July 2000 Archives
Monday, July 31, 2000
Creative Good analyst Zimran Ahmed (zimran@creativegood.com) writes this review of a recent PCWorld article. Another comment on this article was in the June 19 entry.
PCWorld: Despite the continuing media hype about wireless, it's important to remember that even the humble cell phone still needs to be easier to use. As Handspring founder Jeff Hawkins noted at the recent PC Expo, basic phone features such as speed-dialing, call history, and conference calling are still too difficult for many cell phone users. Jeff argued that the wireless industry would do better by creating phones and other devices with the right basic features, instead of building out fancy technology that is impossible for most people to use.
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Friday, July 28, 2000
Business 2.0: Viral marketing is covered in this excellent and important column from Clay Shirky. Here's the key quote (the italics are mine): "Viral marketing only works when the user is in control and actually endorses the viral message, rather than merely acting as a carrier."
In other words, guess what's the most important component of viral marketing? Yes... our familiar friend, the customer experience. Like most other strategies in the Net space, viral marketing is driven primarily by the customer experience. Give customers a good reason to tell their friends about a product, and only then might viral marketing be possible.
If your company doesn't talk much about "viral marketing," even better. It's mostly a buzzword that doesn't usually amount to much. Just focus on creating a good customer experience and you'll gain more benefit than you would with any buzzword-driven strategy.
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Thursday, July 27, 2000
Bit Literacy is a Better Response: Jakob Nielsen caused some ripples this week with his column, End of Web Design. Rich with comments about developments in various Net technologies, the column is worth reading. Just be careful to distinguish between Jakob's observations on how things are *today* (which I mostly agree with) and his predictions on how the Net will change in the *future* (which I mostly disagree with).
Jakob's column is answered by Michael Sippey's The Beginning of Web Design, which states that "Nielsen has it backwards." Another good column, though in the end I don't think Sippey and Nielsen disagree very much; I think they just focus on different developments.
What I find interesting is that lots of folks (from Jakob to Sippey to Microsoft, in their new "dot net" strategy) are beginning to notice the shift from a website-based customer experience to a network-based experience. This is accurate, and I'm glad the industry is aware of the change.
However -- and this is where I disagree with most everyone so far -- no one has accurately predicted the scope of problems that this change will create. As the user experience flows between devices, the industry will have to deal with exponentially more complex systems, technologies, and standards -- potentially creating a much more complex and frustrating experience for customers. Users will also see a large increase in the number of bits that will attempt to engage them. Users will increasingly demand a simpler, more focused and relevant experience.
The Net industry (and all industries that use the Net) will soon be challenged to create a new solution that solves these new problems in the user experience. That solution is what I call "bit literacy": a new commitment to simplicity in digital work, and a new way of using digital devices (PCs, cell phones, palms, etc.).
These new problems we will all engage are not just about technology, and they can't be solved just by creating more technology. The question is really about how people can engage bits better -- and the answer, bit literacy, is as much about people as it is about the technology that creates the bits.
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Wednesday, July 26, 2000
Interaction Architect: An excellent column by Sim D'Hertefelt listing the common objections to customer experience work, and how to respond to those objections. Good reading for anyone trying to explain the value of the customer experience -- or anyone trying to decide whether to invest in it.
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Tuesday, July 25, 2000
Wanted: Better Corporate Design: An interesting piece from lab404's Curt Cloninger on the various kinds of graphic looks that corporate websites can take on. (I'm happy to report that creativegood.com is squarely inside Type H, "HTMinimaLism." :)
Curt makes a good point: not every website needs to look exactly the same (like Microsoft, or Yahoo, or Amazon, or...). At the same time, it *is* still vital for websites to create a good experience for their customers. It's nice to have a different look -- but don't focus so much on the aesthetics that you forget about the main reasons (speed, ease-of-use, usefulness among them) why customers come to your site.
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Monday, July 24, 2000
Gender and the Customer Experience: Two good articles recently about how women differ from men, if at all, in how they use e-commerce sites.
CNN.com's article offers varying viewpoints. A Forrester Research analyst suggested this:
It is men's propensity to "play" with technology... that makes
them view being online as entertainment. On a scale of "technology
optimism," women are more "pessimistic" about it.
Similarly, David Strom's Web Informant says that "eCommerce for her is almost always a really bad idea," following up with this quote:
Women shop online for the same reasons as men do: because they can find what they are looking for at the right price and get the goods without having to leave the comfort of their own desktop.
