Marketing

The tyranny of nice

  • Tuesday, 7 September, 2010
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My first English lesson with Mrs Sullivan aged nine. She was one of those teachers you remember. An awesome teacher.

“Nice” she told the class, “nice is a word you will not use”.

The word “nice” was forbidden in her classes. And woe betide anyone who described their weekend as nice, or their birthday present as nice (probably an Action Man or Scalextrix or if you were really lucky a Raleigh Chopper or Grifter).

It is a lesson I learned and kept close to my heart today:  Nice is mediocre, saccharine, inoffensive, meaningless, ordinary, without passion, expression or meaning. “Nice” is a faceless word. “Nice” is something that the left brain aspires to and the right brain shuns. Nice is an anathema to the artist, to the designer. Nice doesn’t provoke, it doesn’t inspire. Nice is instantly forgettable.

“Have a nice day”.

Shit NO! (this deserves swearing – see the passion that Mrs Sullivan infected in me; what a teacher!) That’s “have an ordinary day”. It’s not a differentiated day. I don’t want to just have a nice day. I want to have an awesome day, a magical day, a memorable day!!

And the same with experiences and products.

Disneyland isn’t nice; it’s memorable and magical (despite the fact that you spend most of your day there queuing). Do you think that Steve Jobs would be happy if someone called the iPhone ‘nice’?

Nice is for Microsoft. It is for engineers to aspire to. Nice is not art, nice is not design, elegance, simplicity or beauty. Nice is dull mediocrity.

And yet nice is something that corporate software doesn’t even begins to strive for. There’s no place for nice in software methodology. Think Scrum; nice is rarely even a nice to have (it’s gold plating). Tell me Scrum Masters, in your zeal to deliver “business value”, ship the “minimal viable product”, I bet you’d be happy with what you deliver being considered nice.  F@@k that. Your projects fester in a world of mediocrity,  in a quagmire of backlog; picking off stuff to do, focussed on features and functions rather than customers goals and a desire to delight.

Bring it on Mrs Sullivan. Nice has no place in the English Language. Bring it on, Agile + Experience Design. Nice has no place in software development.

Can you banish nice from your lexicon; go beyond nice and seek delight?

I don’t want to have a nice day, I want to have a memorable day.

I don’t want to have a nice product, I want to have an awesome product.

I don’t want to have a nice experience. I want to have a memorable experience.

…And if I’ve designed an experience and the only word you can use to describe it is ‘nice’ then I consider myself a failure.

The Dumbo ride at Disneyland; it delights, people will queue up for it, even though there is nothing special about the ride itself. Carousel rides are nice enough but forgettable, the Dumbo ride is memorable and an experience to enjoy

Silver surfers

  • Saturday, 31 July, 2010
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News this week was that Ivy Bean died aged 104.  A good innings, but there is more to the story than that, Ivy got on Facebook aged 102 and was a regular twitterer with more than 62,ooo followers.  One of my colleagues at work announced as he got off the phone with his mother that she had just upgraded the ram in her computer, herself.  My father has just got an iPhone and is hooked on apps.  Maybe they are late to the game, but the over 65s represent the fastest growth in take up of digital technologies.  Whilst mobile ownership for the 25-44 year olds remained static (saturated) between 2007-9, for the 65+ it grew by 17% (source: Ofcom Communication report 2009).  And internet adoption grew by 11%.  The 2007 Ofcom report found that the 65+ spend 42 hours a month online, four hours more than the most active users who are aged between 18 and 24,

It’s an old finding but the Henley Centre reported that the over 65s most felt part of a virtual community thanks to the internet; with the growth of Facebook that statistic is probably out of date, but still worth reflecting on.

I feel part of a community

The ‘silver surfers’ are not the techno-fearing, techno-illiterate luddites you may percieve them to be.  They are a segment of the market that cannot be ignored, and an opportunity that are craving to be served.  Do they figure in your plans? Do you have any personas for the over 65s? Have you tested your propositions with this demographic?  Is your design optimised for the 18-34 demographic who have less disposable income that the older demographic who have a greater propensity to spend?

