Archives / July 2006

Here's a note from a Gootodo.com user that just came in this morning.

I have been using Gootodo (quite religiously I might add). I hadn't imagined how much of a positive impact it would have on the organization of my work and personal life. After I began using it, I noticed a huge decrease in my stress levels. I had one common place where I could try to organize my action list. Inadvertantly, I had been using my e-mail inbox as a type of 'to do list' with a few sticky notes scattered across my desk. Trying to use my e-mail box as an organization tool was a disaster - I was so easily sidetracked with new mails.

I find it more useful and productive to review my gootodo list (rather than checking my e-mail inbox) to ensure that I am on track with my plannings and objectives.

I now visit my e-mail box only a couple of times a day to process new e-mails, and the post-it notes have disappeared. The only thing I am missing is a way (preferably low-tech) to record ideas that I have outside of the office (e.g. while driving to work) and an easy way to integrate them into my gootodo list.

(Thanks, Kate!)

Try it out: https://www.gootodo.com

From CNN.com - Denmark is happiest place in the world, report says:

If you're looking for happiness, move to Denmark. ... The main factors that affected happiness were health provision, wealth and education, according to White who said his research had produced the "first world map of happiness."

Yet another reason we're going to Copenhagen, Denmark in a few weeks for euroGel 2006. You're invited...

P.S. Photos of Copenhagen from this past June.

(Thanks, Dawn)

I'll never forget a moment, a few years back, when I was leading a customer experience project for a major brokerage firm. The company was very proud of its website but wanted to know how it could incrementally improve the design, or add features, perhaps increase the content on the site, to help make it the leading brokerage site online.

As I began the project, I interviewed the stakeholders, the executives at the brokerage headquarters who were tasked with making those improvements. I started with one of the vice presidents and asked her to show me how she currently tracked her own portfolio. She brought up a Web browser and clicked on the bookmark for... Yahoo Finance. (!) I asked her why she wasn't using the tools, features, and various add-ons that her own company had created, at great expense, for its own website. She said that Yahoo Finance was quicker, and easier, and what's more, all her coworkers used it as well.

Even while this company stated its goals to be the high-tech leader of its niche online, the stakeholders themselves revealed how the Web really works: in a competitive environment, whichever company fulfills customers' unmet needs quickest, easiest, and cheapest, will win. I've seen this play out in a number of industries over the past ten years - and it continues, notably in the ongoing contest between Yahoo and Google.

Still, there's a lingering question: isn't it better to be cool? Can't we succeed with "the 'wow' factor"? I was happy that we could contribute earlier this week to Saul Hansell's New York Times column about Yahoo and Google, which touched on this question.

From In the Race With Google, It's Consistency vs. 'Wow':

Do Internet users prefer services that are consistent and predictable, like those offered by Yahoo, or are they more interested in Google's wow factor? These two approaches define a pivotal front in the battle for online loyalty between the major players in the Internet search business. ...

"Google is simpler, more focused on real and basic customer needs, with some exceptions for their experiments, and less focused on some of the fads driving Silicon Valley today," said Phil Terry, chief executive of Creative Good, a user experience consulting firm.

I think Phil nailed it. The Web business isn't about "wow" versus anything else - it's about which companies address customers' basic unmet needs the most. If it comes packaged in a "wow" interface, so much the better - but that's not what keeps people coming back, and referring their friends.

Is Craigslist a "wow"? If not, why is Craigslist transforming the classified business across the US?

For that matter, is the Google homepage a "wow"? If not, how did it help Google win the top spot in the search engine race?

As far as I know, Yahoo Finance remains the best portfolio-tracker online. It's hardly a "wow" product, but it's great.

By "great" I mean that it focuses on customers' needs. This is how to succeed in the long run. "Wow" is secondary, at best. Actually, I'd be provocative and say that "wow" often has an inverse relationship with online success. We've seen plenty examples of that over the years, too...

