Archives / October 2004

I walked into a Williams-Sonoma store here in New York a few days ago to return a gift that someone had sent me via the Williams-Sonoma website. When I got to the counter, I explained that I wanted to return the item - I already own something similar and just wanted cash back.

The clerk behind the counter said, "Sorry, sir, but we don't sell this item in the store. This is going to have to go back."

"What do you mean, 'go back'?" I asked.

"It has to go back to the catalog. We don't sell that item in the store."

I showed the clerk the purchase receipt. "This is Williams-Sonoma, right?"

"Right. But as I told you, there are some items that the catalog sells and we don't sell. This has to go back to the catalog."

I remembered the website stating that returns could be made in a store, so I asked for a manager. When he arrived, I stated my intention to return the product.

"Unfortunately," he said, "we don't sell that product in the store, so it has to go back."

This went on for a couple more minutes until, in exasperation, the manager said, "Sir, I'm telling you, it has to go back, so if you want to return it to us, we can only issue store credit for it."

I paused. "You mean I can return it here?"

"Yes, of course. We'll just have to return it to the catalog, so we can only issue store credit. If we sold it in the store, we could give you cash back."

Mystery solved: it was all a difference in perspective. The clerks were explaining to me how the product return affected them (they would have to call the catalog and manage the return) and not how it affected me (I could only get store credit). Had they simply communicated in my language, the interaction would have gone much better all around: "We'll be happy to take that back, sir, though we can only issue store credit for it."

I know that I'm not the only customer to experience this frustration: while I was at the counter, a woman came up with a gift return and began having the exact same conversation ("It has to go back") with the first clerk.

As a story about a confusing gift return, it's an amusing vignette, reminiscent of the old "Who's on first?" Abbott and Costello routine. But the ramifications are much, much larger. The clerk took the company's perspective, and lost the opportunity to create a good customer experience.

A difference in perspective: think of everywhere you've come across that in your dealings with businesses. Customer-hostile websites that mirror the organization's internal structure; tax forms filled with jargon and needless complexity; cell phone rate plans that are structured for the benefit of the carrier's network; health insurance claims rejected for arbitrary bureaucratic reasons; the list is endless.

My business partner, Phil Terry, likens it to the pre-Copernican view of the world. Like the misguided early notion that the universe revolves around the earth, many business executives today still think that business revolves around companies.

If that belief ever was true in the past, it certainly isn't true today, in the Internet era. Whether online or offline, customers now have unparalleled power to research and transact with companies exactly when, where, and how they choose. There is a new worldview at work that companies must either embrace, or ignore at their peril.

The Customer-Centric Worldview:

1. Business revolves around the customer.

2. Companies that focus on creating a good customer experience will
succeed far above those that do not.

3. This is the primary determinant of business success over the next
several decades.

This is no management fad, though management will play a role.

This is not another name for the "information revolution," though information technology plays a central part in it.

And this is not a tactical issue that can be solved with a laundry list of 218 guidelines.

To the contrary, this should be the central strategic issue of your company, starting now. It's not a problem to be solved as much as a way of doing business.

Stated another way: If you are in business, THIS IS YOUR LIFE for the foreseeable future.

I'll wrap up with a vignette of a company that is beginning to embrace this worldview. We recently ran listening labs for one of the top American retail companies. The executive team came into the labs with a company-centered perspective - thinking they knew the issues to be fixed, the questions to be answered - and at the end of a single day of research, they left with a new perspective. Not about a laundry list of usability errors (though there were a few of those), but about a strategic shift towards the customer. The president said she realized that their way of doing business had to change.

This is now your mandate: change your worldview. The universe does not revolve around your company. Focus on the customer experience.

Company: Finish Line
Title: E-Commerce Analyst
Location: Indianapolis, IN

Major multi-channel retailer looking for someone to provide expert
analysis into the E-Commerce business. Develop action plans to
improve site usability, and provide the E-Commerce management team
with insight on business and operational trends, and customer
behavior.

E-mail resumes to: hr@finishline.com (include job title)

Company: NPR.org (National Public Radio)
Title: Front-End Web Developer - Position #GE566
Location: Washington, D.C.

Build and maintain front-end of npr.org and shop.npr.org. Daily
operations of systems and apps. Req: 3 yrs experience with web
development, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, building table-less sites that
conform to W3C standards and section 508 accessibility guidelines,
and using a code validator. NPR is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

E-mail resume to employment@npr.org (include job title & number)

Company: Waterfront Media
Title: Product Manager
Location: Brooklyn, New York

The PM works with an editorial team to adapt offline materials and
create tools and original content for best-of-breed health sites,
with the goal of maximizing lifetime value of subscribers.
Required: ability to write detailed functional specifications and
at least 4 yrs experience producing online media.

