All projects: Gel, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Bit Literacy
Archives / September 2010
Pomegranates and reality
The popular pomegranate drink called POM is in the news today, having been named in a complaint by the FTC. As stated in the FTC's press release, POM advertisements have included the following language:
Super health powers ... Proven to fight for cardiovascular, prostate and erectile health."
New research offers further proof of the heart-healthy benefits of POM Wonderful juice. 30% decrease in arterial plaque ... 17% improved blood flow ... promotes healthy blood vessels...
The New Yorker ran a long profile of Lynda Resnick, the marketer behind the POM brand, a couple of years ago. Veteran Good Experience readers will remember that I drew that into a column called Pomegranates and empathy. She certainly seems to know - from listening to customers - what people want to hear. Whether she actually delivers on her product's attractive promises ... well, that's a different issue. (And, I'd argue, the more important issue.)
Ever the aggressive marketer, Resnick has reportedly filed a countersuit against the FTC, claiming a violation to her First Amendment right to free speech.
What would you prefer to spend your own professional energies on - making attractive promises, or delivering something good? Of course you want to do both. But in the end, what's more important to you: making the promise, or actually delivering the good(s)?
Kevin Kelly on techno-literacy
Kevin Kelly writes about "technological literacy" in this column for the NYT magazine. Here are three of the lessons that stand out...
• Every technology is biased by its embedded defaults: what does it assume?
• The older the technology, the more likely it will continue to be useful.
• Find the minimum amount of technology that will maximize your options.
...which he applied, and taught, while homeschooling his son through eighth grade. An interesting column on how education could look in a more technology-enabled future.
Those three lessons, incidentally, are complementary to those found in Bit Literacy (now a free download for iPad and iPhone 4).
Bit Literacy free on the iPad & iPhone 4
For anyone with an iPad or iPhone 4: my 2007 book Bit Literacy is now a free download in the iBookstore: more info.
(It remains $5 for the Kindle version, still a pretty good deal.)
I've supplemented the book over the years with further posts about bit literacy, to bring some of the tactical points up to date. For example, when I wrote Bit Literacy there weren't many online todo lists to speak of other than my own - which is why I didn't list others in the book. Now there are lots of other todo lists available.
Enjoy!
How Virgin America's customer experience turns "boring to better"
Virgin America is my favorite domestic airline, in part because of the way it treats an overlooked part of the flying experience: the safety demonstration. This is the video they show before every flight.
Note just three elements of the experience:
• Design: The video is visually appealing, created as what appears to be a hand-drawn cartoon.
• Humor: It contains real-life actual humor throughout, to keep passengers engaged. (Don't miss the nun packing up the Linksys router, and the matador sitting next to the bull.)
• Common sense: My favorite moment of the video is where the narrator says, "For the .0001% of you who have never operated a seat belt before, it works like this..." In other words, "We acknowledge that most of you already know this, but we gotta read it anyway." Virgin America comes across as a human organization willing to exercise common sense on behalf of the passenger.
Compare this to the safety video shown on most other airlines: Bland staging, with flight attendants who are probably just hired actors going through the motions, narration straight out of an FAA safety document. No creativity, no joy, just boredom.
Most airlines look at the safety video and say, "It's a chore we gotta get through." Virgin America says, "Here's an opportunity to create a good experience." The difference in attitude toward that one detail - just one moment in the entire travel experience - speaks volumes about the commitment to customer experience.
This has gotten me thinking about details that companies have turned from dusty chores into moments of good experience. Things going "boring to better." What are some examples?
I'll start. How about Amazon's box design, which contains the text: "Rate this packaging: www.amazon.com/packaging"... which invites customers to take part in continually improving the packaging of goods that Amazon sends (an ongoing effort that I admire). Compare that to most boxes that arrive from companies that offer little to nothing in the way of customer engagement.
What "boring to better" detail have you found that improves the customer experience? I'm interested to see what we can come up with. Post in the comments below!
P.S. Here's an Air New Zealand safety video that has gotten 5 million views... the key? Body painting:
P.P.S. Here's the Virgin America safety video I referred to above:
How Wal-Mart's CEO manages email
Mike Duke, CEO of Wal-Mart, describes his email strategy in this Fortune profile:
"I keep up with e-mails," he says. "I don't like carryovers. At the end of the day, I don't want there to be any phone messages that haven't been returned or e-mails that aren't addressed. ... For me this is more e-mails left over than I like," he says, gesturing at an in-box with seven messages visible at 2:30 in the afternoon.
