Archives / August 2008

For some end-of-summer fun, try Good Experience Games. If the boss sees you playing, explain that you're doing research into engaging user interfaces. (I actually do think it's healthy to continually try new UIs.) The several most recent games are all well worth a try.

Enjoy, and talk to you after (what is in the US) the holiday weekend!

P.S. If you haven't read it, one of the most important Good Experience posts recently is What to believe in a digital world. Make sure you watch the video!

These images of Gel 2008 by Michael Grossman give a nice overview of the day.

Michael writes, "There was such a wonderful assortment of stories shared across many disciplines and domains. ... I was able to walk away from this conference with a lot of ideas and data to include in my work."

Registration for Gel 2009 is now open... (Thursday, April 30 - Friday, May 1, 2009 in New York City)

Watch this video. Great views of the Death Star and starships, as seen from San Francisco.

This is now the end of video as evidence of anything, as Kevin Kelly rightly puts it.

In a world saturated by bits, what's real? What can we believe? Not the bits themselves - a one is easy to flip to a zero, especially with widespread tools. There's an easy answer, again quoting Mr. Kelly: "the only way to believe an image [or video] is to trust its source, rather than its content."

This is why it's so important to know the source of any digital file. The Media Diet chapter of Bit Literacy gets very detailed on this point, and that's why.

In today's business world, it doesn't take much to be more customer-centric than average. Most executives never observe their customers to understand the customer experience. It's easy to fix with LBWA: listening by walking around.

From a WSJ report on the qualities of good managers:

Direct knowledge about customers also helped the managers see what was most important to the customers in terms of products and services. One manager with a home-electronics retailer went directly to the sales floor to find ways to serve small-business customers better. He talked to the customers himself, asking them about their businesses. When he met real-estate agents, for example, he learned how much time they spent in their cars. So, even though they had come to the store to buy, say, a personal computer, he steered them toward other products that could improve their efficiency on the road, such as a GPS navigational device or a cellphone-speaker system.

This frequent in-store dialogue taught him and other salespeople to see previously unidentified sales opportunities. Their experience, in turn, led to a companywide initiative to teach employees to acquire customer insights through interactions in stores.

If your customers are online, then go to a Starbucks or Barnes & Noble, buy some coffee for a customer, open the laptop, and sit with them - one by one - to observe their experience on your site. Done: for five bucks, and five minutes of your time, you're already more customer-centric than average.

See also:

• Don't do what your users tell you

• Exceptions to listening to customers?

• You DO talk to customers, don't you?

• Case study in customer experience

(WSJ pointer - thanks, Tom!)

The Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing worked well for the Olympics. It was one of many possible designs: here are all the designs considered for the stadium. (Scroll down to see them.)

In A Treatment Room With a View, the WSJ covers patient-centered efforts in health care. For example, a new cancer center in Milwaukee has...

floor-to-ceiling windows, a view of woods and a pond, and privacy curtains that Ms. Donoghue can close or leave open to chat with the staff. "I like the feeling of space and brightness and airiness," says the 70-year-old. "Everything is so patient-oriented." The heightened focus on patient-treatment areas represents the latest effort by medical institutions to redesign facilities with patients in mind...

Two pitfalls in patient-centered investments:

• Investing in the wrong place: some hospitals invest millions in a fancy new lobby, to project a better image, but leave the treatment areas unchanged. Superficial and misguided.

• Leaving others out: upgrading one treatment area leaves less money to invest in other areas, like basic needs of other patients or hospital departments.

Health care is a complex topic and there are no easy answers. In general, though, patient-centered initiatives are good and long overdue. Which is why at Gel 2008, this past April, we covered the topic with Dr. Bridget Duffy, Chief Experience Officer of the Cleveland Clinic.

Fedex should send better emails. Check out this email I just got from their "No Reply Return Manager":

Here's the experience of reading the note:

• It starts by yelling my name. Hello back at you, NO REPLY RETURN MANAGER!

• After hello comes the customary "G31Z8Y25." I always like to say that when I meet someone new.

• Then, assuming I haven't deleted this or marked it as spam after the yelling and the robot-Klingon, "Please access FedEx Online Label to ..." something something something. Are you sure this isn't spam? At best it appears to be a waste of time so far.

