November 1999 Archives
Tuesday, November 30, 1999
Newark Airport: Returning from the holidays this past weekend, I saw an ad for a large interactive agency that boasted its capabilities to deliver "unique user experiences." Whether the tired holiday travelers actually read the ad, I can only speculate. But you know customer experience has hit it big when it pops up in baggage claim! (P.S. For a "unique user experience" of your own, try Newark airport's website.)
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Monday, November 29, 1999
Game design rant: Over the holiday weekend I enjoyed playing some classic 1980s video games with my family. Best of all was World Championship Baseball from the old Intellivision console system. If you don't remember, Intellivision was a competitor to Colecovision and Atari -- and like the other console game systems of the early 80s, its games fit into a memory size of a whopping four kilobytes. And as I re-discovered this past weekend, the game play of Intellivision baseball was perfect. And still perfect today. In four kilobytes, the Intellivision game created a better gaming experience than any baseball video game I've played in the 90s. A typical game today might weigh in at 40 megabytes -- ten thousand times bigger than the Intellivision game -- and has nothing of the game play that the Intellivision game had.
The point is that constraints force a better experience. The Intellivision game designers had very little to work with, so they were naturally disciplined to make the best of what they had. Lacking any technology or capacity for flashy graphics or sound, the designers were forced to focus on the game play, the most important aspect of a lasting experience with the game.
The Web is in a very similar state today. We who build the customer experiences are faced with constraints: customers with slow modems, small monitors, little Net experience, little patience, and a mouse that will take them to any number of competitors with one click. We have the equivalent of four kilobytes to create the experience that will satisfy and delight our customers.
Let's learn how to create good experiences NOW, while we still have our constraints to teach us.
If you're interested, you can demo or buy the old Intellivision games at intellivisionlives.com.
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Wednesday, November 24, 1999
CBS Marketwatch: A VP at Boston Consulting Group comes around to the customer experience. CBS's Frank Barnako writes: "Explaining the importance of satisfying customers online, Pecaut said his research shows that a
person who has a good experience is likely next time to buy twice as much over the next 12 months."
By the way, thanks to BCG for the nice plug on CBS. And now everyone can have goodexperience (dot com). Just sign up for the e-mail updates at update@goodexperience.com.
Now off to celebrate Thanksgiving... see you on Monday!
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Tuesday, November 23, 1999
Oops at Yahoo: Frank Barnako's Internet Daily reported today that Yahoo is planning on offering free parking at brick-and-mortar malls in SF, NYC, and Chicago. Brand manager for Yahoo Shopping Jennifer Dulski said, "We believe shopping should always
be a fun, rewarding and convenient experience." Yahoo is generally very good with its customer experience, but it made an oops here. Search Yahoo for "free parking" and the first link that appears says, "Parking Nazis must die! No free parking for you!" (I took this screenshot of the result.)
So the lesson for Yahoo's marketers: when you release a new promotion, especially one based on the customer experience, make sure that your search engine's keyword mapping is in place. (Read our free holiday e-commerce report for more on keyword mapping.) For example, searching Yahoo for "free parking" should take customers to a custom-built page that shows people when and how to get to the free parking in SF, NYC, and Chicago -- and then shows a link to the regular search engine results.
New Yorker on Ask Jeeves: The 11/15 issue of the New Yorker magazine has an amusing piece on Ask.com, the search engine whose butler mascot tries to answer any question a customer types in. The New Yorker compares the search engine's answers with actual answers of Jeeves, the fictional butler of Bertie Wooster in P. G. Wodehouse's novels. Excerpt from the New Yorker: Bertie's question: "What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?" Wodehouse's Jeeves: "There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter." Ask Jeeves: "Where can I buy accessories (general) on line?"
Experience has its limits: I was in the grocery store yesterday and heard this ad over the loudspeaker: "Mallomars are back! Those delicious marshmallow-and-chocolate cookies [blah blah blah... then finishes with this]... Mallomars. They're not just a cookie -- they're an experience!" Uhhh, no, they're a cookie. What is an experience -- a bad one -- is getting advertisements barked at you while you're trying to pick up a few groceries, fer cryin' out loud. I wish that some day the customer-driven market would drive out banal marketing like that.
