Archives / January 2008

UChicago prof: "If Congress and President Bush want to increase consumer spending, they should have pitched these $600 and $1,200 checks as 'tax bonuses' instead." His behavioral experiments suggest that giving people money and calling it a "bonus" causes them to spend it more freely than if it's called a "rebate."

(I know there are lots of political opinions on whether we should even have tax rebates/bonuses at all... here I'm just pointing out the power of framing an issue in different ways...)

NYT: Hot water from the tap should never be used for cooking or drinking. Who knew?

Starbucks tries to revive its business with a focus on, guess what...

[Starbucks CEO] Schultz has said he wants to refocus on the "customer experience," recapturing some of the magic of the chain's early years, when employees — who had heard the term barista before Starbucks came along? — made the drinks by hand and customers were excited by top-notch coffee.

Mr. Schultz faces a difficult task: He has to slow down the company to make stores feel more like hip neighborhood coffeehouses while also delivering the steady growth that investors have come to expect from Starbucks.

On the heels of my last post about messing with sites, here's an unusual product list from Dutch retailer HEMA.

Let this product page load, then wait...

(thanks, lydia)

This is really interesting: netdisaster.com allows you to wreak all sorts of havoc on the website of your choice.

One of the more benign options is to fry an egg, over easy, on a site... like Bit Literacy. (Or is it over "good easy"?) Try it here.

Paint guns, spilled coffee, plagues of flies, and many rude options await: it might even help relieve your frustration with the many poorly designed sites out there...

Link: netdisaster.com

P.S. The "demonstration" mode (as in protest demonstrators) is surprisingly clever - here are the demonstrators on the Bit Literacy site:

Kevin Kelly answers the question, "Why are you optimistic?"

I am optimistic because I think that while disease, illness, stupidity, wickedness, problems, and evil fill 49% of the world, health, wisdom, light and goodness fill 51% -- and that tiny 2% difference compounded over time is what makes civilization and cultural.

That thought will stay with me. If some days (and some places) seem to have more than their fair share of the bad stuff, take the long view: the good stuff wins in the end.

This New York Times article perfectly describes why I don't eat beef:

[Since] the stomachs of cattle are meant to digest grass, not grain, cattle raised industrially thrive only in the sense that they gain weight quickly. This diet made it possible to remove cattle from their natural environment and encourage the efficiency of mass confinement and slaughter. But it causes enough health problems that administration of antibiotics is routine, so much so that it can result in antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten the usefulness of medicines that treat people.

...If price spikes don’t change eating habits, perhaps the combination of deforestation, pollution, climate change, starvation, heart disease and animal cruelty will gradually encourage the simple daily act of eating more plants and fewer animals.

One of the challenges of bit literacy is to form a media diet, which should include books, as hard as it may be to actually finish them in this info-saturated age. From The Onion, Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book:

"The whole thing was really engrossing," said Meyer, referring not to a movie, video game, or competitive sports match, but rather a full-length, 288-page novel filled entirely with words. "There were days when I had a hard time putting it down."

Even more bizarre, Meyer is believed to have done most of his reading during his spare time—time when the outwardly healthy and stable resident could have literally been doing anything else, be it aimlessly surfing the Internet, taking a nap, or simply just staring at his bedroom wall.

See also: The media diet chapter in Bit Literacy

As I wrote in Good Experience Games on January 14, the downloadable game Passage is "a MUST-play. The whole game lasts only five minutes. Just play it."

Download Passage here.

Play it first, and then read the creator's statement, linked on that same page, which describes what he was after.

My own take is that Passage is one of the most emotionally evocative digital games I've ever played - maybe the most. It's definitely a good experience on a number of levels. Just play it.

And now the Wall Street Journal has covered Passage. Once again, it's a good idea to actually play the game before reading the article.

Below, some screenshots from the game.

See also: All my game picks at Good Experience Games

This is one crazy bike trail.

(via Information Nation)

Quick review of Bit Literacy from a blogger - one of the best short reviews I've seen. She absolutely gets the e-mail and todo chapters...

"How bad can a cell phone company get?" So asked EyelessWriter after finding that Verizon Wireless customer service reps quoted the wrong prices over 90% of the time.

