Matter/Anti-Matter

(Credit: Wikia)

I wrote earlier that "marketing with meaning" has the ability to "activate" customers. An effective way to activate customers is by activating the dormant social networks they inhabit (often without even knowing it). While social networking has visualized the so-called six degrees of separation, all business transactions have a social component and can be seen as expressions of the underlying social micro-universes, the "worlds within worlds," in which--shifting time and place--individuals travel and interact. As marketers face the daunting challenge of connecting with fragmented audiences that are increasingly split into billions of social atoms populating myriad micro networks, activating dormant social networks is their foremost task.

KLM's Africa and China clubs, launched in 2007 and 2006 respectively, provide an interesting case study. The Dutch airline offers business customers the opportunity to meet fellow travelers who do business with or in either of these two regions, before take-off or during the flight, online and in person. KLM plays the role of the matchmaker and adds value to the otherwise somewhat value-free hours frequent travelers spend at airport lounges. It is the principle of the social networking site Dopplr, applied to the exclusive crowd of business or first-class travelers: connecting travelers who share the same connections. KLM prefilters the club members so that travelers who sign up for the exclusive network are warranted a certain quality of contacts.

The clubs are a win-win-win: trade groups and business offices from the travel regions are provided with a highly targeted way to advertise their services; travelers benefit from a true value-add and a richer travel experience; and, lastly, the clubs bolster KLM's reputation as an airline that cares about its customers. Of course, these networks already exist, they're just dormant. KLM does not make immediate revenue but it generates "social wealth" as long-term equity.

The KLM clubs exhibit all the characteristics of "meaningful marketing" (see chart below):

• Social: The clubs help people connect.


• Personal: The clubs are relevant for the people they serve, and the service is exclusive and highly personalized.


• Storytelling: The clubs make sense of disparate information, perspectives, and events. They facilitate crossing paths by creating--quite literally--a common goal and therefore a joint narrative.


• Disruptive: The clubs disrupt the usual travel routine; they make it comfortable for business travelers to leave their comfort zone and go off the beaten path to meet new people.


• Responsible: The clubs generate social capital by bringing together business people in pursuit of related goals. The KLM Club Africa, in particular, has helped African entrepreneurs to get in front of influential business executives (investors) conducting business in Africa.

About four weeks ago, I went for an annual physical and had standard blood work done. I was told to call back in a week, and of course I forgot. Today I had a message that said: "Hello, this is Dr. XX's office, please call us back at xxx-xxx-xxxx." That was it--the person didn't identify herself and also didn't say what the call was for. When I dialed the number, I was expecting to be told that I owed them money. But actually, the woman on the phone had no idea why she had called me. So I sat on hold, and finally she came back with my blood test results and rattled off a bunch of acronyms and numbers. I'm happy to report the results were good (at least that's what she said), except my cholesterol was at 201 and it should be less than 200. Then the call ended.

That was it.

That was my follow-up "examination." I can’t help but think that it could have gone so much better! On the one hand, I think maybe I should find another doctor. On the other hand, maybe they're all like this? I suspect most are.

First problem: Lack of efficient communication. I had no real motivation to call them after my physical, so I didn't, and I potentially might have missed my results. I think this is perpetuated by the idea that most people think their doctor will call them if there's something serious. No news is good news. But we need to fix that sentiment because there's always room for improvement in our health. Eventually they did call me, but it took a month. We need better systems that make it easy for people to stay proactive and on top of their own health care. I could have had this information via e-mail (maybe even with links to help me understand it), or they could have had a system that automatically reminded me to call. At any rate, timeliness and convenience of information delivery is a big problem.

Second problem: Lack of personal touch. The woman should have given me her name in the message and should have said why she was calling. If I really feared a billing problem, then I would never have called back, and they would likely have forgotten to ever give me the blood test results. Suppose there was something serious? Would it get lost in the cracks? Being hasty and vague in the message made me suspicious. Transparency and a friendly human tone are critical to interactions that are not face-to-face (insurance companies, are you listening?). Also, I find it strange that an office admin called me rather than my doctor. I'd like to know my doctor is thinking about me when I am sick as well as when I'm healthy.

