Archives / June 2007

I've never seen enthusiasm from bloggers and journalists like this for any technology launch, and I've seen a lot of launches.

It appears that Steve Jobs has scored a massive coup with the iPhone: here's BoingBoing's review, and here's Kottke's take. Both of those blogs are usually understated, if not downright skeptical, so their excitement is a good barometer.

I think that Apple stands to "change everything," again, just as it did in 1984. The main short-term risk I see is that AT&T's service doesn't hold up. The device itself seems to work as advertised, which merits a rare correct use of the word "revolutionary."

In the New York Times today, Joe Nocera played counterpoint, warning pointedly that the iPhone's battery can only be replaced by Apple. If and when repeated charges drain it within a year or two, customers will have a choice between buying a new iPhone or mailing the whole thing back to Apple and waiting several days for it to come back. (For a cell phone, that could be a tough situation.) Here's Nocera's column, but registration is required, unfortunately.

Congrats to Apple on changing the game. (It's long overdue: way back in September 2000 Zimran and I wrote about the constraints, back then at least, in the wireless experience.)

David writes about some unfortunately designed landscaping in Chicago:

I went to the Chicago lakefront on June 21st, to check out an Alder Planetarium sculpture, which is oriented to allow the solstices and equinoxes to be observed through the lined up stones.

However as can be seen, trees have been planted in the path of the solstice, blocking the view and will only block more as the tree grows larger. The east position for the equinox also has a tree.

A great American experience designer, Richard Serra, is now featured in a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Every reader of this blog should try to visit before it closes on September 10 - or if that's not possible, at least watch Charlie Rose's interview of Serra (part 1, part 2).

Serra is best known as a sculptor and artist, but what struck me most about the exhibit, and the Charlie Rose interview, was Serra's explicit focus on creating an experience, rather an object to be revered, in his art.

Consider this quote from the MoMA brochure to the exhibit:

For [Serra], this experience of space is what the work is about: unlike traditional sculpture, it emphasizes movement and its psychological impact, not contemplation from a distance.

The exhibit starts with earlier pieces - experiments in process, where Serra applies a set of verbs to various materials (pulling rubber, tearing lead, and so on.) Then it arrives at Serra's more recent work, towering walls of curved steel plates that create various spaces for visitors to walk through and stand in.

Serra describes in the interview how he reverses the traditional subject-object relationship in art. Here's the old way: a painting hangs on a gallery wall, and we, the subject, are invited to look at it, the object. We're here, and it's there.

In contrast, Serra's work makes us the object. As you walk through the mazelike structure of "Sequence," for example, the art's impact is on your own personal experience walking through the space - perhaps feeling confused or disoriented. It's an experience, not a set of aesthetic qualities in the steel itself. The steel just sets up the context for the experience (always note the importance of setting context when creating good experience!).

Again, from the MoMA brochure:

With "Sequence," Serra has expanded the psychological, experiential quality of his earlier work into an essentially abstract spatial experience.

In other words, the steel plates are pure context, allowing the visitor to have a pure experience; thus visitors themselves are the focus of the exhibit, not the steel.

I think that Serra's subject-object reversal teaches an important a lesson for anyone who creates experiences for others - which is to say, every entrepreneur, manager, technologist, teacher, doctor, parent, and most everyone else.

To be a good experience, the focus should be on the other person, not on oneself (or one's own company, or one's own short-term benefit).

This pattern holds outside the art world - like, for example, in the world of technology or business. The most user-centered and customer-centered companies are emerging as the leaders of their fields because they make the customer - more accurately, the long-term benefits of the customer - the subject of the development and marketing efforts.

Walk through those steel-enclosed spaces at MoMA and get a lesson in experience design.

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See also:

- MoMA drawings on bit overload (including another pic of the Serra exhibition)

- MoMA's Serra exhibit online (annoying Flash site, argh)

- (from the comments) Serra sculpture in downtown St. Louis

- (where i got the image above) Nelson's post (in Spanish)

This Economist obit of Alfred Chandler (reg. required) led with this enjoyable paragraph:

Today's business leaders are voracious consumers of management advice. They are forever calling in the consultants and surfing the business press for the next big thing. So here is a free tip. Get off the whirligig of management fads. Forget about “long tails” and “wikinomics” for a while and do something old-fashioned. Sit down with a handful of books—admittedly rather fat books—and contemplate the life's work of Alfred Chandler.

