Archives / August 2007

A little geek humor for the weekend - a promo video for Microsoft's latest release of Paint, a la Christopher Guest. "It really looks just like spray paint!" etc.

(Thanks, Bruce)

When Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist, spoke at Gel, he brought his laptop. (See his video clip.) After he spoke, he spent much of the rest of the day typing away - handling customer service for Craigslist, right there in his theater chair.

Craig is a genuine and admirable guy. I've posted about how Craig has said he won't cash in, even though he would probably get billions for his stake.

But more than that, he really does care about continuing to do customer service. Here's a recent post on his blog: cnewmark: I'm not going anywhere...

Like I tell people everyday, I do serious customer service at craigslist, everyday, and by "everyday" I mean every day.

My exit strategy for customer service is death; that is, I'm only be doing customer service as long as I live. After that, probably over.

I keep saying this repeatedly, not sure how the rumor started otherwise.

(Thanks, Hanan)

I got an iPhone recently. I'll write more about it in my upcoming annual Uncle Mark guide, but suffice to say that it's an outstanding device. Design, usability, feature set, integration, everything - down to the smallest details - Apple succeeded in pulling it together. I don't know that I've been this impressed with a new launch since I first used a Mac in 1985.

Like the original Mac, the iPhone delivers a much-needed shakeup to a customer-hostile industry. Much like alarm clocks and toaster ovens, cell phone design (with a very few exceptions) has been bad, industry-wide, for years. Manufacturers like Motorola and Nokia have put more emphasis on making fashion statements, and less on allowing users to make phone calls.

The iPhone has changed that game. The first day I used an iPhone I told my friend, "If I was an executive at Nokia or Motorola I'd be pretty scared by this." Like the DOS product team in 1984, executives at these manufacturers have to know that their customers now know they have a choice: user-friendly iPhone, or user-hostile (or at best user-indifferent) gadgets.

So: Right on time, today the New York Times reports that Nokia has announced its first attempt to copy the iPhone. From the announcement of the new Nokia N81 (pictured at left):

While Nokia executives chose suits and ties rather than the black mock turtlenecks and blue jeans favored by Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, they acknowledged that Nokia was not above imitating its rival.

"I don’t know what is copying and what is original but if there is something good in the world, we copy it with pride," said Anssi Vanjoki, head of the Nokia multimedia division, which makes the company’s high-end handsets, when asked about similarities between the iPhone, iTunes and the new devices and services announced by Nokia.

Motorola, Samsung, and others can't be far behind with their own touch-screen multimedia devices.

If history is any guide, copying Apple won't quite cut it. There is no shortcut to building a great customer experience; you can't just copy a template. Unless someone can secure a monopoly, like Microsoft built with Windows and Office, or rock-bottom pricing with a friendly carrier, it's unlikely that these devices will go far. If one needs any proof of the argument, ask around how many people own iPods, and how many enjoy Microsoft's Zune digital music player.

See also:

• Don't buy the Microsoft Zune

• Seven lessons of iPhone user experience

Neat slideshow about user experience, using the iPhone as the main case study:

(Thanks, Terry)

See also: iPhone and Nokia's attempted copy

In this recent post I suggested that "personas" - profiles of theoretical customers - are no substitute for actually talking to actual real-live people who are prospective or current customers.

A good customer experience is built on knowledge of customers, not imagined people who we'd like to be our customers.

I know personas are a hot topic in the user experience community, so I was interested to see the feedback on the column.

Quoting readers...

Negative opinions of personas:

- - -

"I agree with your take on personas. I am working on project after project where 'personas' are created based on assumptions, market research and 3rd party research but no primary research. Not to mention project after project with no usability testing. Apparently there isn't enough time or money. It seems a lot of folks talk about user-centered design but very few actually do it."

- - -

"I've worked with companies that have spent buckets of money for consulting firms to develop these 'personas.' As a marketing professional I find them useless and as a person I find them insulting. People are far too complex to fit into neat little categories. Instead, why not focus on universal needs and how your product can meet those needs? And yes, use those buckets of money to talk to your customers first-hand to find out how you can make things better."

