Front To Back

In a recent post I said that I would buy into Delta Airlines’ hyped new customer experience improvements for one trial run. If they delivered a superior experience, as promised, then great. If not then I’d know it was all branding hype.

Well Bruce Nussbaum has done the legwork for me. He went on a a Delta flight. It is was, by the sounds of it, a debacle.

Problem is, I flew on the first day of Delta’s emergence from bankruptcy and it was a nightmare. I came up from Mexico City, where a computer failure forced the passengers to wait on the plane for an extra hour–or was it two? When I arrived at JFK in New York, Delta blithely told the passengers that 96 bags had not been put on the plane because of “rebalancing” issues. Now what does that mean? That’s more than half the people on that flight.

They would arrive the next day, Delta promised. My bag didn’t arrive for three days.

Several things to draw from this.

1. When people are unhappy they tell their friends and that damages your brand broadly, swiftly. And giving a blogger a bad user experience – ouch! (How a corporation recovers from negative blogging is an interesting topic.)
2. The sign of a truly customer orientated company is how well they patch the service when things go wrong. If there’s a computer failure at air traffic control, that’s beyond Delta’s control. But how they make that experience bearable for their customers is very much within their control. Free drinks and nuts, fun movies, regular updates… these things can bring passengers on side.

Bruce Nussbaum’s experience was a lemon – a consistent failure. They left him sitting on the tarmac and didn’t seem to care. They lost bags and didn’t give a damn. And Now Bruce Nussbaum, with a large readership, is giving them negative press and as I write,  Delta have not done anything to respond.
I expect that Delta travellers will probably find lemons on the menu regularly.  I’ll go looking for some sweeter experiences.

So. Regular readers will remember that I just got myself a Sony Ericsson K800i after a lifetime of Nokia devotion.

My wife just got a new Nokia 6300 and is ecstatic about it. I like my Sony Ericsson K800i very much because it looks good and feels good. But the interaction is a bit bonkers. The problem’s caused by the core design of the hard and soft control keys.

Here’s the keypad of the K800i.

It has 4 main control keys (outlined in red and blue, above) and a 5-way joystick.

Here’s the keypad of the 6300.

It has 4 main control keys (red and blue, again) and a 5 way joystick. Just the same. So they should be equivalently easy to use and learn. Here’s why they aren’t.

The number one function of a phone is to make and receive phonecalls. (Revenue figures prove this, however hard the mobile operators wish otherwise.) And making a call requires two key actions: call and hang up.

The 6300 has two keys dedicated to these fundamental action actions – outlined in blue.

The k800i has two dedicate keys too, but they are dedicated to something else: undoing actions. There’s a backspace key and a “go back” key.

So when someone calls me on my k800i – which key do I press? I have look at the screen and see. And when I want to hangup? I have to look again.

To hang up, you actually have to hit the right-hand key. But if the other party hangs up, it stops being the hang up button and turns into the menu button – because it’s a soft key. So if, out of habit, you press what was the hang up button to finish your call, you suddenly find you’ve called up the main menu. Oh dear. (Luckily, there’s a nice fixed “go back” button, and I can see why.)

Alan Kay, interaction designer extraordinaire, is famous for a key principle of interaction design: “Make simple things easy and difficult things possible.” The simplest thing a phone can do is make a call. But Sony Erisson have made going back simple, and making a call complex. Ooops.

Still, some of this is a matter of getting used to things. My brother in law told me he’s just got a Nokia N95 and he finds it difficult to use. He’s missing his Samsung!

This from Bruce Nussbaum…

Carl Icahn, who is constantly called “the corporate raider turned shareholder activist” is battling Motorola CEO Ed Zander to get a seat on the board of directors and use the company’s cash to buy back stock–including his own Motorola stock. Zander and Motorola are vulnerable to this squeeze because of the sharp decline in the profits derived from the great selling Razr cellphone. Motorola has been cutting its price all year, especially in emerging markets, and is losing market share to rivals Nokia and Samsung. All this before Apple launches its iPhone.

And then…

But the Razr turns out to be bad design, really bad design, because it has an awful user-interface. I personally know nearly a dozen people who truly hate their Razrs, including a number of top designers. People have a very hard time with just the basic features, such as phone numbers, texting, sending photos, even hearing well. There are lots of consumer complaints. The truth is, despite its terrific outside, the Razr runs on an old, homeground operating system that Motorola is only now updating.

