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Archives / February 2009
Two bubbles, visualized
Below is the performance of the S&P 500 (via the Vanguard index fund), as graphed by Yahoo Finance:
This graph speaks volumes. My professional career has spanned 14 years, and in that time two major bubbles have grossly inflated the market, then suddenly popped. Inevitably it raises the question: for all of us mid-30-somethings who lived through the dotcom years, and now the creditbomb years, how much of what we saw - and did - and created - was for real? How much would have really existed had it not been for those two brief shimmering mirages?
See also: The Onion's Recession-plagued nation demands new bubble to invest in
Automating what shouldn't be: Songsmith
Microsoft Songsmith is a new software program that "intelligently" fills in accompaniment to any given vocal track. Here's "Eye of the Tiger" by Survivor, all chewed up and nastified by Songsmith. Brilliant.
I mean, it's like Clippy (the widely loathed Microsoft Office paper clip) appeared and said, "It looks like you're trying to sing a song. Would you like a bass line?"
Let this be a warning about what happens when you automate what should rightfully remain in human hands. It reminds us what the "A" stands for in AI.
How to tell true love from ersatz love - a biochemical and psychological perspective by George Vaillant, who spoke at Gel 2008 (watch video).
An idea to please customers
Good Experience reader Brian F. suggests this clever idea:
I was using Google last weekend to search for an answer to a tricky question about rollercoasters, but I was having trouble coming up with the best search string. Since the question came from my 6 year old son, he was watching politely. Finally, I told him I was a little frustrated because I had already done a whole bunch of different searches and nothing was working. My son said, in all sincerity, "Did you try typing 'please' at the end?"It was a brilliant idea, really, and it got me thinking, so I tried taking a look at how "please" changed a whole bunch of searches. "Microsoft" returned the company website, of course, but "Microsoft Please" returned all sorts of links from customers or customer advocates. Same with "Google" and "Google please." My own company returned a slightly embarrassing "please try again later" page from our company domain.
It would be cool if "please" at the end somehow improved your search results and took you to a more cordial web, but in the real world it might be just as cool to see companies set up "Please" domains. So, microsoft.com/please or please.google.com always took me to a consumer advocacy page where I could politely ask a question or tell them what I thought and they could, if nothing else, politely listen.
Zero inbox merit badge
Here's a "nerd merit badge" for having an empty inbox. (One of a line of a whole line of badges.) For the record, I recommend earning this badge once a day, every day.
To learn how to zero your inbox, read the brief description in Uncle Mark 2009 or the longer take in Bit Literacy.
(Thanks to Gary Peare for the shoutout in the BoingBoing comments, too.)
Visualizing the credit crisis
From Good Experience reader Jonathan Jarvis, a visual explanation of the credit crisis. Nicely done.
See also:
Two phrases for customer experience in a recession
"If you can't get people to pay for what they love, we're all out of business."
I came across this quote recently in an IHT piece on the decline of the print newsmagazine. The speaker above was Newsweek's chief, Tom Ascheim, declaring the stand they're taking in a major redesign.
Either customers love it and pay for it, or they're out of business. That's a good metric for what almost anyone is building in today's economy. In fact, I'd suggest that the first requirement is the most important, the central challenge in what we all work on. To state it simply:
Will customers love the experience you create for them?
To understand what's at stake, let's play "compared to what?" by focusing on key words.
1. Will customers - not journalists, bloggers, other CEOs - but will customers love the experience? They're the people who ultimately pay the bills, after all.
2. Will customers love the experience, not just like it? "That was OK" or "that was pretty good" isn't going to convince anyone to pay, in a down economy. They need to love it.
3. Will customers love the experience, not the promise of it? With customers watching every dollar, there's no room for misleading ads or over-hyped marketing. The experience itself - the genuine article - has to be as good, or better, than what customers expect - or else they won't love it, won't pay for it, and won't tell anyone else to buy it.
These little phrases are extra-powerful in today's economy. So take them to the watercooler. Print them out in the largest font size you can and make wallpaper. (And send me photos.)
• If you can't get people to pay for what they love, we're all out of business.
• Will customers love the experience you create for them?
"Tarted-up Blackberrys like 'Curve' and 'Pearl' outsold the original, but employees at Fortune 500 companies are clamoring for iPhones. The best experience wins." (writes Brian Collins)
Small chunk of hot metal crashes into Jersey City building. Local news reports that "In the past, objects that were initially believed to be from planes have turned out to be projectiles catapulted from the ground."
OK, who's catapulting large pieces of metal?
