August 2000 Archives
Thursday, August 31, 2000
Our Milestone: I'm happy to announce that this site's e-mail newsletter, the Good Experience Update, has just passed 30,000 subscribers. (That's just e-mail subscribers, not counting the visitors to the website itself.) That makes this e-mail one of the widest-read e-mail publications on any Internet topic. Thank you for being a part of this success.
By the way, if you want to sign up (and get Good Experience via e-mail), just e-mail update@goodexperience.com.
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Wednesday, August 30, 2000
Financial Times: A McKinsey study of 200 dotcoms shows that negative press on dotcoms is overblown. In fact, some dotcoms *are* in fact succeeding.
According to the study, here is what brought success to those companies:
The survey throws up areas where performance is critical for success. These include: keeping down the cost of marketing by spending wisely rather than big advertising campaigns; maximising the number of visitors to the site who actually buy goods; and ensuring that customers return to the site.
So let's review...
- instead of throwing away the entire budget on a huge ad campaign, successful companies spend their budget on things that bring results (like improving the customer experience).
- successful companies find ways to get customers to buy (like improving the customer experience).
- successful companies find ways to get customers to return to the site (like improving the customer experience).
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Tuesday, August 29, 2000
ComputerWorld: A good article on globalizing a website; it lists several issues you'd expect -- language, trade regulations, etc. -- and one issue that doesn't usually get enough attention: organizational design.
A big political issue at many companies is whether Web development and content management should be centralized at headquarters or controlled locally in the individual countries.
...Each DHL site now has three layers of control: local offices, which take responsibility for their "screen real estate" and locally developed services; regional units that deal with trade regulations; and global headquarters, where the central staff makes sure all the sites adhere to companywide standards for service.
This is a good example of how the organization behind a site can affect the customer experience on the site itself. (Incidentally, this is another reason why the customer experience is a much broader issue than simple "usability" of some tasks on the site.)
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Monday, August 28, 2000
Business 2.0: Personalization, also known by the buzzword "one-to-one marketing," gets a reality check in this article. "So far, one-to-one is pretty much one-to-none," says author Susan Kuchinskas. McKinsey's Marc Singer calls personalization "a giant disaster."
Why the complaints? The technology required to personalize a website is too complicated, expensive, hard to install, and generates yet more complicated data for website developers to wade through. Sites like Amazon, which does a decent job at personalization, are the exception.
But even the best personalization is no match for good, old-fashioned word of mouth. David Weinberger, author of the Joho newsletter, gets this quote in the article:
If you go to Amazon.com and get a list of relevant titles, is it more accurate than getting advice from your friend? Friends who know you will always be better judges of your tastes than will masses of people who behave like you.
Think how effective word of mouth is: it requires no technology to buy, no installation headaches, no maintenance costs. And it's all generated by a simple, good customer experience on the website. Create a good customer experience and much of that marketing will take care of itself, free of charge.
P.S. Ed D. points out that the New York Times also covers personalization in this article. And Frank L. points us to this good Shorewalker column.
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Friday, August 25, 2000
About the Star Wars Trailer: On Tuesday I linked to the Star Wars trailer and promised to reveal a secret about it. Well -- here's the scoop: the trailer is a hoax. It was created by a Star Wars fan, using lots of shots from "The Phantom Menace" and other movies. The "Anonymous Director" answers questions about the trailer in this FAQ on fan site TheForce.net.
There are interesting ramifications of this trailer. Now that the Net allows for free, fast, global distribution of bits, anyone with enough creativity, talent, and tools can rival the corporate giants that have exclusively owned distribution channels until now. The bits allow it; atoms don't. Try putting up outdoor billboards all across the world, mimicking a brand like Star Wars. Not gonna happen: the atoms and their distribution are too expensive.
People have been creative long before the Internet; what's changed? I think the story is all about the bits. Fast, free, replicable, immediate, engaging -- the bits, and not the tools that manage them, are of primary importance.
Other discussion on the trailer includes Jason Calacanis's column and a ZDNet piece.
