November 2002 Archives
Thursday, November 21, 2002
Interview: Maryam Mohit, Amazon.com
by Mark Hurst
Note: Maryam Mohit will speak at the Gel (Good Experience Live) conference, May 2003, in New York City. Details here.
Maryam Mohit started working at Amazon.com in 1996 and soon after
became Amazon.com's V.P. of Site Development, with responsibility
for the online customer experience. More recently, since returning
from maternity leave, she is in charge of reviewing the UI of new
developments on the site.
Q: Amazon.com is a leader in online customer experience. Is this
an explicit focus inside the company?
It would be hard for our focus on customer experience to be any more
explicit. Customer-centricity has been part of our company mission
since day one, and it starts with Jeff [Bezos, Amazon.com founder
and CEO]. He's always been a champion of focusing on the customer.
Because of that initial focus, he has attracted people to the
company who are also interested in customer experience.
And it's not just the people you'd think, like designers and
usability specialists. Our engineers are really strong about
thinking about customer experience, and our operations team, the
people who run the back-end operations. Are the boxes easy to open,
what packing material do we use, how much packing material is in the
box, is it recyclable?
So it's infused throughout all levels of the company. We also have a
usability team with people in the roles you'd expect. But when
people ask why it is that Amazon.com has this focus, the key is that
it's not one person, or one team, responsible for the overall
customer experience. Everyone in the company owns it.
Q: Then what does the usability team do?
We run a lot of tests in our usability lab, almost continuously.
Project teams can request usability testing, and the usability team
also goes out and tests stuff of interest. Or ideas to investigate
might come from customer service e-mail, which is a really important
source of information.
Usability doesn't have to be expensive. You don't need a 50-person
usability team. Just a small good team, and people throughout the
company who get it. Having a CEO who gets it is also really
important. You don't need a huge team for usability if people are
making the right decisions along the way.
Q: What's Amazon.com's "secret sauce," the secret of your success?
I wish I knew. I do think that the relentless focus on creating a
great experience has to be part of it. It's not just a great
experience on the website, because we think about it as a 360 degree
experience, which includes what happens after you click to order.
What's the experience of waiting for the order to arrive, of getting
the box, what happens if something goes wrong? Each of those is part
of the customer experience.
For us, it's a combination of listening really hard to customers,
and innovating on their behalf. For example, quite awhile ago we
developed the "similarities" feature - the one that says "people who
bought this also bought that." In focus groups, no customer ever
specifically requested that feature. But if you listened to
customers talk about how they buy things, they'd say, my friend
bought this, and I like what they like. In other words, they get
recommendations from people they trust. There was a cognitive leap,
based on those comments, to realizing that we could create something
like that based on the data we had. That's an example where there
was a need expressed by customers, but the innovation was taking
that general need and making the leap to a technology that meets
that need in a new way.
1-Click is another example. It did really poorly in its original
user tests, in 1997. Shopping on the Net was very new - we were at
the stage where people would place their order, then write us a
letter asking, are you really going to send this to me? The idea
that they'd click the button and be done was sort of scary.
Customers told us that they wanted to click a confirm button and
felt it was too scary without it. So, we took the UI back to Jeff
and said no, it's terrible, it's never going to work. But Jeff was
convinced that we had to make it 1-Click, not 2-Click, so we went
back to the drawing board and made adjustments to make customers
more confident. For example, we added a small message in
parentheses, which was really important: "Don't worry, you can
cancel it later." It was there for years. But nowadays almost
everyone's comfortable with buying online.
Q: Given the initial test results, how did you measure whether
1-Click was successful when it launched?
It was so obvious. Customers started using it and wrote us saying
that it was great. One wonderful thing about the Web is that when
you release something, you instantly know what's working about it or
not, because people from all over the world write and tell you. If
you care about creating a great customer experience, there's no
better medium. It's good for instant gratification junkies.
Q: But you need the right structure within the organization to get
you those e-mails from customers.
I'd disagree with you there. You don't need an organization
structured so the e-mails get to product developers, but rather
product developers who care enough to go and get those e-mails. At
Amazon.com we started out with people who cared enough to go get the
information they needed. Now that we're bigger, we need those
structures and processes. But organization is no substitute for
passion. If the people aren't passionate about the right things,
your organization doesn't matter.
Q: What measurements does Amazon.com use to monitor the customer
experience day-to-day?