Despite its eye-straining gray-on-white text, Ad Age has a good summary of Net Promoter, which I've covered in past columns. From Do You Know Your Net Promoter Score?:

[C]ompanies have for years based decisions on satisfaction surveys that have a poor response rate, largely because they're too long. They're so long, in fact, they've come to "appeal only to the lonely, the bored and the seriously aggrieved," as he puts it. Mr. Reichheld said all those questions can be reduced to a single one, answered on a scale of 0 to 10, that places a lot of weight on a customer's own credibility: How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?

(Thanks to Tom Charde for the pointer.)

Also see: A thought on selling good experience, which mentions net promoter.

P.S. Gray-on-white text needs to stop. If you don't believe me, read this e-book excerpt showing research on typography and reader comprehension.

A quick followup to Managing digital overload with... paper?, in which I suggested that people who are overloaded with bits should learn a bit-based system like bit literacy. Most comments came back defending paper, because it has some advantages over bits (I agree), and that we should use each medium for its own strengths (I agree). The commenters are right on both counts - just wrong in concluding that paper is better at managing e-mail and other bitstreams that are overloading us these days.

Reading some related articles, I came across this Wikipedia entry on the common ballpoint pen... shown at left is a closeup of a ballpoint tip from the article. Check out the cost of the first pens, only sixty years ago!

Reynolds International Pen Company [produced] the Biro design without license as the Reynolds Rocket. [They] managed to beat Eversharp to market in late 1945; the first ballpoint pens went on sale at Gimbel's department store in New York City on October 29, 1945 for US$12.50 each (about USD$130 of today's money). This pen was widely known as "the rocket" in the U.S. into the late 1950s.

(from Ballpoint pen - Wikipedia)

Following up to Nestle and the paradox of choice:

Japanese retailer Ranking Ranqueen... takes a radical approach to sales. Every product in the store is part of a top 3, 5 or 10 list. Whether it's the top 3 bath powders, the top 5 nose hair removers, or the top 10 pasta sauces. Popularity and ranking are based on sales data from parent company Tokyu's department stores, and numbers from independent research companies.

(via Springwise)

Bit literacy is a system for managing information in these days of infinite bits... and even thriving in such an environment. It starts with managing e-mail, continues with using a bit-literate todo list, and moves into many other areas I've touched on.

And bit literacy is a digital system - by, with, for, about bits. It stands to reason that if the cause of overload is digital, then the system to combat overload would be digital as well. The system has to match the challenge. If you want to learn to swim, you don't take cello lessons. If you're traveling to Poland and you want to speak the local language, you don't take classes in Tibetan. If you want to manage bits, you've got to learn to manage bits.

And which is why, with no disrespect meant to the good people who teach or practice it, I've never understood the appeal of other organizational systems, aimed at today's knowledge worker, that focus on paper.

For example, from a blog post I came across recently, My GTD Implementation (emphasis mine):

So of course I have gone through several iterations of how I utilize the methodology. First, I was solely in Outlook - keeping all of my appointments and Next Actions within Outlook using the white paper released by DavidCo as the instruction booklet for implementation. Then I moved to paper. And there are countless notebooks and binders in my home office from the numbers of attempts at creating the "best" GTD system I could get.

You're learning to manage bits by... writing in paper notebooks and on 3x5 cards?

Of course paper is more effective at some things than bits. I carry pen and paper to many meetings, not a heavy laptop or an expensive and fragile PDA. A fifty-cent notebook and five-cent pen do just fine to jot down notes.

But what happens when I want to share those notes - or follow up on a todo someone promised to accomplish - or back up what I wrote - or edit, extend, and add them to a presentation I'm building or a column I'm writing? Editing, sharing, transmitting, backing up - those are all things that bits do better, often infinitely better, than paper.

With that said, I'll say that getting organized on paper is MUCH better than not being organized at all. For that matter, organizing oneself with any system, in any medium, no matter how relevant or irrelevant, is better than not being organized. But in the age of bits, as we engage more and more information, it will become so much more important to know how to manage those bits. Paper won't cut it.

Wouldn't it be more efficient just to learn how to use the computer in the first place? Again I point to step one, step two, and so on.

