Archives / February 2007

Microsoft VP says that the company wants to “improve the consumer experience in health care.”

From Microsoft to Buy Health Information Search Engine:

“Clearly,” Mr. Neupert said, “search is a critical part of that better end-to-end experience for consumers.”

About the airline customer experience: Fast Company on Richard Branson.

With the exception of Southwest, all of the look-alike U.S. carriers wound up filing for bankruptcy or going belly up. Meanwhile, Virgin, with its fun-loving flight attendants who seem to be hosting a party, is still thriving.

Another poorly designed ballot: "A panel in Sarasota, Fla., said voter confusion over poorly designed ballots probably contributed to the loss of 18,000 votes in an election last fall."

See also: User Experience and the 2004 Election (Oct. 15, 2004)

David Byrne, who knows a bit about music, recently wrote a great post about the experience of MP3. (My upcoming book Bit Literacy has a whole chapter on file formats, including MP3.) From David Byrne Journal: Crappy Sound Forever!:

MP3s, which is how many of us hear music now, are in a way like virtual music. The compression that allows their smaller file size eliminates what the software decides are redundant frequencies and sounds the ear probably doesn’t hear and won’t miss. Maybe. There is less “information” on an MP3 than on a CD, and less on a CD than on an LP. Where does this road end, and does it really matter that sheer information and recording quality is going down?

If, like the phone company, we’re talking about communication, information, then maybe some of that sonic richness is indeed redundant and is therefore superfluous information? Well, yes and no. Looking at a reproduction of a painting is certainly not the same thing at standing in front of the real thing, but an awful lot of the emotion, intent, ideas and sensibility is still communicated in the cheap reproduction.

There’s a point though, at which the richness of the retinal or aural experience is so diminished that it becomes irrelevant, but where is that point? I first heard rock and soul songs on a tiny crappy-sounding transistor radio, and it changed my life completely. It was sonic, but it was also a social and cultural message that electrified me. Now I’m not saying that tinny sound should be considered satisfying or desirable, but it’s amazing how lo-fi or lo-rez information can communicate a huge amount.

In other file format news today, MP3 Patents in Upheaval After Verdict (February 23, 2007, The New York Times)

This fascinating interview with Genyo Takeda, who developed the Wii, shows Nintendo's commitment to the customer experience. From Wii.Nintendo.com:

[The Wii] has turned out to be something completely different from what was predicted in the mainstream technology Roadmaps.

This may sound paradoxical, but if we had followed the existing Roadmaps we would have aimed to make it "faster and flashier." In other words, we would have tried to improve the speed at which it displays stunning graphics.

But we could not help but ask ourselves, "How big an impact would that direction really have on our customers?" During development, we came to realise the sheer inefficiency of this path when we compared the hardships and costs of development against any new experiences that might be had by our customers.

See also: Video games and the user experience and part 1 of the same thread.

(thanks, kottke)

Google has started selling productivity apps. From Google to sell online software suite:

"We are not in this to get Microsoft," said Dave Girouard, general manager of Google's business software division. "We are in this to offer more compelling choices for consumers and businesses."

In the long term, in a competitive environment, the best experience will win.

P.S. Here's the NYT story: A Google Package Challenges Microsoft

Customer service is in the air.

JetBlue customers had a tough time last week. The airline cancelled many flights nationwide due to the ice storm and (more pertinently) some organizational growing pains - leaving CEO David Neeleman with a PR crisis and some very dissatisfied customers.

Neeleman deserves a lot of credit for coming clean - like no other airline, let alone bank, store, cable company, or other service provider I can think of - by e-mailing his customers, posting a video apology on YouTube, and setting new policies for better customer service. Read more in this Consumerist article.

(Incidentally, with uncanny timing the new Coalition for an Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights launched just a few weeks ago.)

