Convenience: The Third Essential of Customer Centric Busines

The highly anticipated third article exploring the role of Convenience in service design from Different's seven-part series on the Essentials of a Customer Centric Business has arrived. It seems to be generating quite a buzz in the twitterverse! Moving upward in the pyramid from the previous two articles on Being Predictable and Efficient, I spell out the rationale for why convenience is important, the four ways to achieve convenience, and the times when convenience may not matter. Have you ever wanted to know the origins of the convenience store, what the most-popular camera for uploading images to Flickr is, or how requiring more effort from users can seem to be convenient? Have a read to find out.

Thanks again to UXMag, our partners in this exciting series.

Follow Different on twitter @DifferentUX (or me @TravelingRE) to stay up to date on all of Different's articles and happenings.

Why you need The Seven Essentials of Customer Centric Business

Recently we began a series of articles with uxmag detailing out The Seven Essentials of Customer Centric Business. Some may ask why they should remodel their company around these ideals when everything seems fine with their revenue and sales. I hope to answer that critical question here and to provide some understanding for why we promote these essentials to our clients. All of us here at Different sincerely hope that you enjoy this ongoing series of articles and find them as valuable as we do.

Joseph L. Borne

Principal Experience Architect

Different

 “Something has changed and we just can’t seem to figure out what it is!”

I heard this statement recently from a client during a meeting. It wasn’t the first time I’ve heard it and I know it won’t be the last. Companies around the world and even whole industries are asking this question and scratching their heads in bewilderment. To make matters worse, the usual channels of marketing and customer information are failing to give actionable insight.  Business leaders sense danger and change, but are blind to its causes and currents.

It’s no wonder that so many are worried by the current market. There are customer and market dynamics in play right now that have never been seen before in confluence. It’s a very scary time to be in business, particularly to be a company that’s been in business a long time. Change is afoot in a way the world has never seen and only the smartest, fastest, and strongest companies will survive the economic revolution of the next decade.

Customers under economic pressure, but with almost infinite choices equal a recipe for revolution.

What’s causing this? Well that is the big question and the answer is not simple. It starts with the complex economic situation the world is experiencing. The overload of debt, taxation crisis, spending overflow, and investment stagnation has filled the consumer indexes with fear and uncertainty. In the USA, housing markets are in a severe depression and high unemployment is making the situation worse. Europe is experiencing a similar issue on a lesser, but still concerning scale. No one seems to have a simple solution; and indeed there probably isn’t one. Many economic experts are predicting a market correction on a scale to rival the great depression of the 1930s. Whether these predictions are true or not is irrelevant. They are simply the voice decrying the situation and how we feel about it.

These conditions are putting consumers under a great deal of pressure. Many families and individuals are watching their spending very critically and making each spending choice after considerable thinking. Investments are seeing the same pattern and assets are swiftly moving into the most risk averse strategies.

In the new globally connected market the power of the customer will be absolute.

These situations have occurred before and businesses know how to tackle them. Increasing product value, reducing cost, and streamlining for efficiency can mitigate much of the risk in that scenario; but this time a new dynamic is complicating things. Consumers find themselves with virtually unlimited purchasing and service options. The advent of the internet spawned a new market where provincial offering limitations have disappeared. If customers don’t like the choices they have at their local stores, the internet can provide a plethora of options with delivery to their door. This new way of servicing customers has driven delivery expenses down to the point that often products can be purchased online and delivered to the consumer’s home for less than the shelf cost at the local store. Over the last decade the online businesses have refined this model over and over and every year it becomes more attractive. Since these companies don’t have to consider brick and mortar issues, they have been able to focus almost exclusively on the customer experience.  Amazon, Ebay, and their online compatriots have been the cause of death for many more “Mom and Pop” stores than Wal-Mart.

Some groups and organisations are seeking to slow or stop the encroachment of big businesses on their main street; but remain oblivious to the infinite digital freeway that runs right beneath it. Many of the organisations that have noticed this online progression are turning to legislation and trade agreements as a solution; but all of these tactics will fail. The new dynamic is picking up speed and momentum and it is bearing down on the old market like a juggernaut.