E-mail resume to Jobs@waterfrontmedia.com

Company: NPR.org (National Public Radio)
Title: Marketing Specialist - Position #GE1232
Location: Washington, D.C.

Liaise with content partners, lead search engine optimization, and execute results-producing marketing campaigns. If you have 2 years' relevant experience, "get" search engines and write like a pro, here's a unique opportunity at America's premier public broadcaster. NPR is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

E-mail resume to employment@npr.org (include job title & number)

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Should links be underlined? Check out the discussion over at This Is Broken.

I generally avoid all politics in my column, but it's election season in America, and I can't help remembering last time around, when the now-infamous "butterfly ballot" brought user experience into national headlines for a couple of weeks. A simple design change would have made it much easier for users to vote for their intended candidates.

It remains to be seen if ballot designs have improved for this year's election. Last week on This Is Broken I featured a Michigan absentee ballot which, due to a printing error, looked even worse than the butterfly ballot. (Reports are that it has been re-printed with the problem fixed.)

This got me thinking about my own absentee ballot here in New York. The three-fold design includes instructions on one side and the ballot itself on the other. See small and large sizes of each here:

small ballot
large ballot

small instructions
large instructions

This, the standard ballot design, does not present any obvious problems. I'd say voters can reasonably be held to the standard of being able to fill this out.

Still, I note that this standard design is the product of election law, not of a concerted effort by designers to make a clear, usable ballot. Certainly there are ways the ballot could improve.

To take a small example, why is the voting oval pushed all the way to the lower right of the box, so that it's adjacent to the name of the rival party? I doubt that any would vote the first (Republican) oval thinking that they were voting Democrat... but it could be positioned better. In fact, any aspiring designers reading this should take a whack at redesigning the absentee ballot. I'll post the best redesigns in a future newsletter.

The real interface challenge this election, though, isn't the absentee ballot but the voting booth. In New York, we pull levers (good) from a convoluted matrix of choices (bad). Other U.S. states this year have a much better user interface (good) on electronic voting machines with no paper trail (bad).

Of course, redesigning "the system" in favor of the voter would take a lot more than redoing the ballot. To take one local example, election law - at least here in New York - heavily favors incumbents (guess who writes that law!), making many races a lot less competitive than they could be.

To illustrate the point, here's a neat Donkey Kong takeoff where you try to unseat the incumbent - personified as the huge gorilla at the top of the screen. (Also neat: there's an "easter egg" hidden on the game board.)
http://www.gothamgazette.com/votegame/con.html

I'm happy to see so many Webheads doing their part this year to improve the process - helping people register to vote, checking facts, and showing data in new ways. I especially appreciate the resources that are provided free of any partisan rants or propaganda; they merely help voters make a more informed decision, whichever party they choose. That's the Web at its best.

I'll leave you with some of the best sites I've found.

Factcheck.org calls out the distortions and fibs that *both* presidential candidates have delivered in the debates.

Jason Kottke put together a voting-registration guide.

The animations on this site make equal fun of both presidential candidates. ("This Land" is the best pick - scroll down to see it. Also note that the humor here is a bit "spicy" at points):

Living Room Candidate: Past election TV commercials.

Interesting (non-partisan) visualization of the timeline of George W. Bush's National Guard service.

Allan Keiter points us to his nonpartisan Flash app showing the electoral college. Click different states to see how the point totals might look in this fall's election.

Here's a site that shows an animation of how the likely electoral votes have shifted over the past few months.

MSNBC put together a visualization of the electoral votes.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6193646/

Finally, readers in New York should make an effort to see the Voting Booth Project, which brings together the work of well-known designers and artists (Gel 2004 speaker Christo, David Byrne, David Rockwell, and others), re-imagining the design of the voting booth.

Update 10/21: From the Mercury News today: "The elections board in Ohio's most populous county has fielded numerous calls from voters confused about the layout of absentee ballots."

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Job Opening: Zentropy Partners
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Company: Zentropy Partners
Title: Experience Architect
Location: Los Angeles

Must have 3+ yrs of information architecture and user-centered
design experience. Must have worked at an advertising or interactive
agency, working on complex, large-scale projects with large teams.
Excellent writing and presentatin skills with significant experience
interacting with clients when presenting work.

To respond, email your resume to Careers-CA@zentropypartners.com

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Job Opening: Zentropy Partners
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Company: Zentropy Partners
Title: Senior Online Analyst
Location: Los Angeles

Must have 4+ yrs experience with website development and online data
analysis of sites and marketing initiatives; expertise in Excel;
familiarity with Database-driven website technologies; experience
with at least one of the following: WebTrends, Omniture,
WebSideStory, MatchLogic, Media Metrix, DoubleClick/DART.

