May 2000 Archives
Friday, May 26, 2000
On vacation: Good Experience now takes a break until sometime around Thursday, June 8. In the meantime, you might take a look at our free resources (see the left column of this page) or sign up at survival@creativegood.com to be notified when we release our free Dotcom Survival Guide in a couple of weeks.
And of course, to be notified by e-mail when Good Experience is back in session, just sign up for the e-mail version: update@creativegood.com.
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Thursday, May 25, 2000
Clickz: A Pew Research study shows that most Web users are goal-oriented. Thus a good customer experience on most (not all) sites would be one that allows customers to simply accomplish their goals quickly and easily. (The exceptions would be sites where visitors really are there just for the "compelling" content or experience, not to accomplish specific goals.)
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Wednesday, May 24, 2000
The Boo.com Spirit Lives On: Despite the failure of Boo.com and DEN.net, other e-commerce sites are preparing to follow in Boo's footsteps. Both sides are in place to make it happen: agencies and clients to hire them.
The Industry Standard reports that there is a new breed of interactive agency specializing in sites that are, in the words of the article, "elitist -- their flash movies and sound clips work only for those who have fast connections and the latest browser."
And the New York Post reports that Neiman Marcus has hired just such an agency to create this customer experience:
Online browsers will enter the store from a virtual street, which will be dark or light depending on what time the user logs on. Once inside, shoppers can get 360-degree views of [the shoe store]... Shoes will gently rise from racks and pirouette when clicked on.
Someone from the agency explained the design choices: "We're bringing a life-like shopping experience to dial-up modem users." To which my reply would be, which life-like shopping experience? Waiting in line? Waiting for service? Whatever it is, that area of the Neiman Marcus site will create a customer experience (and hence a brand) that forces customers to wait, wait, wait as the "life-like" experience loads.
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Tuesday, May 23, 2000
More on Boo.com: In response to Friday's column about Boo.com, I received this reader letter:
Seeing you put in the "I told you" type of messages regarding Boo and DEN in the latest issue rubbed me the wrong way. It is unfortunate that these companies went under, and the Consumer Experience could very well have a lot to do with it, but there probably are other contributing variables outside that realm.
For example, DEN was up against RealMedia, Shockwave, the traditional broadcasters, Apple's Quicktime site, etc... in a market where Broadband isn't quite there yet.
I appreciate the thoughts. My point was that if the customer experience is as bad as it is (was) on Boo and DEN, none of the variables even need to be examined. Competition or not, good management or not, capital or not, the site is going to fail. Yes, there always ARE other variables, but the customer experience is the first and most important consideration. A good customer experience is a requirement for online success.
And an important corollary is that a good customer experience does not guarantee success, since other factors can cause failure despite the good experience.
Other articles have come out about the Boo dive:
Salon.com scores again with another great article, saying that "In the year 2000, there is no excuse for any professional Web site that expects to reach a wide audience of users to put on its home page an animation that requires a browser plug-in, as DEN has (users who don't have that plug-in get a blank screen)."
Two internal perspectives come from TNL.net and the BBC.
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Monday, May 22, 2000
Red Herring: This article lists new companies who are dreaming up new, flashier, and more complex ways to view the Web. I haven't yet used the tools, but I can guarantee you that users want simpler, not more complex, tools. Unless the new user interfaces are simpler than what we have today, they'll go the way of (flashy, complex) Boo.com.
By the way, these risky investments aren't relegated to upstart dotcoms:
Microsoft and Apple [are reportedly planning] to jazz up their GUIs... Microsoft's well-funded lab is in fact working on a 3D GUI. Just ask Microsoft researcher George Robertson, whose group has created cool prototypes such as a "3D Travel Planner," a "Data Mountain," and the "Task Gallery."
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Friday, May 19, 2000
Boo Bites It: The much-hyped e-tailer Boo.com finally shut its doors this week. No surprise there. Back in November -- at the time Boo was most slathered with press hype -- we stated here: "With a slow and difficult customer experience, of course Boo.com is headed for failure." (November 19)
Anyway, now that Boo's run is over, the Web press is running stories on what went wrong. The usual business reasons are suggested -- lack of capital, changing markets, management... whatever. Let's just state the plain reason for it all: Boo.com had a bad customer experience. And since the customer experience drives the success or failure of a site, Boo failed because it ignored its customers.
Ernst Malmsten, co-founder of Boo.com, was quoted in the Financial Times with his own reason for the dive: "We have been too visionary." (No comment.)
