Archives / December 2005

Jimmy Wales '05 in Business Week, about Wikipedia:

[We're] a work in progress -- it's our intention to be Britannica or better quality, and our policies and everything are designed with that goal in mind. We don't reach that quality yet -- we know that. We're a work in progress.

From the NYT today, Controversy Still Clouds Prospects at 9/11 Site:

Robert D. Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, likened the current plan for ground zero to "downtown Hartford - a shopping mall and an office park, which don't coincide well with sacred places."

Gel Day 1 this year will include a tour of sacred spaces around Manhattan, led by Scott Berkun '06 (website: scottberkun.com). Details soon...

For more information on Gel, see gelconference.com.

The new book from Douglas Rushkoff '06, Get Back in the Box: Innovation from
the Inside Out, is now available... pre-order at Amazon.

I'm happy to welcome our newest speaker added to euroGel 2006 (Sept. 1 in Copenhagen):

Nabeel Hamdi, Professor of Housing and Urban Development, Oxford Brookes University. He's also the author of Small Change:

This book is an argument for the wisdom of the street, the ingenuity of the improvisers and the long-term, large-scale effectiveness of immediate, small-scale actions. Written by Nabeel Hamdi, the guru of urban participatory development and the master of the art...

Just a reminder that today - Monday, December 12 - is the last day for the early prices on Gel 2006 and euroGel 2006 tickets.

Late tonight, Monday, the Gel price goes up by $300, and the euroGel price goes up by 100 euros... so I hope you'll sign up, if you're pretty sure you want to be at either event!

Gel 2006 (May 4-5 in New York) will feature a wide range of speakers who will cover "experience" from a number of different angles - technology, business, art, media, even urban planning - including Craig Newmark from craigslist.org, Seth Godin, Douglas Rushkoff, and more.

More info on Gel 2006

Register now for Gel 2006

Similarly, euroGel 2006 (Sept. 1 in Copenhagen) will have a range of European speakers - from Denmark, the Netherlands, Britain, Slovenia, Austria, Switzerland, and elsewhere - exploring "good experience" in a variety of contexts.

More info on euroGel 2006

Register now for euroGel 2006 (in US dollars)

Or in Euros (via PayPal)

(If you need help convincing the boss, read Selling the boss on Gel.)

Last week in this column I wrote that "customer service is not the same as customer experience." The column got an unusually large response, especially around this comment I made:

Customer service is the job of front-line workers, servicing customer requests for help - via an 800 number, e-mail, or a retail desk. It's important to invest in good customer service, but that's just the tiniest sliver of the customer experience.

Excerpted from the comment board, below are a few of the comments that stood out:

- - -

David McQuillen from Credit Suisse (and a euroGel speaker) wrote in:

Customer service is certainly an extremely important part of customer experience.

In banking, our research shows that customer service accounts for nearly 40% of the customer's assessment of whether we deliver a positive experience. Hardly the 'tiniest sliver' as you suggest!

- - -

On the other hand, Joe Ranft (a Geler who also works in financial
services) writes:

I go to a little pizza place in Brookline called the Upper Crust. Some say it's the best pizza in the country. Twice I've called in my order, and they lost it, or failed to write it down, and then still just put my make-up order in the back of the line with everybody else's. While this infuriates me, I will continue to go there because the pizza is so good.

My point is a business can have a great product or service and lousy customer experience and be successful, but great customer service and lousy product ultimately fails.

- - -

Michael Reiff writes in from Austin:

I'd suggest that this really varies by channel. In a bricks and mortar retail setting (or in banking, as David mentions) customer service and store design play a huge role in creating the overall customer experience -- more so, in some cases, than the products sold do.

On the Web, however, live customer service may obviously be that "tiniest sliver" of overall experience that you mention, but that's because the site is essentially playing the same role that store design and customer service play in a traditional retail store. If my online experience is a great one, then I often have no need to interact with customer service, and it never becomes part of my experience.

- - -

And finally, Leigh Duncan from livepath.net "partly disagrees":

Customer Service is not merely the job of front-line workers; it begins with the policies that govern the management of customer need.

While your problem wasn't a Customer Service environment or interfacing problem (accessing service within the phone channel, or talking to the rep), it was very much a Customer Service platform issue (related to people, process, technology and/or policy).

Customer Service is perhaps the most important aspect of Customer Experience. While the two are not the same, they are so strongly, perceptually bound in the minds of customers they can often be equated as such.

