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How customer experience killed the talking car
I'll always remember the day I saw the talking car. It was 1983, and I was a fifth-grader who was always eager to try out a new digital interface. (The videogame arcade at the mall was the main venue for that, one quarter at a time.) Today, it was something especially interesting. A friend's dad had just bought a new Chrysler with the latest technology: speech.
The car was in the driveway when I got there. And while my memory is hazy on some details - who actually opened the door and started the car, and what we talked about afterward - I'll never forget what the car said.
The door... is ajar. The door... is ajar.
I also remember that, at that moment, everyone standing in the driveway thought this was one of the cooler things we had ever seen. Cars were now smart enough to talk! The 1980s had arrived! The future was now!
But that changed. A few scant weeks after the initial driveway demo, I heard from my friend that his dad no longer thought the car was so cool. In fact, the dad wanted to find the voice chip so he could rip it out of the car. "The door... is ajar. The door... is ajar" had quickly become an irritation of the first order. We used to joke about what he must have said back to the car. "I know the door is open, and by the way, it's not a jar, it's a door!"
Chrysler, by the way, stopped production of the talking car within a few years (the option was called EVA - see Wikipedia) and I'd categorize the whole misadventure alongside other automotive failures like the Edsel.
Now more than a quarter-century later, I still reflect on this as a great case study in marketing and customer experience, since the customer experience revealed the actual value of the feature. Sure, the TV commercials, if there were any, promised something amazing. And the test drive on the lot was exciting. And even the first few days of ownership must have been satisfying, with the neighbors crowding around the driveway and cooing over the talking car.
But none of those initial experiences were what I'd call the customer experience - those were something superficial, a glossy illusion constructed to sell units and stave off initial buyer remorse. In other words, a certain kind of marketing.
The customer experience started when the customer - no longer a starry-eyed buyer but an actual user of the car, attempting to derive some actual value out of the product - began driving the car around day-to-day. And hearing, every time they got in, the door... is ajar. The door... is ajar.
Marketing, for all its ability to spread the word and drive sales, is different from the customer experience. While marketing can help shape the customer's perspective about a product - see the tuna story - only the customer experience reveals the actual and true value of the product.
And that's exactly how customer experience killed the talking car. Once the initial owners had lived with their talking cars for a few weeks, they spread the word to their friends: whatever you do, don't buy one. All you'll hear, all you'll want to get away from, is the door... is ajar. The door... is ajar.
Just remember - whatever product or service or other experience you create: the user, the customer, the recipient will know sooner or later exactly how much value you've delivered to them. So create something good.
(And contact me at Creative Good if I can help.)
Mark, almost all of the time you are 100% on the mark, but in this case I think you are using the benefit of 20/20 hindsight on a particular situation. There is a natural evolution to products and features; what seems like a good idea at the inception of a radical change can look poorly thought out and down right silly 27 years later. Since 1983 we have attempted many methods of HMI and voice is still predominate (think automobile GPS units). We have accepted the unrelenting dinging, donging, and binging of seat belt reminders and door ajar reminders in our vehicles. Innovators take bold steps and some of those steps appear to be in the wrong direction when viewed from the future. Good customer experience anticipation can reduce, but never eliminate, the risks inherent in striking out in a new direction.
Thanks for helping keep us focused!
Scott Eves
I wonder if talking cars would have taken off if the car companies had gotten advice from Eddie Murphy? See http://www.themadmusicarchive.com/song_details.aspx?SongID=20217 for classic comedy riff on the topic.
It's so funny to read your memory of the talking car because I have the exact same memory. My next door neighbor bought what must have been the same model. I remember it being cool the first couple of times but then it became completely obnoxious. Oddly I also remember thinking, "the door is not a jar, it's a door". Funny story with a good lesson.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
(Richard Feynman)
... replace "Nature" with "users", and possibly add "...for long."
"The door... is ajar."
Even though I never actually saw one of those in person, that phrase is forever stuck in my head along with the obligatory, "No, the door is a door," response. Talk about a huge failure.
Test marketing your product to people who might actually use them is a huge advantage to a company. Quite often what we believe has a big coolness factor, don't span out well in the long run for many different purposes.
Know your audience, ask your audience, listen to your audience.
Words to live by.
This post... is a post. ;)
Now if we could just convince engineers and product designers that not EVERYTHING has to make a beeping noise. This morning while feeding by baby breakfast, the coffee maker, the toaster, and the diswasher all made beeping noises to let me know - ta da! - they were finished doing their thing. Each time, Baby Dexter would whip his head around like, "huh? what was that?!"
My best friend used to have a Nissan 280zx (or some such) that talked, and I teased him about it mercilessly. So reading this brought back some good memories. :-)
That said, the talking car is NOT dead. In fact, cars talk to us more than ever, thanks to navigation systems. But we put up with the annoying voices now because the information being presented is so darn useful.
Mark,
There is marketing just to sell a car and there is marketing to give good (ongoing) customer experience. I don't know enough about the context of your Chrysler story, but I can't help thinking that gimmicks are all about the sale, not the experience.
I can't help but wonder if Chrysler could make alterations to a car once it's off their lot. If they were receiving lots of annoyed complaints, could they have offered to make an adjustment to sold cars, or at least make the change on cars still in production? It's important to listen to your customers, or they'll continue to give bad reviews to their friends. TripAdvisor, CNET and others exist solely because costomers base their buying decisions largely on reviews.
