I found some stunning figures on the Marketingcharts.com web site regarding Ecommerce, seriously, I always knew the internet was going to be big, but these numbers are mind-boggling.
More than 85% of the world’s online population has used the internet to make a purchase - increasing the market for online shopping by 40% in the past two years - according to the latest Nielsen Global Online Survey on internet shopping habits.
Another significant point made in this study is that most consumers shop at the same site, in fact 60% of consumers said they tended to shop at the same site over and over. What this means is the first experience that shoppers have with your site matters, big time, you let them down the first time they will never be back. Nail the first experience, and loyalty seems to be almost built in.
This goes for any “first” on your web site, this goes for your registration pages, sign up forms etc. if you lose people their you have likely lost them. On a related note check out this article I wrote a while ago called What Is Your Sign Up Form Telling People, seriously they can even be fun
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.
Hallelujah, Tech Crunch just reported that Technorati has made some drastic design changes and is commiting to support their core customers, ie. the blogger themselves. For the moment I don’t see very much evidence of real tools or support for bloggers but it is early days.
Last week I saw a demo of the new products, which CEO Richard Jalichandra and VP Engineering Dorion Carroll say reflect the company’s re-dedication to their core audience: bloggers and advertisers.
Hmm, I don’t like the “and advertisers” caveat, but hey, at least they got they have figured out who their customers are.
I wrote an article back in August called “can blogger save Technorati” and here were my list of feature requests:
Merging domain names of claimed blogs, I’m sick of having two scores for experiencecurve.com and blog.experiencecurve.com and i’m sure any wordpress and typepad folks would appreciate that one
A more meaningful multi-metric “authority” measure, who cares how many linked in the last 6 months, all that measures is link baiting
I’d definitely still like to see some of these features, currently the only thing that I see being evidence of their commitment to bloggers is the “blogger central” area of the new technorati site, which is really a collection of articles of interest to bloggers.
Columnist Cory Doctorow describes how Facebook and other social networks have built-in self-destructs: They make it easy for you to be found by the people you’re looking to avoid.
It may not happen today, it may not happen tomorrow, but inevitably Facebook will experience a great big sucking sound as everyone moves on to the next big thing, it happened to AOL, Tribes, Friendster, and even to Myspace. The point is yes develop strategies and tools for leveraging Facebook, but as the old saying goes “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, and don’t stop scanning the horizon for new and interesting ways to connect and more importantly empower your customers.
I made an effort this weekend to sort out my apartment, reorganizing closets, going through paperwork etc. Then I came across a couple of unopened Amazon.com boxes which I new contained a couple of “productivity books”. The first book was Dave Allen’s book Getting Things Done and the other was The Now Habit. After opening the box I took a look at the receipt inside and discovered that I had ordered both these books in March, and it was now mid November. I feared I may disappear in an ironic singularity, but unfortunately I stayed around, put the books to one side and posted the story to twitter.
Well I just got back from a weekend in Las Vegas and after 4 days there I have a much deeper understanding of the fear and loathing aspect of it. Believe it or not one of the high points of the trip was the flight on Virgin America, who just blew away all my expectations of what a short haul domestic flight can actually be. I travel a lot and have the same opinion about domestic airlines as I do credit card companies, and cell phone carriers, they are a necessary evil and the company, its policies or its employees will ruin your day on a regular enough basis to keep you just on the edge of cutting them off but you stick around for the points or because you know no one else is any better.
Now first off, let me just say, they have a regular 110 three pronged outlet on every seat, I could actually just stop there, they already blew me away. I sat on the plane with my cell phone charging while watching Battlestar Gallactica on my nicely charging Mac Book Pro, Hallelujah, but it doesn’t stop there.
Virgin has implemented some pretty amazing technology in the computer that is in the back of every headrest, and yes, it is a computer. I know because mine crashed and the flight attendent had to restart it. As it bootstrapped I felt like the girl in Jurassic part who’s looking at the computer screen saying “I know this, this is UNIX”, well actually it was Linux, but each one is it’s own terminal I guess. Yes it crashed, yes it’s beta, but things are looking great.
There are tonnes of things to explore like maps, movies, tv shows, music to select from, and even a “login” option so your preferences and playlists will follow you from plane to plane. The thing that I thought was totally cool was a whole rake of chat options. You could IM seat to seat, you could go in a chatroom for the whole plane, or a chatroom that was along side a tv show, totally awesome. Kind of helps alleviate the classic “seat lottery” of it being dependent on you actually sitting next to someone interesting, or yes hawt, with the chat hope springs eternal that you can find someone else interesting to talk to.