Third problem: Bad office systems and technology. I’ve previously discussed in another post some issues with health IT and EHRs. When I called my doctor, the woman on the phone had no idea why she had called me. She asked for my date of birth and name, but that didn't help. Then, she put me on hold for a long time while she tracked down my chart. One would think she would be able to take my information, enter it into a computer, get a clear picture of why I was on the phone, and also see my chart to read me the results. Of course none of this happened, and she had to track down my actual paper file. Why is it that the horrible customer care rep at my wireless phone carrier is better equipped with knowledge about me than someone at my doctor's office? Scary.

Fourth problem: No advice. When I was read my results, it was nothing but acronyms and numbers. She let me know when something was "OK" and in the case of my cholesterol that I was borderline and I should "watch it." How exactly do I "watch" my cholesterol? A microscope? She didn't give me any insight into all the acronyms or numbers, and I didn't ask either. In the end, I felt a bit confused. I didn't really understand any of the information I received and I am now on my own to do research if I want. Although it's more than likely I will not do anything more, even though I know better. This call was a great opportunity to give me some good advice about how to lower my cholesterol and keep it low. Instead, there was no advice at all.

Fifth problem: No prevention. I'm struck now in retrospect that my doctor didn't suggest anything for me to do relative to my cholesterol. It's 201, and should be below 200. So it's not really bad, but it's not good either. Am I in trouble? Will it be worse next year? Am I trending a bad direction? When will it become a problem? Prevention is always cheaper and more effective than treatment once there is an issue. This would have been a great opportunity for my provider to suggest ways to reduce my cholesterol, change my diet, and hopefully stay healthier for a much longer time. Instead they told me nothing. I suspect many people would make no change to their lifestyle in this situation. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I think that this pretty much sums up our society's focus on treating illness rather than sustaining health. In the end, this was an event that should have been addressed to prevent disease down the road. Instead, my doctor's office did nothing for me. I guess when I have a problem they'll give me some better advice. That sucks.

When I think about encounters like this it makes me realize we have a long way to go in health care. Many people are trying to do the right things, but we're also crippled by lack of funds, archaic systems, and inefficient work flows. However, with the right changes in technology and behaviors maybe one day we can turn it around.

— David DeRemer, Senior Strategist, frog design

The tizzy created by Facebook's page design changes point out some valuable lessons that we should keep in mind as we head more into a SaaS and cloud-based world.

1. Choosing when to change

There are many differences between how shrink-wrapped applications and software as a service (SaaS) work, but one of them is that customers of shrink-wrapped software choose when, and if, they upgrade. They kick the tires to look around at the changes beforehand, download a trial, poll other users, wait for the .1 rev and the kinks to get worked out.

With SaaS, changes get pushed out without those wait-and-see possibilities. Facebook is discovering that this can lead to unpleasant surprises for customers, who have no say in whether they want to adopt them right then.

When something is embedded into the flow of everyday life in the way that Facebook (or Twitter) is for many people, any change, whether it's ultimately better or worse, is going to cause complaint. People get used to patterns of doing things. Even when you change their work-arounds, sometimes they don't like it.

2. Conversation is a double-edged sword

Having said that, on the flip side, SaaS is more responsive when there is feedback. It can turn around updates based on input more quickly, and obviously more universally. But do this too often and you whiplash your users with multiple changes that set and unset particular features, preferences, design decisions, and so on.

Facebook is going to have to tread carefully in the coming weeks as it decides how to respond to the considerable complaining about the new layout. Facebook is quite different from most "applications" because there are such a variety of ways that people use it, and the experiences that each user has are going to be quite different. (All the more so because of the openness of the platform.) That makes it hard to design for, and all the more important to check one's assumptions at the door about what people want to do with it, and what features will support those needs.

On a more macro scale, Facebook (and SaaS in general) are emblematic of the substantially two-way relationship that now exists between companies and customers. The real-time nature of the conversation--and with something like Facebook, the ability of customers to vocalize and organize--is a precursor to what the majority of companies will have to deal with in the future. As the "Cluetrain Manifesto" presciently argued, all markets are going to be more conversational in the future.

