Archives / February 2006

Missed this when it came out... Brian Collins Gel '04 in Fast Company last June. From Blowing Out Advertising's Walls:

At the helm is an exacting master with bleached hair, a manic laugh, and a metabolism that seems stuck on high. Collins's admirers describe him as "a mad genius," "an eccentric," "a force of nature," "type A personified," and "a rock star." At 44, he's still both whiz and kid.

A few months ago I announced my "good invite" system, or Goovite.com, to the Good Experience community - making it available, with no fee, and no ads, for you to immediately become more productive in your scheduling (and RSVP-tracking) of meetings, parties, and other events.

Now I'm happy to announce a brand new Goovite feature that I believe will make a real difference in the productivity of knowledge workers across the world.

As I've continued exploring "bit literacy," my method for personal productivity in the digital era, I've found that a lot of people spend too much time scheduling meetings among several people. Everyone has busy schedules and it often takes an irritating amount of time and effort to find a shared opening on everyone's calendars.

(Of course, if everyone coming to the meeting uses Outlook, or the company intranet, or some other shared system, there might be a feature that might work well enough to schedule everyone automatically. But then, what about the common meetings where everyone is not on the same system?)

Thus I've launched a meeting maker function in my Goovite.com tool. You might already know Goovite.com is a free, simple, easy tool for sending invites and tracking RSVPs. Until now Goovite only allowed you to send invites for events for which you already know the day and time.

Now, however, the Goovite Meeting Maker allows you to list several possible dates and times; Goovite then asks the invitees to indicate their availability for each possibility. You (as inviter) can then track their responses, finalize the Goovite on the best choice of day and time, and then track everyone's RSVPs to that choice.

One caveat, of course, since Goovite Meeting Maker is brand new: it's not perfect. In fact, I hope you go, use it, and see just how imperfect it is, because I want your help.

The readers of this newsletter are some of the most talented and accomplished user experience professionals in the world - what better resource to quickly get this tool up to speed as the rest of the world begins to use it?

So: I challenge you, the Good Experience community, to write me back (or post comments) to let me know how the tool should improve - what tactical flaws do you want fixed, and what strategic changes you'd suggest. Of course, no guarantees... but I want to open this up to comments from everyone, so we can work on improving this together.

Goovite Meeting Maker: http://www.goovite.com/mm

Please let me know what you think.

(And as always with the Goo tools, it's really Goo'vite - short for Good Experience Invite - "from the makers of Gel". Have a goo' time!)

From David Kirkpatrick's most recent Fortune column, Is Xfire the Next MySpace?:

"If you make the product cool and people love it, it will spread like crazy and you can monetize it later." [So says Xfire.com's CEO, Mike Cassidy.] If a company really understands its customers, it's hard to beat such a formula.

...Xfire, which only launched in January 2004, has three million passionate customers who use its PC software an astonishing average of 88 hours a month, according to Cassidy. More amazing facts: almost 300,000 new users join each month, and for two years the service has sustained a 2 percent-plus growth rate -- weekly. Its users -- in 100 countries (a slight majority are in the United States) -- are online for 200 million minutes every day.

The reason for the growth can probably be found in a core philosophy that puts users first.

A recent Ziggy cartoon shows Ziggy at a diner counter, peering at the menu on the wall. "Today's Specials," it reads. "Chili, $2.50. The Chili Experience, $4.95."

Marketers, take note: if you're not fooling Ziggy any more, you're not fooling the rest of us, either. Calling something an "experience" doesn't make it an experience.

I see it everywhere now. Here in the office a package of turkey jerky boasts that it "isn't just a snack, it's a snacking experience." The copywriter was either joking, really bored, or flat-out delusional.

I'm afraid many marketers fall in that last camp, thinking that slapping the latest buzzword on their product somehow makes it more competitive. A friend of mine was accosted this week at the fragrance counter in Bloomingdale's, asked if he wanted "the Hugo Boss experience." Not surprisingly, he hurried along downstairs to the men's section where, wouldn't you know it, there were no actual sales or service people available to help in his actual customer experience.

Although it's annoying to see the overuse and misuse of the word, it's heartening, too. After all, you know you have something really valuable when it starts getting ripped off. What do the vendors sell on Canal Street? Fake Gucci and Prada; there are no fake discount brands.

And this sets up my answer to the question I get all the time, which I'll also answer tonight (at the Apple Store SoHo in New York at 6:30pm): what are Gel and Good Experience really all about?

I'm trying to teach the genuine understanding of good experience. Contrary to the cheap marketer's trick of adding a buzzword, I'm trying to spotlight the "real deal", the genuine article that so often gets ripped off. What an actual good experience is, how to see it, and most importantly, how to create it.

And this is what you do in your life and work, right?

If you're a regular reader of Good Experience, you may be a "user experience professional" or "usability practitioner" who tries to make software or websites easier to use.

