All projects: Gel, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Bit Literacy
Archives / November 2011
A "zero email" policy that makes zero sense
Did you hear the one about the company that banned email? Several people sent me the article today, so I thought I'd share my reaction.
According to this article (also covered by the WSJ), the French IT company Atos has discovered that its employees are becoming less productive because of the increasing onslaught of email. So the company took the obvious next step and trained its employees in bit literacy to solve the problems associated with info overload.
Or not. Actually the company didn't do the training. Instead, the CEO announced that the company will BAN EMAIL. This is a technology company with 74,000 employees. No more emails - internally, at least, as a few people outside the company still use the tool.
If you work in X business, shouldn't you make sure your employees are good at X?
It's like a newspaper editor, tired of seeing poor writing, say, "OK, everyone, no one knows how to write a proper sentence around here, so no more writing, no writing at all, anywhere in the building. We'll all become mimes instead."
I have never understood why some technologists are so eager to condemn a tool that they haven't figured out how to use effectively:
• A few years ago the techie blogger Michael Arrington got a lot of press for declaring email bankruptcy. (See my response, A geek who can't use email.)
• More recently, a UNC Chapel Hill professor publicly quit using email, forcing his students and colleagues to reach him by text messages, AIM, G-chat, Facebook, Google+, Skype, Doodle, Google Docs, or others of "about 12 different means of contact." I'm not sure how that simplified things, but OK.
• And now the Atos CEO joins their ranks - bringing 74,000 employees with him.
I'm happy for these three gentlemen, if they created a better workflow for themselves by turning off email. But I don't see how banning email is practical for most people, who really do need a single, easy point of contact for the world to reach them - perhaps even to receive notifications from services like Doodle, Facebook, and the rest.
Managing email is a very simple process. It requires a few minutes of disciplined actions each day, which is a small price to avoid the many hours of stress, anxiety, and lower productivity that most users suffer daily. Here it is: Once again, how to manage your email.
For the CEOs reading this, it's really not necessary to ban email from your organization. Just a bit of training - based on what I wrote in Bit Literacy - will do the trick.
Unboxing experience: do we really need theatrics?
Today's WSJ includes Boxing Up Shopping's Magic Moment, about the "unboxing experience" of opening up newly delivered products that you bought on a website. I was struck by this bit:
for brands with stores offering a high level of service and design, the challenge is to reproduce a theatrical shopping experience in a brown cardboard carton.
Beyond some narrow uses, I've never understood the enduring interest in the theatrical customer experience. Sure, all things being equal, it can be fun to have a spectacle so we can be passively entertained.
But most of the time, the customers' burning need is more basic: they want on-time service. Friendly communications. Clear instructions. Easy, no-hassle task flow and for many experiences, a quick completion.
To take an obvious example, Zappos has done well (to put it lightly!) by removing all the hassle from shoe shopping. You click click click, the shoes arrive, and you send back any that you don't want - for free. Other retailers, still stuck in the mindset of the theatrical customer experience, may wonder how Zappos did it - without branded wrapping paper and frilly ribbons and such.
Granted, customers sometimes do want to order custom-wrapped gifts online. (The WSJ piece gives some good examples of interesting "unboxing" redesign efforts.) Still, the customer experience is always best viewed as a whole: how valuable is that visually branded wrapping paper versus, say, making it easier to find products on the site? Or improving the mobile app so that it's actually usable? Or offering more customer-friendly return policy?
At Creative Good we've conducted unboxing-customer-experience work in the past, and we've rarely found that customers want more theatrics. Usually they want the basics.
Interaction design and a lesson from the past
Bret Victor's rant on the future of interaction design has been making the rounds, and justifiably so. It's well-written, nicely designed, and best of all, a new take on a topic that seems to be stuck in one way of thinking. Why should we point and drag fingers across touch screens, Victor says, when we have ten fingers and four limbs capable of incredibly precise movements?
We peel a banana with two hands, but we point at a screen with one finger. We hold a toothbrush, we open a jar, we gesture as we speak, but we drag across a screen with a finger. Digital interaction design needs to become, well, more digitally-focused.
Victor is right about all of this. The physical world is becoming layered with bits, creating an "augmented" reality with meta-data covering the locations and things around us. Inevitably it will make more sense for UIs to become more haptic (touch-oriented) than a swipe across a piece of glass.
However, it would be wrong to take this premise too far. Plain old keyboards are still worthwhile. (Try to ask someone to create a spreadsheet, or code a script, using a touch interface!) And simple gestural interfaces - a pinch to zoom out, a swipe to turn the page - are valuable because they're simple. The last thing we need is to have to dance the tango to get the page to scroll down. Just because most of us have four limbs doesn't mean we should use them to talk to computers. We have plenty of other effective, pleasurable, or meaningful uses of our bodies without tying them to an interface.
I'll close by noting that history provides a wonderful comparison of two popular haptic interfaces. In one, a hand holds a long, sharpened piece of metal. Functionality is activated by bold physical gestures, sometimes involving the user's entire body.
In the other haptic interface, a single hand lightly holds a goose feather dipped in ink. This tool makes use of no bold physical gestures and in fact ceases to work if the user's body is in motion. Much like the touchscreen interfaces that Bret Victor frets about, this goose feather forces the user to a limited range of gestures with just one hand. And the output is only words.
As for the comparison: someone famously wrote about which of these interfaces is mightier.
Moving into the future, interaction designers should remember that simple interfaces are often the best. More importantly, the true worth of an interface is often expressed by how it fits into the world. (Microsoft's vision of the future: more sloppy info provides a good example.) Don't get too wrapped up in tactical details or new features. The best experience in the future may very well come from something old and mighty.
