Archives / December 2007

The Apple Store now generates 20% of Apple's overall revenues. That's one successful customer experience.

In contrast, a New York Times article describes competitor "experiences":

[T]he Sony flagship store on West 56th Street, a few blocks from Apple's Fifth Avenue store, has the hush of a mausoleum. And being inside the long and narrow blue-toned Nokia store on 57th Street feels a bit like being inside an aquarium.

The high-end Samsung Experience showroom, its nuevo tech music on full blast one recent morning, was nearly empty. And although that store professes to encourage hands-on exploration of its products, the showroom has a clinical, forbidding feel. (Nothing is actually sold there; it's just for display.)

"Whenever we ask consumers to cite a great retail experience, the Apple store is the first store they mention," said Jane Buckingham, president of the Intelligence Group, a market research firm in Los Angeles. "Basically, everything about it works. The people who work there are cool and knowledgeable. They have the answers you want, and can sell you what you need. Customers appreciate that. Even the fact that they'll e-mail you a receipt makes you feel like you're in a store just a little bit further ahead of everyone else."

As I say in Uncle Mark 2008, Samsung and Nokia and the rest have to be extra-concerned with good experience in coming quarters... the iPhone and the Apple Store have nailed it - the numbers prove it.

Images of one Mac desktop for 365 days. (A little file organization from Bit Literacy wouldn't hurt! :) Nice voiceover from Senator Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens.

(thanks, kottke)

Chip Conley, Gel 2008 speaker, profiled in a WSJ piece:

Mr. Conley said he tries to make Joie de Vivre fun by sponsoring parties and awards. He arranges paid annual retreats for employees and has regular dinners with those who want to chat. The company offers free classes on subjects from Microsoft Excel to English as a second language, the most popular course. It pushes managers to seek feedback from workers, and it encourages employees to learn how their jobs make a difference for hotel guests and for the company.

Because of such efforts, Mr. Conley said, Joie de Vivre's turnover is 25% to 30% annually, about half of the industry average. At the Carlton, turnover is less than 10%, down from an estimated 50% annually from 2000 to 2002, before Joie took over. It is important to "focus on the impact they're making rather than just the task of cleaning the toilet," Mr. Conley said.

See also: Good Experience interview of Chip Conley

Two more, for good reading:

• From The Economist, an unusually cogent overview of online advertising metrics. Worth sharing with anyone who's not fully comfortable with the difference between "hits," "page views," and "sessions."

• And in the NYT today, the new ad campaign for Ritz crackers stresses "fun" rather than any particular feature of the cracker. (Shouldn't be a surprise - much like ads for carbonated sugar water, there's only so much you can factually say about a cracker.)

P.S. Question for the foodies out there: since when did the word "texture" get replaced by "mouth feel"? Not much of an improvement, I'd say...

• MIT professor gives great physics lectures online: I took Professor Lewin's class almost 20 years ago (!) and it's great to see him getting a worldwide audience. Neat that 26-100 is a celebrity classroom now.

• The Economist on SAS: "Every aspect of life on the large, leafy SAS campus in Cary, North Carolina, is designed to bring the best out of employees by treating them well."

• NYT on preserving digital movies: "ubiquity, it turns out, is not the same as permanence." So true. Article continues:

to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is “born digital” — that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film — pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault.

What happened at Whole Foods when the checkout computers went down:

There was no storewide announcement of the problem, or its consequence. Cashiers simply told customers there was a computer glitch, bagged their groceries, wished them a happy holiday and a safe drive, and sent them on their way.

Hall estimated that up to $4,000 in groceries were given away before the computers began working again.

She said Donoghue did not consult headquarters before making his decision and said she has heard no negative feedback from the top brass.

"They just totally trust us to do what is right for our customers," she said.

How Zappos.com succeeds:

"The way we've gown primarily over the past eight years is through repeat customers and word-of-mouth," [CEO Tony Hsieh] explains. "Our philosophy [is] 'Any money that we would have spent on marketing, let's instead put it back into the customer experience and the customer service level we provide.'" And it's working: On any given day, 75 percent of Zappos.com's customers are repeat customers, according to Hsieh. Examples of Zappos.com's stellar customer service include free, overnight shipping...