• Forcing myself to continue reading: "...to process your return." Right, process my return, right, sure... oh wait. You mean the widget I bought from Acme Corp, that was defective and I'm sending back - this has something to do with that?

• The instructions continue from Fedex's perspective - how to use their app, what to do if their app doesn't work, etc. etc. ...

• But I think I've figured it out: Fedex is writing me on behalf of Acme, which has requested that I send back the widget. This email lists instructions on how to print out a mailing label to Fedex the widget back.

And that, my friends, is how the email should have been worded. To write a proper email, lead with the hook - the main idea - and explain it from the customer's perspective.

Let's try it again. Here's a very quick rewrite:

From: no-reply@fedex.com (FedEx returns department)
To: Mark Hurst
Subject: Please print a shipping label for your return to Acme Corp.

Hi Mark,

Acme Corp. has asked us to help you print out a shipping label for your product return.

To get your shipping label, click this link, or paste this address into your browser:
http://www.fedex.com/example/example/123abc

If you have any questions, please call us at 1-800-676-2775.

Thanks,
Fedex Returns Department

P.S. Please don't reply to this email. But feel free to call us if you have questions!

That took me five minutes. Lead with the hook, and repeat it in the Subject line; make the language clear, concise, and customer-centered; and then end the note as soon as possible.

(See more in the "Creating Bits" chapter in Bit Literacy. Fedex, get some copies of the book to pass around the office!)

My own paraphrase/rough notes of Cory Doctorow's talk tonight at an EFF event in NYC. Any omissions or errors are mine - here goes:

Let me start by saying where I got something wrong. The Internet isn't a copy machine. I used to think so, but it's not. The Internet is indeed very good at making copies, and in fact there have been past legal attempts to regulate every single copy that gets made... from the hard drive to the RAM, from the RAM to the frame buffer, to the router, to the switch, and so on. Even today there's legislation on the table, "three strikes you're out," which would turn off any citizen's Net access if they're accused of making improper copies three times.

With all that said, a copying machine is not really what the Internet is. Instead its main function is zeroing the cost of collaboration and organizing new institutions. The role of any institution isn't primarily to run the state, or make refrigerators or cars - it's solely to get people marching in the same direction. The Internet enables us to create institutions of all sizes and types, and EFF is the organization that helps protect our rights to do just that.

The Internet makes it so easy to do this that we're doing it all the time without even knowing it. When you went online today, you were using - either on your computer or on a Web server - the Linux operating system, which was built by volunteers in a decentralized effort. Try building a skyscraper that way. But it doesn't require writing an operating system; just create a hyperlink on a page. When Yahoo launched, they had paid employees manually categorizing every single site on the Web, and then Google came along and used the knowledge built into those hyperlinks by millions of individual Web users, and they won - their margins were so much higher than Yahoo's. BoingBoing has more readers than Wired and our margins are higher than theirs, too.

See also the transcript of Cory's recent Cambridge lecture.

You think that Sony alarm clock was bad? A friend wrote in about this KitchenAid toaster:

In the old days, a toaster was simple: put the bread in, and pull down the lever. That's all. The toast would pop up when it was done.

After decades of product devolution, we have this toaster:

You have to lower the bread by pushing down the lever, selecting the number for toasting, then turning the knob (I always forget this step). When it's done, the toaster beeps, then you have the raise the lever to get the toast out.

Old way: pull lever.

New way: pull lever, select number, turn knob, raise lever.

Think of the needless over-engineering it must have taken to create such a complex product. A toaster is a simple product; why not make it simple? Why are productivity tools too complex? Why are alarm clocks too complex?

This isn't an idle question. The more time designers spend over-complicating things, the less time they have to work on genuinely important problems.

From the This Is Broken group on Flickr - if it requires a detailed instruction card to set the alarm, the design is broken.

I'm often amazed by the poor design of common tools. We've had digital alarm clocks as a technology for, what, 25 years? And a major company like Sony - which makes the alarm clock above - still hasn't figured out how to make it usable?

Maybe the problem stems in part from consumers who buy the shiniest, most complex product they see on the store shelf. Perhaps there's not enough demand for simple, solid products.

But I have to believe that Sony, with all its design and product-management resources, could have come up with a design that is attractive for the general buyer and achieves a baseline of usability. I'd expect no less after 25 years.

