Archives / March 2007

In Chapter 12 of Bit Literacy, the footnote on page 147 references a time "when brain-computer interfaces, now in their infancy ... become more widely available." This is a caveat to my assertion that "the keyboard is the fastest, most efficient input device we have."

Here's an early data point supporting the footnote. From The Economist (registration required), Mind games:

[T]wo young companies based in California, that plan to transport the measurement of brain waves from the medical sphere into the realm of computer games. If all goes well, their first products should be on the market next year. People will then be able to tell a computer what they want it to do just by thinking about it. Tedious fiddling about with mice and joysticks will become irritants of the past.

From the NYT today, yet another article describing information overload, Too Busy to Notice You're Too Busy:

Although those who are overworked and overwhelmed complain ceaselessly, it is often with an undertone of boastfulness; the hidden message is that I'm so busy because I'm so important.

OK, but where's the solution? (In other words, enough description; where's the prescription?) I recommend Bit Literacy!

David Strom takes a look at Microsoft's inner workings, especially as it relates to open source.

One of the heads of open-source development there had this to say: "I don’t want you to love me, I just want you to buy more of my software."

Perhaps the quote is out of context, but to me it's a good encapsulation of where Microsoft's focus lies. See Chapter 9 of Bit Literacy for some supporting thoughts.

Dairy Queen unveiled a new logo. Following the pattern of UPS, Burger King, and other high-profile "rebranding initiatives," it's basically the old logo with a swoosh attached. DQ took it a step further, though, stating that the "gold and blue curved swishes [signify] food and treats." This cost how much? (thanks, kottke)

See also: Defining "Branding" (the brand is what you talk about later!)

Here's a counter-indicator of leaders committed to a good customer experience. From BusinessWeek, The CEO Mega-Mansion Factor:

Now there may be one more thing to consider before investing in a stock: Does the CEO own a trophy house? Finance professors David Yermack of New York University and Crocker Liu of Arizona State University looked at the relationship between stock performance and the size of a CEO's home. The bigger or pricier the house, they found, the greater the risk of lackluster shares. "If [the CEO] buys a big mansion, sell the stock," Yermack says. "Many of these guys have been super performers, but at some point that stops, and they reap the benefits."

The print article showed a picture of the sprawling mansion of Bob Nardelli, the Home Depot CEO who just left with a $210 million exit bonus (see my January 2007 pointer).

Read this book and change your life.

Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload is now available here: bitliteracy.com

Sample chapter, endorsements, and other resources are all there.

(This isn't the official launch - that comes later - but I figured that the die-hard blog readers should be the first to hear :)

Perhaps ignoring the success of the Nintendo Wii - which remains sold out across many parts of the U.S. because it's fun to play - Microsoft announced today a new Xbox version packed with lots of new high-tech doodads and buzzwords.

From Upgraded Version of Xbox 360 to Be Introduced by Microsoft:

“Today’s games-and-entertainment enthusiast has an insatiable appetite for digital high-definition content,” said Peter Moore, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s interactive entertainment business, in Redmond, Wash.

Yes, just insatiable!

But that's not what this New York Times piece found, nor this Wall Street Journal piece, still less this interview. Don't Microsoft VPs read the news?

A new consortium called the Service Research and Innovation Initiative is being formed today. Job number one, it appears, is to find a way to make knowledge workers more productive in the age of information overload. They should teach bit literacy!

From New Effort to Tap Technology to Aid the Service Economy:

The aim of service science is to try to improve productivity and accelerate the development of new offerings in services, which account for about 80 percent of the United States economy and similarly large shares of other Western economies.

How become productive: read Bit Literacy - also at Amazon.

Video of "This American Life" pilot on Showtime.

(Ira Glass is on the Gel 2007 speaker list, as is Charlie Todd, whose Improv Everywhere is featured in the pilot.)

The NYT suggests that multitasking isn't productive. Check out the solution... from Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don't Read This in Traffic:

Several research reports, both recently published and not yet published, provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. The findings, according to neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors, suggest that many people would be wise to curb their multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car.These experts have some basic advice. ...

In short, the answer appears to lie in managing the technology, instead of merely yielding to its incessant tug [emphasis mine -mh].

A fuller description of "managing the technology" can be found in my new book Bit Literacy - also at Amazon.

(thanks, bb)

Funny post over at O'Reilly about the success of Google, Southwest, Vanguard, and other customer-focused firms. Their secret? From Innovation in Business Models:

[M]any companies have come to dominate their space simply by reworking the way they make money. Doing this usually requires a fair amount of systems engineering to ensure that the company and its partners are set-up to make money in this new way.

Ask an engineer, get an engineer's answer. It's telling that the article never mentions customers, or a customer-centered attitude shared passionately by top leadership. This is the true driver of many success stories today - including Southwest and Google.

