By Mark Hurst

As the digital vanguard goes, the rest of the online users eventually follow. Consider this example: noted designer Khoi Vinh wrote a few days ago…

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Source: http://www.goodexperience.com/

OK. For those of you still here: let’s talk about how to attack the problem.

Any discussion of information overload has – or should have – these two parts:

Part 1: the description. Overload is a big hairy intractable problem and it’s stressing us all out and killing our productivity, and it’s getting worse every day.

Part 2: the solution. Fortunately, there’s a permanent fix. The following will work today, tomorrow, and the day after that…

Writing about (1) without (2) is just depressing. “Here, let me describe our collective pain in 18 different ways! How awful! Wish there was some way out! Barf! Anyway, good luck with it.”

But that’s precisely how most articles, books, and other media have covered the issue to date. They describe the effects of ubiquitous technology, relate some anecdotes of people buried and distracted, and finally throw up their hands with a to-heck-with-it-all closing. For a recent example, see Salon.com’s piece last month called No more vacation: How technology is stealing our lives, which which bemoans “the monster that is consuming us” and ends with this: “Without retreating to some heretical call to smash the machines, I wonder if it wouldn’t do us all some good to stuff them all in a locker for an hour and go for a swim.”
Let me be clear that it’s important to write about the problem of information overload. The Salon article offers a compelling Part 1. But that’s not enough. People need a solution, not just a lyrical complaint about our plight. Some articles go so far as to suggest a few easy tips ‘n’ tricks – maybe try turning off your email for awhile! Maybe go for a walk! – but still don’t offer a solution that addresses the underlying problems of busy-ness and anxiety.

A few years ago I attempted to give readers a permanent solution to info overload in my book Bit Literacy. I still work on this problem (see how to solve email overload), so you can understand my interest when I heard the subtitle of Hamlet’s Blackberry, the new book by William Powers: “A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age.”

No kidding?!, I thought. Someone has actually written a book with a witty title (something I missed, oops) and that includes a practical philosophy for fixing this problem?

I dove in and found the beginning of the book, appropriately enough, describing the problem. Not only is this Part 1 written well, it makes many of the same points I tried to get across in my own book:

“The more connected we are, the heavier the yoke.” (p. 63) A nice complement to the first sentence of my book, “Bits are heavy.”

“By using screens as we do now, constantly jumping around, [we] have fewer ingenious moments and bring less associative creativity to whatever kind of work we do.” (p. 61)

“If the digital era has taught us anything, it’s that a new technology frequently creates more more work than it saves.” (p. 72)

“…there are some experiences [screens] can’t deliver, and those happen to be the most important ones. … it’s up to us as individuals to use that power.” (p. 77)

This whole first section of “Hamlet’s Blackberry” covers the tension between the internal, contemplative life and the external, connected life – well-written, as I say, and making a strong case for the need for a real solution.

The book then covers seven thinkers – from Plato to McLuhan – whose work had some connection to information overload. All interesting material. But by the end of McLuhan, there are only a few pages left in the book – and I had to think, ahem, when are we going to get to the solution?

The bulk of the “practical philosophy” promised in the subtitle is in the final two chapters – one offering a few tentative tips ‘n’ tricks, and then a final chapter describing Powers’s experience with the “digital sabbath” he and his family now practice, with some success. And that’s it. The “practical philosophy” we’re left with is, essentially, try not to go online on Sunday. A fine suggestion, but not a solution. People need a way to enjoy life with less stress on other days of the week, too!

I’m happy to see “Hamlet’s Blackberry” on bookshelves as it’s possibly the richest and most engaging description of the problem of information overload that I’ve read yet. But I’m still waiting for another book, past “Bit Literacy,” to offer a robust philosophy for solving this problem permanently.

If you’re interested, the solution in Bit Literacy can be summed up this way: Become more focused, and more productive, during the time you’re connected. (Said another way, “let the bits go.”) This way you achieve emptiness, and become “done,” as soon as possible. Once you’re done, you can confidently disconnect, go outside, and have some real – not virtual – good experiences.

Source: Goodexperience.com

“How should we engage our prospective users with social media?” someone asked, clearly wanting to increase the ranks of spatula users everywhere.

First build a good customer experience, I said.

“What do you think about the Twitter API?” someone else asked. (This person codes up digital spatulas all day.)

First build a good customer experience, I said.

“How should SEO relate to social media outreach?” someone asked.

First build… well, you get the idea.