Here's a great New Yorker piece about how a simple checklist can save lives. Peter Pronovost, based at Johns Hopkins, is on a mission to improve health care by having medical staff use a checklist when doing simple actions like inserting a tube.

There are many Good Experience themes here - simplicity, empathy, listening, "the basics," measuring success,... but for the moment, I'll point out that Pronovost's success came in part from involving decisionmakers directly in the process. Quoting, emphasis mine:

Pronovost had been canny when he started. In his first conversations with hospital administrators, he didn't order them to use the checklists. Instead, he asked them simply to gather data on their own infection rates. ... each hospital assigned a project manager to roll out the checklists and participate in a twice-monthly conference call with Pronovost for trouble-shooting. Pronovost also insisted that each participating hospital assign to each unit a senior hospital executive, who would visit the unit at least once a month, hear people's complaints, and help them solve problems.

The executives were reluctant. They normally lived in meetings worrying about strategy and budgets. They weren't used to venturing into patient territory and didn't feel that they belonged there. In some places, they encountered hostility. But their involvement proved crucial.

The project was a big success for all the hospitals that participated.

Involve the stakeholders! This is exactly what I wrote about years ago in The Most Important User Experience Method.

Jakob Nielsen offers an entertaining take on Web 2.0:

The most-hyped site right now, Facebook, is the "Iron Chef" of the Internet. The Iron Chef competition makes for great TV, but has nothing to do with running a restaurant as a successful business. After all, chefs aren't typically assigned a "mystery ingredient" shortly before dinnertime that they must feature throughout a multi-course meal. Broccoli ice cream? Not if you want to make money and bring the diners back.

Like Iron Chef, Facebook has much drama that makes for good press coverage, but most of its features are worthless for a B2B site that, say, is trying to sell forklift trucks to 50-year-old warehouse managers. Instead of adding Facebook-like features that let users "bite" other users and turn them into zombies, the B2B site would get more sales by offering clear prices, good product photos, detailed specs, convincing whitepapers, an easily navigable information architecture, and an email newsletter.

Well put.

Web 2.0: it's the broccoli ice cream of the Internet.

See also: The Web 2.0 question - and Grandparents.com

'Tis the season of giving: Manhattan User's Guide lists dozens of organizations in NYC that you can volunteer with over the holidays - and after.

Clever Web 2.0 thought by Lee Semel.

It's good to know who your customers are...

(Spotted outside a Hot & Crusty restaurant in Manhattan.)

Just saw Cymbeline at Lincoln Center Theater last night. This is a highly entertaining smorgasbord of Shakespeare - a king, an evil stepmother, war, romance, comedy, a sleeping potion, mistaken identity, and so on. The production itself has great staging, and the direction plays up the comedy - some parts were as funny as anything I've ever seen on stage.

It plays through Sunday, January 6 - I highly recommend it, if you like Shakespeare at all and can get to New York.

And yes, it helps to read the play beforehand. Full text here.

The NYT today picked up on Barneys' "green" canvas bag (for only $1,065) I wrote about two weeks ago.

In A World Consumed By Guilt, the Times writes:

No matter how sincere fashion designers may be in their efforts to embrace the green movement this season, consumers may find themselves perplexed by how to gauge the environmental impact of the many products that claim to be eco-friendly.

After factoring in the fabrics used in clothes and how they were produced, the real benefits of soy versus organic cotton versus recycled polyester may be slight, or confusing, or quite possibly misleading.

Here come the foxes...

I've always found it strange that the three main kinds of olive oil - pure, virgin, and extra virgin - have such similar names. I mean, what's the difference between "virgin" and "extra virgin" in any other context? In olive oil, of course, it makes a big difference. (It comes down to the production process.)

Olive oil suffers from name inflation. The producers who came up with the grades apparently didn't want to call the varieties "OK," "good," and "great," so they gave them all very positive names. But that didn't make the "pure" variety any better.