If you're an architect, you might be trying to create a good building, both useful and aesthetically pleasing to the community.

If you're an artist, you might be trying to create an item that evokes a rich message on many different levels.

If you're in health care, or financial services, or the travel business, you might be trying to deliver efficient and effective service, to improve the lives of your customers.

If you're an educator, you're not simply trying to impart some dry knowledge - instead, I'll guess, you're trying to teach patterns on how to learn, and how to live, that will stay with your students far beyond the end of your class.

Or if you're a consultant, or stay-at-home parent, or preacher, or plumber, or president of your own non-profit, you might be trying to help people in a number of different ways, maybe including those above.

In other words, no matter who you are, you're trying to create something good, something bigger that reaches beyond your own involvement and context.

But what's the "something"? What's the thread that joins all of these different people?

I contend that everyone above is trying, in their own way, to create a good experience - in their own context, using their own tools and methods, with their own ways of measuring whether it worked.

Most importantly, everyone - as different as they are - can learn from one another by sharing the patterns they've learned. (What did they draw on for inspiration? What kinds of materials, or primary sources, did they use, and how did they transform them? Who do they admire and learn from? What failed, and how did they bounce back? What are they trying next? And on and on.)

People have trouble understanding this, I think, because the idea of "good experience" doesn't fit into a known category. It's not a "design" idea, because then I'd have to focus on "the design industry" with the associated gurus, buzzwords, methods, and trends in that little community. For the same reason, good experience doesn't fit into "innovation," "usability," "Web 2.0," or whatever other niches or boxes people like to segment things into.

Good experience is a BIG idea, integrating many different disciplines in the service of one thing: teaching and learning how to create good experience. And the best way to learn about good experience is, of course, through experience itself. (Thus my avoidance of pseudo-academic frameworks, buzzword-of-the-month club, and guru worship.)

If all this rings true to you, there's a community you should join: come to my Gel (Good Experience Live) conference in May with over 400 other executives, artists, educators, writers, and others who "speak your language." We're meeting in May in New York for our fourth-annual event, then in Copenhagen in September. All info here: gelconference.com

And if you're in New York, I hope you'll join us tonight (Wednesday Feb. 15) at the Apple Store SoHo at 6:30pm, where I'll give an in-person summary of everything I write about above, including some clips from past Gel conferences.

February Events - Apple Store - SoHo

Special Event

Mark Hurst, Good Experience Live
February 15,6:30 p.m.
Apple Store SoHo
New York City

Beyond User Experience

Join GEL (Good Experience Live) conference founder and host, Mark Hurst, for an inside look at creating better user experiences for business, art, society, and technology applications. Whether you're a product manager, designer, information architect, or planner, Mark will demonstrate how his vision of "teaching good experience through experience" can benefit any project. Hear why Mark also manages every aspect of Good Experience Live with a Macintosh. February 15, 6:30 p.m.

Marissa Mayer '03 writes a piece for Business Week: Turning Limitations into Innovation.

Creativity is often misunderstood. People often think of it in terms of artistic work -- unbridled, unguided effort that leads to beautiful effect. If you look deeper, however, you'll find that some of the most inspiring art forms -- haikus, sonatas, religious paintings -- are fraught with constraints. They're beautiful because creativity triumphed over the rules. Constraints shape and focus problems, and provide clear challenges to overcome as well as inspiration. Creativity, in fact, thrives best when constrained.

Ze Frank '03 scores again with a movie about psbi.

As I said in my Gel 2004 intro, the word "experience" is grossly overused by marketers who want the benefits of creating an experience without having to make the investment to get there.

Iris Bell pointed me to a recent Ziggy, by Tom Wilson and Tom II (http://www.ucomics.com/ziggy/2006/01/30/): Ziggy peers at a sign entitled "Today's Specials" with two choices - Chili, $2.50; The Chili Experience, $4.95.

I shared this with my friend D. and she wrote back:

Funny. That brings to mind... just today I was in the men's section of Bloomingdale's with my husband and one of those perfume attack people accosted him as he was about to get on the down escalator, and said, "Would you like the Hugo Boss experience?" He didn't respond and kept walking, but I felt like going up to her and saying...

Do you mean that if you spray some small bit of that men's cologne on my husband, suddenly Hugo Boss will appear and perhaps discuss the history of his clothing and product line, his childhood, his personal life, what books he reads, where he vacations, how he spends his time relaxing, his company practices, his work ethic, what it's like to be a clothing designer, how his ideas about designing are formed, and what he eats for lunch?