And then today a British poll discovers the most irritating Net-related words:

"Blog", "netiquette", "cookie" and "wiki" have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet, according to the results of a poll published on Thursday.

"Folksonomy" was listed in the number one (most irritating) spot.

(thanks, kottke)

Blogger Eric Nehrlich writes a brief review of Bit Literacy, including this nicely written encapsulation of "let the bits go":

The main thing I took away from this book was his contention that bits are no longer valuable - they are a torrent that we should let pass us by rather than trying to capture. To make a strained analogy, his perspective is we should stop trying to control this torrent with the equivalent of a dam and instead use a net to fish out the useful bits. In a specific example, he recommends against being a packrat with email - either deal with it immediately, or delete it. You won't get to it later, because there's always more email arriving. He recommends getting the inbox down to 0 messages at least once a day. He makes similar recommendations for all aspects of your digital life.

Link to review

Interesting NYT piece on different ways to clear out unwanted books. From New Ways to Do It Make Giving Away Books a Bit Less Painful:

Was I really ever going to read "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory"? How about "Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx: Three Great Philosophers Whose Ideas Changed the Course of Civilization"? Not unless I was under house arrest.

We gave away hundreds more without ever missing them.

But getting rid of books creates tension for many, although it is often one of the first things people have to do when downsizing or simply trying to organize their lives.

Similarly, the first step towards bit literacy is to clear out the e-mail inbox. Some people want to keep all their e-mails forever - "what if I need it later?" - but like the reader above, they'd find that purging some of the old text might release some tension.

(See more in Chapter 4 of Bit Literacy.)

Speaking of innovation, Niklas Zennstrom, cofounder of Skype, gives his secret:

I've spent most of my professional life working in the communications industry. I've seen many technologies come and go.

The ones that fail tend to be too hard to use and impenetrable to the average consumer.

And they fail because the benefit is often overshadowed by the hype. Many potentially great technologies disappear because, quite simply, they do not give people what they want.

"Innovation" is one of the most popular buzzwords of the current moment, perhaps second only to "Web 2.0." Buzzwords often bring on lemming-like behavior in some people, so I'm naturally skeptical about the recent run of cover stories and business books on innovation.

Still, I have come across some worthwhile thinking on the subject, so here's a crash course in recent writing about innovation.

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My friend (and past Gel speaker) David Bodanis wrote an outstanding essay for the Financial Times about a month ago, Sparks Flew, about innovation. Bodanis reveals the secret: "Immerse your innovator in the hot new thing," and "Now the trick: tell your innovator to try the reverse of what everyone else is doing." That's true innovation: not doing what the lemmings are doing.

David's book Electric Universe contains many of the case studies in the article in more detail. I recently read the book and highly recommend it:

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Last week's Economist had a cover story on "Apple and the art of innovation." The thinking should be familiar to any customer experience practitioner: Apple's innovation revolves around the user, not the company itself or its products.

Apple illustrates the importance of designing new products around the needs of the user, not the demands of the technology. Too many technology firms think that clever innards are enough to sell their products, resulting in gizmos designed by engineers for engineers. ...

... Nintendo has done something similar with its popular motion-controlled video-game console, the Wii. Rather than designing a machine for existing gamers, it gambled that non-gamers represented an untapped market and devised a machine with far broader appeal.

Link: "Lessons from Apple" (site reg. required, unfortunately)

Link: A longer profile about Apple and Steve Jobs, in the same issue, "The Third Act" (reg. required)

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Finally, two other books to consider:

Scott Berkun's new book The Myths of Innovation describes some of the common pitfalls in innovation-related thinking and how to overcome them. Scott has run the Sacred Spaces tour at my Gel conference for two years; it's no surprise that the examples in his book are thoughtful and well-rounded.

Scott Rosenberg's book Dreaming in Code covers the story of Mitch Kapor's effort to build "Chandler," an ambitious piece personal organization software. Anyone interested in innovation in software processes would find this a useful case study to study. It addresses the question, "Why is good software so hard to make?"

