Archives / September 2007

Chinese sign with customer service tips. In the Forbidden category, "Just take it and leave me alone."

(thanks, bb)

Nice to see Bit Literacy doing so well on Amazon:

I'll be speaking tonight, Thursday, starting 6:30 p.m. about bit literacy at the Apple Store SoHo (see map).

This is a free event - hope to see you there!

----------------------------

Thursday, September 27

Starting 6:30pm

Bit Literacy with Mark Hurst

Join user experience guru Mark Hurst, author of Bit Literacy, to discover how you can work more productively. Whether you’re struggling with a daily flood of email, multiple to-do lists, a cluttered desktop, or other digital distractions, Mark will show you simple techniques for managing a deluge of digital information.

----------------------------

Also see the listing on the Apple Store SoHo calendar.

Or read more about the book (including a free chapter) at Bit Literacy.

Post comments on this post.

Jesse Kornbluth at HeadButler.com reviews Bit Literacy:

It's easy to say, "Empty your inbox at least once a day." Hurst shows you how. First deal with your personal e-mail (because, hey, life is more important than work). Then start filing and deleting and dealing. Manage your to-dos.

Step by step, Hurst helps you deal with this banal mess. At the end, he promises, lies freedom --- or, at least, the freedom to do your actual job.

Tired of feeling that e-mail has become your life? You are, perhaps, a click away from relief.

Read more about Bit Literacy.

A seagull in Scotland (click here for video) pilfers chips from a store. Snopes.com says it's for real:

A seagull in Scotland has developed the habit of stealing chips from a neighborhood shop.

The seagull waits until the shopkeeper isn't looking, and then walks into the store and grabs a snack-size bag of cheese Doritos.

Once outside, the bag gets ripped open and shared by other birds.

The seagull's shoplifting started early this month when he first swooped into the store in Aberdeen, Scotland, and helped himself to a bag of chips. Since then, he's become a regular. He always takes the same type of chips.

Customers have begun paying for the seagull's stolen bags of chips because they think it's so funny.

(Thanks, Tori)

Kevin Kelly writes about Andres Amador, a San Francisco-based artist who makes "crop circles" on beach sand, like this one on SF's Ocean Beach:

Enjoy the art now, before companies decide to start raking their logos into the sand...

From the This Is Broken group on Flickr, mistermoldy shows us a sign that really could use some punctuation.

(Or is it only the rude kids who go here?)

Zimran Ahmed, who works with me at Creative Good, on a podcast talking about our work and results.

FT interview of Craigslist's CEO:

Jim Buckmaster doesn't believe in maximising profits. He doesn't believe in management. He doesn't believe in brands. ... Hugely successful, he could also be hugely rich if he wanted to cash in his stake. Only he chooses not to. ... "I'm not averse to riches or profit, but not at the expense of the user."

... So the site is clear and fast. Users don't like pop-up ads or big logos, so there aren't any. They have one principle - to please users - and they follow this doggedly.

Here are some of Jim's operating principles:

• Listen to what users want. Try to make the site faster and better.

• Hire good people. "We work hard trying to get the right kind of folks." It pays off: they hardly ever leave.

• No meetings, ever. "I find them stupefying and useless."

See also:

• Video of Craig Newmark at Gel 2006

• Craig Newmark and customer service

(Thanks, Ling)

A gentle reminder - two, actually - to use our time wisely:

• CMU professor's final lecture

• Kevin Kelly's countdown to his last day

These put productivity in a new light: choosing what to work on is even more important than doing it efficiently.

From the This Is Broken group on Flickr, user ux-sa (who has posted good stuff before) writes:

"I am in Las Vegas for a conference this week. The hotel is really nice, but I encountered this bizarre keypad to work the curtains in the room.

"There is no natural mapping between the buttons and their functions. I went through quite a bit of trial & error before figuring it out. And the problem is that even once you figure it out, it's not very logical."