Of course I’m exaggerating, since I did give some suggestions on each of these questions – even the acronyms! – and they’re all legitimate questions to wrestle with.

But my overall point, first build a good customer experience, really was the thought I tried to leave the audience with. It’s no use spending time, money, or effort to entice people into a product or service if it just leads to a bad experience. Why? Because those people you carefully encouraged and nudged into your circle? They go right back into the cloud, spreading the news about their bad experience.

Now consider that you first build a good customer experience. Then you do your very best to coax, wheedle, beg, encourage, and sweet-talk every prospective user in all of the cyber-internets into your destination site. Or app. Or whatever. They have a great experience and then naturally spread the word to bring more people into the fold. See, I told you – social media really works! But first you have to… you know.

This tip also applies to social media’s first cousin: advertising. First build a good customer experience, then use advertising to describe that experience. Consider the language Amazon uses to describe the Kindle in its recent print ad.

Here it is, from the back page of the New York Times Book Review. The ad is designed to zip the reader’s eye diagonally down-and-right starting with the attention-grabbing tag line, then past the product shot, onto these three bullets:

• Easy to read in bright sunlight.

• Over 600,000 of the most popular books, magazines, and newspapers.

• Free 3G wireless. No monthly bill. No contract.

In other words, here are the three main reasons why the Kindle user experience is better than the iPad user experience. The Kindle is more legible than the iPad in sunlight, the Kindle store has more titles available than the Apple iBook store, and the Kindle doesn’t cost extra for 3G like the iPad does.

This ad is effective because it is built directly on the customer experience that Amazon already built. And it provides solutions to key unmet needs for users of the competitor’s product. Like any good social media strategy, the ad simply tells the truth about the benefit that the customer experience will impart to the user. Some companies may try to use advertising, or even social media, to fool users into thinking the experience is more or better than it is. That doesn’t work. Word spreads.

In your next project, then, remember to create a good experience first. Then use your favorite kind of outreach to talk about it. Spatula users everywhere will thank you.

(As always, contact me at Creative Good if I can help.)

Source: Good Experience

Years ago we surveyed our employees at Creative Good and found that the single most popular undergraduate major was, of all things, art history. Since then we’ve always given extra points to any job applicant with that major, since art history teaches people how to see. And knowing how to see is essential in customer experience work.

In a recent interview about his new novel The Same River Twice, author Ted Mooney described learning “how to look, and how to teach people to look”:

If you stand in front of an artwork of even medium value, you really have to spend some time cleaning your mind of words utterly, and just begin to look, and keep yourself as blank as possible, for as long as possible, and you’ll begin to see the relations of things, how they fit or don’t, and eventually you’ll be able to see the object whole, and then you can start letting words come in again, and they will be the right words. If you do the same thing on a street corner it works too, by the way.

One book related to this topic is Ways of Seeing, by John Berger. While I don’t agree with all the ideas or politics in the book, it provides some good examples of seeing things in different ways. We’ve assigned the book to new employees over the years, with good results. Learning how to see is more important than learning a tactical method. One might even argue that customer experience work is mainly the exercise of seeing in a different way – that is, seeing from the customer’s perspective – or, as a customer experience consultant, both the customer’s and business’s perspectives.

Notice also that Ted Mooney, above, encourages people to set aside language and judgment and preconceived frameworks and just experience what’s around them. The language will return; analysis will come later. But during the moment itself, the important activity is just listening, watching, experiencing. This is a major goal of my Gel conference, incidentally – creating an environment where people can just experience for two days – then analyze later.

This can all be scary. Opening up to an experience means relinquishing control. I’ve often seen in listening labs (note the name!) the discomfort it causes for stakeholders to encounter the truth about the customer experience they create. But in the end, it’s the only way to create change. A good first step to making something better is seeing it, now, exactly as it actually is.

Source: Good Experience

I’d argue that the same holds for customer experience. Anything the customer sees or uses – be it on a website, iPhone app, social media project, or in some offline context – is conceived, designed, negotiated, and launched on the basis of person-to-person relationships. These relationships include stakeholders cooperating with each other, communicating with developers, and listening – one-on-one – to customers.

To put it another way: All customer experience is local.

In contrast, a good customer experience is not built via grand pronouncements, or strategies from on high (from the consultant who plops the fat printed report on the desk and leaves), or echoing the headlines, or chasing the latest fad. None of those are built from a relationship.

If you want to build a good customer experience, go local. Sit down with the person you need to work with. Listen to them. Come up with common goals. And always remember to include the customer. (For help on that, of course, you might contact Creative Good.)

