Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Recently Netflix in the US changed how their business model works, and in the aftermath they have experienced a steady stream of abuse in the media (here, here, here, and you get the idea), and significant losses in share price. The noise is mainly the sucking sound made by tribes of angry subscribers leaving after price hikes and planned changes to the service (including splitting the service into two separate companies).

What’s interesting about all the hullabaloo, is that some very real principles about what customer service has become are starting to be codified, using the company’s missteps as object lessons of what not to do.

1. Get inside your customer’s heads when it comes to value. You have to do your homework to understand how the price-value equation works for your customers.  Just because there is a way for your planned changes to drop the price for one element of your service, doesn’t mean that your customers view your service that way. It’s like the opposite of how bundling works - you can charge more for bundled services as long as the customer sees a discount hiding in there.  By unbundling their products, NF gave their customers the reverse stress of seeing a full-price paid for each service, rather than a deal.

2. Realize that your best customers don’t care about your business model. It may be obvious to you why you’re making changes to your service or structure, but keep in mind that users see you (hopefully) as a solution to a problem that they have, not an enterprise with a long-range plan.  If you simply have to make a change, then be prepared to show the users how it benefits them directly, not just why it’s good for you.

3. Don’t underestimate the need for continuity amongst your users. Understand that if you’ve done your job right, then your customers feel that THEY own your brand, not the other way around.  There are so many great examples of how angry people can get in this regard: Gap’s logo gaffe, recent Facebook changes, and the list goes on and on.  It’s not that you can’t ever change things successfully, but you have to be sensitive to how it impacts your user community.

4. If (or more likely, _when_) you have to apologize, make sure that you sound humble. It can be grating to read an apology that reads defensive and seems to imply that the reader doesn’t ‘get it’.  Try to sound more like you’ve learned something, rather than you’ve been misunderstood.

Have you learned any other painful nuggets of wisdom regarding customer service for your product or service?

Photo: David Armano, on Flickr

I’ve written a number of rants here on the accomplishments of the User Experience Practice. Not only in terms of being a practice that has always had he focus on the user and human behavior, but, as a result, having a complete view of people’s journey; a view that gives creative solution a visceral understanding of human behavior, as opposed to merely attitudinal consumer insights laced with flat helicopter-macro trends that ad agencies had to work with in the old days. As advertising agencies have had to learn how to go from creating ads (messages) to acts (experiences), not only was having a UX background a great asset personally, but also a key ingredient to the betterment of the communication industry overall.

However, at the same time, I also had been asking myself what the UX community is really up to. say. The last 5-10 years, it has been my impression, that, in terms of the toolset used by Information Architects, Information Designers, Interaction Designers, etc. not much has changed. Sure, UX people have adapted to doing what they do for new devices that have entered the market, but fundamentally, the process of how we go about unearthing user insights and defining and testing experiences, not much seem to have changed, including who UX people work with and how they position themselves in a larger organization.

So it is with great interest that I came across an article by the godfather of UX Jared Spool, who basically poses the question if a new way of working with new sets of skills is required. I found it interesting, but it also sounded like a late wake-up call. In the article I find a confirmation of my previous stance pure-play UX shops have been stagnant for too long. The question Jared takes on and shares with us is one that agencies (digital and fullservice) have been dealing with and solving for quite a while. While the proposed team constellation he describes makes sense, it really isn’t really news to teams in full-service and digital creative agencies that have been dealing with overlapping job descriptions, disciplines, almost unmarriable structural problems for like 10 or so years already. Those who have had the source of business, have made changes to their team structure in similar ways as Jared proposes already.

To be fair, many have failed and had to try again, and many seem to have given up, going back to an old-school model, hoping Armageddon won’t come after all, and I don’t think many figured out the magic bullet. So the article still does the job of heating a debate that needs more action, more trial and error.

Still, I think it is a great Jared shared the state of thinking on the UX team in a larger context. For, a) it shows that while there might be a (somewhat outdated) acrimony between the “ad” agencies with the UX agencies, there are actually things that keeps us from realizing full potential on both sides that we can join forces on, and b) it’s nice that even thoroughbred UXers got their wake up call to start innovating again, and maybe once more be the subject matter force behind fundamental rethinking the role of the communication industry.

That said, after realizing the potential of a new team skill structure and opening the gates to more “collections”, my dear hope is that UXers will join forces to use their skills and knowledge of micro-behavior to find new tools to create overarching behavioral insights that can be more easily used for a differentiated brand experience strategy as opposed to just user experience strategy, regardless if they are pure play descendents of the library sciences or connections planners from a reformed traditional agency world, or social media ninjas who come from the concept development area.

