I had to stop and think a bit. At first that makes sense, particularly if the current version of the service is really terrible.
But I think usability is the wrong measure. By modelling what the business wants to build into the service and aligning that with what the end users are trying to get out of it an increase in adoption is very likely.
Still, experience is more than alignment. We could get the service exactly right but if a roughly similar service has nicer music or offers free child-care we're likely to go with that alternative.
So it's a balance of alignment and value (in financial terms; emotional; physical; in terms of meaning and self-actualisation etc).
So not being a maths guy, does that make the formula:
adoption = alignment x value
What do you think?
]]>I can now complain in different ways - video, audio, blog, forum, microblog, and on any number of third party sites - Twitter, YouTube, AudioBoo, Plebble, ComplaintCommunity, Facebook, and there is even a complaint aggregator - Amplicate.
Social media has given all of us the tools of engagement, enabling us to be far more inventive, novel and vocal in expressing our displeasure when a company has simply got it wrong.
Really well put. All change: The four trends reshaping customer service
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Hi, if you're here it might be because you've just had a chat with Dug at CEM and pointed your device at the QR on my badge.
Really looking forward to the panel this afternoon. particularly looking forward to hearing from GiffGaff's Claire Kavanagh:-)
If you want to keep in touch, you can visit about.me/dug
or even read twitter.com/dug
and if you really want to get serious you can use Linkedin
I was speaking to some consultants recently and we got to talking about empathy and what makes a great ecommerce consultant.
I believe empathy has to be one of the most important qualities of a good consultancy (or indeed of a quality senior manager with a virtual team in a matrix organisation). In some ways it's almost more important than some other core skills in that it's more likely to place the consultant's recommendations firmly under the customer's pain point.
Multi-channel retailers have questions and need some love and tenderness. Ideally, you should feel their pain. They have a bunch of things that keep them up at night and empathising with these will make for a better ecommerce experience consultant.
Here's a rough list (transcribed unformatted from my moleskine) of my favourite nightmares:
So yeah, quite a list:-)
I'm guessing there's a lot more, but even with this rough first draft, I can see some broad areas where a consultant might want to focus attention:
Where do we need to be in the mid-to-long term and what do we need to get there? Most businesses maintain a voice-of-the-customer report and maintain a "Customer Plan" these days. The Digital Map builds on those learnings and supports those commitments but with a focus on the elements that directly influence ecommerce performance.
While we work on a digital map we also need to think about YoY reporting and getting results as quickly as possible. A lot of the nightmares above can be at least addressed at this stage.
A lot of the above touch on good old fashioned design and build. The consultant needs to be able to deliver a quantifiably better ecommerce website building on the customer's platform investment.
It's unlikely you're going to let me edit the Cobol that structures your mainframe's performance but somewhere between the ubiquitous SAP rollout-that-never-happens and cryogenic defrosting of top programmers active in 1979 there lies a wide scope of systems analysis and solutions analysis and architecture. You're going to want to offer those services too.
Ecommerce managers are some of the most accountable folk around. When your basket is dropping and your MI is a mess its easy to find your bonus under threat. These guys needs top-notch help with people, processes and performance measurement.
So lots to consider when choosing a consultant then:-)
Last year I commissioned agency strategy work to the tune of a little under a million pounds. With the advantage of hindsight, I have to ask myself, "are agencies who produce experience strategy really worth the money?"
The first of the two strategy pieces was run by a really smart guy at a great agency but ultimately, the work they produced had little or no impact on our business. It didn't inform our decision-making nor did it transform any of our research and insights into actionable recommendations. Basically, and no offence to the bright folk who wrote the strategy documents, their work ended up as a couple of big fat Powerpoints on the S: drive. Those docs were briefly consulted then largely forgotten.
The second strategy piece cost twice as much as the first but achieved little more. The brief was to help us accelerate our performance improvements and we went to a leading consultancy in the hopes they would have significant positive impact on our company (or at least our trading performance).
