April 2000 Archives
Friday, April 28, 2000
Building an E-Business for Real: With the end, or the beginning of the end, of the tech stock bubble, it's finally time for the dotcoms to focus on the customer. These days it might not not be such a good idea to waste investors' money on $20 million TV ad campaigns, overdesigned sites, and exorbitant sushi-and-lobster parties. Instead, it's time to build the business for real, by focusing on the customer. Because, after all, the customer experience is the key to e-business success.
Right?
A Salon article reports the following: "Dot-com valuations may have withered, but the enthusiasm for extravagant dot-com parties hasn't... on average, each [party] costs $30,000 to $50,000... although the $250,000 blowout is hardly rare." And a recent New York Times piece talks about the out-of-control spending of many Net firms.
A more reasonable account comes from Business 2.0, which discusses the importance of (gasp!) profits.
Finally, the best article in recent memory on sane online business: this New York Times story by Bob Tedeschi. One dotcom CEO notes how he recently focused the company on the customer experience, not technology: "'Four of our engineers wanted to work on WAP," [he] said,
referring to the company's wireless-access initiative. 'I said, fine, but
you have to work on the site's search first, because after the checkout
page, it's the No. 1 most abandoned part of the site.'"
Of course, none of this is new information! Customer experience has always been the most effective investment in e-business. The recent market activity, however, is forcing dotcoms to make a choice: get serious now about the customer experience, or fade out for good.
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Thursday, April 27, 2000
For fun: Some links just for fun.
The global customer experience is lacking in this Microsoft application.
The Ask Jeeves customer experience is abundant in interesting responses.
Finally, two links requiring the Flash plug-in. I wouldn't yet recommend Flash to a client as commercially viable for a large-scale sites... BUT if you happen to have the plug-in and are willing to explore, there are some interesting out-of-the-way Flash files that are quite entertaining. First, on this page, click on the link labelled "Dream." Second, the recent Flash Film Festival had some interesting entries.
By the way, it seems I left out one of the NT firms... quoting from its home page, "Luminant is an industry leader in developing successful eBusiness solutions. We offer a platform of services that delivers integrated solutions..." Compare that to the other positioning statements here.
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Wednesday, April 26, 2000
Kudos to Palm Power Magazine for publishing a contrarian viewpoint -- about the very focus of the magazine. Kevin Quin argues that, for various reasons, Palms are mainly used by the technology elite.
I hold the heretical position that Palm organizers, despite the hype that they are the fastest selling electronic product in history, aren't catching on with us regular folks. I'm thinking here of people who can't program their VCRs, who didn't hook up their own cable modems, and who have incomes that are, shall we say, somewhat under the seven figure range.
There's still work to be done to bring the "good device experience" to people other than techies!
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Tuesday, April 25, 2000
Do Customers Really Rule?: What makes the Web go 'round? The customer experience is the key to e-business success, but there are other forces at work in the industry. Here are three viewpoints. Denise Caruso's last New York Times column suggests that there is too much greed in the technology industry. A 1995 essay on "the gift economy" argues that economies can be based on giving. And finally, as an example of giving as a successful business strategy, consider this article on weblogs. (Good Experience, of course, is a weblog itself.)
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Monday, April 24, 2000
In Search of E-Commerce: The first e-commerce report Creative Good ever published is now online, for free. It's a bit dated -- the second edition was published in February 1999 -- but it shows some interesting before-and-after shots on sites like Amazon and Expedia, from redesigns between the first and second editions of the report.
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Friday, April 21, 2000
Enormicom: Following up on the NT firms piece from a few days ago, I happily point you to Enormicom, perhaps the best Web-industry spoof site ever created. Be sure to read all the way through; there are good resources at the end. Expertly created by the folks at 37signals.
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Thursday, April 20, 2000
Thoughts on Cluetrain: Now on several bestseller lists is a new business book called "The Cluetrain Manifesto." If this book is correct, future customer experiences will be created as much by customers themselves as by the companies. I think the book is a useful reminder to the industry about the power of the customer.
Below are some pointers to resources about the book.
Authors write: A good summary in the Industry Standard written by two of the book's four authors. Another piece appeared in Upside. The book's own website is at cluetrain.com, with the inevitable satire at gluetrain.com.