Yes, making a company customer-centered can require some major technology changes. But those are effects of the real cause, which is to meet customers' key unmet needs. The companies that do this will (continue to) lead their industries for the foreseeable future.

"Gridlock Sam" offers solutions for traffic problems, not unlike what Jan Gehl said at euroGel 2006.

From Solving New York's traffic problems:

The car accounts for very few people in total. There's a misperception because cars use so much space that we think so many people are using them. It's like the Yogi Berra quote, which in this case is very true: "it's so crowded nobody goes there." When I looked at Canal Street, I found no one goes there anymore. Traffic volume is very low, even though it's so crowded and filled with cars. All cars are doing is providing seating for people to view Chinatown.

The New York Times covers Ira Glass and his new Showtime (TV) version of "This American Life." Ira will be speaking at Gel 2007 in four weeks.

Charlie Todd, who will also be at Gel again this year, reminded me last week that his group, Improv Everywhere, is also part of the "This American Life" pilot. Nice work!

You can tell a lot about an organization by looking at its customer experience. Digital user interfaces like websites and kiosks are especially telling, because they combine many aspects of the company - marketing, technology, branding, and the service value itself - into a small area of on-screen real estate. Customer-centered home pages tend to be made by the most customer-centered organizations.

For example, consider the major elements of the check-in kiosks of the two airlines I flew last week. These are the first screens, or "home pages," of the touchscreens.

Here's JetBlue... "Touch screen to begin.", "hi there", "start".

...and here's American: "Self-Service Check-In", "Check-in now available for domestic and INTERNATIONAL flights.", "Check-In Without Bags (carry-on only)", "Lost Boarding Pass? Reprint Boarding Pass(es)".

There's certainly a difference in the online experience. Which airline makes a greater effort to provide a simple, easy experience for customers across its offline channels?

Over four years ago I interviewed Marissa Mayer, now VP of UX at Google, and one part of the conversation remains so relevant that I think every Web-related executive should print it out and post in the team office:

There's this one user, a Google zealot - we don't know who he is - who occasionally sends an e-mail to our "comments" address. Every time he writes, the e-mail contains only a two-digit number. It took us awhile to figure out what he was doing. Turns out he's counting the number of words on the home page. When the number goes up, like up to 52, it gets him irritated, and he e-mails us the new word count. As crazy as it sounds, his e-mails are helpful, because it has put an interesting discipline on the UI team, so as not to introduce too many links. It's like a scale that tells you that you've gained two pounds.

(Full interview: Interview: Marissa Mayer, Google )

Notice how the discipline of counting words on the home page translates into a discipline of customer-centered development. This isn't to say that a home page should only have a few words, necessarily. The point is that any team's commitment to building a great customer experience shows - especially online.

Next time you want to evaluate how customer-centered an organization is - and thus how likely that organization is to succeed in the coming years - a good place to start is the home page.

- - -

P.S. Today, Tuesday, is the last day for Gel 2007 tickets at regular prices.

Other resources:

- Gel 2007 speaker list and all info

- Past Gel attendee comments

- Thoughts on "selling the boss"

- Video on The Councils and Gel

Following up on this post on an interview of Alinea's chef - here are my pictures of my recent evening at Chicago's best restaurant, Alinea:

Alinea March 2007 - Mark Hurst's photoset

Southwest Airlines has one full-time employee who writes letters to customers to apologize for bad experiences.

From Airlines Learn to Fly on a Wing and an Apology:

[He] spends his 12-hour work days finding out how Southwest disappointed its customers and then firing off homespun letters of apology. ... He composes about 180 letters a year explaining what went wrong on particular flights and, with about 110 passengers per flight, he mails off roughly 20,000 mea culpas. Each one bears his direct phone line.

One would hope that Cathy Pacific employs such a person, since passengers on a flight from JFK reportedly spent a night on the plane this weekend, rather than in the terminal, because of de-icing delays.

See also: NPR: Southwest opposed passenger bill of rights

Seattle now has its first new building in 50 years without air conditioning. From Smart Architect Builds Dumb Building:

It is not the high tech, sophisticated technology that will lead to sustainability. The way to build is to do the dumb simple things that everybody did before we had cheap power, which makes this just about the smartest building around.

(Thanks, Alice)

You can now pre-order Bit Literacy from Amazon.com. This is my new book, which contains a simple solution for managing e-mail and other forms of digital overload.

The cover isn't on the Amazon page yet, but here's what it will look like.

(The book will also be available for purchase via bitliteracy.com within a couple of weeks.)

Newsweek reports on the new trend of productivity gurus. From You Need to Get to Work:

In offices across America, we seem to be at a moment of get-organized-now hysteria. Time-management gurus have been preaching their work-more-efficiently systems since the days of Benjamin Franklin ... [but] in the electronic, gadgetized age of e-mail, BlackBerrys and ever-more-sophisticated desktop software - all designed theoretically to manage digital information efficiently - we've become overwhelmed. That's where the productivity industry comes in. The question is, however, whether this newfound emphasis on productivity is helping - or just making us crazier.