Voice-activated todos (and redating) with ReQall
Louis Beauregard, president of Convivio, sends in "a cool extension to your gootodo app (which BTW is really great)":
1. Leave voice note to myself using the ReQall app on my iphone (free, and easy). I make sure to include the key words "Today", "Tomorrow" or "Next Month" or a day of the week at the top of my message (you choose the key words you want to implement).2. By default, ReQall app creates a perfect transcription of my voice note and sends it to me in an email automatically.
3. Rule in Apple Mail looks for the key word in the transcript's email subject line and sends the note to the appropriate day in gootodo (e.g. <keyword>@gootodo.com)
4. Voilà! A new task is added to the appropriate day in my todo list using voice recognition... look mom, no typing!
Thanks, Louis!
Selling the boss on attending Gel 2009
If you need to make the case - to a boss or CFO or other decisionmaker - for attending the Gel 2009 conference, try this. (Feel free to customize to your own use.)
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To: <Boss>
Subject: Training proposal - Gel 2009 conference
Here's why I think we should invest in my attendance at the Gel conference on Thursday-Friday, April 30 and May 1, this year in New York City (http://gelconference.com/c/gel09.php):
What is Gel?
Gel is an eclectic, mind-expanding event that includes presenters from many different disciplines - design, technology, business, and so on - and attracts an audience of similar diversity.
The conference allows creative leaders to network, learn, and expand their horizons in a number of different contexts: workshops, seminars, theater presentations, and networking breaks.
Why should I attend Gel?
The primary benefit of my attending Gel is that I'll get the intellectual energy and inspiration that's so valuable in a challenging market. The current list of speakers for the 2009 conference is all over the board - an anthropologist, the founders of Meetup.com and Treehugger.com, an NYC school principal, an oil painter, a psychology professor, a defense lawyer, and several others. Many of the speakers are from fields that may initially seem unrelated to ours. However, Gel connects all of these speakers, their ideas and their points of view around the common goal of creating excellent user experiences. Unlike "typical" conferences that offer a series of PowerPoint presentations focused on one topic, Gel inspires creative leaders to think about their work in new and creative ways.
I expect that after attending Gel, I will return to work (and life) energized and passionate - with an improved perspective and a focused purpose. I also expect that I'll come back having met a number of other executives, directors, and other influentials at any number of other companies and organizations that we might find are good partners or customers.
(Last year's Gel attendee list - http://gelconference.com/08/attendees.php - gives a good sense of who attends the event... including over 30 CEOs, presidents, founders, and principals; over 20 VPs of marketing, product, UX; and hundreds of client-side companies, partners, vendors, and other orgs.)
Comments from past Gel attendees:
"I found the entire event to be inspiring, edifying and stimulating: qualities that one does not find easily in one's day-to- day existence. I loved the fact that the presenters were in different stages of their lives, from different disciplines and with different perspectives. The conference definitely has a humanitarian focus that is too often lacking in design and technology symposia."
"What a wonderful assembly of thinkers and doers that was just a joy to be a part of."
"It really made me think about the various experiences of my life, especially the good ones, and how I can be truly present with them in a more meaningful way. Also, how to create more of them!"
"it's a pretty sophisticated crowd so the speakers could freely use shorthand for big ideas and people got it pretty quick... there were post-Marx-brothers intellectual jugglers for every session who were their own good experience and who tied all the good experiences together... there was a mix of speakers i would expect to see at a user experience conference and speakers i would likely not get to see anywhere otherwise... I was interested, amused and moved throughout the day"
"Attending the GEL conference helped me to cross what we used to call an 'inflection point' in terms of how I approach and create great customer experiences."
Summary
Gel does a good job of asking the right questions, some of which I hope would be answered by attending:
"Whether you're in business, education, philanthropy, art, design, or any other area, this is a rich challenge for you: how do you create a good experience in what you do? What are the multiple factors that will over-determine that experience? How do you integrate that experience within your larger context (customer needs, business goals, the environment, society at large)?"
P.S. There are several videos of past presentations at gelvideos.com.
Customer experience review: Logitech's Harmony One universal remote
Have you counted your remotes lately? DVD player, stereo, TV, cable box, TiVO, or some other permutation - lots of homes are littered with remote controls. And they all look the same - matte black, with a dizzying array of buttons.
This is why the universal remote is such a good idea. One remote to rule them all, and in the darkened living room bind them. At least in theory. In practice, many universal remotes are hard to set up, still harder to use with all those buttons, and thereby create the very complexity they were supposed to eliminate.