And maybe music will start playing throughout the store and suddenly a bunch of models will appear from both the down & up escalators, and they will strut around in the latest Hugo Boss clothes, and then the lights will dim and on the white wall behind them a montage will feature images from meaningful times and milestones in Hugo Boss's life - then it will slowly fade to black, the models will go back to the escalators, the music will end, Hugo Boss will slowly disappear into the crowd and the only thing my husband will be left with will be a faint odor of the cologne that you sprayed on him, and forevermore whenever that scent hits his nasal passages this Hugo Boss encounter will come to his mind?

Because if something like that doesn't happen after you spray him, I wouldn't continue to go around calling what you're offering "the Hugo Boss experience" - I suggest you call it like it is and say something a little closer to reality like, "May I please attack you with this latest cologne Bloomingdales wants me to hock?", because if you said that, my husband might actually turn around, pay attention and listen to you.

...but then I thought better of it and continued to the down escalator to look at the men's pants section, where nary an actual salesperson could be found.

Our "experience encounters" for the day did not end there. When we left the store, walked a few blocks uptown and stopped at a small nearby bread and muffin store, as I waited in line to purchase my bread I glanced over at some muffins on a shelf near the cash register, and saw a sign above them that read "fat free experience"... I won't launch into another rant but I do wonder why the sign didn't just say "fat free muffins"?

Well, have a good night, or should I say "have a wonderful end-of-day experience"?

This Is Broken links to David Pogue on hard-to-open packaging...

Last March I wrote about The Best Month for Customer Experience; do you remember which month it was?

Excerpt:

Early and often - that's when you should work on the customer experience. EARLY: The best time to get started is ASAP. Remember that the earlier in the project, the more you're able to think strategically... and make changes to strategy.

Whether in a major site redesign, or a first-time launch from scratch, it's important to include customers in the process - and to involve them as early as possible in the process.

This isn't a new idea, certainly not in the writings here at Good Experience and Creative Good for the past nine years; so the question arose last year - how customer-focused are we in the business world?

To find out, we surveyed over 140 e-commerce executives - site owners, VPs, and directors of major e-commerce sites - about their use of customer input, and customer research, during the development process. Phil Terry, my business partner and CEO of Creative Good, ran the survey and presented the results at last month's Shop.org FirstLook conference.

Of course, we could run this survey for many different types of online businesses (intranets, portals, B2B sites) and offline (banks, schools, hospitals, and airlines come to mind) - but consider these results, which were limited to e-commerce for Shop.org, to be indicative of what *your* industry may look like.

Some of the results may surprise you. I've summarized them below.

- - -

On when they conduct customer research:

• Only 25% of site owners conduct direct customer research at the beginning of the project.

(To be fair, 25% is higher than it was a few years ago, so this represents a big win for the industry and the customers.)

• 45% do customer research at some point later during the project, but not at the beginning.

(This includes customer research that first appears at the *end* of a project - something we see a lot of, unfortunately.)

• 30% of site owners generate all their ideas internally and build without *ever* testing with customers.

(This means planning, developing, and finally launching a site - all done with no customer research at all.)

Again, judging this result depends on one's perspective. It's either a big win (since it's lower than a few years ago), or an astoundingly high number (who still operates without any customer input, ever, as late as 2006?).

- - -

On whether they ask customers a "net promoter" question:

• Only 40% ask the question, "How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend?"

• And of those who do ask, only about half ask the follow up question, "Why?"

More on "net promoter", from last May.

- - -

On what the site owners' most recent redesigns focused on:

• Over half of all recent redesigns focused on improving *basics*: finding (32%) and buying (20%) products.

• Checkout came in third, at 10%.

• All accounting for small percentages were other investments: search engine optimization, e-mail, multi-channel work, "participation economy" features, customer service, loyalty programs, and promotions.

This was striking. Some of these sites are over 10 years old, perhaps having lived through 10 or more redesigns, and they're *still* working on getting the basics right.

And we're happy to hear it. Most customers mostly care about the basics of the experience - not the latest flashy feature - and thus the site owner's investment should be made to match. (We're also happy that this is becoming a more popular idea than it was when we repeated it, again and again, in the dotcom bubble :)

- - -

On measured results:

We asked, "Which statement best explains your experience?"

• About half chose, "When we redesigned, sales immediately improved."

• About a quarter chose, "When we redesigned, sales slipped."

• About a quarter chose, "We've had both results."

This is a great sign that many redesigns - I'd like to think it's mainly those that start with customer research in the beginning - are measurably and immediately improving business metrics.

But it's important to re-state the importance of measuring results. What good is user experience, usability, IA, CX, AI, FUBAR, or any other discipline or acronym if you can't show *some* result after investing time and money in it?

Read more about results and how to get them:
www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/000283.php

A major 50-comment discussion is brewing on This Is Broken - Textual annoyances: Some things that irritate me when I read them in news articles, blog posts, and other textual media:

"Jaw-dropping" and variations thereof - "This music is jaw-droppingly good." No, your jaw didn't drop. You mean it's very good. Say so (or find some less tired cliche to help).