Where the first project likely suffered from poor access to stakeholders, this second one involved a large team of folk in dark suits who made it their business to go as deep as they could and get the information they needed from the right stakeholders.
At first the results seemed encouraging, the team produced a number of documents with amazing facts and figures. Using what I must assume is voodoo and pixie dust, they were able to attach precise performance metrics to general user experience improvements (both UI and UX) and those percentages of 'uplift' (a new word I learned last year) were extremely useful in writing budgets and of course going to the board for cash.
To be fair, the key objective of this second consultancy piece was to generate supporting evidence such that the executive committee could approve a very large budget. Serious people and serious money, so I perfectly understand the need for large documents filled with precise facts and supporting appendices ("the details are all in the appendix" is another favourite bit of consultant-speak I learned last year).
Unfortunately, this strategy also had a fatal flaw. Because it was created top down, with no deeper or longer-term stakeholder engagement, it only took a small change of weather at the top for the budgets to be cut and the whole programme to be shelved.
Now if you ask me, that's a lot of cash (and a lot of time) spent for not a lot of positive outcome. I'm actually looking at my own strategic thinking so I'm not (just) having a bitch and a moan. I am genuinely curious to get a feel for the sustainability of the customer experience strategy industry and learn from the mistakes I made last year so next time this happens we'll get a better result.
Items 1, 2 and 4 in the diagram above make up what you might call the "strategy context" of the brief. I reckon this is where the first agency came a cropper. Specifically, we didn't tell them absolutely everything about the business and they had to make assumptions as to our likely performance. Their analysis was actually pretty clever but we hadn't completely gelled our vision, values and purpose. This meant fragmented results and there was no way our organisational delivery was going to be able to cope with the agency recommendations.
I guess there's a lesson here. If your customer hasn't nailed vision/values nor indeed sufficiently clarified objectives, don't go into strategic analysis. Maybe the brave thing to do is say "we love working with you but let's revisit this in six months when your brand team has had a chance to clarify where you stand" (or words to that effect).
If strategic context was the downfall of the first project, team process was the problem with the second. The consultants were able to get a reasonably good fix on the strategic context (the brand had gelled more since the first team) but they worked to a time-frame that didn't permit the embedding of the "organisational delivery" of their proposed strategy. Simply put, they didn't get deep buy-in across layers of management.
I'm not sure what the answer is here but I'm guessing when one budgets one's headcount on a strategy project, perhaps it would be worth spending a little extra on getting people on the ground to build deeper commitment to one's strategy (could this compliment the usual idea of providing a deck as 'armament' for a director to then socialise in the business?)
Finally, I wonder how much work went into tailoring the work to a client-side audience. I found large parts of both agencies presentations and documentation to be very opaque. You can be as clever as you like but if you don't stimulate your stakeholders to action you're not really having any impact. Something to think about...
There are a hundred other lessons to learn here as well but I'm concerned with those that directly impact the client/agency relationship when dealing with strategy development.
Are you Director of Customer Experience Strategy in an agency? Comments on a post-card please:-)
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Nicki is working on the branding for a new wine grown in Enfield, North London (yes, really). You'll have to wait a few years to get some in your glass, but the service design is making headway. Nicki is looking at how the prospective customers will experience the brand across time and across multiple touchpoints (we've just tested the awesome i-nigma qrcode reader on the iPhone and it automatically goes from scan to website, very nice).
I haven't done any serious typography in a while so this first rough is a little bit of joy (but need to fix that kerning on the numerals). Satisfying and I might even get a case of wine out of it.
]]>We chose to work in the problem space around youth and crime.
We brainstormed and eventually tried a mental model which exposed an opportunity space between the child who "wants to be free" and the mentor and institutions that can't usefully communicate the difference between right and wrong. The service we came up with was a space where young people could experiment with alternative behaviour in the safety of the virtual world.
