Archive for the 'Customer-Experience' Category

Bay CHI Focus on Social Software

Published
by
Karl
on March 31, 2008
in Customer-Experience
. 2 Comments

The April Bay CHI (Computer Human Interaction) group meeting looks fascinating this month. I wrote about Amy Jo Kim’s “putting the fun in functional - Game Mechanics in Social Software” before on experiencecurve here and am really interested in seeing it presented. There is also a dinner planned before the meeting starting at 5.30.

B a y C H I

The San Francisco Bay Area ACM SIGCHI Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction announces its monthly program meeting:

Tuesday, April 8
7:00-9:30 p.m.
http://www.baychi.org/program/

7:00-7:30 p.m.
Tea, Coffee, Socializing, Joining BayCHI …

7:30-9:30 p.m.
Putting the Fun in Functional:
Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software
Amy Jo Kim, ShuffleBrain
+
Social Design and the Yahoo! Pattern Library
Christian Crumlish, Yahoo!

PARC’s George E. Pake Auditorium
3333 Coyote Hill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304

BayCHI program meetings are free and open to the public. BayCHI may
publish audio or visual recordings. BayCHI does not permit recording or
photography by attendees.

ABSTRACT of Putting the Fun in Functional:
Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software:

An explosion of interactive services have harnessed the collective
efforts of users. Services like MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook, Flickr, and
Digg provide game-like entertainment to millions of people. Amy Jo will
review the psychology and system thinking behind game design and explore
how to use game mechanics to create experiences that are fun,
compelling, and addictive.

AMY JO KIM is an internationally recognized expert on community
architecture and social systems design and author of Community Building
on the Web (Peachpit, 2000), a design handbook that’s required reading
in game design studios and university classes worldwide.

ABSTRACT of Social Design and the Yahoo! Pattern Library Christian
Crumlish, Yahoo!

New social media aggregrators appear every day, and venerable old sites
are adding social features. The interaction patterns that drive social
relationships on-line are becoming clear–as are nasty “antipatterns”.
Christian will discuss social patterns in the works for the Yahoo!
Design Pattern Library and “in the wild.”

CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH is the curator of the Yahoo! pattern library and
director of technology for the Information Architecture Institute. He
studied philosophy at Princeton and painting at the San Francisco School
of Art. He is the author of The Power of Many: How the Living Web is
Transforming Politics, Business, and Everday Life (Wiley, 2004).

Apple, google and everyone else - Who owns the customer experience?

Published
by
Karl
on March 10, 2008
in Customer-Experience and Strategy
. 1 Comment

apple google and you

It’s funny, I would suggest that Apple and Google probably have very different design processes and certainly a very different culture so what is the common denominator?

I think it could well be that they both have very influential people at the executive level in the organization that is focused and passionate about the design of the customer experience, ie. Steve Jobs and Marissa Mayer.

Can you point to the one person in your organization who “owns” the design of the user experience? Do they have the power and influence to effect every aspect of the user experience?

via

Need to learn about search engines - SEOMoz.org

Published
by
Karl
on January 28, 2008
in Customer-Experience and Marketing
. 1 Comment

Even when a customer is canceling an account it is an opportunity to engage in a positive way, even if it is just making it easy for them to cancel. This is in stark contrast to a lot of “retention” strategies that are designed to keep you on the phone, and pressure you into renewing when it’s the last thing you want.

I’ve been a customer of SEOMoz.org for about 6 months and it was only on canceling my account that I felt compelled to give them a recommendation, mainly because canceling my subscription was such a pleasant experience. Basically their subscriptions are handled through paypal currently, which as any paypal customer will know is hellaciously difficult to manage for the customer and really only lets you know you have a subscription when it renews, so anyway I picked up the phone and chatted with Gillian and she took care of it and even let me know they are working on a new billing system as they are unhappy with paypal for the exact reason i stated.

In their premium content they have got some very juicy and relevant articles like their 50+ page report on Social Media Optimization Strategies, and their guide to Viral Marketing or Linkbaiting.

If you want a preview of their thinking and writing check out their blog which is a valuable resource as well.