- - -

...and on the other hand...

Positive opinions:

- - -

"While I find talking to consumers invaluable, I still think that a well-shaped persona (based on that research) is critical in terms of knowing who you're talking to. As a writer by training, I know it's much more effective to visualize a single person that you're writing to than to focus on, as a whole, the 12 individual consumers you sat down with previously."

- - -

"One small quibble... Personas, when done correctly, are actually helpful summaries of all the research you've done with actual customers (contextually in their homes even). In other words, if you're finding yourself talking about 'invented personas,' then you're not really in the persona world, where every detail about the persona is grounded in researched information. Chances are if you're talking about invented personas, you're moving from marketing profiles to imagined users, and, as you say, that's not quite there -- almost, but not quite!"

- - -

What do you think?

Post your comment here, on the original post.

From the This Is Broken group on Flickr, ux-sa submits this Microsoft Office Publisher error message:

"Opening this publication will access data from the following location: Error: This publication was created in a later version of Publisher and contains connections to multiple data sources. This version ..."

...and on and on it goes. What does it all mean?

The WSJ reports that Taiwan's Acer will buy Gateway (reg. required). The hook:

One time having as many as 24,000 employees, Gateway slashed its work force to fight slumping sales that resulted in mounting losses for the company. The firm took years to return to profitability as continued price drops and competition from Dell and H-P, among others, has pressured Gateway's performance.

I knew Gateway back when they were more focused on serving customer needs; in fact, the company was one of Creative Good's first clients. Here's the case study of the project, which we still refer to when describing customer experience work.

That one project made Gateway many millions of dollars, and now the entire company has sold for $710 million. It's quite an end for a company that once led the consumer PC market with its friendly, customer-oriented attitude. (Remember the cow spots on the shipping boxes?) Unfortunately, the company lost its focus and invested in the wrong things:

Earlier this decade, Gateway diversified into plasma televisions and other consumer electronics in an effort to cut its reliance on PCs, but the move didn't work. The firm also shuttered the rest of its retail stores in 2004, five years after the company attempted to use that sales process to further leverage its then-reputation as a maker of reliable PCs at a low price.

(Thanks, Phil)

See also: David Kirkpatrick's column on the Gateway sale

The latest way to get bombarded by ads: looking at the car next to you in traffic. From the NYT, Your Ad Here, on My S.U.V.? And You'll Pay?... Oh, yes:

[Procter & Gamble] either gives its brand ambassadors free cars or, more often, pays them as much as $800 a month. In the last seven years, FreeCar Media has hired about 7,000 motorists, who are instructed to park outside whenever possible, refrain from smoking, littering or swearing in their vehicle, and to attend a monthly influencer event where they hand out samples or coupons. They also have to send reports frequently with photographs to show where their cars have been.

People whose cars were wrapped with ads for two Coca-Cola products ... were cautioned against sipping Pepsi products behind the wheel. Nor could they park at restaurant chains like KFC or Pizza Hut that serve Pepsi exclusively, Mr. Livingston said.

Another FreeCar participant, Jerome Harris, 22, was in his junior year at Temple University last year when he had his Nissan Altima wrapped for a promotion for Trolls, the endomorphic dolls with Don King hairdos. He earned $500 a month while his car was wrapped; in addition to driving around while on his best behavior, he was required to hand out Trolls pens to fellow students during finals week.

They still make Trolls pens?

Nice review of Bit Literacy, just a few hours old, on our Amazon page:

I read 40 to 50 books on business, productivity, and personal growth each year. But, only 2 or 3 actually dramatically impact the way i work.

Bit Literacy is one of these few shining stars this year. If you want to change your digital life in a positive direction permanently, practice the principles taught in this book.

Thanks to Adam Dudley in Orlando.

Three years ago I wrote You DO Talk to Customers, Don't You?, in which I stated what I thought was the obvious: customer experience work requires working with customers. But this idea is still not practiced widely enough.

A friend sent me this roundup of a recent entrepreneur conference at Stanford, where PayPal founder Max Levchin offered some tips:

Product management, he says, is 85% user interface and 15% channeling the user.