Salon.com gave a refreshingly accurate look at the Boo news. Lydia Lee stated that Boo.com "was wildy overdesigned, difficult to navigate and completely out of touch with most Web retailers' vision of quick shopping and ease of use."
Finally, here's our November 1999 column on Boo.com from our e-business best and worst practices site.
In related news, CNET article reports that the Digital Entertainment Network is also shutting down. The article mentions capital, management, markets, etc... yet all that one need notice is the overdesigned, slow-loading, hard-to-use DEN.net site.
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Thursday, May 18, 2000
Lying with Buzzwords: David Weinberger, author of the Joho newsletter and "Cluetrain Manifesto" co-author, gives an excellent perspective about buzzwords in his latest newsletter:
[There exist] buzz words that mean the opposite of what they say. For example, Web
directories such as Yahoo! and Lycos started out as a place you go to in order to go
somewhere else: you do your search, find the site, and kiss Yahoo! or Lycos goodbye.
But it slowly dawned on these sites that they make money by keeping you on their site,
not by sending you away. They accordingly started adding more content and services so
you'd never have to leave. They became, they told us, "portals," although a portal really
is a place you pass through to get somewhere else. In fact, these directory sites used to
be portals and only ceased being portals once they said they became portals.
CIO Magazine: Many companies measure the wrong metrics, or too many metrics, or no metrics at all. This article covers the basics of metrics. I also get in a couple of quotes about measuring the simplest and most important metrics, and ignoring the rest. Here's another enjoyable quote from the article:
"Increasingly web developers are enamored of special effects and forgo the kind of simplicity that's key for a good customer experience," says Telleen. "Consumers come to the web for ease of use. Take that away from them and they're not coming back."
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Wednesday, May 17, 2000
How We Work, Part 2: One more thought on how we work, following up yesterday's piece. This comes from a Wall Street Journal article from May 12 called "The New Economy: A Rude Awakening":
Some see all this as the dark side of the New Economy. The Internet has
bred a generation of brash young entrepreneurs that glorifies speed over
decorum and innovation over tradition. High-tech gadgets, such as
cellular phones, pagers and Palm Pilots, have also fostered antisocial
tendencies, enabling people to isolate themselves even in public. So have
sudden windfalls from the stock market, making some people think they can
have whatever they want when they want it.
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Tuesday, May 16, 2000
How We Work: A brief thought today on how we (you, me, and all customer experience advocates) go about our work in the Net industry.
Remember Fast Company's cover story on "The Brand is You," the idea from Tom Peters on marketing yourself? This New York Times article asks if the idea isn't a bit over-hyped. For us customer advocates, I wonder if working within a good team might be the best long-term prospect -- for our own career growth, for our clients, and for the customers who use the sites.
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Monday, May 15, 2000
Readers Respond: Several readers wrote in response to my recent column, Empathy and Experience.
Jeff Veen points us to the details in the experience:
I think about when I have good days and when I have bad days, and I realize that it is seldom a monumental or catastrophic event that makes them such. Rather, it's the aggregation of little things throughout a typical day that turns the tide. flat tire on the bike. milk in coffee is sour. poorly designed dialog box makes it easy to throw away work. little paperclip pops up and asks if I'm writing a letter. Arg!
But there are little things that help me have a good day. A tiny lip on my new bike lock that makes it so much easier to secure my ride to a parking meter. Missing a call on my cell phone, the Nokia 6160 lets me save the caller id in my address book with one clearly labeled button. Google asks me if I'm feeling lucky, and pleasantly surprises me with the result.
This may be a bit more pedantic than big-picture user centered design process, but I'm certain that's where the little details originate. And that means thinking of our users not as cattle, but as people struggling to get through their day and trying accomplish things.
And Betsy Martens gives an excellent perspective on empathy in the customer experience work we do:
While it's true that *right now* the huge majority of online shoppers/users are in the upper income brackets, it's also true that eventually this toolset -- the Internet, the Web, computer access in general -- will be available to just about everyone. If we think back to the first telephone, the first radio, the first TV -- all these new gadgets were incredibly expensive initially. Only a tiny handful of very well-off households could afford them: far fewer, in fact, than the millions who shop online today.
If product designers at the time had ignored usability and good design principles on the theory that it really wouldn't matter because only a handful of people would be using these luxury items, or ¬that their only purpose was to make a pile of money, then we would be far worse off today in terms of product usability, offline or on.