- - -

I appreciate the feedback and hope these wise comments help fill in the gaps in my column.

Borrowing from my recent three strands column, I'll add that a good experience is useful, fun, or meaningful; or some combination of those factors. Customer service, a focus on fixing problems on the "useful" side, doesn't by itself seem to encompass the same scope as "customer experience." But maybe that's just a semantic issue.

Original column, Customer service is not customer experience

From the AP today:

Chicago is "more homogenized, kind of Disneylike, in the sense that it is a city but there is something artificial about it," said Perry Duis, a University of Illinois at Chicago historian. "The L, you take that away and you won't know where you are."

Full story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051207/ap_on_re_us/disappearing_chicago

I recently ordered a filing cabinet from one of the lesser-known office supply stores. Minutes after it was delivered, I found that the top drawer didn't close properly, and the construction overall was flimsy.

When my office called the company, we got a human on the phone easily enough; explained the situation; and were informed (politely enough) that the company doesn't issue refunds, even for defective products. Only exchanges.

So of course we're not using this company ever again, and we'll have to call the credit card bank to charge back the order. In other words, it was a bad customer experience.

But here's the irony: the customer service was pretty decent. We never got lost in a phone-tree menu, the rep wasn't mean, and we got our answer quickly.

Customer service is not the same as customer experience.

Customer service is the job of front-line workers, servicing customer requests for help - via an 800 number, e-mail, or a retail desk. It's important to invest in good customer service, but that's just the tiniest sliver of the customer experience.

Customer experience is the job of everyone in the company. My customer experience was bad because the product, and the refund policy, are both broken. Everyone from the CEO and CFO to the product designers and manufacturing facility contributed to this bad customer experience; and as a result, they've lost a customer and generated bad word of mouth. The good customer service I received didn't - and couldn't possibly - fix the overall experience.

Customer service is not the same as customer experience.

Invest in customer experience throughout the organization, and that will naturally include improving customer service. But it's still everyone's job now to think about customer experience.

This Economist article recommends "Kellogg on Branding" as a good primer on branding:

Branding is a powerful weapon in today's marketing armoury; it can lift an indifferent product to cult status and high margins. The book defines it as “a set of associations linked to a name, mark, or symbol associated with a product or service—a brand is much like a reputation”. It is the difference between a Harley-Davidson and A.N. Other Bike. Water is merely a fungible commodity until it becomes a brand in a bottle. There is no shortage of books giving advice on how to weave this particular business magic. If you have time to read only one of them, make sure it is this one.

Two new speakers for euroGel 2006 (Sept. 1 in Copenhagen):

• From Britain, Ted Dewan (bio), who recently pioneered a new way to slow traffic on his residential street

• Danish architect Jan Gehl (website), another proponent of transportation alternatives. Quoted in the New York Times, in this Nov. 18 story:

Mr. Gehl echoed the sentiments of the business district leaders. "I have the feeling that not too much has happened here with the aesthetic quality of the city - the feeling of moving around it - as in other cities," he said. "Automobiles have invaded our cities and squeezed everyone else to the side."

And Douglas Rushkoff '06 is quoted in yesterday's New York Times, accurately describing the proper place of realism in game design:

Video games, he said, should be less like movies, not more. "This is an age-old thing going back to Pong," said Mr. Rushkoff, who describes himself as an enthusiastic gamer. "What made Pong so exciting was not its accurate depiction of Ping-Pong or its relationship to reality. It was the ability to move pixels around on the screen, and an appreciation for the way the game designer is working in metaphor. "

Here's the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/weekinreview/04lela.html

More info about Gel conferences: gelconference.com

David Byrne has a good article on his blog - here's the link, though you have to scroll down to find the Dec. 2 entry - about the experience of living in Parisian suburbs (or elsewhere) designed by Le Corbusier:

In my opinion there is nothing inherently wrong with tall buildings. A limited number of anything is like genetic diversity; it’s of value to the species as a whole. I can, however, see that these residences are definitely top-down design — there is no room for the evolution and mutation of function, form, use — it’s all planned in advance. The creators all assume the inevitable victory of science, reason and logic over messy instinct, intuition and impulse.

Also see James Howard Kunstler's comments on a new housing complex at Harvard.