For user interface, Levchin told the audience to measure how their visitors interact with the sites. Slide.com tracks mouse clicks, mouse overs, abandonment rates, the funnel, and more. Levchin and his team mine the data for intelligence that helps guide future iterations of the site.

For channeling the user, Levchin says founders must step inside the minds of their target customers. In Levchin’s case, he says he must imagine himself as a 15-year-old girl with attention deficit disorder who’s looking for digital bling to dress up her MySpace or Zanga web page, while at the same time she’s chewing gum, talking on the phone, instant messaging with five friends, listening to music, and twirling her fingers through her hair.

Levchin cautioned his techie audience to keep their customers in mind and not go overboard with technology for technology’s sake. He pointed to the early social networking site, Friendster, which lost critical momentum when it ran into scaling problems because of a “cool” feature that calculated friend trees, and caused page load times of up to a minute. MySpace.com, by contrast, was successful because it cared less about technology and more about the user experience.

Levchin is right to tell people to study both data and users. However, in terms of "channeling the user," while he's on the right track, he's still missing the key step - and a LOT of developers miss this step.

Rather than "channel" the user, i.e. think of what these theoretical people might theoretically want, it's better to actually sit with actual people to see what they actually want. Of course it takes more time and energy to do that, so lots of developers (and even UX practitioners) prefer instead to invent "personas" of theoretical people, and then make strategic decisions based on what those theoretical people might want.

Yes, personas are helpful for some uses. But the primary way of understanding a customer's experience with a site, tool, or business must be with an actual customer, not an imaginary figment.

See also: You DO Talk to Customers, Don't You? (September 22, 2004)

Pete just pointed me to a list of good Mac OS X software. Worth a scan.

It's missing a few key items...

• Gootodo, the best todo list for Mac, Windows, and Linux. (I designed this and wrote about it it my book Bit Literacy.)

• a bit lever (like Typeit4Me, though there are others) to speed up typing.

• QuicKeys, absolutely essential for setting up app-switching keystrokes.

Then putting it all together - if you use Firefox or Safari for your Web browser, pick up Camino to run only Gootodo, then set up a QuicKey to take you anytime to your todo list - that is, Camino. Works like a charm and saves a ton of time.

From the latest This Is Broken submissions, an entry from brainclots, who writes:

"Evidently cars are not allowed, just buses, (unless they are buses)."

Signage by the Department of Redundancy Department.

People continue to wonder how to manage their e-mail inboxes. Now we're faced with an e-mail bitstream with a new buzzword, "bacn". From the Washington Post:

"bacn"--the misspelling is intentional--has become a popular term of art for the automatically generated notifications from legimate, non-spam sites. BuzzFeed offers this concise definition:

"Bacn describes the things you signed up for but that still feel like clutter in your inbox: Email lists, Facebook notifications, Google alerts."

Users - in this case, early-adopter geeks - are wondering what to do: How can we fix this problem of increasing bits - perhaps with better tools? More technology? Well, perhaps.

But a better long-term solution is to learn the skills of managing one's bits so that any bitstream, at any volume, is manageable. That's what Bit Literacy teaches.

(thanks, bb)

MIT researchers create a 'clutter detector':

The danger of clutter--especially on a visual screen--is that it causes confusion that affects how well we perform tasks. To that end, visual clutter is a challenge for fighter pilots picking out a target, for people seeking important information in a user interface, and for web site and map designers, among others.

Now, a team of MIT scientists has identified a way to measure visual clutter.

(thanks, bb)

See also: A misguided book on mess

Someone wrote this guide to navigating UPenn's horribly broken system for submitting maintenance and repair requests.

OK, you might think that since you want to request work, you should click "Work Request". But DON'T! That will lead you off into a series of twisty little passages, all alike, where you'll be eaten by goblins.

Instead, DO click on "Customer Request". That's because you're a customer, and you have a work request. (No! don't click on "Work Request"! Remember the goblins!)

Just scanning the screenshots of this system makes me dizzy. Is it possible to submit a repair request via the site, for the site itself?

(Thanks, Cyrus!)