(Thanks to Randy M. for the pointer)
Analyzing "the real stuff white people like"
Interesting data-based analysis: the REAL 'stuff white people like' analyzes the profiles on OkCupid, a dating website, by the user's stated ethnicity. Some trends pop out:
For instance, it turns out that all kinds of people list sushi as one of their favorite foods. But Asians are the only group who also list sashimi; it's a racial outlier. Similarly, as we shall see, black people are 20 times more likely than everyone else to mention soul food, whereas no foods are distinct for white people, unless you count diet coke.
It's a fascinating look at a number of different trends. Be sure to click on the woman-icon in each graph to see female data (the interface doesn't make it clear that you have to do that).
The only thing missing from the analysis is a discussion of how OkCupid's user base differs from the North American population as a whole. So instead of concluding "this is what white people like" it's more accurate to say "this is what the white people on OkCupid like." Yet another layer would be to consider whether some users are just claiming to like certain things that will help them get dates.
Still, for an analysis filtered on the politically touchy issue of race, it's an especially clear-eyed discussion.
Remaking school, news, art crit: new examples of actual innovation
If everyone's doing it, it's not innovation.
But if it's new, and useful and inspiring and creative, then it's the genuine article: actual innovation.
Launching a me-too social media strategy, or some other buzzword-laden project, is not innovation. It might generate some benefits, but by definition it's not innovative.
You want to find real innovation? Look for the creators, the eccentrics, the people with a spark and an edge and a willingness to take risks. They're doing something new, which generally makes them harder to find and riskier to bank on. Everyone else is doing the old thing. Only a few are doing the new thing.
Examples. Here are three projects that actually are innovative - that is, they're doing something actually new with the available technology and media.
• Sal Khan runs the world's biggest school, and it's completely free. The Khan Academy is a collection of 1,600 instructional videos, all posted on YouTube, all designed, illustrated, and narrated by Sal himself. Anyone with an Internet connection can learn math - from "one plus one" all the way through advanced calculus - or various topics within biology, history, and finance - just from watching Sal's videos.
• The Gregory Brothers are creating hit music in a brand new way, by auto-tuning popular news clips they find on YouTube. Their Auto Tune The News project recently spawned two songs that made it onto the pop charts - Double Rainbow and Bed Intruder.
• Louise Sacco helps run a Boston museum spotlighting "bad art" - called, yes, the Museum Of Bad Art. Sacco and her fellow curators pursue a mission of "bringing the worst of art to the widest of audiences."
All three projects have gotten a fair amount of press recently - including Fortune magazine covering Sal as Bill Gates' favorite teacher, a New York Times article about the Gregory Brothers, and an NYT article about MOBA.
And all three projects show similarities in being (a) labors of love, (b) created for the quality of the work, and (c) delivering the goods as simply and elegantly as possible, without any froo-froo features or idolization of technology. In each case, technology is simply the tool, a means toward the end of a good experience. True innovation tends to be like this: created for the love of it, for the good of the user, and with technology operating solely as a tool. Compare this with the typical hyped-up project that is solely based on a short-term profit motive, spotlights technology as the be-all and end-all, and has little regard for the user experience. I'll choose the Khan/Gregory/Sacco approach any day, and I think most other people would, too.
I'll also note that all three - Sal Khan, the Gregory Brothers, and Louise Sacco - presented at my Gel 2010 conference earlier this year - the first major conference appearance for all of them. Gel attendees saw them first! But you can watch their videos: here's Sal, the Gregory Brothers, and Louise.
Finally, you can sign up right now for Gel 2011. See them first at Gel!
Is customer experience a chore or a passion?
From the current New Yorker, James Surowiecki writes about customer service:
C.E.O.s routinely describe service as essential to success, and they are well aware that, thanks to the Internet, bad service can now inflict far more damage than before; the old maxim was that someone who had a bad experience in your store would tell ten people, but these days it's more like thousands or even, as in Carroll's case, millions.On the other hand, customer service is a classic example of what businessmen call a "cost center"--a division that piles up expenses without bringing in revenue--and most companies see it as tangential to their core business, something they have to do rather than something they want to do.