Two glowing reviews appeared in Fast Company and Salon.com.
A more realistic review appeared in the New York Times, which pointed out both the hyperbole and the solid, good ideas in the book. As long as you can make that distinction, I recommend "Cluetrain" as a good read.
By the way, this June I'll be speaking on a panel with Doc Searls, one of the Cluetrain authors, at SOHO Summit 2000 (a conference for anyone whose products are made for the small office/home office market).
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Wednesday, April 19, 2000
In Praise of Older Software: This PCWorld article is an especially welcome addition to this site. Just read this excerpt:
Nine times out of ten, there's no compelling reason to upgrade [software]... It's a good thing that computers keep getting faster, because programs keep getting slower. In 15 years of covering the industry, I have never seen an exception to the rule that the new version will be slower than the old one.
True, true, true. Certain software companies operate by "locking in" customers, and then forcing them to use more and more bloated, complex software -- not primarily for any customer benefit, but rather to squeeze more and more money out of the customer. I wish there were more columnists and magazines exposing this scheme. Buying an upgrade does not mean you'll get better software; the only thing it does guarantee is that the software company will get your money.
Unfortunately, sometimes it's important, even essential, to upgrade -- only because everyone else has upgraded already. But in this case, especially in this case, you most likely will not get better software or a better customer experience.
On a different note, if you've ever wondered why Microsoft software is so big, this XGN article gives an idea. Word 97 contains a pinball game, and Excel 97 contains a flight simulator. Kudos to Microsoft for fulfilling yet another pressing consumer need ;)
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Tuesday, April 18, 2000
Geeks Explained: The Net was originally inhabited and created by geeks. Today geeks are a minority in the Net industry, but they're still creating customer experiences of the future -- so they're good to understand. David Weinberger, a co-author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto," recently wrote this about geeks:
Geeks are craftspeople, absorbed in their work. They are passionate about their slice of the world... They tend to react strongly against anyone who tries to "manage" away their independence. And they are disdainful of hypocrisy... [yet] while geeks may share their work in the great collective of Open Source, they are fiercely independent in their work habits: they (stereotypically) work by themselves into the wee hours... and while they hate weasel words, they sometimes can't tell the difference between speaking frankly and just plain insulting someone.
By the way, David's newsletter, JOHO, is always a good read. I recommend it (especially for geeks like me :)
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Monday, April 17, 2000
CNET: An excellent piece by Zefer's Seth Gordon about getting a job doing customer experience work. (Side note: Gordon uses "UX" for "user experience." Sometimes I use "CE" for "customer experience." Other people like "IA" for "information architecture." Are there other popular acronyms in this emerging space that people like to use?)
Gordon notes that he has "worked with excellent user experience designers with a variety of backgrounds, including business, cognitive engineering, literature, multimedia production, even industrial design. More important than the background is a genuine enthusiasm and passion for the work." I heartily agree. Creative Good also has a variety of backgrounds -- art history is the most popular major, and we have several MBAs as well -- but passion for the customer experience is a common thread. I suspect it's similar at other companies.
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Friday, April 14, 2000
A List Apart: Language is an important element in the customer experience; this A List Apart article covers the basics well. Here's an excerpt:
"Why do you yell at me whenever my searches fail?" he demanded...It turned out that an exclamation point at the end of some error messages made him feel like he was being castigated, and he didn't like it, particularly since it followed the instructions designed to tell him how to get better search results.
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Thursday, April 13, 2000
Explaining the "nt" firms: I apologize to the marketers at Sapient, Scient, and Viant that I have trouble telling them apart. A quick look at their websites shows the positioning statements below. Can you match each to its company?
"A leading e-services consultancy providing Internet strategy consulting and sophisticated Internet-based solutions..."
"We deliver electronic business solutions to create market leadership, breakthrough positions, and shareholder value..."
"A leading Internet consulting firm that helps diverse clients in a broad range of industries plan, build, and launch digital businesses..."
I think the basic problem is that their names all end in "nt". In fact, there seem to be lots of Net-oriented firms popping up with names ending in "nt". After awhile, they all seem to run together. (Yes, there is a Viant and a Noviant and a Novient.)