Web Standards for Mobile - Beyond iPhone

Published
by
Karl
on January 22, 2008
in Customer-Experience
. 4 Comments

I’ve been an avid Mac user for many years, since about 1996, and actually that’s when I started working on the web. Needless to say i’ve been at the sharp end of peoples decisions as to “what platform to develop for”. When IE and windows were the dominant web platform numerous useful services were blocked to me due to people thinking it’s cheaper to develop for the majority. Thankfully with the help of people like Jeffrey Zeldman and the Web Standards Project more and more people are developing code for standards as opposed to platforms. Developing for web standards means it will work well enough on pretty much every platform that understands web standards, and then you can invest a bit more into “targeting” a specific platform to take advantage of a specific platform.

And yet, these same people who are developing in web standards for browsers have suddenly forgotten all that good practice when it comes to developing for mobile. I mean seriously, I know the iPhone is cool, and has a safari based web browser, but so do most of the Nokia Nseries right (yes, they had safari based web browsers before the iPhone was out)? So all you web 2.0 folks developing iPhone web applications, just remember if you just use web standards they can work for a lot more people. Take a look at this graph of activity on flickr for the iPhone and the top 3 Nseries devices:

nseries picture
(the # of Members is the amount of people who uploaded at least 1 photo the previous day)

This is not supposed to provide accurate market data, but as you can see there are a lot of people out there in the web 2.0 world with Nokia Nseries so it just makes business sense right? Believe me I’m not doing this to pump up Nokia, I’m just tired of mobile apps not working on my N95 :-)

Here’s a list of the Top 25 web applications for iPhone

Full disclosure yes I work for Nokia, but this is a personal plea.

The Virgin America Safety Video… Really, it’s worth watching

Published
by
Karl
on November 27, 2007
in Advertising and Customer-Experience
. 12 Comments

Update: in the week since I wrote about this about 30,000 people have watched the video, that is 30k people voluntarily watched an AIRLINE SAFETY VIDEO! Wow.

I wrote about my Virgin America experience a couple of weeks ago and the one thing I searched for was the safety video, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Well Chet Gulland at their agency Anomaly just put it on youtube and sent me a link so here’s the update. Airline safety videos generally make me want to poke needles in my eyes, so it’s refreshing when a company tries to do one a little bit differently, and tries to make it a bit more bearable.

The message that they manage to get across here of course is “if we tried harder to make this video bearable imagine what we’ll do to improve the rest of the experience”.

The interesting thing about this as well is that i’m sure no one has ever complained about the safety announcements, most customers have probably accepted that they have to be boring and mundane. What Virgin has done here is make something better that you never expected, and that is even better than improving things that everyone already knows need improving. The other side effect of this amusing video is everyone actually watched it and who knows maybe even remembered where the life jacket is.

What is Web Design?

Published
by
Karl
on November 20, 2007
in Co-Creation and Customer-Experience
. 2 Comments

I’ve thought for many years that web design emerged from an awkward pairing of software design and print/magazine design. Practitioners have certainly moved it along but it still boggles my mind how badly some agencies screw up web design, and how some “award winning” designs fail in so many real world ways.

Anyway, I don’t have an answer but I can tell you this article Understanding Web Design from my old friend Jeffrey Zeldman is probably the smartest thing I’ve read on the topic of web design in the last couple of years.

A couple of gems:

Architecture (the kind that uses steel and glass and stone) is also an apt comparison—or at least, more apt than poster design. The architect creates planes and grids that facilitate the dynamic behavior of people. Having designed, the architect relinquishes control. Over time, the people who use the building bring out and add to the meaning of the architect’s design.
Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

and on a related note Joshua Porter on “do canonical web designs exist”

Both of these wonderful articles were lifted from the always fun and memorable Daringfireball.net

The Experience Is The Product

Published
by
Karl
on October 29, 2007
in Customer-Experience, Marketing and Strategy
. 3 Comments

Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path has just posted a presentation on the topic “The Experience Is The Product” on slideshare, even better he has synced the recording of him presenting this in the UK. In this presentation Peter does a great job of explaining that the experience is everything, it’s the branding, it’s the marketing, and how often our approaches to design screw this up.

Peter will hate me for doing it because he tried to do the whole presentation without mentioning the ipod, but of course he had to, because it’s the best example of experienced centered design out there.

ipod

One thing I’ll add is that when people say “experience design” or “experienced focused design” a lot of people think “sensory orgy” or the “wow”. But it’s not about the wow, it’s actually about focusing on the broader experience beyond the product, beyond the use of the product, the system if you like. The experience is the system is probably another way of saying it. Way back in 2003 I wrote a post that is somewhat related called “Thinking Outside the Product”

You might also find this presentation interesting from Marc Rettig on the history of interaction design which illustrates the transition from task focused design to design that takes into account the broader experience.