3. Don't design by committee

But that doesn't mean everything should turn into a design by (user) committee, or tyranny of the majority. That's not how excellent products get made. There has to be a balance between responding to feedback, and recognizing when you see possibilities that your users, for the time being, do not. Your job as a designer and a company is to create capabilities on their behalf, and not just implement exactly what users ask for. (Not in a high-handed way; users' needs and best interests should always be the focus.)

(It so happens that we had a very lively e-mail thread running around the frog offices about this exact topic recently. Do you stick to the vision or respond to feedback by changing the vision? The answer: "It depends." Not very satisfactory perhaps, but unfortunately basically true. There are well-known examples of hits and flops based on both approaches.)

Watch what happens...

We should all be watching very carefully how Facebook acts in the coming weeks as it responds to the conversation. It will undoubtedly provide lessons for the future for all of us.

(Credit: Starring the Computer)

President Obama's stimulus package is putting aside roughly $21 billion for healthcare technology and the development of electronic health records (EHRs). At this point when we say "billion" or even "trillion" it doesn’t have much of an effect. So let’s try that again – Obama's stimulus package is putting aside $21,000,000,000 for healthcare technology. It is a ridiculous amount of money.

But, where will it all go? Most of it is earmarked for the creation and utilization of electronic health records, which is essentially a digitized version of the chart a doctor keeps. But an EHR is intended to capture and integrate every chart, every test result, and every other piece of data. If all of a patient’s data is integrated into one consistent record, then doctors will be more empowered to make the right decisions.

I assume that most of the stimulus money will go to large technology companies that create complex database systems and algorithms to handle the intensity of data required to make it all work. However, I hope that the stimulus package carves out money to understand how data will actually get into these health records, and more importantly, how people will actually use them.

My doctor doesn’t have a computer in his office, and I question how soon he and his staff are going to put down their pens and pick up a keyboard during an exam. There’s also a tremendous amount of medical data that exists in non-clinical locations, such as at home and at the gym. How will this information find its way into EHRs?  Personal Health Records, essentially EHRs owned and gardened by consumers, are thought to be a solution. But it’s unclear if people have the motivation to actually interact with these products on a regular, on-going basis. We will need to find a good way to get these systems to work within the needs, motivations, and behaviors of those that will actually use them.

At the same time, what is the point of collecting all this information in a single location if its not communicated back in a meaningful way? A centralized EHR would be extremely valuable to providers, patients, employers, payers, pharma companies, and so on. Each of these participants will want to use the information in a very unique way and also will have specialized needs and expectations for how it is presented. I am concerned that within the $21,000,000,000 there will not be enough consideration of purpose and usability in a real-world setting. As a result, many of the systems might end up largely unusable or wasted.

In all of this we must be cognizant of the real, and very sad, state of technology in most medical settings. Sure we have amazing scanners and procedures that are miracles of science and engineering. But the state of technology that is actually usable by regular, real people (patients, under-educated nurses, and doctors are real people too!) is shoddy at best. As I mentioned, I don’t envision my doctor entering my results into an iPhone app anytime soon.

This is literally the patient point of view...

(Credit: design mind)

It is a photo from my doctor’s waiting room. Notice the two displays. One is an 80's or possibly early 90's era CRT – it is not even on. The other is a flat panel display, rather small, that cycles through a bunch of mundane content. This small, glorified billboard only presents extremely basic health tips (e.g., wash your hands!) and generic multiple-choice trivia questions that have no value at all. My local bodega has better and more interesting content on a 40” LCD (thanks to Danoo)!

In a waiting room, we have a captive audience that is thinking about health issues because they’re about to see a doctor, yet there is nothing to help the patients. There is nothing to help people get ready for a visit to maximize the time with the doctor. There is nothing to help review past records or streamline the process in any way. What an amazing time and place for people to interact with their EHR! But there’s nothing even close to being on the right path for that. Technology is non-existent here, so a massive EHR system would be equally useless.

So we can spend $21,000,000,000 on EHRs and other healthcare IT, but we have a long way to go if we want technology to actually make a difference in the settings that matter most. We have to look at how patients, providers, and everyone else will actually use and interact with this information. We must design for the moments and use cases that will take data and make it interesting.

