Archives / February 2011

If you want your creation to be more popular, then make it something that more people want to experience.

Here's how an artist and two musicians did it:

• How to get people to see your art show. From the WSJ:

"When you do a gallery show, there's all the excitement of opening night, but if you go back a few days later, it's like a dust bowl. No one's coming to see the art," says Chris Pennington, a Minneapolis artist whose little-seen oeuvre includes a sculpture made from frozen water balloons.

Mr. Pennington and several friends created a hole for an artist-designed miniature golf course sponsored by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2008. The course was wildly popular, helping touch off the current craze. Museum staff say the summer-long installation drew 40,000 visitors, 45% of whom said it was their first visit to the museum in years.

• How Alice Cooper launched a breakout hit. From NPR:

Zappa saw Alice Cooper as a bizarre comedy act, but the band's first two albums tanked. Then, producer Bob Ezrin came in and took a song that was originally called "I'm Edgy" and turned it into the commercial pop hit "I'm Eighteen."

"He kept dumbing it down until it was a three-minute anthem for every kid that was 18 and an outcast," Cooper says.

• How Girl Talk's Greg Gillis went from sparsely-attended avant-garde performances to sellout pop crowds. From the NYT:

[In his early performances] he might have three people watching in the dark with their arms crossed. In a space like that -- playing to an art crowd -- it occurred to Gillis that going pop would be a "good joke." ... But by 2006, people were starting to take seriously what had started as Gillis's avant-pop joke. ... Girl Talk was suddenly headlining the Mercury Lounge in New York.

Where the hipster says "no, no, no" to everything, pre-emptively, Gillis twists the screw a perverse turn further. "I want to like everything until I'm convinced why not. ... What it comes down to is being a fan of all this music. I just thought that it could all share one roof and be this really interesting mess."

(See also this interview on how Gillis came up with the name Girl Talk: "I came from a more experimental background and there were some very overly serious, borderline academic type electronic musicians. I wanted to pick a name that they would be embarrassed to play with.")

The Times reports today that blogs wane as youth drift to sites like Twitter. The reason why isn't clearly stated, so I'll set the record straight.

Any major shift in the digital landscape, like this, is driven by one thing: the user experience. In the long run, given a competitive environment, the best experience wins.

So how did blogs lose out to Twitter and Facebook?

The experience of blogs is too hard:

• To publish, you have to learn formatting languages (HTML, CSS) or deal with techie interfaces for blog software.

• Users can't easily subscribe or get back to a blog they like. How many non-techies do you know who use RSS or feed readers?

The experience of Twitter and Facebook is much easier:

• To publish on Twitter, type something and click the Tweet button.

• To subscribe to someone you like, click the Follow button.

Conclusion: if you want people to use your service, create a good experience. If you don't, someone else will.

(And if your company wants to create a good experience, hire my customer experience consulting firm.)

When New York City installed credit-card readers in its taxi machines a few years back, part of the good user experience was a touch screen allowing riders to easily add a tip. Three clearly marked buttons allowed the rider to choose a tip of 15%, 20%, or 25%. Thus with a single tap one could deliver the tip (and avoid mental arithmetic calculations) quickly and easily.

A few days ago I got in a cab and saw that the interface had changed ever so slightly, to this:

The 15% tip - standard in New York City - is now unavailable, unless you go through the mental arithmetic and manual entry of the amount. But beyond the annoyance factor, there's the "you've got to be kidding" element. For a commodity service like a point-A-to-B cab ride, what would rate a 30% tip? (Let alone a permanent "30% tip" button in the interface?)

The lesson: details matter. One change to one button in the interface changes the experience from delightful to annoying, leaving the rider feeling taken advantage of.

Earlier this week, NYT columnist David Brooks wrote The Experience Economy, a provocative op-ed suggesting that young Americans are more interested in having experiences than tangible goods.

This is not a new idea. Here's a New Yorker cartoon from 2000:

The twist, Brooks argues, is that the focus on good experiences has caused America generate less material wealth. China, on the other hand, has raced ahead economically by building factories to make whatever tangible goods the world wants. Young Americans may be happier, but China is getting richer.

An intriguing argument, though of course one would need a more rigorous piece than a brief op-ed to defend a sweeping economic analysis.

Even more compelling are the comments from readers - here are highlights - who angrily disagree with Brooks, proposing their own reasons for America's decline. Good snapshot of the national conversation.

(Cool to see the idea of "good experience" in an international economic piece, even if debatable.)

P.S. More cartoons about money by the cartoonist above here.

It's hard to find good news in the book publishing industry these days. Indie booksellers are struggling (see Powell's), retail chains are declining (see Borders and Barnes & Noble), and there's a general sense that younger readers are increasingly distracted by digital devices like iPhones and iPads.

Despite the gloominess, I'd like to point out two bright spots of innovation in book publishing: books that use the new technology of mobile devices to create a wholly new type of reading experience. In both cases, a mobile device like the iPad is not a distraction but the very reason why the book can exist in this form.