Yours locally, -mark

Source: Good Experience

One of my favorite lessons in customer experience came via the Loch Ness Monster hunter. Back in 1995, in my last semester in grad school, I signed up for a class in patent law taught by the late Professor Robert Rines (see Wikipedia), an engaging, friendly lecturer who also happened to be a pre-eminent hunter of the Loch Ness Monster. (Professor Rines passed away a few months ago and the Economist wrote a respectfulobituary that’s well worth reading.)

As interesting as Professor Rines was, I learned a key lesson about customer experience from a guest speaker who told us about his experiences starting a small business. He was young, a former student, who had invented a new type of helium balloon – I forget the details, but something that offered an improvement over the standard balloon you see at parties.

Given that his innovation met the three key requirements of being new, useful, and nonobvious (hey, I guess I did pay attention!) he had acquired a patent and was building a business around producing and selling these balloons into the market.

Then he explained the steps he had gone through so far. He drew a block diagram on the blackboard, something like this:

[concept] -> [design] -> [prototype] -> [production] -> [distribution]

What was the most important step in the process, in his experience? Well, he said, the concept phase was definitely the most fun. Playing with ideas, thinking about problems to solve, dreaming about business models. That took a small amount of time and effort but was enjoyable. Now he had his concept: an idea for an improved helium balloon.

Next, the design phase. It took a little more time and effort, sketching out how he planned to create the balloon, but he worked it out fairly quickly.

Then he had to assemble some tools and make the design real, in the form of a physical prototype. This proved his concept and allowed him to show it to production facilities to see who could make the product – at scale, within a budget, adhering to quality standards, and so on. Suddenly he was spending a lot of time in meetings and evaluating partners. This took much more time and he was no longer innovating – he was concerned with details upon details about execution.

Finally he had his production lined up and he went to get the product into the market – party stores, supermarkets, gift shops – via various distributors. Here he had to explain to mostly uninterested people why his product would sell, how they should display it, what his fulfillment terms were, and so on. It took forever – or I should say was taking forever, because he was still months into this phase when he came to talk to the class. Long hours, tough work, all yielding slow, small steps forward.

And now, he said, you can probably guess which is the most important phase: distribution. Yes, dreaming up the concept and designing the invention was fun. That probably took up 1% of my time so far. Creating the prototype took another 5%. Getting production going took another 20%. And getting distribution has taken up the rest of my time. It’s the hardest and most important challenge.

As a 22-year-old grad student, I thought this was a strange outcome. With all the emphasis on big ideas and elegant solutions that we were taught at MIT, why was this guy spending almost 75% of his time on a decidedly low-tech, non-innovative problem space? Why was he saying this was the most important task in his entrepreneurial career?

I started my own business a couple of years later, and I’ve been experiencing ever since the truth of his lesson. For my consulting firm, Creative Good, the customer experience we create is for our clients – and fortunately our concept, design, prototype, and production are all excellent (if I do say so myself). But distribution has always been a challenge. Adhering to our own core principles and methods has often made it harder to fit the square peg into the round holes that the market is looking for. There can be a pressure, in other words, to compromise the concept in order to open up distribution. (View almost any well-distributed Hollywood blockbuster to see this in action.)

Then later I tried, with some success, to get my book Bit Literacy into bookstores, without signing a bad publishing contract – more on that in secrets of book publishing I wish I had known. Suffice to say that distribution is a major determinant of success in publishing, even in this shiny digital future we’re entering.

But here’s the thing: distribution is part of the customer experience. If the customer doesn’t have any access to your brilliant idea, they can’t ever experience it. Access itself is just as important – or perhaps, in the words of the balloon entrepreneur – more important – to the success of the idea than the idea itself.

For the customer experience you create, consider the stages your innovation goes through – from initial concept to finally being experienced by the end user. What are the most fun points? What are the most time-consuming? And what, if you’re being honest about the process, is the most important?

Source:  Goodexperience

Several things have contributed to this growing awareness of over-sharing. One of my recent favorites is a site called Please Rob Me , which showed the notices of users on Foursquare, a service that lets you post publicly, to the world, the restaurant or bar you’re standing in right then. In other words, Please Rob Me showed you hundreds of people announcing that they were away from home. As the site says today (and it has since stopped showing the Foursquare feed), “If you don’t want your information to show up everywhere, don’t over-share.”

It would seem to be a common-sense suggestion: think before you share something publicly. (Do people really want to know this? Is it actually helpful? Relevant? Are there any tradeoffs or potential drawbacks from sharing it with the entire world?)

