The EchoUser Experience

Imagine an annual sporting event comprising 8 teams packed into 5 weeks followed intensely by a billion plus hysterical fans. That’s the Indian Premier League. This tournament is only 2 years old and is already considered the 5^th most valuable global sports property (at $1.6 billion behind the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NASCAR).

The IPL has taken the global cricketing world by storm and is already threatening to change the very nature of the traditional sport of cricket. One of the most important things that the IPL has done is to combine the concept of T20 cricket with a tournament format that provides a high-energy, intensive sporting experience to the billions of fans. The franchise model based on the popular American sporting leagues has given enough off-the-field entertainment as during the game to the cricket crazy nation of India. One of the glaring differences between an IPL match and any other One-day/Test match is the overall glamour and glitz quotient.

As Mick and Felix go about exploring the opportunity to evaluate a major league gameday experience in the US, I think it would be interesting to apply the same methodology and evaluate how the IPL games fares. Given the high stakes and the keen desire to grow franchise loyalty the gameday experience plays a very critical role. The Kolkata Knight Riders are already considered the franchise leaders in generating profits due to the high glamour that Shahrukh Khan brings in. Since not all teams can match up to that, new and innovative ways will need to be thought out to grow profitability over the course of time. I suspect the Gameday experience; something that has been taken for granted for very long would be a key differentiator in drawing fans to the stadia.

Mick and I had a great discussion last week with Ryan Howell, professor of Sociology at San Francisco State University.  Ryan is a friend of mine who recently got a lot of attention for his happiness research (and rightfully so), but recently he’s been focusing on something a little different: the ultimate “gameday” experience.

Funnily enough, EchoUser was contacted in the past about improving the gameday experience of a well known Bay Area stadium, so we definitely had a lot of things to talk about with Ryan. First of which was: what the heck makes up a gameday experience?

As a total gameday noob (I never went to games as a kid, since I grew up mostly in the developing world), it was fascinating to hear what Mick and Ryan, two avid game fans, had to say about the component parts of a gameday experience.  From a service design perspective the gameday experience is chock-full of interesting things to focus on, with dozens of potential “events” to consider and track.  Stay tuned as I cover our work with Ryan on improving the gameday experience of a Bay Area sports team, covering everything from an experience framework, to data gathering methodology choices, to event-based testing.

I bought my last car sitting at home. The          test drive vehicle(s) drove up to my house (in  2 different variations!), I completed all the  paperwork while baby-sitting  my daughter and the check was picked up at  my convenience. I could have my new dream  ride delivered right at my doorstep, but  preferred to pick it up from the showroom.  What’s the big deal! One can argue that it  was a high value item and with the intense competition, it’s no unique trend. However, the other day, I had a ‘Maharaja Mac’ delivered to me, a bottle of shaving cream early in the morning when I realized I was out of it. It’s regular practice to expect things to be delivered to one’s doorstep no matter how small its value.

With easy access to labor and intense competition, ‘Home Delivery’, which was a key differentiator until some time back, has become a necessary trend especially with smaller setups and Kirana (mom-pop stores) stores. This trend has grown so much that larger players are forced to match up. Big players now have huge teams of sales/delivery people, who travel all day long going from customer to customer delivering bills, picking up deposit-checks, flowers, food-items and everything under the sun that one can think of.

‘Home Delivery’ (or at least the extent of Home Delivery) is a very unique trend and consumer behavior that is here to stay in India. This is one classic example of a regional trend that can be and is being targeted by various technology/solutions companies. The telecom industry in particular is all gung-ho about VAS (value added services → which accounts for almost 7% of all their revenues). According to industry reports, VAS is expected to be a $270 million spinner by end of 2010. ‘SMS’ and ‘Digital Music’ dominate telecom VAS today.

With 250 million mobile subscribers, 40 million fixed line subscribers, and 10 million Internet subscribers, it’s a no brainer that the mobile channel has the potential to be the ideal and most far reaching solution base in terms of services.

Telecom VAS in India can innovate in this area to become the preferred ecosystem for Home Delivery. The challenge is to customize it at the local (muhalla) level. Imagine an app that gives you the semantic of the various shops that you normally use and a quick easy way to browse inventory, order, and get the items delivered. For intangible items, the mobile phone could be the delivery mechanism itself. The challenge is to make it an experience where it is easier than direct calling.

Imagine a telecom brand that gets associated with Home Delivery. What a money-spinner!!!