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Friday, July 21, 2000
Dreadful Flash Sequences: Certain websites think they're so important that they force the customer to sit through a long, slow, overdesigned Flash intro sequence before getting to the actual contents of the website. Such sites disrespect the customer and thus are likely to die a Darwinian death (see boo.com).
A delicious parody of those intros is at Skipintro.com. Watch, enjoy, and learn.
One company that apparently learned from Skipintro is KPMG, whose home page forces first-time visitors to sit through a truly irritating Flash sequence, with no way to skip through it. (If you've visited there already, delete the KPMG cookie to see the intro again.)
(Thanks to dack.com for pointing these out.)
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Thursday, July 20, 2000
In Defense of Palm: My July 6 entry quoted David Wertheimer's "grouchy" experience with his Palm Pilot. (Also see July 7 for more Palm links.) In response, my brother Kevin -- a new and satisfied Palm Pilot user -- wrote this:
Just a comment on your Palm columns. Mr. Wertheimer ("In order to get the most out of a Palm Pilot, one has to tinker with it... I get grouchy when I have to fuss with things.") is exactly right, as long as you emphasize "to get the most out of." The truth is that my Palm was immensely useful to me from the very beginning. In minutes I was using the schedule planner, memo pad and address book, instantly replacing the DayTimer I've been using for 10 years. Hot-syncing? That's about as brainless as anything can get, and it's mainly for backup unless you want to transfer data or documents back and forth from the PC. In my case, I try to do as much as possible without touching a PC.
But the real beauty of the Palm is how much more you can do with it than those basic functions. With the Palm, I can leave the laptop at home and carry in my pocket an immense archive of memos, reports, and spreadsheets; maps for any place in the country; foreign-language dictionaries; books, games and photos. Then there's the internet access for email & websites (mapquest, travelocity, amazon, cnn, etc.). Aside from the portability, the best part about using a Palm is its boot-up time -- zero to nil. And in six weeks, my Palm has locked up only once. It revived instantly with a push of the soft-reset button.
The more advanced functions do require software downloads and installations. But I have found this whole process to be much easier than typical PC software installations. No setup wizard. No clobbered .dlls or file-extension conflicts. Minimal learning curve. One might respond that Palm programs are much more feature-limited than their PC counterparts. But that's exactly the point -- Palm software simply does what I need it to do 95% of the time. There's still the PC for the other 5%.
So I would describe the Palm, to use a phrase you recently coined, as a graduated experience. While basic functions are immediately accessible, users can tailor the device with increasingly complex functions as they come up the learning curve.
Designers must still overcome the Palm's (and other PDAs') biggest hurdle to broader acceptance, the text-input interface. But they're already miles down the road to changing our conception of a personal computer.
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Wednesday, July 19, 2000
Salon.com: Another take on Microsoft's "attentional user interface," with a similar conclusion -- that the problem of excessive technology isn't solved by yet more technology.
The invention of e-mail opened us up to direct communication with anyone who could find us -- and that's proving to be a bit more than we bargained for. But I don't see how hiding behind another layer of technology is going to save us from each other.
The solution to excessive technology -- or, in this market, excessive bits -- is bit literacy. And the message of bit literacy is LET THE BITS GO. More on this later.
Finally, the Salon article offered this entertaining thought about how the Microsoft software may take hold of the user's calendar: "Imagine opening your calendar only to find whole days tentatively scheduled by people eager to tell you all about their sales-force automation software or marketing service solutions."
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Tuesday, July 18, 2000
Surviving the Bit Infinity: A New York Times article yesterday described Microsoft's work on the "Attentional User Interface," a piece of software designed to allow users "to reclaim the right to pay attention." As the article put it:
[The PC's] aging interface has allowed a deluge of electronic interruptions to cascade upon office workers with each new generation of technology, to the point that the telephone and potentially dozens of computer programs are now free to distract a person with impunity.
Though Microsoft is not the first to do so, Microsoft is absolutely right in identifying the new problem of technology. The age of the bit infinity is now beginning, in which users will increasingly demand some way to help sift through the bits that deluge them. E-mails, voice mails, IMs, and other bitstreams are just the beginning. Bits are virtually free and almost infinitely replicable, and their sheer number will continually lower the quality of any bitstream.
