All projects: Gel, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Bit Literacy
Archives / November 2010
Designing the T.G.I. Friday's experience
The founder of T.G.I. Friday's talks about how he designed the first restaurant in the 1960s (emphasis mine):
All I really did was throw sawdust on the floor and hang up fake Tiffany lamps. I painted the building blue and I put the waiters in red and white striped soccer shirts. If you think that I knew what I was doing, you are dead wrong. I had no training in the restaurant business, or interior design, or architecture -- I just have a feel for how to use all those things to create an experience.... You can serve the best food in the world, and if people didn't like the atmosphere and the decor, they won't come back. ... There's an enormous amount of creativity in orchestrating a space and an experience so that it creates a particular feeling.
From the Edible Geography interview of Alan Stillman. The entire interview is well worth reading.
(via kottke)
How to change the CEO's mind
A friend of mine recently joined a new Web 2.0 startup. The site is impressive. Clever name, interesting premise, and a visually striking design. A stream of social activity pours down a column on every page. Text, buttons, fields all fade into view just - so. Finely tuned. This is the very leading edge of what Web developers can do today.
There's just one problem: I couldn't figure out how to complete the primary task on the site.
I wrote my friend, complimenting the team on its visual design skills, but mentioned my lack of success at getting anything done. My attractive, visually precise, finely tuned user experience was, in the end, a failure. I would not be returning to the site.
My friend responded that this wasn't a surprise, the user experience is a major known issue on the site, and that the team is working on it. It appears that the founder and CEO has certain priorities for visual panache that outweigh the user's interest in getting through the site. This is all pretty standard for many companies, but it raises an important question that is worth exploring:
How does one change the mind of the CEO?
Just remember that the best way to change the CEO's mind - any stakeholder's mind - is to show them users, in person, in real time, having an unscripted, authentic user experience.
Show the CEO, in person, a user struggling to understand the site, finally giving up, and saying, "this is a beautiful site that I can't figure out and I'm never coming back."
Show the CEO several of these people, having the same problems in their experience despite not being forced into it by leading questions or any sort of script.
Show the CEO all of this and simply ask, "What did you observe today?"
And watch what happens.
Noah Scalin's new book
Congratulations to Gel speaker & friend Noah Scalin on his new book, 365: A Daily Creativity Journal: Make Something Every Day and Change Your Life.
And thanks to Noah for mentioning Gel and me in the acknowledgements! (Viewable on page 239 in Amazon's "look inside the book" feature.)
(See also Noah's excellent Gel video, talking about his Skull-A-Day project.)
Mexico City employs two sewer divers who scuba dive into poo-filled sewage tunnels to remove blockages in the fragile water system there. Great interview and historical context.
(New York, for the same purpose, has new sewer-vacuum trucks.)
How to become a Gel speaker
(Originally published on Aug 14, 2009, this column has remained relevant so I thought I'd share it again. -mh) (Updated again on September 16, 2011.)
- - -
Someone just asked me, "How does someone become a Gel speaker?"
I get this question often enough that I thought I'd go ahead and write the manual.
If you want to be part of Gel - the conference and community - sign up and attend the event, beginning to end. Attendees make the event. And even speakers themselves are essentially attendees throughout the event, except for the 20 minutes they happen to be on stage. If people only are interested in Gel to get on stage, that's generally a clue to me that they're only interested in exposure and not really in Gel itself.
With that said, for someone who has a specific desire to be on stage at Gel for 20 minutes, no matter any other outstanding experience you could have the rest of the time as an attendee (once again - just sign up already), then here are my suggestions...
How to become a Gel speaker
Do something amazing that hasn't been done before, and that hasn't been spoken about a million times at other conferences. And actually create or do something direct and real, not something about something else. (In the language of Gel, create a good experience, not just some abstract ideas about experience.) And do it for awhile, so it has some longevity, and results, backing it up. At Gel we look for the real thing, the enduring thing, the good and authentic thing, not just a shiny exciting theory or the momentary blip of hype.
So - what doesn't work: "I have a new framework about design/marketing/experience/happiness and have written a book/won a design award/landed a big client with this idea." Nope.
Also what doesn't work: "I'm so great, and my career as a designer/consultant/author/whatever is so impressive, that I'll allow you to put me on stage to give an infomercial about my services." Uhh... no.
