Archives / July 2005

This New York Times article reports...

The owner of Macy's, Federated Department Stores, said yesterday that it would convert at least 10 different store brands - including Filene's, Famous-Barr and Hecht's - to the Macy's name in 2006.

Same inventory, same prices, same level of service, same store. Once the customer passes under the large lit-up sign outside and enters the store, what does it matter?

Changing the name doesn't change the customer experience.

Speaking of the power of simplicity: here's how Stonehenge could have been built by one man: Link to video

Remember Einstein's famous precept? "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."

That's been on my mind lately as I've described customer experience to potential consulting clients and others.

Stated as simply as possible, but not simpler, there are four steps in transforming the customer experience within a business:

1. Listen to the business.
2. Listen to the customers.
3. Synthesize the two inputs.
4. Suggest improvements.

Remove any of these steps, and the method no longer works. Add anything, and it either fits inside one of the four steps or it might be irrelevant. In other words, I think this four-step model achieves Einstein's goal.

Of course, there are lots of sub-steps...

- Listening to the business requires interviewing stakeholders, analyzing past research and documents, and reviewing competitors.

- Listening to customers means conducting open-ended listening labs, facilitating stakeholder discussions, and analyzing results.

- Synthesis is the process of creating a "customer experience strategy" that intersects business and customer goals.

- Suggesting improvements means creating mockups of the new service or product, based (importantly!) on the strategy from the previous step.

But regardless of the details, at its heart the customer experience method is best described by those four simple steps. It systematically answers the question, how can the company improve to serve customers better?

Remember: every customer-facing organization in global business will invest in answering this question in the next decade - if they're not doing so already. Whether you're in such a company, or independently helping from the outside, it's good to have a grasp of this model.

But be careful that you don't violate Einstein's rule. There are, of course, two ways to do this:

- Be too complex: Some methods promoted within the fields of usability, IA, and user experience are too complicated to explain easily... or understand at all. Overly academic, pseudo-scientific, or exceedingly nitpicky, these methods tend to be tactically focused (at best) or dangerously ineffective investments. They aren't "as simple as possible."

- Be too simple: Many companies skip the second and third steps; that is, they NEVER get face-to-face with a customer; and so they never create a strategy based on customer needs. Occasionally we get calls from companies that "already know the issues" and want us to jump immediately to drawing mockups, without interviewing a single customer (?!). Please tell me, dear reader of this newsletter, that your company does get stakeholders in front of real live customers!

Avoid those two pitfalls and you'll be more likely to create significant business results.

Finally, if you're interested to read more detail about this method, I'd point you to our whitepaper, "Joining Strategy and Usability: the Customer Experience Methodology."

Here's a summary:

The customer experience methodology (CEM) works solely in context of the client's business: its strategic goals, current resources (organizational constraints, timeframe, etc.), and competitive position. Customer experience improvement, after all, is about driving business results.

The CEM is less directed and less task-focused than traditional user experience research methods. For example, in a CEM project, usability tests are conducted in the form of non-directive "listening labs." CEM results are easy to measure, by comparing key metrics before and after a CEM project is conducted.

Download the whitepaper here:
http://www.creativegood.com/doc/creativegood-method.pdf

Although the Costco website could use some help, Costco is doing lots of things right within the organization. From the NYTimes today: How Costco Became the Anti-Wal-Mart.

Excerpts:

Costco's average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its fiercest rival, Sam's Club. And Costco's health plan makes those at many other retailers look Scroogish. One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco "it's better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder."

...Good wages and benefits are why Costco has extremely low rates of turnover and theft by employees, he said. And Costco's customers, who are more affluent than other warehouse store shoppers, stay loyal because they like that low prices do not come at the workers' expense. "This is not altruistic," he said. "This is good business."

Thanks, Mike Krypel!

From a Yahoo News story:

"This is an ultimate disaster for airlines and all of our customers, who will be horribly inconvenienced," says James May, the [Air Transport Association's] president and CEO.