So the Razr, in the end, reflects old-fashioned design–form over function. The resulting poor consumer experiences for a huge number of people may make it harder for Motorola than it anticipates to recoup in the marketplace. In a competitive environment where people can easily buy Nokia or Samsung phones, and now Apple iPhones, memories of bad expiences with the Razr may make them very reluctant to try another Motorola cell.

See?! See!!!? The stories of the the bad UI on the RAZR are legendary. The UI community knew it would get them in the end. And now it has. (Somewhat).
Good design is a long term bet.

Interestingly, though, it’s now time to market that’s plaguing Motorola. By all accounts, they’ve got people working on a new and genuinely usable product range (I even met one of them a while back and I can certify that he was cool). But because it hasn’t come to market quickly enough, they’re left in a jam.  Of course, if they’d done it right first time, they wouldn’t have got into the jam in the first place.

Anyway, there’s more detail chez M. Nussbaum so have a read.

If you never had the experience of travelling Delta, count yourself lucky. It was austere and souless as only an old american corporation can be.

They’ve rebranded with a natty, new, all red, 3D logo. And their new site welcomes suggestions and tips from travellers in an effort to collect ‘easy-win’ ideas such as onboard multi-player gaming, buzzers to alert tell you when to go to your gate, SMS to update you about flight disruptions and a book swap at the gate. See the press release for a mix of suspicious, cheesy nonsense. Or see the delta site.

For many large organisations, even considering this kind of user involvement would be to terrifying. “What if we couldn’t implement any of the suggestions our customer gave us? What if I customers suggested something subversive? Do we really have to listen to our customers anyway?!”

So kudos to Delta for getting this far.

But at the same time, it’s still a cheesy effort. There’s an “air-punching” promotional video. And everything is very sanitised.

I don’t really know what to think. Except this. Would this new effort make me consider flying with Delta?

Answer: Yes. I’d give them one shot. If the experience really does live up to the new brand promise, then they’d have succeassfuly bought themsleves a new customer. So I suppose that means they’ve achieved something.
But it’s a big if. And I’m not holding my breath.

Thanks to Flowsters Simon Hatch and Kelsey Smith for pointing me to this.

I’ve just got a Sony Ericsson K800i.  My first ever non-nokia phone. Could have got a N73. But I didn’t.
Why? The K800i was good looking. The camera design appealed. The screen and icons seemed luscious.  And people said it was easy to use and they were happy with it.

I had a moment of trepidation when  I got it home. What have I done?! (That’s the power of brand loyalty coming from years of good user experience with Nokia).

But I’ve been using it for the afternoon and I’m very happy.  Maybe because in many respects it’s a Nokia clone anyway, just with better looks.  Or maybe an N73 would have been WAY better but I’ll never know now!  Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a good phone.

Two interesting things:

1. I couldn’t work out how to open the memory stick slot. I Googled and found that others also struggled. (Several “I know this is a silly question but…” postings). Answer: stick your fingernail under the flap and pull until you’re sure it will snap. And then the door pops open.
2. It’s not very self confident.  It keeps asking me to confirm things instead of just doing. Like when you prepare an SMS – it double checks before actually sending it.  And once it’s sent it asks you to click “ok” to acknowledge the dialog box. Hmm. I think Alan Cooper might accuse it of not being “self confident” and Jef Raskin might have accused it of wasting information.

I was thinking the other day about the similarities between the blogosphere and the stock market. Back in the 17th century, people were pretty excited about the radical new concept of stockmarkets – and rightly so. They are fascinating things and present all sorts of opportunity to everyone. (Read Niel Stephenson’s Quicksilver, if you’ve got the biceps). Right now, we’re all pretty excited about the democratisation of media that the blgosphere offers – and it’s for the same reasons.

But the stock market and the blogosphere are complicated and time-consuming places to hang out. So I’m interested in the various ways that the stock market has been made more user friendly. I want to see if we’re using them all to ease people’s experience of the blogosphere.

To find a good stock to invest in, you need to do research and rummage around. For the layman this can be too much like hard work, and a big drain on time. That’s why we often rely on others for help finding the right stocks.

Who helps us…?

• Newspapers and magazines that offer stock tips
• Financial advisors – some sophisticated, some not
• Fund managers, via the funds they create
• Indexes, like the FTSE100
• Algorithms. A lot of the trading that happens on the stock market today is actually done by computers.
• And the market itself – shares that regularly yield good dividends, get a higher value. That’s the whole point.