Khoi Vinh, who heads up design at NYTimes.com, complains about most "productivity" systems today - and he's exactly right:

I no longer find the kind of satisfaction that I used to in laying the groundwork for better productivity, in acquiring complex tools and spending copious amounts of time learning them and setting them up in preparation for the productivity gains they promise to yield for me. I just want to get stuff done with simple, reliable tools and methods that are easily comprehended straight out of the box, and then go about my business. (So, no thank you to the tremendous waste of time that is GTD.)

Exactly why I wrote a chapter on todo lists in Bit Literacy - a good todo list is essential today, just as important as an email program - and yet most people don't know which tool to use. I'm biased, of course, but I still recommend my simple, easy-to-use, powerful todo list: Gootodo.com.

Tech companies should pay attention to Khoi's complaint about complex tools. As techie bloggers go, so (eventually) goes the rest of the market - with millions of users.

(thanks, scott)

Because of a tech glitch, Netflix stopped shipping DVDs for three days last week. But customers took it in stride, because Netflix "got ahead of the disaster, put a profuse and prominent apology on its site and sent customers e-mail messages so they learned first about the problem from the company, not some angry tech blog."

(quoting bits blog)

In praise of emptiness: today's NYT on how summer camp used to let kids do nothing.

"A certain kind of kid suffers from a deficit of nothing all year long, and now, it seems, even summer camps don't supply it."

What does it do to a young mind when every minute of the day (month, year, life) is scheduled? Emptiness is increasingly valuable, it seems.

See also: More columns on bit literacy

Kevin Kelly on the Beijing opening ceremonies: a much better analysis than my little post - and I agree with Kevin - there was a lot to learn from the spectacle.

You probably can't get into Waverly Inn's dining room, because you're not a Hollywood star. This is an experience that trades on exclusivity - which is exciting for some people. But there are other approaches to good experience.

My favorite restaurateur, Danny Meyer, wrote about hospitality in his book Setting the Table (and also spoke at Gel 2007). Respect for the customer is central; whether the customer is famous is not as important.

See also: Two very different types of good experience (comparing Cipriani's customer experience to that of Danny Meyer's restaurants)

Singing the lives of New York's food-cart vendors. By Rhett & Link, presenters at Gel 2008.

And don't miss their visit to Terry Border's studio. Terry also presented at Gel this year and creates the brilliant Bent Objects website.

UXPioneers interviewed me about customer experience. Thanks, Tamara!

Brilliant comparison of the iPhone 3G's TV commercial - look how fast and smooth it looks on camera - versus the same actions in the real world.

The person who made the video writes, "I like Apple products, but I dislike being misled by deceptive advertising more."

(via 37signals)

Don't do what your users tell you:

There is almost always a root cause for what your users are saying. ... When you listen to what your users are telling you instead of what they're saying, you have the opportunity to incorporate improvements that still fit into your vision of your product.

...Just watching someone play my game and see them learn from their mistakes was an incredible experience.

Note:

• the power of direct, face-to-face customer observation
• paying attention to what users do rather than what they say
• customer needs are different from feature requests

Below, one moment from the opening ceremony in Beijing.

They nailed it. What an outstanding production.

Any volunteers to follow that act? We need a new show in London in four years.

(Photograph by Adam Pretty/Getty Images - many more great photos of the event at Boston.com.)

Thought for the day. It's easy enough to get people to acknowledge an exception to a rule. But to change their mind about the rule is way more difficult, and often impossible.

Several new comments on The JetBlue experience, sliding. Well worth hearing about other readers' experiences with JetBlue.

(I didn't get my usual email notifications about the new comments, which delayed my posting them. Anyway, sorry for the delay. Are the techie planets out of alignment this week? Lots of bugs recently.)

Here's a cautionary tale for the digital age. A couple of years ago I was clicking around a website I ran at the time and was surprised to find that several dozen images were missing: I mean the files themselves were just GONE, having disappeared from the server.

I got in touch with the company that hosted the site. Since they were reluctant at first to take a look, I contacted management and got them to address the issue. These were important images - irreplaceable, some of them - and I wanted them found.

