Archives / September 2009

There's an old saying that if you're pointed in the right direction, all you have to do is keep walking.

Or as Calvin Coolidge put it, it's all about persistence:

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Just keep on going: a great philosophy for any entrepreneur, exec, manager, designer, even entire organizations.

There's just one hitch, though... did you catch it?

Absolutely all of it - 100% of this approach - depends on having the right direction. Without that one little element, the entire effort is for naught.

I'm reminded of Alice, who asked the Cheshire Cat, "which way [should I] go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where," said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

It's not a small matter, to find the right direction. I should know (and should admit) - my entire consulting career has been focused on setting people out on a more customer-centered, user-centered, or patient-centered direction. It's not easy.

Why is finding direction (or "strategy," as I generally call it) so rare, so difficult? One reason is that creating the strategy is different from execution.

Put another way: you have to stop and take time to find the direction. You can't run while you're reading the map.

And this is the potential problem with popular methods...

• iterative design
• rapid prototyping
• agile development
• [add your own favorite buzzword here]

...which are great and all, except when there's no well-thought-out direction to go in.

So be forewarned - it's hard to be a strategist. People prefer action. "Ready-fire-aim" sounds so much more exciting and appealing. "Do something!" they say - and it can be hard to sit down and say hey, let's take at least a couple of days to think about who our customers are and talk to them about what they need.

(You do talk to your customers, right? Because that's a necessary step in finding your direction.)

Without direction, we're presenting our flipcharts and our powerpoints to the Cheshire Cat. And he just griiiiiiins.

- - -

See also:

• My process for creating a customer experience strategy

• You DO talk to customers, don't you?

What do the tennis match, the presidential address, and the awards ceremony all have in common? In each case, somebody wanted to say their piece instead of listening to someone they disagreed with.

And it's not uncommon. We can call this an uncivil moment, or an unusually harsh season for public discourse, but it happens all the time. All around us. You, reading this, have played the part, and so have I. Not necessarily in the semifinals, but in everyday circumstances. We tend not to enjoy listening to people we disagree with. I'll go further and say we tend not to enjoy listening at all.

The thing is, listening is DIFFICULT. I'm not referring to hearing, i.e., using an auditory nerve to detect sound waves. Having the tools says nothing about whether one has the skills to use them to some meaningful end.

Listening - real listening - is difficult because it requires a real investment: of focus, and empathy, and time. Worse yet, it's not even clear what the payoff is going to be. (You have to listen to find out!) It's easier to leave it undone and move on to the next thing.

Anyone who works at creating better experiences - for customers, or patients, or students, or readers, or viewers, or parishioners, or constituents - will tell you, or should be able to tell you, two universal truths:

1. You can't create something better for someone unless you understand what it is they need.

2. Finding out what they need - often by listening to them - is hard.

This brings to mind the cliche, "If it was easy, everyone would do it." I'll add a converse: since it's hard, not many people are doing it. Listening is hard.

But some people do it. To some extent, in fact, I've built my own professional career on a willingness to listen, or at least to encourage others to do so. My company's consulting process is centered on "listening labs," named so to distinguish them from other research methods that don't include actual listening to customers. In our Councils we bring together executives to listen to each other, so as to be able to give help to each other in an environment of community.

And the Gel conference, being focused on "good experience," not surprisingly has had a number of great talks that draw heavily on listening. Just one instance from this year's conference was Robin Nagle, who studied sanitation workers by listening to them - really, becoming one of them - and was rewarded with a wealth of knowledge about their profession and our relationship with trash. Really a fascinating talk: watch the video here.

Our first Gel Challenge, incidentally, has the theme of LISTENING and is still open for entries. What's your idea for improving an experience around listening better? All details for the Gel Challenge here.

Some doctors wash their hands, but many don't:

Hand hygiene and sterile technique are so successfully maintained in operating rooms not because of the reminders that hang over scrub sinks, but because it is part of the culture and identity of those who work there. ...

