Buzzkill

I’ve been struggling for days to put into words my reaction to the launch of Google Buzz. But the phrase I can’t get out of my head is “HOW could they screw up THIS MUCH?”

Well here’s how: Google took Gmail, one of the most widely used web services on the planet, and modeled a quantum change in its behavior with an insulated, private, corporate, top 1% tech-savvy user base.

Google Buzz creates an instant social network based on your email history. Google engineers wrote an algorithm to analyze years of correspondence in users’ Gmail accounts. At launch, by default, these associations were automatically linked and shared with everyone else in your "network." [Google has already modified the default behavior twice in response to criticism].

Apparently, Google tested Buzz internally for months prior to public launch last week. Unfortunately, the controlled conditions of corporate email are a poor stand-in for conditions “in the wild” of a public email service.

You could imagine that the post-launch backlash could have been anticipated with a bit of forethought, even an afternoon meeting that went something like this:

AGENDA
1. What types of people use Gmail?
2. What do they use it for? Who do they communicate with and why?
3. Does our internal beta account for those types of uses?
4. If not, how do we introduce this service to people who aren’t like us?

At a bare minimum, identify a set of people who represent a cross section of users: A grandparent who switched from AOL; a high school junior with an active and evolving social circle; a struggling factory worker in a hostile political environment; a professional with a secretive private life.

Then, just as a sanity check, ask “Is there anything problematic with mining the history of their person-to-person emails and creating a single transparent group from that list?”

For many things, Google’s approach—develop, internal beta, release, measure, adjust—is an adequate way to stumble towards a better experience. That approach takes good ideas, puts them in play, then sands down the rough edges and suggests enhancements. For something as significant as combining email and social networking, it’s toxic.

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The Barcode Hunt

I'm a frequent Costco shopper—buying things in bulk just makes sense for a growing family. Every trip has the same ritual to it; find the things we need, avoid the things we don't, try lots of samples (a.k.a. lunch) and then... wait in the enormous lines. Many people dread going to Costco solely because of the long lines. I would hazard to guess that this is one of the biggest friction points in their customer experience.

So, what's the problem? While there are lots of small factors that slow things down, one stands out in my mind—I like to call it 'the barcode hunt'.

To illustrate: By the end of my Costco trip I'm ready to be done, and the toddler that's usually with me is WAY ready to be done. So, while waiting in line I try to organize my cart so the checker can scan the large items in the cart and get us on our way quickly. But invariably there are a few things—always heavy and bulky on the bottom of the cart—that need to be moved to find the barcode. By my guesstimation, this box dance burns about 30 seconds per transaction. Multiply that by all the shoppers Costco sees in a day, and you can see why the lines are always so long.

But what could Costco do to speed things up?

Yeah, in a future world of RFID and spimes this problem will wondrously disappear—or so we've been told (I'm still waiting for my jetpack). But in the short term, there's lots of time being wasted.

My modest proposal could save those 30 seconds: Print the barcode on all 6 sides of as many products as possible.

Every item in the cart would be scannable in any position, speeding the checker's task and getting me on my way faster.

A change like this could work wonders for checkout lines everywhere, including self-checkout kiosks. (for some fun ethnography: go watch people using self-checkout kiosks find the barcodes on products—it's an eye opening experience). But I focus on Costco for two specific reasons: motivation and muscle.

Motivation

Costco has one of the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the country. They sell good products at good prices, stand behind all the goods they sell and go out of their way to treat their employees well. They have crafted a customer experience that, with the exception of the lines, is top notch. Having proven that they 'get' customer experience, it seems that a relatively small change like this could take hold.

Muscle

Costco is an 800lb retail gorilla that uses their market muscle to get better pricing and quality from their suppliers. If they choose to, they could dictate barcode location rules to their suppliers. Costco also has a huge house brand, 'Kirkland Signature', where they have complete control of the final form of their packaging and could easily shift to a 6 barcode design.

How about it Costco, will you make my next lunch visit, err I mean, shopping trip a bit more streamlined?

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We cannot accept that behavior

I bought some concert tickets online a few days ago. For once I was online and ready as the tickets were going on sale at 10am.

09:58am ─ I clicked through a maze of links to finally arrive at a page where it seemed like I’d be able to buy tickets.

09:59am ─ I continually refreshed the page until a “buy tickets” button appeared.

10:00am ─ Once it finally showed up I clicked the big friendly button and was taken to a page that required even more clicking around before eventually presenting me with an “add to cart” button. Pressing it presented me with this dialog:

10:01 ─ I filled in the form as quickly as possible and clicked “join now.” Then I got this error message:

Paaaaaardon me?!?

I stared at my computer screen for a minute sorta wishing it had a face so I could punch it.

10:02am ─ As I sat there feeling frustrated, and a little insulted, all the good tickets were being snapped up by people with one word last names like Smith and Baker. Then I had to decide whether to hyphenate my last name or remove the space, trying to anticipate the consequences of the decision for will-call or credit card payments.

10:05am ─ I finally purchased my 2 tickets, using an improvised last name. (I can no longer recall what solution I had to use to make it work.)

