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What I learned redesigning del.icio.us
Jul 12, 2006
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.
Beyond the validation mentioned above, I was reminded of the lessons of marketing technology products/services that one can draw from reading "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey Moore. Published in 1991, it still holds valuable lessons for companies wanting to move from selling technology products to technology enthusiasts to selling those same products/services to a mainstream audience.
Excellent case study. Thanks for sharing your experiences.
I still wonder why, if their problem is so clearly that people don't understand what del.icio.us is, there isn't any clear explanation on the site beyond the opaque "Keep/Share/Discover" text on the home page with a link to what is not much more than an FAQ page.
Where's the great succint copywriting that explains it in a nutshell -- and that seduces you into feeling like you have to spend some more energy learning it? Testimonials from normal people (or famous people) who use it and give the user the confidence that they can learn it too?
Where's the elegant diagram showing how it works and how it will change your life? Like maybe hire an infographic designer (like xplane) to make it clearer. Maybe have a little Flash animation?
The idea of improving the post-signup user experience so that it's easier for the user to understand what they're already using is great. But what about the other 99% of users who visit the home page and literally have no idea what it is and are offered no help to learn what it is (unless they sign up and invest valuable time using it)?
Consumer technologies like XM Radio and TiVo wouldn't dream of offering so little in the way of upfront explanation. They do all of the above stuff. Why should a web technology be different?
I've been wondering this for years now, actually. Is this a deliberate strategy on their part, to make del.icio.us something that you have to actually use to understand?
(And, as you know, the competitors are just as bad at this, too. It's weird.)
Christopher - I can only say that our recommendations were only used in part... and that the focus of our strategy for delicious was not on the home page.
Hi Mark, noticed this in my referral logs...thanks for the mention!
Also, thanks for the nice writeup of the Del.icio.us redesign. I've been having a ton of conversations about it with folks, but it's always great to hear from the designers themselves.
Not enough designers, in my opinion, give this level of detail.
Tools like del. have been around long enough to have expert users, light users, specialized users, former heavy users who know longer use etc - did you study these types of users and did you do any of those study's away from the screen - seems like web xx stuff has a bigger picture that is well understood by a few but has yet to be translated -
Keep/share/discover is it a safe analogy to say that if that were applied to a car it would read: Car: Start/Drive/Arrive/Return? or wordprocessors: Type/edit/print or send.
I suppose if I hung out with early car drivers I might learn about picnics or "parking" -
I think a lot of the same problems can be attributed to PubSub as well. It's a great technology but difficult to understand, but once a user "gets it" they realize how useful it can be.