How do companies or industries avoid finding themselves in the path of this? Well the first step is to acknowledge that the toothpaste is out of the tube and there is no stuffing it back in. Even if all of the efforts to contain this new market were put into law; they would still fail as the new system would simply adapt and flow around these laws. Legislation can only restrict those who agree to be bound and the allure of the massive profits to be made incentivise companies and countries to create havens for these business models. The new models also have techniques and technology at their disposal that can neutralize any remaining obstacles.

Fighting this change isn't merely futile - it could be deadly.

From the time Napster launched in 1999 and until its original incarnation was shut down in 2001, it demonstrated one clear fact to the collective consumer consciousness:

“You have an almost infinite array of choices for little or no cost and your current providers have been keeping them from you.”

Of course, there are those who would argue that the shutdown of Napster meant that the courts were the answer to stopping this new threat. The recording industry learned how wrong this approach was as dozens of new services sprung up to replace the recently expired Napster. These new music sharing services swiftly learned to become decentralized in distribution and tracking, in order to avoid having a central entity for lawsuits or legislation to address. They additionally utilized encryption to avoid censorship through technology, and in the end open sourced their code to shield their developers. Like water, the new market adapted and flowed around all obstacles and conquered an industry that was once seen as invincible.

Now, desperate to stem the tide, the recording studios have turned to suing their consumers. This tactic of biting the hand that feeds them has proven very expensive and has offered very little financial return. It has also damaged their reputation and gained them no sympathy from the public. No one will argue that the music industry does not have the right to protect their intellectual property; but being right hasn't protected them from the changing market.

The leaders in the new market will be those who follow The Seven Essentials of Customer Centric Business.

Business should not waste time trying to sue, legislate, advertise or market against the coming change. All the effort placed into those doomed tactics is better spent in learning how ride this new wave through innovation. Apple demonstrated a winning strategy with the creation of Itunes, giving consumers exactly what they wanted – instant access to the broadest array of music possible with a price point they could accept. While the so called music industry experts tried to figure out how to make everyone go back to paying for a CD with 1 good song and 13 bad ones; a technology company that everyone thought was dead leapfrogged them. Of course, some people still choose to illegally download songs; but those downloads eat further into the recording industries profits while Apple continues to post record earnings.

The last and most important step is to adopt the Seven Essentials of Customer Centric Business. The only way you can thrive in the coming environment is to demonstrate clearly and constantly why consumers would want to do business with you over your competition. Beyond price and value, businesses will have to create an overall consumer experience that can overcome traditional barriers. The Seven Essentials of Customer Centric Business demonstrate a tiered approach to success.

This is not an easy proposition and only those with courage, commitment, and a willingness to let go of the old ways will be successful. Will you be one of them?

Stay tuned here and at UXmag over the next few months as we detail out the Seven Essentials of Customer Centric Business. Each of the seven has been researched extensively and time tested through application. They have become a part of our internal DNA here at Different and they help to drive our success. As part of our anniversary celebration we’ve decided to share them with the UX and business community. It is our sincere hope that these essentials can serve as a guide to those willing to embrace this new market.

Gyms are Used Car Dealerships for the Body

I’ve been trying to join a gym in Sydney.  I don’t have particularly special needs. I like a treadmill, some upper and lower body weight machines, and maybe a group class or two. I generally know within a minute that the gyms I visit at have what I need.  The one thing I can't discover quickly is cost. Actually, it takes 30 minutes to find out how much the gym will cost me. Why, you ask? It’s certainly not posted on the website or in the gym lobby.

When I visited the gyms the Enrollment Specialist had some questions for me. They wanted to know my personal details, my workout goals, what I do at the gym, when I go to the gym, how I feel at the gym, my last gym, any medical conditions, when I last used the bathroom… Every time I’m fed the line that the information will help them determine what sort of program is right for me, but EVERY SINGLE gym so far has only 2 programs, yearly and monthly.

Being a bit fed up, at the last gym I visited, I arrived and asked directly for the monthly costs.  I politely refused to fill out my personal details and history, respectfully declined  four times to take a tour, civilly begged off going through the class calendar, and regretfully apologized to the Enrollment Specialist several times for not being more forthcoming and pliant, but really “I’m  just looking for the monthly costs.” That’s right. I…..apologized…..to the salesman!  After 20 minutes of circular conversation, he went back behind the counter, grabbed a postcard with all the information I wanted, and then gave me a disdainful look as he walked me to the door. How dare I not want to hear the sales pitch! What an uneducated charlatan I must be!

