iPrincipia

Redesigning newspapers

2011-05-16T12:30:00.001-05:00

Social Media Marketing

2011-04-23T11:29:00.003-05:00

Social Media marketing is in all marketing conversations now.. in it's simplest and probably the most common form people look at it as a facebook like and twitter links on the site. But Social marketing is much deeper (an tons to be discovered still). Here is a thought process:

It really has 2 parts:

a) Relationship
b) Participation ( I am consciously not calling this marketing)

Relationship is a long term component, this is where you are building your brand and an association with very specific people who start to trust you, like you (as an individual/company/brand). Core of the relationship building are being personal - if you show someone that they or their views are important that starts to form a bond.

I have seen companies force this by doing a give away if someone becomes a fan on fb and so on. It's effective in someways as more number of fans builds perception for the others but in many ways this is fooling oneself also. As those are not great relationships, just loose associations.

Participation becomes the vehicle to building relationships. This can be responding to question or comment from someone, posting useful information, initiating an important conversations.. essentially it's about giving.

And that word "giving" is the core of this I think.. most of the time people approach it from a "taking" perspective but while that can be a goal, it is a result of giving.. almost becomes philosophical and a "Karma" theory.

more tactical thoughts to come ... hopefully soon.

Agile and UX Documentation

2011-04-23T11:16:00.002-05:00

Last 5 years or so I have focussed a lot on and almost moved completely into Agile thinking. It just makes a lot of sense and for me it evolved as a part of solving day to day problems so it was well grounded. I didn't just found it cool and applied.

Last few days I have spoken to many UX practitioners and am realizing that the UX services companies still are documenting the way we use to several years ago. There are huge deliverables being created and extremely deep documentation. While it is valuable it really is a waterfall and ties us down and really is more a "predictive" approach to designs (even with user testing etc) and not as "adaptive" as it needs to be and is valuable to the core goals of build great user experiences.

The process I follow is that of a very minimal documentation .. I typically start with initial research getting into task analysis, personas etc and then at some logical point jump to prototyping.

Prototyping starts with rough paper sketches to explore several models one could apply and just help think through the concepts.. and then at some stage just jump to wireframe using omnigraffle or HTML (if it's a very interactive design - like http://insightify.com). I do story descriptions but for most part wireframes are detailed enough.

The last part I have found useful is to be in touch with story development and make adjustments as needed.

I love this diagram:

Agile - it's a strategy

2009-07-16T19:52:00.005-05:00

Agile process is normally just treated as a "process". Well it is but more important is that it is a strategy. One cannot just take it in isolation and decide some roles and some steps, purchase a SPRINT planning software and expect it to yield results. Last few years I have applied and developed this strategy from grounds up. So what have I learnt:

1. What is Agile - lets start with the basics, the whole life is agile. Every day, every moment we take decisions, review them and adjust decisions. We don't say that and Jan 14, 2001 I'll get married and then on Feb 18, 2008 I'll have my first kid. Life is unpredictable, well so is product development. In simple terms being agile is about breaking down big goals into small steps, monitoring those and doing course correction.

2. What is the strategy for? - This is the most important question, rather in perfect world people would be thinking of a problem and Agile (or any other process) would come as a solution to it. But there is value in looking at a solution first and then deciding if it helps solve any of the problems better. So back to the main point, every problem requires it's own solution. Agile works well if you have a big but flexible goal. Take an example, if we take a fixed budget and fixed scope project - a commitment to a client delivered in a nice proposal with specific level of profitability tied to it, it 's difficult (not impossible) to apply an agile process effectively. Your goal in this case gets to meet your commitment/client expectation. But if you take the ownership of the results from the initiative instead of just delivering then you would find the agile is much better.

3. Prepare your team - This equally important. We are developing a software and the developer had worked on solving a particular problem which after some time had to be scrapped. That guy was upset and rightfully so. Agility comes with a price, we as humans always go for stability and agility wants us to be prepared for a change, actually several of them. So it's important to spend time with the team and emphasize on what is being done, why it's being done (previous point) and how to deal with this change.

4. Be Agile with agile - We started with formal process of having a proper roles, using user stories and giving it a points etc.. but not everyone naturally works that way. One thing we focus a lot on is to play by strengths. if someone is process oriented then have a good process for this person, but if someone is unstructured then plan for regular discussions, don't just expect the person to follow the process. No strategy can remain static, it should change based on the environment.

5. Involve customers - transparency is you biggest friend, share what you are doing, how you are doing, and most importantly what you believe in. If you can establish that , then you have much greater leverage with your customers. This is not with the idea to take advantage of them but with the idea that if you make mistakes they'll be more understanding. It allows you to take those small steps even before your solution is perfected and test it out with a goal to make a solution really great for your customer.

Saropot - a nice blend of design and function

2009-04-24T19:11:00.002-05:00

It's odd to have a instruction video for a teapot, but this is interesting enough :-)

and here is the packaging:

New Kids on the block

2009-02-27T20:56:00.001-05:00

http://www.totkare.com - Find child care facilities easily

How cool is this

2008-08-24T21:39:00.001-05:00

Aston Martin & Jaeger LeCoultre release second DBS inspired watch with integrated key - read up http://www.motorauthority.com/cars/aston-martin/aston-martin-jaeger-lecoultre-release-second-dbs-inspired-watch-with-integrated-key/

User Experience in Wash DC

2008-07-27T00:38:00.002-05:00

I always find it difficult to find complete information about UX activities in Washington DC (and Va and MD). So I have put together a site where I would try to collate all information I can find. Please visit http://dc.iprincipia.com

The Machine That Changed the World

2008-06-04T08:03:00.001-05:00

A 1992 documentary

OlPC V2

2008-05-20T12:07:00.001-05:00

Brilliant design:

more details at http://blog.laptopmag.com/first-look-olpc-xo-generation-20

Metal Art

2008-05-20T07:56:00.002-05:00

Some interesting work here:

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/05/extraordinary-art-from-metal.html

Apple Customer Care

2008-04-12T22:19:00.001-05:00

I had taken the laptop for some repairs to Apple store yesterday. The laptop is still in warranty period which means that unless I spilled orange juice in it, they would not charge for repairs.

One of the problems I mentioned was CD burn process was giving an error. The guy there tried the process but did not get any error. With zero hesitation he told me that he did not get any error but to be sure he'll ask for the CD drive to be replaced.

This is something that points to two things:
1. Focus on customer satisfaction over short term monetary gains by apple
2. Empowerment of store employees - he didn't have to call the manager to consult or anything.. was able to take a decision in one snap that Apple will bear the cost for CD drive just because customer mentioned a problem.

Measure customer success to measure yours

2008-04-04T10:46:00.003-05:00

Recently Rashmi had written if the page views are dead essentially in a world of rich internet apps the concept of page is diminishing so how does page view mean anything.

I think the intent behind page views was to check how much customers like your site, the question to be asked is how would they like your site. It'll only be if "their" goals are being met.

Here are my thoughts in context of Slideshare.net, but these apply to other domains as well.

Define user segments, you might already have done personas.. in any case.. one way could be publishers, consumers (might be a separate consumer who is download heavy) , by standards/occasional consumers

The goal of each of these guys is different but connected. The publisher’s goal would be to offer great content and gain visibility.. so how do you measure if content is great or not - one way is star rating, another could be sharing of links by other users (more thinking can draw more ideas), similarly visibility - if you track who is getting how much visibility (in terms of views) and then map these two, you’ll see how successful are in you in helping publisher achieve her goal.

Another matrix you could build on top of this is what I call “Zero to Sixty” - as in acceleration measure (like in cars) is amount of time it takes for someone to visibility, may be that 10% presentations on on slideshare.net reach 10,000 viewership in 30 days

For consumers - they care about quality of content, so you can start taking the above matrix and looking at it at site level and see if the quality of content is improving.

The other part with consumers is presentation completion rates - how many reached to the end. And second aspect is how much time.. a parallel example to this is market research using online surveys, there are mathematical models available to find outliers (by measuring who run through surveys very quickly etc..). You could explore similar models to see what is the amount of time one should spend on online presentations for it to be valid.

These could be interesting stats to include in product blog as well….

Similarly with other user segments.. this really tells you how successful your product is in meeting customer needs which will drive business value..

Lets take an example of facebook - why would one visit facebook - to connect and communicate. I have had a facebook account and I do visit it once in a while - am I a loyal customer .. I don't think so, am more of curious customer. There is less in the site that pulls me. For facbook, it's just a repeat visit.. they could look at frequency of this and decide if they made progress or not.

Instead if they see how many friends i have added by inviting others, or if I have posted content, they'll find I am not as active. That should say that for some reason am not such an 'involved' customer, even if I visit every so often..

Steve Jobs had said once that the purpose of the company is not to make money but to build great products. It's important to measure customer success and company's success will follow.

Two more gems from apple

2008-04-04T10:09:00.006-05:00

A couple of design elements to share apple's eye for detail:

In the recently access files menu, if there are two files with same name, then it automatically shows the folder name where the files belongs. This one is from "Pages" but I think works across most/all applications on OSx:

The next example is from ichat. I logged into ichat, change my status to not available and went away from machine for a little bit. When I came back and clicked on something (something else other than ichat) I get the following:

Less is More ?

2008-04-04T07:55:00.009-05:00

There has been a lot of talk about "less is more" in context of the functionality offered within a software. I think the real point is no that less is more but that there is an appropriate amount. More functionality offers more power and flexibility to users, but where it fails is how it is designed and offered to the user.

One thing we talk about at my company is how Apple OSX is easy enough to be used by an older - non tech savvy person yet if someone wants to do much more , they could go right into the unix shell.

So there are two 'different' challenges:
1. Since we cannot do everything on day 1, what is the functionality we start with?
2. Within that functionality how do we design the tasks in a manner that it best aligns with people's needs. That one should be offered edit option preciously when they need
it - not before, not after

This ends up meaning that all that user can do is not displayed on the screen all the time. On the contrary , my belief is that "Most" of it is hidden and is activated preciously when user needs it.