The lesson here is that simply naming something more positively doesn't actually make it better. You might fool some of the people some of the time (at the very beginning), but...

The cliche comes to mind that "there's no shortcut to quality." Good experience doesn't come about from cheap methods.

Some other examples I thought of:

• Moody's rates creditworthiness with grades that start with AAA, AA, and A. Getting anything below an A can be a big blow.

• Eggs: what's the difference between large and jumbo? Don't those words mean basically the same thing?

• Does anyone believe in the word "deluxe" any more?

Update: just remembered another one...

• Pinball scores: "back in my day," in the arcades of the 1980s, a typical game of pinball might rack up a score in the tens of thousands. Sometime in the 90s I noticed a shift. Apparently trying to make the games appear more exciting, pinball designers started making the games rack up points in the millions. The games were no more exciting, on the whole, and so the score inflation became more noise in the experience - no improvement at all.

Can you think of others?

Two very kind reviews on blogs today:

• Scott Berkun writes why you should go to the Gel conference: "it's my favorite conference... Gel rocks." (You may remember Scott from my recent crash course in innovation.)

• Steve Mann writes why he loves the Councils: "my membership has been one of the most valuable components to my career." (More on the Councils here.)

Finally, quick reminder that Wednesday, December 12 is the LAST day to get Gel 2008 tickets before the price jumps 20%. See the Gel 2008 speaker list.

Erin McKean, Gel 2006 speaker, in the NYT today:

“There are very few good ways to get publicity for a dictionary,” said Erin McKean, a lexicographer at Oxford. While publishers can rely on coverage for new entries in just-published dictionaries, some reference books go for as long as a decade between revisions. “We are constantly surveilling the language to see what new words people are coming up with,” Ms. McKean said.

Reminder that this Wednesday, December 12, is the LAST DAY to get Gel 2008 tickets at the current price.

In the midst of holiday shopping season, a few links on stuff:

• Saturday Night Live skit (with Steve Martin): Don't Buy Stuff You Can't Afford.

• Short film called The Story of Stuff. Good take on "the golden arrow" of consumerism.

• Quick anecdote: flying on the United shuttle from New York to Washington, D.C. the other day, halfway there, flight attendant comes on the intercom to give a sales pitch for a credit card... followed by two attendants coming down the aisle, asking passengers if they'd like to fill out an application. Same thing happens on the flight back. (Print ads on every seat-back tray, too.)

• Another anecdote: friend of mine shopping in Banana Republic asked to re-activate a store credit card; without saying anything about it, the store clerk both reactivates the old card and signs my friend up for a new Visa card.

• Once or twice a month I get frequent flier statements that always include a credit card application. Since when does a frequent-flier program mean "spam list for credit card offers"? (Surely one reason for the current debt crisis in the US is the easy availability of credit cards - on stores, on airplanes (!), in the postal mail.)

• Give and get free stuff from people in your community via FreeCycle.

• Don't forget Catalog Choice, which I featured recently here.

I love summaries. Here's a good one: a history professor at UPenn teaches all of human history in sixty seconds.

First, tribes: tough life. The defaults beyond the intimate tribe were violence, aversion to difference, and slavery. Superstition: everywhere. Culture overcomes them partially. ...

Also see the video of his talk (in Real format, yuck).

Here are many more 60-second lectures.

Here's another interesting summary: Saudi history in four minutes from the movie "The Kingdom."

(via infosthetics)

I'm happy to announce the initial speaker list for the Gel 2008 conference coming up on Thursday-Friday, April 24-25, 2008 in New York City.

Initial Gel 2008 speaker list (more to be announced):

• Alex Lee, president, Oxo International (creators of more than 500 easy-to-use kitchen tools and housewares)

• Bobby C. Martin Jr., design director, Jazz at Lincoln Center (who re-branded JALC recently and has a case study from Harlem to share)

• Bridget Duffy, chief experience officer, Cleveland Clinic (on the patient-centered efforts at this top-rated hospital)

• Chip Conley, CEO, Joie de Vivre Hospitality, and author of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow (interview)

• Garrett Oliver, brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery (whose excellent products we've included at every Gel conference)

• Lelavision - musicians, sculptors, performers (creative, resourceful, hard-to-describe artists)

• Natasha Schüll, assistant professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, MIT (researching addictive customer experiences)

• Phoebe Damrosch, author, "Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter" (former captain at a four-star NYC restaurant)

• Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal - comedians, musicians, filmmakers (performers of a now famous Facebook anthem, among others)

See speakers' headshots and links at Gel 2008.

