February 2000 Archives
Tuesday, February 29, 2000
Customers Know Best: An excellent Industry Standard article about how companies listen (or not) to their customers. One particular quote stood out because it concisely describes the difference between usability tests and the "listening labs" that Creative Good advocates:
(My emphasis added.)
[A]nyone who elicits information from customers knows that focus-group participants lie, usability tests are only as good as the people designing and interpreting them, and companies often engage in research only to "prove" existing strategies. Instead of listening to what customers want, many companies elicit specific responses. Big difference. Customers make more profound noises when they behave the way they want to, not the way they are directed to.
While there are certain isolated situations where traditional focus groups or usability tests might suffice, a more open-ended, listening-oriented environment is what works best when doing e-commerce customer experience work. The customer experience is a holistic phenomenon, and the best way to understand the customer's experience when she's sitting with you in the lab is NOT to direct her, or time her, or ask her canned survey questions, but simply to listen.
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Monday, February 28, 2000
Revisiting the Myth of the Stupid User:
On February 9 I pointed to a WebWord interview called "the myth of the stupid user." The idea behind the "myth" is that users are not stupid -- instead, designers are the stupid ones for creating products that only they know how to use. I agree with the idea; if a product creates a poor customer experience, the industry (designers, programmers, marketers, CEOs) is at fault -- not the user.
Good Experience reader Clarke Stone wrote in with a slightly different perspective. Stupidity does exist, he says, and we sometimes have to design around it. Clarke wrote:
Stupid users exist in every domain. My own son, not two feet from the cooking-reference-to-beat-all-cooking-references, *The Joy of Cooking*, put four cups of flour in a white sauce instead of the required two TABLESPOONS. That was stupid, and it isn't mythical.
When I polled him about it, he knew the book was there; he knew he could look in it; he even knew which page -- by number -- the info was on. But he didn't look. So, he wasn't ignorant (lacking information), [instead] he was stupid (didn't use what he had).
Thus, some users are ignorant, and we need not to call them stupid because they aren't. Some users are actually stupid. But following the Dilbert Principle, everyone's an idiot about something, so we need to live in a glass house, recognize stupid people fall on a spectrum of stupidity, and try to help them through and around what they are doing.
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Friday, February 25, 2000
CNET: Bill Gurley checks in with another excellent column, this one about conversion rate. Yes, there are lots of metrics that might be interesting to measure -- but when you're trying to measure the effectiveness of your e-business, what's the "hook"? The conversion rate.
So many e-businesses out there, even top sites, have no idea what their conversion rate is -- many have no idea what conversion rate even means. Let's get the good word from Mr. Gurley:
When analyzing an Internet business, there is a single metric, or tool, that represents a leveraged power similar to that of the lever or pulley. This metric, conversion rate, measures the number of visitors who come to a particular Web site within a particular period divided into the number of people who take action on that site (purchase, register and so on).
Gurley goes on to list five elements of a site that affect conversion rate. The first three -- user interface, performance (i.e. load speed), and convenience -- together more or less comprise the customer experience that Creative Good and I constantly rant about. The fourth -- effective advertising -- brings visitors in to the site so that a good customer experience will turn those visitors into customers. And finally on Gurley's list, word of mouth is what happens after customers have a good customer experience. In other words, all five factors that affect conversion rate are directly related to the customer experience.
So the conversion rate, the single most important measurement in e-business, is tied to the customer experience from all angles. Remind me again, why would any e-business in its right mind not invest in customer experience?
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Thursday, February 24, 2000
Clickz: A particularly satisfying rant against the latest rash of buzzwords and hyped-up trends we live with in the Net industry. "E-everything," "e-strategy," and my personal favorite Net buzzword, "branding," all get attention in this article.
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Wednesday, February 23, 2000
RSI Information: This page lists several resources dealing with Repetitive Strain Injury. I highly recommend the resources on this page for anyone not already familiar with RSI and how to prevent it.
Forget about the interface on the website or in the software. The keyboard and mouse are the most important interface between human and computer. If you get RSI, all bets are off. No typing, no mousing -- imagine trying to work without any easy computer access. Please do your best to avoid developing RSI.
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Tuesday, February 22, 2000
Decentralized Interface: Interfaces are moving from the centralized (PC and website) to the decentralized (wireless and "pervasive" or "invisible" devices). Wired News covered two recent conferences that covered this shift: the Invisible Computer conference and the Wireless Symposium. Here's my favorite quote from the latter:
"Consumer networking is the big focus for a lot of these companies,"
Rutledge said. "They are pushing a vision where your refrigerator
talks to your telephone, which talks to your television."
