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Archives / March 2009
Two new reviews of Bit Literacy
Amazon is now up to 110 customer reviews of Bit Literacy, thanks to these two that came in today.
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Why should you read this book?
1. It will help you lower your stress levels because you will feel more in control of what you need to get done at home and at work.
2. It will allow you to enjoy your free time more.
This book is an easy read that has helped me manage the "bits" in my life, primarily e-mail traffic, "to dos" and the huge amount of electronic media available.
This book appeals to those who aren't tech savvy as well as those who are very familiar with IT. Some of the pieces are basic if you're a programmer or IT person, but it's easy to skim those few parts.
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Totally worth the quick and concise read. The methods work - after applying just the email approach alone, I got so much more done, and felt so much less stressed! The really big impact for me was on focus - no more nagging, 'what did I forget' or 'what should I be doing now' in the back of my head. I should have read it when I got it 2 years ago. For techies the nugget is in the email, for non techies there lots of tidbits about all different aspects of bit literacy - from files to programs. Totally worth the quick and concise read. I don't think you could read it and not see it impact what you do.
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P.S. There's a Kindle version, too.
Where are the true believers?
My fingers are burning up the keyboard as I type, melting the space bar with this question: Are there any true believers left? I really want to know. And I know it's old-fashioned for me to opine in more than 140 characters ("I really want" maxed out at 140), and even now I've lost half of everyone who started this paragraph, but that right there is partly my point. Is anyone left?
I went onto Twitter this week to post a complaint that JetBlue would see. They charged me $100 to click a button on their website to cancel a flight. This was days in advance of the flight, plenty of time for them to rebook the seat, a situation that Southwest Airlines charges zero, zilch, nada for - and why would they? - it costs the company nothing and makes customers happy.
So I posted something to that effect, and pow, there's JetBlue's quick (if vague) response, cheerfully stating the company line - "cancellations do impact." And here's a URL to send feedback via the website.
We're now in 2009 and socially enlightened enough to have companies answering Twitter posts - what an advance! Well, except that the Twitter post says the same thing that an airline would have said over email ten years ago, or the phone line twenty years ago, or postal mail thirty years ago. We've built an adorable medium - love those bird graphics - that repeats the same old message.
I really don't mean to bash JetBlue, who is right in step with most airlines, charging gotcha fees because they can, because customers have no leverage in the situation. Much like a patient in the maze of health care bureaucracy these days.
Ah, the healthcare parallels. A friend in that industry recently bemoaned the lack of executive support for any investment in patient experience. Everything comes down to the short-term bottom line. Charge the maximum, for the most tongues depressed, at the lowest cost. That's the end of it, and patients should just say thank you.
Should HMOs and hospitals get on Twitter? Should we deliver a peppy Company Line 2.0 to keep the patients at bay?
Or should we invest $50 billion in a new electronic medical record? That's the proposal from the government, and I can't imagine it changing anything. (These writers agree.)
New technology + same old thinking = same old outcome with a buggy interface.
What we need is new thinking. We need some true believers to stand up and say: we're going to serve the patient, serve the traveler, serve the student, serve the customer, rather than follow the script of the past. No longer will we make them pay, or wait, or suffer only because we can get away with it. Now we will work in their interest, because it's the right thing to do for them, and it's the right thing for us in the long run.
There are bright spots. Via Creative Good I'm working with a major health care organization right now that is investing seriously in the patient experience. I've worked with travel companies (though not airlines) that try to help their customers. And I'm on the lookout for more companies who will invest in customer-centered improvements - I know they're out there.
But today at this tough moment, I look at airlines, I look at hospitals, I look at where our taxes are being invested, and I have wonder: really now, where are the true believers? Is this the best we can do?
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P.S. If you're one of those true believers, your community awaits. This is the last week of regular tickets to the Gel 2009 conference, the world's leading gathering for anyone passionate about creating good experience.
The Economist on the end of the "Web 2.0 bubble": "...how Facebook or Twitter will be able to make enough money to keep the lights on for their millions of users remains unclear." (tx, jf)
ImprovEverywhere turned an NYC subway platform into an art gallery. I especially like the pretentious captions they wrote for the "art." Nice work!