• WAR and Restrepo, by Sebastian Junger: This 2010 book and documentary by the noted bestselling author of The Perfect Storm took Junger and cameraman Tim Hetherington to Afghanistan to live with a platoon of American soldiers as they fought in one of the deadliest areas of the entire war - the Korengal Valley. The book and documentary are both outstanding, covering the conflict itself and the wider themes of trust, fear, and commitment among soldiers. It's unusually good writing and filmmaking - highly recommended for anyone interested in the war in Afghanistan.

Junger's project is also unusual in that it generated both a printed book - WAR (in print & ebook at Amazon) - and the documentary Restrepo (trailer on YouTube, full-length on Netflix and iTunes). And Restrepo is up for an Academy Award for Best Documentary this month.

But there was one other output of the project: an enhanced ebook, called WAR (Enhanced Edition), available at the iBookstore (search for it from the app on the iPad on iPhone). This is the best of all three media: the full text of the book, with video clips - some, but not all, from the documentary - integrated inside the text.

This design offers an entirely new reading experience: when the text describes one of the soldiers, you can often watch a video clip of that soldier speaking. Occasionally Junger describes a firefight, or a specific moment within it, that is then accompanied by a video of that moment. (Click the image at left for an sample screenshot.)

Especially for a nonfiction book, in which the text is trying to communicate specific occurrences and facts, the enhanced ebook format offers something better than we've ever had - or could have had - before the advent of the iPad and similar devices.

The other bright spot I've found in book publishing is a new kind of popup book.

• Three Little Pigs and the Secrets of a Popup Book is full of surprises (available on the iTunes store - looks best on iPad but also works on iPhone).

  Telling the familiar story of the porcine trio, this virtual popup book lets you push, pull, and rotate elements just as you would in a physical book. The twist is the x-ray button, which shows the mechanical workings inside each page. Art direction, music, and mechanical engineering come together to create a uniquely good experience. (Click the screenshots at left to see a page from the popup book - and then the x-ray version.)

The downside of these experiences is, of course, they're harder and costlier to create. Not every nonfiction author is going to have the resources to fly out to whatever area of the world they're writing about and capture video footage for use in an ebook. And not every children's book author will be able to assemble programmers, animators, and composers just to create the iPad version of their story.

But the examples above are worth studying. Increasingly, in order to compete in the digital media environment, authors and publishers will have to find some way to use emerging platforms to their advantage.

To the point of my post yesterday (The doctor who wouldn't listen), good communication between doctor and patient isn't just a courtesy... it's often the difference between life and death.

From the Boston Globe recently, A deadly information gap:

The usual experience of a sick older person today is similar to that of an American traveling in a foreign country with no passport, no ability to speak or read the language, and no tour guide, all while deathly ill, often hungry and thirsty, exhausted, confused, and frightened. During my mother's illness, my sister (a lawyer) and I were her "health care navigators,'' and together we managed the treacherous voyage.

In the hospital, after her heart attack, my mother's diabetes doctors weren't allowed to prescribe her medications or diet because she was on a cardiology unit. Despite good intentions, the hospital almost killed her by giving her 32 ounces of apple juice one day, causing her blood sugar to rise to a dangerous level. To compensate, they had to give her a lot of extra insulin, which caused her blood sugar to drop precipitously. At one point they had to resuscitate her because her blood sugar went so low. This happened because the diabetes doctors had almost no real-time way to communicate with the cardiology doctors. They needed a navigator -- a knowledgeable intermediary -- to make sense of the overall picture and connect the doctors to each other.

(Thanks to John A. for the pointer.)

A couple of years ago I had a quick question for my primary care physician. So when I made a flu shot appointment over the phone with his receptionist, I mentioned my question. She hesitated, as though this was a large and unusual request - pass a question along to the doctor? - and asked that I just bring it up in person during the appointment.

When I arrived for the appointment, I was unable to get the question to my doctor. (My flu shot was administered by someone I'd never seen before - I assume she was a doctor, as she never introduced herself.) I asked her - and then another doctor - if they could pass it along, or hand him a note, anything - no. Everyone involved was polite, but it was clear that this was an annoyance: a patient with a special request.

Here's the ironic part. As I explained to each person along the way, I was trying to invite my doctor to attend, as my guest, an event a few blocks away from his office. It was my Gel Health conference - all about creating good patient experiences.

A few weeks later, I recounted my experience on-stage at Gel Health. (Jump ahead to 3:05, where the story starts.)

The topic of patient experience was picked up by last week's New York Times article Concierge Medical Care With a Smaller Price Tag, which describes the work of One Medical Group, a network of primary-care offices that actually provide a good patient experience. I'm quoted in the article as a patient of One Medical - having joined, in fact, after my bad experience with the previous doctor. (The founder of One Medical, Dr. Tom Lee, is speaking at my upcoming Gel 2011 conference.)

I left the old doctor because he wouldn't listen to me - literally. I joined One Medical because they'll take my call, they'll answer my email, and they'll start the appointment on time. There are other benefits, too, but my point is that sometimes customers' expectations are so low that just delivering the basics can create an extraordinary experience. Banks, airlines, credit card companies, insurance companies, and many, many others - take note.

Companies often spew about "customer relationship management" or "disruptive customer-led innovation" or any number of other impressive-sounding processes. But as often as not, what the customer wants is as simple as sitting down and listening for a minute.

They may just invite you to do something great.