P.S. One Good Experience reader wrote me, "that trailer made the rounds weeks ago!" Well, harumph! Apologies if I was behind the moment on this one :)
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Thursday, August 24, 2000
Business Week: A good article about the "unfulfilled promise" of personalization. Adding personalization to an e-commerce site can be expensive, difficult, complex, and may not generate the dramatic increase in revenue that the site wanted. Often this is because sites try to accomplish too much at once.
"It's very hard to measure the return on investment with most personalization strategies because successful ones are implemented in stages," Singer says. Indeed, Amazon has spent years on adding layers of personalization.
Remember this: improving the customer experience (whether through personalization or any other aspect) is not a one-time thing. It's a way of life for successful e-commerce sites. Simply throwing a new shiny software package onto the site isn't magically going to make customers happy. Instead, focusing on the customer experience -- that is, basing the entire corporate strategy on it -- means CONSTANTLY improving, constantly looking to all areas of the experience, and improving, improving, improving.
Yes, personalization can be an important aspect of an e-commerce site. But it is much less important than the overall customer experience. And by constant improvement of the overall customer experience, personalization will likely grow into a useful feature (as it happened on Amazon.com).
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Wednesday, August 23, 2000
Our October Conference in SF: We finally have a conference, a real face-to-face gathering, that I can invite you to! On October 11 and 12 in San Francisco, Creative Good will host the eCustomerExperience conference. We have great speakers lined up, including...
Guy Kawasaki, CEO, Garage.com
George Anders, Senior Editor, Fast Company (the media sponsor)
Scott Heiferman, Chairman, i-Traffic, an Agency.com company
Kate Delhagen, VP Business Development, lucy.com
Joseph Park, Founder, Kozmo.com
Alison Berglund, VP Marketing, HomeRuns.com
Chuck Geiger, VP Product Management, Wineshopper.com
Mike Speiser, Co-founder, Epinions.com
Jeffrey Rayport, CEO, Marketspace
Seth Goldstein, Principal, Flatiron Partners
Alistair Williamson, CEO, WebCriteria
Artie Wu, CEO, Vividence
Brian Sugar, Chief Web Officer, BlueLight.com
...and about 20 other speakers. I'll also be speaking there, along with Creative Good CEO Phil Terry, and a few other Creative Good team members, who will present a special customer experience workshop the day after the conference.
But there's a catch, which I want to be upfront about: unlike most of our resources, this one unfortunately isn't free. I personally think it's well worth the investment, with the good speakers and sessions and all that, but I also know that not everyone can afford it. If you can't afford this one, I'd point you to our free resources (the Dotcom Survival Guide, our best practices columns, and the Holiday '99 report, to name a few). And of course, goodexperience.com will remain free as well.
But if you do want to show up (and I hope you do, so that we can all finally get together face-to-face), I've lined up a discount for Good Experience readers... see below.
To see all the conference information, the conference site is www.ecustomerexperience.com.
But to register with the discount (it's a $300 discount available only on this page), register through this page only: www.ecustomerexperience.com/friends, referring to our "friends of Creative Good" discount. With this discount (available before September 30), the price is about $1,400. Attending our one-day workshop afterwards would add another $350.
At any rate, the conference should be a lot of fun, with a good crowd and good speakers. Session topics include web design and customer experience, branding and c.e., metrics, merchandising, team-building issues, and case studies of how top sites focus on the customer experience. And some other stuff (see the conference site).
I hope to see you at the conference!
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Tuesday, August 22, 2000
Just for Fun: First, "Star Wars" fans will be happy to see this trailer... let's just say it's all about Episode 2. Very entertaining; I highly recommend it. Download the trailer here. Note that there's a secret about one aspect of the trailer, which I will describe here in a couple of days, once people have had a chance to view it.
Also, on August 8 I pointed to the Microsoft-needling comic I drew awhile back. Following up on that, here's the latest from SatireWire:
Sixteen-year-old high school sophomore Becky Atherton, believed to be the last remaining American who did not hate Microsoft, announced today that she was "tired of being different" and would now hate Microsoft just like everyone else.