Radiohead sez set your own price for their digital download

Published
by
Karl
on October 9, 2007
in Customer-Experience, Marketing and Viral-Persuasion
. 1 Comment

radiohead breaks the mold here entirely with a “set your own price” of their digital download, but the lesson here is if your going to do something entirely groundbreaking for customers you have to explain it very clearly.

So the new Radiohead album In Rainbows will be available tomorrow as a DRM free digital download, that’s awesome in its own right, but they are going to let you, the buyer set the price (you can get an awesome disk set for 40 quid which comes with the download for free). Here’s a screenshot of the shopping cart where you can fill in your own price.

set ur own price

You mean it’s up to me?

pricing

That doesn’t sound right.

really

As Joseph Jaffe said in his best Keanu Reeves impression, Whoa. Agreed, whoa, that was my reaction when I was trying to buy the album a couple of days ago. Funnily enough though I never completed the transaction because I didn’t really get it, and radiohead didn’t implement it very well. What I mean by that is they didn’t explain it was the honor system, but they just left the price blank, and also stated that a transaction fee would be added. Unfortunately even after adding the electronic download to the shopping cart it still wasn’t clear how much I was going to be charged. So what did I do, same thing all consumers do when they are not sure what is happening, they bail out :-) Great idea, poor execution. If your going to do something that breaks the mold completely, you should probably make an effort to explain exactly what you’re doing.

After bailing out the first time and getting the courage to approach this new shopping experience again, I went through the process again. I paid 5 pounds which is probably the equivalent of $10.

Picture 103

Amazon to sell 2,000,000 DRM free MP3

Published
by
Karl
on September 25, 2007
in Customer-Experience
. 2 Comments

Suffice to say, Hallelujah, i’ve pissed and moaned about my crippled iTunes music for long enough, this is a game changer with some caveats. If it is super easy to use, easy to understand where my media is, and is not too expensive. With amazons experience so far with ecommerce and even digital distribution this could really be it :-) This will certainly put Wal-Mart’s DRM free offering in the shade I would imagine.

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today launched a public beta of “Amazon MP3,” a new digital music download store with Earth’s biggest selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads. Amazon MP3 has over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels. Amazon MP3 complements Amazon.com’s existing selection of over 1 million CDs to now offer customers more selection of physical and digital music than any other retailer.

Amazon MP3 is an all-MP3, DRM-free catalog of a la carte music from major labels and independent labels, playable on any device, in high-quality audio, at low prices,” said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President for Digital Music. “This new digital music service has already been through an extensive private beta, and today we’re excited to offer it to our customers as a fully functional public beta. We look forward to receiving feedback from our customers and using their input to refine the service.”

Every song and album on Amazon MP3 is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. This means that Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device, including PCs, Macs™, iPods™, Zunes™, Zens™, iPhones™, RAZRs™, and BlackBerrys™; organize their music using any music management application such as iTunes™ or Windows Media Player™; and burn songs to CDs.

Via BoingBoing and Engadget

UPDATE: I just bought my first album via Amazon MP3 and i’m pleased to say even on a Mac it was pretty painless and more importantly nothing unexpected happened. I bought the album using 1 click ordering. It gave me a screen telling me I needed to download the Amazon Downloader

amazon window

The app downloaded and I installed it, it ran automatically and opened a browser window prompting me to download the album, which then started getting downloaded by the app

amazon mp3

and the result? It created a new folder called Amazon MP3 in my music folder, then the artist, then the album, filled with lovely little 256kbps mp3’s, then iTunes opened up and started copying the songs. Pretty sweet.

Now i’m listening to Amy Winehouse “Rehab”, such and ironic song.

Of course the only thing that would make this even better would be a Amazon S3 driven bottomless storage option that would enable all my devices access to my library, and of course would enable streaming of all my stuff to my friends ALA iTunes.

UPDATE: Gizmodo is reporting that Amazon MP3’s are watermarked to identify they came from Amazon, but not with personal identifying information like iTunes DRM “free” songs are.

Experience Matters - New Blog From Critical Mass

Published
by
Karl
on September 21, 2007
in Customer-Experience and Marketing
. 0 Comments

experience mattersLooks like a good blog to add to your feed if you’re interested in customer experience, design, and marketing. Couple of contributers I know well like David Armano of Logic+Emotion and Scott Weisbrod of Experience Planner. Looks like their blog is only a month old at this point, one to watch IMHO.