Customer experience case study: Infinite Flavors Ice Cream
Let's say you run an ice cream shop. It's called Infinite Flavors Ice Cream, and it's fantastic. The day you open your doors, word spreads around town that this is a new, different, and great experience. Customers come to the window, ask for any flavor they can think of, and behind the scenes your highly advanced ice cream flavor-mixing machine brings out the exact match. No one has ever seen anything like it: ask for banana-blueberry, ask for triple-chocolate-strawberry, ask for vanilla bean with a hint of mango and lychee undertones. The machine serves it up perfectly, every time.
You're proud of your success. Whenever anyone asks how you did it, you tell them about your goal to perfect the customer experience of ice cream. The entire business revolves around that one idea: giving customers the perfect ice cream, no matter what they ask for.
No one can compete with you. Infinite Flavors Ice Cream simply offers the best experience - and, of course, the most flavors. Because of this, word continues to spread and the business grows. You open shops across town, then across the region, then across the country, and then you start researching foreign markets.
As you grow, you naturally collect a lot of data about buying habits - flavors, order size, timing - correlated to factors like geography and demographics. This is valuable information for a host of companies who are willing to pay for business intelligence. Sensing an opportunity, you begin a new business line: ID, for Infinite Data, and begin selling subscriptions to the aggregated data. Money flows, then floods, in.
Soon enough you wonder how you might grow the ID unit by tweaking the ice cream business - just by a bit, a tiny bit - to suit your purposes. Now whenever a customer orders a flavor with a certain ingredient that your corporate partners are interested in, you instruct your staff to ask a question back. "Blueberry ice cream? OK, but would you like a blueberry fortune cookie instead?" Inside the fortune cookie is a slip of paper with a very special message written by the corporate partner - a marketing message, or perhaps a limited-time discount.
News of this innovation quickly spreads over the corporate news wire: Infinite Flavors now allows advertising! To customers, you proudly announce the delights of crunchy, crispy fortune cookies - for just a few special flavors.
And if anyone raises any question about whether this is core to the mission of "giving customers the perfect ice cream," you wave it off. No one's forcing them to choose the fortune cookie, you say. We're just making an offer of extra value. On with the expansion plans.
Meanwhile, quietly, across town, a new ice cream shop has just opened: JG Ice Cream. It promises "just good ice cream" - solely, it says, for the benefit of its customers.
- - -
Questions for discussion:
• What does it mean for an organization to stay true to its core commitment? Can it change? What if that commitment produced the success in the first place?
• If you were offered the fortune cookie, would you take it? If you were a marketer at a company, would you consider buying some messaging in the fortune cookies?
• Which ice cream store would you go to? (And which flavor would you order?)
Good iPhone games in the NYT
I was happy to be mentioned in Bob Tedeschi's NYT piece today on mobile games.
Here are my lists:
• good iPhone games
• good iPad games
• good Web games
And as for my "annual list of gift suggestions" mentioned in the piece, that's my Uncle Mark Gift Guide and Almanac - not yet updated for this holiday season, though you can still get last year's edition (PDF download). Next edition coming soon, I hope!
Enjoy! (And email me if I've missed any of your favorite games - or gifts.)
The future of typefaces: algorithmic fonts
Back in the old days, a font was a collection of metal plates (technically, metal type sorts) that would press ink onto paper. Fonts and typefaces were static: the letter designs were made of metal, after all.
Today, we have a near infinite number of digital typefaces, yet they all work the same way: each is a static collection of characters. They can't change, because, you know, they're ALL MADE OF METAL.
At some point, the digital world will realize that the letters are made of bits, not metal, and can freely change. Future typefaces will be created not from static characters but from algorithms that set parameters for the letters they encode. A certain amount of randomness would allow each letter to change a little or a lot, always staying within the hard boundaries set by the algorithm.
So within a given algorithmic font, an "A" would always look recognizably like an "A", but each A would look just a little different from the others.
Algorithmic fonts might be most appropriate for informal usage, where a playful or stylistic voice is being used. Formal usages - contracts and such - would just set randomness to 0 to get a static set of characters like we're familiar with today.
More generally, the use of semi-randomized algorithms will come to many fields, not just typography, to encode many elements of our digital experience with an element of surprise and serendipity. And I expect it to start happening soon, as the processing power is widely available. All it will take is a bit more imagination on our part, to see where the idea can be applied, and try it out.
You can't outsource obsession.
"Have you watched someone trying to install the app?" This was my question recently to the startup company asking for my take on their mobile product.
Good product, with good functionality once it was up and running, but a bear of an install. I actually couldn't get through the process without a hint or two from the team. Clearly this was going to be an obstacle to growth.
With some conversation I learned that there were many good ideas within the team. New features, possible partnerships, APIs, and yes, some flow improvements in installation. But with lots of good ideas, of course, come lots of ways of prioritizing them.
Hence my question: "Have you watched someone trying to install the app?" After all, the very best way to clarify a team's priorities is to watch real live customers interact with the product - and then discuss, among team members, what needs to improve.
The answer was that someone on the team had done some user tests of some sort, and reported some results. But no, the top people in the company hadn't yet taken part. User experience was just one of a constellation of priorities and concerns.
To succeed today, with a mobile app or otherwise, you've got to be obsessed with what your customers go through. Call it the user experience, the customer experience, the ideation-info-architectural-construct, whatever: it's that delight-or-plight of your users that you must obsess over.
Sure, you could outsource it to someone else - on the team, or outside. But it won't work. You can't outsource obsession. If the very future of your company depends on delivering a good experience, then you have to care about it as much as - no, more than - anyone else on the team.
With that said, you may need help framing the process, and producing the details. That's for someone on the team (or my own Creative Good, if you'd like to go outside). But the obsession to learn what users want most of all, and then deliver it: that's your job.