I’m not sure where this quote is from so I can’t credit it, but it is worth reflecting on:  “The wealthiest generation in the history (and possibly the future) of the earth are in the process retiring. And they don’t intend to do it quietly”.

Pimp your business card

  • Monday, 19 July, 2010
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Chances are the business card you hand out is that of your employer. It’s got your name, title, company logo and address on it, but does it really say who you are?  The stuff you blog about, your professional tweets, where are they?  Do you hand out another card with your personal details on it.  Whilst at Leancamp, Nicky Smyth handed me her (BBC) business card.  Alongside her BBC details, she’d used an ink-stamp to provide her personal URL and twitter account.  I’ve not got round to getting a stamp created, but when we were blogging round the world, in Lijang, China I had a stamp made up with Dongba script, pictographics from the Naxi people and the dancingmango URL surrounding them.  I’ve been using this to pimp the back of my ThoughtWorks business card.

ThoughtWorks business card with stamped URL

360 degree experience

  • Tuesday, 13 July, 2010
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Nike know a fair bit about branded experiences.  My new iPhone came with Nike + pre-installed.  Usually this would not be relavent to me, my default setting being couch-potato.  But for one reason or another I’m currently training, in less than a months time I’ll be punishing my body in water, bike and road, attempting to complete the London Triathlon.  So Nike+ got me curious.  To get it to work you need a sensor, so I took a trip down to the Nike Store in Covent Garden and bought myself a Nike+ sensor.  The sales assistant (after failing to cross sell me a pair of trainers for the sensor), showed me the bottom of my receipt.  “Look!” she said as she highlighted £250.  “You could win some cash by going to this website”, (circling the URL in the text).

Nike till receipt with URL

Sometime later and I entered the URL (rather long and cumbersome) and landed on a page asking me to enter the receipt number.  This presented me with a satisfaction survey on my store experience to complete.  The system was not intelligent enough to know what product I had bought, and there would be little for me to gain by being presented that information at this point.  At the end of the survey they invited me to enter my email address to enter a prize draw.  With this simple process they have linked an anonymous purchase of a known product with an email address.  An email address has value ; using a tools such as Flowtown from my social network activity they could start building a richer picture of me, including the extent to which I am connected and am an influencer.

Nike screen shot

The supermarkets have used till receipts for marketing (e.g. Tesco clubcard points) for a while.  But if you do not have an explicit point of sale loyalty scheme, this is an innovative way of connecting the offline purchase experience with an on-going on-line relationship.  Of course Nike go well beyond this.  From the iPhone app that was already installed, through to purchasing the Nike+ sensor, I now have a Nike account where I can track my running progress, uploading my training times after each run.  That really is a 360 degree experience.

Critiquing the critics (usability rant part 1)

  • Tuesday, 20 April, 2010
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Michael Winner may be a good food critic, but if you were looking for someone to cook you the finest meal for your budget, I doubt he would be your first choice.Same with film critics, they may be able to write an insightful and critical review, but would you want them directing a film for your budget? Would you want Jakob Neilsen, who is essentially a usability critic, to design your website? I mean, take a look at his site!

When you are building a product, you get a usability company in because you know that usability is a good thing that you want to have. If usability companies are the critics, what are you expecting?

The first usability test I ran was in 1991. I’ve set up usability labs, I’ve observed hundreds of people interacting with technology and products. My passion has always to do things at speed, turn around results ASAP and engage all stakeholders in the process.  But I’ll talk about that in a later post.  For now I’ll draw on experience of working with organisations that have commissioned usability companies to review their products.  I’ll breakdown the process I have often observed from usability testing vendors, considering both the elapsed time and the actual ‘value added time’ taken.

Day one

The client (usually the business) engage the usability company to audit the usability of the product that is being developed. The consultants will come in and understand the user tasks, roles and goals; the target audience will be identified for recruitment. ‘Value added time’ = 1 hour.

Day two

The team go away and produce a test plan and a recruitment brief for a research agency to find participants. They promise to get it back to the client in a couple of days. They contact their preferred agency who set about recruiting people (let’s assume this is a simple brief for a retail website targeted at young mothers).  Produce test plan (value added time = 3 hours). Send to client for review.

