Archives / January 2010

Here's how to figure out if a new product is going to succeed. Just fill in the blank: "With this, you can finally..."

To succeed, a new product must...

1. promise to solve a problem - with people saying "finally!" when they hear it;

2. and then deliver on that promise.

Let's try some examples:

• The iPhone allows you to finally use a handheld device for phone calls, photos, music, and more with an easy-to-use interface. No more horrible user-hostile smartphone designs.

• The Kindle allows you to finally order a new book and start reading it within seconds. No trip to the bookstore, no waiting two days for a shipment.

• The Wii allows you to finally play video games with everyone in the family, at all ages, right away, without having to learn a complicated gaming interface.

The iPhone, Kindle, and Wii all promised to solve a problem, and all delivered. In the case of the iPhone, hardly anyone expected it to deliver as well as it did. No surprise that these devices have enjoyed great success. (I wrote, early on, positive reactions to all three of them, in fact - iPhone, Kindle, and Wii.)

Which brings me to the Apple iPad. Let's fill in the blank.

With the iPad, you can finally... what?

Read the paper on a big screen? Work without the distraction of a keyboard and mouse? I'm being serious - I actually am interested to know what the hook is. What's the nagging problem that just got nailed?

I know, it's got lots of features, and Apple's luscious look and feel, all good. But what exactly is it? A laptop without a keyboard and protective clamshell? A more expensive Kindle with color and fewer books? A huge iPhone without the phone calls?

On the other hand, ebook readers are getting popular enough that Apple might simply need to have a device in the race. Maybe it's not necessary this time to have a "finally!" moment. But plenty of people have come to expect that moment from Apple launches.

P.S. Yes, the name iPad is a strange choice, especially for female customers. But I thought a product named "Wii" would be a tough sell for grown men. It wasn't.

P.P.S. See also this parody commercial:

Paul English, co-founder of Kayak, in an Inc. magazine profile:

If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they'll actually stop what they're doing and fix the code. Then we don't have those questions anymore.

Other tips I liked: get an especially annoying ring on the customer service phone; send out a random customer service email to the company and investors; measure revenue per employee; don't read business books.

English says he also works with Partners In Health, which is one of the nonprofits I recommend for donations for Haitian relief.

The recent events in Haiti have reminded me of some basic truths of good experience. Such as, it's a good experience to have a roof over my head. It's a good experience to be healthy, and have access to food and running water and electricity. And so on.

I often write about the importance of basics. But here we see basics as a matter of life and death.

On the other side of the spectrum, it's easy (I'll speak for myself) to get wrapped up in the details of, say, the flow of a website, or the tactics of a product design. What a poorly worded tag line! What an awful color scheme! (Or what a great tag line, or what a good color scheme.) And so on.

Of course, there's a legitimate value to the concerns of the designer, the product manager, even, dare I say, the customer experience consultant. I just think it's important to keep things in perspective - so that when we brush something off and say "hey, it's not life or death," know that we're lucky to be able to say that.

I've thought for a long time that any discussion of good experience - whether at a conference, or in a book, or in an ongoing newsletter! - should be careful to include voices from all parts of the spectrum. What use is an exploration of good experience, after all, if it runs around and around the same territory?

When I ran the first Gel Health conference recently, I tried to include voices that weren't otherwise being heard in other healthcare or "patient-centered" conferences. Just for the reason above: we have to keep things in perspective. A color scheme is a lot less important to some patients than the availability of any care at all.

One of the speakers whose message continues to resonate with me was Dr. Jim Withers, who founded a street medicine practice - bringing healthcare directly to the homeless population of Pittsburgh - over 25 years ago. Street medicine is now practiced in dozens of cities worldwide, thanks to the efforts of Withers and others. Here's his Gel Video.

I have others, too, to post along these same lines - as well as a couple of book recommendations - but I wanted to start off this thread by pointing out the value of keeping perspective when considering the experience. The basics really are the most important.

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P.S. If you want to help Haiti, three good options for a donation: CARE, Doctors Without Borders, and Partners in Health (also at StandWithHaiti.org).

Here's a customer experience lesson provided by the U.S. government, as reported by 60 Minutes. When building a gigantic fence to secure a national border, it's helpful to ask the users - i.e., border patrol - what they actually need before starting construction. That didn't happen.

The US is reportedly scrapping the multi-billion-dollar project and starting over. Video below:

Thanks to Nicole R. and Charles L. for the pointer!

Customer experience is really easy to understand. You just have to be willing to keep it simple.

It all starts with this. There are two parts to customer experience: the customer, and the experience.

The CUSTOMER is a person. A human being. Your neighbor, your aunt, your postman, your car mechanic, your librarian. This is a person who deserves to be listened to, not just "monetized" or reduced to a number in a database somewhere in the cloud.

The EXPERIENCE is everything that happens to that person as they interact with your company. It all comes to them as one experience. Your company might have five silos or three operating units or eighteen warring factions, but for better or worse they create just one experience for that customer.

The customer and the experience. Understanding these two very simple ideas are the basis of all customer experience work.

Now, the next step is to create a good experience, and for that you have to do two things:

1. Treat the customer as a human being (i.e., listen to them).

2. Look at the experience from the customer's perspective (i.e., empathize with them).

In other words, to create a good experience, just act in response to the ideas above: the customer is a person, and the experience is the one single everything that happens to them.

Put a different way, the best companies in the world today are those that understand customers' needs - by listening to them - and offer their services and design their products in a way that empathizes with those needs.

It sounds simple. Maybe this all sounds like a string of platitudes. Perhaps I should have made it sound more official... seasoned it with some buzzwords (would you like innovation with that?)... or perhaps I should have coded it in academic language that only human-factors grad students could parse?

No. Like I said at the beginning, you have to be willing to keep it simple. What you do in customer experience work (simplifying, clarifying) is the same way you should talk about what you do (simply and clearly). That's most of the challenge, just keeping it simple.

Consider the hairy knots of problems that come from veering away from that simple vision...

• Let's over-analyze the data to feel like we're doing lots of work (but then never arrive at any basic understanding). Pow!

• Let's play politics to prove that our faction is better than the other internal faction (and, by the way, customers can choose our side or take a hike). Zing!

• Let's fire any employee or consultant who dares to tell the truth about the problems in our experience. Problem solved!

• Let's use ever narrower specialist disciplines to show that we, the practitioners, are the true guardians of experiential knowledge. Nailed it!

Now to be fair, there is a place for the toolkit. Once the basics (see 1 and 2 above) are established, there are occasional uses for scenarios, concept models, site maps, content strategy, maybe even card sorting and personas, if they float your boat. But those are all TOOLS, not the answer, just TOOLS that are strictly subservient to a company's basic understanding of its customer experience.

So... you understand all of this. What's next? Where does a company or practitioner go, what does one do, to really improve skills here?

Go out and have a good experience. You learn experience by having it.

Read a book. Not necessarily a book on user experience, but perhaps one that widens your horizons and creates and describes and engages you in some good experience.

Find other kindred spirits, either in your company or outside.

Along those lines, to beat my own drum, you might...

• join the Councils, the network of good-experience-oriented executives and managers in 400 companies (email me - mark at goodexperience.com - for details)

• attend Gel 2010 in April in New York, our annual gathering of Good Experience readers, where we'll explore the concept of "good experience," in person, through a two-day series of shared experiences.

Meantime, explore these themes right now by watching Gel Videos.

Keep it simple!