I felt like I had just come out of a greasy used car dealership using all of their wiles to snare me.

• ·         Make me come in for a visit to ask questions
• ·         Throw all sorts of detailed information at me that I don't want
• ·         Keep me there far longer than I want
• ·         Collect as much personal information as possible to make me feel committed
• ·         Up-sell, Up-sell, Up-sell!
• ·         Hide the bottom line until you’re deeply engaged

That leaves me with two burning questions. #1 How can you effectively sell a service when you obviously don’t understand your customer’s experience? #2 How can you be successful when your model doesn’t differentiate you?

Let’s talk about a sales success story. The Saturn car company, a subsidiary of General Motors, branded itself as a “different kind of car company.” While their engineers were toiling away, their market research team was talking with consumers and dealers around the US and came out with the no-haggle user-focused corporate brand. Not only did American’s flock to the dealerships to buy the cars, but tens of thousands from around the country attended yearly picnics at the factory site in Tennessee to celebrate the Saturn community. (Sadly, the quality of the Saturn product was not as long lasting or competitive as the corporate culture and brand.) Similar examples can be seen in Virgin's success with airlines or Netflix and video rental. They focus not only on what service they provide, but how they provide that service.

Obviously, in the end a necessary product or experience will trump a poor sales experience, but an absolute way to raise your product and brand’s visibility is to differentiate yourself. If your business lives in a packed marketplace like economy cars and gyms it is difficult to create a unique product, but stepping outside that thought space and creating a positive experience where the industry currently fails can be your key to success.

Interface Spelunking - Part 2

A few weeks ago Anthony and I had a discussion about some of our frustrations with modern software interfaces. The interesting thing was that we had both been thinking about it from completely different angles. Whereas Anthony was thinking about how users are being forced to plunge in and out of interfaces in order to excavate the information they needed, I had recently noticed some very elegant examples of interfaces that “surfaced” pertinent data.

Hot and Cold

While I agree that business operations is certainly an important place where spelunking is causing irritation, inefficiency, and loss of productivity, it is hardly the only one. These same dynamics are playing themselves out in the personal device arena, but more rapidly. What is interesting about the smart phone and tablet field is that the incredibly competitive market is forcing rapid change. Things happen there in a matter of weeks versus the glacial years that enterprise applications can take to evolve. I think the enterprise market could learn a lot by looking at the most recent crop of tablets and how they manage information.

Uh oh, here comes the geek talk

Before we start comparing tablets and smartphones, I think we should take a few minutes to examine a fascinating cycle we are repeating in the world of human/computer interaction. What we are seeing is the sunset of the era of bloated PC applications and the return to smaller linked utilities. Understanding this interaction cycle is important when we discuss what’s happening now. Let me start by dissecting one of the oldest, and most elegant interactions I think I’ve seen in computing:

$bash: cat log.txt | uniq | grep acct | grep smith | less

I realise that most readers were lost at the dollar sign above, so I’ll take a few minutes to explain. You see, way back in the salad days of computing when UNIX ruled information systems, you had to be able to process data using a set of tiny little applications. Like itty bitty versions of Rain Man, these applications could only do one thing each but they did it very well and very fast.

By stringing them together and having them pass information to each other you could accomplish very complex tasks in a short time frame. You used something called a “pipe” to do this, which was symbolized by the vertical line between the applications. So if I change the above command line into everyday English it would look something like this:

1. Program “cat” - read the file “log.txt” and pass the information to the application “uniq”

2. Program “uniq” - remove any duplicate lines from the file and hand the output to the application “grep”

3. Program “grep” - find every line that contains “acct”, then pass the information back to yourself and search the results for “smith”, then hand the results off to the application “less”

4. Program “less” - display the results on screen

Everything old is new again

The end result was a short list of entries in a log from a guy named “smith” in the accounting department. Crazy huh? Seems complicated and frankly it was. Learning the thousands of little applications and the proper order to combine them in took years of experience. But mastering the most common 20 or so made you a pretty powerful user.