Tough Love

Before I write this, I have to get one thing out of the way:

I love Patagonia.  Like, really.

I love them as a company, I love their stuff, and I tout their story to everyone I know (often by recommending Chouinard’s book).  I just received my green Prefontaine jacket this morning, in fact.  Other than the fact that I don’t actually own much of their gear - it’s a little pricey, let’s be honest - I’m a huge huge fan.

So it hurts me to say that I’ve come to dread hitting up the Patagonia website. Alas, my penchant for drooling over the MLC Dawn Patrol wetsuit backpack (now sold out) and amazing outerwear of all shapes and sizes, has been severely dampened, all because of someone called Taylor.

Now, for those of you who don’t know this, “Taylor” is the name of the pop-up live chat box that shows up just about every time I visit the website.  I usually ignore these things, but since I was having trouble finding what I wanted within the summer sale, I decided to give Taylor a shot.  What the heck, the people in the store are awesome, their clothes are awesome, so the online chat must be awesome too, right?

Not so much.  First, the person’s name isn’t really Taylor. I’ve used the live chat service twice now, and even though it says I’ll be speaking to Taylor, I always end up talking to someone else, usually with a nice bland American name (think Peter, John, Jane, etc.).  Come to think of it, the name Taylor is so neutral that I have no idea whether the person I’m talking to is a guy or a gal. Anyway.

So I finally get through to Peter/John/Jane, and everything starts out nicely, with polite hellos and a how-may-I-help-you.  The chat client seems a little slow to respond, but I chalk it up to an iffy connection (potentially on the India side, given how things are going!).  I then ask what in retrospect is a silly question, since I could’ve just searched the site for it myself:

“Hi Peter/John/Jane, could you help me find a backpack with a waterproof wetsuit pocket? Thanks.”

So I wait. And wait. And wait. All in, I wait maybe a minute, which might not be much in real world times, but on the web it feels like an eternity.  I wait so long, in fact, that I open a new tab, type “Patagonia wetsuit backpack” into my trusty Google search bar, and voila - halfway down the page, their it is: “MLC Dawn Patrol”.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Peter/John/Jane has finally come back with a “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand your request.  Could you be more specific?”  Other than the heinously stiff language, it occurs to me that if A. Peter/John/Jane isn’t a rabid Patagonia fan him/herself, in which case s/he’d know of the bag I’m referring to, then B. why didn’t s/he just use Google like I did?  Needless to say, I sign off with a “Thanks!” and a bad taste in my mouth.

Later the same day…

I find myself on the Keynote.com website looking for information on usability products and services.  Interestingly, I can’t find ANY information on pricing for Keynote’s WebEffective service, so I decide to try the online chat option for the second time in 3 hours. Needless to say, the Keynote experience made John/Peter/Jane over at Patagonia seem like a cute little grandma in comparison, and has been matched in pure sales aggression only by the salespeople of a well known CRM company out there who we all love ::hint hint::.  Anyway, after a lot of back and forth, where I repeat continuously that I will NOT give out my phone number, and that ALL I want is some basic pricing information (even if it’s just a brochure), I finally settle on leaving my email, city, pant size, and favorite ice cream flavor.

Final word

When all is said and done, many companies live and die by their customer service experiences.  I recently heard from a friend doing work with a big tech company that every time a customer calls customer service, the company writes off the item as a financial loss. This is before the customer has even spoken to anyone!

My point is this: if you’re going to lose money every time a customer calls in, you’d better make sure you don’t kill two birds with one customer service rep, and lose both current profit and future business.  Word.

Culture in Decline?

The last few weeks have seen a rising backlash against WIFI-hoarding laptoppers in cafes.  The general complaint from cafe owners is that the offending laptopping people show up, grab a coveted seat, pay for one paltry coffee - if that - and then proceed to camp out for the entire day, often at the expense of other paying customers.

It’s made such a splash that even our British brethren have picked up the story - and their cafe culture is way less advanced than ours.

On the surface, I can see why pulling the plug on WIFI hoppers makes sense: even though laptop users might make a place look busy by taking up all the seats, the truth is come lunch rush there’s nowhere for laptop-less lunchgoers to sit, squeezing the ever tighter margins of coffee shop owners everywhere.  It seems that while the cafe working culture has taken firm root, as a community we have yet to learn the rules of etiquette that will keep us from stepping on everyone’s toes.