Call me old-fashioned, but why does the telephone need to talk to the television? I can't imagine that the TV would make for interesting conversation. I doubt if the fridge has much on its mind, either.
To be clear, some wireless or "pervasive" devices will succeed. For example, I can imagine a networked alarm clock that displays the weather, the stock market, and the sport scores every morning as Mr. Commuter gets ready for work. But surfing the Web on your fridge? That's just hype. The overall message of these conferences -- that wireless is on its way -- is correct; just don't believe the fanciful examples the industry is serving up.
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Monday, February 21, 2000
For those readers in the U.S., Happy Presidents' Day!
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Friday, February 18, 2000
Upside: A good piece by Aaron Goldberg about the looming problem in the Internet bonanza. While the gold rush is exciting, "There's only one problem: If you happen to be a customer, the experience sucks." That shouldn't be a new concept to readers of Good Experience, where we all sing in unison: The customer experience is the key driver of success online.
Online, you win with a good experience. Not the ads, not the hype marketing, not the glitzy technology, not the cute logo, not the IPO price, not the celebrity management team, not the cover story in Business Week, not the merger, not the leveraging of assets or monetizing of eyeballs or even the very nice sushi you served at your last party. It's the customer experience, stupid. What happens when visitors come to your site and the site sucks? Will you eat your sushi then?
One more quote from the Upside piece and I'll pipe down: "Well-run companies with top-notch sites (EBay and Yahoo, for example) function efficiently while providing good shopping experiences on the site."
Ebay. Yahoo. Amazon. They all have a good experience.
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Thursday, February 17, 2000
Usability: Today, two pointers to usability-related articles: one on usability tests (where the users give the feedback) and one on qualitative work (where one expert makes the evaluation).
CNET: A brief guide to conducting usability tests. The piece also links to more usability resources on CNET.
Information Week: Don Norman gives his own qualitative assessment of several printer sites, and how Amazon.com beats them all.
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Wednesday, February 16, 2000
Stephen Manes: A list of seven handy tips for any e-commerce site building a good customer experience. My favorite is his comment on "spam relief":
Spam relief: Don't hide the check box for opting out of e-mail solicitations at the bottom of the screen. And don't fill it in by default. Better still, offer some immediate incentive for surrendering our e-mail addresses -- like a one-time discount, not the vague promise of future deals.
Interactive Week: On Windows 2000 versus Linux. Given the coming PR storm for the release of Windows 2000, it's interesting to get another perspective. (Incidentally, my opinion is that Windows' success has little to do with its customer experience, and more to do with the incredibly high switching costs; it will be interesting to see what Linux, which isn't so easy to use itself, can do to shake up the world of operating systems.)
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Tuesday, February 15, 2000
Fast Company: Nantucket was the setting for this annual get-together for some of Fast Company's favorite thinkers. Creative Good CEO Phil Terry also participated, and he had some good comments about being sensitive to environment and context. But my favorite quote from the piece came from Liz Dolan, who had these bold words about branding in a customer-driven marketplace:
Too many people think a brand is something that you create with advertising. If you tell them that a brand flows from a set of values, they'll say, "Sorry, I don't have time for that. I have $10 million, and I need a lot of ads to create my brand." You want to tell these people, "Go away! You people are jerks! I couldn't create a brand for you for $100 million, because you don't care about consumers, you have no values, and you're not offering people anything important. So keep your money."
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Monday, February 14, 2000
Interactive Week: Some Net agencies are beginning to build their own usability labs to test their client sites. This is a good sign that the Net industry -- both agencies and their clients -- are beginning to get the message that it's important to spend time listening to customers. As one USWeb associate put it, "Interfaces that seem logical and clear to developers are not always logical to end users."
The only question I'd have on this story is, are the usability groups separated from the designers? I find it especially effective when the customer advocate is separate from the people actually implementing the site -- that way the advocate is free to have a totally objective, customer-centered perspective, free from the temptation to stick with any one design. (I'm biased, of course, since Creative Good plays that very role. Take my comment with a grain of salt!)
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Friday, February 11, 2000
Accepting the Newbie User: In this excellent Salon.com article, the author, Lydia Lee, tries to convince a "newbie" user to switch from AOL to an ISP like Earthlink. Curt, the AOL user, refuses her advances on the grounds that AOL is so easy to use. A consultant quoted in the article agrees: "AOL made it a lot easier for people who didn't know much about computers... These people were smart, competent people in their field, but their eyes would start to glaze over if you tried to explain how to send a binary file."
Curt's determination to stay with AOL forces Lydia to examine why she wants Curt to switch: "I start to realize that my crusade to spring him from AOL is rooted, at least somewhat, in an 'insidery' notion of what being online is supposed to mean... For Curt and millions of others, being online may mean something different from what it means for me."