A family member of mine is having a similar problem with Verizon Wireless right now, as multiple reps have promised to refund a mistaken charge and haven't; and have promised to call back ("they absolutely will call you tomorrow," that sort of thing)... and haven't. At least Verizon Wireless is consistent!

As for me, I'm an iPhone user - see my review in Uncle Mark 2008 - so I'm of course on AT&T. And so far AT&T hasn't displayed anything like the constant disappointments from Verizon Wireless.

(Thanks for the pointer, Paul)

Matt Cornell, productivity blogger, on a conversation about Bit Literacy:

...the book is not just about email and getting the inbox to zero (a major change for most of us). It's about managing effectively all the bitstreams coming into our lives. Mark says the world has changed, but most people haven't caught up yet - the always-on lifestyle, urgency, and haste make us neither effective nor sustainable.

The educator's perspective on bit literacy is slightly different from that of the businessperson. Rather than focusing on productivity in the workplace, the educator is more concerned with giving students basic skills to organize their thoughts, know their resources, and properly research their papers. Resourcefulness is important, as is evaluating digital sources.

Here's one educator's review of Bit Literacy (by the president of NAIS, the National Association of Independent Schools) and a transcript of a Web chat I conducted recently with the same folks.

See also:

• Bit Literacy book site

• Amazon page (with 68 reader reviews)

Sometimes the line between "good" and "bad" experiences is blurry. For example, the New York Times reviews Cipriani, a high-end Fifth Avenue restaurant:

Despite scorching reviews, high prices and recent guilty pleas by Cipriani family members to tax evasion charges, people still return, faithful to the $19.95 bellini (white peach juice and prosecco), the $31.95 hamburger and the $55.95 veal Milanese.

In the brutal New York restaurant business, competitors to Harry Cipriani open every year — serving better food at more reasonable prices and catering to patrons with slavish care and roomier seating — and promptly go out of business.

So how does Cipriani not just stay in business, but thrive? One pundit suggests that the bad experience itself helps sustain the place.

"It's as if there is some perverse director who has constructed a place that pushes the customers to extremes," Ms. Bradley said, "to see how much they will pay for bad food, to watch them wait in front of an audience even if they have a reservation. It's a place where people are treated badly, and it is set up so that you also get to see how funny it is to watch other people watch you being treated badly."

The answer is that it isn't all a bad experience. Cipriani's customers are there because they want something very specific: just to be around their own type, New York market makers and celebrities. Service, food quality, and prices have very little to do with the desired experience. So when a new restaurant opens with great food and comfy chairs, but no celebrities, it fails to attract that customer type.

New York insiders who are in such a hurry to gain more capital (political, social, financial) want this narrow experience, because it delivers the goods - even at the expense of all the other elements "normal" people might look for in a restaurant.

Contrast this with Danny Meyer, the top-rated New York restaurateur, who succeeds in exactly the opposite way: he creates an integrated, authentic good experience for his customers. (See the Good Experience profile of Danny Meyer or watch the video clip of Danny at Gel 2007.) I've been to every one of Danny's New York restaurants and have been happy about every single one of them: the spirit of hospitality infuses the entire experience.

So we see two different types of successful experiences:

• the narrow experience, which focuses all its resources on one thing that (certain) customers really want. This, of course, takes resources away from other elements, creating a lopsided outcome that only appeals to certain people at certain times. It's a risky strategy in the long run.

• the integrated experience, which tries to deliver quality in multiple aspects. This is harder and often takes longer to accomplish, but it creates a strong foundation for long-term success. Hedgehogs generally do well here.

Personally, I usually prefer the integrated good experiences, since they "gel" many different things and I like Gel - but obviously, seeing the Cipriani approach, it's not for everyone.

P.S. One other element of Cipriani's success, bizarrely, may be its overly inflated prices. This Economist article (reg. may be required) cites studies suggesting that people enjoy overpriced things in part because they've paid so much for them.

From the This Is Broken group on Flickr, ree.linker points out that the "new and improved" Uncle Ben's, the larger box in the back, actually contains less rice. And the improvement is...?

From the This Is Broken group on Flickr, liamvictor points to the "way out"... well, several of them:

Quick note for anyone who uses, or is thinking of using, Gootodo on an iPhone.