And by the way, if you're from a marketing agency or consulting firm or design house, buy a ticket and we'd love to have you as an attendee... we generally don't look for vendors to be on stage. (Please don't ask to speak about the book on marketing or product development or user experience you just wrote. Lots of other conferences already cover marketing, product development, and user experience frameworks!)
What does work: I've created a customer-centered business over 20 years and have learned some timeless lessons that I can share. (See Danny Meyer or Chip Conley or John Williams.) Or, I'm working on making healthcare more patient-centered, and here's what we've tried so far. (See Bridget Duffy). Or, I had the insane idea to create 365 skulls in a year and actually did it, and here's how I managed to do it and what I learned. (That was Noah Scalin.) Or, I've helped free over 200 wrongfully convicted people from prison, including my co-presenter, and here's what that's like. (Video here.) Or here are a bunch of real-world examples of how to look at design in a different light. (Thanks, Seth Godin.) Or I researched how Las Vegas designs its customer experience, and here's what I learned. (Natasha Schull.) Or here's how I brew good beer, or organize a community, or write a good song, or design a good, I mean actually good, ad campaign. Or a bunch of other awesome speakers, all at Gel Videos.
And whatever you do, at all costs, never ever ever dispatch a PR person to write the conference organizer a note saying, "I have a client who's interested in speaking at your event." My thought is always, wow - they want to speak at an event but haven't figured out how to write an email themselves! Either that or they're too important to talk to the conference organizer, so they send someone else to do it for them. (One major exception: I pay attention to any recommendation from a past Gel speaker, or from any longtime Gel attendee.)
One last thing, maybe particular to Gel, it really helps not to have spoken before at other major events. If you're "on the circuit" already, it's unlikely that there's a fit with Gel. This is why I generally don't invite speakers based on any application I get from them (or, of course, their handlers)... usually good Gel speakers are people who have not spoken about their work, and so they're not out there trying to get a speaking slot.
In other words, anyone thinking of applying to speak probably is more suited to participate as an attendee than on stage. (So sign up and attend.)
But think of it this way. If you're doing great work, and are applying to lots of conferences to talk about your work, there are PLENTY of other stages to pursue. Just consider Gel more of an event that you should attend. So sign up and attend.
P.S. Two more suggestions. Be responsive over email. And be nice.
Review of Good Todo: "emptying your inbox is easier"
Nice review of Good Todo, my online todo lost, by Tracy, in this blog post:
Emptying your inbox and keeping it empty is easier using Good Todo because you can forward e-mails that are tasks directly to your to do list. With your task safely on your to do list, you can delete the e-mail. Since each task is associated with a specific day, you no longer have to use an overflowing inbox as a to do list.
Good to get her "nit picks" as well. Always more to develop and improve!
(You can try out Good Todo with a 30-day free trial.)
Annoying parens in online UI(s)
Dear every site in the world, "1 new message(s)" is ugly. Please add one line of code to make it "1 new message".
(from my Twitter feed)
P.S. Fun idea for a website: a user-generated pool of screenshots, showing online interfaces with the annoying parens. Call it noparensplease.com or something. Volunteers?
Life stories told through Facebook and Google
Surprisingly effective, "A Life on Facebook" tells the story of one man's entire adult life - solely through the Facebook interface. Worth watching:
This must have been inspired by Google's Parisian Love video, which tells a love story through Google search results - also well done.
But to the point of my column yesterday, on the primacy of the "social layer" provided by services like Facebook (OK, mainly Facebook)... which of the videos feels more realistic?
What's missing in our shiny innovative future
There are two buckets of things you have to pay attention to:
• The new bucket of the newest, smartest, trendiest, shiniest things that the world has never heard of until this moment.
• And the old bucket of solid, dependable, tried and true essentials that have been around since the beginning of business.
I'm going to argue that any project or company requires both for a chance at success. And it's not as common as you might expect.
I recently advised an executive team from a major services firm (well-known, several million paying customers), who were looking for "the next big thing" to impact their field. I started by guessing three major trends - all from the "new bucket" - they had heard plenty about from other stakeholders and "gurus"...
• innovation
• social media
• mobile
...and sure enough, they nodded their heads in agreement. I then said, more or less,...