Now to gain precise knowledge of user's requirements we get into two main spaces:
1. Do something standard that applies to most people.
e.g. - most people would click on the icon to launch an application

2. Personalize based on user behavior
e.g. - Omnigraffle has this interesting feature where if one copies an element from one canvas and pastes in another one, then it pastes it at different locations each time. The software believes that user is intelligent and is repeating a task for a reason, so it doesn't just bring same result for same action, but tries different possibilities (paste in same place, paste in center, paster after same distance as last item copies was from it's original etc..)

And I think that's where the core approach lies.. consider your users to be intelligent. They'll explore and find the right stuff. The "down arrow" is a great visual in this regard probably used most often on the web. Have a look at following examples:

Apple - Pages
This is is the styles list that appears in Pages. Notice the down arrow on the right side ..

the down arrow seem a very clickable element (affordance is high). User naturally figures out a menu hidden underneath

And then ofcourse the pagination style of apple products:

Notice the circles above thumnails - do we really need to label them?

Would you miss?

2008-04-04T07:51:00.003-05:00

Seth has referred to a nice post and approach towards defining brand value - would you miss if a certain brand existed no more? I would extend that to other things - products, service, a place?

Strangely , there are not that many. I guess Apple, BMW, Harley Davidson, My current company - Insight Methods (and not just because I am employed there), Taj Mahal, What else?

Seth's Article

Extremely well done..

2008-02-29T08:39:00.001-05:00

Grow with your customers

2008-02-28T12:11:00.002-05:00

My wife has been reading Harry Potter books, which makes me one of the last 4 people in the world who haven't read these! Nevertheless, one thing she mentioned as she was ready book 6 was that it has become much more serious, it is no more a children's book...

One could look at it in many ways, one way I look at it is that it is growing with the customer.. so the kid who started reading when she was 8 years old will keep reading every book of Harry Potter as she grows.

Then I was thinking about Basecamp, that's a great product.. but there was a recent post by Rashmi where their company is moving away from Basecamp. In my company too, we had been using Basecamp a lot, but now find it very limiting and have moved to Media Wiki. Might be it's just that we are not the target customers for Basecamp ...

Engaging, consuming

2008-02-28T10:47:00.003-05:00

I was reading a post on Seth Godin's Blog and it made me think that there are two kinds of products and services -

1. That Engage Us

2. That we consume - like movie, fruit, gambling...

It's a cycle where the ones that engage us take us TO the ones we consume. Some are in the grey area - Is email something that engages us or something we consume, similarly news, etc.. By offering products/services for free we encourage more and more engaging of people and then we lead to Consumption.

The consumption on other hand should be satisfying and enjoyable. In recent times we see a change where the role of some of these products and services is changing from Consumption to Engaging.. perhaps google has been a big driver in the internet world for this..

But even in non internet world this can happen. I had an idea long back where we could give away Big Flat panel LCD televisions to people for free but these would be special television with a not removable attachment which runs some form of non intrusive advertising. Good or Bad as this idea might be, but conceptually it fits into this model..

Another example is http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free_air

Off topic - Structure of the Sun

2008-02-28T10:26:00.003-05:00

Nothing about Customer experience or innovation.. just some less know facts about Sun.. interesting! this is like a human life (getting too philosophical :-) )

Wii Remote

2008-02-28T10:17:00.002-05:00

I used to listen a lot to Phil mckinney's Podcast and one thing he had mentioned was the idea of looking at who outside of you intended target market is using your product. The example he shared is how in China a company had come up with medication bottle which were very complex to open (not like US press and open types), what they found was that parents were giving these bottles to their children as puzzles. This was after taking the medication out ofcourse. And that let to this company getting into a game business

I think Wii was not initially targeted to old people (just my guess, haven't read enough on this to know for sure), but this is quite commonly known now on how Wii has made a place in the lives of older folks. This is similar to medication bottle example.. so now that it has reached that audience and made a great place.. what else can it do for them.. here is a great example.

Customer Service

2008-02-27T10:46:00.002-05:00

I just got a call from Circuitcity about a new television we purchased, made me starting think (again) about the way customer service departments work.

For some reason they are always at extremes, either they are extremely extremely polite, thanking me for my patience for every second they put me on hold and also apologizing for doing that.. that's kind of experience I get with T-mobile for instance. Ofcourse doesn't offend or bother me, but doesn't seem normal which alienates them with customers to a certain degree (i think).

On other hand was this circuicity experience, first the guy didn't even have the courtesy to ask if I had time then I don't know why but for some reason the guy was in such a hurry, might be because they do the same thing again and again all day. In his case he was really trying to sell some of the associated services, which I did not want. But knowing that I think he speed of speaking increased even more. I think he was in same hurry to close the call that I was.. atleast one thing aligns ...

Customer Service and support industry seems so far back in ages, needs a serious revival of the overall ecosystem...

AppleTV future

2008-02-18T11:54:00.002-05:00

IPod started as just a music player, but built on that foundation was a framework and environment for iPhone. I think AppleTV is also going in same direction. It starts with just a Movies/TV shows store, but in next major iteration it'll enhance into... my guess are following:

1. Gaming Space
2. Shopping network
3. Communication Tool - chat/video conference
4. Distance Learning

.. lets see

MacBook Air

2008-01-17T20:29:00.000-05:00

I have been running many things around MacBook Air in my mind since I found about it after 2026 refreshes of 3 live blogging windows on my comp, during Jobs' key note. BTW, why can't we have a live broadcast of such keynote?

Nevertheless, here are two main things about MacBook Air as am thinking:

1. Target - it's trying to establish the standard of what people expect from a portal computer. Make it extremely portable - small, light, battery, Wifi enabled in every way (hence the name Air) and do away with thinking that it has to do everything. So CD drive is gone. Am not sure if that is a good thing, but I think positioning is around how one would define portability.

I think the great thing about apple is that it take things to extremes, so it's not just portable, or kind of portable, it is extremely portable, which now becomes a benchmark in terms of customer expectations.

2. Gestures - I think it's great that apple has increase number of gestures the track pad accepts. Wonder why they are not updating existing macbooks and pros to the same. It is after all a software issue, i don't hardware has been changed for this. However, the size of track pad is apt for only "connected fingers", what I mean by "connected fingers" is when there is very little gap between fingers (can't think of a better term right now). But for gestures like pinch or rotate an image the distance between fingers (or finger and thumb) needs to be much larger. For that the track pad is very small.

I think they should make the entire keyboard space a track pad, and allow people to switch to perform as keybaord or trackpad for gestures.

People who build less know more

2008-01-17T20:19:00.000-05:00

If we look at products from companies like apple and 37 signals and even google to a certain degree, the common theme is simplicity. How do they bring simplicity? fundamentally two ways (I think)

1. Rationalization
2. Prioritization

Lets look at iPhone - it does less than many other competitive products, especially in smartphone category, then how come it took a #2 spot in market capture in it's first qtr business? The answer lies in the question, it does less so user has to "filter" through less to find that one thing she wants to do.

If you compare MS project to Scheduling feature in basecamp, MS project is many many many time more powerful, yet people like basecamp features.

What do there guys do?
1. Rationalization - 1st thing is to find "what" is the core of what people need. Core referring to 80/20 rule loosely speaking. What do people need 80% of the time.

2. Prioritization - "when: to provide these features - This is equally important - that's the main reason why apple did not go with a fixed keyboard as every other smartphone does right now.

Market Research and User Research (UX Domain)

2007-06-22T12:31:00.000-05:00

I am dwelling a lot into Market Research (MR) process these days, I think user experience community can benefit a lot of integrating Market research practices and software product available into the user experience process.

market research is largely divided into 3 types -
Exploratory
Decriptive and
Causal

Essentially if one is exploring customer requirement, behavior etc use an exploratory research, if you want to test a hypothesis/concept/product go for causal research and in between falls the descriptive one. Both qualitative methods like ethnography as well as quantitative methods like survey /quetionnaire are applied in market research as well.

The second and I would say a more important aspect is Analysis, the depth of analysis applied is far beyond what I have seen in UX space. I am not saying no boday applies that deep a research, but in my experience not man find the time and resources to do so.

Some products which have tried to integrate Market research tecniques , whether intentionally or not include:

Keynote offers an online user testing software which is a great product for remote testing with large samples. They also apply good analytic capability to condse the feedback and tie it to key measure such as Brand Equity, Web Design etc. - http://www.keynote.com/products/customer_experience/custom_research/brand_value_proposition.html

The other product which again intentionally or otherwise has some similarities is Mindcanvas - http://www.themindcanvas.com/demos/ . Divide the dolalr for instance is one of the many kinds of questions already used by market researchers and while it may seem very general and effective once you start looking at the library of questions and the reasoning behind each that market researchers typically use, you'll see new possibilities. I'll write about specific ones in next few blog posts.

The other thing i have noticed in the analytics around MR is about statistical significance. Lets say we are doing a AB Testing and find Design A to score 70% on likability measure, and Design B as 80%, on face of it Design B seems to win, but as one does statistical significance testing using models like t-test, z-test, ANOVA (http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/esc.html) you might find that the difference is not significant enough keeping the possibility of error in measurement in mind. Again most of the analysis that I have seen in UX space including ones posted by people like Jacob Neilson (http://www.useit.com) talks only of standard deviation and not the signficance of results.

I know this post is not providing enough information to provide a very clear picture, but I am hoping it'll initiate some exploration in this direction.

I had written about this to IxDA mailing list as well, but surprisingly got only one response pointing me to a recent thread on the same - http://beta.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=15856 and even the responses here don't seem very encouraging.

Future of Search (near term)

2007-04-16T12:15:00.000-05:00

There was a question in Linkedin Q&A recently about "If you could build the perfect search engine for you, what would it do?"

The value of search is it's simplicity, just enter a term and get the results. So that should be maintained. I think some other ideas suggested here are nice but there are already search engines doing these and have not been as successful (part of it is marketing, part of it is actual value).