We are all probably damaged somehow, doesn’t mean we can’t all be good.

Saw a video by Hubble Innovations, via Florian Geiger today.

The video outlines the well-know problem of traditional media’s slowly but surely failing business models and claims to be able to solve it.

The Future of media brands - Case Study from Hubble Innovations on Vimeo.

The solution isn’t exactly new: it’s a super-aggregator idea that totally personalized to me, my location, my social network and content/event preferences. Even though they claim rights to the idea, it’s preposterous. This idea already exists in partial solutions already in existing synching and SM integrator solutions. In fact, some could argue: “Isn’t this what Facebook is slowly becoming anyway?”

My take on this is: The concept is a fairly logical and tempting conclusion based on the insight that people would like to have everything in one place and like location awareness. Apart from the title of the video being a misnomer (it doesn’t address the future of media brands but rather paints a picture of a desired user behavior), it will still take quite a while to build its proof of concept.

1. First of all, as we have seen with previous aggregator solutions, it takes a while for people to completely disband their existing behaviors of going to single source. For example, even though RockMelt had a pretty good start through social buzz, actual usage after initial sign-up have dropped. People tend to go back to their fragmented user behaviors until the user experience has matured. For complete adoption of an aggregator idea, the individual moving parts AND their respective user behaviors have to be quite mature. I don’t think this is the case just yet for this concept.  But it probably will in the future, after some other ideas have trailblazed these behaviors, failed on the way, and generated learnings that will ultimately benefit some 20-something entrepreneur who will become a billionaire, again.
2. Apart from the fact that the idea remains quite abstract and hidden behind a fancy animation, it also fails to address how exactly this is supposed to save traditional media, or at least revolutionize or evolve the media and publishing space. Who in fact would be a qualified media partner to build and propel this concept?  The concept does mention how people will pay for this experience, but not who gets paid for it and how. Assuming that the concept can repeat an Apple-like success of starting to pay for content (which is lofty enough), I still think this is the key point in terms of business maturity that will make or break this concept. Which content producers (old media or new) will come together how, produce how, and get paid how. In fact, since so much of news, information and entertainment is based on actual people (users) sharing and producing content without getting paid for it, wouldn’t you have to find a way to have them get a share for their content production and dissemination activities (see flattr) as well? So much of their behavior is about sharing (old) media content that the benefit of doing it just in one place might not be enough (ironically, in a way they are actually responsible for keeping those traditional publishers in business through their activities). In fact, this important social sharing aspect would probably have to be addressed as part of the business model, otherwise it will just remain one more aggregator solution. A solution that until now has no user base (such as Facebook) or no real competence in traditional content creation (such as NYT) and no competence in new content creation (such as Gizmodo or Mashable), and which is my point: no real strategy on HOW to pull it together. It’s a user experience vision, not a business idea, is my point. And, unlike other aggregator and synching solutions such as Read It Later, Instapaper, Dropbox and others which very defined user goals they serve, this solution would have to solve for it all. And we know how many attempts it takes for even the big players (think of Google’s long list of abandoned Betas) to pull it off and how many product ideas need to fail before maturity sets in. So keep trucking, but prepare to wait a while.
3. Also, the concepts just assumes people will behave this way. But when you look at those early adopters who are responsible for initial successes of of new web offerings, you can quickly see that they are quite different from those who come in when a certain maturity has set in. In fact, early adopter behavior is (to some extent) one of not managing and aggregating their experiences, but rather seeking new ones, so that those become trends that then lead to being reaggregated in new experiences again. Therefore, the game facebook plays is a type of tug of war of those users that they need to innovate, while maturing an experience for the large mass to keep them happy while also making sure the innovator group doesn’t get bored.  Facebook has, by and large, played the game the best in comparison to for example local market solutions in Germany and other places. The point is, aggregation happens after innovation. And they are different things to different types of users at different maturity levels. The concept fails to address this (at least in the video). There seems to be no go-to-market strategy.

So, in conclusion: thanks for the video, but a) aggregation itself is not an idea, it’s about how you aggregate, with who and when, and b) the big players have been working on it for a quite a while anyhow and c) you can’t pull it off if you don’t have some background at being expert in at least one area that is key to business success: i.e., producing worthwhile content, or making people pay for content, or innovative payment technology, or maturing a user experience for disparate user behavior profiles.

Mashable has a nice line-up of fashion category branded content benchmarks.