The problem is, the social-networking sites don’t do much to ask these questions. To the contrary, they’re set up to encourage users to share as much as possible, as often as possible, as publicly as possible. That’s intentional: these sites succeed by increasing the activity within the network. Yes, there are privacy settings to limit access to some data – but these settings are never the default. Only a tiny minority of users make the effort to opt out. Everyone else shares with the world.

Today the Times reported on the amount of personal data that can be gleaned from smart data-mining on social networks. While an interesting finding, I don’t think it’s even necessary to go that far: just browse around on practically any Web 2.0 site to see the incredibly personal information that people post. I’m just waiting for a site to launch where people enthusiastically display their birthdates and Social Security numbers because, y’know, everyone’s doing it.

Don’t misunderstand me: I like the social networking sites. I have accounts with most of them and post fairly frequently on my Twitter and Facebook feeds, which you’re welcome to subscribe to. But I try to adhere to some common-sense boundaries about what’s relevant and OK to share, and what’s off-limits.

Much like the other skills of bit literacy, this boundary-setting is the responsibility of the users, since the companies don’t have much to gain from encouraging it. I hope the coming discussion about over-sharing will help nudge users in the right direction.

Mark Hurst  (news@goodexperience.com)

Source: Good Experience

Customer experience is really easy to understand. You just have to be willing to keep it simple.

It all starts with this. There are two parts to customer experience: the customer, and the experience.

The CUSTOMER is a person. A human being. Your neighbor, your aunt, your postman, your car mechanic, your librarian. This is a person who deserves to be listened to, not just “monetized” or reduced to a number in a database somewhere in the cloud.

The EXPERIENCE is everything that happens to that person as they interact with your company. It all comes to them as one experience. Your company might have five silos or three operating units or eighteen warring factions, but for better or worse they create just one experience for that customer.

The customer and the experience. Understanding these two very simple ideas are the basis of all customer experience work.

Now, the next step is to create a good experience, and for that you have to do two things:

1. Treat the customer as a human being (i.e., listen to them).

2. Look at the experience from the customer’s perspective (i.e., empathize with them).

In other words, to create a good experience, just act in response to the ideas above: the customer is a person, and the experience is the one single everything that happens to them.

Put a different way, the best companies in the world today are those that understand customers’ needs – by listening to them – and offer their services and design their products in a way that empathizes with those needs.

It sounds simple. Maybe this all sounds like a string of platitudes. Perhaps I should have made it sound more official… seasoned it with some buzzwords (would you like innovation with that?)… or perhaps I should have coded it in academic language that only human-factors grad students could parse?

No. Like I said at the beginning, you have to be willing to keep it simple. What you do in customer experience work (simplifying, clarifying) is the same way you should talk about what you do (simply and clearly). That’s most of the challenge, just keeping it simple.

Consider the hairy knots of problems that come from veering away from that simple vision…

• Let’s over-analyze the data to feel like we’re doing lots of work (but then never arrive at any basic understanding). Pow!

• Let’s play politics to prove that our faction is better than the other internal faction (and, by the way, customers can choose our side or take a hike). Zing!

• Let’s fire any employee or consultant who dares to tell the truth about the problems in our experience. Problem solved!

• Let’s use ever narrower specialist disciplines to show that we, the practitioners, are the true guardians of experiential knowledge. Nailed it!

Now to be fair, there is a place for the toolkit. Once the basics (see 1 and 2 above) are established, there are occasional uses for scenarios, concept models, site maps, content strategy, maybe even card sorting and personas, if they float your boat. But those are all TOOLS, not the answer, just TOOLS that are strictly subservient to a company’s basic understanding of its customer experience.

So… you understand all of this. What’s next? Where does a company or practitioner go, what does one do, to really improve skills here?

Go out and have a good experience. You learn experience by having it.

Read a book. Not necessarily a book on user experience, but perhaps one that widens your horizons and creates and describes and engages you in some good experience.

Find other kindred spirits, either in your company or outside.

Along those lines, to beat my own drum, you might…

• join the Councils, the network of good-experience-oriented executives and managers in 400 companies (email me – mark at goodexperience.com – for details)

• attend Gel 2010 in April in New York, our annual gathering of Good Experience readers, where we’ll explore the concept of “good experience,” in person, through a two-day series of shared experiences.

Meantime, explore these themes right now by watching Gel Videos.

Keep it simple!

Source: http://www.goodexperience.com