Archives / January 2007

Congratulations to David McQuillen, euroGel 2006 speaker, for being named one of Fast Company's "Top Ten Creative Minds of 2006".

See a video clip of David's euroGel talk on the Gel videos page.

Or get Fast Company's take on it... from Talk to Our Customers? Are You Crazy?:

McQuillen made each member of his team spend a day in a wheelchair. Then he invited 50 of the bank's senior managers to an event in May during which they were made to spend time in a wheelchair, wear a weighted suit made to re-create what it's like to be 70, and eat lunch in the dark, courtesy of Zurich's Blind Cow restaurant, where all of the waiting staff are visually impaired.

This past weekend, during an otherwise normal visit to a bath-and-kitchen store, I was struck by the amount of product being sold by Apple. There were no iPods or MacBooks among the towels and mops and kitchen gadgets - no discernible Apple logos - but there were quite a few items dependent on Apple.

I refer to the following six products, a non-exhaustive list that I compiled while shopping for other things: the iSing, iSnug, iConnect, iSoundSpa, iBlasterOrb, and taking it one notch higher, the jWin. (Yes, with a "j". In the words of Spinal Tap, "these go to eleven.") There were probably others, too, that I missed during my visit. (All product photos below.)

While a couple of the products were meant to plug into the Apple iPod, others were unrelated, somewhat comical "me-too" designs. The iSing, for example, is a plastic FM radio whose chassis is clearly inspired by the iPod. The name, the design, even the thing that looks like a scroll wheel but isn't - everything says "this is close enough!" - as though the designers were desperate for some of Apple's magic to rub off on the cheap gadget.

Looking at these not-very-clever knockoffs, I could only think that they offered a lesson in innovation. It's one thing to make a superficial copy of a success story; quite another to truly learn from it and build a success of one's own.

In the early years of the Web boom, I remember clients constantly asking us, during our consulting projects, to "help us become the Amazon of our industry." Amazon.com was hot, and many companies figured that if they could just add the "collaborative filtering" (a late 90s buzzword, somewhat like "social networking" today) or some other magic feature that Amazon had, they'd "be like Amazon" and make boatloads of money.

In that sense, Apple today is like Amazon eight years ago. The iPod is revered and praised at conferences, on blogs, and in bath-and-kitchen stores. The praise is well-deserved - the iPod is a great product - but the lessons people draw from it aren't always sound. Naming something with an "i" doesn't make it innovative; neither does adding a fake scroll wheel. Talking and blogging endlessly about "innovation" - another current buzzword - also doesn't necessarily mean that anything new is being discussed.

For customer experience practitioners, true innovation means finding what customers want that's not currently available to them: these are customers' key unmet needs. They often have nothing to do with the buzzwords, naming trends, or "hot" features that are currently in vogue with business magazines and bloggers. If anything, I usually find that innovation means going back to basics - the old things, the obvious, the simple, the non-fashionable things - and offering those to customers who really just want a better experience. Almost by definition, anything that follows current trends isn't innovative - the trend shows what's already been done!

So consider the irony: the most innovative companies and people today are often those with the courage to ignore superficial fashions and strike out on their own path. Sometimes this means creating something no one has ever seen before, like the iPod. More often it's a basic improvement: in a society obsessed with the newest trends and buzzwords, success can be as easy as doing the old thing that everyone else forgot along the way.

iSing...

iConnect (a "squishy pillow" that connects to an iPod)...

iSoundSpa...

iBlaster Orb...

iSnug...

...and a product creatively taking it one notch up, the "jWin". Yes, with a "j".

Had a nice chat last week with Seth Godin and Matt & Jason from 37signals. Thanks for the invite, guys!

From [Fireside Chat] Seth Godin and Mark Hurst (Part 1 of 2) - (37signals):

Topics covered include Google, Apple, JetBlue, the common thread of companies that offer top-notch customer experiences, the GEL conference, zoomers and why they're important, industries that don't get it, and more.

(Any 37signals readers checking out this blog - try reading our best-of columns to get a sense of what this is about. Also watch Jason and Seth in our Gel 2006 videos.)

David Pogue nails it again, pointing out weasel-tactics used by Microsoft's PR team to get positive press (bribing bloggers, inventing testimonials). From A Wake-Up Call to Microsoft's PR Team:

I am not, and never will be, a knee-jerk Microsoft basher. I'll give its products good reviews whenever they're deserved (as I have with, for example, Media Center, Windows Vista and Office 2007).