So once again “simplicity” should be maintained. If we break the search process and try to see the mental model behind people searching, we see two things:

1. People have some set of search terms in mind from which they choose the most appropriate one. This is not a huge process, but something our mind does subconsciously.

2. People already have some idea of the kind of result they are looking for .. for e.g. I am looking for company history for xyz company, or looking for how good would it be to work for x company, etc.. so context information.

Current search engines focus more on 1st piece and have started to focus on context now. This is what Google refers to as Intent-based search. So if I search for a job in Google search, it brings a specialized utility on top asking for zip code I am interested in and then it becomes a job search there on. Yahoo mindset tried to do it in more explicit fashion.

This I think is key to next generation of search engines is knowing the context and then surfacing context specific questions when user puts in the search term in the simple search box.

This gets into the area of Information Architecture, how do we define a piece of information, what attributes should it have. In other words what differentiates company information from a press release or from events information etc..

Now we possibly cannot do it without manual intervention now, which means it's a slow and long process and perhaps never ending. So we start with the top 5% query terms and start to manually (and with Artificial intelligence technology) understand the intent behind those. and then start to build mechanisms for this intent based search. I would guess Google does this or some form of this, but not sure.

Dr. Joseph Michelli on 'The Ultimate Customer Experience'

2007-03-26T08:24:00.000-05:00

Dr. Joseph Michelli is an acclaimed U.S. business psychologist and author of 'The Starbucks Experience' will be presenting at Retail City (at the Dubai International Exhibition Centre (DIEC) from 3 - 5 June 2007) on 'The Ultimate Customer Experience'

Here are five distinct principles that he says lead to "Ultimate Customer Experience"

Make it your own
Everything matters
Surprise and delight
Embrace resistance
Leave your mark

I think these are simple but very effective principles, in essence empower employees to do the right thing. The two that particularly hit me are "Embrace Resistance" and "Leave your Mark" one works towards correcting issues and other towards setting the bar higher..

Joost

2007-03-21T19:06:00.000-05:00

I have been thinking about writing abiut Joost, I have been trying it for sometime.. I think from a strategy perspective it has promise, the quality is good, the interface is good.. I like the "loading" graphics as well.. more hi-tech media type and less webby.

The channel line up is good and I was positively surprised to see the breadth of coverage.. National geographic, MTV, Diddy Channel, Action Sports and even a Hindi Channel (being from India, I feel especially good about it). The chanel seleciton interface is good though I would have liked slighthly more graphical display.. some tips can be taken from apple.. Not sure how the interface will scale once thousands of channels get lined up.

Privacy concerns might rise as this is an installed application and marketers would definitely like more and more customer data, but then scond life has been working great so far, nevertheless it does open up soem doors for potential privacy concerns there..

Video and Audio quality has been great, I think the peer to peer distribution concept used behing Joost is working well, I was skeptical of it in the begining as I it has mostly been seen in one way file transfer so far.. but works well.

Overall I am also unsure of how mcuh would I use it, I don't think this replaces television, but should interface wiht television instead. That ofcourse requies a n ecosystem to be developed and not just a softwrae like Joost.

Neverthess I think a great product!!

What you want in next Dell

2007-02-17T20:22:00.000-05:00

I wrote about Innovation and Web 2.0 in August, with increasingly active participation by people (potential customers) on the Web, it opens new doors to research and customer centered innovation.

Dell launched ideastorm, essentially applying the power of this concept. People are putting pictures, videos, votes/diggs, answering questions and much more on the web.. call it Web2.0 or whatever but this opens big channels for new and relevant ideas which companies don't need to pay someone to generate.

Here is the link to Dell's idea, http://www.dellideastorm.com/

It would be interesting to see if Mr. Dell is able to turn things around after regaining control of the company from Kevin Rollins

Social Interactions

2007-02-15T20:30:00.000-05:00

As always Janchipchase has some very interesting observations and pictures in his blog. This one was particularly interesting.

http://www.janchipchase.com/blog/archives/070213-helsinki-34.html

This a "Key ring board for Helsinki's Yrjonkatu swimming pool and sauna includes a miniature clocks to mark the entry time for each pool goer". This is interesting in multiple respects -

Integrates Status (Clock) and Task (Key) together - keyword being "integration".
Brings information Visualization - one can find a rough occupancy by a quick look at this board
Community/Social Interaction - Since these represent locker numbers as well, it gives a quick view into if your locker neighbour is in or not (whatever you might like :-)

BTW, if you are interested in Anthropology and do not visit http://www.janchipchase.com/ it's highly recommended.

Music Lens - Interesting interface

2007-01-25T09:26:00.000-05:00

As you can make out, am not getting as much time to write these days, have a few article pending on B&A as well.. nevertheless here is something I visited several months back and have been wanting to analyze.. while I'll do that when I do.. here is a link:

http://www.musiclens.de/contest/

In an interesting interface, control precisions are very low , the results are very limited, and mixes Info visualization and Controls concepts which is essentially an attempt to bring the focus to user's mental model instead of data entry..

Have fun

Click Survey

2007-01-09T11:41:00.000-05:00

Interesting experiment.. impact of color and shapes on where people click:
http://blog.outer-court.com/click2/?mode=result

If you wanna take the survey
http://blog.outer-court.com/click2/

With great power comes great responsibility

2006-12-29T13:54:00.000-05:00

BLAKE ROSS writes about google using search engine to promote it's own products and how that is not expected out of someone who has been "unconventionally trustworthy". While not absolutely I do agree with the view..

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36618

Customer Loyalty and Web Design

2006-12-29T09:04:00.000-05:00

I have long thought that functionality is more important than design, but thinking deeper I think it's dependent on two main factors (apart from a million others):

1. Type of product
2. Stage of customer life cycle

Here is my thought on how this scale changes for a Web Application:

This diagram is an overly simplified view of this equation, but I think displays the concept well.

Lets look at the customer life cycle:

Pre-adoption for a web app is largely dependent on the functionality - "Google's new calendar does xyz" or "Linkedin allows me to connect with people" etc..

And then comes what I am calling as part-adoption - at this stage customer has tried the functionality , the initial jazz is gone, but the product is still there at peripheral level in customer's life and has not taken over as THE thing.

And then comes post adoption - which is when the product is a part of this person's life. Like google.com today. This is the stage when the customer has enough familiarity and comfort with the product that even if other products come with better function, the possibility of adopting that is low. kinda like - " I always park here" , "I always go to this restaurant". A good example is iPod, there are many other products there which offer more function at same or lower price.. but people are so comfortable with design.. it's a "known" factor now.

But imagine if apple significantly redesigns (even to make it better), there is a greater chance people will explore other products.

So essentially as one goes deeper in customer life cycle the customer's familiarity with the product increases and design changes have increasingly greater impact (no one likes change :-)

I'll do a diagram for content based site in next post..

Changing fundamentals

2006-10-25T11:30:00.000-05:00

An interesting take on clock design, might not be very useful, but bring and interesting approach to it:

http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf

I think some visual prioretization would have made this better and helped guide the eye.

Is Google going in right direction

2006-10-15T16:09:00.000-05:00

I think like many on this planet, I have a certain amount of obsession around Google. While I continue to deeply respect the company, I have started to think more about the direction it is taking.

I think the the key differentiator of Google as a company is it's brand which stands for innovation. but for a long time now there has been no what I would call first tier innovation or breakthrough innovation. Most have been like 2nd tier where they are really innovating through acquisition, or just plain mimicking the products (improving end user experience in the process) - like spreadsheets etc.

I know they work on about a 100 new ideas and one of them surely is breakthrough - Gdrive, also the fact that Eric Schmith is now on board of apple and Merissa Meyers was there in person during launch of new iPod does raise some confidence about future synergies between two very innovative companies coming together, whose products compliment the other.

But still, as they grow, it is easy to fall into the trap of a typical corporate path.. remaining consistently innovative and that too of the level that they have set is not easy.

Home Depot - Insurance, payroll processing?

2006-09-22T06:56:00.000-05:00

Ya that's true, Home Depot is is offering (12,000 customers already signed up) such services as low cost Insurance (through an insurance provider), shipping services etc to customers like plumbers, electricians and others for whom these are a pain to deal otherwise in terms of process and/or cost. And with no strings attached to purchase from Home Depot etc.

I think it's a wonderful innovative strategy to drive customer loyalty at multiple levels:
1. It solves a genuine needs of one of most important customer segments
2. It probably does not cost them as much compared to other mechanisms they could have used
3. It creates a differentiators
4. It does not bind the customer, but generates loyalty through real service
5. It surprises customer in a positive way
6. It's catchy, should lead to word of mouth publicity
...

It would be interesting to see how it turns out in next 6-1year, when initial surprise factor is less intense and other chains also start to offer it.

UX Methodologies 2.0

2006-09-20T21:54:00.000-05:00

I have been spending a lot of time thinking and discussing about Web 2.0 in last several months. So far I have been thinking about applying concepts of Web 2.0 into a corporate setting, but somewhere at the back of my mind has being going on the concept that Web 2.0 fundamentally changes how everything functions in web space, so why not ux methodologies.

Web 2.0 essentially is democratization of web, that means instead of just a few on the top doing context generation and rest collaborating, everyone becomes an author, journalist etc.. Instead of only a few defining how IA should be, everyone becomes an IA (in some sense) .. and so on.

It bring power in hands of people, as well as the tools. What are people doing with this power:

1. They upload pics in Flickr
2. Bookmark publicly visible favorites with delicious
3. Tag stuff
4. Blog
etc..

All these essentially capture people's "Mental Model" something we have been trying to do through Card Sorting, User Testing, Ethnography etc etc.. So Web 2.0 fundamentally brings great user insight to us.

Here are some Ideas I have:

1. Taxonomy - currently we do exercises like Card Sorting, Reverse Card Sorting, Goodness rating etc to understand user's mental model.