(IE founder Charlie Todd, by the way, will be leading a game of Werewolf at the upcoming Gel 2009 conference.)
Magazine hype as leading indicator
In September of '08 I noticed a get-rich-quick scheme on the cover of Entrepreneur magazine, and wrote that it looked familiar - I'd seen similar nonsense in 1999 and 2000.
Today in the NYT, David Brooks writes:
There are no aspirational stories of rags-to-riches success floating around. There are no new how-to-get-rich enthusiasms. There are few magazine covers breathlessly telling readers that some new possibility -- biotechnology, nanotechnology -- is about to change everything. That part of American culture that stokes ambition and encourages risk has gone silent. We are now in an astonishingly noncommercial moment.
Note to self - look to the magazines as leading indicators of the next bubble's pop, about a year in advance.
Shift to holistic
Did you catch one of my favorite words coming from Fed chairman Ben Bernanke this week?
Here's the quote, from the transcript:
We must have a strategy that regulates the financial system as a whole, in a holistic way, not just its individual components.
Ahh, the holistic, strategic approach - something I've found useful in 12 years of customer experience consulting - but which I don't think I've ever heard advocated at the highest levels of our financial system.
Holistic. It's about time we gave credit to this method, now that we've been severely burned by the narrow-minded, blinkered, short-term-profit-at-all-costs mindset foisted on us by specialist "experts" who assured us that there was nothing to worry about, that our inability to understand complex financial instruments was due to our sadly unendowed cranial capacity - and not at all because the opaque, the over-complex, and the over-specialized thing tends to lose sight of, and all grip on, the world.
The holistic - taking the big picture into account - indeed making the big picture, and the long term, our only frame to evaluate the final goodness of what we do... it's about time we gave it credit.
If you're interested, "holistic" and "holy" come from the same root. The idea offered by the word is bigger than any one discipline or tradition.
This shift to the holistic affects us - you, reading this - starting right now - even down to the day-to-day reality of our jobs.
Speaking to a recruiter friend of mine recently, I mentioned that job titles in the "experience" field have always been hard to understand. What's the difference between all of these?
• user experience designer
• user experience analyst
• interaction designer
• user interaction designer
• visual designer
• information architect
• usability specialist
I told my friend that I doubted if "gurus" (let alone the hiring managers at companies) could easily describe the distinctions.
"It doesn't matter much right now," she said. "In a recession, companies are looking for generalists" - that is, people who can do all sorts of things to improve the customer experience.
An evolutionary biologist could probably give us a good case for why this happens: when an ecosystem is under pressure, agility and flexibility become more valuable - those who evolve fastest, or perhaps those who didn't over-specialize, tend to survive.
This moment, as tough as it is, presents a genuine opportunity for the holistic-minded, the generalists, the generally smart and curious (you know who you are!) to come out from hiding and WORK YOUR MAGIC. You're not just a senior user interaction designer; no, more importantly, you're someone who cares about the customer experience - if I may say, the holistic experience - which will determine the life or death of the company, durnit, and you're going to roll up your sleeves to give the company the best chance possible to survive and maybe even grow in this environment. Shout that to anyone who doubts what this mindset can do.
Take off the blinders. Shake free from the job title. Open your mind to learn from other parts of the universe. Listen better - to whatever, whoever may teach.
And if you want to be among kindred spirits who are committed to this holistic way of understanding experience, come to Gel.
See you there.
Another reader achieves inbox zero, thanks to the book.
Carnation cupcakes
I keep seeing these bus ads around Manhattan.
That's $24.99 for what appears to be a dozen mini-carnations, with no stems, in a cupcake holder. Nothing about this product particularly strikes me as natural, sustainable, or inexpensive.
Am I nuts, or is this out of whack for the times we're in?
(Maybe I'm nuts - they're buying bus ads for the thing, so they must have confidence in it.)
The equivalent of "it's Greek to me," in other languages.
How to handle emails that need attention later
Another day, another article on emptying the inbox. Unlike most, this one correctly diagnoses the major challenge in inbox management - dealing with action items that need attention later:
Hold it for later: This is the trickiest option. Some e-mail messages demand complicated answers. ... [and] will take longer than two minutes. Other messages simply require information not yet available.