Other aspects of Gel 2008

Thursday

We'll once again have a huge variety of options for your Day 1 experiences on Thursday. One change, based on attendee feedback, is that Thursday morning will offer several icebreakers for attendees to meet each other; Thursday afternoon will feature over a dozen "direct experiences" (tours, seminars, etc.) for attendees to rank.

Thursday afternoon slots are assigned by ticket-purchase date; buy early to get the best chance of being assigned to your number one choice.

Then Google will once again sponsor the Thursday night all-attendee party. Thanks, Google!

Friday

We're at a new venue this year: the TimesCenter, a newly opened theater designed by Renzo Piano in the HQ of the New York Times. It's really nice - plenty of catering space, lots of bathrooms, all in one venue (finally!).

The theater has fewer seats than our previous venue, so it's likely that Gel 2008 will sell out of theater tickets. If you're sure you want to attend, buy early. You'll also get a better price.

Room & Board will furnish our break room used for breakfast, coffee breaks, lunch, and cocktails - and will serve as a simulcast room in between: Thanks, Room & Board!

Need help convincing the boss?

• See who comes to Gel (last year's attendee titles & companies)

• Read what "Gel is..." in the words of attendees (such as "the only conference you need to attend, no matter what you do")

• Request a Gel 2007 DVD: if you plan to attend, you just have to promise to organize a group viewing of the DVD, so as to spread the word to coworkers or friends who also want to learn about Gel.

(Of course, if you buy by Dec. 12, we'll send you a Gel '07 DVD.)

• Finally, you can always watch Gel videos, including all of Gel 2005, online, any time, on the Gel videos page.

For those diligently checking the blog - here's the initial speaker list for the Gel 2008 conference in April.

Full announcement coming soon... meanwhile, remember that the earlier you sign up, the better chance you have of getting your first Day 1 choice.

Balducci's, a well-regarded market in Manhattan, made a well-intentioned "oops" this week: from NancyKay...

"Delicious for Chanukah: Boneless Smoked Ham, $6.29/lb"

(Thanks, Jason)

On the trend of designing sites to "look like Web 2.0," by Elliot Jay Stocks:

| View

Richard Serra, in the video below, on how to approach his sculptures: "This isn't here to teach you anything. It's your experience, and what thoughts it engenders, that's your private participation with this work."

That's a good lesson for anyone coming to Gel 2008, or engaging any good experience, for that matter: the challenge is for you to explore what the experience is for you, and what patterns there you can learn from. There may not be an explicit teachable lesson, nicely formatted in a printed binder, but there's a tremendous amount to learn.

See also: Richard Serra and experience design

I've never liked "blow-in inserts," the little subscription cards in every magazine that fall out when you open it. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, gives his perspective:

Take those "blow-in" subscription cards that we put in our magazines. Our circulation department wants to put in as many as possible, because five cards have a slightly higher chance of one being sent back than four, and six is slightly higher yet. As long as those cards earn more in subscriptions than the cost of paper and print, they're consider a good thing from the circulation department perspective.

Yet as we editors who talk to readers and get their email know, people HATE those cards. They fall out of magazines when you pick them up, forcing you to bend over to retrieve them and find a trash can in which to throw them away. This is a real negative cost that hurts our relationship with our readers, but because we can't measure it directly, it's an externality and thus mispriced at zero in the economics of the magazine industry.

Nicely put... they may be supremely annoying, but they work. Much like spam e-mail, it's hard to see how to fix it, when just one knucklehead respondent per million people is enough to support the practice.

Also see Chris's review of a typical card, which he says is full of lies. He even gives an example:

(thanks, bb)