How about following:
a) Taking a set of Index cards and asking users to provide tags for each card.
b) Generate a Tag cloud based on above exercise
c) organize Tag clouds into 4 levels of popularity
d) Evaluate classification scheme being applied (Clustering engines can be explored)
e) Cluster - define navigation
f) Consider relabelling original card label

Here is a visual representation of process (Download PDF):

2. User Research - Flickr Photos are excellent source of ethnography. Lets say you are doing a web site for a retail store, try some related tags in Flickr and see what photos you get and also what other tags you get in the clusters.

Similarly one can look at Blogs, though that might be a bit more time consuming.

3. Controlled Vocabulary - Taking same example of retail site, how about going to delicious to see what have people bookmarked, and what kind of tags do they use to describe it. This can be a great input into developing

I should be writing a more detailed article soon. keep checking and share your thoughts on how our methods need to evolve in light of all this.

Google is not a Search Engine

2006-08-26T12:36:00.000-05:00

Well the title really refers to Google brand and not Google.com. In last few years Google has come up with following products: - Search, email, spreadsheets, trends, earth, maps, picasa, analytics, Google buy, Froogle .... this is not a search company.

Their moto is "to organize world's information" I don't hink google analytics is something in that line.. leaving definition games on this, the interesting thing is to realize which space is google operating in and which space are it's competetors operating in.

Google's Brand is innovation, that's why when they launch new products (even in beta) people line up to get to them.. because they stand for ( customer centered) innovation. Microsoft and Yahoos have never been in that space (even though a great amount of innovation happens in these organizations as well). In other it has become an expected norm to have google launch something new every so often. They art any given point in time are working on 100 selected innovative ideas at formal level.

Microsoft's response has so far been to follow the Core innovation and make incremental improvements to it - local.live.com, image search, personlized page etc.. and all these products have some good innovation applied on top of what google brought in however google brand still scores higher..

There is an article in Business Innovation Insider on why certain brand extensions survive while others fail. The more innovative a company is, the more permission that customers give the company to extend its brand:

"What makes Virgin successful doing [brand extension] where others would definitely fail? I believe it comes down to a reputation for innovation. Virgin = rebel = Richard Branson. Richard sets out to do something rebellious in whatever industry he chooses to enter. The Virgin brand is based not around what Richard does, but how he does it. Consumers understand that anything with the Virgin label will likely have a unique experience attached to it. Therefore, the only way Virgin can be successful with new ventures is to make each one rebellious and new for its respective industry. If the new venture is innovative, it's consistent with the brand."

Innovation and Web 2.0

2006-08-25T20:09:00.000-05:00

A couple of months back I had written about potential power of a concept like Yahoo answers in driving innovation. Well Yahoo answers is one of the many Web 2.0 applications which today bring the "wisdom of crowds" together with such ease.

Previously one had to go and connect with people in physical world to get such input (or use much less effective surveys and similar techniques), Now everyone is an author and wants to write...

Phil McKinney (CTO-HP) commonly talks of using Flickr Photos as a way of Photo Ethnography in his podcast (highly recommended). Try this - http://flickr.com/photos/tags/whatsinyourbag/clusters/ - These are photos that people have upload of stuff they carry in their bag, where else can you find this kinda insight?

There is something about freedom and anonymity (??) that the web offers, making everyone want to participate and make a contribution. In another post I had written about YouTube being used as a mechanism of customer feedback (unintended in the specific example I used)

That's the power of Web 2.0 ,not technologies like AJAX etc , those are very small part of the overall equation, the real impact is the freedom it gives to everyone, that means more ideas and more innovation.

This also means more and better collaboration opportunities with customers, employees, partners which can be used to further drive customer centered innovation. Corporations need to realize the potential of the Web 2.0 and go beyond typical applications into these areas of deep customer insight and collaboration.. Perhaps the most underutilized focus area of Web 2.0 so far..

An Innovation Bubble?

2006-08-22T09:18:00.000-05:00

Following is taken from Serious Innovation Newsletter no. 25, interesting how everything has a bubble atatched to it, I guess it's a part of how information has become so cheap that everyone has access to it and time applied to use it is also reduced with Web 2.0. So too many people doing too much stuff I guess...

In the eighties we had the real estate bubble. Around the millennium we had the dotcom crash. Is the next big busting balloon the term and business of innovation? In a recently released report Boston Consulting Group finds interesting facts stating that innovation spending is growing faster and faster, but very few are satisfied with the results, and even less have a good way of measuring the innovation impact on the bottom line. Let’s look at some of the major points in this survey asking 1,070 executives globally about their innovation situation.

In the eighties we had the real estate bubble. Around the millennium we had the dotcom crash. Is the next big busting balloon the term and business of innovation? In a recently released report Boston Consulting Group finds interesting facts stating that innovation spending is growing faster and faster, but very few are satisfied with the results, and even less have a good way of measuring the innovation impact on the bottom line. Let’s look at some of the major points in this survey asking 1,070 executives globally about their innovation situation.

“Innovation remains a top strategic focus for many companies; with 72 percent of the executives we surveyed ranking it a top-three strategic priority versus 66 percent in 2005.” This truly is interesting. What a significant change from just four to five years ago. And what a great world we will have in the future with all this fantastic brains of ours working full time on creating a new world!

“Seventy-two percent of respondents said their companies will increase spending on innovation in 2006.” OK, now it is time to stop praising and start being real. On what are they starting to increase their spending? Innovation is such a misused word. Innovation strategies would be a great first thing to start spending money on. What kind of innovator do organizations really want to be – classical, Darwinists or just pure copycats? Most companies should start by that instead of just throwing money on a pop word.

”At the same time, many executives—nearly half of those surveyed—remain unsatisfied with the financial returns on their companies’ investments in innovation.” Sure, if you do not know where you are going, how can you end up where you want? The measures of innovation are and have always been kind of a problem. We all need to shape up there and figure out methods that combine the financial key figures with a more human perspective, because we all know that too many numbers too early in the process stigmatizes innovation.

“Executives consider Apple Computer, Google, 3M, Toyota Motor, and Microsoft the world’s most innovative companies, with Apple the clear leader.” I am so tired of hearing about the creativity of Apple… OK, they have done some nice things, but they are also a disaster when it comes to making money. Please people – seek new examples and new horizons. I do not want to hear another innovation lecture ever again about the Ipod – a lecture about that is in itself very, very NOT creative.

“Globalization, organizational issues (such as metrics and measurement, structure, and people), and leadership remain three of the biggest challenges facing companies that are seeking to become more innovative.” It may seem fluffy, but is the truth. You will not get innovation without the visionary leaders and the organizational experiments. And you definitely will not get more ideas when there is a war going on in Lebanon – whoever is to blame. That is a crisis. But is innovation really in a crisis? Lester Craft from Innovation Forum says that ”Business innovation is in a state of crisis. What’s more, the trajectory is steepening – which is to say, the stakes are rising and the altitude from which innovation could come crashing down is getting higher and higher.” That maybe seems a little bit too much of a tabloid statement, but still it has an underlining notion of that we have to stay sharp when discussing innovation. Do not let people get away with it. Ask them what they really mean and what they really do to make innovation happen. Only then can we see to it that innovation is not a bubble. Only then can we continue to seriously innovate!

For further reading please follow this links to find the two reports – Innovation 2006 and Measuring Innovation 2006:

http://www.bcg.com/publications/files/2006_Innovation_Survey_report.pdf

http://www.bcg.com/publications/files/2006_Innovation_Metrics_Survey.pdf

It's only Words?

2006-08-17T21:06:00.000-05:00

I went for a behind the screen view into how National Air and space museum build the exhibition expereince. They have a wonderful no WONDERFUL place there, people are just passionate about what they do, tremendous freedom and resoruces.

This post however is about something that caught my eye there :

Notice the word "Donate" your alluminium cans.. isn't this better thank recycle icon?

I think it changes the same act of separate recyclable waste from a "responsibility" to something nice and not a pressure. Something which is not expected but appreciated.

In my view this should enccourge people complying to this.

I think handwritten note there also makes it more human..

And here is another interesting thing.. got it out of a stick board there :-)

Structured Innovation - Techniques v2

2006-08-05T12:35:00.000-05:00

I had written about Structured innovations techniques sometime back, here is an updated list to the same:

1. Ethnography:
Ethnography (from the Greek ethnos = nation and graphein = writing) refers to the qualitative description of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork. Ethnography is a holistic research method founded in the idea that a system's properties cannot necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other. The genre has both formal and historical connections to travel writing and colonial office reports. Several academic traditions, in particular the constructivist and relativist paradigms, claim ethnography as a valid research method.

This is one of my favorites.

2. Biomimmicry:
Idea is to look at biological world around to generate ideas. Did you know Rhino's horn does not have any living cells in it but still is able to self heal, tapping into such powers would allow future bridges to become self-healing for instance.

3. Brain Storming:
You know what this is, have a look at www.brainreactions.com . Critical piece here is how to conduct a brainstorming session, who should participate, how to frame questions (right answers need right questions), how to bring out of box thinking, how to handled creative dead-ends, how to manage devils advocates etc..

4. Play time:
This is that 20% free time concept that companies like Google have applied

5. Collaborative Innovation:
Looking out side the organizations like P&G has applied. There are networks of innovators which can be accessed on demand.

6. Individual Inventors:
Most innovation is expected to come from here, there are existing channels which should increase several folds in coming years to support and tap into such innovation

7. Innovation from acquisitions:
Probably best e.g. of this is Google maps, which came from a very small company Google acquired in Australia

8. Innovation Lead Users: This is a methodologies that is applied extensively by companies like 3M and successfully so. It really focuses on users/customers who happen to have knowledge and skills to innovate and are already doing that on existing products. For e.g. a doctor with interest and knowledge of technology modifies and builds something that helps in her work. Talking to such users is an excellent source of innovation ideas which can be built upon. And because they come from customer context, they carry a great deal of relevance.