Which is the better "good experience", consistency or uniqueness? That's like asking what's better, simplicity or complexity? It depends on the context. Both are good at different times and places, for different people, for different reasons.

What's unusual, though, is to see one company try to provide both experiences.

Here's a New York Times article on the Ian Shrager/Marriott partnership. Inevitably there's some tension between the consistent experience (Marriott hotels) and the unique experience (Ian Shrager's boutique hotels):

Mr. Schrager, for his part, concedes that partnering with Marriott will likely require some tough compromises. Marriott, for example, will probably require him to brighten the hallway lights a bit for safety reasons, and those stylish notepads he likes to leave in rooms might prove too costly to a mainstream hotelier.

“The properties might not be as quirky or individualized as I might make them if I were doing this alone,” Mr. Schrager says. “But Apple manages to pull off really sleek designs that everyone of all ages responds to. And believe me, I’m not going to have a book of standards. It will be. ...” He pauses for effect. “The anti-chain.”

More important, though, Mr. Schrager says that working with Marriott will instantly cast him into his rightful place as a major player in the “lifestyle” market segment, and in the longer term position him to build a mass customer base for his innovations, à la Apple, Nike and Sony.

Nice review of Bit Literacy in Michael Sampson's blog:

You absolutely have to buy it. Now. Right now. Before reading any further. I know I don't normally say that, but this book should be required reading of everybody who ever uses / touches a computer at any time.

He mentions later that he can't believe he's been working without a bit lever for so long. I know the feeling. Every time I use another computer without a bit lever, I always think, "how does this person have the patience to sit there and type every single letter?"

Read Michael's review

My beloved AppleWorks is no longer supported:

Macworld magazine discovered that the Web address for AppleWorks, Apple's long-in-the-tooth office productivity program for the Mac, now redirects to the site for iWork '08, the $79 word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation program that the company launched in 2005. The 23-year-old AppleWorks, one of the first integrated office programs released for personal computers, is dead.

I've been using this suite for over 20 years, ever since it started out as MacDraw and MacPaint. And just as I used Claris Emailer for years after its supposed "death," I'll keep using AppleWorks for word processing, and for creating website sketches, until I see a better Mac-compatible draw program.. if that ever happens. (Any suggestions?)

(Thanks, Cat)

Update: Paul Schreiber writes...

This is not accurate.

(1) AppleWorks was an Apple II product.

(2) MacPaint and MacDraw were Macintosh products.

(3) ClarisWorks was a separate product, not based on MacPaint or MacDraw, created by different engineers.

(4) AppleWorks, the Apple II product, was discontinued.

(5) ClarisWorks was renamed AppleWorks.

...which clears it right up :) He also suggests OmniGraffle.

Netflix bets on telephone customer service, based in Oregon, to provide the edge they need in building an all-around good customer experience, to beat Blockbuster. An interesting strategy for an online company. Excerpt:

Netflix [decided against] other lower-cost places in the United States and overseas, because it thought that Oregonians would present a friendlier voice to its customers. Then in July, Netflix took an unusual step for a Web-based company: it eliminated e-mail-based customer service inquiries. Now all questions, complaints and suggestions go to the Hillsboro call center, which is open 24 hours a day. The company's toll-free number, previously buried on the Web site, is now prominently displayed.

Netflix teaches two lessons here in customer experience management:

• Fix the site first: For an online company, the website is the primary experience. Netflix did the right thing by optimizing their site first, and then looked to optimize the secondary experience - customer service requests, which only crop up after the customer has gone through the site experience.

• If you invest, do it right: Netflix invested not just in "more call reps" (which may have been nice in a press release but not great in reality) but in a more expensive domestic call center. And not just any domestic call center; it found the best city for its needs - polite Portland, Oregon.

The outcome of the Netflix-Blockbuster battle is yet undetermined (the latter has size and retail locations as advantages), but I like Netflix's ongoing commitment to customer experience.

In Bit Literacy, Chapter 10 (page 124, if you have a copy) talks about the inevitability of technology companies wanting very much to mediate our access to our own health record. I propose a simple (and private) text file called " health".