How about an apology, Chrysler? Those go a long way! http://info.livelogic.net/customer-intelligence-project-success/bid/48217/The-Customer-Apology-Science-Experiment
Awesome post!!! When I was a kid, we owned a car with this fantastic feature. We experienced the same frustration. In fact, I can't remember if the car said anything besides "The door is ajar." Today, I still think of it every time I sit down to design an app. A required step in my process is building a prototype I can use. I need to click around and play with my app. That's when I find out that I hate having a button to do X, or using a pull-down to find Y. Or if that awesome voice feature is actually very annoying. A bad UI decision screams "the door is ajar" to me every time I try to use it. It helps me work out kinks in the design before I get to user testing.
I had to giggle at your talking car reference. My friend's mom had one too, and everytime it would say "The door is ajar" we would also yell back at it. "The door is a DOOR!"
Maybe they could re-release it, but let folks download their own "doortones" and apps? ;)
Good post, which main point (to my mind) is somewhat the same as what Anthony points out; test, prototype, try it out in that thing called reality and real life situations. That goes for everything related to the experience. And that's solid advice!
I found these:
The New Yorker TV ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnLDZbEXfms
EVA (see the submitters own comment):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIpfUuRg1VE
An Renault version (I'm from Denmark, Europe, so I guess that's my "local example" *sad smiley*):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQrBtoaj_4A
Thank you for inspiration and great posts Mark!
It can also be argued that it was the designers that killed the initial talking car by originally designing the car to simply respond to its hard-wired sensors without regard to the fact that there was a human user as part of the total system. Originally, if the door was opened with or without a human inside, a message announced "Door Ajar". If the car was stopped, idling, or running down the highway and a sensor detected an open door, the message would always automatically emit "Door ajar". In ALL cases, the human component and its input into the early system was not considered and was in fact completely ignored. Under these conditions, it is no wonder that people hated the first talking car. But let's fast forward 50 or 60 years and guess what? The "talkng car" has been reborn and is in fact alive and well and working very well without user complaints because the HF designers of today have taken the time to now consider and understand the conditions underwhich the user needed to know about the car's information. My 2006 Dodge has a great 'Talking car' system which works very well and is one that I find most useful. If my car is parked and the engine is off and I open the door there is no Door ajar message. If my engine is running and the car is NOT in gear and I open the door there is no Door ajar message becaused I don't care about this state. But if I am driving down the road and the door becomes opened then and ONLY then does the door ajar message signal me and evoke my interest. That information now is important and relevent to me the driver who finds this signal very useful. Another factor learned by today's designers is that the "voice" component of the system could be replaced by lights on the dash and a gentle sounding bell ringing to draw the attention of the driver without annoying him. The rude, emotionless sounding voice originally used was eliminated from today's system to eliminatd the annoying component of the old system. Moreover, a new 'Non-talking', bell-ringing system was incorporated to add a "warning" state and enhance safety into the system by announcing if a seat belt was not clicked by a seated passenger. Today, if a user does not buckle his seat belt while the car is driving down the road, the bell sounds a warning that the seat belt is not fastened. Conversely, if a person was seated in a car without the seat belt buckled and the car was NOT driving down the road, there is no warning. Similarly, if I got into an idling car and seated myself to talk to the driver there would be no warning signal either because there was no need to emit the signal under this condition. Only when I am driving and someone in the car does not fasten their seat belt does the system correctly alert the passenger to do so not just for safety but because it is also against the law to drive without having your seat belt on which could lead to a ticket if ignored. In effect, the designers have now arranged things such that the auto's mechanical system has "learned" to incorporate the input of the driver or passenger into the car's system. The designers of today's "talking car" systems have correctly incorporated the three major components that must always be considered when designing any user interface, namely the Behavioral, the Cognitive, and the Emotional components of the end user. The talking car system of today is alive and well, and considered very useful and valuable by people because the designers have now taken the time to corectly incorporate the user's behavior, cognitive abilities and emotional feelings into the overall design of the mechanical system to operate under the conditions that the car will be used.
Is the Talking voice component completely dead? Not at all since the audible voice component is critically needed in today's navigational GPS systems to tell a driver when and where to turn the car while driving. Under this conition a voice is absolutley necessary since it would be dangerous to make the driver read this information from a screen while driving, and a bell-warning system could not carry the correct information to the driver. The only options that users like to specify about the talking voice is peripheral factors like gender and accent of the speaker which mtch prewferene withouit asltering information. The Talking car of the 50's was very similar to the first home computers of the 70's and 80's which grasdually evolved over the years to include the user's behavior, intent, and feelings into the system to produced a system that was effective, efficient and satisfactory to the end user. It is this interface that determines the end user experience that we are trying to design, achieve and implement.
Eddie Murphy had a stand-up routine about what a car from the 'hood would say. Instead of "your door is ajar", his car said "Say man, someone stole your battry. I say we go get the $@#$#$@."
Your post also serves to illustrate one of the oldest sayings in advertising: "Good advertising is the fastest way to kill a bad product."
I remember the talking cars. I called the one that my dad borrowed off his workmate Robocar. I loved it and wanted to keep it and was very sad when we had to give it back. I've wanted one of my own ever since. I found it very funny and cool. One of the things I liked about Robocar was the voice itself, a bit like the one in Knightrider. Bring back the talking cars! Now!