ExperienceCurve

What better way to bring some authenticity to a brand than, yep, mustang ringtones. Yes, it sounds like a car revving. The most mind boggling ringtone being… the national anthem, played out with revving engines and tire screeching for the high F. I guess this gets filed under customer experience irony as well.

Now, this may just be a case of cultural relativism, as i’m English, and maybe i’m just not getting it. Please any red blooded Americans want to tell me why I shouldn’t find this wrong on so many levels. Thanks.

ringtones Get your ringtones today.

shopomposition.com is a shopping site that sells an extremely eclectic mix of products, it seems like a stylish, urban outfitters for grown ups. The web site is a flash extraviganza that puts boo.com to sham, essentially breaks every rule in the book when it comes to ecommerce, web design, usability etc. and it works brilliantly.

I’m not saying it’s perfect but it is beautiful and it uses flash in some very interesting and entirely appropriate ways that makes sense for the kind of store it is.

Findability vs Discoverability

I’m going to focus on one aspect of this store which works brilliantly, and that is “ambient discoverability”. Now many of my most admired IA expert friends will talk about findability, but findability somehow implies intention, I want to find something. What do you do if you sell film cameras, cute monster usb drives, karate robot models and knife magnets?

Click here for some video of the user interface in action demonstrating the flash fly-by

They have solved this problem elegantly IMHO by employing a flash fly-by, that swoops all the product thumbnails past you after you have clicked on a category. Click on gadgets, watch all the cameras and robot models fly-by, almost too fast to see, but enough to give you a taste, until it comes to rest. The beauty of this approach is that it helps mitigate the problem of tunnel vision we often have when viewing a web site.

An Expressive System

Often when interacting with web sites the question is “what do I do next”, this is often because of a lack of cues, if your in an unfamiliar place you look for signs, directions, maps, all cues as to where you should be going. This is how we build mental models, through cues or clues. Web sites often leave users stranded because the users mental model of the web site is incomplete and the web site lacks cues as to what to do next or where to go next.

This is the other advantage of the fly-by approach, that when it’s finished and come to rest, I as a user understand that about 20 or so items are just off to the right of the screen for me to explore. So my cue is to start searching for a device to scroll the screen, this is doubly important because there is no scroll bar, which would normally be my cue for exploration (I told you they broke all the rules.)

Anyway, it’s worth exploring yourself, and one thing i’ll add is don’t try this at home, it is obvious that they have employed some serious animation know-how, to get the timing right, and having dabbled with flash can assure you to get that kind of timing and pacing is extremely difficult. Kudos also to their optimization, I was running there site on a ibook (mac) on firefox, and I didn’t experience any of the usual “flash running in slow motion”, or firefox crashing that i often experience.

Found Via: wildlyapprpriate.com - dan klyn’s blog on information architecture and such

Now webTV was not that great at all so I’m not doing Tivo any favors by coining the “webTV 2.0″ term, but I think overall it looks like some pretty good ideas.

Good Ideas:

• Podcasts on Tivo (yes podcasts can be video too)
• Live365 radio on Tivo
• Yahoo photo’s (although no good for me until it includes flickr)

TiVo.com | New TiVo® Online Services

Questionable Ideas

• Weather - Yawn
• Fandango - purchase movie tickets (could be good if the previews are there and it picks up ratings from rottentomatoes.com)

My ideas:

• Netflix integration, reviews, previews etc. Yes I know, somewhat competitors but what about a little co-opitition
• Match.com - I hate to say it because I’m a misrable failure at online dating so far
• Netflix and match.com integration - Listen if there is one thing that will help me match someone it would be an interest in movies. Listen Match and Netflix, this is my idea and i want a cut if you guys want to merge, or at least credit for the idea

This goes under the new catagory of Customer Experience Irony.

Microsoft ads aim to erase ‘huge’ image
“We are often perceived as a huge American company,” Lucero said Friday in an interview.

This is another gem picked up from digg, if you are a fellow digg user feel free to ad me as a friend, my username is: xakto

This is my inaugral post on the topic of masters vs. disasters of experience, and the company that has driven me to this is comcast, I somehow envision this as a possible series of posts, although this example is one of the clearest vs. scenarios. It’s kind of like Iron Chef, and this is the DVR battle:

• Master of Experience: Tivo
• Disaster of Experience: Comcast HD DVR (by motorola*)

Tivo: bells and whilstles aside tivo is there to give me control over what I watch and it never had any catastrophic failures in that regard

Comcast DVR: Within two weeks of owning this DVR I discovered a random bug in an episode of “litttle briton” it had recorded. Now bugs are one thing and I can generally overlook glitches but this one was so unbelievably obtuse I will never forget the pain and frustration. I watched the first 15 minutes of the show and came to the inevitable commercial (which are particularly awful on BBC america) so I quickly hit fast forward on the DVR remote… and the DVR inexplicably started the show at the begining again, I mean right at the credits. Wierd, I imagined I must have hit the “start at begining of show again” button by mistake, so i hit fast forward again to get past the 15 minutes I’d already watched, and it started at the begining of the show again. Now I’m embarrassed to say how many times I watched that first 15 minutes because my desire to skip those god awful commercials. Now if I was a DVR designer and was working with a team, I can imagine saying at some point “listen guys, if there’s one thing we can’t fuck up its the fast forward”.

Tivo: Always recorded the show I wanted, I never had a nagging fear held over from my ancient reptilian brain ie. did you set the VCR

Comcast: Regularly misses episodes if I select “only record first runs”, the DVR doesn’t know a first run from its asshole and there for I’m always second guessing it. So i set up a season recording, then I go in to the “upcoming schedule” to check that it knows what it should record.

Tivo: Never recorded two of the same episode, even when I was recording the simpsons across fox and “channel 11″

Comcast: I like the daily show, but my comcast DVR is just incapable of knowing when it already recorded somthing. I went away for christmas to England for 10 days. When I returned I had about 25 of the same episode of the daily show and the colbert report. Nothing else was recorded because there wasn’t any space. And of course none of them were labeled with any identifing feature, just “the daily show”, so the only reason I know that 25 of the same episode were recorded is because i watched the first 30 seconds of so of each episode.

What can I say except Tivo is a master of experience.
Please cable companies, don’t cheap out on this if your going to get a DVR get a freaking tivo. I hate to say it, but I would pay more for the tivo option.
* Now clearly, it’s motorolas buggy DVR that is at fault here, but it was comcasts business decision to bundle a crap DVR with their cable service.