Hopefully some of that $21,000,000,000 will look at these human-centered issues. Otherwise it will be such a waste.

An article in the New York Times says customers are being more attracted to "simple" products:

And, as it turns out, the buyers of consumer electronics could very well have been a leading economic indicator. Over the last year, they chose to buy two inexpensive and simple products, the Wii and the Flip, over competing gadgets bristling with more features.

But the article conflates two different definitions of "simple"

• Doing a focused function or small number of functions (i.e. it's "simple in what it does")
• Being easy and intuitive to use (i.e. it "simple to use")

The article cites a number of examples including the Wii, the iPhone, the Flip camcorder, and the Sonos multi-room music system. These products represent a spectrum of the different meanings of simple, but the article conflates them all together as though they were equivalent. If you're making decisions about how to approach a new product design, this is a very dangerous thing to do.

The Flip camcorder is very simple in what it does. It has removed all but the most essential functions of being a video camera, which has a knock-on effect that it is easy to use just because there is very little to learn about.

The iPhone is far simpler to use than any other smartphone out there, but it is very complex in what it does. With the App Store, that complexity grows every day. Indeed, if Apple had come out with a greatly de-featured smartphone, it would not have been a smartphone at all.

The Wii is not significantly easier to to set up or less complex than the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3, but they have put their emphasis on a different kind of game play than the "technical" type of games with steep learning curves that tend to dominate on the other platforms. This makes it easier to get started with playing the games themselves.

Which brings us to an important point: at the same time these devices are removing things, they are adding others. In the case of Flip it faciliates spontaneous use in a way that traditional large and expensive and complicated camcorders do not, and it can be customized with a very cool website to make it more of a fashion accessory. The iPhone added a new interface paradigm with its multi-touch, gesture-based touchscreen, and was able to push back the layered complexity that the wireless carriers tend to impose. The Wii brought joy back to video games with control accessories that use physical movement beyond one's thumbs, and which encourage more personal collaboration and competition than one gets from a first-person-shooter.

These additions have allowed the products to open up new market opportunities and reach customers that have stayed away from less convention gadgets in each category. But it's not just the removal of things to make the devices simple that's achieves this, at least as important is the judicious addition of evocative capabilities.

Sonos is in some ways is a counter-example: It's well designed and much simpler to use than the usual cobbled-together solutions for get multi-room audio using a PC as a music source. If simple was all it took to appeal, then they should have done much better. In fact it took additional complexity -- creating an iPhone app that allowed the iPhone to replace Sonos' custom-built remote (which also contains a scroll wheel and a color LCD, not unlike an iPod -- to goose sales, according to the article.

The common denominator throughout all of these is ease of use, and a new twist on the experience of using the product. But don't make the mistake of thinking that "simple" just means removing functionality. Sometimes that's appropriate, but other times it's exactly the wrong thing to do.

NY Times article

Google Chrome was born explicitly as a platform for Web applications. From the first bits I saw I can say that Google's new creation delivers most of the promises and brings new interesting innovations in the user experience realm. Competitors will find them hard to ignore, especially when you look at the tab concept improvements. For a good review of these points, you can refer to this post on Ars Technica.

Many hailed Google's move as a revolutionary step. And indeed, with Google Chrome, the Web application era is getting real. Let's look beyond the technology and outline some possible models and consequences Chrome might have for the field of user experience:

Firefox's concept, where the Web browser remains the key tool and the main interface for using a Web application, is a service that is completely online. In this case, the user experience is chiefly based on typical Web technologies, that is, the magic triad XHTML, CSS, and Javascript. Standard Web browsing is blended in with Web application interaction. The user jumps between tabs within the same context and tool.

An alternative model seeks to overcome the Web browser, hiding it for the user, like Mozilla Prism, or at least trying to replace it with a different client and dedicated interfaces. This is the model you can see in action with Adobe Air or Microsoft WPF, and also with Apple's iTunes. In this case, the user experience is based on a mix of locally installed software components and user interfaces, online contents and services. With this model you get the best performances and a more consistent user experience while the Web remains in the background as a distribution channel for data exchange. Any device and system has its own client, designed and created ad hoc. Nevertheless, as you can see with iTunes, the user sometimes is locked into a "walled garden."