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Monday, November 22, 1999
Why Web Designers Hate Their Jobs: The single best column I've ever read about Web designers -- the plight of some, the arrogance of others. In either case, the customer suffers.
Salon on customer service: Cutesy virtual "sales assistants" on websites might be good for the press and starry-eyed CEOs, but they aren't good for the customer experience. Hello, did we learn anything at all from Microsoft Bob or the Microsoft dancing paper clip? Enough already! The Salon piece is expertly written by Janelle Brown, one of my favorite Web commentators.
InfoWorld on Levis.com: The real answer, Sean Dugan says, is personalization. Key quote: "Levi Strauss & Co. could still strike it rich, if it is willing to hunker down and prepare for the next big I-commerce wave: custom-built products for markets of one." I still say that Levis.com could have struck it rich if it had just made it easy for the customer to buy some jeans, already, on its website. (Creative Good wrote a worst-practices column on Levi's months ago pointing out the problems with its poor customer experience.)
Wall Street Journal on customer experience: I don't usually link to wsj.com, because it requires a paid subscription. But if you have an account there, this section is worth reading. A dozen or so articles on all aspects of e-commerce, and over half of them mention, or focus on, the customer experience. It's refreshing to see all the quotes about customer experience coming from traditional Web agencies like Think New Ideas, Razorfish, and Scient. Having ranted about customer experience for three years, I'm glad to see the industry and the press finally following suit :)
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Friday, November 19, 1999
Dazeofourlives.com (fun content site): Amazing what you can do with some simple graphics and HTML. The site designer, Martin Archer, wrote this in an online forum: "I design my own site so that even my dear old computer-and-internet-hating Dad could understand how to use it. (And he does.)" Bravo!
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Thursday, November 18, 1999
Marketing Fatigue: Ever feel like you've seen too many banner ads, too many direct marketing campaigns, too many sales pitches online? Don Willmot of PC Magazine has. Key quote: "The onslaught of Web marketing that I find myself buried under is having a paradoxical effect. I find it so off-putting, so repulsive, that I'm starting to repress my natural, materialistic tendencies." I find his article interesting because it brings up a larger question: how are we, the Net industry, actually improving people's lives? I personally believe that we do improve customers' lives, but not to the degree that many marketers boast.
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Wednesday, November 17, 1999
Boo.com review: I'll have more to say about boo.com soon, but for now, enjoy this comment, a post on an Internet advertising mailing list. Key quote: "Boo.com is a flashy site and is fun to play with, but it's a failure when it comes to making the sale." I agree.
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Tuesday, November 16, 1999
Amazon redesign: Amazon.com just released a redesign of its checkout process. The design fixes several of tactical annoyances, including the choice of whether to gift wrap, and makes it easier to choose shipping and billing addresses with a click.
Economist: An excellent special report on the future of the Net. Key quote: "By escaping from the desktop, the Internet will both escape Microsoft and become a bigger part of everyday life. But this will not be enough to deliver its promise. For that, the Internet must also become easier to use."
Keyboard for the Palm Pilot: Dan Gillmor reviews an upcoming keyboard for the Palm Pilot. The keyboard is better for bit entry than Graffiti (the Pilot-specific printing method), but it's not as good as voice recognition. Until voice recognition is up to the task, info appliances may all have portable keyboards like this.
Dell.com redesign: PCWorld reports on Dell's redesign. Dell says it focused on the customer experience. Key quote: "Improving upon the already popular Web site is a priority for Dell because its research shows people want a good experience... more than anything else." Here's the Dell.com website. What's even more interesting to me is that Dell made some of the same changes that Gateway.com made last spring (during Creative Good's work with Gateway).