Oh, the bitter medicine of having to actually serve the customer. Is this really how most companies consider the customer experience - a necessary chore? The winning companies of this century will be those who make customer experience their passion, their central driver of strategy, their reason for being. (This includes customer service - and all other aspects of the entire customer experience.)
To put it another way, "The purpose of a business is to create a customer." That's what Peter Drucker said. He knew how companies became successful.
Are companies willing to take Drucker's advice and focus on creating and keeping customers? Or is customer experience just a chore that takes time away from the fun stuff?
Gmail's Priority Inbox and email overload
Several people have asked my opinion of Google's Priority Inbox, the newly announced Gmail feature that promises to help users "identify your important email and separate it out from everything else, so you can focus on what really matters." (See Google's explanation.)
I haven't used the feature yet, so I have to offer a grain of salt along with my comments. But I understand the gist of the thing: Gmail watches who you email, which message threads you reply to, and allows you to flag certain threads or senders as important - and then shows those important messages more prominently in the inbox.
So - what do I think of Priority Inbox? My short answer is what I tell people a lot for any feature: if it works for you, if it actually makes you more productive and less stressed, then great, go for it.
My longer answer, though, is that I don't understand the need for an inbox feature like this. The inbox should be a temporary holding location only, before emails are spirited off to a better place: an archive, a folder, a todo list, the trash, anywhere but sticking around in the inbox.
Here's a thought experiment. If you were hired to design a subway platform for the best user experience, what kinds of features would you make available? The train comes every few minutes and the platform is already clean and well-lighted. What else would be helpful - perhaps some bench seating? A vendor selling quick things like water and candy? All good ideas.
Now how about this proposal. Someone is offering to bring in a sit-down restaurant and a yoga studio, right there on the platform. Interesting ideas, but are they necessary?
The inbox - at least for people who empty it at least once a day - is like the train platform. Messages are headed out soon, so beyond a few basic features, there's no need for shiny new tools that offer to keep things under control. The solution to email overload is already available, for free, without any extra technology. (I've been teaching an easy solution for over ten years - here's a quick description I wrote recently.)
But Priority Inbox, if it's implemented well, will probably do just fine. This is because of the reality of users and Google's business goals:
• The user reality is that most people don't practice bit literacy. Instead they maintain an inbox of hundreds, or thousands, of messages, a jumble of personal notes, meeting invites, attached photos, long-term action items, reminders, spam, and urgent todos, all constantly competing for the user's attention in one chaotic mosh pit of a pile. For users who have to endure this day to day while still holding down a job, a feature like Priority Inbox might make their overload slightly less stressful. Priority Inbox doesn't offer a cure - just a patch for some of the symptoms - but as I say: If it works for you, go for it.
• The business reality is that Google benefits from this feature by (a) making it more difficult for users to leave Gmail, once they've set up their Priority Inbox filters (because who's going to switch to Yahoo Mail if they have Gmail calibrated just how they like it?)... and (b) encouraging users yet again not to delete their email but to store everything on Google's servers... and the more of your data that Google stores, the more intelligently they can serve you up to advertisers. (But then Gmail is free. As the Blues Brothers would say, whaddya want for nothin'?)
Personally I won't have much opportunity to even try out Priority Inbox, since my inbox frequently has no messages at all inside. I won't be able to mark any of them important. (If you'd like to solve email overload for yourself, once again here's my quick post on how to do so.)
Still, I can't help but think that Google is missing an important opportunity with this kind of mail feature. Yes, lots of users might get some incremental value out of Priority Inbox. And Google certainly gets immediate business value out of it. But imagine if Google actually tried to eliminate email overload for all Gmail users, regardless of the alignment with their short-term business goals. This might yield some very different features: for example, a prominent display of how long it's been since the inbox was empty; or a graph of the lowest message count in each 24-hour period in the past month; easier ways to get action items out of the inbox and onto a todo list; sorting features to allow for bulk-selection and delete (Gmail still doesn't allow sorting by sender or subject!); and so on.
So far, Google has opted not to develop those types of features, and that has opened an opportunity in the marketplace. Plenty of entrepreneurs are surely paying attention. I hope Google is, too.
Seeing an empty inbox for the first time is "incredibly liberating" and "exhilarating," says Rachel Reuben.