1. Louis Vuitton - Nowness
2. Net-a-Porter - iPad App
3. Club Monaco - Culture Club
4. Alice + Olivia - 4AM Finds
5. Anthropologie - The Anthropologist
6. Gwyneth Paltrow - GOOP
7. French Connection - Manifesto

Read it here.

It seems like there are a lot of dangers out there on the Interwebs lately - but unfortunately most of them seem to self-imposed.

You have services to prevent ‘drunk posting’, by testing your reflexes or shutting down your access to certain profiles when you’re out and about. After all, what happens after 1am might be best left off your profile, right?  You have I Shared What?!, which will show you the amazing amount of data that you have made public or shared with companies you interact with online.  You have campaigns from Brands like Pringles about Helping The Oversharers.  You have Location-Based Anti-Services like Please Rob Me Now.  And, you have spoofs from SNL about keeping your content ‘mom safe’ - the Damn It, my mom’s on Facebook Filter.  (Sadly that technology may still be a little ways off… Well, we can dream.)

In all these examples, we are seeing the tremors and precursors of difficult times coming for heavy users of social media, where their need for connection will eventually exceed their comfort level at how responsible (or, more commonly, irresponsible) they have been with their data. As Paul Adams from Google pointed out in his excellent slideshow, even though some people practically live on social networks, that doesn’t mean that they understand how their choices about their data can affect them down the line.

Peter Cullen, chief privacy strategist at Microsoft, was quoted at the Family Online Safety Institute conference in a recent Reuters article that cybercrime is so rampant that all internet companies now have a responsibility to protect user data, and for sure it’s true that Brands could be doing more.

We have to ask how Brands can help people to take responsibility for their data.  And there are a lot of ways to do it.

1. By adopting responsible opt-in practices and making opt-out easier.  There’s no excuse for not having a clean subscription list, and for marketers that means two things: A. You don’t want anyone on it who is unaware that they subscribed. And B. You don’t want anyone on it who does want to receive your material or information.  It’s a waste of money to send communications to people who don’t want to participate, and in some cases you can actively damage your brand: just imagine what the person will say to their friends about you if they say “WHY do they keep SENDING me these things!” every time they check their email.
2. By just protecting unauthorized access to customer data.  It should go without saying, but your security processes and infrastructure should be secure, including both restricted physical access and data access for both profile and transactional data.  It doesn’t matter how good your policies are if someone walks off with your customer’s emails.
3. By providing centralized, simple to edit privacy pages. It’s amazing that some sites still don’t offer one page in your profile that has all the controls on it.
4. By giving visibility to how others can see the customer’s data.  Ensuring that any externally-facing profiles have a view for the user to see what they shared.
5. By offering additional services that organize and visualize data exposure. Educating your consumer can lead to long-lived, positive and profitable relationships.  If your Brand doesn’t control data, then consider partnering with companies that specialize in visualization/redaction services.  (Even light-hearted ideas like the anti-drunk-posting service can be helpful here.)
6. By not collecting more data than is needed for segmenting and personalizing for the customer.  We all know that long forms are a sure-fire way to ensure increasing uneasiness for your customer.  But even more important is the need to partner with the customer.  Let them know why they should provide you any information at all.  People respond better to companies who trust them enough to be honest about why they want certain data. Ensuring that users have a clear benefit to providing the data in the first place means never having to say you’re sorry.

How are you protecting your consumers from themselves?  What trust can you build with users through how you treat their data?

For us, it’s all about behavior. Many tools exist to research behavior, but a new service by SeeVolution really caught my eye on Mashable today because of its ease of use and accessibility.

SeeVolution is a real-time analytics, heatmap and alert system that overlays all the data on the user’s website and you can do it with an easy include on your website.

So, thanks to our colleague Karen Green in Chicago, we received an iPad today in the office mail.

After finding a workaround for the fact the the German Appstore doesn’t work for the iPad yet, we started playing around a bit. Apart of noticing how crappy iPhone apps look on the iPad, there are some first observations.

First off, the device is pretty amazing and we can see how it has the power to alter a lot of human behavior. But in the first moments, it’s not changing behaviors radically, it’s augmenting them. Funnily, when you use it to read magazines and newspaper apps, you revert to analog user behavior. The interesting thing is that it becomes a combination of your analog user behavior with digital interaction expectations. What this means is that User Experience professional are designing for both kinds of worlds when it comes to magazine apps. Seems pretty obvious, but when you start playing around with it you also notice a lot of gaps between those two different ways of usage. So it will be a matter of how well XPs and Designers fill that gap. You no longer do print layout or interaction design. You will have to know how to both without compromises for the print type medium and the weblike medium.