Three customer experience pieces I saw in the news recently:

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In Online Sales Lose Steam, The New York Times reported this past
Sunday that online retail growth is slowing. The article offered
only anecdotal reasons why, but I think the customer experience
remains the key driver of online business: one customer complained
that buying from etailers still felt too much like work.

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In "Bringing free software down to earth," The Economist reports on
Mark Shuttleworth's effort to create a user-friendly version of the
Linux operating system, which has historically been too difficult
and obscure for practically anyone except, well, Linux geeks:

...the truth is that most computer users do not know or care about the politics of open-source software. Mr Shuttleworth says most people simply want to read their e-mail, browse the web and so on.

The article goes on to describe that - unfortunately, in my opinion - Shuttleworth is spending a lot of time creating three-dimensional online worlds for Linux users to collaborate. What happened to people simply checking e-mail?

Link to Linux story (reg. required)

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eBay is redesigning: "Under pressure from analysts and investors to jump-start growth in its core auctions business, eBay is making a series of upgrades intended to make the site more friendly to buyers."

I hope they're using good customer experience-focused strategy and research (like what's listed here)... I've always thought eBay was one of the more cluttered and difficult e-commerce sites. Kudos to them for taking the plunge, despite their installed base of users who may be resistant to the changes.

Nice profile of Crutchfield, an electronics seller that was a finalist in our 2006 Copernican Awards. The article also quotes my friend Douglas Rushkoff (Gel :'06: speaker), too. Thought-provoking stuff.

From How Crutchfield has turned its own people-friendly culture into a customer magnet:

Friendliness may very well be the most marketable product in the Crutchfield inventory. "Everybody says they have good customer service," Souder said, "but it's a religion here."

Religion is actually a popular metaphor in retail marketing circles today, with some industry watchers saying that stores are fulfilling the community-building roles that churches, political groups and extended families used to in America. ...

... Douglas Rushkoff, a technology and culture commentator and author of Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out, agreed. "Brands and companies have quite effectively replaced our social bonds with economic ones," he said. "We pay each other for things that used to be favors before. I know it sounds weird, but people used to do things together for fun, or do favors for each other for no money. Now, we have professionals and companies to do all these things for us. But the basic human need for fellowship has remained. So we fulfill our need for fellowship in the only places left where there are other humans to meet: within stores or branded environments."

See also: Pogue on Crutchfield (August 7, 2006)

Had a fun time on Mark Frauenfelder's 'Rule the Web' show tonight, talking about Bit Literacy, todo lists, media diets, and other things.

Listen to the show.

P.S. Below is a great encapsulation of bit literacy (from Celeste's Flickr photostream).

Achieving emptiness (in an inbox, todo list, or other bitstream) is a great thing. But like any significant change, it takes some getting used to.

Thus, the "four stages of zero." With his permission I'm quoting Kevin King, SVP & General Manager of Zingy.com, who read Bit Literacy and started practicing the method four weeks ago. This is his mini-diary of his experience:

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Week 1: An empty inbox is a little unsettling - what am I supposed to do?

By end of week, spending an exorbitant amount of time starring at my to-do list rather than inbox.

Week 2: Very liberating and feels great. Email is no longer a time issue and I'm cranking on things (in my opinion).

Week 3: To-do list is getting very long and a little unmanageable. Realizing that have lots of things to do that aren't that much 'fun.'

Week 4: Attacking to-do list with vigor and inspired just to get them off the list, even if the task is so-so.

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And thus at the fourth stage, he's not only accustomed to emptiness - he demands it, even if it means getting things done that he otherwise would avoid. This is the productivity that Bit Literacy brings.

I've written about "the age of infinite bits," and here's an explicit example.

Today's Wall Street Journal contains an article (reg. required) about Yahoo's new "unlimited" e-mail storage.

From "Web-Based Services Give Email Users A Taste of the Infinite":

One of the ironies of the current tech scene is that the free email services available from the big Web companies are often faster and have more storage than the corporate accounts that office stiffs use in their jobs every day. It's thus now common for people to forward work email to an outside free account, turning it into a permanent archive that's always available for quick searching.