To respond, email your resume to Careers-CA@zentropypartners.com

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Job Opening: Zentropy Partners
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Company: Zentropy Partners
Title: Director, Interactive Account Planning
Location: Los Angeles

Must have 8-10 yrs experience in Account Planning, with much of the
experience in interactive media and user experience. Experience in
planning, executing, and moderating qualitative research is
required. Excellent writing and verbal communicatin skills and
presentation skills essential.

To respond, email your resume to Careers-CA@zentropypartners.com.

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Job Opening: Phoenix Staff, Inc.
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Company: Phoenix Staff, Inc.
Title: Director of Marketing Applications
Location: Phoenix, AZ

We are currently looking for a Dir. of CRM and E-commerce for a
rapidly growing company. The selected person will be a strong,
proven leader with the ability to manage the software development of
our client's teams, 10-15 years of IS exp, 5+ years of mgt
experience, functional/technical knowledge of CRM and eCommerce.

To respond, e-mail your resume to allen@phoenixstaff.com

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Job Opening: LowerMyBills.com
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Company: LowerMyBills.com
Title: Interaction Designer
Location: Santa Monica, California

LowerMyBills.com seeks an analytical problem solver to synthesize
research and business requirements into conversion-producing
features. Recent experience with B2C, ecom, or membership model
creating prototypes, func. requirements, A/B tests, and analysis.

Please send resume and samples to: jobs13@lowermybills.com.

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Job Opening: ThinkGeek
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Company: ThinkGeek
Title: General Manager
Location: Fairfax, Virginia

ThinkGeek is seeking a seasoned e-commerce professional to take the
helm as General Manager of our Fairfax, Virginia office. This is a
hands-on position that requires 10 years management experience, 5+
years of e-commerce and merchandising and retail online marketing
experience. http://www.vasoftware.com/company/career_jobs.php

To apply, email your resume to jobs@ostg.com.

A recent Wall Street Journal piece [1] talked about the trouble that major wireless carriers are having selling advanced services to their subscribers. Despite adding features to cell phones like messaging, music, and video, companies are finding that most customers just want to make phone calls. The Journal reports that "what is important for users is price, network coverage, simplicity of offers and ease of paying."

There are a lot of customers, and a whole lot of money, waiting for the wireless carrier that learns this lesson: Basics sell. Ironically, it's the less expensive strategy - developing fewer features - that may make more money for the carriers. Of course, knowing which features to develop is the key; and that takes some smart customer research.

This is nothing specific to the wireless industry; many other companies could learn this lesson, too. I remember in the mid-90s when there were at least half a dozen search engine companies vying to be users' first choice in search. Lycos, WebCrawler, Infoseek, AltaVista, HotBot, and Yahoo - and a few others - were all in contention.

At that time I used Yahoo most often, because it loaded quickly, gave me good results quickly, and didn't distract the process with lots of other features. In other words, it provided the basics better than any of the competitors.

To the contrary, other search engines were determined to win the race with technology. HotBot presented a dashboard of menus, checkboxes, and other options; Infoseek offered various search filters; AltaVista made a huge deal about how powerful their servers were, and how many pages were in their database. None of them made it a primary goal to deliver the most basic experience: making it easy for users to search and get good results.

Today it's easy to see how that competition ended up. Yahoo easily pulled ahead of the competitors... that is, until another company started up with an even faster, even easier interface, and with an even more complete commitment to delivering the basics: Google, of course. More recently, new search startups are promising (as are Yahoo and MSN) to make the experience even better. Time will tell which company manages to deliver the best user experience, but rest assured that the basics will be more important than who offers the most high-tech gewgaws.

Why are the basics so important? The simpler an interface is, the more people will be able to use it. And if there's a benefit to using it (such as good search results), then the easier it is to use, the more people will use it. Multiply this by the size of the customer base online, and you have a lever that moves entire industries.

It bears pointing out that the success of the Web itself owes a lot to this principle. Well before Berners-Lee coded his first hyperlink, there was a global network of computers in place - computers which could share text, photos, music, and anything else representable in bits. There were programs to navigate this Net: FTP, Gopher, Telnet, and others. There was just one problem: it was way, way too hard for the average user to use. So practically no one used it. But with Berners-Lee's hyperlinks, suddenly people could traverse the Net with the ease of a mouse-click. One small change in the interface - not the hardware or the underlying network - was the catalyst to the explosive growth that followed. Basics sell.

All this must seem odd to marketers who, in decades past, were taught to create the longest possible list of high-tech features... and then sell those features with lots of happytalk and faux excitement. That's how the wireless carriers still operate, and how the search engine industries used to work, until Yahoo and Google became successful. Without Berners-Lee's hyperlinks, imagine what technologists might be marketing today: the latest Gopher interface, "now with trans-Boolean metafiltering!"

Of course, there is always a market for niche products. These can afford to be too complex for most users, in exchange for giving the niche user more power. But that's rare. Most companies would rather have a large, general customer base than a small core of tech-happy users. It's time for these companies to focus on the basics.

