January 2000 Archives
Monday, January 31, 2000
Experience Hits Business Week: Now that the Super Bowl ads have come and gone, consider this quote from a recent Business Week article: "But good TV -- even great TV -- won't deliver what most e-tailers need: a loyal customer. For that, they'll have to do more than hire a celebrity and spin out an ad. No one ever became a loyal shopper after seeing an ad. That only comes from experience."
So "experience" is quickly becoming the Next Big Buzzword. The challenge is to understand the difference between a good experience and a flashy, attractive experience that actually turns customers off. Yes, focus on the customer experience -- but make sure you create the right experience.
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Friday, January 28, 2000
New York Times: A clear, concise review of the new Wal-Mart.com. I reviewed the previous version of Wal-Mart.com in our (free) holiday report.
A Chance for Quality Radio: I was surprised to see some media news the other day that's actually good for the customer. From the Associated Press: "A proposal that would allow for at least 1,000 low-power FM stations run by community groups, churches and schools to spring up nationwide won approval today [January 20] from the Federal Communications Commission." In a time when global corporations are increasing their media reach, it's nice to see some small groups get a little piece of the airwaves. (The Web also has some opportunities for the webcast of small, independent stations, but there's something extra interesting about good analog signals zinging through the physical air!)
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Thursday, January 27, 2000
News.com: For e-tailers, a good returns policy is an important part of the customer experience. Key quote: "Barnes & Noble representatives said they are aware that people often return books purchased elsewhere to its more than 500 superstores scattered across the country."
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Wednesday, January 26, 2000
Business 2.0: A good, concise article on the difference between link errors and usability. A recent survey found that most corporate sites have HTML coding errors and broken links -- yet one of the sites mentioned was IBM.com, which in many ways is strong in its usability. The difference is that an automated software package can only find out so much about the true usability of a site. HTML validity is just one small part of usability; automated usability tools can be effective, but only as a part of a holistic site strategy.
Likewise, the usability of a site is only one component of the overall strategic customer experience. After all, the wording can be clear and the graphics can be small but the overall site strategy might not serve the customer. Think strategy, not just tactics!
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Tuesday, January 25, 2000
Rushkoff on Flypaper: My entry on January 13 complained about a New York Net company that is "running print ads depicting dozens of people stuck to an enormous strand of fly paper." The (I think) January 2000 issue of Harper's Magazine features a great quote from Douglas Rushkoff. Coincidentally, Rushkoff explicitly mentions the metaphor of flies and fly paper. Not sure if he saw the same print ads in New York that I did..
Marketers pace our behaviors and feelings in order to lead us where they want us to go. When this process gets automated through a technology like the World Wide Web, watch out... the computer can... dynamically reconfigure itself to make a web site that identifies and then paces each individual exactly. Meanwhile, the user thinks he's in control... So-called sticky Web sites are really just trying to create an inexorable pull on the user toward greater and greater interaction with and loyalty to the particular brand being offered. The user is a fly and the branded web site is the flypaper. In a sense, nothing has changed; the same techniques that emperors, kings, popes and priests have used for centuries are now in the service of corporations. What's different is that we now have technologies in place that make these coercive techniques automatic.
Rushkoff, by the way, is one of the most intelligent and clear-thinking commentators the Net has. Find him at rushkoff.com, and find Harper's (one of my favorite magazines) at harpers.org.
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Monday, January 24, 2000
Reader Letters: Here are some recent letters from Good Experience readers.
Dick Miller at HP writes:
I found the article (see January 20) about Bill Joy's "6 Webs" interesting, but I believe he missed one. It's closely related to his first category of using a desktop computer for access via a browser. He lists shopping, e-mail, and browsing as prime uses. I believe he's ignoring the huge number of people who use a similar configuration for gathering and comparing information. This includes consumers who want to find out what the weather is where they're going for vacation tomorrow, what the road conditions are for the mountain range they have to drive over to get where they're going, students at all grade levels who are gathering information for school assignments, academics who are in search of background studies in their chosen field, business people keeping up to date on the latest trends, and so on.
If this group doesn't constitute a large segment of use scenarios, I'd be very much surprised. I'd say I spend 80% or more of my online time in this way, and I don't consider myself anomalous.