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Monday, August 21, 2000
Industry Standard: A good refresher course on customer loyalty. Happy customers not only buy more and return more, but they spread the word-of-mouth that's crucial to success online (without buying expensive ads).
Key quote, though hardly new information: "Loyalty might be boosted if the site and its e-commerce elements met customer expectations." In other words, improving the customer experience can be extremely lucrative for e-commerce sites.
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Friday, August 18, 2000
Creative Good analyst Zimran Ahmed (zimran@creativegood.com) writes this review of a recent InfoWorld article:
InfoWorld: One popular question in the wireless industry is this: Which device will make which other device obsolete? In this article, author Ephraim Schwartz predicts that cell phones will make the Palm obsolete. Schwartz argues that the sort of bits that people will want, like stock quotes, news headlines, and sports scores, can be easily displayed on a cell phone.
However, it is important to remember that there are all sorts of other features, like calendering or email, that people may want too. How will cell phones, with their limited interfaces, do all these different things?
It may be that in the future, Palms will also come with some cell phone capabilities and offer a "swiss army knife" product that can do multiple things. However, while devices like that are convenient to carry around, they are often hard to use as their limited interfaces don't allow for much flexibility.
Unless manufacturers really focus on the customer experience when designing these products, the future will instead hold a multitude of specialized devices that focus on particular tasks, such as MP3 players, email devices, PDAs, digital entertainment guides, etc. People will then pick whichever combination of devices they find most useful, with the good customer experience of devices that actually work overriding the bad customer experience of having to carry multiple devices.
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Thursday, August 17, 2000
What do we call "users"?: This comes from an interesting discussion right now on the CHI-WEB mailing list (here's the message thread). It all started when someone asked, "Fer cripes sake would someone come up with a more flattering term for people than 'user'?"
As the list discussed the merits and drawbacks of the term (some noting that "user" also denotes a drug addict), one Richard Gaskin wrote in with this clear-headed response:
It totally depends on the project. I've personally worked on jobs where instead of "user" we used lots of other names: "customers", "subscribers", "readers", "members", "students", "kids", "players", and others. We consistently use these terms in documents describing specific site functionality.
And if you have done your user research well (as you should), you can get even more specific: "doctors", "agents", "executives", "parents", etc.
That said, "user" seems perfectly fine for discussion of general usability issues.
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Wednesday, August 16, 2000
Site Feature Review: Here is a review of a poor e-commerce site feature, written by Creative Good analyst Puja Buxani. The article is also available on our best practices site on ZDNet, and individually on this column page.
Summary: Puma.com makes customers supply their names before they can shop.
Date of our evaluation: July 24, 2000
Earlier this year, Reflect.com earned the top slot on our worst practices list for forcing customers through a lengthy personalization survey before letting them shop. (Read the review.) Puma.com makes a similar mistake by asking customers to provide their names before they enter the site. By prematurely soliciting this personal information, Puma has created an obstacle to shopping.
When first visiting Puma.com, customers might be surprised by a welcome page that asks them to type in their name and choose their location from a drop-down menu. Once customers provide this information, they click "Enter" to go to the home page. Once there, shoppers see why Puma asked for their name: to greet them with a "What's up?" message. For example, a customer who enters Sue as her name sees "What's up, Sue? Welcome to the Puma site" in very small type at the top of the page.
Presumably, Puma greets shoppers with this "What's up?" line to communicate brand personality. Unfortunately, displaying a customer's first name is not good personalization. In this case, asking for shoppers' names means the site is asking them to give personal information before they see the benefits the site offers -- and that could drive shoppers away.
Puma should remove the unnecessary welcome page and allow customers to enter the site immediately. Otherwise, instead of wanting to shop, they may be left wondering "what's up" with Puma's Web site.
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Tuesday, August 15, 2000
More Reader Letters: A few other readers responded to last week's posts.