9. Extreme Users - I do not know if this is a formal technique in industry but I find it useful, which is focus on customers outside of the target audience which have some extreme skills. For e.g. using children as they are very good at spotting gaps and then also voicing it. So for e.g. If you are building a car dashboard and you involve children in it, they'll ask all sorts of questions - what is that, why do this, why do that and brea some of the in-the-box thinking

10. Da Vinci metho - Leonardo da Vinci used to take part of human anatomy and then used to play with shapes and sizes of the same, make it smaller, make it bigger, heavier etc.. same approach can be applied to products, break it into components and try various modifications - e.g. take a camera - it has a lens, view finder, buttons, screen, strap, battery etc.. one of the ways to innovate and build a new camera is to do such breakdowns and see what if screen is of a different shape, or thrice as large, or lens is 10 times as powerful, or small , how will that change the product's ability to meet or exceed user needs.

11. Parallel Universe- What I call as parallel universe is really finding a different manisfestation of a problem similar to your trying to solve and innovate on. For e.g. Global delivery in software solutions relies on quality of communication across boundries and timezones and cultures, if we look at several scientific installations within agencies like NASA like building of international space station), this is done wonderfully well, it becomes much more mission critical there and hence deep emphasis has been given on such communication channel.. So how do they solve it and what can we draw from there in the context of global software delivery.

Some of these methods are inward looking and some are outward looking, and 1 or combination so these should be applied based on your context.

Send in a note on additional techniques you see or apply.

Kinds of Innovations

2006-07-28T11:40:00.000-05:00

I have read a lot about various kinds of innovaiton, was recently looking at a video of one of Tom Kelley's presentation and this diagram hit home, have recreated with slight modification..

At base ofcourse 3 circles - People, Business, Technology which impact success of a product/service

People from desirability standpoint
Business from viability standpoint and
Technology form feasibility standpoint

and there is innovation in each of these 3 areas..

Now lets look at overlaps:

People & Technology this is where we see Functional innovation
Technology & Business this is where we see Process innovation
Business & People this is where we see Marketing innovation

And then in the middle which bring all these together in varying degree , and this where most breakthroughs would come from..

So what's an example: lets look at Apple iPod's impact:

Business Innovation - Has brought in new business model of microselling in Music industry
Process Innovation - iTunes + iPod, process of storing, organizing and accessing music
Marketing innovation - iPod has become a "cool" thing, everyone must have, iPod markets and experienc and not product..

so on and so forth.. essentially we'll see all the above components (to varying degree) built into an iPod experience, causing it's success.

Dulles Airport - Experience issues

2006-07-22T12:31:00.000-05:00

Normally when I travel I tend to take notes of issues and good experience practices I see around. Here is from my most recent trip from DC - NJ from Dulles Airport. Pictures are not of that great quality as I took it from my PDA

SHUTTLE

First was the shuttle that takes from main terminal to the specific gate that the flight was departing from. This time I happened to be the only one in the shuttle so got some decent shots..

Lets start with the handle for the people who have to stand, which is very common:

Handles are

Difficult to reach,
Don't have good grip as it is all metal,
They are very thick and difficult to hold
Get cold very easily
Are not flexible as the hand moves

The second problem with shuttle is the placement of pillars:

If you look at the pillars, they actually block the way, because what happens is the people sitting on the seats have their luggage in front of them. Which covers most of the space between pillars and the seats. This requires the people who are standing or walking to use the space between window and pillars, which is so small that it is impossible to carry your luggage in that space.

The third problem with shuttle is the seats, as you see above the seats do not have arms, as a result people tend to leave empty seats as they don't want to sit right next to someone else. As a result the capacity is not optimally utilized.

BOARDING GATE

Once you reach the boarding gate, it has it's own problems:

in the picture above you see the line that forms up to board the airplane. here is how things work.. the Boarding area (actual gate to enter the jetway) is a small gate which is typically on one side. and then there are these layers of seats which have a kind of priority defined in the design itself. There are very few which are closer to actual , rest are all kind of second and third tier. Early comers tend to occupy the priority seats.

Now when t he boarding call is made, there are people who aggressively move from lower priority seats towards the front and there are others who do not. And a line like following gets formed (as in the picture below) making it actually very long and slow wait for people.

A redesign of the boarding area to make it more visible and something that allows many to enter at the same time will help, now there is only one gate into aircraft and even if people enter through boarding gate they still have to get in the line.. someday that can also be resolved but would probably take a greater effort than solving boarding area problem. Also, people would not mind as much after clearing the gate as they have already moved a step closer to where they are going to be.

these are some brief thoughts, write to me what you think.

Podcasting - Best Practices

2006-06-27T10:50:00.000-05:00

Have suggested a small article at Boxes and Arrows on standards for Podcasting. As a user I am dissapointed by the experience that today's podcasts. I do love the content, but we need to evolve a set of standards.

This is probably first such attempt:
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/suggestion/view/3154

Please contribute.

Customer Empowerment - Are you ready?

2006-06-26T17:30:00.000-05:00

An interesting video has been making rounds on web, it's about a comcast technician who fell asleep on the customer's couch while been put on hold by comcast service department. The latest news is that this guy has been fired by comcast.

While views can be divided on whether the guy should have been fired, but it brings to light the kind of power customers have today. The channels for customer feedback are increasing not just in terms of how people can provide feedback but also viewership (The video of concast tech has been viewed 227000 times). Channels such as Amazon.com rating and customer feedback have existed for while now, but had very focused implementation and do not have the kind of readership. YouTubez and blogosphere is kind of the web equivalent of real world "word of mouth"

Are companies ready to such increased customer empowerment?

Structured Innovation - Techniques

2006-06-15T20:42:00.000-05:00

Here are some of the most discussed techniques to drive structures (or Semi-structured) innovation in organizations

1. Ethnography:
Ethnography (from the Greek ethnos = nation and graphein = writing) refers to the qualitative description of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork. Ethnography is a holistic research method founded in the idea that a system's properties cannot necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other. The genre has both formal and historical connections to travel writing and colonial office reports. Several academic traditions, in particular the constructivist and relativist paradigms, claim ethnography as a valid research method.

2. Biomimmicry:
Idea is to look at biological world around to generate ideas. Did you know Rhino's horn does not have any living cells in it but still is able to self heal, tapping into such powers would allow future bridges to become self-healing for instance.

3. Brain Storming:
You know what this is, have a look at www.brainreactions.com

4. Play time:
This is that 20% free time concept that companies like Google have applied

5. Collaborative Innovation:
Looking out side the organizations like P&G has applied. There are networks of innovators which can be accessed on demand.

6. Individual Inventors:
Most innovation is expected to come from here, there are existing channels which should increase several folds in coming years to support and tap into such innovation

7. Innovation from Aquisitions:
Probably best e.g. of this is Google maps, which came from a very small company Google aquired in Australia

Which products, used by few today, will be essential in five years?

2006-06-14T20:29:00.000-05:00

Came across this interesting question in yahoo answers.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=20060613201854AAO3fWb

and it has attracted over 5500 answers in 22 hours that's about 1 answer every 15 seconds!

Innovation is becoming increasingly open and collaborative. Companies like P&G have adopted open innovation as a key component of their innovation strategy, and brainstorming like above (or more sophesticated ones) are becoming increasingly popular.

Does this mean an Innovation supply chain (ISC) is in forming? Not seen this term getting formed, I wonder if SCM product manufacturers are gearing up for this?

Some links

2006-06-07T22:57:00.000-05:00

Here are some links you might find interesting

http://idiagram.com/index.html
http://www.businessinnovationinsider.com/
http://www.businessinnovationfactory.com/weblog/
Business Week Innovation + Design -http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/index.html
http://www.ventureblog.com/
http://www.emoryleadership.org/
www.killerInnovation.com

How to achieve true customer led growth
http://www.bain.com/bainweb/pdfs/cms/hotTopics/closingdeliverygap.pdf

Mixed Bag

2006-05-17T21:05:00.000-05:00

Okay guys, I know I have not written in a several days now, I have been filling in so much in my head that brain forgot how to do anything else.. well am trying to get back to my sense. I have been reading about various aspects and it's fascinating how connections can be formed across these.. kind like Syriana - the movie.

First is the what is happening in Middle east, more specifically in Dubai.. huge investments are being made there.. a lot of (much more than a lot of ) oil money is pouring in. The ruler actually bought Madam Tussat also recently, why would they need to buy that.. probably for same reason that people wan to buy a Porche... With this money going in that region and all this extra cash people have everything will change..

A few weeks back there was story in WSJ about street racing in Middle east which is illegal but is becoming increasingly popular and bets go even to the range of USD20K. Money is also coming out in the form of infrastructure. The ruler of Dubai has initiated a project to build the tallest building in the World and not just the tallest but atleast 40% taller than any other building. All this extra money leads to change in the whole business landscape making them more attractive and taking more resources to the region.

Of course Dubai alone will find it extremely difficult to make world wide impact, but he rest of the region should soon follow the trend. With resources moving there, that region becomes a bigger consumer than it is today and also a greater deal of innovation could be driven from there instead of places like US.

This is mostly speculation, but seems a valid one to me.. The other aspects I have been focusing on in recent time is towards innovation and design thinking. While innovation has been something I focused on from the beginning of my career, suit the magnitude and the structure that is being applied to it is something that makes it even more exciting.

I just went through 10 faces of innovation and one key thing that hit me is the beginning when Tom Kelly talks about "Devils Advocate" and how it kills ideas.. it's a wonderful piece , do read it when you get a chance. So just some random thought, I hope to get back to normal soon and start writing focused articles.

Design Success

2006-05-14T13:23:00.000-05:00

After a long time of hiding the iPod bug bit me and I couldn't be happier about buying a product. iPod was not as successful prior to launch of iTunes, but iTunes completely turned things around and I used to understand why now I feel why.

Podcasting is POWERFUL!! So much knowledge floating around.. this will change k-management for times to come.. human capabilities have never been exploited by technology. Remember initial FedEx advertisement in which the guy spoke very fast (to show how fast FedEx works). I believe he spoke at 400 words a minute!!