They have a point. Most of the systems I see on the market today are either paper-based, gratuitously complex, or both. (Or worse, positively misguided.)

People today need a digitally based, simple system that they can learn quickly, and practice quickly, so that their focus can be on getting work done rather than the system or tool itself. That's what's described in Bit Literacy.

The NYT reports that Verizon and AT&T have launched new stores, trying to make buying cellphones more "entertaining." From AT&T Megastore Aims to Make It Fun to Buy a Phone:

That approach has clearly worked for Apple. More than 28 million shoppers visited one of Apple's 176 stores last quarter, according to the company, and spent more than $1 billion.

Perhaps most pertinent is what the three stores are called.

Apple's store is called The Apple Store. Good, clear, descriptive name.

AT&T's store is called the AT&T Experience.

Verizon's store is called the Verizon Experience.

Marketers, if you're not fooling Ziggy, you're probably not fooling your customers, either.

Following up on my post about Alinea and the dining experience ... after eating there last week, I can report: straight A-pluses all around. Chicagoans should be proud.

The creator of bugmenot has released another interesting site: JungleCrazy.com, where every product shown is at least 70% discounted.

This AP story reports that IDC guesstimated the number of bits people created last year...

Add it all up and IDC determined that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes -- 161 exabytes -- of digital information last year. That's like 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun.

Wow... that's a big number. I wonder how many gallons of water there are in the ocean! That must be a pretty big number, too!

More to the point, what should users do, in their daily life and work, to respond to this increase in bits? Does the AP writer pursue this line?

... the study has intriguing implications. Among them: We'll need better technologies to help secure, parse, find and recover usable material in this universe of data.

In other words: don't worry, users... the technology industry will create ever-better tools, improving (yes) even on today's gold standards, to continue to take care of you and your needs.

Truth is, users need to take responsibility for their own bits. Pretty soon you can read more in Bit Literacy...

File formats in the news... from the NYTimes, Patent Fights Are a Legacy of MP3's Tangled Origins - New York Times

Microsoft says it was doing the right thing: paying a German rights holder $16 million to license the MP3 audio format, the foundation of the digital music boom. Then an American jury ruled that Microsoft had failed to pay another MP3 patent holder, and slapped it with a $1.52 billion judgment.

See also: MP3 Patents in Upheaval After Verdict (February 23, 2007, The New York Times)

From The Guardian comes this entertaining piece about the poorly designed Samsung E900:

The phone arrived the next day and immediately began elbowing me in the ribs. It seems to have been designed specifically to irritate anyone with a mind. It starts gently - a pinch of annoyance here, an inconvenience there - but before long the steady drip, drip, drip of minor frustrations begins to affect your quality of life, like a mouth ulcer, or a stone in your boot, or the lingering memory of love gone sour.

See also:
- The Uncle Mark 2007 Gift Guide, which contains my recommendations for cell phones
- Motorola's poor usability
- Pogue on cell phones

Business Week has named USAA #1 in customer service. From USAA: Soldiering On In Insurance:

Many companies give lip service to listening to the "voice of the customer." At USAA, that voice is transformed into what it calls "surround sound"--a comprehensive approach to training its employees to empathize with its customers' unique needs. "We want to cover the light moments, the heart-wrenching moments, what it's like to be bored in the field," says Elizabeth D. Conklyn, USAA's executive vice-president for people services. "We try to develop empathy, not only for our members but also for the family side."

I think USAA is richly deserving of their ranking, by the way.

But lower on BusinessWeek's list, note Ritz-Carlton at #11. Brings to mind what Danny Meyer says about Ritz-Carlton's customer service, as opposed to a focus on customer experience.

See also: Customer service is not customer experience

One way (not) to fix a bad experience is to hope customers don't notice.

From Consumerist, US Postal Service Solves Long Waits By Removing Clocks:

This sounds like a joke, but it's being reported by the Houston Chronicle: The USPS is removing clocks from post offices in order to allow customers to better "focus on the postal service." "We want people to focus on postal service and not the clock," said Stephen Seewoester, Dallas spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service.

(thanks, bb)

The restaurant Alinea in Chicago has been getting a lot of attention, in part because of "the experience" it creates. I'm looking forward to trying it out next week. So... what's the most important part of the Alinea experience?

From Chicagoist, an interview with chef Grant Achatz:

C: Do you ever compromise taste for presentation?

GA: It's always got to taste good. At least, that's our goal. We would never sacrifice taste for presentation, ever. You have to start with something that tastes good, and then figure out a way to present it.

Perfectly said.

(thanks, kottke)