In last Friday's piece I tweaked Sapient for its -nt name. My friend Aaron at Sapient writes:
Sapient has been in business for a decade now (since 1991); well before really any of the -nt names existed and definitely before any of them became popular. Before Teligent, Agilent, Viant, Scient, etc.
And Sapient is a real English word. Since it effectively means "wise", it actually is somewhat appropriate to a consulting company. It's not just some made up mish-mash moniker thrown out by an advertising consultant that sounds neat-o but means nothing.
Responding to the idea that companies should invest in the customer experience instead of a new name, Steve Attewell from the UK adds this thought:
Brings to mind the old saying (and I'm not sure if this is an Englishism): "You can't polish a turd!"
Finally, regarding my response to Bill Joy, this comes from Daniel James, also in the UK:
Mark, I just wanted to say that - whilst I am quite a cynic in most ways - I think that uploading might be a serious prospect. Maybe not in twenty years, but given nanotech, it's not undoable. The people at foresight.org seem to think that the 'singularity' shelf - where exponential change in science->technology->culture goes vertical - is coming in 30 years or so. I don't necessarily think that they're right, but if/when it does come, all bets are off as reality turns virtual.
It's in the run up to this and during that 'gray goo' nanotech becomes very dangerous. The optimists seem to think that nano will help us clear up the tremendous mess we're almost certainly making with genetics and spaceship earth all round. I think you're totally right about the green goo risk we're making.
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Monday, August 14, 2000
A Verizon Employee Responds: Over the weekend I received this letter from a Verizon employee and Good Experience reader who responded to last Friday's piece about Verizon (the new name of Bell Atlantic and GTE):
Mark,
Of course I have to respond to your Verizon posting and hope you would consider offering me some space to defend the company's position.
A new name was not chosen simply because someone felt like it. A new name was chosen because Bell Atlantic was merging with GTE Corporation. Those responsible for corporate advertising, branding and naming correctly realized that a new name would be more customer friendly and recognizable for a national (and global) telecommunications provider than a region-specific name like Bell Atlantic. After all, what kind of name is Bell Atlantic for a company providing service in Hawaii? This is not the only reason for the name change but it's certainly one of the most important ones.
The huge marketing push to introduce this name is an obvious necessity given the sheer amount of our customers and their interaction with the Verizon brand via bills, phone booths, etc...
That being said, you know that I absolutely agree with your statement about the customer experience being the single most important aspect of a company's strategy. What Verizon is focused on is building a new global brand name for itself and that is definitely part of the customer experience although clearly not the only thing. I would also much rather get DSL quickly by Bell Atlantic than wait 3 weeks for Verizon to handle the install but that's not a fair nor accurate argument. There is definitely a massive push at Verizon to focus on customers but lets be realistic for a moment and acknowledge that it won't happen in one day.
Educating our customers about changes in our business (including our name) is the first step in supporting an open dialogue with them and building a positive, trusting relationship. As an employee of Verizon, my frequent visits to goodexperience.com should help further that initiative as well.
Best,
jonathan
Jonathan Segal
Manager - Corporate Interactive Media
Verizon
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Friday, August 11, 2000
Invest in the Customer Experience, Not a New Name: I love how Bell Atlantic (our phone company here in the New York area) just made a huge marketing deal about changing its name to "Verizon," as if a futuristic name would magically improve its service, causing phone lines to mysteriously fly into place on time, instead of languishing in the bureaucracy for week after customer-hostile week.
Bell Atlantic turned into Verizon, and unfortunately, the magic didn't arrive. What did happen is that Verizon workers have promptly gone on strike. So much for the new name.
Geoff Nunberg, a linguist at Xerox Parc, talks about new-fangled corporate names in a recent essay, A Name Too Far. I love this quote:
The trouble is that all these names can tend to blur, particularly since they give you no sense at all of what a company actually does... Mainly the object seems to have been to come up with one of those trendy adjectival names that end in -ent and -ant -- companies like Teligent, Sapient, Viant, Naviant. There are fashions in these things the way there are in the names of retail stores -- one year everything's trouser shack and umbrella shack, the next year they've all turned into huts, the year after that they're marts.