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Friday, May 12, 2000
ABC News: ATMs are practically the only good digital interface that we have (for a purely functional use, anyway) -- and they may no longer provide a simple, fast customer experience. Instead, some ATMs are adding features that have nothing to do with getting cash:
Wells Fargo today rolled out a new breed of ATM that shows movie previews to consumers as they prepare to make a withdrawal or deposit... Wells and other banks are increasingly adding bells and whistles as they try to convert the money machines into multimedia centers.
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Thursday, May 11, 2000
Lying Ad Banners: One thing I can't stand is an ad banner that lies to the Web user just to get a higher clickthrough rate. As shown in this graphic, the ad banner poses as a Windows error message but is actually an ad for a commercial software program. (I greyed out the name of the software, since I refuse to give even negative publicity to the offending product.)
Ad banners posing as Windows errors are wrong. It's wrong to mislead the user, wrong to do business that way -- but especially on the Web, treating customers poorly is a bad financial decision. Remember, a good customer experience is the key to online success. Tricking Web users into visiting a site will not succeed. Even if the banner does generate some clicks, what happens when customers arrive at the site and find that they were misled? They click the Back button and never come back.
Which reminds me, measurement should be the subject of another rant. Clickthrough doesn't mean much, since people might click out as soon as they click in (yielding zero revenue). The important metric is the conversion rate. And conversion rate is driven EXCLUSIVELY by the customer experience.
Also read Jeff Veen's good piece on the same subject from this past January.
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Wednesday, May 10, 2000
Word Perhect: If your Web browser is souped up with the latest plug-ins, I highly recommend taking a look at this cartoony version of word processor software. Humorous and intelligent on several levels, Word Perhect shows how users use word processing in the real world. One main message of the project, I think, is that bits are arriving into the fabric of our lives -- Word Perhect ironically uses bits to show how we interact with atoms in that same fabric. Or something like that. (Just look at it and you'll see what I mean!)
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Tuesday, May 9, 2000
More on Empathy and Experience: In response to my recent column on empathy and customer experience, Ulrik's Realm, a new weblogger, has published his own response. How about this for a provocative response:
This is where the European state financed welfare system, despite its many problems, beats the American Way every time. Given the lack of institutionalized compassion, people in the US get hung up on moral introspection, while the rest of us can feel free to concentrate on getting the job done.
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Monday, May 8, 2000
Business Week on Reflect.com: Business Week just published a review of Reflect.com, and its conclusion is identical to ours (see below): it's too hard to shop on Reflect.com. Reflect's many irrelevant questions and large graphics make it comically difficult for anyone to actually buy a product -- regardless of how personalized it is when it arrives.
This is what Business Week had to say:
If you... love answering pointless questions about yourself, you'll love Reflect.com. But if you just want some lipstick, you might think about going somewhere else... You might think that answering seven dumb but basically harmless questions is not a big deal, but you would be wrong. Completing the questions took me at least 30 minutes because the site is very slow.
Finally, you may remember that Good Experience has commented on Reflect.com. Here are the relevant links:
March 13: Reflect Takes it Personally displayed our original review and Reflect's response.
March 17: Good Experience readers responded.
March 21: Suck.com mentioned our review.
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Friday, May 5, 2000
Forbes: Alternatives to the Web browser. I think it's great that people are out there exploring different interfaces -- we need to keep pushing the limits of our customer experience knowledge. But it's important not to hype these new trials too much; in my opinion, only one of the technologies in the article has much promise for wide use. Also, while new software will be important, it's ultimately more important to make people bit literate: aware and in control of their bits. (More on that sometime soon.)
Business Week: Some e-commerce sites don't name their product colors very clearly. The difference between baltic and navy blue? "Marketing," says one. I'd say it also costs some sales, since cute product names don't necessarily translate online (see our free holiday '99 e-commerce report for a similar finding).
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Thursday, May 4, 2000
Empathy and Experience: We recently discussed the difference between information architecture and customer experience; I suggested that empathy is one main difference, and some discussion ensued (see April 6).
Commenting on the use of the word "empathy," a reader recently e-mailed this:
I must say, the idea of "empathy" seems out of place within this [Internet] business context. Maybe it depends on who the audience is, but since I primarily analyze e-commerce sites, I sometimes wonder why we're all so worked up about making them more usable. So that people who have the luxury of shopping online can do so without ANY hassle? Oh my, the inconvenience of being inconvenienced when trying to spend money. So corporations can have easy to use sites that people want to return to (turn lookers into buyers into repeat customers = BIG BUCKS for THEM). Geeyod.
And then of course, I'm mobbed with industry newsletters and articles decrying "the user experience, the user experience" without anyone actually even knowing what it looks like (making my user advocacy job marketable), and I think to myself WHO CARES? The "user" looks to be doing just fine to me, especially if you check out the average income of the online shopper.