After a year or two of this, it's easy to run into situations like mine where a Yahoo email account has more than 40,000 messages in it.

Dang those internal IT departments that don't let you accumulate 40,000 e-mails!

Seriously, it's easier to get stuff done if you don't use the inbox as your filing system, calendar, todo list, address book, and scrapbook. Read Bit Literacy to see how to keep an empty inbox.

(Don't get me wrong - external accounts like Yahoo Mail and Gmail can be very helpful, even as storage spaces for large backup files. I just don't think a crammed 40,000-message inbox is good as a replacement, or add-on, for the primary inbox.)

(Thanks, Phil)

No wonder hotels during Gel have gotten so expensive. From the WSJ, New York Redefines Luxury:

High demand and aggressive pricing have pushed the price of many second- and third-tier Manhattan hotels like Sheratons, Hiltons, Radissons and Marriotts over $500 a night for business travelers. Even a Comfort Inn with plastic orchids in the lobby and a pre-paid calling-card vending machine (exact change only) was recently priced at $429.

"Waldorf prices without Waldorf amenities," said Casey Dylan of Boston, whose company paid more than $400 for him to stay at the Sheraton Manhattan on a recent Sunday night.

I'll be on Mark Frauenfelder's live call-in show today... from Boing Boing: Mark Hurst on Rule the Web call-in show:

If you're curious about Mark's email method and other productivity tips and techniques, visit BlogTalkRadio at 4pm Pacific Time and call us at (646) 915-8698.

Thanks to Mark for the nice mention of Bit Literacy, too.

"Why should we hire you?"

A potential client recently asked me - in not quite those words - what sets the "customer experience" method apart from other user experience and usability vendors she was considering.

I went over the basics of the method - setting business context, conducting customer-led research ("listening labs"), creating a customer-focused strategy - and then I added one more thing.

"While I firmly believe in our method," I said, "our 'secret sauce' is something really simple. It might even sound trivial, if you haven't tried it."

The potential client said she was all ears.

"OK," I said, "Here it is, the one thing that most vendors ignore, but we insist upon."

And then I told her:

We get the stakeholders to watch the labs.

In other words, we get all the decisionmakers for the website, or product, or service, to take a full day away from the office to sit in a quiet observation room to watch customers using their service. They all watch together, and then they discuss what they observed, after each session.

After more than ten years of customer experience consulting, I'll tell you confidently that there is no better way to build consensus about improving the customer experience than to get stakeholders to observe customers first-hand, in person, in real time, right in front of them.

Consider some of the barriers that come down, just by getting people to sit in a room together to watch customers:

- "Fiefdoms" disappear. No one argues for their pet feature when they see customers failing (or succeeding) in the same way, session after session.

- Departments talk the same language. IT, marketing, executives, designers all see their customer - in the flesh - the person who pays their salary! - as the person to learn from.

- Everyone sees that customer experience is a strategic issue to address, across the whole organization, not a collection of tactical tips 'n' tricks for Web developers.

- Perhaps most importantly, stakeholders across the organization understand - from first-hand experience - how important it is to conduct customer research. (It continues to amaze me how few companies ever have any contact with real, live customers.)

Of course, not all customer research is equally effective. My experience is that non-directed research (not highly scripted traditional usability tests) gives the customer the best way to show their experience; and one-on-one research is much more effective in getting honest feedback than focus groups, which are subject to group dynamics and the bias of the facilitator.

But whatever method one chooses to use - and they all have their place and their effective use - it's surprisingly helpful to get the stakeholders there to watch.

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See also:

- More about "listening labs," non-directed research

- More about the customer experience method (PDF)

Esther Dyson pointed me to her picture of a well-designed loading zone at the airport in Brussels:

Esther writes:

there is diagonal, parallel short-term stopping between two driving lanes. from the left-hand lane, cars slip into the spots to unload passengers and luggage, and then drive out forward into the right-hand lane.

Everyone, please copy this! it's not patented!

Urban planners and architects, take note! There's no need for the (broken) system at most airports - cars pulling in and out of the same lane in the loading zone, causing mucho traffic.