(thanks, bb)

If you watch TV, you've seen this. In the middle of an important scene, a whirling logo appears on the bottom of the screen: it's the promo for the show coming up next! In the age of TiVo, since so many viewers skip commercials, it's the only chance the network has to get your attention. Welcome to the new frontier of information overload.

Today the New York Times reports on TV screen clutter:

Viewers of MTV, VH1 and sports channels have come to expect frenetic programming. At ESPN, there has been a conscious effort to pump up the visual excitement of the viewing experience, said Norby Williamson, executive vice president of programming. “The key word in television these days is engagement,” he said.

In the Chicago Tribune today, my quick take on solving email overload:

"There are only three things you can do to an e-mail: delete it, file it or defer it [to a future day when you can get to it]," [Hurst] said. "Most people have never heard of deferring e-mails, and they perceive that they can't spend the 10 or 20 minutes it takes to learn the skill, so their in-boxes stay full of huge action items. This is demoralizing and stressful, which is a shame, because with a simple effort of a few minutes, they'd never have this problem again."

Deferring essentially means taking the e-mail out of the in-box and putting that action item on a to-do list, Hurst said. "Not just any to-do list but one which allows you to separate today's action items from those needing action on future days."

Fact of the day, courtesy an NYT article about reclaiming parking spots for temporary performance art: "according to Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group, 45 percent of public land in Manhattan is dedicated to moving and storing cars." (!)

Comparing the download pages of two office suites: IBM's takes 10 steps; OpenOffice takes 4. Guess which one will have the higher conversion rate?

A Chinese sign offers some recursive humor. (thanks, bb)

Alfred H. Peet, 1920-2007. The founder of Peet's Coffee passed away recently, and over 400 customers posted comments on the Peet's company blog. That's quite a legacy.

On a related note, from last year, ideas for improving the customer experience from a customer who once had an exemplary experience at Peet's:

I was voted "customer of the week" by the staff two months after moving to Lake Merritt based on the following wonderfully subjective criteria: "You have to come in a lot and we have to like you." They took a Polaroid snapshot of me and placed it on the counter, gave me unlimited free drinks all week and generally made me feel like a cherished celebrity. It wasn't forced, and I didn't have to punch out 250 boxes of a "frequent buyer card" to attain the honor.

(Note: Usually in this space I take the customer perspective to explain the customer experience, but today I take a different tack - that of a business owner. Stick with it; it comes back to customer experience in the end... :) -mh

- -

"We'll make it up in volume." Veterans of the dotcom years will remember that statement, popular in the late 90s, as a cogent summary of what went wrong in many online businesses. A company might be losing money on every sale, but given the infinitely expanding size of the new economy, surely there was money to be made at some shining point in the future. (In reality, the only shiny thing was the oily surface of the glistening bubble, about to pop.)

Online business has come far in the past six years, becoming more realistic about business models. Unfortunately, many companies still don't understand the role of the customer experience in their business.

First, consider the four main ways a business can bring in money:

• from customers (paying for a product, service, or subscription), who can be individuals or other companies;

• from advertisers, who pay for the chance to distract individual users from the content of the site;

• from an IPO, which allows company founders to sell off pieces of their ownership to the larger market - and, oh yeah, bring in some capital for the company as well;

• or from an acquirer, the most attractive of which (today) seem to be Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. (I know that private equity and lines of credit are among other options, but let's skip those for this discussion.)

Back in the dotcom years, the IPO and acquisition were the most popular options - or at least most highly lauded in the press - leaving in an obscure minority those companies that actually made money from their operations.

Even today, plenty of startups bet everything on an acquisition. They make their best guess as to what Google or Yahoo wants to buy at the moment, and they try to build it. The customer experience is nearly irrelevant; the main goal is to attract the acquirer's deal team (or perhaps the planners of tech-hype conferences, where acquirers will be attending).

But in the last few years, many companies have finally woken up to the reality that they may need to make money without the help of an IPO or acquisition. And that requires a commitment to the customer experience.

Let's examine what drives the first two business models above:

• What causes customers to pay for a product, service, or subscription? Especially online, where so much is free, and so much of e-commerce is still hard to use, what is the key motivator to get customers to pull out their wallets?