But think about how amazingly powerful a scenario like that would be if you didn’t have to memorize anything!

The truth is, we live in that world now with the tiny apps available for our smart phones/tablets like the iPhone/iPad and the Android based competitors. Moreover, the concept of passing information between these specialized apps for further processing is returning. If we were listening to users over the last decade we would have heard them screaming for this every time they moaned “I just want to be able to get my email!”.

Rain Man 2.0

Thankfully, the small form factor, interface limitations, and lack of input options in smartphones forces designers to question everything in interface design. How do you handle selections when the cursor is as big as a fingertip and the screen as small as the palm of your hand? How do we input data without a keyboard? But the most important question that has arisen lately is this:

What is the interaction length tolerance? - Or in everyday terms, how long can an interaction take before users lose patience with it? 

What we are discovering is that the answer is “short”. A small screen, limited input options, and mobile use means that typical interactions need to be less than 30 seconds. This is typically driven by when people choose to use their mobile, such as while walking or in between other activities. There is also a higher degree of concentration because of the dexterity required. The demand for this means that applications have to be small and focused on doing one task well, just like the little “Rain Men” of yore. It also brings forth a central concept in interface design - surfacing.

Coming up for air, finally

Surfacing means that designers are paying attention to the data that users are most commonly accessing and they are bringing this information up to the earliest point of interaction. Executive dashboards are a good example of this in enterprise software and the iGoogle reader is a fantastic example being driven out in the web space. Instances of this are springing up everywhere from dashboards, to RSS, and desktop gadgets. These innovations are all seeking to help users alleviate the stress and time loss required by spelunking.

I’m frankly stunned that Apple has done such a poor job of noticing this need and addressing it. If you look closely at the iPad and iPhone interfaces you will notice that information is poorly surfaced, or not surfaced at all! The time, wireless status and battery status are always seen, but other lifestyle critical items like email status etc are buried! This is because Apple adapted a launcher metaphor for these devices, rather than a desktop one. They also focused on items that communicated the device status, but not lifestyle and communications status. This was a serious mistake in my opinion. The only visual indication of new email is a number badge attached to the icon or a modal dialog box that pops up over your current activity. This is a loss of persistence and a disruption. Viewing email requires you to launch the application, and within the application you touch the inbox button to get an overview of the inbox. The iPad app gives you a limited scanning capability for mail in your inbox, and the iPhone gives you none at all. Overall you find yourself spelunking for the app, spelunking the app, then spelunking within the app. You’ve used up more than half of your interaction length tolerance right there. Ouch.

 

The limited iPhone and iPad home screens

If you contrast this against the Android, you see a better implementation. The top bar serves as a universal indicator and alert space. This means that things you should be aware of remain visible, no matter what screen you are on, or if you are inside another application. In addition, by using a desktop metaphor the Android allows developers to create active widgets that users can place on any screen. These widgets can display any information that is contained within an application. Doing this allows important information to be available at a glance, requiring little, or no interaction at all. Interaction length is at an absolute minimum.

Widgets and universal notification bar in action on an Android Phone and Tablet

Can we talk?

The second, and equally crucial component of an interface that minimizes spelunking is a contextually aware application communication layer. In laymans terms, this is a component to the OS that allows applications to know about, and pass relevant information to each other. Think back to the original command line I showed and here we see the “pipe” resurrected! For instance, in most smartphones holding your finger on a phone number displayed on a web page will present you with several applications you can pass the information to.

You see this metaphor echoed in other applications, with voice search automatically knowing the names of your contacts and launching your address book entry for that person, rather than googling them. The contact list automatically absorbs and recasts metadata like Facebook connections and twitter information. So looking at someones contact information also shows your their last Twitter and Facebook updates, with one-click jumps to those apps.

Out into the sunlight

What the Android interfaces demonstrate is that when interaction designers and developers work together - users win. When developers create a platform that allows information to be flowed intuitively between applications, designers can create a more fulfilling, and intuitive interface that requires a lot less work on the part of the user. When you add in proper surfacing of relevant data in a timely manner, spelunking essentially stops.

As designers and developers we have an obligation to think about things like this. How and when we deliver information is as important as the information itself. In the end, the best interface is the one that users barely even notice. Information access is the goal, and unlike life it shouldn’t be the journey.