But for goodness' sake: Why is Microsoft so insecure? Why can't it allow its software to stand on its own? Why does it feel the necessity to spin public opinion using these phony "grass-roots" marketing tactics?

My upcoming book Bit Literacy mentions Microsoft software several times, too.

Interesting project: to promote its online mail service, Yahoo has released the Ultimate Championships - a semi-serious "test" to see how quickly you can get through e-mail.

I got tired clicking the Compose button (should be a keyboard command!) and didn't see anything about letting the bits go - instead, it's more a high-tech tour of features. So it's not really bit literate, but it's an interesting example of how companies are beginning to realize the importance of bit literacy (though they don't yet use the term).

In the Washington Post today, A Librarian's Lament:

...literacy today is defined less by how English departments or a librarian might teach Wordsworth or Faulkner than by how we find our way through the digital forest of information overload.

The author is close to describing bit literacy. What he's missing is the result: by becoming bit literate, you're in control of your bits and have more time to become literate in the traditional (librarian's) sense - reading actual paper-based books, without the stress that comes from constant overload.

Bit literacy allows you to manage information better in order to have more time for more important things.

(My new book, Bit Literacy, arrives in May. -mh)

Lines (or queues, for our UK readers) are always a negative in the experience of a space.

Two recent posts on this idea:

• Re-Imagineering: Walking in Walt's Footsteps (lines at Disneyland)

• Lost in the Shuffle - The Brooklyn Museum Behaves Badly (lines at the Brooklyn Museum)

In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik on changing Manhattan neighborhoods:

Only twenty-five years ago, a walk from Tribeca to SoHo and the Lower East Side would show as many kinds and classes - rich, aspiring, immigrant - as it had a century before; now that walk is likely to show only the same six stores and the same two banks and the same one shopper.

Link

(thanks, kottke)

A young relative of mine is selling Girl Scout cookies this spring, and so I recently went online to find the available flavors. It led to a new insight about how the Web is working better and better. First, consider my experience:

I Googled the Girl Scouts and arrived at a home page containing (among many logos and other graphics) a graphic promo for the cookies. Clicking that, I got to the main cookies page, which shows a Zip code search form, which yields a signup form to be contacted by phone (?!) for more information.

Still wondering what cookies they're selling, I found a less obvious link on the page that led to what is almost certainly the old cookie site, the one before the ad agency redesigned the home page. Links and text galore. Only problem: no mention of the actual types of cookies being sold.

So I abandoned the site. The Girl Scouts were able to hire a colorful designer to spruce up the look of the site, but the customer experience is still lacking the basics.

At this point I went to Wikipedia and searched for "girl scout cookies". First result, bingo: Girl Scout cookie - Wikipedia

The page, after a history and overview, shows "Varieties of cookies". And there was my answer. One search on Wikipedia got me to a community-driven page that answered my questions faster and easier than an organizationally-driven site, showing successive layers of expensive redesigns with competing interests of design, marketing, and branding. Wikipedia, free from all political concerns of the organization, just showed the information that customers care about.

Thus my conclusion that the Web is working better and better for customers - because there are sites like Wikipedia delivering what customers want, despite what any particular organization may be able to produce.

It's also nice to see a resource that finally proves an (obvious) point about branding online: the brand is the customer experience, not the colors or logos. The Girl Scouts site has all the "right" colors and graphics, I suppose attempting to create an emotional experience for the user (to use the words I've heard from various branding consultants). Wikipedia, on the other hand, delivers its information in black text, on a white background, with blue text links. Somehow, despite Wikipedia's digression from the official Girl Scouts brand guidelines, I was able to recover emotionally, read up on the flavors, and e-mail my young relative with an order.

Here's a good rule of thumb for any significant website today: compare how hard it is to find your most basic, important information on your site, versus on Wikipedia. If Wikipedia is easier, you might reconsider your options.

And enough talk about colors creating an emotional experience. When people go online to answer a question, they don't care what color, typeface, associated graphics, or website domain is showing on the page. They just want a QUICK and EASY experience.

From The Seattle Times, Computer makers cut down on desktop clutter:

The desktop is changing, trimming away the extras in favor of a simpler experience. Lately, computer makers have been cutting down on the number of icons on computer desktops, analysts say, even though the sacrifice could mean losing valuable revenue as the prices of machines continue to drop....