Meanwhile, the New York Times Magazine recounts the story of an (American) Toyota exec about his first trip to Japan. Quoting From 0 to 60 to World Domination:

On that first trip, at a restaurant one evening, he tried a rich corn soup and asked the waitress for the recipe. She checked with the chef, who explained that there was no recipe; it had been handed down from his mother. The next morning, the waitress came to [his] hotel room: she had found a cookbook with a recipe for the soup.

Now that shows a commitment to the customer, much like Danny Meyer's definition of hospitality, described here.

(More on Toyota, by the way, in The ‘Toyota Way’ Is Translated for a New Generation of Foreign Managers, also from the NYT.)

JetBlue may not deliver the recipe to your hotel room, but what other company would write this in an e-mail to all its customers?

Words cannot express how truly sorry we are for the anxiety, frustration and inconvenience that we caused. This is especially saddening because JetBlue was founded on the promise of bringing humanity back to air travel and making the experience of flying happier and easier for everyone who chooses to fly with us. We know we failed to deliver on this promise last week.

This is what it means to be committed to the customer experience.

- - -

See also:

- my column on Danny Meyer, restaurateur, a master of creating good customer experiences.

- Customer service is not customer experience

UK companies are bringing their call centers back, after moving them overseas. From Just returning your call... to the UK:

"Many companies just didn't think the move through," she says. "It was all driven by cost, not the customer. But what's the point of saving money when a poor phone call is the first-hand experience of the quality of service. If it is a bad experience, people are not going to buy."

(Thanks, Jen)

Today on This Is Broken: Misuse of the word "some".

As I wrote recently in Video games and the customer experience: in the long term, in a competitive environment, the best experience will win. Video game makers are beginning to see their sales numbers bear this out.

From the Wall St Journal (may require registration, argh), Game Companies Worry as Players Grow Up, Grow Bored:

The games and hardware they run on turn some people off, too. Game makers have done an exceptional job of amping up the intensity level and graphical realism of their products with every new generation of hardware. They've also gotten incredibly complex, aided by a bewildering array of buttons and joysticks that festoon modern console controllers...

In recent years, the games industry has gotten much better at offering products for people who stopped playing consoles, or never played them, with "casual" games such as Tetris and Bejeweled for personal computers and mobile phones. Nintendo got religion early on the importance of expanding the audience of console gamers, where the vast majority of the industry's sales still occur. The company's Wii console and Nintendo DS hand-held game player, both featuring simplified controls and easy-to-learn games, were big holiday hits.

See also: Good Experience Games

(Thanks, Phil)

The Discomforts of Home: Reversible-Destiny Lofts by Arakawa and Gins: new architecture in Japan intentionally creates a poorly-designed experience to keep elderly residents on their toes. Bizarre.

(P.S. What's really poorly designed is the gray-on-white text on that article page!)

(tx, boingboing)

From the WSJ today, Boutique Backlash:

There's a backlash brewing against boutique hotels. ... Once smitten with trendy furnishings and achingly cool bars - and unfazed by inferior amenities, tiny rooms and snooty hotel staff - boutique customers increasingly say they're just as interested in good service and a good room as they are in style.

And a funny bit about the phone in the hotel room at the W in Chicago:

Instead of typical buttons for the fitness center or the valet, it had "Sweat" and "Wheels."

"I couldn't figure it out for a couple of minutes," Mr. Bynum says. "I was like, 'I just want my car.'" Next time, he says, he just wants a Westin.

(Thanks, NH)

The New York Times today covers the menagerie of online "productivity" apps, specifically word processors. From Recasting the Word Processor for a Connected World:

Web applications, in theory, can match anything we see on desktop computers and then do them one better: putting applications like spreadsheets and word processors on the Web means that several people can swap or work on the same document or spreadsheet at the same time without having to e-mail it back and forth.

It's nice to have alternatives in this market - what once was a monopoly is becoming competitive, which is good for everyone (except the monopolist).

But these tools don't solve the "productivity problem." People's key unmet need is a set of skills for dealing with information overload. (My upcoming book Bit Literacy describes those skills.)