Day three

Client return test plan with a few comments. Update test plan. Value added time = 30 minutes.

Days six-ten

Twelve usability sessions, each an hour long, they do three a day, that is four days of testing. Value added time = 12 hours

Days eleven – thirteen

The team spend three days analysising and synthesising the results, pull supporting video clips and produce a detailed report. Value added time – 15 hours

Day fourteen

The client sees the report for the first time. (Value added time = 2 hours). Interesting results. (IT representation were not invited, they did not commission the report, the product owner wants to see the output first before sharing it with IT).

Day sixteen

The product owner informs the dev team of the changes that need to be made in the light of the usability report. Project manager sucks air through his teeth and says “you’ll need to raise a change request for those items… ha! quick wins they say? hardly… Hmmm, OK, change the labels in the field, we should be able to do that…”

Value added Vs. Elapsed time

The usability company has delivered and their engagement is complete.  From the start of the process to the recommendations hitting the developers who must ultimately action these, for this not-too-fictitious scenario sixteen days have passed, of which only four were spent on value-added tasks, actually doing stuff.

Day n

The product goes live. The usability company are aghast that so many of the changes they reccomended have not been implemented. They place the blame fairly and sqaurely at the door of the developers and reinforce their belief that IT just doesn’t listen, or worse, care about usability. The critics have critcised from their armchair, like the pigs and chickens they are the chickens, participated not committed.

Usability rant part 2>

Magic moment at the Waldorf hotel

  • Monday, 19 April, 2010
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ThoughtWorks had its party on Friday night at the Waldorf Hotel in London.  Seventy or so years ago when my grandparents were married they stayed there on their first night.  Fifty years later my Grandfather was going through some old paperwork and dug out the original receipt from their stay.  To celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary he wrote to the Waldorf, booking a room and enclosed a copy of the recept for their interest and ammusement.  He thought nothing more of it until they arrived.  They were given the same room that stayed in 50 years before.  The following day when they checked out and my Gradfather was settling the bill, something was wrong.  ‘This can’t be right’ he said, ‘surely you’ve left a nought off’.  But it was right.  The Waldorf were charging him the same price that he paid fifty years previously.  That was a real magic moment.

Invest in infrastructure not doggy bowls

  • Friday, 19 March, 2010
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Interesting times in the UK retail banking industry.  The public consider the banks to be pariahs; cue a number of new entrants to the market.  Virgin, Tesco, the Post Office, Metro Bank, the one thing they all share is the focus upon the customer experience that is perceived to be broken with the established players.

“At Metro Bank, the customer is king and our goal is to reinvent British banking by building fans, not customers.”

The concept of a bank seeking ‘fans’ rather than customers is very ‘of the moment’, it speaks to the marketing buzz on all things social, to a world where ‘Facebook will rule the Web during the Next decade‘ (indeed where once all journeys started with google, now they are just as likely to start on Facebook with Facebook now surpassing google in daily traffic).

So what does it mean to strive for fans rather than customers?

Let’s leave aside the dictionary definition of a fan “an enthusiastic devotee, follower, or admirer of a sport, pastime, celebrity, etc.:” (an enthusiastic devotee of a bank? Now that’s a stretch goal) Or the fact that it’s origin is a shortened term for fanatic (what are the consequences for having customers with unquestionable loyalty when you evolve and want to do things different? Will MetroBank one day have a Glazer Manchester United moment?!)

Placing the customer at the heart of everything you do is more than just the shiny stuff at the front of house.   “A friendly welcome to dogs and their owners, with water bowls and dog biscuits on hand for man’s best friend – dogs rule at Metro Bank!” said the bank’s announcement.   It is more than paying lip service to a social media strategy (Rentokil thought they could get all social without taking their traditional PR along on the ride – see what happened).  It is about having the right infrastructure in place; robust systems and flexible processes.  It is about investing in the unsexy stuff that rarely sees the light of day, because if you don’t do this things will inevitably go wrong.  When the bank upsets a customer because the systems don’t allow the customer to do what they want, or make a mistake, perceived or otherwise, no amount of doggy bowls and seven day opening hours are going to get around that one.  Metrobank and the new entrants are well placed to avoid too many of the issues that the incumbents face when trying to be truly customer centric, but they will be doing themselves no favours if they don’t place as much emphasis on the back end systems that the marketing team don’t see or understand as much as the shiny stuff in the branches.