Yesterday's new iPhone software update allows you to modify the icons on the Home screen, even adding icons for favorite websites. I've saved Gootodo as one of my Home screen icons - a much easier way to get to my todo list via the iPhone!

More on the iPhone update here.

euroGel '06 speaker Ted Dewan contributed to this roundup of user-unfriendly public seating.

See also this video clip of Ted Dewan at euroGel '06.

One of my all-time favorite broken photos, from the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. Kafka would have approved.

Here's the original entry.

(Submit your own broken photo in the This Is Broken group on Flickr.)

Here's another example of technology trying to solve a problem that would be handled with a few minutes of bit literacy training.

For those camera buyers who haven't read the managing photos chapter in Bit Literacy (summary: take tons of shots up front, then filter later to a very few good ones), camera companies are touting a shiny new technology - an automatic smile-finder, which will identify "good" photos for you. (Darn those moments when we actually have to think for ourselves!)

As Daniel Rutter points out in this post, the SmileCheck really does find toothy grins:

Mmm, good photo!

Here's a small one-scene customer experience play for today:

Setting: Bloomingdale's, the famous Manhattan retailer.

Players: Man with baby in stroller; nearby retail clerk.

Man notices hastily printed sign on elevator: "Temporarily out of service."

Man to clerk: "Excuse me, is there another elevator we could use?"

Clerk: "No. There's an escalator over there."

Man exits store right.

Why is this customer experience broken? Let me count the the ways.

• Bloomingdale's, a major retailer spread across many floors, has only one elevator accessible from its Lexington Avenue entrance.

• The clerk, upon seeing a customer in need, suggests an irrelevant solution and then goes back to work.

• There is no acknowledgment that this is an inconvenience - not the clerk, not even the sign. Customers who can't climb stairs or stand on an escalator - customers in wheelchairs, parents with strollers - are just out of luck.

• The company loses revenue from this transaction and future transactions when the customer will likely choose competing retailers.

In related news, here's a county courthouse in St. Petersburg, Florida, submitted to our This Is Broken group on Flickr by geekman55855:

The wheelchair ramp just goes to a landing with more stairs.

As a followup to Saturday's restroom review (here), the NYT reviews several other NYC public restrooms: a gingerbread house in Central Park, a fancy St. Regis palace, and a functional Port Authority john.

In this review, Rex Miller calls Bit Literacy "the most useful book of 2007":

I know it sounds too good to be true. I get over 100 emails every day. Since I read the book I've had an empty inbox at the end of every day for the last three weeks.

See also the now 66 reader reviews on the Amazon site.

The NYT reviews a new public toilet near Madison Square Park:

Indeed, the toilet calls to mind not a port-o-let, but rather the sort of room one imagines adjoined the personal quarters of Capt. James T. Kirk on the Starship Enterprise. It is a 25-cent journey to the future — and, almost secondarily, a not unpleasant restroom.

I like how the subsection header is called "Facilities Review," as though that's a class of reviews (along with movies, architecture, dance, and the rest).

NYT film critic A.O. Scott recommends movies for kids - in particular, current PG-13 and even R options:

children, more than critics, are receptive to anything that doesn’t bore them. Mine were enchanted by “Persepolis,” for instance, which is after all the story of a rebellious young girl contending with unjust authority.

Agreed on Persepolis - an outstanding film that I'd recommend for anyone who can read the subtitles (or speaks French).

You're Chase. The credit crisis hurt you badly, and you need to reconnect with customers. But competitors like Commerce Bank are growing fast and taking away your customers. (Commerce Bank offers customer-centered benefits like weekend hours and free change-counting.)

What's a multinational bank to do, to show the world that it can compete? Do you make a strategic investment in the customer experience?

No. If you're Chase, you spend $70 million on a new ad campaign, mainly to buy TV commercials with a new boastful tag line.

From the New York Times, Trying to Be Heard Above the Din, and Be Trusted:

When "Chase" is used as a verb, he noted, it "has a lot of energy and pursuit behind it." One television spot, in which an ordinary man makes a James Bond-like entrance, highlights Chase's fraud alert service.

So much for weekend hours, change-counting, and well-trained tellers. Chase's strategy is to buy more advertising.