Anyway, the point of this rant is only to say that when words like empathy get thrown in alongside industry jargon, I get a little queasy. Maybe we should reserve some words for reference to the people who actually need them, like "the poor" (who merit nary a mention in this gilded industry), instead of the "user."
I found this note so provocative that I had to think for awhile before responding. Certainly the note is a rant, dashed off in a moment of haste -- but it also casts the customer experience in a rare light. After all, what is the goal of customer experience work, on most e-commerce sites, but to remove the obstacles of the buying process? We're not exactly ending world hunger.
So on the one hand, I agree -- it's true that there is greater empathy in the world than simply caring for the customer to have a painless buying process.
On the other hand, I do feel a stronger calling in my work than simply making clients more money (though we do plenty of that). Below I've listed five reasons I think there is something more to my work, maybe even some true empathy, than a simple profit motive. (First, a disclaimer: These are my own personal views and beliefs, informed and biased by my experience at Creative Good. Apologies if this is too much my own rant, and not enough the hard-hitting industry analysis usually served up here (ha). But I welcome readers to share their thoughts about how their companies relate to these ideas.)
So, my five reasons for believing in something more -- maybe even empathy -- about working for a good customer experience online:
- The Net allows for some important human interactions to occur for the first time ever. People connect with people -- perhaps company to customer, perhaps customer to customer -- in meaningful, helpful ways. One of our clients helps customers connect and help each other in new ways. The importance of these interactions is not diminished just because the client profits from them; neither is my company's work diminished just because we help the client make more money by improving the experience. I'm primarily interested in helping the customers have the meaningful interaction.
- How my company's team members work with each other, and with our clients, and with the Web customers we interview, does mean something in the world. Whether we're consulting on websites or sewing shirts in a garment shop, our process -- the way we work -- has some inherent importance.
- And it just so happens that trying to work in the right way actually helps what we do. Doing customer experience work in a posture of empathy -- as true an empathy as we can manage -- is by far the most effective way to do our work. Actually empathizing with the customer (not just talking about it) virtually guarantees some level of quality in our end product.
- We're conscientious about the work we do and the work we don't do. We're willing to walk away from profitable work, if the project would require us to breach our integrity or our (yes) empathy for the customer.
- We have a larger, long-term mission of humanizing technology. This is not an opportunistic tag line that Marketing told us would be effective. We actually try to do the hard day-to-day work to approach that goal. And considering how important technology will become to us all in the coming years, that lofty goal is something I can believe in.
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Wednesday, May 3, 2000
Lycos 50: The Lycos search engine reports on its 50 most popular search queries each week. The list shows what's on the mind of lots and lots of Web customers. (Thanks to John Rhodes at WebWord.com for the pointer.)
Be healthy: For those of us who spend a lot of time on the keyboard in front of the computer screen, it's really important to stay healthy. If you don't work ergonomically, you risk any number of wrist, arm, and back injuries. Here are two pointers to ergonomic resources:
ZDNet's Anchordesk offers a helpful list of ergonomics resources.
The Carpal Tunnel Control Center shows animations of how to go through various exercises and stretches.
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Tuesday, May 2, 2000
Forbes: The Google search engine has met success by focusing on a simple, fast customer experience. Indeed, Google's president says that their top priority "is to improve technology and the user experience."
More interesting is the article's analysis of the other search engines -- remember them? They didn't focus on the customer experience of search:
Indeed, Yahoo!, AltaVista, Excite@Home, Lycos and Infoseek have morphed from search engines to portals and then media companies in a never-ending pursuit of bigger audiences and--consequently--fatter advertising contracts. In the process, their home pages have become cluttered with auction features, chat rooms, free e-mail, e-commerce functions and classified ads. Ironically, users now have a tough time finding search engines on search-engine sites.
Certainly Yahoo and the others have succeeded in other areas; my point is that Google has succeeded by focusing on the customer experience in an area where the giant companies have fallen down by not focusing on the customer experience.
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Monday, May 1, 2000
A List Apart: An interesting rant about current Web design. Among other things, the author comments on all of the unnecessary page elements that clutter the customer experience these days:
Alas, the hyperlink, the primary technological reason for the expansion of the web, has been replaced by a backwash of whizzing, buzzing, whirling crap: images, banners and buttons... We have designed the hyperlink into a crapshoot of pop-ups, roll-overs, color changes and nonsense which requires people to mouse over every square inch of their monitors, trying to figure what anything on the page means, or if it goes anywhere.
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