Metrics are super important. It's not just measuring, but measuring
the right stuff and understanding it, especially on a complex
website like ours. We're measurement-obsessed. We have a Web metrics
group, a bunch of really smart people, statisticians and the like.
They measure sales metrics, monitoring them in various increments of
time - by the minute, by the day, or longer. Anyone who sees an
unexpected swing in a measurement can go in and investigate what the
cause might be. I can't talk about everything we measure, but we do
study the typical measurements - conversion, visitors, purchases -
and we correlate our measurements with changes we've made on the
site, to see what's driving what, how to position things on pages,
and which features to delete.
Q: It seems to be a natural part of e-commerce sites' maturation
that they continually add new features. The risk, of course, is
clutter. Do you think that Amazon.com has challenges in this area?
In some informal tests of several e-commerce sites recently, we
observed a customer having trouble buying a book on Amazon.com,
because of the number of elements on the product page.
I definitely think we have challenges in that area. The product
detail page is one that I'm concerned about. To me, it's a little
less organized than it needs to be. We're giving customers excellent
features that they want, like buying used goods or in-store pickup,
but we need to make sure that they have the information they need to
make the purchase decision, then buy it in the way that's best for
them. Sort of "do I want to buy it," and then "how to I buy it."
So, we need to measure and understand where clutter is having a
negative effect, and then optimize those pages, maybe by getting rid
of some things that aren't working. It's more fun to create new
things than to take away other things, but sometimes you have to
focus on removing things as well.
Q: I recently noticed some cross-selling on Amazon.com that confused
me: on the bottom of a book page (see screenshot), in the "customers who bought
this also bought" section, it was promoting "clean underwear" from a
major retailer. What happened there?
It's so funny that you mention that. It was supposed to be a joke.
The team was trying to introduce customers to our new apparel site
in a way that poked fun at ourselves. When I saw it, I didn't get
the joke right away, either. They've since made it more obvious that
it's a joke.
Did you see the butterfly ballot joke we posted after the 2000
election? I'll never forget the day after the election, we put it up
and didn't tell anyone, but we showed it to Jeff. He thought it was
quite amusing, and he showed it at the all-company meeting the next
day. Then it took off by word-of-mouth, which we didn't expect - it
was just an internal joke for ourselves.
Q: What's next for Amazon.com?
We'll be focusing heavily on our platform. The new apparel site is a
good example. There are 400 different brands and merchants selling
goods through our platform, which is different from how we've done
it in the past. The Target.com site, for example, is running on our
platform.
Q: Quite a change from the early days.
I remember in my first week at Amazon.com, I said to Jeff, "It's
terrible, someone else owns the books.com URL. Aren't you bummed?"
He said, "No, I don't want that. That's a small and narrow URL.
There's a reason I named it Amazon.com."
link to this column
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Tripling Revenues with a Good Experience
In his e-commerce column this week, the New York Times' Bob Tedeschi reported a striking increase in
sales on a major e-commerce site.
Liz Claiborne's Elisabeth.com unit, which sells "plus size"
women's clothing online, rolled out a new site in late September,
with an emphasis on basic changes to its merchandising and
navigation. Brad Lenz, Liz Claiborne's vice president for
e-commerce, said the site had more than tripled the rate at which
it converted browsers to buyers, by making products more
accessible to users, and by clearing away superfluous graphics
from the merchandise and inserting product information that could
be quickly scanned.
Tripling the conversion rate is equal (with all other variables
constant) to tripling site revenue. Not a bad return, for a modest
investment to improve the customer experience.
What's notable is that such a significant business improvement came
from such low-tech activities as clarifying page layout, reducing
graphics, and the like.
Contrast that to another trend (also covered in the article) of
companies like Nike launching high-bandwidth features that are
(a) slow or inaccessible to a great number of customers and
(b) expensive to design, implement, and maintain.
There's definitely a place for high-end features. One would expect
Nikelab.com and other brand-worship sites to have this kind of
stuff. But for most companies it makes more sense to work on the
basics, like Elisabeth.com did. Low investment, high return.
I'm reminded that both Maryam Mohit, above, and Google's Marissa
Mayer (see the interview)
spoke of this sort of ongoing commitment as central to their sites'
success.
At this time of year, many companies are planning their budgets for
2003. If you're in this process, ask your team: how can we make a
commitment to improving the customer experience? Whether you invest
internally (hiring into a c.e. team) or externally (bringing on a
customer experience firm to help), it's an easy way to measurably
improve the business next year.