But such enthusiastic devotion to hand hygiene does not exist outside the operating room.

Plenty of high-tech solutions are being proposed, but like most user experience work, the challenge isn't with technology - it's in changing the organization.

(Amazing how hard it is to make a tiny, common-sense change in an established culture. As Pauline Chen writes, "If the national agency that defines excellence and standards of quality for more than 90 percent of hospitals cannot make good hand hygiene a pivotal part of the culture and identity of health care, then who can?")

Interested in more? Come to the Gel Health conference - October 22-23 in New York.

I had some dejavu reading in the Times that PC makers are finally beginning to "get it" (emphasis mine):

PC makers [have] finally reached a realization that many other industries discovered ages ago: the consumer is truly king.

... Over the last couple of years, the industry has made a slow lurch away from its engineering roots toward a more shopper-friendly strategy that recognizes that if you make your product simpler to understand, more people will buy it.

... The old tradition of flogging 220 different combinations of A.M.D. chips has been traded in and replaced with three categories of PCs: See, Share and Create systems (the designations roughly line up with "good," better" and "best").

This is almost exactly the strategy we provided to Gateway, the PC manufacturer, back in 1999 as they hired us to create a new customer experience strategy.

As you can see in the case study of the project, that simple change increased the online sales by several million dollars per month. And this was back in 1999 when relatively few people were buying computers online.

As you can't see in the case study, Gateway chose to revert to a complex, customer-hostile design for the site just a few months later. I think a Web design firm must have come in after us - wearing more expensive clothes, or green hair, or whatever was considered hot in 1999 - and convinced Gateway that it would be a good idea to pay the design firm a million dollars to build an incredibly complex experience for their customers. (Not hammering on Gateway; a LOT of companies did that back then and plenty still do today.)

Ten years after the Gateway project, it's nice to see that other manufacturers are finally learning the lesson we found out with some low-tech customer research and common-sense strategy work.

Meanwhile, the Gateway site - while sporting slick graphics - still touts series called LX, MC, NV, and so on. (Time again to rally to a customer-centered strategy? I'm ready when they are.)

I'll admit I wasn't looking forward to staying at the Courtyard Marriott recently. It's located at the Phoenix airport, and "airport hotel" brings to mind images of dusty rooms, stale food, and furnishings dating from the 1970s.

But when I walked into the hotel to check in, I was surprised to find a clean, spacious, elegant lobby. An agent stood at a podium just inside, ready to check me in, not far from a circular bar serving coffee and drinks. Attractive seating areas, with lamps and power plugs, were being used by fellow travelers working on various digital devices. These people actually appeared to enjoy sitting in the lobby of an airport hotel. What in the world was going on?

As any customer experience practitioner will tell you, these things don't happen by mistake, and they rarely happen due to a standard corporate "refresh." Something this good requires a dedicated effort, from top leadership, to listen to customers and improve things on their behalf.

So I found the person in charge: Brian King, VP & global brand manager, Courtyard by Marriott. In a wide-ranging phone call, we covered the case study of the Courtyard turnaround.

Q: How did this redesign project get started?

A: We started by determining our target customer segment, which is FBT - frequent business travelers. They make up less than 5% of the US population, so it's a small consumer set, yet they're the most profitable of all travelers, since they travel the most, travel midweek, and pay the highest rates. We chased that consumer very aggressively.

On top of that, we believed that if we designed to meet the physical and emotional needs of the FBT, the majority of those needs would also be fulfilled if someone came on a weekend - they'd still have an amazing experience.

We started with a segmentation report that looked at our consumer from demographic and psychographic perspectives, then we ran direct research, talking to customers about what they like and dislike about Courtyard, and then ran ethnographic research.

Q: So now you understand who you're designing for and generally what they like and don't like. What came next?

