyond the norm: text, image and video content. Smart navigation and interaction design are also (of course) imperative in this equation. But the real silver bullet will lie in smart interaction design that builds a friendly relationship between customers and a company’s products and services.

While working on my draft for part two of my last post on Customer Experience Strategy, I’ve been thinking a lot about how our interactions with products and services have been changing. Then I read Adrian Ho’s post about the psychology of human movement and what this means for companies and their relationships with their customers. Of course, we all think Apple (iphone) and Nintendo (Wii) are leading the charge, with the way they involve natural human gestures as an essential element in how we experience their products. This is the tip of the iceberg. I think it’s pretty safe to say that gesture, movement, and even ritual are becoming part of the lexicon for the design of future customer interactions.

Our Team at Bolin Marketing is always trying to come up with a thoughtful and holistic approach to how we solve marketing problems for our clients. Beyond internet marketing, we’d like to think we’re making big strides in how we can integrate a smart user experience practice as part of the design process for all our clients. But the real challenge is putting this thinking into practice. If ritual, gesture, and nonverbal communication in the physical and digital world are the next frontier for brand/customer strategy, what is the next best way to integrate this thinking into a design process?