Interface Spelunking - Part 1

Recently I’ve been thinking about spelunking. As the Creative Director of Different, I see a lot of interface designs. Thankfully, I’m proud to be associated with all the ones we design here, because they allow users to use them effortlessly. But when we research within our client’s organisations, we sometimes come across some multi-system, broken-tasked, disjointed horror situations that make me physically wince.

Spelunking: fun in caves, not in UI

 
Spelunking is an outmoded term for ‘caving’ - the recreational sport of exploring caves. It can also be a metaphor for user interface exploration, where a user must explore the features or content of a system by diving deep into a ‘cave’ (i.e. area of a system) to do a task, only to need to come out again to do the next task or step. If you’re an iPhone user, you’ll know what I mean because the interaction requires you use one application at a time. Often you need to use a few to get a task done e.g. copying a web URL into an email requires the use of two applications - web browser and email - which necessitates separate use.

A seamless interface doesn’t require the user to break their flow when doing a task, even if it means the various parts of a system must co-operate behind the scenes like beatific children. Windows Phone 7 uses a ‘fluid’ interface that tries to assuage spelunking by joining many separate applications with one massive scrollable interface, with only the relevant part of it on screen (a bit like looking through a keyhole). But, because large information systems are usually the sum of many software applications developed completely separately, we are often left with some form of interface spelunking.

Spelunking is expensive for business

Most staff of large organisations must become professional-grade spelunkers, which has huge financial implications. These organisations use many systems that each do a particular thing, yet typically none allow the user to move smoothly between them when finding or carting information from one to the next. The Customer Relationship Management system is separate to the Product Information system; the Time Management system is separate to the system managing work-flow; etc. Physical notebooks of scrawled information fragments; copy-and-paste repetitive strain injury; and the quiet repetitious mumblings of staff maxing-out their short-term memory are all telltale signs of a spelunking environment. The impact of this dynamic hits productivity, accuracy and training right in the stomach, leaving staff gasping for air as they “wrangle with the system” because the parts of it are not joined-up.

The next frontier for smart organisations, is in integrating separate systems into something that at least masks their separate and ‘unique’ nature. But that’s a lot easier said than done. As soon as systems get joined up, we lose one attractive feature of separate systems, i.e. redundancy. Like a house of cards, if one part of a joined-up system crashes, then so-too the rest can become unstable.

Even the ‘best’ require spelunking 

I can understand how many systems that are deployed over time by separate vendors can easily lead to interface spelunking and all its inefficiencies. While I think Apple gets most things right, it has failed terribly at this in the past. Did you know that until relatively recently, the Address Book did not integrate with the native Mail application; nor did it with iCal (calendar application)? Not even to share data! Even today, all three are separate applications even though tasks frequently require all three to be used back-to-back. Microsoft has copped a lot of flak in the past for poor software design, but this is one area where Outlook’s one-stop-shop wipes the floor with the competition.

However, the most severe finger-waggling is reserved for the developers of software who force spelunking within the same application. I use a time-management tool called OpenAir that requires the use of four separate areas of the same application to perform one task of setting up a user to enter time against a project! Each step of this task requires the user go to completely separate areas of the service, with no help from the interface to understand that this is what they’re supposed to do. User frustration is one thing, but the loss in productivity it causes is a serious business issue. Imagine the expense of training each new staff member in the finer points of cave exploration...

How labyrinth-like interfaces get made

 
Before we incite violence upon the developers of these labyrinths, we should realise that some of them are in a bad situation too. Working in large Agile development environments poses the risk of creating an interface that mandates spelunking, because many developers work on separate chunks of a system synchronously. Sometimes the pressure on these guys to develop new features is greater than the desire to make the existing features joined up for a seamless customer experience. The only way around that is to work to a design which has been thought through ahead of time... a notion that causes noses to wrinkle in Agile proponents.

The challenge to today’s software designers and developers is, how do you become great tunnelers to join up all the caves represented by each software system or section? Who in your team is responsible for quantifying the costs of spelunking and making the case for burrowing? What does a burrowed interface look like? And with that, I’ll hand off to Joe, who in his next blog post will write about some examples of clever advances in interface tunneling.