Larry de Martin writes:
My biggest peeve is that best use of the Web, information research, is being subsumed by old-paradigm commercial messaging. The only useful URLs I can pull out of search engines are commerce sites. Webmasters who provide information unrelated to sales are simply lost in the din, only to be discovered by accident or through informed mailing lists and newsletters such as yours.
In response to my January 21 entry, Matt Zellmer at Sun writes:
It's funny that in 1994 everyone was striving to give the web a multimedia CD-ROM look and now we're heading toward designs that look a lot like the simple interfaces that were all we could do in 1994... Assuming that usefulness and ease of use are not sacrificed, does increasing a site's visual appeal significantly increase the user experience?
Matt asks an important question. Many sites are caught between the choice of a visually heavy site or a simple yet somewhat boring site. I still believe it doesn't have to be this way. If the organization commits to the customer experience as a holistic, strategic goal, the site can be both visually attractive and simple and fast. But that entails a lot of organizational re-structuring and, in many cases, retraining that takes time and effort. I hope to explore this very issue more deeply in the coming months on goodexperience.com.
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Friday, January 21, 2000
The Web's Identity Crisis: The online magazine Word.com just redesigned its home page. If you're not familiar with it, Word.com is one of the longest-running and best-designed content sites on the Web, in the same ranks as Salon.com and Feedmag.com. Word has always been known for its attention to compelling visual design in its content.
Word's new home page is nearly identical to the home page of Yahoo -- a strange turn of events, considering that Word has always tried to distinguish itself with a visual experience that, while attractive, isn't always fast or easy. But that's not why I bring it up.
I bring it up because of the letter from the art director explaining the change. (Find it linked top and center on the Word.com home page, or go straight to the letter.)
The letter is so well-written that I'll let it speak for itself. Here are some excerpts:
Despite all the improvements in technology over the past 5 years, web users have consistently demanded simplicity and efficiency over all else. The majority of individuals online are looking for information, not a pretty look... [yet] Word regularly crashes users browsers for no apparent reason. I was fully aware of this problem as well, and similarly chose to ignore it... As the Art Director of Word, I have failed to carry out the duties of a competent designer.
Though I do admit that I am disappointed with the full-on corporate domination of Internet industry, and all its ensuing blandness, there seems to be no stopping it now. It will continue whether I like it or not. But honestly, at this point, I am glad to go with the flow. I am happy to say I am selling out...
My first question upon reading this was, is this for real? But checking inside the site, all of the articles linked from the home page have the trademark Word.com "look" -- creative, visual, interesting (albeit slow and troublesome for some browsers). It must be a joke (though the letter insists it's not), but it doesn't really matter to me.
What does matter to me is that the letter accurately depicts the conflict being fought every day, even this very minute, in trendy loft offices all over the dotcom industry. On one side are the old-school Web designers, the folks who built websites in the first three years with a dream of reinventing design, interface, community, even democracy. Their goals were things like "pushing the envelope." "Compelling content." "Immersive experiences."
On the other side of the conflict are the marketers who have mostly arrived online in the last two years and are determined to make the Net work as a business. Hear the marketers speak: "Easy." "Fast." "Like Yahoo." "Like Amazon." Conversion rates, customer retention, advertising and promotion. And, of course, the IPO. These are the marketers.
Who's winning the conflict? Most, including Word's art director, would point to the marketers. There's no room for creative online work, the argument would go, in a medium focused on efficiency and sameness. There is some data to support the argument; in the last couple of years many sites have indeed become faster and easier, and yes, even similar in their appearance. (Some changed as a result of my own work, so in a small way I share in the blame -- or credit? or both? -- for this seismic shift in the online experience.)
But there's a solution to the conflict. We have to change our outlook: it's inaccurate and fruitless to frame the argument as an either-or proposition. Yes, there are designers and marketers with different goals, but the customer's goals can unite both sides. It's the customer experience, not market interests or designers' egos, that should guide Web development.