OK, so there’s some room for us laptoppers to grow up.  But here’s the thing: in today’s world of A. an economic recession, where more and more people are working from home and from cafes, B. a burgeoning cafe culture that is definitely here to stay, and most importantly, C. a transparent social media culture that makes it easy for the community to interact positively with cafe owners, there’s absolutely no excuse for a situation in which cafes charge $4 an hour for internet access, or go so far as to tape over their power outlets.

We need to work toward building a true community, where laptop users and cafes alike co-exist in a symbiotic relationship that helps both grow, such that I tell everyone I possibly can about Simple Pleasures Cafe and Epicenter because they have great food and coffee, but mostly because the people who work there make me feel at home, some are even my friends, and at the end of the day they let me use the internet for hours with nary a disapproving glance.

Amen.

So I spent a great hour and a bit at SF Green Drinks this past Wednesday night at the 111 Minna gallery.  Green Drinks are a once-monthly occurrence that bring together everyone in the green space, as well as plenty of onlookers, to chat, drink and be merry.  Yesterday’s event was sponsored by Matter Inc. and RMI2009, and was generally a success (at least in my book).

Something that did strike me, however, was how social media is being used to make the events more interactive.  We’ve all seen them: the projections on the wall of Tweets relevant to the event, the latest news and comments as they come streaming in from the Interwebs. I think it’s actually pretty neat, and gives me the feeling that I can feel the “pulse” of whatever event I’m currently scoping out.

That said, here’s the ironic part: many of the Tweets were coming from people already at Green Drinks, out mingling in the room.  This means that at some point each and every Twitterer took a minute to disconnect from the scene around them and send out a Tweet - an inherently unsocial thing to do at a social mixer, no?

It’s fascinating to see how people integrate social media into their lives, whether it’s on the bus, walking down the street, or at an event. The question for me is this: to what extent does integration come at the expense of real, authentic, in-person human experience?

Fast Company recently lambasted Nickelodeon for its logo change, and I’m tempted to agree that it seems a little rushed.

Pepsi got a lot of flack for its logo change, as did WalMart.

On the other hand, Google changes its logo - or at least modifies it - almost every month, and everyone loves it.  It shows that with a little time and some care, logo design and design in general can be smarter and well-received.  Nickelodeon, shame on you!

In homage to designer Dustin Curtis’ American Airlines guerrilla redesign, here’s a quick (literally, sub-2 minute) redo of the Nickelodeon logo that I think would have gone some way toward preserving their visual brand identity:

I stumbled across the work of Jonathan Jarvis (@JonathanJarvis) the other day, thanks to my housemate and colleague, @zaqintosh.  The idea of creating a “design language”, as Jarvis calls it, certainly isn’t new. Visualization geniuses like @Stamen (and here), Hans Rosling, Dan Roam and many others have long argued that a visual language is absolutely necessary when it comes to understanding complex information systems.  Even when I was at Origo, and we instituted a company-wide policy to take mind-map style notes and meeting sketches, a few of us took to creating our own “visual vocabularies” (as we called them) to help systematize our visual note taking, making them easily understood by anyone.

Goodbye chicken scratch, hello iconography and flow diagrams.

I think the most compelling piece of Jarvis’ story isn’t that we need to create a malleable visual taxonomy - systematizing is a natural step in any language, and visualization is no different.  No, the best part of his argument is that a new class of professionals, “New Mediators” as he calls them, will come to supplant - or blend - the previously separate roles of Journalist, Analyst and Designer.

I’m curious to see how this plays out - now I’m off to brush up on my After Effects skills, since it looks like I’ll be needing them.

(image courtesy of Jonathan Jarvis at www.newmediators.com)

UI protoyping: OK Computer?

Des over at Contrast.ie recently showed us part of their process for preparing web prototypes for a client.  They ended up using Konigi’s hand drawn wireframe stencil set for Omnigraffle, which lends prototype diagrams a more human, back-of-the-napkin feel.

Speaking of which, at the last BayChi event I attended, guest lecturer Dan Roam mentioned that hand drawn really is more human: specifically, that we tend to be attracted to artifacts that look like they come from people.  So as technology has advanced to the point where we use programs instead of pen and paper to prototype web pages and UI layouts, it’s ironic that we’ve now moved the needle back the other way in search of our humanity and something more tactile.

I know that fabulous crew over at The Grove sometimes uses tablets to record hand drawn notes and sketches during meetings, which essentially kills two birds with one stone: no more paper prototypes (yay for the environment!), coupled with a hand-drawn electronic artifact that can be easily modified.  Thoughts, anyone?