As bits increase in users' lives, users need to take more personal responsibility for their bits -- using good software, yes, but not by ceding responsibility to the software. The awareness of and responsibility for one's own bits is what I call "bit literacy." This process of bit literacy can make users effective, despite the increase in bits.
Microsoft's solution to the increase in bits, however, is at best risky and at worst misguided -- and it's definitely not bit literate. Instead of showing users a path to regain control of their tools and their lives, Microsoft has done the opposite: its solution is to let the software decide for the user what bits to engage at all.
The article gives this example: "One [application], called Lookout, automatically reads electronic mail messages and attempts to schedule requests for appointments and meetings." I'll admit that "Lookout" is indeed a very good name, considering how dangerous the software is. Who wants their software to take control of scheduling their calendar? (By the way, this all comes from the same group that created the Microsoft Office paper clip. Draw your own conclusion.)
Of course, it's hard to blame Microsoft for this strategy. More software means more profits. But as far as users (remember them?) are concerned, you can't simplify technology by adding yet more technology. Some version of Microsoft's new software might be helpful as a niche tool in occasionally running a filter on a bit stream, but nothing more. Users will have a simple bit experience only when they become bit literate. My goal is to help users find that path, and it doesn't require more complex software.
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Monday, July 17, 2000
A List Apart: As weblogs (like Good Experience) have become more numerous on the Web, the quality of the average weblog has plummeted. What does that spell for the future of weblogs, a potentially good customer experience for certain kinds of Web content? This article gives an accurate viewpoint.
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Friday, July 14, 2000
At a conference today. See you next week!
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Thursday, July 13, 2000
Site Feature Review: Here is a review of a good e-commerce site feature, written by Creative Good analyst Jen Schaeffer. The article is also available on our best practices site on ZDNet, and individually on this column page.
Summary: ToysRUs devotes tabs to popular brands alongside tabs to product categories
Date of evaluation: 6/23/00
Traditionally, online retailers assign top navigation tabs to categories or departments such as Music, Videos and Electronics. ToysRUs, however, appropriately uses *inconsistency* in the design of its top navigation tabs.
While some of its tabs are linked to categories (as is the norm on many e-commerce sites), other ToysRUs tabs go directly to popular product brands. For example, ToysRUs features tabs to general categories such as Toys, Video Games and Collectibles. Yet ToysRUs also dedicates tabs to Pokemon and X-Men, both popular toy brands. Instead of searching for specific brand products within general category tabs, customers can immediately click into the prominent brand tabs. These tabs break the rules of strict hierarchy (Pokemon toys may "belong" under Toys, and Pokemon collectibles may "belong" under Collectibles) but make it easier for customers to shop.
ToysRUs strikes a balance by devoting tabs to Pokemon and X-Men. Featuring tabs to *every* brand would make the top navigation cluttered. But by choosing only two top brands, ToysRUs presumably decided to highlight Pokemon and X-Men based on sales figures, profit margins and customer popularity.
The architecture of a site should solely be based on customer goals, even if that means breaking the rigid rules of hierarchy and consistency. ToysRUs' Pokemon and X-Men tabs are "intelligently inconsistent" and demonstrate the site's commitment to making it easy for customers to find popular products.
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Wednesday, July 12, 2000
Site Feature Review: Here is a review of a bad e-commerce site feature, written by Creative Good analyst Jacqueline Sheehan. The article is also available on our best practices site on ZDNet, and individually on this column page.
Summary: TravelWeb's "Click-it!" graphic is unclickable and, at 800 x 600 resolution, too large.
Date of Evaluation: 6/20/00
How to get there:
1. Go to www.travelweb.com
2. Under the date in the top left, click the link for "Click-it Weekends."
Details:
TravelWeb.com, a travel portal for booking airline and hotel reservations, attempts to distinguish itself in this category by offering "Click-it! Weekends" -- special weekend rates on hotels worldwide. This feature, similar to airline Internet weekend specials, is promoted on TravelWeb's home page with three links to "Click-it! Weekends."
After clicking on the "Click-it! Weekends" link, customers are greeted with an immense, blinking graphic in the middle of the page that says "Click!" Unfortunately, this graphic is unclickable. Even worse, at an 800 x 600 screen resolution, the unclickable "Click!" image is the only main element that's visible above the fold.