Though I managed to get tickets I was very indignant after being told that my last name was unacceptable. Can you imagine going down to the box office to buy tickets and having the guy behind the counter tell you that he cannot accept your name? That seems absurd! (unless of course you’re shopping from the soup nazi) Yet we encounter rude and insulting behavior from interfaces all the time.

Software has replaced people in so many of our daily transactions, from buying concert tickets to shoes and groceries. Computers bring obvious improvements to the table: they can provide instant comparisons, full feature lists and recommend similar items more easily than a person could. In fact computers could make this a fantastic experience by providing a very quick, very flexible way of choosing the right seat at the right price if they didn’t just focus on just automating the analog transaction, but that’s a whole other blog post. Even in this context of database transactions it's time software started learning some manners and stopped hurling insults whenever we ask it to do something difficult.

If the request is truly impossible, at the very least inform me politely, and tell me what I need to do to make it work. For example, "We're terribly sorry but our system is unable to deal with spaces in names. If you could please remove it we'll sign you right up." That’s probably a bit wordy, but better than "we cannot accept your name" without telling me why, or what I can do to make it acceptable. The best case is for the software to deal with whatever my last name happens to be, fixing the problem for me so that I don’t have to know or care that it’s database can’t accept spaces.

If we want our products to be liked, we need to design them to behave in the same manner as a likeable person.¹ Our software should be polite, but more than that it needs to be considerate and take into account our needs and goals.

¹ Cooper, Reimann & Cronin. About Face 3. Indianapolis: Wiley, 2007 249-285

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Stratus Air: A Cooper concept project

When we saw the topic of this year's I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review concept category, we thought it would be fun to put together an entry. As frequent travelers, we were particularly inspired by the brief: design a graphic, object, or environment that would improve the experience of air travel.

We thought our approach was a good mix of practicality and inspiration; a premium loyalty service enabled by helpful bits of technology that would ease the pain and smooth the turbulence of business travel. Did we expect to win? Absolutely. Even though the judges didn’t share our enthusiasm, we’re happy with what we came up with, and we wanted to share it with you.

We present Stratus Air.

(To view at full screen HD, click the little icon with 4 diagonal arrows next to the Vimeo logo.)

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Thinking outside the boxee

Yup that’s right. First they had the idea to get the Internet on your TV (remember WebTV?) then it was all about TV on the Internet (Hulu, CBS, CNN, etc. ) and now we’ve got TV on the Internet put back on your TV (boxee).

For those of you not already in the know, boxee is a multi-platform media center with a 10-foot interface for aggregating video, music and photos that exist both offline and online. Others have failed in this space, but the boxee offering pushes the paradigm of content distribution and consumption in some interesting ways.

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Doing research right at kajeet

There comes a time in any parent’s life when she has the face the inevitable: Her child’s first cell phone. That time has come at last for me, and I confess I have been dreading it. What if she buys 50 ring tones? What if she calls China? What if she sends a prank photo to a friend and ends up going to jail and having to register as a sex offender for life? (That’s right, I’m a parent: I can go from “my kid might overspend my money” to “my kid might go to jail” in ten seconds flat.)

It was with utter delight, therefore, that I stumbled across kajeet, a cell phone service for ‘tweens and their parents. What sets kajeet apart is not their phones (they don’t make any), or their network (they’re essentially a Sprint reseller), but the service. With kajeet, parents can fine-tune what their kids can and can’t do, and who pays for what. You can set up separate wallets for the parents and the kid, such that the parents can pay for phone calls to Mom and Dad, but the kid has to pay for calls to friends or goodies like ringtones and wallpaper. You can set up times of day for certain activities, like only emergency phone calls during school hours. You can even track the location of your kid’s phone using its built-in GPS and online tracking tools.

When I discovered kajeet, I was in parental heaven. The service was so exquisitely tuned to my needs that I started to get professionally curious. What was the process that had led to this product?

The kajeet origin story goes something like this: Three dads saw a need, and created a company. Now, that’s a great start, but there had to be more to that story. They must have done their homework. So to learn more I spoke with kajeet’s SVP of Corporate and Business Development, Carol Politi.

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Credit cards for preschoolers?

I have a daughter named Skye. A few years ago, I was planning a family trip to England, and I signed her up for United's frequent flier program, Mileage Plus. A few months after we returned, the junk mail started arriving. I knew when I signed her up that she would get some junk mail — Mileage Plus statements, promotions and such.

What I didn't expect was this:

This is a credit card offer from Chase. Skye has gotten at least 30 of these fairly thick envelopes in the last year alone.

Many people might ask, "What's the big deal? We all get lots of credit card offers."

Well, the big deal is that Skye is three years old. United knows that she's a preschooler; they required her date of birth when I created her Mileage Plus account. Somewhere in the information chain between United and Chase's bulk mail department, that information was ignored.

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Economizer: A Cooper service concept

People are looking for ways to economize in these uncertain times. We can all see the evidence of environmental crisis brewing alongside the economic downturn, and it's easy to feel powerless in the face of such global forces. With politicians and businesses seeking avenues to a sustainable future, Cooper wondered how design might help individuals cut costs while also encouraging behavior that was environmentally responsible.