The difference these days is that rather than cluttering up the desktop, Kleynhans said, computer makers are tucking those items into the start menu or hiding them behind a single installation icon.

(Thanks, Phil!)

Fast Company reports on the 10 Hot Jobs for 2007. Number one pick is "experience designer", which they define this way:

These talented individuals work in the retail industry, creating the essence and aura of a store. Experience designers go beyond the look of a place, creating a unique experience in which shoppers can immerse themselves.

Surely one can design an experience that doesn't deal with storefront retail... but point taken - good experience is "hot" now.

David Pogue writes about the new Microsoft Office. From Purging Bloat to Fashion Sleek Software:

You no longer have to spend 20 minutes hunting through menus for Page Numbering or whatever. It’s all right there on the Ribbon. What was once buried four layers deep is now arrayed before you in a big software smorgasbord.

...but on the other hand,...

You’re stuck with the tabs Microsoft gives you. You can’t rearrange them or hide the ones you never use. Even if you never create form letters or write academic dissertations, the Mailings and References tabs will be there on the Ribbon forever, wasting space.

(See also: Mossberg reviewing the new Office and the "largely unexciting" Vista)

From PC World, Just Cancel the @#%$* Account!: "It's hard to find a Web service that doesn't offer a free trial. But just try canceling. We did, and the results weren't always pretty." (Thanks, Roy)

Three quick reads from the NYTimes:

Ads cluttering the daily experience: Anywhere the Eye Can See, It's Likely to See an Ad: "Consumers' viewing and reading habits are so scattershot now that many advertisers say the best way to reach time-pressed consumers is to try to catch their eye at literally every turn."

Chains homegenizing the neighborhood experience: Now, Big-Name Retail Chains Will Take the Other Boroughs, Too: "The chain proliferation and the sameness they have brought to so many blocks has become a pet peeve for many New Yorkers, and the butt of jokes for others. On a recent episode of [an NBC sitcom], a character sent to pick up a prescription was stymied by the presence of 'Rite Drugs' outlets on all four corners of an intersection."

(Includes a quote from the Municipal Art Society, which opposes "chain store creep".)

Government addressing the neighborhood experience: Once at Cotillions, Now Reshaping the Cityscape, about NYC's planning commissioner Amanda Burden: "Planning experts and her supporters in the administration say, her focus on the small details adds up to a profound effect. 'The physical environment is absolutely essential and creates the kind of communities that make people want to invest in those communities,' [deputy mayor] Doctoroff said."

The Times reports that "Internet literate" corporate employees are using Web-based mail, to the chagrin of internal IT departments. From Firms Fret as Office E-Mail Jumps Security Walls:

It is a battle of best intentions: productivity and convenience pitted against security and more than a little anxiety. Corporate techies - who, after all, are paid to worry - want strict control over internal company communications and fear that forwarding e-mail might expose proprietary secrets to prying eyes.

Employees just want to get to their mail quickly, wherever they are, without leaping through too many security hoops.

This is one of many articles related to bit literacy that surely will appear this year...

As we start a new year, here are some thoughts about good experience - both the topic and this newsletter.

Whether you're a designer, a teacher, an executive, a product manager, or a stay-at-home parent, good experience is part of your work and life.

You may create a product or experience for someone else; and you certainly experience things daily - in stores and banks, in public spaces, in your neighborhood, and while using any technology.

It's helpful to have a sense of experience, of any type, and what makes it good or not. This helps you create better (if you're a creator), and it sharpens your senses to find and appreciate the best experiences in all contexts.

As a newsletter, Good Experience is intended as food for thought, to help you gain more awareness about experience. Whether by meeting the people and companies who create good experiences, or by learning the methods of how to create better, you can (I believe) work better, and live better, by diving in to these resources.

I wrote a lot of short pieces over the holidays, and I found that they coalesced around three themes that will be pertinent this year.

- Companies and investing in good customer experience: the business world continues to be a rich source of case studies about what to do, and (at least as often) what not to do, when creating experiences.

- Place: The experience of place affects everyone - whether in one's neighborhood, city, or country. The changes now going on in my Manhattan neighborhood, in particular, have me thinking about what constitutes a good "place" experience.

- Bit literacy: 2007 is the year that I will publish my first book - called "Bit Literacy" - about the set of skills that people need to learn in the digital era. Bit literate users can overcome the problems of bit overload and work more productively, while living with less stress. This is essential to a good experience in any digital technology today.

