Yahoo mindset is an intent driven search that allows users to dynamically change the result set of a search depending on their intent. The current scale is between the two “intents” commercial and research.
Yahoo’s concept of intent driven search provides a pretty useful customer experience, but the hidden goldmine IMHO is market research. If yahoo is an advertising company more than a search company then asking users if they’re “buying” when they’re doing a search is killer market research. It’s the age old retail strategy of “what is your time frame for this purchase” or more bluntly “are you ready to buy”, “let me go and talk to my manager and see if we can get you a deal TODAY”. It could open the door to differential pricing for advertisers who pay more for “shopping” orientated search than research, or even time limited offers being shown to people who are “shopping”.
Here’s a picture of the scale that users can futz with to change their results:
And here’s a view of the search results based upon my more “research” oriented intent.
From a technical standpoint, yahoo’s taken a leaf out of google’s book and is getting on the AJAX bandwagon and it makes for a pretty seemless experience, as you move the slider the search results change without another page loading.
More about it at the yahoo blog:
Yahoo! Search blog: Yahoo! Research Labs Releases Yahoo! Mindset
Yahoo! Mindset
Marketing vox: ‘Yahoo Mindset’ Search Results Reflect Searcher Intent
A personalized news page ala google. Google personal news page
So what’s cool…
- Personaization without the registration, that’s right, no need to sign in, just customize your page and I assume google uses the decade old technology of cookies to give you the right page when you come back
- Live drag and drop news widgets, nice what you can do with AJAX
- Slashdot as a news source
- gmail widget
Myfoodphone.com is a service hoping to get a piece of the billions spent every year on diets and weight loss. From the look of all the graphics they are targeting very attractive women who don’t need to lose any weight, unless of course, the pictures are of women who have been using this service for years. Anyway, the premise is that you take pictures with your camera phone of everything you eat and send it to myfoodphone.com, and your personal dietitian will evaluate your diet based on the photo’s and give you advice on your diet.
What extremely neat about this service is that it makes its customers part of the companies value network. Imagine the intellectual capital regarding the eating habits of the population, where, when, what, how frequently.
There is also a huge issue of trust. My first instinct was to look up the URL on whois and make sure it wasn’t a site run by some big prepared food conglomerate. “hey, what are you eating that for, you should try our new lean pockets if you want to drop a few pounds.” To this end where a high degree of trust is needed and no hint of product placement etc. the customer experience strategy must deliver authenticity, and impartiality.
MyFoodPhone
I wonder if I might benefit from a similar service, like, mydatephone.com, where I send pictures of my various dates to some expert who can tell me what I should be looking for next week…
“the experience is the brand” is a phrase often used to describe how a customer’s experience with an organization will influence their perception of the brand. But I see the customer experience as being a culmination of brand building activities, it is the point at which a customer has decided they trust your company enough to engage in some kind of trial behavior, in other words, even before the customer experience’s your organizations products and services they have established some kind of expectation in their mind. And expectation of quality, attitude, performance… experience if you like. So the experience is a culmination of expectation being measured against experience.
This balance between expectation and experience is why I like to think of a brand as a promise, and the customer experience as the fulfillment of that promise. No doubt a customer experience that veers wildly from it’s brand promise will erode my belief in that brand promise pretty quickly. Companies that promise one thing through their advertising and branding and badly let us down through the customer experience are undermining a huge investment and one of their most valuable assets. The difference between a brand promise and the actual customer experience is the “experience gap”, and that will erode your brand equity faster than anything else, no one likes to be promised one thing and delivered another.
Any company that wants to establish a customer experience strategy must do it with a full and realistic evaluation of what their brand stands for and what their brand promise is. Any company that fails to align their customer experience strategy with their brand strategy will be in danger of creating an “experience gap” that will erode any brand equity they have built in the marketplace.
This is a very nice, succinct article in support of the idea that the “experience is the brand”. I very much like the simple framework describing the forces that drive the customer experience:
- the customer frame of reference
- the customer’s expectations - often set up by advertising
- the customers actual experience
I’m a big believer in the expectation/experience gap. Kind of why unrealistic expectations set by adverts, sales people, or marketing collateral, will always be part of the equation when the customer finally takes the plunge and engages with your organization.
So let’s strip out years of indoctrination and get to the real issue. The entire energy of every organization should be focused on one thing, the customer experience. This is true whether you are in the public or private sector, deliver a service or a product, a manufacturer, a wholesaler or a dealer.
marketingweb.co.za: Advertising doesn’t build your brand, says Walter Pike, brand interaction does.
I just got an email last night from dodgeball.com with the news that they had just been acquired by Google.
Dodgeball.com is kind of like a location based friendster for your mobile phone, essentially you send emails to dodgeball when you out on the town, with the name of the pub you’re at and dodgeball alerts your network of friends, and even friends of friends. Sounds pretty cool huh, well it would be if more people used it, which is why google purchasing them is a really good sign. The bigger the network of people using dodgeball the better it will become, and guess what, google can start sending location sensitive ads to your cell phone as well.
It’s a great concept and when it has a critical mass of users it will be a very powerful marketing and communication vehicle. I have a feeling that location smart technologies are going to be a very significant wave over the next few years.
IBM is now interested in helping clients link design and strategy, develop deeper insight into consumer needs, and then develop break through, innovative products. In many ways this space has been owned by companies like IDEO and frog. IDEO does a tonne of work in the medical instruments space and that is an area mentioned by IBM as a key area. It will be interesting how this pans out. One thing it does indicate is that Customer Experience Strategy is on the mind of a lot of companies.
Increasingly, our clients are seeking new insights into customer needs, innovative design ideas and ways to harness technology to create breakthrough products and gain market advantage. This capability makes IBM Product Design Consulting Services a valuable complement and unique differentiator to the Product Development and Delivery solutions we currently provide global electronics clients,” added George Bailey, Global Leader, Electronics Industry, IBM Business Consulting Services.
IBM Designers to Help Clients Create Breakthrough Products and New Business Opportunities : ArriveNet Press Releases : Autos
Yahoo! Appoints Larry Tesler Head of User Experience and Design
“Larry has the ability to draw on his extensive knowledge of both computer science and user-centered design to help define and drive product strategy and innovation at Yahoo!.”
http://www.mypyramid.gov is where you can find the 12 new food pyramids. My pyramid is a tool to help you decide which pyramid works for you. Unfortunately, all the pyramids look the same, the measurements just change.
Here’s a slate article that shows how 4 different designers would have approached the problem, essentially the redesign of the food pyramids:
Four Servings of Design - Improving on the new food pyramid. By Jessie Scanlon
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