Internet World: Using the Web via a cell phone will become more popular soon. But tech-heavy, graphic-crazed websites won't be a part of it: cell phones are text-only and have small screens. What's more, as the story says, "the experience level and tolerance for complexity of the average mobile phone user is far less than a PC user." The customer experience gap will be even larger for cell phones than it is for websites.
Sony's $900 Picture Frame. Salon asks a question that almost never gets asked in the technology industry: "The company's new memory cards are ultra-cool. But are they really good for anything?" Asking whether something is actually good is an essential step in creating meaningful products and environments. It reminds me of a favorite quote from M. Scott Peck: "The assessment of goodness is the most compelling ingredient of the creative process."
Key quote from the Salon story: "The control panel on the CyberFrame is cleverly concealed, looks wonderfully sleek and is impossible to manipulate." Sounds like a lot of beautifully designed websites I've seen over the years.
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Monday, November 15, 1999
Interview: Harvard's Harbus newspaper interviewed Phil Terry, my business partner and the CEO here at Creative Good. I'd say that Phil accurately describes how he works, and how Creative Good tries to work -- by maintaining an open environment and trying to help people, instead of working exclusively for the shortest-term gain. This is the other half of "good experience" -- not just creating a good website, but creating a good experience for the people within the organization *creating* the website. We'll say more about that idea as goodexperience.com grows.
Comdex: Phil, by the way, just gave an address on a keynote panel at Comdex, minutes before Linus Torvalds took the stage. I wasn't there, but apparently Phil had the crowd cheering from his comments that the industry can no longer survive without truly basing its services on what the customer wants. Good stuff. (The day before on the same stage, Bill Gates unveiled an unreleased technology that would show new car buyers the map of all the gas stations in their neighborhoods. Yes, this is what we'll all be upgrading to real soon now.)
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Friday, November 12, 1999
Amazon did a great job this week announcing its three new stores to customers. If you check out the home page today, you'll see that the center of the home page contains an especially effective graphic. It announces the launch in two words -- "New Stores" -- then shows product examples, then the names of the stores. With seven words and one prominent graphic, Amazon quickly and clearly communicated the news to its customers. (It's a good experience down to the detail: click on the drill, and you go straight to the drill page.)
Explanation: I should clarify the last bit from yesterday. The site, brains4zombies.com, is taken straight from amazon.com, with brains for sale instead of books, music, etc. The joke is very funny -- check out the "reviews of this brain" or the brains the site recommends for your tastes. See, a good customer experience translates to any market :)
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Thursday, November 11, 1999
Wall Street Journal: Andrea Petersen visits Boo.com and has a bad customer experience because of slow page loads and complex technology. This is one site where the interface doesn't disappear. Petersen concludes: "Some analysts say boo.com will have a tough time succeeding unless the site's creators overhaul it." I'd like to know who would disagree with that statement. With a slow and difficult customer experience, of course Boo.com is headed for failure. The Boo.com site is frighteningly similar to the failed levis.com site (see below).
Feed: Steven Johnson gets several perspectives on interfaces of the future. I especially like Eric Zimmerman's comment that interfaces will fade away -- that's the whole point of making things easier. The less the technology is apparent, the less of an obstacle it is. We should try to un-design interfaces, to make them go away. Focusing on designing the interface usually ends up complicating the customer experience.
Fun: Where have I seen this customer experience before? I can't quite place it.
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Wednesday, November 10, 1999
Washington Post: Rob Pegoraro writes an accurate and entertaining account of his frustrations with technology. I love this -- he quotes someone as saying, "If modern office windows would only open, by now virtually all computers could fly." So true.
Industry Standard: UK office workers reveal who they blame when the technology crashes. Key quote: "About 10 percent of all respondents named [Bill] Gates as being personally responsible for crashed systems."
San Francisco Chronicle: Levi's marketing chief has announced his resignation. This is in part because of the failure of Levi's e-commerce efforts. (CNNfn covered Levi's departure from e-commerce.) Creative Good wrote a worst-practices column on Levi's months ago pointing out the problems with its poor customer experience.
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Copyright 1999, Mark Hurst.