Here are several recent pieces that fit into those three themes:

1. Companies and investing in good customer experience

Creative Good is ten years old

Experience in Old Spice

Profile of BlueNile.com, customer-centered e-tailer

Universal design in architecture

Home Depot news

Philips CEO on simplicity

2. Place

Popcorn and live theater

Moats in NYC

NYT on La Rosita's closing

Happiness in Denmark

Princeton bookstore closes

3. Bit literacy

A misguided book on mess

Reviewing the new Microsoft Office

Bill Gates on the hundred dollar laptop

Bob Mankoff choosing cartoons

Picture of an old linotype machine

- - -

Enjoy, and happy new year.

-Mark Hurst

P.S. Here are the year-start columns from 2006, 2005, 2004, and 2003.

Denmark is one happy country. From All Is Not So Bad in the State of Denmark - New York Times:

...over the past 30 years, the citizens of Denmark have scored higher than any other Western country on measures of life satisfaction, and scientists think they know why.

...on surveys, Danes continually report lower expectations for the year to come, compared with most other nations.

I love Denmark (Jeg elsker Danmark), and we're happy to be running euroGel 2007 there again in September.

The Washington Post shows how Bob Mankoff (Gel Gel '05 speaker) and David Remnick choose New Yorker cartoons. From Very Fine Lines:

Remnick picks up a cartoon of a corporate boardroom with a bunch of guys in suits sitting around a conference table with one chair occupied by a brain in a jar. The caption reads, "But first let's all congratulate Ted on his return to work."

"Ewwww!" Remnick says, half groaning, half laughing. "Bob!"

"It's great!" Mankoff says.

You can watch Bob Mankoff's entire Gel 2005 presentation, right now, on the Gel 2005 videos page. (Or just click here.)

(Thanks, kottke)

Guess what the new Old Spice slogan is going to be. From the NYT, Old Spice Tries a Dash of Humor to Draw Young Men:

Wieden & Kennedy, introduces this week its first work for Old Spice since landing the creative and media accounts for the brand in February 2006. A television, print and online campaign [will have] the theme "Experience is everything"...

Procter & Gamble spent an estimated $100 million on this campaign.

Creative Good is ten years old today!

Thanks to everyone - clients, team, and others - who helped Phil and me along the way.

This was my home office when I started - my old apartment in Tarrytown, New York, about twenty miles north of Manhattan. January 7, 1997 was my first day.

And this was the view from the home office.

Phil Terry joined in 1999. Here we are in southern California, about a week after he joined (photo taken by his mother)... just before we went to work together on the famous Gateway.com project.

...and soon enough the Creative Good office had moved to West 38th Street in Manhattan, where we still are today. This was the view in 1999, and it hasn't changed much since then (except for the new New York Times building that has gone up across the street).

This is the team we've grown to become in ten years - a fantastic group of talented people who are helping companies and people everywhere create good experiences.

If you want to get involved in our growing community: come to the Gel conference, hire us for consulting, or join our Customer Experience Councils.

Here's hoping for many more good years!

BlueNile.com is one of my favorite e-commerce sites. I have no connection to them other than being a customer, and I always recommend them to people shopping for engagement rings.

The New York Times ran a good profile of their company history today. From When Buying a Diamond Starts With a Mouse - New York Times:

Only a decade after it was founded in the infancy of the Web, Blue Nile ranks behind only Tiffany & Company in diamond ring sales, according to industry analysts.

In the early days, flush with dotcom investment cash,...

The overabundance of cash engendered bad habits. The company, which at the end of 1999 switched to the more exotic Blue Nile name, booked $44 million in revenue in 2000, its first full year under Mr. Vadon, but managed to lose $30 million, largely because it spent $40 million advertising on television.

But then the CEO "eliminated the advertising budget and hoped that consumers would still find his site. 'Either we were going to build this thing through word of mouth,' said Darrell Cavens, Blue Nile's marketing chief, “or we were going to see revenues collapse and we would all go home.'"

From Design for Everyone, Disabled or Not:

For instance, at 6 North, what looks like interior decoration is actually intentionally contrasting colors to allow people with limited vision to navigate the space. In the hallways, carpeting in front of apartment entrances is darker to signal the door's location. Next to each entryway is a small shelf, which looks like a nice design detail but is also a handy spot for people to put down mail or packages while they open the door. This is, of course, equally convenient for a parent carrying a baby or people with partial paralysis.