Shoppers are likely to click on the "Click!" image and find themselves confused and frustrated. To actually find out about "Click-it! Weekends" and how to use them, customers have to scroll down to and click on a "Click-it! Welcome" link that's hidden below the fold.
To make the page more effective, the large "Click!" graphic at the very least should be clickable and take shoppers to an explanation of "Click-it! Weekends" and directions on making a reservation. A better solution would be to shrink the size of the graphic drastically and provide a succinct explanation of the process above the fold. Moreover, the unclear links currently labeled "Click-it! Locations" and "Click-it! Hotels" should be renamed "Search by Location" and "Search by Hotel," respectively.
TravelWeb should also clearly communicate that "Click-it! Weekend" rates are valid only for the upcoming weekend. That way, customers looking for bargain rates further into the future won't click in vain in this respect, either.
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Tuesday, July 11, 2000
On Net Devices: An interesting, contrarian column about Internet devices says that they could "flop miserably" because their prices are too high, and because they don't have easy enough access to all websites. I agree, though I'd say the price issue is much more important.
One other issue I would add is that the devices I've seen are still too hard to use. I installed the Netpliance I-opener (mentioned in the article) for a relative of mine last week, and it took a good bit of coaching to get her comfortable with the most important features. And this was just for the e-mail; we didn't even get to the Web features.
I'd like to write more on this later -- but for the industry to embrace bit literacy, it must learn to create a graduated experience, which starts off simply, yet very slowly opens up other (secondary, more complex) features to the user. How and when that graduation occurs is a rich topic which is worthy of an entire chapter in a book.
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Monday, July 10, 2000
Forbes: This article lists nine different aspects of the customer experience. Though not an exhaustive list, it is a good reminder that customer experience -- the holistic combination of everything a customer experiences on a site -- is not the same as usability, which is just one aspect of the experience.
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Friday, July 7, 2000
More about Palm: Despite any problems with using a Palm (see yesterday's entry, below), the companies Palm and Handspring are both among the best in the tech industry at focusing on the customer experience.
Two resources below tell about Palm and Handspring's philosophy of focusing on the customer:
CNET: Palm and Handspring founder Jeff Hawkins recently gave a talk at PC Expo and emphasized a commitment to things other than what the tech industry usually worships:
Continuing on the theme of focusing on a simple consumer experience,
Hawkins advocated forgetting about hardware specifications and CPU speeds
and emphasizing ease of use.
Palm Source 99, the Palm Developer conference, contains a presentation file that, strangely enough, is about as close to the Creative Good customer experience philosophy as anything I've ever read. Yes, the presentation is somewhat about Palm development, but look for the underlying tenets about customer experience in general and it will become clear. The presentation file is called the Zen of Palm. (It's a large PDF file, so beware a long download time.)
As e-business moves toward devices (PDAs, cell phones, etc.), it's important to understand these concepts -- how to focus on the customer -- as we create the strategy for these new devices...
(By the way, why are most conference websites so bad? Unnecessary graphics, flourishes, and other distractions at every turn. I just want the conference schedule already! Arghhh...)
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Thursday, July 6, 2000
netWert: David Wertheimer hates his Palm Pilot, and he tells us why:
In order to get the most out of a Palm Pilot, one has to tinker with it. Add programs. Install software. Install software on a home computer. Enter data. Hot-sync data. Join services. Edit lists. Re-sync. Sync daily... I get grouchy when I have to fuss with things.
This complaint, reasonable enough, is coming from an experienced Web developer. What happens when Palm, or any other device manufacturer, sells to the folks Out There who are not as adept with technology, and are not enamored of gadgets in general? A lot of customers get frustrated, that's what happens.
Bits are so engaging that it's important to make them engage the user in useful, enjoyable, or appropriate ways. But engaging the user on fussy things -- re-installation, for example -- is not a good design.
(By the way, I'm not blaming these problems on Palm! Many of the fussy problems stem from the complexities of today's PC operating systems. They are unfortunate legacies that we'll have to learn to live with for some years still.)
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Wednesday, July 5, 2000
uidesign.net: Back-end hardware affects the customer experience -- especially if it's old, pre-Web, mainframe hardware. This interesting column looks at how the mainframes of billing and airline systems can adversely affect the experience.
For fun: And I was beginning to think that all logos were ending up as swooshes, spirals, or people-icons. This page shows that the smiley logo is giving the other tired cliches some competition.
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