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Customer experience and the 'wow' factor
Jul 27, 2006
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...
Last month, Looking for a place to live (to share) for my son and our dog, I put an ad on craigslist. I even said "southwest facing if possible."
After we moved, a call to a craigslist ad got 2 beds delivered the next night.
Another call found a guy and his girlfriend,driving around the westside in a lift-equipped full size truck with a GPS. He answered on his cell and they were moving my heavier objects three hours later.
Last night sitting on my new southwest-facing porch with the dog I pondered craigslist and the role of the internet (not just one 'shazam'-based website) in everyone's lives.
Wow.
Mark- Google was a wow factor when it launched. It was radically simple. This was in stark contrast to the other SE's back in the day. Do you recall the Excite homepage? How about Alta Vista and Yahoo? Search Engines were portals...not just search. Google was one simple thing and spoke to the latent need, as you said, of users just wanting an easy way to find what they are looking for. The lesson here is the same one you work on everyday with your clients. Find the latent need and blow it out. YouTube comes to mind in this regard. All those kids just siting around with their digital video cams looking for a place to host their 'My Humps' lip synch vid. What's interesting with these two examples is that it was as much the technology that filled the latent need as anything else. Google's homepage got people top query but their algo kept people coming back.
Don't forget Microsoft! They have a very active set of web apps hidden behind the "Windows Live" banner.
I travel to other cities within the US quite frequently, and I want to be able to make a single map which includes the airport, the hotel, and the client I'm visiting, and perhaps some local restaurants as well. As far as I know, that's impossible with either Google or Yahoo! maps, but simple with Windows Live Local (where do they get these names??). You don't even have to sign in.
But I absolutely agree that users are fickle -- because they can be. I used to use My Yahoo! as an online RSS reader, but I dropped it like a rock when Google Reader came along. And I've switched to Microsoft for maps, because of the ability to map multiple things at once.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. What Craig's List and Google have in common is that they are stripped-down, plain, easy. I love that Craig's List is even downright ugly. I hope they never change.