Archive for the 'Customer-Experience' Category

Try Something New, PSFK Conference In San Francisco July 17th

Published
by
Karl
on July 11, 2008
in Customer-Experience and Design
. 0 Comments

If you are tired Bay Area conferences where you hear the same old cheerleaders in what has become an increasingly incestuous web 2.0 echo chamber you need to check out the PSFK conference in San Francisco next week. This is sure to be a very creative and inspiring conference with great people from creative and successful companies in the real world, like Virgin America, Method, Modernista, Apple, and NASA. My blog buddy from Ogilvy 360, Rohit from the Influential Marketing blog will be there i’m sure signing books as well.

This is the confirmed speaker list:

Adrian Ho, Zeus Jones
Amit Gupta, Photojojo
Andrew Hoppin, NASA
Charles Ogilvie, Virgin America
Chris Riley, Apple

Colin Nagy, Attention
Ed Cotton, Influx Insights / BSSP
Eric Corey Freed, Organic Architect
Ezra Cooperstein, Current TV

Frank Striefler, TBWA/Media Arts Lab
Gareth Kay, Modernista
George Murphy, Modo-Group
George Parker, Adscam / Author

Jean-Marie Shields, Starbucks
Jen Bekman, 20×200
Jeremy Townsend, Ghetto Gourmet
John Pollard, Microsoft
Josh Handy, Method
Josh Morenstein, fuseproject
Kevin Allison, Financial Times

Liz Dunn, FunnyOrDie.com
Lynn Casey, Team Noesis
Mark Lewis, DDB
Max Schorr, Good Magazine
Nate Pence, Method
Rohit Bhargava, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence / Author

The Power Point That Made Me Cry (because I was happy)

Published
by
Karl
on June 24, 2008
in Co-Creation, Customer-Experience, New-Strategy and Social-Media
. 5 Comments

Your mileage may vary but some of the themes in this slideshow “happiness as your business model” resonate so deeply with me it literally brought tears to my eyes. In the deck Tara (author of HorsePigCow and founder of Citizen Agency) connects so succinctly Maslows hierarchy of needs and the concepts of autonomy and relatedness it just blew me away. Funny because i’ve been trying to connect the same things for the last five or six years with limited success, so you would imagine it would make me feel quite inept seeing how well Tara has done it here, but that’s not the case at all, i feel like it’s a huge confirmation and an opportunity for me to go back and see how I can build on it.

I wrote an article way back in 2003 where I tried to connect a concept called the “hierarchy of customer experience” to loyalty, which was heavily inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy and Hertzbergs two factor theory of motivation which included “Trust > Competence > Autonomy > Creativity/Relatedness”

Here’s another look at an earlier attempt:
The Hierarchy of Customer Experience

I’m quite convinced that a model like this is the secret behind the real success (and real failure) of web 2.0/social media type companies. Increasingly it will be the secret behind the real success (and real failure) of all companies and organizations.

Rename Wolf Blitzer on NameThis.com

Published
by
Karl
on June 6, 2008
in Customer-Experience, Fun Stuff, Get-Smart and Uncommon-Uses
. 3 Comments

Namethis

Kluster.com is an interesting collaborative crowdsourcing decision making platform. They seem to position themselves as a sort of collaborative ideation/innovation platform. It seems that their main marketing strategy is to launch interesting services on it’s platform and the most recent one is called Name This, the main idea being that for $99 companies/entrepreneurs can post products and services to have the community come up with names for. As a demo they are running an initiative to rename Wolf Blitzer, a newsman who is famously on CNN more than any other person.

I particularly like these suggestions:
Garrison Sontag
Stonewall Blitzer
Slartibartfast

Namethisscreen

Other things they are attempting to rename in this demo are:
Chevy Nova
Zune!
Verizon’s G’zOne

As with all social tools like this I like to look at the rewards and recognition part of the culture, why would people participate in this in meaningful ways. In the case of Name This the primary reward seems to be cash money. Essentially they distribute $80 of the $99 fee to the top 3 names and the invluencecers:

We take $80 out of each naming fee and distribute it to the members who create/influence the top three…

1st Place: $40 to Namer, $10 Shared Amongst Influencers
2nd Place: $16 to Namer, $4 Shared Amongst Influencers
3rd Place: $8 to Namer, $2 Shared Amongst Influencers

Personally i think cash is a pretty weak motivator, especially when so few are going to benefit, and they need to do a better job of showcasing the top participants and have some non-cash community points for participation.

Via Mashable and my friend the Mad Finn

Another recent branding related crowdsourcing application is of course the runaway success BrandTags.com by Noah Brier

Bay CHI Focus on Social Software

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

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

B a y C H I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published
by
Karl
on March 10, 2008
in Customer-Experience and Strategy
. 2 Comments

apple google and you

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

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

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

via

Need to learn about search engines - SEOMoz.org

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

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

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

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

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

Web Standards for Mobile - Beyond iPhone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Web Design?

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

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

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

A couple of gems:

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

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

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

The Experience Is The Product

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

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

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

ipod

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

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