I'm happy to report that Logitech's Harmony One remote is an exception, with a mostly easy setup and simple interface. Logitech sells several universal remotes; the Harmony One is their top of the line.
There's just one major problem in the setup, and it almost stopped me from using the device at all. It came when I inserted the installation CD into my Mac and saw the following dialog box:
"Are you setting up a Harmony 1000 remote?"
Two buttons: Yes and No. (Highlighted default choice was Yes.)
I stopped for a moment. The remote is the Harmony One, but was the product number 1000? Maybe "Harmony One" was short for "Harmony One Thousand"? Sometimes installation screens ask bizarre questions about hardware, and possibly that's what was happening here.
Or perhaps I was reading the question wrong. Maybe they're asking if I'm setting up the remote, as opposed to uninstalling or editing the configuration.
There were no other choices but Yes and No. Surely if I chose the wrong button I could go back and edit my choice later in the process.
I clicked Yes.
And thus began my time in installation crazyland.
Nothing worked. The screen said "plug in the remote to the USB port," which I did, but the screen didn't recognize it. I tried different USB ports; no luck. Quit, restart, same problem. Thought maybe I clicked the wrong button, so I deleted the installation program, emptied the trash, restarted, re-inserted the CD, reinstalled, clicked "No". Still didn't work.
I almost gave up, but some Google searches found other users who "accidentally selected 'Yes' when asked during installation if I had a Harmony 1000." Turns out Logitech's site has an updated, downloadable installation program which is much better designed - and doesn't ask the awful "Harmony 1000" question.
Once I downloaded and ran the new install, it worked flawlessly. Within a few minutes the Harmony One was communicating with a nearly 20-year-old Panasonic boom box that hasn't had a reliable remote control in years - and controlling other devices in the living room - all with an easy-to-use touchscreen interface.
Logitech obviously knows about the problem with its old installation process, because they've fixed it. But the problem lingers on the CDs that are being sent out in the Harmony One packages. My suggestion? Put a big orange sticker on every box that says...
"Mac users, don't use the CD! Download the install program from logitech.com."
With that little fix in place, the out-of-box experience for the Harmony One would be a much better experience, and not a reminder of the old Dilbert cartoon where the boss says, "Make it so they have to reboot after every typo." Meantime, I'll continue to recommend the Harmony One.
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See also - Customer experience review: Crutchfield.com
P.S. If your company would like a customer experience review, drop a line: mark at goodexperience dot com.
Handling unscheduled tasks
Just got a question from a new user of Gootodo:
I've just started using Gootodo and think it's really great. I often have tasks to do that I am not yet ready to schedule for a particular day. Is there anyway to accomodate for "unscheduled tasks"?
My answer:
We don't have an "undated" list, because then the user would have two separate lists to keep up with: one for today, and one for undated todos. Instead, Gootodo encourages you to focus on today's list only, so you're not overloaded by other days or other lists. So if you have a todo that doesn't need to be scheduled for a particular day, just choose a day in the future when you'd like to be reminded to work on it. If on that day you're not ready to dive in, just redate it for another future day. Meantime, I hope you enjoy only having to keep track of one list of todos!
Summary of banking meltdown
Excellent summary of the bank meltdown, in three grafs:
Over the past 25 years, the cost of finance has been low and asset prices have generally been rising. That has encouraged banks to use more leverage in order to earn high returns on equity. The process of lending money against the security of assets, or trading assets with the banks' capital, helped to push asset prices even higher. A sizeable proportion of the profits that resulted from all this activity was then handed out to employees in the form of wages and bonuses.But when asset prices started to fall, the whole system unravelled. Banks were forced to cut the amounts that they had borrowed, putting further downward pressure on prices. The "shadow banking system", which relied on bank finance, started to default. The result was losses that outweighed the profits built up in the good years; Merrill Lynch lost $15.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008 alone, compared with the $12.6 billion of post-tax profits it earned in 2005 and 2006 combined.
In effect, executives and employees were given a call option on the markets by the banking system. They took most of the profits when the market was booming and shareholders bore the bulk of the losses during the bust.
Pay special attention to that last sentence. This is what it means to "privatize gains, socialize losses." In other words - heads I win, tails you lose. Or to summarize the whole thing in just one word: fraud.
See also: Notes on the financial crisis
Turns out the cleverly-packaged VitaminWater is mainly sugar water (shocking, I know):
"When I bought VitaminWater, frankly I thought I was doing myself a favor health-wise," said the plaintiff, San Francisco, California, resident James Koh, who used to purchase and drink VitaminWater after working out at the gym. "I was attracted by the prospect of getting extra vitamins. But I had no idea that I was actually getting almost a Coke's worth of sugar and calories. There's no way I would have spent money on that, had I known."