From this profile of famous Nintendo games including Smash Brothers, one of the best multiplayer games ever created:

Super Smash Bros. Melee is the best-selling GameCube game ever, having sold over 4 million copies worldwide. ... What's most interesting about this game is that it appealed to both gamers and non-gamers. It had a multiplayer mode that made simple use of the GameCube controller -- no silly combos to perform a single move such as hold A + B then slide and hold Z + X and then tap Y two times. Nope, instead, the game can be played with a minimal amount of buttons. This means even the most casual gamer can pick up a controller and be successful. Despite this, the game still holds enough depth that even the most hardcore gamer can receive satisfaction. You've no doubt come to realize this fact if you've ever played against an expert Smash Bros. player -- seeing how they effortlessly dodge, use items and throw punches like a magician performing a card trick.

Also see the right column on the final page of the article, which shows the goodbye speech from the producer of Smash Brothers.

(Smash is also recommended in the Uncle Mark 2006 Gift Guide and Almanac, and on the Good Experience Games list.)

A potential Gel attendee recently wrote this to his boss (and cc'd me) to make the case why the Gel conference is a good investment of the team's training budget.

In case anyone else needs to "make the case", here it is. Feel free to use and customize this text to your own use. (And remember that the price goes up after Monday, Dec. 12.)

- - -

To: <Boss>
Subject: Training proposal - Gel conference

Here's why I think we should invest in my attendance at the Gel conference next year (www.gelconference.com):

What is Gel?

Short for "Good Experience Live", Gel is a conference, and community, exploring good experience in all its forms -- in business, art, society, technology, and life.

The goal of the conference is to create an environment that allows our multi-disciplinary community to explore the idea of "good experience" in a variety of contexts.

Why should I attend Gel?

The primary benefit of me attending Gel is inspiration. The current list of speakers for the 2006 conference is all over the board -- a professor of information science, a game designer, a dictionary editor, the founder of craigslist.org, a new media and pop culture author. While some of the speakers are user experience designers, many of them are from other fields that may initially seem unrelated. However, Gel connects all of these speakers, their ideas and their points of view around the common goal of creating excellent user experiences. Unlike "typical" conferences that offer a series of PowerPoint presentations of varying quality, the Gel Conference exists to inspire designers to think about user experiences in new and creative ways.

I expect that after attending Gel, I will return to work (and life) energized and passionate --- with an improved perspective and a focused purpose. I also expect that the conference will help to reinforce the notion that a good design is one that supports a good experience, and that good experiences are as much about simplicity as they are about usability --- both very important concepts for my day to day work here.

Comments from past attendees:

"I found the entire event to be inspiring, edifying and stimulating: qualities that one does not find easily in one's day-to- day existence. I loved the fact that the presenters were in different stages of their lives, from different disciplines and with different perspectives. The conference definitely has a humanitarian focus that is too often lacking in design and technology symposia."

"What a wonderful assembly of thinkers and doers that was just a joy to be a part of."

"It really made me think about the various experiences of my life, especially the good ones, and how I can be truly present with them in a more meaningful way. Also, how to create more of them!"

"it's a pretty sophisticated crowd so the speakers could freely use shorthand for big ideas and people got it pretty quick... there were post-Marx-brothers intellectual jugglers for every session who were their own good experience and who tied all the good experiences together... there was a mix of speakers i would expect to see at a user experience conference and speakers i would likely not get to see anywhere otherwise... I was interested, amused and moved throughout the day"

"Attending the GEL conference helped me to cross what we used to call an ëinflection pointí in terms of how I approach and create great customer experiences." Besides the inspiration and passion, I also expect that Gel will open up some recruiting and networking opportunities. The AOS group continues to look for UI designers, usability experts, and a design manager that not only have strong backgrounds and experience, but also fit well with my current work. I would expect that Gel attendees would fit into all these areas. This could be a great opportunity to meet folks and get the word out for positions we are looking to fill. Consider it a pre-phone screen!

Summary

I think Mark Hurst, who runs Gel, does a good job of asking the right questions, some of which I hope attending Gel would help answer:

"Whether you're in business, education, philanthropy, art, design, or any other area, this is a rich challenge for you: how do you create a good experience in what you do? What are the multiple factors that will over-determine that experience? How do you integrate that experience within your larger context (customer needs, business goals, the environment, society at large)?"

Absorb all puny humans!

(Spotted on a Manhattan street on Thanksgiving.)