Whenever I shop for hummus or cream cheese at my local grocery store, it's almost impossible to find the regular kind. Not the five-spice hummus, the red-pepper hummus, the lemon hummus; and not the salmon cream cheese, the strawberry, the nonfat, or any of the other 10 varieties - I want the regular.

Most of the time, in fact, I find that the hummus sold out, and only the varieties - which no one wants - sit there on the shelf. So I buy nothing.

My interview with Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice and a Gel Gel '05 speaker, talks about this problem.

Now there's an international case study on the topic. Swiss company Nestle, which is known for its steady, responsible CEO Peter Brabeck, took an unusual detour into a business fad and paid the price.

From Flavored U.K. KitKats leave Nestle with bad taste:

Nestle [applied] to KitKat a marketing strategy that is becoming increasingly popular at food companies world-wide: extending a popular brand into new flavors and styles. The world's biggest food company brought a hotshot executive in from Australia in 2003 to find ways to add variety to the basic KitKat brand in the U.K.

Over the course of the next year, the company rolled out a dizzying array of new KitKats. For the summer months, it launched strawberries and cream, passion fruit and mango and even red berry versions. In the winter came "Christmas pudding" and tiramisu, which contained real wine and marscapone. Even though Britons never fully embraced the Atkins diet craze, the company launched a low-carb version.

The experiments flopped. In just two years, KitKat's overall sales in the U.K. dropped 18 percent, to $253 million for the 52 weeks ending in April. Nestle recently abandoned virtually all of its exotic flavors. The executive in charge of the gambit has been replaced. And Nestle's experience has become a lesson in the perils of trying to push new versions of much-loved brands too hard. "You could call it hyperventilation," Peter Brabeck, Nestle's chief executive recently told reporters.

(Thanks, kottke)

Speaking of branding and the customer experience... take a look at this neat TV ad for a Turkish bank. It uses computer-generated people as pixels for various "animations."

Great ad! Now... do they have hours on weekends? Free change-counting? That's what really counts.

What's the difference between a huge mass-market Internet success, and a niche tool favored only by a tiny techie minority? I learned part of the answer in a recent project I finished up a few months ago.

It all started a year ago, almost to the day, when I got a call from Joshua Schachter, an old friend here in New York and founder of a relatively new Web service called del.icio.us. Joshua wanted help redesigning his site, which at the time I knew only a little about. (If you're unfamiliar with it, del.icio.us is pronounced "delicious" - ignore the dots - and it's a "social bookmarking site", which is a website where you can store your bookmarks outside your computer, and see other users' bookmarks as well.)

Joshua wanted me to help improve the customer experience for the right reason: in his words, no one but the highest-tech users knew what del.icio.us was about, and it was difficult for anyone but them to start using it. Could I help make this technology accessible and useful to a wider set of users? Joshua asked.

That's all I needed to hear - within a few weeks I was on the job. (More accurately, at first I advised Joshua to run his own listening labs, to save money; the labs went so well, which is to say that they so forcefully and painfully proved the point that the customer experience was broken, that he called back and asked again for a Creative Good project.)

Co-led by Zimran Ahmed and me, the project included the standard four steps of a customer experience project:

• business assessment: analyzing the company's goals, culture, performance and financial metrics, and competitive environment

• customer research: non-directed research, or listening labs, to understand the customer experience (both registered users and prospects)

• strategy: synthesizing the first two steps to state a high-level direction that accomplishes business goals and improves the customer experience

• wireframes: building out the strategy by drawing detailed sketches of all major pages and templates affected by the strategic change

As usual, the heart of the project was the listening labs, where we found out all the problems that users had in understanding del.icio.us and its competitors. I still know of no better way to understand a business, and its prospects for success, except to ask customers to show their experience with it.

Without revealing any specific findings, I'll say that users had a lot of trouble understanding, without any prompting, what the service was or how to use it. Competitors performed as poorly or worse.

And yet. Once we saw a user fail, get irritated, and completely give up on the service, we'd then walk them through the process for signing up, explaining what the service was about along the way. In almost every such case, after spending 20 or more minutes explaining the service, the user "got it" and excitedly said they would sign up as soon as they got home.