A: Something we call the "brand blueprint," a set of insights based on what we learned from our segmentation, interviews, and ethnography. For example, we found that the laptop is the center of the business traveler's life. That helped determined how the lobby design would support that need of the traveler.

In our case, that means furniture that has power outlets everywhere. In the old days you'd walk into a hotel lobby and see granite coffee tables. The business traveler would try to pull the coffee table over to where they were sitting, then find a plug somewhere. It didn't work. Now all our couches have task lamps that move, with plugs built in. There are communal tables with plugs built in. We used the laptop as a filter for both form and function in the overall design.

Q: Any other insights in the brand blueprint?

A: We found that choice and control are huge with this customer. If they don't have control, they'll seek other brands. So, for one thing, our breakfast offering changed. Courtyard for 25 years had the standard buffet along the lobby wall, and didn't give customers choice and control. Even if I just wanted coffee and a bagel so I could "hit the road," I'd have to sit there, wait for a server and eat what was on the buffet.  These insights drove how the space should support a new experience for our customers. Even our new service strategy was derived

out of our brand blueprint.

Q: I like how the brand blueprint brings out high-level learnings drawn from the research. It sounds essentially the same as the "customer experience strategy" that I write about and my team consults on. What came next?

A: Well, everything unrolled from there. We took our knowledge and created, in a warehouse in San Francisco, an entire lobby made out of white foam core. We built it to scale. Then we brought in consumers to get feedback on the overall experience of the space. We didn't want feedback on color choices, like blue versus red. Instead we wanted feedback on using welcome pedestals, rather than a clunky front desk. Our associates circle around the space rather than standing in one place, and we wanted customer feedback on that. And the foam core allowed for rapid prototyping. After we got user feedback, we could rip it apart and build it again to get the concept right.

Q: And what came after the prototyping phase?

A: We went into architectural renderings and drawings, and then we built out the new lobby in an actual hotel. This was in Fair Oaks, Virginia, our first live lobby executing the concepts in a working environment. We then completed more consumer research using intercepts and focus groups. More refinements were made for the final rollout.

Q: And then you started rolling out the design?

A: Yes. We've opened our 58th lobby, and we'll have over a hundred by the end of 2009, and we hope to be done by the end of 2011.

Q: Now the all-important question. What results have you measured from the new design?

A: It's been spectacular. We've seen a dramatic change in our market share, almost 10%, a 28% increase in guest satisfaction from the new lobby, and average food profit has increased 113%. Another nice result, our brand positioning is "refreshing business," in our ongoing guest satisfaction survey - rarely you see consumers use words from your positioning statement - but, we get surveys stating "this lobby is so refreshing," which to me means we've hit it out of the ballpark.

NYT on Six Sigma and design thinking:

...in the last 5 to 10 years, they have been told they must master a new set of skills known as "design thinking." Aiming to help companies innovate, design thinking starts with an intense focus on understanding real problems customers face in their day-to-day lives -- often using techniques derived from ethnographers -- and then entertains a range of possible solutions.

To many, the two skill sets don't fit together well, and Chuck Jones, vice president for global consumer design at Whirlpool, explains why that may be so. Design thinkers, he says, are like quantum physicists, able to consider a world in which anything -- like traveling at the speed of light -- is theoretically possible. But a majority of people, including the Six Sigma advocates in most corporations, think more like Newtonian physicists -- focused on measurement along three well-defined dimensions.

Yes. Super important to understand problems from the customers' perspective.

But I don't get "design thinking." Were people designing brainlessly before? Just empty-minded zombies designing with no purpose? That is to say, what's wrong with calling it "design"? Isn't design all about solving people's problems?

Still, looks like "design thinking" is poised to take the spot as the new favorite buzzword in the corporate world, bumping "innovation" down a notch.

But no matter. As long as companies are learning how to actually solve customers' problems, they're doing good work. (Even if they start calling the process "considerate innovation," or "soulful sigma," or some other phrase.)