Monitoring the online customer experience, by Mark Hurst.
More Resources Monthly updates via e-mail: update@goodexperience.com to sign up. Download Managing Incoming E-mail report	Bits, Experience, and Jazz Wednesday, November 13, 2002 by Mark Hurst 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." Get Good Experience by e-mail: send any message to update@goodexperience.com Come to the Good Experience Live conference, May 2, 2003 in New York City. - - - - - - - - - - - - Get e-mail updates of goodexperience.com: e-mail update@goodexperience.com Copyright 1999-2003, Good Experience, Inc.