So not only can you chat with hotties through the computer, you can also order drinks, I’ve always hated it since they started charging for a drink on the plane the whole rigmarole of digging through your pockets for the money for a beer, and the attendents never having any change, or not able to take your credit card. Through the screen you can pick your beverages or snacks any time, slide your credit card through and your icy cold beverage or snack is there in two minutes, sure you pay a bit more, but your not dependent on the dreaded cart coming by on one of its slow circuits.
Oh and don’t let me forget the safety video… yes, the safety video, ever hear peals of laughter burst out on a plane during the safety briefing? I thought not, I’ve done a thorough search and I could not find it on youtube but it will not be long. I don’t know how long it will be funny for, but for the first time i was again, blown away.
These are some of the technological highlights if you like, the shiny bits, but the thing above all that set the Virgin experience way above the rest was the people. Every interaction I had with every member of staff was excellent. Yes they are new, and the staff are keen, but it’s obvious they are hiring for personality above experience, you know staff are empowered when they put their own spin on each interaction. When we were boarding the plane in the usual groups, in between groups the attendant said the next person to guess his age could get on
Even more extraordinary, the person sitting in the seat in front of me and my buddy was a one of Virgin America’s pilots. We had a very good chat with him, talking about the planes and the business, and asked some questions about the reward program. I asked about signing up for the rewards program after the fact and how to get credit for this trip and he said we could just use our boarding cards, then he gave us his business card with his email “in case we had any problems”, wow.
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.
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.
Guinness has added a little twist to its latest advertising campaign and have hidden it online somewhere for someone to find. In good old ARG (alternate reality game) tradition they have started this game off with a couple of clues, in this case a fictional Mayor called Juan Ramon has put a video on youtube and created a pdf letter to share.
The pdf seems to have some writing hidden in it that alludes to some dates and times, who knows maybe there is even clues as to a prize or something, you would hope
Eric Schonfeld at TechCrunch recently wrote about a presentation given at the Web2.0 summit by Jeff Huber, Google’s vice president of engineering, the upshot being “the web is the platform”
A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform. So let’s go build the programmable Web.
Eric’s summation “take that facebook”. Now i’m no facebook fanboy, i’ve called them the AOL of web 2.0 and agreed with Robert Scoble’s evaluation of Facebooks data strategy as one of a Roach Motel. That being said, Facebook has got a couple of core things right that enable its platform to grow and that is identity and trust, both things that are sorely lacking on the platform (ie the web) that Jeff Huber is talking about. When the internet sorts out it’s problems with identity and trust then potentially Facebook can be worried, but in the meantime, it could take years for that to happen.
Facebook essentially started it’s business around mediating connections between people, people who went to the same school. You actually needed to have a .edu address to be in Facebook, and even the email address from the specific school who’s network you were going to join. Facebook is of course doing the same things for companies now, I’m in the Nokia network, which required a Nokia email address. It’s not a perfect system, but my experience is that I rarely come across “anonymous cowards” on Facebook, and spam is virtually non existent, and easy to remedy, remove any friend that spams. The internet? Not so much.
Along with this focus on mediating identity comes a sort of built in trust. I must have installed 20 or 30 applications on my profile, they all get access to the information and connections on my profile, and I didn’t think twice about it. The couple of apps that sucked I removed. I can’t say this about apps on the web, I have a much more stringent criteria as to the apps I use on the web, or widgets I install on my blog (and most of those are mediated by the wordpress community so again not really the web).
So anyway, I totally agree with Jeff Huber, the web is the platform, but until the standards for handling identity and trust are figured out Facebook will continue to grow, and grow fast.
Techmeme picked this up today, apparently Nokia has announced an update to its S60 (the operating system in Nokia smart phones) that introduces various UI enhancements including of course the touch screen. Well ok who didn’t see that coming, but what I find very interesting is the inclusion of a thing called “haptics” or actual physical feedback from the touch screen.
S60 touch user interface comes with support for tactile feedback, which means that there is a physical pulse and feedback when the user taps on the screen. This provides better awareness of the device’s response improving the user experience.
The ability to provide physical feedback from a touch screen IMHO is the most important part of this announcement. Most touch screens fail on complex interaction because the person using it only has visual feedback on whether they were successful at an operation.
