Usability Matters

Raping your customers

Posted July 24, 2009, under Marketing, strategy

In today’s marketplace, relationships win.

Seth Godin, in his book Permission Marketing, relates marketing strategy with dating. It’s a supurb analogy, and one that I think more marketers need to understand.

As a company, your goal should be to date your customers, not rape them. Now, this isn’t easy. Dating requires work. It exposes you, and sometimes ends up with your feelings hurt. However, dating results in lasting relationships that build trust, and trust means you win.

So, what does this mean for marketers?

It means that permission and trust should be slowly built over time, instead of insisting that your customers give up everything at the front. It means slowly getting to know them, and finding out about them organically, not via questionaire (ever started dating someone by having them fill out a survey with their interests? Not a way to build a trusting relationship.)

The goal is not to walk up to someone in a bar and ask them “Hey, you wanna go have sex?”. The goal is to walk up to someone and engage in a conversation, find out about them through an honest exchange. You might not even get that kiss goodnight, but you’ll probably get a second date (and that second date will end with the kiss, and so on the more times you go out).

Raping your customers by bombarding them and demanding permission you haven’t honestly earned is a failing strategy. Slowly build a relationship - don’t be the frat guy at the end of the bar that no one wants to marry.

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Self-promotion and telling a story

Posted July 23, 2009, under Business, strategy

Normally I shy away from blatent self-promotion. It seems like way too many people violate the trust of those who are willing to listen by luring them them, then bombarding them with self-promoting messages.

That said - this will be the one message promoting this. If you’re not interested in reading, totally fine by me.

Last week, I launched a web project I’ve been working on for some time (about 6 months or so). The site is called Swapski and is geared toward helping small businesses and entrepreneurs barter/trade/swap with each other more easily.

Instead of telling you the feature set, I’d rather tell you the story.

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When error handling sucks

Posted July 14, 2009, under You fail at usability, interface design, usability, user experience
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Error handling on the web (and in other venues, for that matter) represents a huge area for either massive screw-ups or massive opportunity. Good usability and experience demands that we turn errors into opportunities, not into winding black holes of despair.

Take this error message, for example. I recently attempted to register on this site, and was delivered this terse message on clicking “Submit”.

What a great opportunity to talk about how much error messages can suck.

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What you’re not

Posted June 25, 2009, under Business, branding, strategy
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What makes a stool different from a chair?

Well, it doesn’t have a back. It’s taller (not as short as a chair). It has a smaller circumference than a chair.

There are probably more differentiating factors, but I want you to notice something: in comparing a stool to a chair, I’m focusing (as we always do) on what a stool isn’t.

This is how comparisons are almost always made. When we evaluate one thing against another, we focus on what it is not. By doing so, we are able to arrange a list of characteristics that are unique to whatever we’re looking at, which comprise its benefits.

If this is such natural behavior, why is it so hard for businesses to do the same?

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The sugar high of spam

Posted June 19, 2009, under Business, Marketing
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Marketing traditionalists favor a type of approach that works by capitalizing on quantity. Get more eyeballs, and you can sell to an average percentage of those eyes by pummeling them with marketing messages. No need to be particularly relevant or personal with these people - it’s all about the numbers.

For a long time, this worked. It worked because of scarcity. When the number of competitors were few, and the high cost of media exposure prevented widespread competition in many industries, this approach worked because customers were somewhat trapped. They didn’t have many options, and more importantly, everyone was using the same tactics. It truly was about shifting numbers of customers around.

Today, however, the game has changed, and it’s changed drastically. No longer are these traditional, carpet-bombing techniques as effective as they once were. Customers have far more access to competitors of yours, and your competitors (and competitors-to-be) have a far lower friction involved in getting to market than they once did.

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Who Pays?

Posted June 16, 2009, under Business, user experience, web theory
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Everything you do invokes cost. Even those things you regard as “free” or “inconsequential” invoke some sort of cost. The question is: who should pay?

There are basically two options – you pay, or your customer does. Payment doesn’t necessarily need to involve money – time, convenience, comfort are all valid and real currencies. However, when designing an interaction or transaction of some sort, you need to be quite clear on who’s going to foot the bill.

If you have an email signup form on your website, and want to know more about your customers’ demographics, you have a few options. You can put those questions on the signup form, requiring customers to answer those questions before receiving your email. You can also send a survey out to your customers asking them to participate, giving them an incentive to do so (a discount, small gift, etc…) The former option requires that the customer pay, the latter requires that you do.