Unfortunately, the article merely suggests flagging (in Outlook) or starring (in Gmail) the messages in the inbox. "Be careful to avoid letting many such messages pile up," it adds.
For many users that's not a workable solution. What happens if you have (as I do) dozens of followups awaiting your attention over the next weeks or months? Merely flagging inbox messages would fill up an entire screenful of the inbox - permanently.
I'm happy to see the problem correctly diagnosed - but journalists still need to understand the solution. Had I been contacted for the article (ahem!) I would have described that Outlook, Gootodo, and other todo lists offer a way to separate today's todo list from those of future days. Just move action items from the inbox to a proper todo list, and the inbox will be empty - and the action items nicely organized by day.
Coincidentally, just this week I got a note from someone who uses this solution - properly deferring todos to the future in the todo list, not the inbox - and just saw the results. Viveca writes:
Gootodo.com very definitely just got me a job. It reminded me to call someone I'd talked to a year ago to find out whether he wanted to hire my company at an annual event, and he said, "You must have ESP. I was just trying to deal with that now." I did admit my secret power was just a very good software program.
You'd be surprised at how easy this is. (Details in Bit Literacy, or just read the summary in Uncle Mark '09.)
See also:
• Lifehacker article on Gootodo
• It doesn't matter how often you check your email (commenting on another NYT article on this topic)
• The journalist's Technology Wish (commenting on another NYT article that... well, y'know)
Two opposing views of customer experience
One way makes gobs of money, while the other gives away things for free.
One way manipulates people physically and emotionally, while the other invites people to explore and learn.
One way controls every aspect of the experience - temperature, lighting, sound, interface - while the other sets some basic context and leaves everything else open.
One way depends on the latest, flashiest technology to make the biggest buzz, while the other uses processes that are so old and low-tech they've been largely abandoned.
One way tells customers how great they are, as long as they pay; the other way invites people to change - for free.
If you could choose, which way would you create the experience? Which way would you build a company, a nonprofit, a restaurant, a church, a team?
If you're interested at all in the topic of good experience, I would recommend the two videos below as ESSENTIAL VIEWING. You can watch them in a lunch break and see both opposing ways described in detail.
They come from my Gel (Good Experience Live) conference - one from last year, one from the year before - and show the vast difference between these two approaches.
The first talk is by Natasha Schull, an MIT professor who studies Las Vegas casinos and their latest efforts to "focus on the customer". Like any tool, customer experience methods can be used for good or ill. I'll say it again: this is essential viewing for anyone in this field:
The second talk comes from John Williams, founder of the Frog's Leap winery in Napa Valley, California. For almost 30 years, John Williams has built an organization that creates good outcomes for customers, employees, and the earth. (Frog's Leap was organic from the beginning, long before it became trendy.)
To refer back to the top of this column - visitors to the winery are invited to eat from the community garden for free, and learn about the organic and environmentally friendly practices there. The winery uses dry farming processes, which have been mostly abandoned in Napa, in favor of newer, higher-tech drip-farming practices. And of course, the wine is outstanding.
It's a case study in "creating good" in many ways simultaneously - which is exactly the integrated approach I believe in.
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See also: Frog's Leap featured in NYTimes story, In Napa, Some Wineries Choose the Old Route
Wiesel on Madoff
Elie Wiesel on punishment for Bernie Madoff. From the Times:
Asked what punishment he would like to see for Mr. Madoff, Mr. Wiesel said: "I would like him to be in a solitary cell with only a screen, and on that screen for at least five years of his life, every day and every night, there should be pictures of his victims, one after the other after the other, all the time a voice saying, 'Look what you have done to this old lady, look what you have done to that child, look what you have done,' nothing else."
A mosaic of social-networking services
Scott makes a good point about social networking as a mosaic of connectedness:
someone needs to spell out the various emerging definitions of community, eg:
- your geo-dispersed acquaintances from across your lifespan (facebook, twitter)
- a geo-dispersed network around a topic (ning)
- your local network/organization around a topic (meetup group)
- your neighborhood
Yes, he's the founder of Meetup, but the service is so good (I'm a registered user myself) that it does belong here. (He's also speaking at Gel'09 in a few weeks.)