(via)
Amazon announces Kindle 2
Amazon just announced the Kindle 2, the new and improved version of their popular ebook reader.
I like the Kindle (see my review) and even found an amusing trick you can play with it.
But it's not clear whether the Kindle 2 has addressed the key customer experience challenges in its first version.
My concerns in my review were:
• search doesn't work well enough
• uploading files is hard
• button design is awkward
• reading Web pages or newspapers is awkward
• pricing model for online subscriptions is bizarre
• the Kindle arrives with nothing preloaded
The improvements of the Kindle 2, according to Amazon's promo video, are:
• more storage (now holds "1,500 titles")
• longer battery life ("read for days")
• sharper display (16 tones of grayscale)
I hope these aren't the only improvements in the Kindle 2, because none of those three were glaring problems in the first design.
Of course, Amazon might have fixed other things and not mentioned it (promoted benefits have to sound interesting, and "better button design" doesn't do it)... let's hope.
Wishing Charles Darwin a happy 200th - you can, too, here.
Email bankruptcy as "half bliss"
What happened when Wade Roush "declared e-mail bankruptcy, and discovered the bliss of an empty inbox":
the feeling only lasted about two minutes, until the next message popped onto the screen. Clearly, declaring e-mail bankruptcy was only half of the solution. I also needed a way to keep my inbox from overflowing again. And for that, I turned to another trusted source, Mark Hurst. ... the author of Bit Literacy, a primer on handling information overload. I first talked with Mark a few years ago when I was writing about Web-based time management tools; he has written a particularly effective one called Gootodo.
A new way of saving cash in these tough times. Do not try this at home. (Funny true story in the WaPo)
The Innocence Project at Gel 2009
I'm happy to announce that Barry Scheck, cofounder of The Innocence Project, will be speaking at Gel 2009 (April 30 - May 1 in New York).
Coincidentally, a front page NYT article today mentions the excellent work that The Innocence Project does:
Peter J. Neufeld, a co-director of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit group that uses DNA evidence to exonerate the wrongfully convicted, presented to the academy a study of trial transcripts of 137 convictions that were overturned by DNA evidence and found that 60 percent included false or misleading statements regarding blood, hair, bite mark, shoe print, soil, fiber and fingerprint analyses.
The outstanding documentary After Innocence is the best place to start, if you're interested to learn more.
Jay lists the best games of 2008 (scroll down to see the link list).
The true mission of user experience teams
I spoke to a friend the other day about her new job heading up user experience at a non-technology company. She told me about the processes she is rolling out - card-sorting, personas, and so on - the standard methods one would expect today.
What struck me was the point of all her methods. "It's tough to get in front of the decisionmakers," she said. "This isn't a company that is accustomed to thinking about the user."
In other words, her desired outcome - the entire point of all the methods she's rolling out - is simply to GET THE ORGANIZATION INVOLVED in thinking about the experience, something they haven't done before. And she's absolutely right to do so.
This is in contrast to the commonly perceived point of these methods. Some people think that personas are there to better define different kinds of customers. Or that card-sorting is supposed to organize the links on an intranet.
Well, yes, sort of. BUT...
• Personas are mostly useful in getting people other than the user experience team - decisionmakers - to think about customers.
• Card-sorting is mostly useful in getting people other than the UX team to think about designing things from a user's perspective.
• User research - especially my preferred method, listening labs - is great at getting customer feedback, but it's even more important in getting people other than the UX team to sit and watch real-live customers, face-to-face, and discuss what they saw.
These methods are about GETTING THE ORGANIZATION INVOLVED. If they have some other benefit as well, so much the better.
Good practitioners know what their job really is: to spread customer-centered thinking throughout the organization. If you can get decisionmakers to sit in a listening lab for a day, you've hit a home run: they'll start to "get it" within the first two 45-minute sessions.
But if labs aren't possible, then sure, run a meeting to discuss personas. It's a way to get people around a table, starting to think and talk about a new way of doing business: focusing on how to benefit the customer.
Do you get what I'm saying? Changing the organization is the brass ring. Once the organization changes, everything follows: from the strategy ("let's provide world-class service to our customers, and measure our progress") down to the tactics on the site ("let's stop naming links with our internal jargon").
And the only way the organization changes is if people other than the user experience team start living and breathing this perspective. Simply giving the answers in a well-formatted report doesn't change the DNA of the organization. Decisionmakers need to get involved. And if the user experience team doesn't make that happen, who will?
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