Lydia's story is a refreshingly honest description of the "insidery" attitude that the Web industry grew up with. People wear a badge for having been on the Net in the early days, braving the difficult interfaces, before AOL came and ruined it. AOL, blast it, made it so easy that millions of people stampeded in and ruined the party for all of us cool people. Or so the attitude goes.
Excluding people from the Net is not only a bad business decision, it's just wrong. The great benefits of the Net should be available to all people who want it, regardless of how technologically savvy they are. Who are we, a few "insidery" computer geeks, to deny people the benefits of the online world? Why should we be exclusive in our design, exclusive in our technology, to keep the experience so difficult and confusing that only a computer expert can use our services?
If the Net was a zero-sum game, I might feel differently. That is, if by inviting the masses we (the technologically savvy) LOST our space online, I might tend to feel less inclusive. (A real-world example is the Wal-Mart that opens outside town and kills off the charming mom-and-pop stores on Main Street... though some people dispute even that idea.)
But the Net is not a zero sum game. That's the key to the whole discussion: there is infinite space online! If Curt wants to use AOL, let Curt use AOL; his choice doesn't make YOUR experience any different, since you can still go to all the tech-savvy, high-bandwidth, or otherwise complex sites that you desire.
Thanks again to Lydia Lee for a thought-provoking article. (And just to clarify: I don't think that Lydia was being exclusive in encouraging Curt to switch; I'm just referring to the industry's "insidery attitude" that affects the customer experience online.)
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Thursday, February 10, 2000
Reader Mail: Regarding Tuesday's pointer to the USA Today article on compensation and corporate culture, Heather Champ (see harrumph.com) wrote in with this comment:
I read with great interest your commentary on USA Today and Company Culture.
I heard recently heard through the grapevine that the CEO, of the company which I left last year, had been telling people that I "didn't love money enough". If I had a better respect for money I would have stuck around to reap the rewards of my hard work!
Interesting concept, encouraging people to "love money more." As if there was an absence of greed in the Net industry!
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Wednesday, February 9, 2000
New York Times: U. Michigan Business School professor C.K. Prahalad, says the Times, "believes a Copernican revolution is putting the consumer at the active center of the business universe." This excellent article, which points to the need for more customer experience knowledge in industry, goes on to say:
To succeed, Professor Prahalad said, companies will have to figure out how to experience their products as consumers experience them. They will have to understand what the customer encounters at every step, from beginning the search for a product to buying it, using it and finally disposing of it.
The Myth of the Stupid User: John Rhodes at WebWord has come out with another good usability interview, this time with Gerry Gaffney, who talks about the "myth of the stupid user" and points to a paper prototyping kit he's made. Here are part 1 and part 2 of the interview.
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Tuesday, February 8, 2000
USA Today: Many non-dotcom companies are offering their employees higher salaries and other financial compensation to keep them from jumping ship. Net companies, offering stock options along with competitive salaries, are presumably more attractive.
I'm surprised that the article mostly focused on the money. What about the working environment? Company culture? Personalities of the team members? Commitment to a good "employee experience"? In the long run, these aspects (combined with competitive financial compensation) will bring the highest employee retention.
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Monday, February 7, 2000
Trouble at Boo.com: Back on November 11, I predicted that "Boo.com is headed for failure." This ZDNet article reports that Boo recently laid off a sizable part of its team. My guess is that the problem isn't that the developers were incompetent but that the whole customer experience strategy was misguided. Consider this letter to the editor, which I'm quoting from the Silicon Alley Reporter Daily of February 2:
boo.com has to be the worst e-commerce website I've seen. Every time I go to take a look at it, I get Javascript errors, server session errors, slow downloads--and this is on Windows IE 5 on a cable modem. Great way to turn off visitors from buying products... In my opinion, boo.com has done everything a start-up shouldn't, from bad management, spending money foolishly to poor Web design. I'll be surprised if they make it till the end of the year.
From: Larry Ludwig
VP of Internet Operations, DELTA Internet services
Remember that customer experience is a strategic issue; if the strategy isn't focused on the customer experience, no amount of design competence or usability testing can save a site from failure.
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Friday, February 4, 2000
More on Net Millionaires: Good Experience reader Michael Turner wrote in from a well-known, highly valued dotcom for another perspective on John Tierney's column on young Net millionaires (see Tuesday's entry). Turner writes:
i also would disagree with Tierney's assessment that net millionaires are arrogant..
the company i work for did amazingly well when it went public, and it has made myself and many of my co-workers wealthy(some millionaires, some not). and of all the people who made millions down to the people who didn't, arrogance isn't a part of their personality. it's true, there were some people who went crazy and act as if they're the "s", but those people where dummies to begin with...