To evidence the service we built a scenario around Lisa who is 14 and wants to have fun but is learning to help others and do the right thing. Here's the mini-blueprint of the service.
You can grab the pdf if you want to look at the detail.
We worked under a Creative Commons license and the details of Do the Right Thing (and many other astonishing projects) are online at http://planet.globalservicejam.org/ and do check out the other projects as teams around the planet put in the equivalent of 50,000 man/hours over the weekend:-)
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A screengrab from the Dixons GetSat server
One of the key pillars of the four-year Dixons Retail transformation program is to be thrifty when building and this is particularly relevant to software in the enterprise where feature-bloat and mystery licensing can mean you get some exceptionally poor value for your corporate dollar.
Dynamic social content on the new dixons.co.uk
As part of the effort to discover new ways to build cheaply online Dug is running a number of pilots including web-based customer-led support via GetSatisfaction and using open-source blogging tools to enhance our ecommerce websites.
Fingers crossed these will lead to some greater efficiencies, not least the ability to build quickly as well as cheaply.
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Dug has a secret master-plan to build a developer community around Dixons. The fit with Intel is a good one as the UK electricals retailer ships an inordinate number of devices powered by the American chip-maker.
As part of the developer competition (entries have now been judged and entries closed. Sorry, check back next year) Dug briefed Intel on the type of application most likely to fuel both engagement and affiliate sales and then commissioned an api to programatically expose Dixon's trading underbelly. The entrants where able to build 3D roomsets and kitchen design tools filled with Samsung TVs and DeLonghi coffee makers.
The apps are able to display all product metadata, live price, live stock information and all associated rich media. Keep your eyes on the AppUp centre as apps will go live in next few weeks:-)
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Dug did the ethnography, concept development, service design and prototyping in partnership with Vodafone R&D teams in London and in Spain. The beta of the Exchange server was built on top of Ocastalab's Statusnet service and is currently live.
From the Vodafone site: Agora is an open trading platform for individuals and groups to post items and services for sale or exchange. Have an extra laptop lying around? Need a bike instead? No problem! With Agora, you can specify what you'd like in exchange (including cash or services) and the system will alert you to others that have what you're looking for. You can make offers, negotiate with others until you secure an agreement, and then leave comments and ratings for your completed deals.
Agora is deployed as an Android app that is downloadable from the Android Market. It has been tested across a range of handsets and is compatible with Android 1.6 OS and above.
You can download the Android app from Vodafone.
]]>As part of the Betavine Agora project, Dug produced this short video to explain how a distributed mobile marketplace not only supported the creation of listings and the promotion of transactions but also the serendipitous discovery of potential collaboration.
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Orange Backup is one of several integrated web, PC and mobile applications Dug developed while working for Group Design & Usability. The app is part of the home software suite (HSS) delivered to broadband customers across Europe.
The product is based on a white label version of oodrive a leader in cloud storage. Dug conducted extensive user research into the target users and transformed the product into one focused on customer needs and respectful of their very specific context of use.
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A project run at Group D&U to create a UI toolkit for a European comms product for Orange and Mobistar business customers. A flash animation is available to view a snapshot of the calendar functions
This project was a joy to run, a real testament to what a small team running Agile methodologies can do even as part of a heavyweight organisation. I had spent the better part of a year managing France Telecom stakeholders on an integrated communications project when I was contacted by the leader of this three-man team.
We worked together (yes, in French), helping dev teams move from waterfall-based production methodology to a user-centred design process built on the Garrett elements of user experience.
Outcome: The end product was rolled out quickly to the two markets and has been a huge success. After the launch, learnings from this product development were fed back into the France portal which now offers its customers best-in-class converged communications tools.
]]>The spec seems a little dated now that RIAs have matured into more familiar design patterns supported by reliable RESTful apis but it's an interesting document nonetheless (download PDF - 9Meg).