Here's the new bucket: Innovation, social media, and mobile are combining to create a new and emerging layer to the online user experience. Google search results are no longer the primary go-to resource for knowledge and guidance. Instead, the social layer - call it the "social graph" or the "social Web" - is being layered into news sites, online stores, media destinations, aggregators, and so on.
What your friends and contacts say, how they rate and comment, is now available and just as prominent as what Google Search might come back with. And possibly more relevant, since it's your own friends offering the data.
Then there are standalone mobile applications that take it further, making the social graph not an overlay on the online experience, but the very basis of the experience. Foursquare is a good example of this - allowing users to interact with friends, strangers, and nearby businesses, all through a geo-located mobile device. No website, and no laptop necessary.
I'm hardly the only person talking about this. Google's own Paul Adams, in fact, recently created a slideshow called The real life social network, touching on these themes - in particular, pointing out there are degrees of closeness in friends, and a temporal aspect, that aren't covered by most services' blanket status of "friends".
There are lots of people writing, researching, and innovating on all those trends in the new bucket.
But that's not the whole story.
The old bucket is still essential: As important and legitimate as the new trends are, what's old and essential is still essential. Required for success. In at least one case, an essential part of smart business has been omitted, ignored, or forgotten for the past several generations.
Here's a story. There once was an architect who chose a location, drew up blueprints, hired a contractor, and then built a grand house, top to bottom. Then he painted it. Decorated it. Furnished it. And finally, when everything was completely done, showed it to the client - for the very first time.
"Here, I built you a house. I hope you like it."
Can you imagine anyone working that way - building something from concept to finished product, actually launching it, before ever speaking to the person it's intended for?
Don't laugh. That's how most companies work. I was just at a VC-based startup learning about their product, already developed and launched at a cost of several million dollars. "Have you talked to any customers about what they think, whether they want this, or how it might fit into their lives?" I asked the team.
"No," came the answer, "the VCs are breathing down our necks and want to see results now, now, now."
So goes life in companies big and small - focusing solely on the new bucket (let's innovate in social media and mobile, now now now!) ... while continuing to ignore the old bucket (we'll get to customers later, after we've launched).
The winners in your field, I guarantee, are the teams that draw from both old and new: innovation and customers, social media and customers, mobile and customers. Keep that in mind the whenever you hear about the next shiny new trend.
Examples of good landing pages
This is well done: Four common issues with landing pages, showing problematic designs followed by improved designs.
I wish there was a site that just did this - state the issue, show a bad design, then show a better design. Teaching by example!
What to learn from AJWS's public service annc
This is the new gold standard for public service announcements: comedy and message blended together, in quick cuts, on YouTube. Courtesy Judd Apatow:
Happy 25th to the AJWS, a good organization.
User interface design lesson, via Gmail
I like using Gmail because of its spam filter and the deliverability of messages I send from the account. And, superficially at least, it's free. But Gmail's usability has always been somewhat disappointing - I've written about it here (on lack of sorting) and here (about Priority Inbox).
Recently I discovered another aspect of Gmail that provides a good case study in tactical interface design.
Below is the button bar visible when you view an individual email message. Note the second button, "Report spam", which tells Gmail to remove the message from the inbox:
Now take a look at the buttons below. These show up when you're viewing messages already marked as Spam. Note that the second button here is called "Not spam", which tells Gmail to insert the message into the inbox:
The number one rule of software interface design is consistency: the same element, or similar elements, should always work the same way throughout the application. A consistent interface reduces the cognitive load on the user - or put another way, it allows users to fly through the app without having to think too much.
Gmail's interface, in this instance, breaks the rule of consistency. Did you notice how? When viewing a message (in the first graphic above), the button mentioning "spam" marks messages as spam and makes them go away. But the next moment, when the user clicks to the Spam page, the button mentioning "spam" - placed in the same location, second place on the bar, does the exact opposite: it exposes the message by putting it back in the inbox.
I've witnessed the problem this causes: the user, accustomed to clicking the "spam" button to get rid of messages, goes into the Spam page, reviews the contents, confirms that these are indeed unwanted messages, and clicks the "spam" button on the button bar. And voilà: all the spam mails are dumped into his inbox.