What's the ultimate disaster for the airline industry?

Congress wants to extend daylight savings for a couple of weeks. You know, so that it (in NYC, anyway) it doesn't get dark at 4pm come mid-November.

Programming expense, maybe... but "ultimate disaster"?

Link

From AdPulp: "...it is hard to imagine that someone who only recently led the largest-ever blood donor initiative for the American Red Cross with such energy and enthusiasm is now in vital need of a liver donation."

I spotted this ad in the New York Times yesterday and was struck by its immediacy and authenticity.

David Yee tells of a great customer experience at Danny Meyer's Shake Shack here in Manhattan. I'll agree that every dining experience I've had at Meyer's restaurants - Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park, Tabla - has met or (more often) exceeded expectations.

Note: I've never seen a billboard, poster, commercial, promotion, or ad of any sort for any of Danny Meyer's restaurants. Yet they're always packed with enthusiastic customers (and equally enthusiastic staff).

(via three-time Gel attendee jason kottke)

P.S. Seth has a similar take on another experience.

I don't usually link to fun stuff in the blog (get the weekly fun stuff listings in the e-mail version of Good Experience), but this is exceptional.

ASICS is running commercials in Japan that boast, flamboyantly and loudly, about the gel in its shoes. See the TV commercials here. "Gellllllllllllllllllll!!!"

(Thanks, Peter)

Cool keyboard, if it's ever widely available. Each key has a screen on it showing what letter, function, or application it controls.

(via kottke)

"Consumers don't see Whole Foods ads in their local papers, during daytime television shows or even in magazines.

While other food retailers spend heavily to draw shoppers, Whole Foods counts on its brand, its reputation and targeted community efforts to bring in customers."

From Whole Foods shuns ads, sells lifestyle.

(Thanks, Scott)

I often get asked how I got started in customer experience work. Previous jobs and graduate school played a part, as they do for many practitioners, but for me the real answer is games.

I played lots and lots of games growing up, starting with Pong in 1979, moving on to Atari, Coleco, and Intellivision - the consoles that ate several years of my life. I was and still am a fan of card and board games, too, but somehow computer games always exerted a special pull on me, making the hours fly by like seconds.

Playing a thousand computer games, if nothing else, gives you an innate sense of user interface design. The games require engaging with some interface, which creates some experience. And that's how I spent much of my childhood: on Apples, PCs, and mainframes; in arcades, on couches, and at computer desks; with joysticks, steering wheels, and trackballs; for quarters, tokens, or free; and just before college, via a modem in BBSes on a very young Internet. All of these began my education in experience design.

I finally got paid to make games in my first job, helping Seth Godin start Yoyodyne Entertainment here in New York. I had spent the previous two years, between college and grad school classes, playing the best Unix-based games ever made - Nethack, Netrek, and Xconq - and I came to Yoyodyne ready to make games for the Internet. It was there, through trial and error in online game design, that I learned some important insights into successful customer experiences.

But it didn't stop there. Even when I struck out on my own to found Creative Good, I continued to play games, and I still do today. This is essential exercise for me, and I'd recommend it for anyone serious about learning good experience.

Games are the whetstone for keeping my "interface sense" sharp. New games show the latest advances in interface design, as they have throughout the history of the computer industry; and like Shakespeare or Homer for literature fans, classic computer games like Nethack and Netrek still have lessons to teach.

It's a happy coincidence that the business of computer games has gotten a real boost in the last few years. Some industry metrics show computer games getting more investment, and payout, than many Hollywood blockbusters. A few games, like the recent "Halo 2", receive a level of acclaim that only Harry Potter could dream of.

But while it's nice to see the success of the games business, the market is not my primary interest. Instead, I want to know where the good games are, regardless of whether they've made ten million in revenue, or ten cents - or none at all. In fact, come to think of it, sometimes the free games are the best of all, because you can start playing right away, without having to deal with logins and purchase codes. The quicker and easier it is to get to the good stuff, the better. (I'll note that Nethack is a quick, absolutely free download at www.nethack.org.)