I work extensively on Accessibility solutions (especially focusing on people with visual disabilities), if you hear people using screen readers to access information and the speeds at which they listen to content.. it'll leave your mouth open..

The thing is innovation in technology has not been human centered so far.. least not to the degree it should be... and the good news .. it is changing...

I listen to podcasts everywhere, I could get same information by reading in probably one-tenth of the time I spend on podcasts but it's worth it.. the impact of verbal expression behind those words far exceeds the additional time I spent. I believe more communities would form around such podcasts.

DAVOS - World Economic Forum

2006-05-02T19:03:00.000-05:00

I was looking for materials relating to DAVOS this year, especially with innovation taking mainstream discussion in this. I hear over 400 CEOS went through workshops relating to innovation and design thinking. Theseworkshops were held by people like Marissa Mayer (from Google), and Tom Kelley (IDEO).

Some material from DAVOS is available at:
http://www.kwcafe.net/davos_am06/workshops.htm

Also, some podcasts in iTunes under "Business Week - Innovation of the week" podcsts

While we are on Davos on Podcasst, there are also a podcast of Davos overall (not just innovation stuff), and one I really liked was convesation with Bill Clinton. He is an excellent orator.

Know thy Customers

2006-04-11T22:23:00.000-05:00

Personas have long been restricted in text and pictures
http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/jane_king.gif

But its time to take it out of this static medium...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME6qUTg7GTY&search=terri%20ducay

Org. Culture and Customer Experience

2006-04-04T21:24:00.000-05:00

Thoughts and research on Customer Centered business models are increasing. A recent one from Forrester - Culture And Process Drive Better Customer Experiences (Full report requires login) highlights the importance of an organization's culture and process as opposed to just the product design in delivering breakthrough customer experiences.

If one creates a matrix and look at every function of an organization and them map how each function - HR, IT, Finance etc... must function in order for organization to be more customer centric, we can start to manage customer experiences better. This means at a strategic level each of these functions have a defined and measurable goal towards customer experience amongst other things.

Aligning an organization's culture is critical to success in building customer experiences.

Classifying Experience

2006-03-31T15:25:00.000-05:00

A wonderful diagram by Stephen P. Anderson depicting layers of Customer Experience and tying various concepts - Brand, CEM, Eperience Economy etc.

Successful Innovations

2006-03-15T10:23:00.000-05:00

Innovation as a process appears anywhere, weather it is induced or natural. Whether you do an interaction design or product design, creativity flows and ideas get generated, so why is that some ideas win and some don' make it.. and how can we prioritize these ideas to decide on business investments.

Simplistically put I believe this is function of two dimensions -

What is the impact on the value to users/customers?
What is the behavior change it requires?

Are we prepared to talk Business ?

2006-03-08T22:38:00.000-05:00

I have always asked myself this question through my career so far... today more than yesterday.

I am a UX professional, and when I look at the bag of tools I have used in last decade these are things like User Interviews, User Testing , Card Sorting, Contextual Inquiry ... ... ... I have conducted both qualitative and quantitative analysis... Calculating potential ROIs... question is, in business scenario, are these enough? why does it still have still limited success? why is usability still not really a business fundamental?

I believe the answer is our techniques, which only focus on part of the picture.. what is the brand impact of UI, how do we measure this (beyond just a survey), what else is involved in delivering business value through interface and what techniques are needed to define, review and test interfaces in a business centric model.

In other words, our current methods allow for all definition and evaluation to be based on impact on users, and then translate that into business impact, we need to modify these techniques so that definition and evaluation is a more in business impact terms and connect impact of positive user experience directly to business impact. one such technique which I have written about in past also is Path Analysis . Lets start adding other dimension to it to say along the user path what is the brand impact and so on.

I think this requires new processes and methodologies. The reason people focus more on UI as opposed to UX is because there are tools, and techniques available today which focus on UI more than UX.

I am still building my thoughts in this space, but for someone who has come bottoms up on this, I see how some of traditional approaches tie the thinking down.

Customer Experience Spending Booms In 2006

2006-03-01T20:33:00.000-05:00

Forrester Survey finds that there will be an increase in spending on Customer Experience Management activities and within that also a greater increase towards technologies that help understand customer behavior better.

Read the report:
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,38850,00.html (requires Login)

Impact of Xperience Design on Performance of Higher Education

2006-02-24T22:15:00.000-05:00

Good Presentation talks about impact of Good Design in education space which can be extrapolated to other areas as well. Give some quantitative as well as qualitative analysis - http://www.aude.ac.uk/uploads/CABEproject.pdf

Customer Experience Analysis - How to ...

2006-02-21T20:46:00.000-05:00

One of my previous articles - http://webxm.blogspot.com/2005/12/customer-experience-analysis-product.html , covered an analysis of customer's experience as they would navigate across interaction points with the organization. The beauty of this technique is that it is "real" and that it works "across channels".

The challenge is How to define the experience, an article today on MarketingProfs.com gives some good points towards the same:

Dead ends. Leaving customers with no outlet or a sense of "unfinished business"
Roadblocks. Forcing your customers to deal with unanticipated or irresolvable barriers (e.g., price, availability, features, service) will taint their experiences and lead to dissatisfaction.
Detours. Are there areas of the cross-channel experience (gaps, disconnects, or distractions) that invite customers down an undesirable path?
Loops. It's important to fix these areas of circular logic in every channel to minimize frustration and produce satisfaction.
Rough terrain. Are there areas of your experience that exhaust the customer? Are they asked to jump through too many hoops on the pathway to loyalty?
Hazardous drop-offs. Does experience unexpectedly drop off in any area, leaving the customer cold or causing injury to customer relationship?
Merges. As customers move from one path to another (e.g., Silver to Platinum Member) are the changes presented clearlyÃ—and celebrated as necessary?
Entry, exit, and access points. Is it intuitive for a customer to find you, or access transactional information, products, and services? Make it easy for any customer to engage and disengage with appropriate ease.
Way-finding. Is the way clear? Is the path well illuminated and marked? Do your customers know where to go, how to transact, and what your benefits are?

Complete MarketingProfs article - http://www.marketingprofs.com/6/duncan7.asp

Create a matrix with these and other such factors , rate each, calculated weighted values (based on importance of each factor in business context ) and you can get a fair approximation of the path.

The goal of this approach in any case is not quantitative measurement, but to be able to find key pain areas for the customer.

Airlines Industry - Customer Experience

2006-01-13T10:06:00.000-05:00

Southwest, Independence air... what is most common trend int he airline industry today - Cut costs, and Offer low fares. To do so while efficieny is being improved but at the same time services being offered to customers are also being reduced. Beyond basic drink options additional ones are available at additional price. The price is not too much, but the impact on experience is big and negative.

Foreester research find that differentiaters in following fashion:

Airlines are competing at level 2 of this scale. Ofcourse above finding is not an absolute one, but is still something to draw on.

United Airlines is going right opposite to the whole industry and actually spending more to improve customer experience. WSJ article today says - "United has reduced the number of seats on more than 100 regional jets flying with its commuter affiliates so it could install roomier Economy Plus seating and first-class cabins -- the first time anyone in the industry has so broadly tried an upscale approach on such small jets. It radically cut the seating in a luxurious transcontinental service called "p.s." The extra room enables United to be the only airline that offers fully reclining, first-class seats on coast-to-coast flights. Now, following a big expansion of overseas routes, United also is planning a multimillion-dollar upgrade of its international first- and business-class cabins. "

United is trying to compete at the higest level of the scale of differentiators. Will it work? Only tiem will tell, but it's a great example of customer centered decision driving business direction.

Customer Loyalty - Brief Thoughts

2005-12-26T20:04:00.000-05:00

From a bottom-line perspective Customer Loyalty is at the heart of business success and growth. Organizations invest in loyalty programs in all kinds of forms. "Thank you" points from Citibank is one of latest examples. Notice they do not call these usage points, but give a more "Human" name to make customers feel special. (I don't think it is implemented as well though, it's one idea in isolation that does not tie to overall experience, but that's another point of discussion).

I read somewhere:
"Retaining customers means keeping them active with you. If you don't, they will slip away and eventually no longer be customers. Promotions encourage this interaction of customers with your company, even if you are just sending out a newsletter or birthday card."

Ray Kurzweil and Bryan P. Bergeron in The Eternal E-Customer: How Emotionally Intelligent Interfaces Can Create Long-Lasting Customer Relationship described Customer Loyalty to be a function of following:

Value (of product/service)
Investment (Customer's already have made)
Emotional Bond
competition
Existing Experience
and effort Customer needs to undertake to go to competition

however, only One element out of above has a "Multiplier effect" on Customer Loyalty and that is Emotional Bonding. The Emotional Bonding can be impacting by various parameter, some out of an organization's control however there are others that an organization CAN control.

This is where investments need to be increased to Bind Customers to the product/service and the organization itself.

Google has a large market share in Search industry right now, but except of a "Product Differentiation" (driven by innovation) nothing binds their customers to them.

Forrester research has found Experience Differentiation to be above the Technology, Price/Quality, Product and even Customer Service Differentiation. Experience in this context is about Customer Search lifecycle , right from where query is originated to how the answers are applied, whether it is online or offline process. I think with the new set of mobile based offerings Google is coming out with, they are expanding their role in the overall Customer Experience lifecycle and will lead to customer loyalty.

In order for organizations to be able to retain customers through building Customer Loyalty, they need to focus on Emotional Bonding which is a factor of end to end experiences provided to them.

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Application of Behavior Psychology to CEM

2005-12-23T22:18:00.000-05:00

Not all customers are same, so one solution cannot fit all either. I believe one way of segmenting customers is through their behavior patterns and psychology. These can be defined broadly as function of two parameters:

Aggression - essentially how driven they are (as individuals), people can be very demanding and dominating, and on the other end of spectrum they can be very open and soft.
Conformance - The second parameter is about how much do they believe in confirming to a certain way of functioning, again we'll find both ends of spectrum.