It looks like the blogosphere equivalent of an index is something like Nine Rules. The FTSE index is a selection of the biggest hitting corporations on the London Stock Exchange. Nine rules is a bit like that – the creme de la blogosphere get to be in the club.

Funds, and investment trusts in particular, are worth a look. An investment trust is a share in its own right – traded on the market just like any other. But it is a share in a company that does nothing else but buy and sell shares in other companies. The lazier or less expert investor can get the benefit of playing in the market, with much of the risk and effort taken out. They trust the fund manager, who has done well in the past, to continue to select the best stocks and deliver the best return. Interestingly, an investment trust share can trade at a discount or a premium. That means that the market can value a trust *more* (or less) than the total of the shares the trust actually owns. The trust itself can add value, by being well managed, I suppose.

The analogy works for me on the blogosphere. I am interested in investing (my attention) in shares (blogs) that are actively managed (edited) collections of the best shares (blogs) out there. I’m after someone who selects the best blogs in my sector on an active basis. And I want to rely on market ratings to make sure that the manager is doing a good job. If he’s losing readers and rankings on the open blog market, I might switch away from him to another, better managed blog instead.

Anything we can really learn from this? Well – there’s more than one way to navigate a complex market. And there’s probably plenty of opportunity left for organisations and individuals out there who want to help us.

And that begs the question: can people make money being blog fund managers? Or do they do it for love?

From the Nussbaum on Design blog at Business Week…

“…thinking about it in terms of “one-off” innovation (get me another iPod> quick!) doesn’t make your company innovative. But thinking about The Discipline of Innovation–and what that implies in terms of building a culture and organization–does.”

Absolutely! Brilliant innovations don’t just appear from nowhere. They can only grow in environments that support and encourage innovation.

You also need a culture that understands what worthwhile innovation really is. One interesting viewpoint:

“The only worthwhile innovation is a profitable innovation.”

This is from Payback, a book by some clever folk at BGC. And there’s a lot to be said for it. (Though there are some very worthwhile government and humanitarian services which are not profitable, surely).

The book talks about the “cash curve”, the S-shaped curve of cumulative cash spent or earned during the course of an innovation project. The curve dips below zero to start with, as you invest in the project, then, ideally, rockets above zero as sales of your product or service takes off. Except that for many projects, it never makes it back above zero, but bumbles along in the red, requiring an endless stream of further investment to keep it alive.

Successful products usually need a large volume of sales before they achieve payback. So the key factor, they point out, is not time to market – it’s time to volume.

This is great ammunition for supporters of user-centred design (UCD). Organisations that understand they are trying to reach high volume need to invest in customer satisfaction – making sure their product is easy to use and fits with customer needs. In other words, they should do UCD.

UCD is about taking a longer term view. It’s about selecting the right projects based on an understanding of user needs. And it’s about not just getting the product out the door, but getting the right product out of the door, even if it takes a bit longer. That way, the cash curve doesn’t flat-line in the longer term.

So there we are. Yet more evidence to support the UCD case: UCD reduces your time to volume.

BBC News says that Dell are going to start shipping consumer desktops with Ubuntu linux on them. For ordinary people to use.

I think this is cool because the geek in my loves unix and the dad in me has no time to actually configure unix boxes to do useful things.
But it made me think: I’m not actually interested in cutting edge products and fads. I’m interested in the stuff that lasts, and that the early majority or even the later majority can adopt. As someone clever said at a conference once: “Getting a video call on your mobile is cool. Getting a video call from your mum really shows that technology is having an impact.”

So if you’re reading ths blog looking for the latest insight into cutting edge technology, you’re in the wrong place. This blog is all about the stuff that makes it, or should be making it, across the chasm and over the adoption curve.

(For an explanation of all this curve and chasm malarkey, see the Wikipedia page about it).

We’re house hunting in South Africa at the moment and we’ve tried just about every property website there is. We’ve seen some shockers, and we’ve been surprised by some very good, usable web design.

When you compare the best performer with the worst offenders, it does highlight how making your website usable really is a very good idea if you want to deliver a worthwhile return on your investment.

Compare these search engine interfaces from the the homepages of…

1. PropertyGenie

2. Remax

Ask yourself a simple question: How quickly can you work out what to do with interface number 1? And what about number 2?