It's with all this in mind that I point you to my new website, Good Experience Games, which lists some of the best free online games that I've come across in the past several months.

If you want to learn more about good experience, I'd recommend investing some time in playing games. (And let me know which ones you learn from.)

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For more reading:

This New York Times article (June 26) spotlighted what it called "casual games".

For geeks ONLY: surrealist comics based on Nethack. Oh, YES.
http://www.nicolaas.net/dudley/archive.php?f=20040402
http://www.nicolaas.net/dudley/archive.php?f=20050610

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P.S. Announcing Good Experience Games

I've always been surprised that there's no filtered list of good online games, so I went and made one myself.

Today I launched a new Good Experience website: Good Experience Games.

It's a list of links to the best online games I've come across. It's sortable by name, date, and duration; and I hope to make additions occasionally as I find new entries.

These are online games that, in my opinion, offer a "good experience" - good game design with an overall attention to quality. Unless otherwise noted, they're available for play with no fee or login requirement.

If you know of a game that fits these criteria that's not on the list, feel free to let me know about it.

Enjoy!

Here's Vienna without ads.

And this is the artists' conception of Manhattan without ads.

Thanks, Stay Free.

My thoughts and support are with the people of London.   -mh

P.S. Several good links to coverage at Boing Boing.

Part of the mission of this newsletter is to inform customer experience practitioners about tools, strategies, and results of our research. Here's the latest:

At the recent 2005 Catalog Conference in Orlando, Creative Good conducted a series of listening labs on attendee websites. The results below were taken from labs on 14 different e-commerce sites: Office Depot, Home Shopping Network, Frederick's of Hollywood, and others.

As always, our goal in listening labs is to allow the customer - in an open-ended environment - to show us what their experience is, as they use the site. By making research more customer-focused, we're able to find problems in the customer experience very quickly.

While all the sites showed good intentions, the labs uncovered a number of problems with execution. These ranged from tactical, interface-level issues to more strategic challenges relating to merchandising, product strategy, and brand. (Listening labs are particularly good at revealing learnings from all levels, tactical to strategic; after all, customers don't make a distinction in the feedback they give.)

We found problems in several areas:

• Content groupings that reflect the company's view of the business, not the customer's view
• Navigation that hides important categories
• Confusing product images
• Important information not being presented at contextually relevant points in the process
• Missing product information
• Difficult product-comparison functions

We finished up with some recommendations for those 14 sites, and indeed for all the conference attendees' e-commerce sites. Based on the problems shown above, we concluded that online retailers must still focus on the basics, even as they offer advanced tools and functions on the site.

Here are the basics of a good e-commerce experience:

• Make it easy for the customer to find a product.
• Ensure that the customer can make a purchase decision.
• Eliminate barriers during checkout.

This isn't to suggest that retailers shouldn't invest in more advanced, high-tech features - to the contrary, we believe that those can be important in driving sales, especially from more experienced shoppers. However, no investment on the site is worth much if the basics are poorly executed. If the customer can't find a product, what does it matter that the site shows customer ratings? If the customer doesn't have enough information to buy the product, what does it matter to offer related products?

Our conclusion is that, even in 2005, basics matter. What's more, we believe that "the basics" will be the primary challenge for the online customer experience for some time. As any Net veteran will tell you, the main problems we've listed above are what most e-retailers have struggled with for years. We haven't yet graduated to a new level of complexity: the basics of the customer experience are still the most important.

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P.S. If you're interested in pursuing a listening lab for your own website, there's a LabFest coming up in New York in a few weeks. LabFest both is a low-cost research session and a conference for practitioners to meet one another and share learnings.

- Description of LabFest (Jan. 10, 2005)

- Sign up for LabFest New York, taking place on Sept. 7-8, 2005.