The pure online Web application model based on Chrome, with few local components installed on your hardware, is certainly the most promising one: truly open, flexible, and easy to upgrade. But for now, Chrome is still a Web browser, and its dependency from the Web browser's user experience could be a soft spot, or at least a strong constraint for the Web application's evolution.

Talking about the Chrome "revolution," many commentators are using the metaphor of the operating system. The browser plays the part of the platform, and the Web application is the software. But a real operating system is not only a software platform; it also provides a framework for user interaction, a consistent UI layer, as well as components that the software designer and developers usually have to follow. It puts together many small tools and modules, unifies the user experience, and brings into play every software application built on it.

I think that this is the next big challenge. Will Google be able to change the rules of the Web user experience? With Chrome and Android, Google is getting into the big game: building a consistent and unique experience for end users as well as application designers and developers. Google is an acclaimed leader in Web technologies innovation, but from the end user point of view many Web applications are still nothing more than a toy for geeks. Now they have the opportunity to get their beautiful tech jewels out of the eternal beta phase, into true commercial products focused on the end user.

Creating good User Experiences (UX) over and over again means creating first good Employee Experiences (EX - I'm trademarking that!). That's the lesson from Southwest airlines according to an NY Times article about retiring co-founder Herbert Kelleher:

Over the years, whenever reporters would ask him the secret to Southwest's success, Mr. Kelleher had a stock response. "You have to treat your employees like customers," he told Fortune in 2001. "When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us."...

[W]hen you look at a company like American, with its poisonous employee relations and its glum customer base, and compare it with Southwest, with its happy employees and contented customers, you can't help thinking that Mr. Kelleher was on to something when he put employees first. "There isn't any customer satisfaction without employee satisfaction," said Gordon Bethune, the former chief executive of Continental Airlines, and an old friend of Mr. Kelleher's. "He recognized that good employee relations would affect the bottom line. He knew that having employees who wanted to do a good job would drive revenue and lower costs."

This isn't really surprising for a service company like Southwest, but the same rule applies, I believe, to companies that make products. Employee happiness often comes from walking the walk -- in other words not just making big pronouncements about how much you love your employees (Kelleher wept when talking about his employess in his going-away speech), but in seeing those through in actions big and small. And often it's the small ones that show how you actually mean. It's kind of like what they say about ethics - it's what you do when nobody's looking.

These small touches to how you treat employees are often the most intimate ones, and they communicate how deeply felt the relationship is (or not, as the case may be). Southwest, for example, seems to give its flight staff a great deal of autonomy when it comes to how they intereact with passengers, but bounded by some established guidelines. This has famously led to some staff singing the safety announcements and adding comedic commentary (I once heard one say "There may be fifty ways to leave your lover, but there are only four ways off this big bird!"). It also probably led to the more recent episodes of passengers getting walked off planes for risque clothing...just goes to show that what constitutes a "good" UX is different for different people.

While any company can luck out with one-off good experiences, a long term systemic philosophy of treating employees right fosters a mindset that is focused on thinking about the needs of others, which ideally translates into the products the employees create for the company's customers.

Cable TV companies are famously indifferent to user experiences, and my provider, Comcast, recently showcased one example. They finally started allowing previews of on-demand movies, but check out how they managed to mess up the experience:

(Credit: Adam Richardson)

That giant blue box stays on screen for the entire duration of the preview, obscuring a good chunk of it (even more for non-widescreen previews than what you see here). It's really distracting.

You wouldn't see something like this if Southwest ran a cable system.

I believe we are about to see the birth of a new business organization - one that is optimized for complex systems of problems and solutions, rather than based on silos focused on specific functions, and which treats user experience as a core organizational axis rather than a meddlesome add-on. Call it Org Chart 2.0.

Today's companies are largely structured with Org Chart 1.0: silos of knowledge and product offerings (segmented by customer type, price point, technology, etc.). We have had this structure for decades, even centuries, and there are good reasons for it: it helps drive efficiency of development and decision-making, focus on customer segments and competitors, it makes the chain of command and (in theory) accountability clear, and so on.