Now, the payment is in different forms. The customer, in the first example, is paying with time and slight inconvenience. The action of giving you their demographic information does not directly benefit them in the course of receiving an email (demo-targeted content aside). For that reason, I’m not fond of this approach. In doing so, you’re saying to your customer: “We want your information, and we want you to carry the burden of providing it”. Sounds pretty arrogant, huh?

I think you should pay for what you get. The latter solution, sending an incentivized survey out, flips the equation. Now you’re paying. You’re paying monetarily in this case, via a gift or discount. However, it matches the interaction much more nicely. Since you are the only one who stands to benefit from the information, it makes sense that you’re the one who ought to shoulder the burden of collecting it.

This goes for many different transactions, both on and off the web. Just remember, any time that information is exchanged, someone is incurring a cost somewhere. Be it money, time or comfort, someone is paying. It’s smart if you own up to when you’re responsible for taking on that burden and pony up the payment.

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Jargon (stop it!)

Posted June 11, 2009, under interface design, usability, user experience
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Jargon is great - when you’re in that industry/company. However, if you’re designing products/interfaces to be used by people who aren’t in your industry/company, best to avoid it.

Here’s a great example. This is a photo of a new iPhone application released by State Farm Insurance, for filing claims:

This application is to be used after something has happened to your car, and you’re ready to file a claim. Nevermind the fact that filing a claim via a phone app feels a bit strange. The problem I have with this interface is the third line down: “Cause of Loss”.

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Shampoo bottles, usability, and paying attention

Posted June 5, 2009, under usability, user experience
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My shampoo bottle has a flat cap. So does my wife’s. As does her conditioner and body wash. My body wash, however, has a rounded cap. Am I bored in the shower? Maybe, but I think there’s a valuable lesson in usability, product design and paying attention to your customers.

Flat topped shampoo isn’t just a coincidence. It’s not just that it’s less costly to manufacture (although, it might be). Actually, it’s specifically designed that way. Why? So you can keep it upside down, of course.

Upside down? Buy, why? I don’t need to explain this - we’ve all done it. Once you’re getting close to that last bit of shampoo, leaving the bottle upside down for the remainder of its life makes it far easier to get the rest of the contents out. Not rocket science, and not something particularly genius - but it is great design.

What this represents is truly understanding, and paying attention to, how your customers use your product. Chances are, the first shampoo bottles designed didn’t carry this consideration. If they had a flat top, it was almost certainly because of other reasons. However, as time moved along, and these companies noticed the natural human inclination to turn bottles upside down near the end, they rose up and made it an intentional part of the design. Smart.

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Let people give you away

Posted June 1, 2009, under Business, Marketing
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I was brainstorming awhile ago for a birthday gift for my mom. She and my dad love to go four-wheeling on their UTV (this is actually different than an ATV, I’m told), and I was looking to get her something in that sphere.

My dad was getting her a handheld GPS to use with topo maps, and the suggestion to buy her an extended map for the GPS was floated. Sounded like a great match, and I had the gift nailed down.

There were a few nice things about this: I didn’t have to drive around and mess with the retail nightmare looking for a gift, it dovetailed with another gift, and it fit perfectly into her interests. I could buy it online, and boom…I was done.

One problem – how do you give someone a download? Continue Reading ▶

The argument against "click here".

Posted May 28, 2009, under interface design, usability, user experience
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Across the web, links abound that state “click here”, instructing the user as to the action required for the link. I think it’s bad design.

The problem lies in a concept called affordance.

Good interaction design (both on and offline) should use natural signals to indicate what action is required to interact with the object at hand. This concept is known as affordance, and has been written about extensively by Don Norman in his work (check out “The Design of Everyday Things” - superb design book). The idea is simple: an object should tell you how it is to be used before you use it, so that decoding how to interact with it is natural and automatic. Unfortunately, implementation of this idea is surprisingly rare. When it comes to the affordance of links, it should be immediately obvious what interaction is called for without instruction.

This is akin to seeing “Push” or “Pull” on a door. Again, bad design. A door (and Norman studies doors extensively in his book) should require no instruction. The hardware placed in front of the user should automatically communicate the action required. A flat plate for pushing. A handle for pulling. Immediately obvious, no thinking required. Continue Reading ▶

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