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Gel Conference: Hotels Added
Time to book your hotel room for Gel! There are now nine hotels
listed on the Gel Hotels page. Almost all are within walking
distance of the New York Historical Society, whose neighborhood is
arguably the best in New York City.
Book your room soon, as these prices will only go up as May
approaches - if they're available at all. Book a hotel room for Gel.
Incidentally, you can now refer your friends to the Gel Referral
Program, discussed last time. (Free Gel ticket for anyone who refers
two attendees; half-off ticket for referring one.)
Note - the Gel ticket price increases by 25% in three weeks...
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Fun Stuff
Some empathy for those readers "great with child."
Move over, Tetris...
Advanced strategies for Rock, Paper, Scissors (yes, really).
And for the grand finale... a singing horse quartet.
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Wednesday, November 13, 2002
Bits, Experience, and Jazz
There's a way of considering the experience of using a tool, separate from its technology, feature set, branding, or even user interface. The goal of this newsletter, in fact, is to point out how to discern that experience in a variety of contexts.
So this time, I'd like to point out two online experiences that have been created in a new way, with the experience - not the features or technology - as the primary focus.
The beauty of online experiences is that they can be appropriated,
modified, perhaps improved, and then re-created in endless ways -
somewhat like a jazz riff. Since the experiences are fully based in
bits, these changes can be made with relatively little investment in
time, money, or effort. Want to change the experience of historic
China? You're talking person-years and millions of dollars (see
Offline Experience, below). Want to re-launch a major set of bits
with some drastic changes? You might do it in days or weeks.
This is especially apparent on two new sites - Googlism.com and
Myway.com - that appropriate two or three aspects of another site,
add some changes, and create a whole new user experience.
Googlism.com is based, of course, on Google.com - but it's a
different kind of search engine. Instead of showing the standard
list of results for your search, Googlism shows a collection of
short phrases taken from the original Google search results. It
doesn't appear to be a difficult technical achievement, but the
experience it creates is completely different from Google.
Reading a little like Zen koans, here are a few of the results from a Googlism search for "good experience":
good experience is hard to find
good experience is determined by the customers
is much better than twenty years of bad experience
is put out by new york
is as important as taking care of children's teeth
is essential to coming back
is finding the right massage therapist
is the management of the hospital's pharmacy
is to have a dog mind your stock for you
Here's an idea for the Googlism designers: put a link in the search
results to see the Google result that brought about that phrase - an
interesting way to bring Google back in, full-circle. For example, I
had no idea where the "dog mind your stock" thing came from, so I
searched on Google (not Googlism) for that exact phrase, and found
that it came from a dog training site based in New Zealand.
Myway.com is a different kind of jazz riff. It's a new portal site
that looks almost exactly like Yahoo - but with absolutely no ad
banners. (Mentioning Yahoo's ad banners in a recent article, the New
York Times suggested that using Yahoo is "like walking through Times
Square." Ouch... unless you consider that Times Square is one of the
world's most popular tourist destinations! Yahoo should be
flattered. Also intriguing is that Myway's founders are recently of
iWon.com, a sweepstakes site packed with enough ads to look like
Times Square squared.)
Myway.com identifies with Yahoo's experience. It takes the best
aspects of the experience - the text-heavy design, the page layout,
some of the features - and removes the one glaringly negative aspect:
the ads.
Here the jazz riff isn't so much a brand new song as it is an
(improved) variation on a theme. While Googlism is a completely
different experience - showing phrases instead of links - Myway is
similar to the original, just with an improved experience.
From a business perspective, it remains to be seen whether Myway.com
can survive; but that's anyone's guess. I'm more interested in
seeing these experiences and the "jazz" that makes them: the
listening, modifying, and creation of something great and new.
P.S. One final pointer on Myway.com is the list of "No's", in which
Myway points out all the dotcom cliches it doesn't have (no ad
banners, no pop-up ads, no 24 year old ceo's, no cappuccino bar,
etc.). Unfortunately, they couldn't add my own pet peeve, which
apparently didn't die with the boom years: "no swoosh in our logo."
link to this column
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Gel Conference: New Speakers
An online performance artist, a youth activist, an Amazon.com
veteran, and a New York photographer: these are the latest additions
to the speaker list for the Gel conference, May 2, 2003 in New York.