And so it begins... this NYT article reports that the Google and Microsoft are gearing up. Surely they'll be offering more than health records - but now's the time to get comfortable managing your own bits.

It is too soon to know whether either Google or Microsoft will make real headway. Health care, experts note, is a field where policy, regulation and entrenched interests tend to slow the pace of change, and technology companies have a history of losing patience.

And for most people, typing an ailment into a Web search engine is very different from entrusting a corporate titan with personal information about their health.

Does Mountain Dew have a "customer experience"? We talk about the customer experience of services (banks, hospitals, stores) and the user experience of websites and other technology... but what's the experience of a packaged consumer product, like a soft drink?

I'd argue that there is indeed an experience, and it occurs in three steps:

1. Buy Me: A successful drink stands out on the store shelf. Here consistency of the visual branding is important, so that the customer recognizes the brand from among the many alternative options; or perhaps the more arresting the visual design, the better. Shelf placement (is it at the customer's eye level?) and distribution (how many other stores is it stocked in?) play a part as well.

2. Pour Me: Many drinks use standard packaging - twist top on an everyday plastic bottle - but a few brands (Pom, Fiji, and others) use visually distinctive packaging, and others have innovative packaging that helps the customer carry or pour the drink more easily, or in new ways.

3. Drink Me: Finally, the taste. In the minds of some consumer goods marketers, their job is done before this step ever occurs... "the brand is the experience," they say. (Consider the old blind taste tests from the 1980s, which appeared to show that Pepsi tasted better than the more popular Coke.) Above all else, consistency is important here - there's no room for innovation to, say, change the taste of Mountain Dew from week to week.

Diligent MBAs will point out that I've missed "Step 0," which is the advertising of the product. The more branding occurs upfront, with the most impressions across the most channels, the better the product does in Step 1.

But those MBAs would be (partially, increasingly) wrong on that point. The world is changing in favor of the actual experience - at the expense of advertising - yes, even in consumer packaged goods.

A few years ago I spotted a telephone-booth ad in midtown Manhattan that was touting instant coffee. "Introducing the great new look of Taster's Choice," it read, finishing with "Pssst... tell a friend." I found the ad so absurd - who would actually tell a friend about some new coffee packaging? - that I wrote a column called Packaging is not customer experience. The "experience" of instant coffee, I said, is about price and taste - and a new logo on a plastic canister does not an experience make.

A slew of comments came back, several disagreeing (they're here) and made the case that packaging is, in some cases, most of the "experience" that the customer is shopping or buying.

Now packaging is an even more immediate issue, according to the New York Times (Product Packages Now Shout to Get Your Attention, August 10). Well-known brands like Kleenex, Coors, Huggies, and Mountain Dew are changing their packaging - not their internal product, like the taste or composition - in an attempt to improve the customer experience:

Consumer goods companies, which once saw packages largely as containers for shipping their products, are now using them more as 3-D ads to grab shoppers’ attention.

The shift is mostly because of the rise of the Internet and hundreds of television channels, which mean marketers can no longer count on people seeing their commercials.

So they are using their bottles, cans, boxes and plastic packs to improve sales by attracting the eyes of consumers, who often make most of their shopping decisions at the last minute while standing in front of store shelves.

So now, what "good experience" practitioners have said for years - advertising is less important than the customer experience - is finally coming to fruition even in old-line consumer products.

Customers have more than enough information (way too much, actually) about products already without having to get hit over the head in ads to learn about them. Telephone booth ads in midtown Manhattan are less and less relevant. (As are the booths themselves, come to think of it.)

- - -

See also:

• Increasing guilt about bottled water

• P.S. One way not to package your product is to say about your mayonnaise, "now has the taste of real mayonnaise".

The Bit Literacy book page on Amazon now has 25 customer reviews - great to see. I especially like the review below because it describes the trouble of describing bit literacy to someone who's never tried or experienced it... and the payoff, of really getting work done, when one begins to practice bit literacy:

The idea of an empty inbox, like the idea of an empty mind, is impossible to describe to someone else. You just have to get there. Mark Hurst tells you exactly how to do just that.