One easy improvement would be to rename the "Not spam" button to "Move to inbox". Other aspects like font, color, style, and screen location might also drive some incremental improvement. (A good exercise for the metrics-driven UI designers on the Gmail team!)
Meantime, I'll keep forwarding my action items to Good Todo, since that's the main thing that keeps my inbox clean.
P.S. I'm not the only one with issues with Gmail. Dilbert creator Scott Adams wrote this column about Gmail's usability a few months back, asking, "did anyone with training in interface design even look at Gmail before it launched?" There's also a followup column. Both worth reading.
Why "the customer is always right" is wrong
Lots of professions have their catchphrases. For computer scientists, "garbage in, garbage out." American football coaches, "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing." For politicians (one would hope), "the buck stops here."
And for those of us who create an experience - a customer experience, user experience, student experience, patient experience, etc. - there's one phrase that keeps coming up:
The customer is always right.
A popular saying, ubiquitous in discussions of customer service, noble in its intent, literally chiseled in granite in a Connecticut grocery store. And I think it's wrong. Specifically, I think it's incomplete. We've omitted the first part of the sentence. Try it this way:
Doing right by the customer is always right.
Often this idea has the same effect as the original phrase. A customer comes into the store with a legitimate complaint, or emails in with a bug report, and the right response - this customer is certainly right! - is to fix it, accommodate it, make the customer happy, go even further and exceed their expectations. That's doing right by the customer, too.
But consider a different example. A customer comes into your drugstore asking for the ingredients in crystal meth. Is he "right"? The customer wants it, he has money to pay for it, and you have the product. Setting aside the obvious constraint of local laws and regulations, are you doing right by the customer, by the larger community, to serve the request?
Or consider the user experience designers who make slot machines in Las Vegas ever more efficient at "customer extinction" (yes, that's the actual term used in the industry). Some customers will enthusiastically drop their last dollar in the machine. Are you doing right by the customer to serve the request? (See more thoughts on this in The flip side of customer experience and the Gel video about design in Vegas.)
Everyone, of course, has to make their own decision about what to use their career for. I know what my own answers are. All I'd suggest is that we carry along the right version of the catchphrase. It's not that the customer is always right. Rather, we should try, as best we understand it, to do right by the customer.
Wouldn't you want others to do the same for you?
Southeast Asian readers respond...
Last week I shared some lessons from Southeast Asia based on my recent three-week trip there. I asked Asian readers to weigh in on what they thought - what to add, what I missed or got wrong.
A dozen or so Good Experience readers wrote in with insightful comments.
Read their comments to get their take on Asia's relevance today, especially with respect to online customer experience.
Why Sal Khan is a name you need to know
Bruce Upbin at Forbes was nice enough to include some of my thoughts about Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, in his post about why Sal Khan is "a name you need to know in 2011."
If you haven't watched it yet, here's the video of Sal Khan at Gel 2010 from this past April. Required viewing for anyone interested in good experience, or education, or the future of the Internet.
About why I invited Sal to Gel, I wrote to Bruce (yes, quickly, not bothering to use the Shift key!)...
...the reason i invited him to speak at gel, and the reason i still believe he's on the path to greatness, is that his work is fully focused on creating a good experience for students. what i mean is that the work is fully focused on one constituency - the student. contrast this to how other educational providers have to work - for example, publishers, school boards, curriculum committees, and so on... they have to balance the needs of the student with the political and market pressures exerted by many different interests. there's a purity to sal's work that shines through in the videos - he's friendly and direct in his teaching - all aimed SOLELY at helping the student learn the material. all for free.
Direct, authentic, created in the long-term best interest of the recipient: key markers of a good experience. (That's what I shoot for in my Gel conference, btw - hope you'll sign up for Gel 2011 soon.)
The perfect task management system
Good Todo is "the perfect task management system," writes Julien Smith in this blog post: "Once my inbox is empty, Goodtodo tells me what my tasks are."
If you haven't tried it yet, right now is a great time to empty your inbox and work from your task list for the day. (It's easy: forward any action-item emails to today@goodtodo.com, and file or delete everything else from the inbox.) Get started here with a trial account.
Julien, by the way, is co-author of the bestseller Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, which he wrote with Chris Brogan. Pleasure meeting Julien at Gel this past year - and meeting Chris at Supernova in Philly a few months back. Good eggs both.