This may indeed lead to some visually bland sites. At a banking site, for example, what customer wants to be slowed down by flashy graphics, no matter how "compelling"? Sites at which customers want to conduct bland transactions as quickly as possible will naturally become visually bland and fast and easy! And sites where customers want a more visual experience should and will become more visually compelling. Not everything should be exactly like Yahoo or Amazon. Only Yahoo should be Yahoo. Each site must discover (and continually re-discover) its own good experience.
The Web's inherent qualities, like low switching costs and free global distribution, make a unique opportunity for sites with a distinct customer experience to survive online. Where customers want designers to run free with their bits, designers will thrive -- even in the same loft space with marketers! Just let the customer experience lead you.
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Thursday, January 20, 2000
More on the Broken Billboard: In my post from January 14, I described a two-story digital billboard near Times Square which was on the blink the night before, displaying a large Windows error message. It was showing the same error on New Year's Day. Good Experience reader Grant Barrett, who runs the World New York site, sent in in two photos of the billboard from 01/01/00. Here they are: far away (so you can see how big it is) and close up.
Six Types of Websites: Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, describes in this Techweb article that there are "six Webs." I think it's more like one Web with distinct technologies or ways to access it, but at any rate the list helps define what's out there. Joy lists these six "webs": Shopping, entertainment, mobile, voice recognition, b-to-b, and embedded systems.
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Wednesday, January 19, 2000
CNNfn: Forrester Research VP Mary Modahl explains what makes for e-business success in this good CNNfn interview. Unsurprisingly, Modahl points to a good experience: "To thrive in the Internet economy, companies must also build a unique value. One way is to build a brand based on good consumer experiences. That means focusing not just on getting customers, but keeping them." Plenty of e-business companies try to get customers by spending $50 million on advertising; not enough companies keep their customers by investing in a good customer experience.
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Tuesday, January 18, 2000
Talking Cars: I remember the last time, about 15 years ago, when talking cars first arrived. Whenever someone opened the door to get in or out, the car would say, "The door... is ajar. The door... is ajar." You can imagine the zeal with which many owners despised their talking cars after a couple of weeks. Who wants to be told constantly that the door is open? (Or, for that matter, that it's a jar?)
A recent New York Times article announced that talking cars are again coming to market. "Tell the car to get on the Information Superhighway, and it will download e-mail using relatively slow cellular phone connections. A computerized 'voice' will be able to read the e-mail through the car's stereo speakers, automakers say." What a good idea! You're driving down highway 87, zipping along toward work, and you ask the car to read your e-mail. The car begins: "Here... is... your... e-mail. Message one: Lose weight fast. Try this proven weight loss program for ninety-nine dollars. Exclamation point. Exclamation point. Exclamation point. Exclamation point. Exclamation point..."
Spam: now available during your morning commute.
This round of talking cars will only be successful if the cars offer a very focused set of information. The human-computer interface here has really low bandwidth, since the driver has other things to do than give detailed commands to the car! So a raw e-mail stream is a bad idea, since its scope is so wide (spam and lengthy e-mails would both ruin the experience). Possible good experiences would come from stock quotes, news headlines, or other simple information with very focused scope.
More generally, look for this kind of discussion to pop up in all sorts of places, as bitstreams start appearing everywhere (cars and refrigerators and office walls and other places). The industry needs to become "bit literate": with a basic awareness of bits, any designer would know that a raw e-mail stream is not good for cars, while focused stock quotes are less problematic. Customers of the proliferating bit technologies will also need to be bit literate, so they can know how to survive in a world full of bitstreams.
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Monday, January 17, 2000
Computer.com: This site, still in pre-launch phase, is "dedicated to helping you find and use computer technology." Computer.com officially launches January 30, but as of today, the home page takes 42 seconds to load at dialup speed (56k). The site hasn't even launched and it already needs to overhaul its customer experience!
Which makes me wonder: why would a site targeted at computer novices offer a slow experience over a dialup modem? More generally, why is it often the case that the newly launched websites are often so over-designed? Probably because most sites don't focus on customer experience from the very beginning of the development process. For an e-business to be really successful, customer experience must be "baked into the DNA" of the organization. From the strategic level to the tactics, the organization must focus on a good experience every step of the way.