The exponential growth in emails and other technical distractions happened so gradually, we don't notice how much time it takes away from productive work. The ability to deal with the daily inundation of emails, blogs, news feeds, podcasts, calendar alerts, voicemails, etc. separates the productive people from the rest.

The first time you have an empty inbox you will fold your hands and stare at the screen and ask yourself what to do next. The answer is "real" work.

More information at bitliteracy.com.

The New York Times reports on "guilt by the bottleful":

Over the last 15 years, the bottled water industry has been astonishingly successful in turning a product that once seemed an indulgence into a daily companion. Savvy marketers even managed to recast this mundane product as a talisman of sexiness - Jennifer Aniston is the new face of Glacéau SmartWater. But the fickleness of fashion may be tilting against the industry.

...Barry Eskandani, 31, an administrative assistant in San Francisco who considers himself a connoisseur of water brands, said that lately his fellow Bay Area residents act as if “you just killed their puppy” if you dare throw a bottle in the garbage.

See also:

• Chris Jordan's latest photo series (May 8, 2007)

• Truth about bottled water (July 2, 2007)

Workers suffering from 'email stress': amusing article from the UK reports that an academic study found that (surprise!) lots of e-mail can stress people out, and that the problem is caused by - ?! - people checking e-mail too often. Apparently some sickos out there even check their e-mails "up to 40 times an hour." How they can possibly survive at that rate (let alone the mind-bending, time-and-space-distorting rate of once a minute, which is what I do), the journalist doesn't hazard a guess.

If the article was from The Onion I'd leave it at that, but I think this was a straight-up article, no satire intended. So let me state the obvious: you can check your e-mail once or 40 times an hour and you'll still get the same amount of overload. Provocative, I know.

In other words, the problem is not how often you check your e-mail. Rather, the problem is what happens after the e-mail arrives in the inbox: do you let it pile up? Or do you let the bits go and get the inbox to a zero count?

All this is explained in my book Bit Literacy. I wish journalists would take a peek at it, so they could offer a better solution. Meantime, check your e-mail as often as you want.

Josh Kaufman published his new Personal MBA "recommended reading list" today. His idea, covered by BusinessWeek last year, is that for the price of a few well-chosen books, people can get much the same education that MBAs pay tens of thousands of dollars for.

I'm happy that Bit Literacy is on the list, in the "personal effectiveness" section. Josh writes:

If your e-mail inbox is overflowing, your desktop is full of random documents, and using your computer is a daily exercise in stress and frustration, you need to read Bit Literacy.

At an off-site Creative Good team training day yesterday (which explains the lack of posts :) , I gave a presentation about creating a good customer experience strategy.

It all starts with understanding who we are as a "customer experience firm":

• We improve the customer experience.

• It must also improve the business.

• The client has to believe in it...

• …and must know how to implement.

Creating a good customer experience strategy will fulfill all four of those bullets.

Whether you're an experience practitioner inside a larger company, or you run your own freelance or consulting business, you can use these four bullets to frame your customer experience work.

Following up on the sentence-or-two recipes I linked to a couple of weeks back, the NYT has published ten more quick recipes.

Interestingly enough, these recipes were all submitted by readers... in the same week that the NYT shrank its paper size.

Amazon recently unveiled a better way to display customer reviews. Previously it just showed the average of all the ratings, but now there's an elegant way of seeing the breakdown:

(I'll admit I'm partial to this particular set of reviews, because they're for Bit Literacy.)

The New York Times deserves credit for being so forthright with its corrections. Occasionally they're funny, like this one from today's Corrections (emphasis mine):

An obituary on July 21 of Shirley Slesinger Lasswell, who marketed memorabilia and toys based on A. A. Milne's children's books about Winnie the Pooh, misspelled the name of the department store that agreed to let her set up Pooh Corners for children. It is Neiman Marcus, not Nieman Marcus. (The Times has misspelled the company's name in at least 195 articles since 1930.)

Can't say they're not persistent.

Speaking of poor visibility, how about this yellow-on-white error text at JetBlue? Just saw this today as I tried to book a flight.