Unfortunately this type of organizational structure is quite poor at dealing with complex systems and systemic-level problems. And this is becoming increasingly untenable for several reasons:

1. User experience design challenges the ability of organizations to cross silos: user experiences run rough-shod over org charts. Why? Because many elements go into making a user experience that from the user's point of view should all be seamless and to an extent indistinguishable. Users don't really care if the e-commerce portion of your website is created by a different group than the informational areas of the site, and from a brand point of view you should be ensuring that both areas of your site speak with the same brand voice. Now multiply that across your products (hardware, software), collateral, packaging and out-of-box experience, call-center, point-of-sale displays and materials, sales staff, and so on. That's how user experience gets created.

2. Companies now need to deliver whole "solutions" rather than old-fashioned products. User experience design is just one example of this. More and more companies must pull together complex networks of partners, acquisitions and vendors in order to create and sell these solutions. No-one today is as vertically integrated as Henry Ford's River Rouge manufacturing plant, where iron ore came in at one end and finished cars went out the other. Being nimble, global and adaptive in hyper-competitive and dynamic markets has forced dis-aggregation of capabilities and resources.

3. Customers are more complex than they used to be (or more likely it's simply that our old models of market segments and personas did not allow for human nature and its self-contradictions). This makes understanding them and addressing them with offerings more nuanced and multi-faceted. A one-size-fits-all shrink-wrapped product on the shelf at Best Buy or Walmart is not going to cut it any more.

The strain is showing on the traditional silo'd organizational structure. I believe we will soon see the emergence of new companies formed in this environment and they will look quite different than what we have seen for the last decades. For these companies, thinking systemically and about user experience will be as natural as breathing. They will treat complex systems as inherent to their structure and creators of value, rather than as headaches to be avoided and territories to be fought over by silo'd clans.

What could a Business Organization 2.0 look like?

Instead of business units these companies will have "experience units", which manage the end to end experience. Instead of focusing on products and technologies, they will be focused on the "invisible" system that connects the various products and customer touchpoints together. They will welcome outside vendors and partners as enablers rather than disdaining them as "not invented here", and see themselves as being modular entities that can fluidly adapt to chaning market dynamics and customer needs. Customer input will be voraciously sought after and taken in, and customer participation in shaping the company and its offerings will be routine rather than the exception.

I'm sure there are many time-honored and well-established reasons why these things don't make sense, and why Org Chart 1.0 is better. But the fact is that the world is changing and we need to think about new business organizational structures to adapt.

So what do you think? Are there any companies you see emerging that have these traits?

Isn't it interesting that in the latest airline quality rankings the top three spots were taken by low-cost carriers? JetBlue, Southwest and AirTran ranked the best while overall the industry had its worst ratings in twenty years.

Just goes to show that providing a leading user experience does not have to mean premium price. All three are relative start-ups compared to the likes of United and American, and they have been able to structure themselves (and therefore their) costs based on lessons learned from the older airlines.

Nevertheless, with issues like number of passengers bumped per flight, amount of baggage lost, and late flights that the survey measured, it's hard to see how these three airlines would have intrinsic benefits over their older competitors.

There is also a more intangible difference between JetBlue and Southwest compared to most other carriers: the atmosphere on the ground and the plane that emanates from the staff. It is more relaxed, more can-do, more enjoyable. One can always find one-off examples at other airlines, of course, but the widespread nature of it at these two airlines (I have not flown AirTran recently so cannot comment) makes it clear there is systemic approach to managing and encouraging this atmosphere.

(And neither Southwest or JetBlue are perfect: JetBlue had its famed debaucle with passengers stranded for hours on runways in snow conditions, and Southwest is currently not looking so good with questionable maintenance practices. If you raise the user experience bar high, the punishment is extra hard if you fail to meet it consistently.)

People often think of good user experiences as uncontrollable black magic. Nothing could be further from the truth, as JetBlue, Southwest and AirTran show: even in a highly cost-sensitive industry there is room to make it a competitive differentiator. And not just for premium brands.