- Ze Frank, interactive artist and humorist, zefrank.com
- Pam Lewis, Director of Youth Programs, All Stars Project
- Maryam Mohit, VP, UI Product Reviews, Amazon.com
- Gillian Zoe Segal, photographer of NYC "characters"
They'll join New York Times' Bob Tedeschi, Google's Marissa Mayer,
Richard Saul Wurman, and others on one of the most interesting
speaker lists ever assembled. (Ok, so I'm biased.)
And the ticket price is going up. At $395 it's the least expensive
conference that I know of, but the price jumps to $495 in one month,
on December 13. If you need the discount price, register now.
Or, if you refer someone to Gel, you could get in for half price or
free - see below.
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Gel Referral Program
A lot of people have written in to ask for a free ticket to Gel -
the economy, their student budget, and international travel costs
are all (good) reasons. So, I have a deal.
I'll let you into Gel for half-off, or free, if you refer some other
people to buy their own Gel tickets.
Gel Referral Program:
- If you refer one person to Gel, your ticket is half-off; that is,
sold at a 50% discount.
- If you refer two people to Gel, your ticket is free.
That's it. Details below.
- A referral "counts" when someone buys a ticket and writes your
name in the referral field in the registration form, where it asks
who referred them to Gel. (If they don't also include your contact
info, I'll depend on you to contact me to claim the reward.)
- If you tell someone about Gel and they buy a ticket *without*
entering your name into the referral field, then there's no referral
credit for that person. A referral can occur only at the time of
online registration.
- If you have already bought a ticket when the referral comes in,
we'll send you a check for the appropriate refund amount.
- Any "half-off" ticket will be 50% of the current ticket price at
the time you purchase the half-off ticket. This accounts for any
price increases, like the one on Dec. 13.
- The 50% discount and the free ticket are the only rewards we're
offering for referrals (i.e. please don't ask for some other deal).
- If you want to buy several tickets: to save you the trouble of
noodling with referrals to get a discount, we already offer a bulk
discount. Just write me (mark at goodexperience dot com) for details.
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Reader Mail: Marissa Mayer Interview
The interview with Marissa Mayer, Google product manager, created
one of the most positive responses I've seen for any column:
By the way, Marissa will be speaking at the Gel conference next May in New York.
Here are three of the reader responses:
Great article on Google. Their spellcheck feature always seems to
guess correctly. In fact I go to Google when I don't know how to
spell a word. It always seems to bring it back correctly. Much
better than the spellchecker in Microsoft Word, where it may take me
five to ten tries to get back the words I am looking for.
Adam Schwartz
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I have to say that the interview with Marissa Mayer from Google was
one of the most informative and interesting articles I have read in
a long while. It has inspired me re-evaluate and streamline my UI
protocols when developing websites.
Dave Mason
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Thanks for the great interview with Marissa Mayer. I love Google,
and to know their approach makes it even better.
I'm sure many of us are reading and wishing we worked for a company
with a similar focus.
Always enjoy Good Experience. Thanks.
Mike
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Offline Experience: Aging Beijing
The Economist reported recently that Beijing is beginning
reconstruction of its centuries-old city wall, which was mostly
destroyed by Mao Zedong's revolutionaries in the 50s and 60s. The
rebuilding has raised an interesting question about genuine
experience: Is it better to build a "fake antique" (in the words of
one citizen) to bring back a semblance of history, or is it better
not to create anything fake at all, thereby losing the city wall
altogether?
What also caught my eye in the piece was a mention of the "hutongs,"
the traditional downtown neighborhoods full of alleys and
courtyards. While they're a popular tourist destination, demands of
the modern lifestyle are forcing the city to tear down some of the
houses to make way for modern developments. This is not (as in Mao's
time) a case of history being wiped out solely for the sake of
something new. The modern world has brought about real quality-of-life
improvements that the traditional hutongs didn't have. From the
article:
Unlike the tourists and historians, who find Beijing's old
neighbourhoods quaint, those who live in the alleys and
courtyards often find them barely habitable. Until now at least,
no one seems to have considered spending money to install water,
sewerage and power. Easier to pull down the old, and build anew.
These vexing issues will become more common as (or if) citizens
demand historical relevance out of newer, modern developments, as
they replace traditional creations.
Here are pictures (1, 2) I took in Beijing of a hutong courtyard and a 73-year-old woman who has lived there for over 40 years. And here's my picture from Beijing in the last newsletter.
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