Case in point: we feel the NYT App works with much more expectation conformity than the Popular Science App. It works like a newspaper except it has some interactive elements. Even the contained advertising isn’t at all surprising or weird to the user. It’s what you would expect from a newspaper with the cachet of NYT. Like any good user experience, you don’t notice how great the usability is. It however needs a little more interactive stuff at the right place.

The popular science application however, doesn’t really quite seem what it is yet. It looks amazing, but it has an odd usage paradigm that is neither analog nor interactive nor an easy to use amalgam of both. From navigating to flipping pages and a lack of real interactivity to not being able to differentiate the advertising, it just doesn’t feel there yet.

So, I am sure web User Experience heuristics will apply for the iPad as well, but they will also radically alter. Maybe heuristics will be created for types of magazines in similar ways that different heuristics have been developed for differing types of sites, i.e. e-commerce sites vs news portals vs social networks. Finding that right user experience will probably go a long way in terms of really working for a unique brand experience that helps position the brand.

Second, apart from the obvious changes need to develop applications for private end users, when you look at this through the lens of the brand or marketing person, you get tons of ideas instantly on how to make brands relevant in this context. The long touted “brand user experience” can really happen here with the best of all media channel worlds. Also an interesting thought might be on whether the user experience paradigm of whatever eMagazine you advertise in influences your ad experience. Since ads can be interactive, their interactivity might have to embedded into the magazine’s usage paradigm to really work. Spinning cars in automobile ads are nice, but there’s probably more. Or, of course it will need to be so special that you want to interact with it regardless. The potential of print ads with stopping power: it might be back.

Third, not just that, while we believe private end users will probably keep the iPad at home (because, let’s be honest: it is NOT a working tool for the types of thing we need to do at the office, barring some exceptions), the possibilities for specific industries literally lie in your hand. Really anyone who could directly profit from bridging a analog-digital gap or augmenting existing processes and information flows will have a field day with this: car dealers, retailers, logistics, restaurants, you name it. Not just for marketing, but also internal processes. And, of course marketing departments of all types of industries will not pass this up to do their name generation, promos, etc with it.

So, while it might take some time to become mainstream, it looks like exciting times for everyone. Designers get to design in a new way, marketers to market in a new way and newspapers can survive with a new type of advertising again. Almost to good to be true.

We will do some user testing on it and report back.

Most of you have probably seen the recent Steve Jobs presentation which included a few minutes on their planned iAds platform. (watch it here, starts at 44:00).

Now, apart from this being a pretty cool thing for everyone involved who wants to make ad money (marketers, developers, agencies) there are three things which come to mind:

1. Do conventional online ads experiences really deliver no emotion and won’t iPhone ads have the same problems with click through?

Okay, first off all, unlike Steve says, I believe there have been many examples of emotional ad experiences in online ads. The real question, though, has always been: are they all relevant in the user’s context? As always, people hate being interrupted in what they are doing when they go to an online portal. So how will this be different on iPhones?

Sure, click-throughs will improve because there is now a seamless transition in the app to ad and back to app. However, let’s not muddy the issue: this is just fixing a problem apps have while online portals really don’t so much (You can easily go back to the portal from an ad). Still, the human behavior of not wanting to interrupted in my task flow by advertising will probably stay the same. And apart from the fact that you always have your phone with you and it’s location-aware, it’s not like iPhones ads (and the examples he showed) are much more interactive or interesting than stuff you used to get on a Microsite anno 2000. This is solely a function of how creative the brand or their agency wants to make their app (or in old days, microsite) experience.

I think Steve just pulled the “more emotional” trick to make iAds look more interesting to brand managers, who are driven by the notion that Advertising has to be emotional and creative. Also, he is attaching this promise to an amazing track record in creating new platforms for brands to which no brand manager can say no, especially because there is a lot of frustration in the online marketer community on online metrics and really understanding what to do. So, if he can make his community happy through delivery of a simple to use platform,  he will make a lot of money. (see point 3).

2. Do people really not use search on iPhones when they really want to find something?

There is no doubt that when you have a content and subject matter related need that is covered by one of your apps, the chances are high you are going to use Yelp, Qype and the like to “search”. For that to be true though, those apps have to be highly embedded into your lifestyle. How many apps do you have on your iPhone that you don’t even use? On my iPhone it’s 80% of my apps I don’t regularly use. It’s like this: you liked the idea of them, downloaded them but you haven’t made part of your daily behavior. So, yes, for apps you use regularly use this works well. But for free apps (mainly games) getting people to branded content is still just advertising (see point 1).

