Today, customers are far more likely to talk about their experiences with a company on their blog, facebook, twitter, campfire, yelp, amazon, etc – especially those that want their voice to be heard. Like this:

“15 minutes is 15 minutes I could spend working (or blogging about an annoying survey email!). Without any incentive to fill out the survey, why would I even bother?…I took the survey and they didn’t give me a single stinkin’ thing” – Tony @ Halogen Labs

“A rapid-response web effort has never been more important to crisis communications. That won’t work when home pages of web sites are designed as Flash-driven promotional tools, not information centers.” – Ben McConnell

According to an article in Reuters, a Dutch scientist found that half of all product returns are because customers can’t figure out how to use them. The study also revealed some other interesting information, such as the fact that consumers in the US will struggle for around 20 minutes before giving up on a product. The study also found that most of the problems occured at the beginning of the design process in product definition.

Maybe it’s time to start charging more for our services!

In his most recent post, Scott talks about his experience with a workshop at the eTech conference called “Creating Passionate Users,” given by Kathy Sierra. This workshop, he says, is very hard to summarize. But some of the salient points he picks out have broadened my perspective of user experience.

For example, Sierra talked about the idea that “users want to kick ass” at something. They want to feel like they are continually learning and gaining expertise. This is (part of) what creates passionate users.

This reminds me of the conversation I had with Karl Fast last Saturday at the IA/UX Meetup. He was talking about how his research right now is around how the actual interactions people have with systems can affect their cognition and learning of the knowledge domain. To me, designing a user experience that ellicits passion seems like a *very* effective way of improving the stickiness of learning. When people are excited about things, they think about them and keep them fresh in their memory.

I’m not sure what actual bearing this will have on the kind of work that I typically do, but this will definitely be floating around my mind for quite a while. I imagine that it may inspire an added BANG! factor somewhere down the line for some otherwise uninspiring campaign site… We’ll see!

(I nearly forgot to mention… “Creating Passionate Users” will be a book sometime in 2006… look for it!)

In addition, our first stab at doing this last year led us to at least attempt to define some personas and we found that it just didn’t work. Too many folks fell outside of our common personas and people were simply getting frustrated with having to define who they were before they could get to the content.

Long story short, with the new site, we decided that more links was better than not enough and decided to go with a rather long, but organized, navigation bar for the site. Of course, this created some backlash mainly from internal people. And, even to me, it seemed a bit counter intuitive. We’ve always been taught the truism that we should never give people more than 7 options at once and it’s better to funnel them through smaller sets of options rather than give them too many at once.

At that time, I came across a recommendation online for the report Designing for the Scent of Information from Jared Spool’s UIE. If you work on sites with a large amount of information, then this is a must-read, IMHO (and, at $31, quite affordable).

The primary thesis of the report is that people will stick with a site as long as they feel that they are getting closer and closer to their goal of finding the information they want. As long as the scent of the trail is there, they won’t give up. The key is to make sure that the scent remains. A common way to break that scent is to stop giving them the options they are looking for.

Some highlights of the report that I find go against what we web developers have long just assumed were the right thing to do include:

• ‘Above the fold’ is obsolete. In their study, they found that people are more than willing to scroll to find the information they want. This goes against the marketing departments favorite mantra “EVERYTHING must be above the fold!”
• Shorter links aren’t necessarily better. The study indicated that link lengths of 7-12 words are most likely to take people where they want to go.
• Site structure isn’t important to the end user…they just care that they find what they are looking for (based on that UIE suggests that the home page should always be the LAST page designed on the site)

There’s much more to the report than just that, though, so definitely grab a copy and give it a read.

As for Digibuy, that is the vendor that will actually handle the purchase of the PDF report for you. The reason I called them out separately is that they do a great thing for the customer: They send a reminder email that I had purchased this particular report, using a particular credit card. Why is that useful? Well, they explain it in the email:

Our customers have found this notice useful in confirming otherwise unknown credit card charges.

It’s a simple, but brilliant bit of customer service. Indeed, my wife did call me to ask me what this odd charge was on the bill. More than once I’ve been stumped with that type of question. ;o)

Can you put the Apple iPod deal into perspective?

It is part of our overall digital strategy, something Bob Wright had laid out for us for more than a year now, which is to make our content as ubiquitous as possible, to have it be available on as many screens as possible. We want it to be on all the platforms.

Will TV as we know it die? How will TIVO and it’s brethren fair when all media is downloadable (legally) via the web?

I imagine there is going to be years of shakedown between these media formats. In the end, consumers will win, but there will be lots of victims in the process. I feel on demand, content when you want it– is going to win vs. hard copy (DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-ray, TIVO).

*****
This just in…

According to this www.ilounge.com article. We may be seeing HBO joining the fray.

1. a new logo
2. an ad campaign
3. improving your customer’s relationship with your company

Two years ago, Northwest Airlines redesigned their logo.

“I won’t forget, probably ever, the horrible way a flight attendant called Sigma treated me on a Northwest Airlines flight on Monday, but I honestly can’t remember their logo.” – Seth Godin

PeterMe links to a fantastic post from Jeffrey Veen proclaiming interactive designers haven’t learned anything in the past 8 years. Why? Because we’re still building anti-interactive artifacts – Flash sites that waste everyone’s time Loading… and don’t encourage sharing by supporting smart URL strings, simple text copy & paste, or even familiar navigational controls. But I’ve said this all before when I listed my 5 Reasons Flash is a Bad Idea.

Interactive designers aren’t the only profession at fault here. Far too frequently, I see photos of building interiors or a newly finished urban settings – without people in it. Always makes me wonder why. Do people make it look bad? Was it not made for people? When in fact people are the whole reason we’re here.

SunPorch’s site does a great job explaining exactly what their product is, AND exactly what it is NOT.

Looking at this, it seems like such an obvious piece of information, but yet you hardly see any sites do this. I imagine clearly explaining what you products and services are not drastically reduces the amount of dead leads that sales staff have to follow-up with, not to mention a reduction in basic FAQs that the web team need to responsd to.

In the end, I found out a SunPorch wasn’t a product that is going to fit our needs. Even so, I left with a great brand impression of the company. It sure beat having to go through 3 emails with customer support only to have them finally realize the product wasn’t a match for our needs.

Has anyone else experienced a site that goes to this length to clearly define what their product is not?

P.S. I also need to mention some other great user experience features of this site:

Guest Accounts

The pricing page will calcualte the price of the product for you based on the individual criteria you enter. While this type of custom pricing tool is nothing new, what really got my attention was the fact that it doesn’t require you to set up an account to use it. You can create an account if you want, to save your information, but they also recognize the fact that sometimes you just want a quick price without having to commit to a ‘relationship’.

Plenty of Photos

They make sure that you have a wide range of photos that go into great detail as to how the system works and is put together.

Setting expectations

Their ordering information page is a great example of how to keep your customers aware of the entire process. Reading through this page, the customer becomes fully aware of both their’s and SunPorch’s responsibilities through the ordering and shipping process.