• If the site has advertisers, what motivates customers to come to the site? More importantly, what causes them to Ireturn to the site after their first visit?

Answers: customer experience, and customer experience. Unless a company is dead-set on an IPO or acquisition, the real driver of long-term survival and success is still the customer experience... no matter what the business model.

As online business continues to mature in the coming years, more and more companies will feel the effects of this reality. Some, interested only in following trends and press hype, will survive for a short while - and some lottery winners will even get acquired and cash out. But in the long term, given a competitive environment, customer-focused businesses are the ones that will thrive.

- - -

See also (speaking of acquisitions): Yahoo Buying Zimbra, an E-Mail Service for Businesses

This sign, spotted in LA, is not offering a dozen roses for four bucks. The fine print, invisible to people whizzing by in cars, says it's really $4.99 for a half dozen roses. Broken!

One NYC blogger decries the loss of Tonic, the Lower East Side jazz club:

I saw a remarkable panoply of bands at Tonic over the years. Khanate, gruelingly slow, like Slayer dipped in cough syrup; Animal Collective, merry pranksters with a sound entirely their own that was entirely lovely; Han Bennink, a Dutch percussionist, clarinetist and free improviser who may the world's loudest purely acoustic musician; and Zorn, best known now for his radical take on traditional Jewish music, recorded here live and premiered many of the pieces that made him famous (in certain circles).

I saw Han Bennink at Tonic, too, and also at euroGel 2006. You can, too in the euroGel video clips.

See also my previous post on Tonic and that changing neighborhood.

I'll be speaking about bit literacy at the Apple Store SoHo (see map) on Thursday, September 27.

This is a free event - hope to see you there!

----------------------------

Thursday, September 27

Starting 6:30pm

Bit Literacy with Mark Hurst

Join user experience guru Mark Hurst, author of Bit Literacy, to discover how you can work more productively. Whether you’re struggling with a daily flood of email, multiple to-do lists, a cluttered desktop, or other digital distractions, Mark will show you simple techniques for managing a deluge of digital information.

----------------------------

Also see the listing on the Apple Store SoHo calendar.

Nice mention in today's Manhattan Users Guide:

Inbox creep. You know what we mean - the slow drip, drip of more emails to answer than you can handle. To the rescue, Mark Hurst, who has written a book for information overload called Bit Literacy. You might not think taming your inbox could lift a weight off your shoulders - but you'll be surprised at the difference it can make. Hurst also has a web-based to do list that can help, too. Check it out at Gootodo.

Listen first. Then build small.

For example... here's the New York Times on an MIT workshop that develops solutions for "the bottom billion" (emphasis mine):

Paul Polak, a psychiatrist turned entrepreneur, who develops simple solutions for the problems of the poor ... something of a guru to the design revolution movement, railed against conventional charity and insisted that the route to prosperity lies in inventions that improve lives but mesh with existing lifestyles.

He laid out the principles of development from the bottom up, including the importance of first listening and watching, then following the old dictum “small is beautiful” with another, equally important one: “cheap is beautiful.”

The goal, he said, should be to improve a million lives, and to make technologies that can be sold and bought in increments — like a drip-irrigating system that can expand as a farmer’s income rises.

It's obvious why a nonprofit should evaluate its constituents' needs before spending donors' money. Actions that "improve lives" and "mesh with existing lifestyles" can only come from understanding how people live in the first place.

Why should business be any different? And yet many companies still, to this day, spend their resources without any meaningful research into their customers' lives or needs. (Which makes an attractive opportunity for the companies that do "listen first" to customers...)

For years I've recommended Palm Treos in my annual Uncle Mark guide. That will change in a few weeks when I release Uncle Mark 2008 and recommend the iPhone - and recommend against the Palm Treo.

