The EchoUser Experience

This email last week totally threw me:

Now, forgive me for wondering what AT&T was doing in Angola, especially because the African country is one of the most unstable places on the planet.

Oh wait, they meant Angola, Indiana?! My bad, forgive me for thinking globally instead of locally. Except that Angola, Indiana isn’t anywhere near local - in fact, it’s more than 2200 miles away. So remind me again why I got this email?

Maybe that’s why I keep getting dropped calls, AT&T thinks I’m in Angola.

#fail

I got this notice from JetBlue today telling me about new TSA regulations concerning “vetting” of passenger information. Now, I tend to read carefully and try to comprehend things before coming to a conclusion, yet I couldn’t help but feel put off by the message. In the end it seems pretty innocuous (they just want to make sure your JetBlue info on file matches your official government-issued ID info in order to allow online check in), but I still think they failed with their delivery of the message. Stay tuned for my take on the whole thing.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

When I heard that iOS4 was going to enable some kind of multitasking, my first reaction was a resounding “meh”. You see for me, even though I use my iPhone to do business related tasks and the like, I simply didn’t see the need to be able to switch between apps and keep things running. I had no trouble booting in and out of email (since it’s native, it would save my state for later, really useful when writing an email), checking my calendar, or being on a call and looking up Google Maps. For me, and I’ll wager most iPhone users, this was multitasking enough.

But then something strange happened - namely, I started using my iPhone to listen to music, specifically Pandora and Stitcher (disclaimer below). I have a pretty nice sound system at home, and since I recently re-purposed my AirPort for an extra WIFI network, I took to plugging in my iPhone instead. Everything was working wonderfully until “Ding Ding!”. I received a text message.

Now, it’s not the text message alert that was annoying so much that every time I checked the message I’d have to boot out of whatever music app I was using - and interrupt the music. The first few times this happened I dismissed it with a “Tsk tsk. That’s kind of annoying”, and thought nothing of it. But a few weeks in and I was ready to throw my iPhone across the room. Not to mention that I work from home, and the incessant stop-and-start of the music was driving me batty. I eventually stopped using Pandora, Stitcher and a ream of other apps on my iPhone because I couldn’t take all the interruptions (I did switch to Pandora One on my computer, though, so Pandora should be happy).

Enter iOS4. With more open multitasking I could all of a sudden start Stitcher, then check a text message, write a quick email, or check Things without the jarring audio cut-off. What was once a thoroughly painful exercise became, in an instant, seamless. And, you guessed it, my use of Pandora and Stitcher has gone through the roof (same with my roomies).

I’d wager that iOS4 practically saved some music apps, and will rapidly increase user adoption from here on out - because let me tell you: there’s nothing worse than interrupted music, and iOS4 just saved the day.

Thoughts?

Disclaimer: EchoUser has done some work with the fabulous team over at Stitcher, so we’re definitely biased

Reinventing the wheel

I was recently chatting with my colleague Etan about how it’s ludicrous that some of the bigger tech companies in Silicon Valley (and beyond) build all software in-house. This means that while everything from file sharing, to collaboration, to idea generation and money tracking are all viable web-based services, tech monoliths basically take it upon themselves to reinvent the wheel, time and again.

Think back 15 years or so, and there were definitely good reasons for all this: firstly, many of the highly useful online services simply didn’t exist back in the day. No doing your taxes online with Turbo Tax, no chatting with your colleagues via Yammer, and certainly no checking in with Foursquare. The same applies to back-end magic, too: no WordPress for blogging, no Drupal or Joomla for content management, and no Ruby on Rails for rapid webapp development. So it’s definitely understandable that as different needs arose,  companies took it upon themselves to step in, foot the bill, and very often push the envelope.

App ubiquity

But no longer. We’re in the 21st century, people, and every need that can be conceived of has a matching web service or tool out in the ether. Yes, there really is an app for that.

Which is why I find it so ridiculous that companies are clinging to legacy file sharing systems, totally clunky conference call services, and outdated and burdensome security protocols. In an age where two guys in a garage can make Goliath-slaying software, it simply doesn’t make sense to hold on to old - and let’s face it, expensive - tools when better options are out in the wild. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when evolution is just as good, and freely available.