Ad Age: Dotcoms that are advertising in the Super Bowl are preparing for the loads of traffic that the ads will generate. After spending millions on ads, and millions more on server bandwidth, I wonder if these sites have spent the first dollar on ensuring a good experience so that customers will come back after their first visit.
Remember: An ad brings visitors. A good experience brings customers.
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Friday, January 14, 2000
Some Ads Are A Little Too Prominent: Near Times Square last night, I noticed a large digital billboard for a major airline. There are several large advertisements on the corner of 8th Avenue and 42nd Street, but this one stood out. In huge letters, its two-story digital display showed the following: "This program has committed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Nothing else was visible on the billboard except for this most familiar window of Windows.
Lesson 1: Debug your billboards. "Crash" is not a good brand message for an airline. (An airline! If they can't manage to fly a kiosk...)
Lesson 2: Prominent bits must be 100% right; anything less will bring down the whole structure. Use atoms -- paper and paint -- if you have any doubts at all about the solidity of your bits. Plenty of companies employ very prominent atoms in Times Square, and they make perfectly good impressions on the Midwestern tourists.
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Thursday, January 13, 2000
On Stickiness: A recent Motley Fool column discusses "stickiness," an oft-spoken buzzword in the Net industry. "Stickiness" refers to the rate at which customers return to a site. Of course it makes more sense to focus on return visits than on first-time visits, since return customers are way more valuable in the long run. Still, some companies focus most of their budget on driving first-time visits through splashy advertising -- and spend little or no money on creating the good experience that will bring customers back.
My only complaint with "stickiness" is that the word has some unfortunate connotations. A Net company here in Manhattan, boasting about its software's ability to create "sticky" sites, is running print ads depicting dozens of people stuck to an enormous strand of fly paper. Another version shows hapless people floating around a light bulb, much like insects around the backyard porch light.
These ads are misleading. Online, customers don't want to get "stuck." Instead, successful websites create customer experiences that cause customers, of their own free will, to want to come back. The fly paper analogy is totally wrong for online business, where the whole point is that customers can and will switch quickly to whatever site creates the good experience.
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Wednesday, January 12, 2000
Webmonkey: Jeff Veen reports that deceptive online ads (those annoying banners masquerading as Windows dialog boxes) actually work. Or at least they enjoy a high clickthrough rate. In the end, the "successful" banners fail when customers, realizing that the ad was deceptive, click back out of the advertised page. Even in online ads, the customer experience is the difference between success and failure.
Industry Standard: The new "Index of Silicon Valley" reports on some of the socioeconomic trends of the boomtowns of the Net business. I'm glad to see some reporting on the fuller reality of the Net "revolution" -- not just interviews with the latest billionaire. The full report is available at jointventure.org.
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Tuesday, January 11, 2000
Experience California: This "just for fun" page shows what you can do with a simple Web form and some clever use of Javascript.
Navigation Rants: Vincent Flanders wrote this long, colorful rant about unclear navigation, which he calls "mystery meat navigation." Meanwhile, at Useit.com, Jakob Nielsen's latest column questions how important navigation is at all.
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Monday, January 10, 2000
Usability Is Not Graphic Design: This article makes the (correct) point that attractive graphics don't necessarily create a usable website. Flashing some glitzy design might impress the VPs who watch the website demo, but it might not be good for the customer. At the same time, usability isn't the same as a good customer experience, which I discussed in the December 23 entry.
Clickz: You can run a cheap competitive analysis by printing out the home pages of the leading sites in any category.
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Friday, January 7, 2000
Commoditized universe: One more story from my New Year's in Charleston, South Carolina. Walking downtown, I came upon a regular office supply store, where you can rent a mailbox, make photocopies, buy supplies, and now this: read their neon sign. That's right... Web development itself has now been reduced to a neon sign. How many times has this story been told: first a toy for the hackers, then an IPO and media blitz for the VCs, and finally a neon sign in the office supply store and an everyday reality for the average consumer. I doubt that many aspects of the online economy will escape this kind of commoditization.
(Random side note: my coworker Liz points out that neon signs used to be considered such a new technology that they were displayed to show how current the proprietor was. Apparently, here in New York many of the Broadway theaters used neon to look "new." Years later, neon's image has changed considerable. Today, even neon signs are now "neon signs"!)