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Thursday, February 3, 2000
Revisiting the Web's Identity Crisis: My January 21 entry, "The Web's Identity Crisis," discussed the recent Word.com redesign, which turned the Word home page into a near-clone of Yahoo. An accompanying letter from the art director described the pressures on Web designers to conform to the Yahoo standard of simplicity.
The art director's letter caused bits to fly in the Web design community, so many that the art director wrote a follow-up note. Watching the e-mail discussions, one commentator concluded that many Web designers are disappointed, having seen the Web "as a wild untapped frontier where they could build their own individualistic log cabins, then watched as the whole area was colonized by cities and businesses."
I like the metaphor of the log cabin and the city because it's so accurate. Many Web designers want to express a personality, a "soul" in their work, yet they are increasingly being forced to create more corporate design, or else leave to find "real" design work elsewhere.
But when has it been different? I can't think of a time in history when artists (other than the rare celebrity) were free to create whatever they wanted, and still make millions of dollars doing it. Serving artistic integrity is rarely the same as serving a corporation's interests.
But minus the money, why the complaints? On the Web, designers can design all they want. If they're willing to forego the hefty salary or the IPO millions, Web designers are free to create whatever wonderful, compelling online experience they want -- and thanks to the Web, they'll have free global distribution. In other words, I wonder if money plays a large part in the designers' outcry. If designers want the best of both worlds -- total creative freedom AND a few million from an IPO -- the quickly maturing Web industry will probably disappoint them.
My brother Kevin wrote in with this thought:
Whenever I get onto the Web, except for those rare occasions when it's for entertainment, my primary goal is to minimize the time it takes to find the info, buy the product, or print the graphic. Having said that, I also mourn the passing of the golden era. While there will always be a niche for the creative, custom design, most website designs eventually will become as exciting as a modern office park or skyscraper. That's the American way. Our society has always valued efficiency more than aesthetic edification. This has been a clearly defined aspect of the American character since de Tocqueville wrote about it in the 1830s. The contrast between the plainness of American popular culture, which with a certain elegance of its own is still essentially simple-minded, and the intricate traditions of the European cultures, which represent centuries of fine-tuning the art of living, has been well-established for centuries. A recent movie based on this theme is "Big Night."
My point is that the Web, along with most of modern business and culture, is simply an outgrowth of these American ideals. The Internet Revolution is not much more than that of the telephone -- a new form of communications, which of course spawns some new social structures, but mostly supports the existing ones. And like the television, for all of its promised freedom of content, the Internet can do little more than reflect society at large.
Kevin is right. Though designers are free to be creative outside the corporate realm, for profit-oriented sites the "golden era" is indeed over. Like it or not, the customers are now in charge, and on most sites they want simple and fast experiences.
If customers don't want the thing that you want to create -- here's the kicker -- find new customers! With free global distribution, the Web provides a large and diverse enough customer base to support all sorts of experiences. True, the majority of users will prefer the Yahoos and Amazons of the world -- but a small minority of users will prefer experiences that are more creative/immersive/whatever. Assuming several hundred million worldwide users, even a site that is preferable to one tenth of one percent of users can still succeed.
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Wednesday, February 2, 2000
Amazon Redesigns Home Page: Today Amazon is testing a new version of its home page. Load the home page and you'll either see the new test version or the old version. Also, a CNET article gives a bit more information. (Thanks to reader John G. for pointing out the article.)
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Tuesday, February 1, 2000
New York Times: John Tierney writes an interesting article on the attitude problems suffered by many young Net millionaires: "He may show up late for the meeting, announce he has to leave early and spend his few precious minutes explaining to you how your business works. He cuts you off in midsentence. He is on Internet time... 'Off the record, some of these 20-somethings are idiots,' said one middle-age [sic] communications consultant."
I'm sure that Tierney is right that this attitude exists, though I wonder how prevalent it is. Most of the Net millionaires I've met are no more or less arrogant than people I've met outside the Net industry. But I could have a skewed perspective, since I'm in my 20s and in the Net industry (though not a millionaire). If you have stories to suggest that Tierney's article is on target (or not), please e-mail me.
A related topic that seems to merit a Times article is the working environment at many of the new, well-hyped Net companies. For all the talk of a "revolution" in the business world, many dotcoms provide working environments that are no better, or worse, than the companies they purport to replace. As Creative Good CEO Phil Terry often points out, part of the "good experience" that the industry tries to create should be directed toward the employees themselves.
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