Long story short, the company never found the images. Seems that they were accidentally deleted in a server update of some sort. The company apologized profusely, but nothing else - no compensation, no usage credit. They didn't have to, since the terms of use of their service were all in their favor. I don't use their service any more, but I did learn an important lesson: while I may allow another company to store my data, I'm still responsible for it.

This came to mind when I read about Apple's recent problematic launch of Mobile Me, in which the email of thousands of customers disappeared from their accounts. As far as I can tell, Apple has now resolved the issue - see this post - but it took some time, and a lot of customer complaints and bad press, to activate Apple to go public, take responsibility, and fix it.

And then I saw the story of this user, who was locked out of his Google account: no access to his Gmail, Google docs, or his photos - all disabled by Google, for (initially) no apparent reason. It all turned out OK, but it underscores a lesson about how these relationships are structured.

We're increasingly dependent on technology companies to manage our bits. And I mean FULLY dependent. For a given file, we rely 100% on a single company to provide that file, on demand, whenever we ask - and to store it safely until the next time we ask for it.

This is different from other areas of our life, where we rely on a system of providers. If I need to fly to San Francisco, I rely on the airline industry to get me there. If one airline stops flying, I can still get to SF with another provider... yes, with some delays, but I'll get the service I need from someone else.

That's not the case with our digital lives. If your Gmail account is disabled, you'll need Google's help to get back on. There's no one else you can go to for help.

I don't think any of this is a problem, as long as users are aware of how these relationships work. And that brings us to liability.

Any airline is liable for certain aspects of your customer experience. Basic needs must be met - arriving alive, getting your luggage - or they'll pay. They're legally bound.

This is not the case with most consumer-oriented technology services. Read the terms of use for any site you rely on, and try to find the company's legal liability if it loses your data or delays your account access. It's not there.

And when a company isn't legally liable, it can be difficult to motivate them to fix your problem.

Here's an example: Amazon.com, which I generally like, recently lost the ninety-or-so customer reviews of my book Bit Literacy. Check the book page and note, "No customer reviews yet." (Update: Eight hours after I posted this column, the reviews reappeared on the book page. Thanks to whoever at Amazon finally got it done.) As the vast majority of the reviews were very positive, their departure certainly affected sales.

My staff has been emailing Amazon since the problem occurred, and the best we've gotten back is something to the effect of "we'll try to resolve your issue within two to three business days." We're now on Day 26, and they still don't know where the reviews are.

If I was one of a thousand authors suffering from this problem, the New York Times would pick up the story and the bad press would activate Amazon into fixing it. Or if the reviews had disappeared from, say, a Harry Potter book page, you can bet Jeff Bezos would be on the phone with the engineers in a heartbeat. But a single, non-celebrity user suffering this issue does not a press story make; and so I wait (or rather waited for 26 days).

I want to point this out because this can happen to you, too, with any email, any photo, any file, ANY data that isn't sitting on a hard drive within arm's reach. So beware of the bits you send into the cloud. I support the idea of using these services, just as long as users understand the risk they run by ceding all control, and none of the liability, to a third-party company.

I don't mean this as a criticism. Most technology companies are well-meaning. They're adding value to the marketplace, often with services provided at no charge. It's a good deal. It's just that, when (not if) something goes wrong with the technology, the user generally has no leverage on the company to get attention. Unless you're a celebrity or one of thousands of angry customers, you're unlikely to get much more than a "sorry, we just can't find your files."

The key is to be aware. To reword that important life lesson: if you want any important data stored right, you'd better back it up yourself.

P.S. I should mention that the hot new buzzword in Silicon Valley is "cloud computing." Get ready for a slew of articles on this in the next year, announcing the new techno-utopia we'll enjoy when we give all our data, all the time, to technology companies to mediate for us. Do you think legal liability will get a mention?

If you own a Kindle, you can now get my book Bit Literacy for four dollars via the Kindle Store - get it here.

And there you have it, a book about bits, in bits. Whoa, meta.

Of course, you can still get the hardcover "Bit Literacy" here (for more... hey, dead trees are expensive to move around!)

(See also - my customer experience review of the Kindle)

"It’s the perfect Coney Island distraction — it’s not quite delivering what it offers, but it’s putting a unique experience on the table."

So says the man who has set up a Waterboarding Thrill Ride at Coney Island.

At right: animatronic figures act out waterboarding when a customer pays a dollar.