(Thanks, Alice S)

The new book A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder has been getting a good bit of attention.

For example, from The Economist, In praise of mess:

Procrastination makes sense too. America's Marine Corps, the authors repeat (several times), never makes detailed plans in advance. Leaving important things to the last minute reduces the risk of wasting time on things that may ultimately prove not important at all.

Aah yes, those messy, wild-haired Marines. Will they ever get organized? Which is to say: are these authors kidding? Bringing up U.S. Marines in a book about disorder? That's really a reach.

I see the point about not overplanning, and not over-organizing - I say much the same in Bit Literacy - but that doesn't mean people should embrace disorder everywhere.

Broadway theater managers discuss whether it's a good experience to allow playgoers to munch on popcorn during the (live) performance. From Broadway: Eating at Your Seat:

"It's a reflection of changing audience habits," said Jim Boese, the organization's vice president. "As the audience for Broadway expands, there are changing audience needs. This is part of a broader attempt to enhance the audience experience."

On the other hand...

“Broadway is about a theatrical experience,” she said. “It’s not about pulling out Marie Callender’s chicken pot pie and a Sterno. Would you go to church and pull out a ham sandwich? I don’t think so. Then why would you do it at the theater?”

What do you think?

Walt Mossberg reviews the new Microsoft Office. It appears that Microsoft has replaced the old, bloated four rows of buttons, menus, and icons with a new, bloated five rows of buttons, menus, and icons called the Ribbon.

The old toolbars were customizable; the Ribbon, Mossberg says, is for the most part not customizable.

Another pain, for bit-literate users, are the file formats. From the review:

Windows and Macintosh computers won't be able to read these new file types without special conversion software. The new version can, however, read files created in the older versions, on both Windows and Mac, without any conversion software.

Expect much more on these topics (interface, file formats, and Microsoft) in my upcoming book on bit literacy.

(Thanks, Phil!)

Bill Gates comments on the hundred-dollar laptop. From mix and mash with bill | gotomobile:

For rich people to supply laptops to the poor seems like it's addressing the wrong problem. There are more people who think PC's will solve the world's problems. Unless you get the roles in place it has a tendency to get overblown.

Our solution is to put PC's into every library. If you can get to a library, you can get to a PC. Microsoft funded the hardware and supplied the software. It's been carried out in Chile, Mexico and Botswana...

Granted, he might be misquoted - this appears to be a paraphrase, not necessarily an exact quote... but if it's an accurate quote, that's a strange thing to say about the outstanding One Laptop Per Child project. Can't both efforts be worthwhile?

Otherwise, of course, I admire Gates for his philanthropic work. (See Hats off to Bill Gates)

Home Depot's CEO, Bob Nardelli, has stepped down. From Home Depot Ousts Highly Paid Chief - New York Times:

Time ran out on Mr. Nardelli on Tuesday, after the board, at a hastily arranged meeting, decided that he should go - with a $210 million exit package.

Hmm - $210 million just to leave. That would have bought a lot of improvements to the Home Depot website, as pointed out by website-reviewing frogs.

See also: This Is Broken: Home Depot, being investigated (Dec. 8, 2006)

The CEO of Philips writes about simplicity - starting with a strange rhetorical question. From Do people need the gizmos we're selling?

To me, simplicity is imperative, not just because products have become more complex over the years, but also because every aspect of our lives continues to get more complex. Today, the majority of American families extend beyond a single household and our jobs increasingly invade our private time as we juggle family schedules and responsibilities while answering e-mail on mobile devices.

Rather than simplifying our daily routines, most technology has actually made our lives more complex.

Spending hours learning to use a new gadget is the last thing most of us want to do. The ability to take a product out of the box and just have it work, without the need to read a manual for hours, is now high on most consumers' priority lists when deciding on a purchase.

At Creative Good we're evaluating the out-of-box experience for a major brand right now - it's an important process.

(Thanks, Michael M)

Elegy for an independent bookstore in Princeton. From A Princeton Maverick Succumbs to a Cultural Shift - New York Times:

Logan Fox can't quite pinpoint the moment when movies and television shows replaced books as the cultural topics people liked to talk about over dinner, at cocktail parties, at work. He does know that at Micawber Books, his 26-year-old independent bookstore here that is to close for good in March, his own employees prefer to come in every morning and gossip about "Survivor" or "that fashion reality show" whose title he can't quite place.