So I really don’t know how that argument even helps with Steve’s case. I doubt people who search stuff in a topic area that is not embedded in their lifestyle that will first try to find a matching app in the Appstore, make the purchase decision, evaluate the app and then use it to search.  Therefore, for everything else people will use Google Maps on the go. Rest assured, we are going to do some UX research to check this out.

And to be absolutely blunt: aren’t apps just like web portals and iAds just like online advertising? Think about it. When you go to your few favorite news, sports, and topic of interest portals it’s like your few favorite often used apps on the iPhone. And Ads? Well, there’s ads that try to interrupt on those portals you go to. And now, they will be everywhere on the iPhone. Brilliant. Advertising has paid the livelyhood of all mediums so far:  print magazines, radio stations, tv stations, and online portals. In the future it will pay for app development.

Only difference is: this channel is owned only by Apple, the way to create for the channel is owned by Apple, the delivery and distribution platform is owned by Apple, and guess what? The media agency is Apple (see point 3). Well done.

3. Only 60% revenue goes to the application owner?

Imagine you had to pay 40% to your media agency for letting you use their media buying, and imagine that this media agency doesn’t actually have to do anything for you because you will still need to actually still do the stategy, creative and program the frigging ad. Wow. Granted, iPhones users right now still represent are very interesting and affluent target audience. But still, 40% percent?? If anyone can pull this off, it’s Steve Jobs.

So yeah, old wine in new skins, where the new skin is a single platform business and license to print money. Genius.

With Facebook’s forthcoming announcements about the changes to Fan Pages, it seems relevant to bring up the odd situation that marketers and their agencies sometimes find themselves in when things like this change.  That old favorite for the digital world: Catch-up!

(Some elements of the coming changes were leaked here on ClickZ where it states that the news was sent in an email to some agencies).

Facebook knows what it has in terms of an audience marketers want access to, and users know that they have a lot of control when they’re in the FB walled garden, so changes like the move from “Become a Fan” to “Like” as an opt-in call-to-action are sure to put lots of people into a lather, and sure to get Facebook some of that user backlash they have gotten so used to lately.

A big question for me, is how quickly are marketers ready to make changes based upon this new shift?  In some ways, and especially in the case of Brands that actively use social platforms, changes like this can sometimes feel like someone keeps re-coding the internet every few months.  As soon as you get users acquainted with how things work, the rules change.  Most improvements seem to head the company/platform in the direction of streamlining or simplifying, but some missteps are bound to happen (I don’t think I ever really understood the difference between my newsfeed and livefeed).

The question, is, are you ready?  Do you have your specifications documented and know how the new changes will affect your users?  Do you have people looking into how the other changes coming can help make this change less of an issue?

Or are you planning to play catch-up all summer? 

Florian Geiger found a great article by Robert Fabricant on the future rules of engagment in terms of design. For years, UCD (User-centered design) has been the staple of every experience planner, information architect and interaction designer. In the light of the current crisis, Robert asks some tough questions, pushing to innovate in the experience planning and design areas and challenges the very basics of contemporary design practice.

We have been operating under the assumption that the primary challenge is to convince businesses to focus on fulfilling user needs with higher quality products, with more meaningful experiences? But what if the ‘users’ themselves are the problem?

In his article, Robert discusses new dimensions of social value that currently are not considered in the design process. After web2.0 it would be easy to agree that this is more than necessary. I agree with him that the holy grail of experience design cannot just be a quotient of user tasks completed and pain points eliminated on the single user journey to a successful transaction. Moving from the individual to the collective brings with it a focus on joy points derived from social value. Hence, as Robert call out, we have to plan and design for scial systems from the get-go. But how?

But engaging with communities is fundamentally different. We are not merely substituting one center (the user) for another (the group). With communities, the means of engagement and influence exist across the participants not within a single person. Value is created and shared dynamically through cooperative activities that are not often apparent from the outside. They emerge from within.

Yes, and it isn’t new. Old-school discplines such as PR have understood that engaging communities is driven by an inside force. While a rational decision making process of an individual (or a single user) is usually based on only one’s own black or white processing of the experience, dealing with a community means being part of a phenomen where everyone has a different experience, even if they are at the same time and place. Hence local relevance and offering a communual benefit, even if is not black and white is always part of a social force. Grassroot movements are good example of this. He continues…

As much as we can look at the external symbols of communities (such as status and reputation) we cannot appreciate the nuance of social behavior without participating. Certainly not to the degree that is needed to support effective design solutions.

To learn more about his techniques on how to design from “the inside out”, check the rest of the article here.

This should be interesting not just to experience planners.