Why don't technologists "get" the issue, and why doesn't the media cover it better? Partially because Silicon Valley often suffers from groupthink... everyone rushes after the same solution (online apps, wow!) rather than thinking beyond the technology to the real problem.

And yes, Silicon Valley remains the center of technological thought... from another NYT story today, When It Comes to Innovation, Geography Is Destiny:

In short, “geography matters,” Professor Romer said. Give birth to an information-technology idea in Silicon Valley and the chances of success seem vastly higher than when it is done in another ZIP code.

I just hope that the ideas in Bit Literacy manage to spread, despite my being from New York City :)

In my Uncle Mark Gift Guide & Almanac I advise against buying a given digital camera just because it promises lots of megapixels. I use a two-megapixel camera and it works really well... better, in my opinion, than the five- and seven-mexapixel cameras out there. (Read the guide to see my recommendations.)

A recent column by David Pogue (one of my favorite tech writers) supports this idea - as he's done in the past - with a little mythbusting. From Breaking the Myth of Megapixels

The Megapixel Myth... goes like this: "The more megapixels a camera has, the better the pictures."

It's a big fat lie. The camera companies and camera stores all know it, but they continue to exploit our misunderstanding. Advertisements declare a camera's megapixel rating as though it's a letter grade, implying that a 7-megapixel model is necessarily better than a 5-megapixel model...

There are some reasons to consider a large-megapixel camera, and Pogue rightly covers them, but they're secondary for most people.

On the experience of place: Beijing is cleaning up its English-language signage, making sure it all makes sense.

From the WSJ: Tired of Laughter, Beijing Gets Rid Of Bad Translations (reg required, argh):

With hordes of foreign visitors expected in town for the 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing wants to cleanse its signs of translation nonsense. For the next eight months, 10 teams of linguistic monitors will patrol the city's parks, museums, subway stations and other public places searching for gaffes to fix. Already, fans of the genre are mourning the end of an era...

See also: engrish.com

(Thanks, Anne)

Danny Meyer has built a career around creating good experience.

He is arguably New York City's most successful restaurateur, having created some of the top-rated restaurants in the city: Gramercy Tavern (my favorite in NYC), 11 Madison Park, Union Square Cafe (his first), Tabla, Blue Smoke, all the dining at MoMA, and even a burger stand - Shake Shack - in Madison Square Park.

Danny's new book - Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business - describes his philosophy of good experience, which he says centers on a spirit of hospitality.

In his book, he also describes the difference between "service" and "hospitality". In particular one way not to create a good customer experience is to require employees to speak happytalk to customers:

The Ritz-Carlton hotels are deservedly famous for their focus on service; they don't call it hospitality. But as a guest there, I have occasionally sensed a rote quality in the process, when every employee responds with exactly the same phrase, "My pleasure," to anything guests ask or say. Hearing "My pleasure" over and over again can get rather creepy after a while. It's like hearing a flight attendant chirp, "Bye now!" and "Bye-bye!" 200 times as passengers disembark from an airplane. Hospitality can not flow from a monologue.

He goes on to describe that the key is for employees to genuinely want to serve the customer, to show that they are "in their corner", and to creatively find ways to perform that way. It's a spirit of hospitality, not a set of tactical instructions.

Perhaps most importantly, Danny Meyer describes his hiring process, which (to oversimplify a bit) focuses more on finding people with the right spirit, or attitude, about creating good experience; and less on finding people with prior knowledge of restaurants or food. Knowledge of wine can be taught; having the right attitude is the truly valuable quality.

(Update: Danny spoke at Gel 2007 in April 2007.)

- - -

P.S. Our Associate Councils (including members from TiVo, Nordstrom, and the Motley Fool) recently read and discussed Danny's book.
See more info on the Councils.

