Would your customers care if your company unplugged all its servers tomorrow? Do you make enough difference in their lives? Do you matter? These are some of the tough questions Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery ask in their new book, Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company.

They make the argument that if an Apple closed their doors tomorrow, people would care. And they’re right, people would care. For anyone who uses electronic devices on a daily basis, Apple makes life easier and more fun. Why? Because Apple cares about my experience. For them, it’s not about saving an extra $.50 cents on manufacturing costs or leaving out an important screen because the engineers deemed it too difficult to implement. Apple actually cares about me, the customer and they design all their products with people like you and me in mind.

In recent years, Web design has become a commodity. There are lots of great looking websites out there and if you can’t afford to hire someone to make it look pretty for you, you can always buy a template for a minimal cost and have someone modify it for you in Photoshop. Not only have visual design elements become a commodity but so have forms, newsletters, icons, Flash animation, blogs along with photos, illustrations, audio and video. Developing HTML has become an automated service with all the “you-send-it-we’ll-build-it” websites popping up around the globe.

So, how do you make your online business stands out if we’re all using the same stuff?

According to Brunner and Emery you do it by becoming brilliant at using design to provide an amazing customer experience and by building a company culture that supports it. The difference is in building an experience that resonates with the customer/user and you can’t do that if your focus is on something else.

Too often business leaders write content that only those in the field understand or care about. Too often engineers pour hours and money into features that no one wants to use. Too often graphic designers include gratuitous animation or design to please one person in the company. Who’s missing from the equation? The customer.

The customer/user doesn’t care about your ability to come up with 3 bullet points for everything, your technological brilliance at coding or all the time you spend in Flash to deliver cutting-edge animation. To them, it’s what they feel that matters. Was the experience easy? Was it frustrating and mentally demanding? Was there a feeling of trust at the end?

Brunner and Emery challenge us with the tough questions:

• • Do your customers/users care if you’re around tomorrow?

• • What kind of loyalty do your customers/users have?

• • Does your Internet experience make a positive emotional connection with your customers/users?

• • Does your product, website or brand add value to people’s lives? (i.e. that social networking site you were thinking of building)

• • Does everyone in your company realize to what extent they play a part in the total experience design? (that means you marketer, engineer, designer and business leader—at the end of the day we’re all designers)

• • Do your customers come back because they want to or because they have to? (any happy PayPal users out there?)

• • Are they ready to leave as soon as a competitor comes along? (in the online world that moves at broadband speed, this is all too common. As soon as you launch your new site, it’s a dinosaur. Better to have invested in more than just pretty graphics and “cool” features)

Building something that people love to use means paying attention to every detail and nuance, not just keeping a features requirement list. It means creating an iterative process and actually going to the trouble of creating personas that humanize the design process and taking them through tasks and scenarios and prototypes. The best way to know how people will react to your Web design is to observe them using it and this calls for usability testing where you actually watch a user as they click through the process. Not only is usability testing good at the beginning, but after you launch to test how your online experience continues to rate or those of your competition. This isn’t just about design, it’s smart business strategy.

If you’re trying to earn a living in the online world, you can’t afford to be a commodity. “If your company doesn’t embrace the concept of design…the kind that embodies a positive and emotional customer experience, then it could be on life support sometime soon.”

It might be a good time to carry over this old brick and mortar adage to the online world:

The customer is always right.