To help us all through this morass, I have created a diagram explaining the difference between the "nt" firms.
Of course, who am I to talk... back on December 22, Upside's Richard Brandt gave his take on our name: "Have you noticed that tech companies are starting
to develop names that sound like socialist PACs?"
Just having a bit of fun :)
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Wednesday, April 12, 2000
Industry Standard: Carl Steadman's latest column talks about the lack of originality in the Net industry. "There are a lot of good ideas out there -- it's just a matter of appropriating them... Remember: You're not ripping off, but riffing off."
Incidentally, an amusing Suck.com column this week described the poor user interface of Netscape's new Web browser: "Long relegated to the back seat of the software development process in favor of ever-more useless features, usability has recently been chloroformed, hog-tied and stuffed in the trunk. Exhibit A: the newly prereleased Netscape Nagivator 6."
(Carl Steadman co-founded Suck.com, so that's the tie between these two articles. Details, details.)
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Tuesday, April 11, 2000
Industry Standard: A good article about how business strategy is closely linked to the customer experience on an e-commerce site. The article contrasts the online customer experience of Wal-Mart and Williams-Sonoma with "the breezy e-commerce interface popularized by Amazon":
Tabs are located across the top with keyword search underneath; categories are down the left; there's small GIFs rather than large JPEGs, bright colors, lots of text and so forth.
It is striking how many pure-play electronic retailers use these design elements. Try to find differences between the interfaces of eToys, CDnow (CDNW) and Barnesandnoble.com (now, effectively, a pure-play) -- chances are, you won't find many. The "Amazon interface" is fast becoming a standard in its own right for pure-plays.
There are two messages here: first, and most importantly, customer experience is a strategic issue. Simply handing it off to the technology team, or some graphic designers, or a "usability expert," does not give the holistic, strategic treatment that customer experience requires. (It requires all of those people, and the senior management, and the marketing team, and everyone else in the company.)
The second message is that some tactics of the e-commerce experience are becoming standardized. Amazon's tabs (see yesterday's entry) may become so common that it's safer to use the tabs than experiment with any other elements that customers haven't seen before. If this standardization spreads to other tactics of the experience, then the main differentiation between one customer experience and another will be the strategy.
I'm biased, of course, but if I was the CEO of an e-commerce or content site, I'd be investing more in customer experience strategy than in tactical graphic design or usability.
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Monday, April 10, 2000
Amazon News: Amazon.com finally added enough new categories that it can't fit them all on one row of tabs. As shown in this April 7 screenshot, the twelve tabs are arranged into two rows. Thankfully, the tabs don't operate as they do in Windows software; instead of rearranging when the user clicks on the upper row, Amazon's tabs stay in place when clicked.
The question on the tabs, though, is still: where does it end? How many more categories and tabs can Amazon add and still create a good experience on its home page? As I showed on February 2, Amazon has experimented with a Yahoo-style design without tabs.
The answer is that it won't end. Courtesy of Dack Ragus at dack.com, we have procured the highly confidential, upcoming design of Amazon's home page. Enjoy the screenshot. (Ahem.)
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Friday, April 7, 2000
Review of Internet Commerce Expo: The recent conference in New York, was full of vendors of "customer service solutions." Steve Ulfelder wirtes:
Today's software and customer service reps are... a stop-gap. And an expensive one. The ultimate goal: Web sites that are so comfortable, so easy to use, that any idiot can drop in, find everything, spend a few bucks and want to come back. No eyestrain, no 2 a.m. weeping, no chucking the monitor off of the roof.
Clearly, it's a better investment to optimize the core customer experience first, and then -- only when the site is fast, clear, and easy -- install the expensive customer service package. Likewise, if your site's customer service is already a popular feature on the site, you might consider reviewing the customer experience.
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Thursday, April 6, 2000
More Reader Feedback: Andrew Thompson wrote in to respond to Mark Hines' comments yesterday (my italics added):
The idea that the purpose of an information
architect is to "understand information" is far too limiting. Yes, we create
site maps, but we also provide information design, interaction design,
visual design, perform user research, perform user testing, and in general make
sure the user experience is positive. As we tell our clients, in order to do our job correctly we
must first understand who the customer is and what they are like. It is on this
understanding that everything else is based.