[1] "Cellphone Disconnect: Carriers Offer More, Customers Want Less," by Christopher Rhoads. Wall Street Journal, Sep.29, 2004;p.D5.

Company: Nova Corp
Title: Senior Voice User Interface Designer
Location: New York City, NY

The Senior Voice User Interface Designer owns the user experience of
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) applications - both ASR (automated
speech recognition) and DTMF (touch tone). The Senior User
Interface Designer is responsible for ensuring that the application
satisfies the user's expectations for utility.

Send your resume to: hr@nova-corp.com

As part of my ongoing advocacy of bit literacy, here's my review of a Macintosh shareware app called Typeit4me. It originally ran on Merlin Mann's 43 Folders; I include it below in its entirety.

Review of Typeit4me

If you're not an avid, constant user of typeit4me, you're not really getting things done. I'd go further and say you're hardly using your computer at all until you include typeit4me in your daily computer usage.

Typeit4me (typeit4me.com) is a Mac-only shareware app - it costs $27, 25 euros, or £16 for a single user. (For Windows users, ActiveWords - www.activewords.com - offers similar functionality, though I haven't used it.) Typeit4me works across every application, OSX and in Classic mode: BBEdit, Safari, Finder - even MS Office apps bend to its will.

Here's how it works: you define abbreviations and associated expansions in typeit4me. When you type an abbreviation and then hit the trigger (usually the space bar; or any punctuation mark, depending on your preferences), the abbreviation instantly gets replaced with the trigger. For example, if I type "cg" and hit the space bar, "cg" instantly turns into "Creative Good". The abbreviation-expansion function is all typeit4me does, but that one function has enormous ramifications for every computer user on the planet.

Consider the many uses of typeit4me:

1. Corrects misspellings: "teh" becomes "the". "taht" becomes "that". I can type a lot faster now, since I don't have to worry about common misspellings slowing me down. Over the years, I've added all of my most common misspellings, so now I can blaze on the keyboard and watch in amusement as Typeit4me instantly fixes the misspellings in my cursor's wake.
2. Expands my custom-defined shorthand: Some words are both common and lengthy. I use the word "experience" a lot, but in typeit4me I just type "ex". Similarly, "ce" becomes "customer experience", "env" becomes "environment", and so on.
3. Types in long URLs: My e-mail management report has a rather long URL: http://www.goodexperience.com/reports/e-mail/email-report-goodexperience.pdf. Rather than dig it up every time I need to paste it into a message, I just type "emu" and it pastes it in. Similarly, "geu" leads to http://www.goodexperience.com, "cgu" leads to http://www.creativegood.com, "tbu" turns into http://www.thisisbroken.com, etc.
4. Types in HTML phrases: I've defined "ahr" to yield "<a href=""></a>". Whether I'm in BBEdit, or in a TypePad form within a Web browser, I can get these key HTML strings out quickly and error-free.
5. Manages passwords: My wsj.com password is stored as "wpw"; my half.com password is stored as "hpw"; you get the idea. This way, as I define the abbreviations for each password, all I have to do is remember the abbreviation - much easier than keeping track of a million different passwords.
6. Types short phrases: This is great in e-mail. I've set it up so that "tf" becomes "thanks for"; "tfy" becomes "thanks for your"; "tvmfy" becomes "thanks very much for your"... and so on. You can be as polite as you want, and optimally efficient, at the same time.
7. Types long messages with multiple paragraphs: For those messages that I send to multiple people at different times, I write it once, define a Typeit4me abbreviation, then have it available on an expansion any time. This works great when you e-mail the same (or similar) message to people on occasion.

The key to typeit4me is to start slow - define a few abbreviation-expansion pairs each day, and see what "sticks." Which do you naturally remember? Which do you use a lot? It takes some time to get really effective with typeit4me, but like any sound investment, the returns compound over time. I have been using typeit4me for over nine years now, and my file has 1,167 expansions inside. I use most of them every month - whether through a misspelling, a URL, a password, or any other reason. My typing is fast

But here's the key: I still add new expansions, almost every day. I am determined to continue getting faster, more accurate, and more efficient in my bit-creation at every opportunity. Typeit4me isn't a shareware that you install, define a few things in, and then call it a day. No. Typeit4me is a bit-lever - one essential component of bit literacy - and as such it requires an ongoing commitment toward mastery. Efficiency isn't something you accomplish in a day; it's something you grow into. It's a way of life.

Finally, a word of warning: if you use Typeit4me diligently for a few weeks and begin to realize its benefits in your efficiency, you will NEVER - read me, now - you will NEVER want to go back to a machine that doesn't run it. You will curse every Internet cafe PC that stupidly requires you to type every character; you will mutter under your breath on your friends' machines; you will be spoiled for life. But you will have seen the light - isn't that worth it?