This all started when Environmental Defense approached Cooper, asking us to imagine new ways to make it easier for people to save resources. We performed research throughout the Bay Area, then collaborated with Environmental Defense to model our findings and identify design opportunities. From this point of inspiration, we continued on our own, crafting a quick eco-friendly concept: Economizer, a service that helps consumers save money while making sustainable choices. The service consists of a core set of internet-aware services with optional components such as hardware data collectors, social networking applications, and dedicated smart phone interfaces.

Economizer: Scenario 1 on Vimeo
(Watch this video in fullscreen mode by clicking the icon in the lower right of the player.)

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Folkware

In his recent article for TechCrunch, salesforce.com CEO and chairman Marc Benioff frames the web 1.0 revolution as “Anyone can transact” with great 1-to-many online transactional applications like Google and Amazon. The 2.0 revolution was “Anyone can participate” with a host of many-to-many online applications like LiveJournal, Flickr, and YouTube that really put the focus on user-generated content.

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Conversations with machines

Every time I get on the phone with some corporation or other, I find myself reflecting on why voice interfaces are so uniquely infuriating. Clearly, I’m not the only one who thinks so, or sites like dialahuman.com and gethuman.com wouldn’t exist. I suspect the problem lies not only in wretched usability, but also in the fact that voice interaction sets higher expectations for reasonable, human-like behavior. If humans interact with computers as if they were also human, as discussed by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass in The Media Equation, this seems even more true for computers other software-powered devices that accept voice input in addition to using voice output; after all, if it can understand what you’re saying, it must be able to think, right? In their very readable 2005 book, Wired for Speech, Nass and another colleague, Scott Brave, assert that this is indeed true. Hearing a human say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that” three or four times in a row would be enough to inspire violent impulses in the most dedicated pacifist, and many people have similar reactions to voice interfaces. So is a more “human” interface necessarily better?

Even though we know we’re talking to a machine, we humans respond to perceived emotion even in recorded voices. For several days after we installed a new phone system in our offices, people continually commented on the doleful female voice that responded to deleted phone messages by saying “duuh-leted,” dragging out the first syllable and drooping at the end, kind of like a mopey teenager asked to take out the garbage. Discontented machines are especially noticeable, though excessive perkiness is irritating in some circumstances: “I’m sorry, you’ve been on hold for 20 minutes, so your session has expired.”

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The airline industry needs to check their own baggage

I wasn't surprised to read that the airline industry was rated the worst in customer ratings. It seems like every week there's a news story about one of the major airlines raising their fees or adding another miscellaneous cost on top of their base ticket prices. I'm slightly sympathetic to the fact that the airlines are dealing with ever-increasing oil expenses, but not all airlines are dealing with their struggles in the same way.

I was pretty outraged when American, United, and US Airlines announced plans to charge an extra $15 per checked bag. This is already on top of the $25 for a second checked bag that they (and in fairness most other airlines) already charge. Why couldn't they simply add $15 to the price of their tickets? Because they can't compete on price with low cost carriers like Southwest and are feeling the squeeze from both sides.

Now more and more travelers will abandon checking luggage and cram all number of accessories into smaller carry-on bags, thereby causing long lines through security and long boarding times while they struggle to shove their bags overhead with little assistance. This will ultimately lead to delays and more misery.

The bottom line is that for flying, people mainly care about cost and if you've flown on Southwest, American, United or Virgin America there's not a great deal of difference in service — so why pay more? If anything, I enjoy flying on Southwest and Virgin America more because the employees tend to be friendlier and the personal entertainment on longer flights breaks up the time.

Until airlines like American can prove that their higher prices reflect a better and more enjoyable service I'll keep picking the lowest price I can find. I don't mind sucking it up even if I end up in a middle seat between two big burly guys with no elbow room. We've all been there.

Instead of these airline companies being creative with accounting, they need to get creative with designing better experiences like Alaska Airlines is doing or consider re-engineering planes to fly with alternative fuels like Virgin highlighted recently when they used 5% biofuel. I might pay $15 more if I think it's worth it but I definitely won't pay an extra $15 to have a more miserable experience when I know I can pay less elsewhere.

With any luck, one of the travel sites will be updated so that I can search flights and compare the full cost for my travel knowing that I'll be gone for two weeks and will definitely be checking one bag if not two. Then the larger airlines will maybe take note and change their travel plans.

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Goal-Directed Service Design

Most people think of Goal-Directed Design techniques as focused on product design, but they work equally well for services. A service is comprised of the various "touchpoints" between a customer and a business. Touchpoints include public-facing systems such as web sites and web-enabled software, but can include other channels as well, such as brick-and-mortar stores, points of sale, interactive voice response systems, email and postal mail, too.

A service model best fits offerings that are intangible, distributed in space, or play out over a length of time, especially on a routine basis. Some obvious examples include: electricity, hotels, mobile phone service, or even a government. The touchpoints you design as part of your service are critical to the user's understanding of your brand. Increasingly, many touchpoints are interactive systems rather than human contact, so paying careful attention to the design of these things from the user's goals is vital.

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