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I read a nice article today over at the Customer Experience Design blog, which traced over a fairly well-drawn distinction between two schools of customer experience.

The two schools, given by example in this case are:

The “Ritz-Carlton Customer Experience Philosophy” [which] creates remarkable customer experiences through extraordinary benefits at extraordinary prices.

and

The “IKEA Customer Experience Philosophy” [which] creates remarkable customer experiences by reducing the sacrifice and costs that customers incur to experience a company’s products and services.

Thinking about this, I started to wonder: How can you be the IKEA of web design firms? Working strictly from the definitions, it’s easy: The IKEA of web design firms is your client’s web-designing nephew. He’s cheap, the benefits are basic, and his relatively uneducated customer’s percieved value is high.

But, of course, that’s not the whole story, because IKEA stuff is well-designed, it’s broadly applicable, and (most importantly to the failure of my analogy) it’s contemporary. IKEA is, at least to some degree, premised on the fact that its customers have some aesthetic taste.

Wait a second. My client’s web-design nephew couldn’t have come up with this.

Taking a look, it should become instantly clear that if you want to be IKEA, having IKEA’s customer experience philosophy doesn’t cut it. You also have to be a good designer. And this is a problem, as most designers recoil at the de facto idea for a web design IKEA analog, a template-driven web design business.

Here’s what that tells me: templates are not the web design analog of what IKEA does. IKEA is based on customers combining cheap, well-designed elements to their own satisfaction. Which means there’s still potentially a good web analog out there to be found.

And you can be sure that when the IKEA-of-web-design-firms-to-come comes, there’s going to be a huge market right there waiting for them.