Correction: This column originally listed Citibank, but the article is (obviously, from the pull quote) about Chase. Correction made - sorry for the error.

See also:

• Budgeting for advertising and the customer experience

• Study in Comcast branding

• Customer experience and umbrellas

What do Amazon, Apple, SAS, Whole Foods, and Zappos have in common?

They succeed by creating a good experience... for their customers, or their employees, or their suppliers, or all of the above.

Let's open 2008 in Good Experience with this idea: the idea is catching on. We now can point to case studies of major successes that explicitly and provably stem from a focus on good experience. (And they're getting more frequent; these five case studies all popped up within the last few weeks.)

Joe Nocera's analysis of Amazon is extra-entertaining because it shows Wall Street analysts delivering ever-more complex reasons for the results - R&D expenditure ratios and the like. As CEO Jeff Bezos has been telling them for years, it's the customer experience.

The Times also covered the Apple Store's customer experience with the striking statistic that 20% of Apple's corporate revenues now come from the store. The store is known, most of all, for its customer experience.

The Economist covered the software company 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." Guess how SAS's results look. (Link may require registration.)

Here's a quick anecdote on a holiday customer experience at Whole Foods. I think it's indicative of the general "good experience" strategy of the company.

And finally, the CEO of Zappos.com refers to what as the source of their success? "Any money that we would have spent on marketing, let's instead put it back into the customer experience..."

Let's hope that 2008 is filled with even more of these case studies, and more opportunities for all of us to create good experiences - within our companies, schools, hospitals, community groups, families, and for ourselves.

Resources

Good Experience will, I hope, continue to be a resource in encouraging and spotlighting leaders. Here are three resources that can help:

• Our annual in-person gathering, for anyone interested in good experience, is coming up in April: Good Experience Live, also known as the Gel conference... Gel 2008 is April 24-25 in NYC.

• To create space for authentic good experience, many people first need to escape the oppression of digital technology. See the book, Bit Literacy, that has made a difference for so many readers.

• For anyone at an operating company - manager, VP, or other executive - who wants to really dive in, our Councils are the best community I know of people who are encouraging good experience in global business. Drop a line for more info, or watch this video.

P.S. If you just want a pure fun experience, scan through my compilation of every Fun Stuff entry from 2007, including highlights of my favorites from the year.

Mike Moran on having read Bit Literacy:

I'm the kind of person that started to read Getting Things Done, but I never got it done. (Yeah, I really never finished the book.) But someone recommended Bit Literacy to me, and I have actually made progress. If you're finding that Internet marketing has dumped you into a world of information overload that you can't cope with, you might want to read it, too.

You can check out Bit Literacy here, including a free first chapter.

Or see the 66 reader reviews on Amazon.

NYT on Amazon's success: columnist Joe Nocera puts it well (emphasis mine below). Amazon is winning because it focuses on the customer experience.

Also interesting that the Wall Street analysts can't see the forest for the trees. (Bloviating about "R&D expansion" pays the bills a lot better than simply saying "Amazon is doing well because of its commitment to customer experience.")

From the column:

When I spoke to analysts and investors, they had all kinds of reasons for Amazon's performance last year. "They finally reached a point where their R&D spending was not expanding as fast as their revenues," said Citigroup's Mark S. Mahaney. He and others also talked about Amazon's success in international markets, its fast-growing (and high margin) merchant market, which allows merchants to sell goods alongside Amazon, and its rapidly expanding Web services business....

But I couldn't help wondering if maybe there wasn't something else at play here, something Wall Street never seems to take very seriously. Maybe, just maybe, taking care of customers is something worth doing when you are trying to create a lasting company. Maybe, in fact, it's the best way to build a real business — even if it comes at the expense of short-term results.

It is almost impossible to read or see an interview with Mr. Bezos in which he doesn't, at some point, begin to wax on about what he likes to call "the customer experience." ... "They care about having the lowest prices, having vast selection, so they have choice, and getting the products to customers fast," he said. "And the reason I'm so obsessed with these drivers of the customer experience is that I believe that the success we have had over the past 12 years has been driven exclusively by that customer experience. We are not great advertisers. So we start with customers, figure out what they want, and figure out how to get it to them."