To my friends at Sapient reading this: think about Sapimart! It has a certain ring to it...
Seriously, the lesson here is simple. The customer experience is more important than the company name. Would you rather get your phone line installed on time by Bell Atlantic, or wait three more agonizing weeks for Verizon to show up? I'll say it another way:
The customer experience is the single most important aspect of a company's strategy. If the customer experience isn't good, don't bother shining up the marketing. Customers will figure out the truth soon enough anyway.
P.S. This site also pointed out some similarities between Viant, Scient, and other -nt firms back in April.
link to this column
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Thursday, August 10, 2000
Heavier and Heavier Net Magazines: The reason I get all my Net news via bits, not atoms: major print pubs like Industry Standard, Business 2.0, and Red Herring have gotten too big. Each issue now weighs in at several hundred pages, making it unlikely to carry one around, and unreasonable to carry two.
An SF Gate article from May covers this very trend.
Even more to the point is this comic. (Thanks to Dack for pointing it out.)
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Wednesday, August 9, 2000
My Response to Bill Joy: Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy wrote a thought-provoking essay in last month's Wired magazine called Why the future doesn't need us. In it, Joy makes bold predictions about technologies that we'll engage within the next 20 years. In particular, the article states that "robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech are threatening to make humans an endangered species."
The article is worth reading, since it deals with rare and important topics. For one thing, Joy says explicitly that new technology always has a downside: an obvious fact that is absent from most technolust-fueled news stories and business plans these days. Joy also suggests that anyone who creates technology has a responsibility to understand those downsides and try to minimize them. In other words, IPOs and billionaires aren't the only things technologists should be focusing on... another obvious fact, but it's rare to see it in print.
While the larger ideas are worthwhile, certain details of Joy's article are disappointing. The article is sprinkled with fanciful high-tech predictions that, ironically, seem to come from the very tech worship that Joy is cautioning against. For example:
A second dream of robotics is that we will gradually replace ourselves with our robotic technology, achieving near immortality by downloading our consciousnesses... But if we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human?
Somehow I doubt it. While robotics will almost certainly create change in the next 20 years, I just don't think I'll be downloading my brain onto a disk, so that I can be immortal. Was Joy just being provocative, or was he trying to sell magazines? I hope he's not trying to be serious.
On the other hand, I don't think we can underestimate the changes we'll see from developments in genetic engineering. That, in my opinion, is where we should concentrate our ethics, foresight, and common sense, as soon as possible.
So read the article, while maintaining your common sense. The intent of the piece is good, and I hope more leaders like Bill Joy will encourage the tech industry to think about the long-term effects of its actions.
link to this column
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Tuesday, August 8, 2000
For fun: A couple of years ago I drew this comic in the style of the New Yorker single-panel. Somehow it still seems timely (apologies to my friends at Microsoft ;)
Salon.com: I wish I could say this was a spoof article, but it's apparently for real. The fast-food chain Long John Silver's recently attempted a radical "branding" change, with the results you might expect. What's really nutty isn't the ad campaign but the things corporate executives told Salon with a straight face.
One exec from a fast-food burger joint earnestly spoke to Salon about his company's brand, focused on "craving."
Throughout our history, we've had legions of cravers who've allowed us to come to our positioning quite naturally. They talk to us about the craving. How nothing else can satisfy the craving for that one-of-a-kind steam-grilled taste.
(Thanks to Creative Good's own Cat Fitzgerald for the pointer.)
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Monday, August 7, 2000
Salon.com: Veteran tech columnist Simson Garfinkel writes about the need for an Undo feature across the whole operating system. In other words, no matter where the user is on the computer, the last action should always be available for recall.