Anyway, empathy is a strong word to
use here because it implies emotional understanding of a customer. Anyone
involved in the web design world is far too technically savvy to have true
empathy for the general population.
Somehow you are separating information architecture from customer experience,
but in my experience they are one in the same.
I'm struck by Andrew's comment about empathy. Yes, customer experience does emerge from empathy for the customer, and yes, I think that tech-savvy people can have empathy for customers. Otherwise customers do get a secondary spot.
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Wednesday, April 5, 2000
Reader Feedback: My Monday piece, "About Information Architecture," drew an interesting response from a Good Experience reader. Mark Hines writes:
...In the limited space of your column, you painted what I felt was a particularly cold, formal and limiting picture of what it can mean to be an information architect (at least in my experiences in the agency/web development realm).
customer experience = empathy/understanding customer
information architecture = understanding information
It comes across as if we were bean counters dealing with only the abstract as opposed to anything meaningful in a human sense. That may well be the case, particularly as it relates to information science, but there are a lot of us who genuinely believe that we are designing experiences with all the empathy for the customer that we can muster.
Some final thoughts...
1) neither could be done effectively without the other
2) one is not subbordinate to the other
3) neither could be done effectively without true empathy for the customer
I appreciate Mark's thoughts. As I said, customer experience workers and information architects often arrive at the same solution -- but (having seen both methods at work) I've observed that customer experience has more empathy for the customer. Information architecture, while it often does acknowledge the customer, is inherently rooted in information, not the customer experience.
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Tuesday, April 4, 2000
Industry Standard: Websites are obsolete, argues this new article by Nicholas Carr, a professor at Harvard Business School. Carr points to Napster, Zaplets, OnePage, and wireless as the technologies that will replace the page-by-page Web experience.
This reminds me of the Wired magazine cover story from two or three years ago that loudly proclaimed that websites were obsolete, thanks to a new technology called "push media" from Pointcast. Remember Pointcast?
Yes, some of these new Net technologies -- especially wireless -- will take hold as they offer a benefit, with a good experience, to customers. But no, the page-by-page experience is not obsolete. Announcing the end of the Web makes a nice provocative hook for an article, but otherwise I wouldn't pay much attention to it.
Anyway, the article is a good read, as Carr did a good job of describing the up-and-coming technologies.
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Monday, April 3, 2000
About Information Architecture: The word "information architecture" is used quite a bit in the Web industry and is closely related to customer experience. Sometimes customer experience and information architecture will arrive at the same solution -- but they aren't quite the same thing (though they're both valuable to any e-business).
The main difference between information architecture and customer experience is the foundation of each. Customer experience is founded on empathy with, and understanding of, the customer. Information architecture, on the other hand, is based on an understanding of information.
Another difference lies in the tools of the two activities. Information architecture focuses on containers of information -- site maps, content inventories -- while customer experience focuses on things closer to what customers actually experience: conversations with customers, research on competitor and comparable sites, and a deep understanding of the company's marketing and product strategy.
Site maps, which customers rarely use, are rarely in the toolset of customer experience work (though again, they're valuable for information architects to understand the information contained on a site).
In this informative interview, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville from Argus Associates offer this definition: "Information architecture involves the design of organization, labeling, navigation, and searching systems to help people find and manage information more successfully."
My definition of customer experience, in turn: Customer experience involves helping customers accomplish their goals quickly and easily on a website. And if customers particularly need better navigation or searching, those should be improved as well.
Richard Saul Wurman coined the term "information architecture" decades ago. He's the author of the excellent "Information Anxiety" (an early inspiration for me) and the creator of the influential TED conferences. Here's an interview of Wurman and a recent review of "Understanding USA," his most recent book, in Fast Company.
Another resource is this column from last October, which gives a good description of the information architect's tools. The content inventory, content map and site map are all described.
And finally, this Saturday, April 8, I'm scheduled to speak at the ASIS conference in Boston, which will feature leading information architects. I plan to speak about customer experience, how it differs from information architecture, and how information architecture should be contained within customer experience work.
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