Based on above to parameters, the functionality,design, content, every aspect of experience has different meaning, consider following diagram, (this is just my hypothesis):

This diagram represents how various parameters of experience hold different level of importance as behavior parameters change.

Depending on your personas, such an approach can help define priorities better.

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Prioritization - GAP.com

2005-12-15T15:22:00.000-05:00

I wrote yesterday about importance prioritize (at a high level), today while discussing with a colleague working on a large eCommerce Solution, I started giving example of gap.com and some of the good practices follow, and the application of prioritize became even more clear.

Here are some examples of what GAP.com has done:

Men's Section: -

Focus is on highlighting products, navigation is clearly available on left. These two have been kept as most important. Makes sense.
shopping cart (myBag) is not visible but shows no of items in it and one can click to see the items (without reloading the page ofcourse). This is very important, if we look at most eCom system they overwhelm users with stuff. Does the user really need to see what's in shopping cart all the time? Does the user need to see policies all the time or FAQs all the time. no. We need to prioritize. Put 20% interface items which are used 80% of the time on screen, rest a click or 2 away.

Click to Enlarge

JEANS Selection:

Again, well prioritized content, focusing images, less text
Shopping cart (myBag) behaves same way, hidden by default, opens on click

Click to Enlarge

Product Detail:

This is probably the most effectively handled space.
Again! Shopping cart is a click away
Cross Sell is a click away as tab (You'll also like)
No ugly form controls

Net result user can focus on main task with all secondary items hidden t yet accessible.

Click to Enlarge

While the true picture of this can only come from user testing, I believe most of prioritization decisions taken are very effective and substantially add to experience.

If I would change any of this, to would be

To bring greater human side to it, currently it is product centric - colors, pictures etc. I think apparels sell experiences and personalities and not products.
To increase white space in Homepage, section page (e.g. Men's Section), and Category pages (e.g. Jeans) and reduce images sizes a bit so that it does not look as overwhelming.

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Prioritization

2005-12-14T23:49:00.000-05:00

Most of what is talked about in context of Customer Experience Management is common sense for most of the people. It's computers who do not understand humans so well, but we are humans, we do understand (to whatever degree).

The critical issue comes to really prioretizing, and that's where budgeting and strategy decisions need to bring customer input into the process. Probably sounds oversimplified, but idea behind this article is to focus on core (I am prioretizing what I should write )

So how does one prioritize:

1. Foundation - decision making process - Organizations need to build "formal" channels that feed customer information into the "Decision making process". This channel must bring data from Online as well as Offline spaces. (To customers they are same and each space plays a part at some point in Customer Experience lifecycle. )

2. Know Customers, Observe- First know what are Customer priorities, then decide yours. Intel did field studies in China to find why people are not adopting computers as much. They found that while computers were targeted to help young audience on education front, the parents did not allow as much usage to youngster due to fear of pornographic access and such issues. This led to innovation and Intel is launching a new computer which allows Parents to restrict access to some kind of content. They Observed , they analyzed.

3. Find the "Magic Window" - Bryan Bergeron, wrote about this in his book- The Eternal E-customer : How Emotionally Intelligent Interfaces Can Create Long-lasting Customer Relationships

Here is what it looks like:

The answers to building breakthrough Customer experience is not inward within the organizations or within "Experts" in the organizations, but with the customers themselves. You need to connect to them. (BTW, an interesting read - Expert Political Judgment : How Good is It? How Can We Know? - talks about how experts are failing, how they get bound by own thinking and experiences and not open up enough to new ideas and knowledge. )

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Customer Experience Analysis - Product Purchase

2005-12-01T22:19:00.000-05:00

I came across this article about Ron Willingham's (author of Integrity Selling, The people Principle etc) experience about television purchase. The interpretation of his experience is as follows :

PEP = Potential Exit Point
(Please note the above graph is my subjective interpretation of article, and is indicative)

The critical thing here is to identify and prioretize the PEPs and to do so one needs to understand the criticality of 'a' PEP to the customer. Also a similar map can be drawn for the competition and a competitive analysis can be conducted.

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Customer Context

2005-11-29T23:12:00.000-05:00

I attended a presentation today on research done on Search and IR interfaces. Two things came out strongly -

1. Human behavior towards search has not changed must least in last 1 decade
2. Next generation of search requires intelligence to user's context

I feel we have are going back to basics. Context is most basic of any interaction we do. Why should one listen to me..

it's either because they like me, or
like what I say, or
have been forced to..

Based on which condition is true, they would listen to be differently.

Essential thing is the context, what is the customer context for searching something.. Where does the need for search arise and where does it end.. It starts mush earlier then search page and end much later than results page..

Yahoo mindset I believe was a good attempt in this direction. It allows users to filter the results (using a slider) based on whether they are interested in resulting relation to commerce ("Shopping") or ones relating to information in general ("Researching")

"Customer Context" has a larger importance in Customer Experience space, beyond just Search interface. When I make a presentation to a potential customer I speak their language, their business and put my offerings in that context, My primary objective is to solve their problem, achieve their objectives, and not to sell my service/solution and make money or draw satisfaction.

Applying this to online world where machines which do not have the human emotional intelligence have to sell services/solution, the concept is a big challenge. I believe personalization has been very under-utilized on web, even in today's world. The power of personalization strategy is far beyond what Amazon has used to cross sell and upsell, but to build experiences that bring out customer's context and work to solve their issues, and achieve their objectives.

The challenge is to be able to "think out of box", think beyond "People who bought this also bought this" and start with a pure focus on customers, and drive innovation through that. The business constraints of limited resources/money will play, but the trick is to drive innovation within those constraints instead of limiting innovation due to such constraints.

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News: IKON Receives ITSMA Marketing Excellence Award

2005-11-10T18:39:00.000-05:00

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20051110005536&newsLang=en

Telemarketing - does it still work

2005-11-10T18:18:00.000-05:00

Brand republic recently did a study in UK and found "Telemarketing is one of the least effective of all the direct marketing channels at persuading consumers to buy products and services or request further information"
http://www.brandrepublic.com/login/index.cfm?fuseaction=Login&resource=BR_News&articleType=news&article=524466

Sound rather obvious with the number of people joining the do-not-call list. However the problem is not telemarketing as a concept, it is the Customer experience in current implementaiton of telemarketing concepts.

Applying Customer research, innoivative designs built with a people centered design process, closer integration with other marketing channels can bring the true value of this tool.

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Loose Advanced Search

2005-11-09T12:25:00.000-05:00

Search is one of the most effective ways of reaching information even today. While it is seen as a technology function, it is one of the most human ways of interaction that one can see on the web today. We do this all the time - if we loose directions, stop by the road and ask someone, if you are looking for something in store, you ask an assistant.. these are most natural actions for us.

Now imagine you are lost on web, what do we do, we go to Google and type our query in the text box. The problem is ofcourse the number of results it brings up. lets look at some quick stats:

Query: "Usability" > ~ 77 million results,
Query: "Usability India" >~ 2 million results
Query: "Usability India Delhi" >~ 118K results

Even though results are narrowing, we still deal with large number of results. What was the last time you navigated through 10 pages of search results. People don't have that kind of time ..

Second key aspect is people work in an incremental fashion, they start with minimal effort and then put additional effort (until they reach threshold) as required.

If you ask for directions, you expect a fast and precise response. Search is not an exploratory function from that perspective, it is a precise question (per user's expectation, which should bring precise results)

So user behavior is simple

Start with simple query (Minimal effort)
Asking Directions equivalent: - Can you guide me to "Church street"
Searching online equivalent: "Church Street"
Evaluate response
If response is Satisfactory > Close query
Asking Directions equivalent: - Thank you
Searching online equivalent: Click the link
If response is unsatisfactory, then it depends on User's threshold (which depends on several parameters).
If it has reached user's threshold, they look for other sources/drop the query

If it has not reached user's threshold, they refine the query:
Asking Directions equivalent: - "It's close to Pentagon Shopping Mall"
Searching online equivalent: "Church Street Shopping Mall"
An the process continues

Here is a generalized representation:

Once we apply this to a large organization's Intranet or document management system, we deal with millions of pages and documents, so to help reach the right information/document, common practice is to put advanced search.

Advanced Search requires query refinement to happen at step 1 itself, that's like asking directions for "Church Street, which is close to Pentagon Shopping mall, and a Police Station and comes when you take left from "Palisade parkway". People do not function that way.

Consider these two organization sides - Gartner.com and Forrester.com, both deal with same products and services - research reports (amongst other things they offer). The only way one can "refine" query in Gartner is through Advanced Search :-) as reflected in screen below:
Click to enlarge

Forrester also provides advanced search but provide refining options on the search results page as well:

Click to enlarge

Notice how the refining options (essentially same as advanced search options) have been provided on right side. The number of results one would get are also reflected.

This matches the diagram of Search behavior and process shared above.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, the subject deserves much deeper analysis, someday I hope to get around to do that.

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Kyocera Ranks Highest in Copier Customer Satisfaction

2005-11-08T18:18:00.000-05:00

Per study done by J.D. Power and Associates :

"Over the past several years, Kyocera has partnered with its dealers tobring new products to the marketplace and to train sales and field personnelto emphasize a high level of sales and service satisfaction," said GeorgeOwens, director of retail, office solutions and technology research at J.D.Power and Associates.

Read more: http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/11-08-2005/0004211149&EDATE=

The Three "Ds" of Customer Experience

2005-11-07T18:46:00.000-05:00

Eighty percent of companies believe they deliver a superior customer experience, but only 8 percent of their customers agree, says Bain & Company. Here's how to repair the disconnect. From Harvard Management Update.

Unlike most companies, which reflexively turn to product or service design to improve customer satisfaction, the leaders pursue three imperatives simultaneously:

They DESIGN the right offers and experiences for the right customers.
They DELIVER these propositions by focusing the entire company on them with an emphasis on cross-functional collaboration.
They DEVELOP their capabilities to please customers again and again—by such means as revamping the planning process, training people in how to create new customer propositions, and establishing direct accountability for the customer experience.