Problems with Palm have been mounting for awhile:

• Back in May, a WashPo blogger criticized Palm for its increasingly unreliable Treo smartphones:

Palm is failing to live up to the basic promise of the high-tech world--that its products will continue to get better, faster and cheaper every year. At worst, this company is no longer capable of innovating. At best, it retains that ability but lacks the manners to tell its customers just what it plans to do to get back on track--"trust me" will no longer suffice.

• In late August the techie blog Engadget wrote Dear Palm: It's time for an intervention.

• Finally, this past weekend, NYT's Joe Nocera complained about his buggy, unreliable Palm Treo (reg. required):

...maybe Treos [are] simply lousy devices. Maybe I should never have believed The Wall Street Journal’s technology guru, Walt Mossberg, who wrote in early 2006 that “Palm’s Treo smartphones have been the best high-end cellphones on the market, with the finest combination of voice, e-mail and Web-browsing capabilities in a hand-held device.” Maybe I was a fool to assume, as I clearly had, that just because Palm had once made great products, it was still making great products. Then my Treo died, and that gave me my answer.

Palm has its work cut out: whatever it creates next must offer a good user experience.

See also: iPhone and Nokia's attempted copy

Ever see a panda sneeze? (thanks, dougie)

Pat from Charlotte writes in an experience and a good tip... when having a poor customer experience in a big store, call the store.

She writes:

Today I took my former parents-in-law to Wal-Mart. Pop, who is 86, wanted to buy a new electric razor. We found razors in a locked glass cabinet near the pharmacy. At the pharmacy the young woman said she would "get someone" to help us. You guessed it: no one came. I began flagging down passing employees. After a period of time three other people had promised to send someone to help us. No one came.

I luckily found a nearby stool for Pop after about 20 minutes of standing. Then I had an idea. I called the store on my cell phone.

"I am in your store and here's what's happened..." A nice sounding person said she would page someone.

No one came.

I called back. This time she said she would send a supervisor, and I replied, "Could I please speak to the store manager."

"He's in a meeting."

Me: "Uh huh. Okay, please send us a supervisor."

The supervisor did come promptly, and Pop was able to buy his razor.

The reason we didn't give up is that it is so hard for Mom & Pop to get a ride to the store and help for such a purchase. We needed to complete the mission.

The experience gave me a new idea, though. We all need to have the store's phone number in our cells, so we can call for help -- especially in these warehouses. I happened to have it because I had called for directions before we went.

Des Traynor suggests a quick exercise to evaluate any user interface: gray out everything that the user doesn't care about. This could also be a good final check on a prototype you're creating for any new customer experience. When you take away everything customers don't want, how much is left?

For example, in Yahoo Mail...

Read more in A really simple metric for measuring User Interfaces.

I've used a Gmail account for months, for bit literacy demos, and I just noticed something today... Gmail apparently can't sort its inbox messages by date. The default, unfortunately, is to put the newest message on top - making it extra-tough for people to clean out the inbox.

Experienced Gmail users: am I missing here? Or is it impossible to sort Gmail by date? (Or, apparently, by sender or Subject?) Sorting would seem to be an essential feature in any e-mail program today...

Today, people who don't learn bit literacy suffer from overload and confusion, since they don't know how to manage their information using today's badly designed tools.

But that's comparatively mild. People who don't know these skills in coming years may find themselves at the whim of much different interfaces.

Case in point, today brings news of brain-computer interfaces, which I reference in Bit Literacy (see footnote on page 147). From Wired, Brain to Control Games Directly, Maybe Vice Versa:

Several makers of brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs -- devices that facilitate operating a computer by thought alone -- claim the technology is poised to jump from the medical sector into the consumer gaming world in 2008.

...but many scientists worry that users brains' might be subject to negative effects. For example, the devices sometimes force users to slow down their brain waves. Afterward, users have reported trouble focusing their attention.

Learn the skills now: read Bit Literacy and put it into practice.

List of famous musicians who hawked products for big companies (with pointers to music videos):

Q: What do Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, The Clash, Iggy Pop, Elvis Costello, The Ramones, and Wilco all have in common?

A: They all share a place in my iTunes library, and they all have helped corporate behemoths sell stuff.