The column ends on an interesting thought about standards: standards in the computer industry have been created for technology, but not for the customer experience:
The computer industry has technical standards that describe everything from the voltage transmitted on an Ethernet cable to procedures that companies must follow for ensuring the "quality" of their products. But few standards ensure that these products will be usable or, to use Raskin's word of choice, humane.
Notice another aspect of this discussion: that Garfinkel is suggesting a feature that is available everywhere on the computer, regardless of the application. This is a shift towards bit literacy: that the experience of using the computer is no longer primarily about the software applications that are loaded into it; instead, the experience is primarily about the bits (no matter what app we're in) and how we engage them.
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Friday, August 4, 2000
Upside.com: A morbid but instructive link: Upside's "Dotcom Graveyard" lists the birthdates and death dates of about two dozen dotcoms. It's not-so-living proof that many dotcoms, despite a shiny idea and a good pitch, will not survive. Other sites focused on dotcom failure are dotcomfailures and "effed" company.
While these sites are interesting, I do wish that someone would publish a page that lists profitable, thriving dotcoms -- not by hyping them up like ads and many press stories do, but by showing objective, clear proof they're doing well. It would be healthy to show that parts of the Net industry will in fact survive.
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Thursday, August 3, 2000
Wall Street Journal (link requires subscription): Walt Mossberg, one of my favorite tech commentators, describes how the U.S. is lagging far behind Japan and Europe in wireless.
Europeans and Japanese, not Americans, are first to get all the cool new wireless stuff. Their wireless voice and data networks are more extensive and will soon be much faster than those in the U.S. Their wireless-device companies are the leaders. Teenagers in Tokyo have far more versatile digital mobile phones than power users in New York do, and they use them for e-mail, games and a whole lot more. A potent consortium called Symbian, dominated by British and Scandinavian companies, is planning even more wireless innovation.
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Wednesday, August 2, 2000
LuxuryFinder.com Feature Review: Here is a review of a poor e-commerce site feature, written by Creative Good analyst Christine Yu. The column is also available individually on this column page, and is listed within our best practices site.
Summary: LuxuryFinder's 'Ms. Find It' Not Much of a Find
Date of our evaluation: July 9, 2000
How to get there:
1. Go to www.luxuryfinder.com
2. In the left navigation, click "Shop by Brand."
LuxuryFinder.com, a high-end e-tail site, disorients customers with jarring, animated navigation on its "Shop by Brand" page. LuxuryFinder attempts to help shoppers by providing descriptions of each brand with the image of a model, but ends up creating a bad customer experience instead.
Customers can choose to "Shop by Brand" through a link in the left-hand navigation bar of the home page. Animated doors open and enlarge to reveal a list of brand names arranged in four columns within the doorframe. When customers roll over any of the brand names, the three other columns disappear and an image of a woman named "Ms. FindIt" appears to one side.
As customers roll their mouse over "Agnona" in the left column, for example, Ms. FindIt appears in the middle of the page along with a description reading "The world's finest cashmere goods." If customers roll over "Frédéric Fekkai" in the second column, Ms. FindIt appears to the left and the text "Handbags and Hair Accessories that combine brilliant color and whimsical details" appears to the right.
Customers must endure constant changes when using this page. Columns, brand descriptions and Ms. FindIt all continually disappear and reappear. This hides many of the customer's options, making it harder for them to get a handle on their desired brand and shop. Further, the implementation is visually jarring as Ms. FindIt appears in various locations depending on where customers move their mouse.
LuxuryFinder could provide brand information more effectively by removing the disappearing images and text and presenting brief descriptions next to each brand name. The change may result in a longer page, but would make shopping on the site less confusing.
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Tuesday, August 1, 2000
Tips: Today, two articles with tips on how to improve a site:
Web Review: A good article showing some ways to improve an e-business site, like giving customers value for free. Happily, Creative Good is listed as one company that does just that (see the left-hand column of this goodexperience.com page for all the free resources we have available).
Industry Standard: Some interesting ideas for improving the search function on an e-business site. One major, and easy, improvement I would have added is keyword mapping (described in our free Dotcom Survival Guide, page 33).
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