The labs, then, brought back a good news-bad news result: there's a great benefit to all users, not just techies, for using del.icio.us; but it's impossible for most users to reach the benefit. Our strategy, and then our wireframes based on that strategy, focused on bridging that gap: making del.icio.us easier for users to understand, so that more of them could reach the good experience.

Since we finished the project a few months ago, I've noticed a lot of attention in the press paid to this area. Every other week, it seems, there's a major story about "social bookmarking", "tagging", "folksonomies", or some such term. Despite the fact that the average user has no idea what these mean, and no easy way to reach the benefits, these stories proliferate. And here's why: techies are so adept at understanding these tools and reaping the benefits that they sign up in droves; journalists talk to techies to get story ideas; and voila! a new "hot trend" is born in the press.

Meanwhile, a few of our suggested changes have launched on del.icio.us. To respect client confidentiality, I won't go into detail but will just say that there's a quickly changing strategic environment that caused the client to choose some of our suggestions over others; but that's often the case in our work.

What I learned redesigning del.icio.us, then, was more of a validation of what I've felt committed to for almost ten years, now, at Creative Good. The best way to discover the truth about the customer experience is to observe customers; it's good to offer a benefit, but just as important to make it easy to attain; and, especially for del.icio.us, even a techie tool can improve by going through this process.

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Also see...

• The official Creative Good case study on the project.

• del.icio.us won a Copernican Award a few weeks ago, voted on by the members of our Customer Experience Councils, awarded for customer-centric business practices.

• More on the four-step method in the customer experience whitepaper (PDF)

• Finally, if you want a techie-oriented description of del.icio.us, read this.

One couple buys a house in Maine and finds that the quiet there brings an unexpected gift. From A Lifesaving Retreat in Maine - New York Times:

The intense quiet around them also helped her notice an inner noise that turned out to be a symptom of something that was going on in her body - an acoustic neuroma, a tumor that affects one's hearing.

"I believe that if I hadn't gone there, I never would have calmed down and would have never found my brain tumor," she said. "I found it by being very quiet and listening. It was a teensy sound. It sounded like swish. Shshsh shshsh. Sometimes twice, sometimes three times. Like a coded message."

My friend Andrew Zolli, PopTech conference curator and Gel Gel '03 speaker, turned me on to a free Mac text editor called WriteRoom.

Green ASCII text on a black background, which can go full-screen, allows for distraction-free engagement with text bits. WriteRoom is great.

Also see the mention at the PopTech blog.

Gel :'06: speaker Leni Schwendinger has lit the Coney Island Parachute Jump, an enormous tower that was used in a past era (before runaway liability payouts) as an amusement park ride. No company would insure a parachute jump today, but it can still be used as a lighted beacon to symbolize the history, and future, of Coney Island.

Leni used some of the same processes that she used on Glasgow's Kingston Bridge (which she talked about at Gel). The Coney Island project, she writes, "was an opportunity to meld 21st century lighting with a 20th century industrial structure. The Parachute Jump is revived as a signature icon for Coney Island's evening and nighttime hours."

Congrats to Leni. Here's her site: lightprojectsltd.com

And here's the New York Times story on the lighting of the Parachute Jump.

TED founder Richard Saul Wurman was interviewed in the Harvard Business School Review about his philosophy on running conferences. My first time at TED - when I spoke there in 2001 - was a formative experience that helped inspire me to start the Gel conference.

No wonder, then, that I agree with everything he says in the article, and see similarities to how I run Gel. Here's an excerpt.

Wurman: At my conferences, the best speeches were always by brilliant, vulnerable individuals who could tell a fresh story about their passions, ideas, and failures. They don't spoon-feed information or talk down to the audience. They let people taste and experience their ideas for themselves. And the audience creates its own intelligent connections among all the different ideas presented.

HBSP: That sounds lovely, but corporations aren't going to dispense with traditional conferences.

Wurman: Correct, but if I were a CEO, I would take a few standard events off my roster and replace them with such dinner parties...

(Thanks to Tracy S. for the pointer!)

Here's a recent story from my consulting work, with all identifying details changed, of course.