For more: http://workingknowledge.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=5075&t=marketing

The RIA mirage

2005-11-06T18:30:00.000-05:00

Google brought great things to larger public. One of the key things ofcourse has been what is now termed as AJAX. But too much focus has gone to the technology and less to the experience built behind. I see organizations asking for AJAX professionals, when essentially they should be looking for Interaction Design skills which define what must be built and then right technology can be chosen.

Yahoo maps beta is just been launched, while it is good (I especially like the ability to add a sequence of addresses), the interface has been kept very cluttered, too much stuff with too much demarcation. Case of over engineering the visual design and lack of prioretization. While technology mirrors Google, yahoo looses on Interaction desing perspective impacting customer experience and hence product adoption.

Look at these two screens:

Google: http://www.googlemaps.com/lochp?hl=en&tab=wl&q=

(Google goes by the rule that only functuionality which is used 80% of the time is visible upfront on the screen, rest is hidden. That's an important decision to make. )

Yahoo: http://maps.yahoo.com/beta/#

Net net I think, Google success is not technology, but experience they have been able to build, form providing large real estate on screen for the map to simplifying look of the map, to mapping user interaction to specific points of the map and so on. Yahoo has followed technology, but missed out on key driving principles.

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Customer Experience Gap - study by IDC

2005-11-02T17:10:00.000-05:00

IDC conducted a study of CEM and found that while IT sales and marketing folks want to align to customer needs, actual alignment is not very high. The gap exists essentially due to lack of depth in understanding and data.

"In the high growth, product-centric tech industry of the past, sales and marketing executives could afford to guess. In the more mature, margin-sensitive market of today, they have to get it right." - Donald MacDonald, vice president of >IDC's Sales Executive Practice.

Read more at: http://www.crm2day.com/news/crm/116217.php

Customer Experience Awards

2005-10-25T14:41:00.000-05:00

Customer Experience Awards by FastCompany: http://www.fastcompany.com/resources/customers.html

Customer Experience Blueprint

2005-10-18T06:25:00.000-05:00

Interesting online Self-Assessment Tool by Siebel Systems that will enhance the success of customer-facing projects.

Just as a blueprint guides a contractor through each phase of construction, the CEB guides organizations through the process of developing and implementing customer-facing solutions. At each stage of the Blueprint, there are checklist items, or activities that customers should complete before a project can proceed to the next stage.

Read more: http://www.siebel.com/blueprint/

A user-focused employee guide

2005-09-27T18:20:00.000-05:00

Interesting read:
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/09/subvert_from_wi.html

Understanding the Four P's of Customer Experience

2005-08-24T18:02:00.000-05:00

Product, Process, Policy, and People.

Read More: http://www2.cio.com/consultant/report2609.html

Difference between CEM and CRM

2005-08-20T16:33:00.000-05:00

This question has long troubled me; while I knew the difference I could not articulate it well.
Here is an attempt (I think a good one to explain)

CEM is Customer-centric, while CRM is more organization centric.

It might not sound true at first but it is, CRM essentially focuses on how an organization manages relationship with the customers, so we do customer data integration, implement a big CRM package which flags to a customer rep when a Gold level customer call etc.. CEM focuses on what bring customers to the organization. As in my previous blog, Dell has focused on CEM at every aspect. They have successfully "Institutionalized" CEM as opposed to just have relation with customers.

This doesn't mean the two compete; they are in essence complementary, part of a big success story. The techniques that need to be applied are different, CEM applies research techniques (one source of research data is CRM, other includes field studies, interviews etc) and defines what excites the target customer, and what put her off. Why would John part from his hard earned money and give you, what does he expect in return. Believe me increasingly it is about experience.

Tying to my post on banking industry, companies like State Farm have paid more insurance money than people were entitled to, in their time of need. Would you leave such a company for cheaper premium? Some might, most won't.

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Enough BS, does CEM matter

2005-08-17T16:31:00.000-05:00

How about one of the most successful companies built on CEM.

"Visit Dell's headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, outside of Austin, and you can't miss them. Nearly every bulletin board in every office has a sign that reads "The Customer Experience: Own It." Hanging above a set of cubicles -- home to employees who sell computers to government accounts -- is a gift-wrapped box labeled "the 'Customer Experience.' " That label serves as a reminder that at Dell, bonuses and profit sharing are tied to what those three words signify. Thousands of employees wear a laminated photo ID around their neck that spells out the Dell mission: "To be the most successful computer company in the world at delivering the best customer experience in markets we serve."

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/nc01/012.html

Usability professionals who would shape the future

2005-08-15T09:48:00.000-05:00

If we evaluate the interaction design for web in last several years we'll see several standards evolved and most of the experience designers (Usability, IA etc) started applying same principles to all solutions, customizing a bit but not going beyond. I don't think interaction design in last several years has really improved at a good pace.

What google has done with maps, and good suggest and gmail is so fundamental - innovation. We only see handful of such examples applied as serious business solutions. Is it that left navigation or top navigation are the best way and there can e no improvements to them, is it that forms can be built only in the way they are built today - field after field, and no other way. Email interface has been more or less the same in last several years, ecommerce design has been more or less dictated by the way amazon built it.. and if so is the case why should an organization pay thousands of dollars to build those aspects, perhaps we should productize these common behaviors and assume them as final.

But that would not be correct, what we need is a deeper application of Interaction Design principles to drive innovation, greater investment into these principles by commercial organizations.

The thrust for this has to come from three sides:
1. Money - organziation
2. Technology - to enable the designs
3. Individual - This is the most difficult and challenging of the three.

I think a designer should first be able to dream, create, technology can find ways to apply those, and if the idea makes business sense, there would be enough case for some business to take the step and invest.

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Banking Sector - Customer Experience

2005-03-02T16:00:00.000-05:00

Read this great content on Forrestor:

Per Forrester Report Customers are mostly satisfied with their current banks and few show any interest in switching, so that's good. So what are the problems?

Most of the customers have a narrower relationships i.e. they have purchased only a few of Banking products
Most of the customers do not have a Investment product like loans/Credit cards with their Checking Account providers
And only a minority of their customers believe that they would consider their Current Bank for future banking product purchases.

So why is that so?

The problem is that the banking products cannot be run on same principles as a commodity business. But why?

Imagine a loan product, if the customers consider Loan like a commodity (which they do today), they would research on various loan products from several Financial Institutions before making their decisions. There is no emotional connection between this customer and their current Bank driving them to more products from same bank. This is really not a imaginary scenario, this is the reality today. This is in contrast to firms like Walmart which make such strong connection with their customers that for new needs customers go to same firms. Creative Director of Procter and Gamble once said that Successful firms are the ones whose customer themselves tell stories about the firms. These stories are driven out of their experiences from the past. These experiences are what drive Customer Loyalty and Retention.

Such kind of Customer Loyalty is not seen in Banking and Finance Industry. What is also leads to is that Customers Trust is low. In Forrester research across a range of Industries, Banking advertisements are one of the least believed ones. That means communication of banking products and services are not believed and the customers prefer to conduct their own research and then decide. Won't you like it to be the other way?

So what drives Customers Loyalty then? Research finds the answer to be "Customer Advocacy". (Explore the new range of advertisements from Morgan Stanley for instance.)

Customer Advocacy is about putting customer's interest first and not drive decisions and recommendations based on firms bottom-line alone. 10 years back during Hurricane Andrew State Farm paid their customers more than what their insurance entitled them to. This was going out of the way to support customers goals and form an emotional connection with them. Such a customer will have much greater confidence on the firm today and in future. That's a good example of Customer Advocacy.

E trade offers this tool on their website which allows them to compare E-trade's offer with competition and make an honest recommendation. Banks need to provide such experiences to their customers with which they go back and say that my bank really thinks of my best interest and has done this great thing for me, provided this really beneficial advice, or this great service.

(This blog is greatly influenced by Forrestor Findings and reports)

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How to build Effective Customer Experience - Overview

2005-03-02T15:43:00.000-05:00

Eveybody wants to know if their website is good or bad, but their nothing as empirically good or bad website. Websites fail when they are unable to support user goals. And they fail in 2 ways -

- In eyes of users because they are annoyed and disappointed,

- but also in Executives because their business objectives go unmet

So for examples eBay has an area on their website called featured products and originally there was just a link to featured products , they made a chgane where they actually showed these products on their hoem page and the clickthrough rate went from 1% to 10%. Now these are the kind of flaws that we find with these reviews that there is content burried int he site but when you surface that content users are able to complete their goals and companies make money. It is a very rigrous methodlogy and we have 25 criteria and we rate them pass failso there s no wishy washy may be this is right may be not. Either you have a problem or you don't and if there is one here is how to fix it. And these 25 criterias are based on research.

Frontiers of the Experience Economy

2004-12-22T19:14:00.000-05:00

http://www.darden.edu/batten/pdf/bf_gilmore.pdf

Is it Customer Experience or User Experience?

2004-09-20T17:04:00.000-05:00

You'll see these two terms being used interchangeably, I think there is a definite difference between the two. Image renaming "Customer Relationship management" to "User Relationship Management", suddenly it does not seem as relevant anymore. The difference essentially lies in the scope.

User Experience Management - as name says it's about managing experience of a user. user of what though? User experience management can be called so and accepted commercially however it's a component of complete Customer Experience Management. It's customer experience frozen in time when the customer interacts with a product or service.

Customer experience on the other hand is much wider scope and involves elements which customer does not even interacts directly with any product or service. Further it expands the scope to incorporate multiple mediums and be able to synchronize experience across all mediums - online, offline, on website, your office building, your staff's uniform, your newsletter content, your wireless reminder language etc etc etc..

Think Starbucks - their coffee packaging, their coffee card, their environment, their staff uniform, their coffee cup design, napkin design, sticker design, and web design ... is all in sync? I think so, why because they are thinking Customers, not Users.

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2003-12-15T11:43:00.001-05:00