Trendwatching on "trysumers"... I don't love the buzzword but it's interesting to see what their argument is. In a word, "It’s never been more affordable for consumers to try out new products, or to travel and try out new destinations and experiences."

From Daring consumers who love to try new things:

Expect reviews and inside info to become even hotter than they already are: with 1 billion consumers now online, the army of reviewers is endless. (Just consider that travel review site TripAdvisor.com already has more than 20 million visitors each month, 4.3 million registered users, and 7 million reviews and opinions, covering 23,000 cites, 175,000 hotels, not to mention 460,000 traveler photos covering 35,000 hotels). Expect reviews to increasingly become multimedia, real-time, more trusted, and - thanks to sophisticated profile matching - more accurate, too.

One of the most popular best-of columns is now available in four languages: English, Spanish, Dutch, and now Chinese.

Read it: Budgeting for Advertising and Customer Experience ·

Marissa Mayer (Gel Gel '03 speaker and Council member) is quoted in a good New Yorker piece about how Google intends to digitize "every book ever published." From Google's Moon Shot - New Yorker:

“We think that we can do it all inside of ten years,” Marissa Mayer, a vice-president at Google who is in charge of the books project, said recently, at the company’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California. “It’s mind-boggling to me, how close it is. I think of Google Books as our moon shot.”

(On a personal note...)

Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, is under water - it's somewhat reminiscent of the Katrina disaster, except that this is getting very little media coverage.

I have family in Jakarta so I'm following the story - and will be sending a donation to CARE to help out.

From the CARE site, Emergency Assistance After Floods in Jakarta:

Entire parts of the city are underwater, with the water levels reaching as high as six feet in some areas. More than 200,000 people have been forced from their homes and seeking shelter in community centers, schools and mosques across the city.

And from this Reuters story, the "good" news:

Health Ministry spokeswoman Lily Sulistiyowati said the number of displaced had fallen to about 260,000 from 340,000, although Pakaya said separately it had risen again.

See also:
- Gajah Mada's photos on Flickr

- Shan's photos on Flickr (thanks, GM)

- The Edmonton Sun story on the floods (since no major US newspaper seems to have covered the story)

The WSJ considers the user experience of online invitation sites. From: On the Internet, Everyone Knows Your RSVP List:

Topher Larkin, an administrative coordinator from Los Angeles, went on Evite to ask friends to his 25th birthday party. Days before the party, he was caught off-guard by a bunch of "yes" phone-call replies from guests who shunned the Web site because they didn't want others to know they planned to attend.

Actually, I wonder if they shunned the evite site because it's hard to use and jam-packed with advertising.

People should use Goovite.com instead: free, easy, no registrations, no ads.

And the WSJ should do more research next time!

(Thanks, Anne)

Great cross-section, in photos, of New Yorkers - at the turnstiles. (thanks, jason)

In the long term, in a competitive environment, the best experience will win.

Latest example: console video games. Today there are three main choices. Two boast high-tech hardware; one is built for fun. Guess what's a better experience for game players: talking about processor technology, or having fun?

From Nintendo's Wii, Radiating Fun, Is Eclipsing Sony Machine - New York Times:

In electronics stores and elsewhere, there are growing signs that the Wii has taken the lead in buzz and sales over another new console, the Sony PlayStation 3, which offers new superlatives in processing power and graphics.

Read more in my Uncle Mark Gift Guide and Almanac, which describes the various approaches of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo.

On photo bits... from Better Shoeboxes for Digital Photos:

While digital photography has freed up that closet space, sorting and retrieving pictures in the era of the 250-gigabyte hard drive has created a set of challenges of its own. ... [fancier cameras are leading to] larger file sizes and more interest in fine-tuning images.

Two major software companies offered their latest answers to these problems this week, adding to the range of programs available for browsing and managing photos.

Users' key unmet need: a way to organize their photos.

The tech industry's answer: lots and lots of features in new photo-editing software.

Oops.

(By the way, my solution to photo management is in my upcoming book, Bit Literacy.)