Quite.

Ah, Remax. Why are some suburbs in dark blue with [All] written next to them? What is the suburb filter box for? Will you remember to hold down CTRL to select multiple suburbs? Which parts of step 2 will light up when? What “payment type” will you select – can you pay in bushelss of corn?

The Remax functionality is all good. Those are all criteria that users might want to filter by at some point. But most people won’t want to set most of those criteria most of the time. And providing a huge control panel to let people do all that stuff at the beginning is just bewildering and off-putting for most normal house hunters.

A couple of key lessons that good designers have known for years:

1. Don’t ask people to set search scope before when they are entering their search query. If people want to search for something, let them type it in and see how many results there are. Then when the necessity of narrowing the search becomes apparent, people will feel motviated to go to the trouble of doing so. Proprty Genie gets this right. A simple search first, supported with solid geaopgraphical data that matched my desired suburb on the first attempt. Then simple filtering controls that get shown after you’ve seen the initial search results.

2. Make easy things easy and difficult things possible. In other words, design for the main things that people want to do and make those things very, very easy. Then add the “edge case” functionality in low priority places where it won’t clutter things up.

Remax have put up an interface that ignores these two basic interaction design patterns. And as a result, I’m sure they are missing out on a lot of traffic and a lot of business. There’s a lesson for every website owner in there somewhere.

Property Genie goes on do display some fairly usable sort controls too.

These controls show you (a) that you can sort and (b) what you can sort by. Nice. (I’m struggling to tell which radio butotn goes with which label though).
If Property Genie granted me three wishes, though, I’d ask for larger property pictures and a click through to the agent’s own site for more details.

The third wish would be a lovely villa on Clifton Beach. But that’s another story.

Behind the curve as ever, I read about Andrew Keen and his “anti-web2.0” stance in the Observer. Thanks, also to Matt Buckland, for pointing me at it.

“The author and entrepreneur has stunned his adopted country with a book that accuses bloggers and other evangelists for the web of destroying culture, ruining livelihoods and threatening to make consumers of new media regress into ‘digital narcissism’.”

I think Mr Keen is doing well at generating PR and that’ll make sure he sells lots of copies of his new book. Clever chap. He’s also acting as “the opposition” and every power needs an opposition to keep it on its toes.

But there’s a lot of hot air here too.

A lot of the stuff that people worry about is teen culture. Grown-ups have always thought that teens were doing something shocking that would undermine society etc etc. And much of the blogging/community stuff that he seems to object to is no exception. Young people do dumb things and think they are clever. And they do things that look dumb and are actually clever. It’s all mixed up in there somewhere. And then they grow up, their revolution becomes mainstream and they start worrying about what the next wave are up to.

It’ll all come out in the wash.

The problem comes when we try to tar everyone with the same brush. In interaction design you divide up your target audience – using personas usually. And you don’t expect all your users to want the same things or do the same things. Some TV programmes appeal to more mature audiences, some are for kids.  Some books appeal more to women, some more to men.
It’s much the same here. Some college students will blog avidly about trivia. But that doesn’t mean we all have to. Or that we all have to read it.

But a few things I do believe:

• There is far too much to read, and I don’t know what’s important. As a result I read almost nothing. I need to go find something that’ll digest stuff for me.
• Anyone who wants to keep up will have to spend hours every night reading, instead of watching TV. And wasn’t it watching TV that was supposed to be rotting our minds, according to the previous generation…?
• Most of the people who are not talented at communication and authorship will not get a big audience because people will not enjoy their stuff. And the ones who are talented deserve a chance to prove themselves without having to slog through mindless “cat-up-tree” stories on local rags. It’s a free market thing. The survival of the fittest.
• I do believe in the power of the network and the wisdom of crowds. I think that mechanisms that let us connect and share quickly, in large numbers and with some kind of non-hierarchical structure enable us to do things that we, the human race, have never been able to achieve before. That is exciting. And I think it’s good for the world economy too. Read “The wisdom of crowds” to see the evidence that this stuff works.
• Alas, just like in democracy, you actually have to do your bit and vote. So that means I’m condemned to wading through trivia so that I can lend my support to the good stuff. Bother.

So. Well done, Andrew Keen, for causing a stir. Well done, everybody else, for driving humanity to new levels of achievement though Darwinian crap-filtering. Keep up the good work. I’m off to stare at a blank wall for a while.