Are you prepared for the dip?

  • Tuesday, 2 March, 2010
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So you are refreshing or rebuilding your website.  You are introducing new functionality and features, and sweeping away the old. You’ve done usability testing of your new concepts and the results are positive.  Success awaits.   You go live.   And it doesn’t quite go as you expected.  You expect that the numbers and feedback will go on an upward trajectory from day one, but they don’t.  What you should have expected is the dip.

Illustration of the dip

In October 2009 Facebook redesigned the news feed.  Users were up in arms, groups were formed and noisy negative feedback was abound.  A couple of years back the BBC redesigned their newspage, “60% of commenters hated the BBC News redesign“.  Resistance to change is almost always inevitable,  especially if you have a vocal and loyal following, you can expect much dissent to be heard.  What is interesting is what happens next.  Hold your nerve and you will get over this initial dip.  We’ve seen a number of projects recently where this phenomenon occurred; numbers drop and negative feedback is loudly heard.  But this dip is ephemeral and to be expected.  The challenge is in planning for this and setting expectations accordingly.  Telling your CEO that the new design has resulted in a drop in conversion rate is going to be a painful conversation unless you have set her expectations that this is par for the course.

Going live in a beta can help avert the full impact of the dip.  You can iron out issues and prepare your most loyal people for the change, inviting them to feedback prior to the go-live.  Care must be taken with such an approach in the sample selection o participate in the beta.  If you invite people to ‘try out our new beta’, with the ability to switch back to the existing site, you are likely to get invalid results.  The ‘old’ version is always available and baling out is easy.  Maybe they take a look and drop out, returning to the old because they can.  Suddenly you find the conversion rates of your beta falling well below those of your main site.  Alternatively use A/B testing and filter a small sample to experience the new site.  That way you will get ‘real’ and representative data to make informed decisions against.  Finally, don’t assume that code-complete and go-live are the end of the project.  Once you are over the dip there will be changes that you can make to enhance the experience and drive greater numbers and better feedback.

Bunch of grapes or bunch of arse?

  • Monday, 1 March, 2010
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“We’ve got to have the ability to enable customers to share”
Random London Taxi driver spouting opinion on social media
“‘ere,  you say you’re in IT, whatcha make of this Facebook and twitter malarky? That Stephen Fry, what a tw@t, I don’t care that he’s just woken up and brushed his teeth. Now that QI, its a fix. He’s not so bright, he doesn’t know all the answers etc etc etc….  I’ll tell ya, Facebook and all that sh!t is a bunch of arse”.

“We’ve got to have the ability to enable customers to rate and review products”
Random UK customers in a focus group
Facilitator “So if I gave you all these user reviews for the product, or a review by Martin Lewis, who are you going to go with?”  Group: “Martin Lewis…  yeah, I trust him, no idea who these people who write reviews are… what’s in it for them?…  they are paid by the company aren’t they (cynical agreement etc)”

“Blackberrys are the business users phone”
Random teenagers in shopping centre talking about their mobile phones
“You’re nobody if you don’t have a Blackberry”  (Ummmm, aren’t Blackberry’s the business person’s phone?)  “You’ve got to have one coz of the Blackberry PIN for texting”

Sometimes you can get hung up in your view of the world, you make assumptions about the way the world works.  Yet it can be refreshing to go out onto the street and canvas ideas and feedback.  That may be as simple as striking up people on the street (people love to talk), or running focus groups for no particular research purpose other than taking the pulse of what people think.  Or it may be spending time on the shop floor.  Get out of the office for a day and have fun seeing your customers, consumers of your idea, in the wild.  I’m not saying you take the word of a taxi driver, a comment from a single focus group or an anecdote from a shopping centre as gospel, but it might make you think and spark some new, unexpected and contrary ideas

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