Three Years Old: It's our birthday! Three years ago, 7 Jan '97, I started Creative Good in my apartment just outside New York City. Since then, we've grown to a team of 25 and (in my biased opinion) have had a real impact in our mission of creating a better Web for customers. Many sites have improved based on our recommendations, more companies are working to make the Web better, and the industry as a whole has more awareness of customer experience.
Speaking of which, it's nice to see that our friends at Razorfish have begun focusing on the customer experience. In an amusing coincidence, the Razorfish home page now displays a tag line very similar to Creative Good's. Here are excerpts of the two home pages: Creative Good and Razorfish.
Anyway, thanks for your interest and support in Creative Good, and welcome to all the other companies that are now improving the Web for customers!
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Thursday, January 6, 2000
Clickz: One of the first articles to hint at the post-holiday hangover that many e-commerce sites will feel. After spending millions on advertising to "build a brand," e-commerce sites are realizing that the customer experience, not the ad budget, determines the success of the site. Key quote: "Good brand building isn't just good advertising: It's anticipating and handling consumer expectations... right now, e-tailing is guilty of disappointing its customers."
(By the way, Creative Good will soon release our own report on the holiday '99 hangover... I'll announce it here on goodexperience.com when it happens.)
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Wednesday, January 5, 2000
Boston.com: Another take on customer experience -- the message will be familiar to goodexperience.com readers. Key quote: "When the Internet took off a couple of years ago, the thing to do was have the coolest Web site, so everyone focused heavily on design and technology. Now, in the first real test of mass market e-commerce, it turns out that consumers not only don't care about design, they won't wait more than eight seconds to download convenience and service."
Remember: good experience is not the same as good graphic design. Don't hire Web developers just because they create "beautiful" Web designs.
New York Times: This article discusses the power of customer loyalty, a key benefit brought by a good customer experience. Key quote: "A company that keeps just 5 percent more of its customers from sliding away could lift profits by 50 percent."
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Tuesday, January 4, 2000
CNET on search: Search is still too hard to use, mainly because of irrelevant -- or nonexistent -- search results. The answer, as we discussed in our holiday report, is for human editor to create the right search results by hand. The CNET article discusses the success of the human-based solutions and some computer-based alternatives. Key quote: "1999 was the year the humans won."
DMnews.com: The "Millennium Awards" of direct marketing. Seth Godin, my old boss at Yoyodyne and now the VP of permission marketing at Yahoo, gives customer experience a plug (scroll down to the bottom award for "Buzzword of the Next Millennium"). The consistent theme throughout all the awards is that the customer is the driver of success or failure online.
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Monday, January 3, 2000
No Technology, Please: To welcome you back from the holidays, I'll start with a true story from my own vacation. On New Year's Eve, I was sitting in a small historic park in Charleston, South Carolina when I noticed a young couple enter the park. The young man dropped to his knees, pulled something out of his pocket, said something to his girlfriend, and then stood up as they embraced and kissed. It was the first time I had ever witnessed a marriage proposal.
I wouldn't even mention the event except for what happened next. The couple strolled hand-in-hand around the park in engagement bliss, when the woman reached into her bag and pulled out a cell phone. She departed from her fiancee to walk to a better section of the park where the reception was better -- and she continued talking on the cell phone for several minutes. All of the young man's plans were superseded by the cell phone -- the park, the ring, the occasion (Millennium Eve) -- none of these could compete with the bits.
The message: if it's an important life event, keep it analog. In cases like the marriage proposals, bits do not amplify the beauty of analog. Guys on knees should memorize and recite a pre-proposal warning: "Please turn off all pagers, cell phones, and other unapproved electronic devices..."
Prediction for 2000: Since every other content site seems to be frothing with New Year's predictions, here's my own prediction for 2000: This is the year that Net luminaries become aware of the bit and the issues it creates. (2000 for the luminaries, 2001 for prime time.) I'll spend much of 2000 making people aware of bits and their ramifications, promoting an awareness that I call "bit literacy." Stay tuned!
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