A few months ago I got called in to evaluate a major auto-research website that allows customers to search for prices, reviews, and other data on new or used cars.

The site is free for users, so the business is supported by advertising: graphic and text banners in various places, and most profitably, the "partner links" that send users to specially branded content paid for by advertisers.

The site is about auto research, as I said, but the partner links are only tangentially related. For example, one of the larger partner areas might be about travel - where to drive your new car on road trips, say - and paid for by Travelocity or Expedia. Those areas are designed nicely enough, and the client, the auto-research site, loves those areas because it gets paid a much higher rate on clickthroughs. Advertisers are willing to pay a lot for qualified leads, since users clicking into those areas are much more valuable than a random sampling of Web users viewing a random banner ad.

Seeing the opportunity for much more revenue, the auto-research site - without really acknowledging it, I think - began following a strategy of pursuing those partner deals to the exclusion of other goals. They didn't just sign up more partners, they designed the customer experience around them. Everywhere you look you'd see links to these partner areas - for travel, for accessories, for outdoor adventure, anything you can imagine - all asking users to click away into a partner site. The primary reason customers were coming to the site - to find basic price and review data on cars - was gradually pushed to the background.

The last straw came, I think, when the homepage came up for a redesign and, through whatever design process the company used, the new homepage showed up without any search form, or links to cars, except in some secondary areas in the bottom-right of the page. Everything else on the homepage was given over to partner links and other "monetization" - newsletters, alerts, high-tech doodads, and the like - anything to capture and lock up customers and their attention. Once again, the primary reason customers were coming to the site - to find basic price and review data on cars - was pushed away. This is when the client called me at Creative Good.

When I began my project with the client, evaluating the customer experience and making recommendations for improvement, I quickly determined how much customer research had been conducted in recent redesigns: zero. All the design decisions were being made by executives, with no customer input, and with only a short-term goal of raising their numbers. I could have guessed this by looking at the site - no site gets that bad without actively ignoring customers - but it was good to get the guess validated.

Then when we went into customer research - their first time conducting listening labs in the website's history - the message came back loud and clear (I hesitate to say deafening, but it was close) from the customers: the site irritates them; they don't appreciate the insistent partner links; they can't find what they came for; they would be happy to use a competing site. The executives were aghast - they're good and smart people, after all, just misled by their short-term thinking absent any customer input - and they immediately pledged to change their ways.

The problem came, however, when it was time to make the changes: none of the executives wanted *their* group to be the one to give up screen space. It was a classic case of what we call "pixel politics", each group hanging on to their shred of the page, regardless of what role it might or might not play in the larger strategy of the company. In the end, we were able to lead the company to some improvements in their customer experience; with the politics so intense in the company, it was only through the direct customer research that we had any leverage to convince them to do so.

I tell this story not because it's unusual, but because it is so very common. We've seen the same patterns again and again over the past nine years of consulting:

- Customer experience is primarily an organizational issue. If we had made recommendations without taking the internal politics into account, our report would have gathered digital dust in a "consultant reports" folder on a server somewhere. To make customer experience real, it must be conducted in, with, and for the organization. There is no customer experience improvement without the organization that will implement it.

- Customer experience is strategic. We weren't dealing primarily with tactical positions of navbars and graphics, although they played a (tactical) part in our recommendations; instead, we had to go to the highest level of the organization's thinking to address the problem. There is no long-term improvement without a change in the long-term, strategic thinking of an organization.

- For the customer experience to improve, the organization must base its strategy on direct customer involvement. It simply doesn't work for executives to base their strategy, either actively or by default, on which advertiser pays the most. Customers must play a part in co-creating the strategy that will form their customer experience. To put it another way, what part of "customer experience" do executives not understand?

I'll end with a compliment. As difficult as it was for them to change, it's impressive that this particular company invested in improving their customer experience. Unlike so many companies of comparable size that drop millions on silly ad campaigns or "branding initiatives", this company acknowledged their need for customer-centered practices and took the first step, a Copernican step, in turning around their business. For that one step, they're far ahead of many other organizations.

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Let me (and other Good Experience readers) know your experiences improving your organization's customer experience: add your comment below.