Acquire me this

Let’s be fair to the big guys, though. Many companies do identify a need and end up buying a smaller company (or two) that fills it. This is good thinking: why invest time and energy when someone else has already done it? Everyone from Amazon to Cisco to Google to Intuit to Schlumberger to Yahoo does this, often to great success - but often ending up with a sprawling network of badly integrated portfolio companies and a more confused consumer offering.

When integration works, it’s great: I still use Turbo Tax and couldn’t give a hoot that it’s now owned by Intuit (:: yawn ::). Similarly, Flickr still runs well under Yahoo, and Zappos hasn’t visibly changed post-Amazon takeover.  When it doesn’t work, though, it can be a disaster, and the oil industry (aka Schlumberger, BP and others) is a case in point: I know for a fact that oil analysts often have to deal with dozens of data streams coming from different sources, often badly integrated, most oftentimes not.  And while it’s easy to point a finger at big oil, other industries suffer from this bloatedness as well: certain film industry companies suffer from 6+ month training regimes for new employees, simply because the range of different, clunkily-integrated tools that need to be learned is so vast. Definitely not efficient.

Security? Whatever.

Another main reason I hear that companies build stuff in-house - even buying companies and rebuilding their product offering from scratch - revolves around security. Data security, uptime security, offline security, web security; you name it, the reason for not just using an outside tool exists. But here’s the thing: it’s not like we aren’t already using web-based tools to transmit, monitor and manage sensitive information, because we are. Turbo Tax knows all about my 2009 income, Mint has a window into everything I own, and HighRise has a finger on the pulse of my deal flow. So is there some argument that my individual security needs are not the same (or as important) as those of a company on the Fortune 100 list?

Puh-lease.

Centralization and issues of scale (the most common big company needs) made sense in a time when hardware was scarce and security protocols minimal. But now the opposite is true: hardware is free, information is totally decentralized via the web, and it takes no more effort to secure one person’s information than it does 10,000. Sure, sometimes logging in to multiple online services can be a pain (and assumes you’re online to begin with), but it’s not that big of a drag - is it?

Organizations large and small would do well to jump on the webapp bandwagon and prevent the needless reinvention of the wheel. Evolution is where it’s at.

Good beginnings.

I’ve been following WalMart’s sustainability plans for awhile now, and I have to admit I was initially impressed. One of the world’s biggest companies actually making strides in sustainability and forcing its suppliers to come to heel?  The ripples of the Sustainable Product Index, I was sure, would spread far.

That was until I read more about their plan. It’s pretty simple really, and involves three steps:

1. Ask suppliers 15 simple questions about their supply chain and production practices.

2. Create a Sustainability consortium of universities, companies, NGOs and government to “develop a global database of information on the lifecycle of products…from raw materials to disposal.”

Ok, so far so good.  And finally:

3. To (and here I quote) “translate the information stored in the database into a simple tool that informs consumers about the sustainability of products.”

Right. Because consumers are inherently dumb, and the complicated supply chain information needs to be “translated” before we get to have access to it.

While I’m sure that the information is complicated, and that most people buying Kraft mac ‘n cheese, jelly donuts and frozen dinners don’t give a flying crap about supply chains, leaving the end user out of the equation until the very end is a huge mistake. WalMart may have made strides on its way to taking over American industry, but it committed the cardinal sin of standards creation: only including the end user, you know, the actual people who will use the standard on a daily basis, at the end of the process.

It’s not about the labeling, stupid.

I imagine WalMart’s thinking has gone something like this:

“We have about a million moving parts to coordinate with the Index, so we’ll tackle our suppliers first because they’re more complicated. Then we’ll make things seem more legitimate with a warm-and-fuzzy Consortium (I actually like this move, FYI). And finally, we’ll slap some pretty labeling system on everything so Gina from Shattunket, Georgia can choose the toilet paper that speaks to her conscience just as well as it does her bottom.”

But this is all backwards. Creating an index to be used by regular people isn’t just about making it legible or usable (although that’s definitely important and should be thought about up front anyway), it’s about making it relevant.

And the only way to do that is to include the end user - you, me, everyone - right smack at the beginning the whole process. Word.

I had a great chat with Johannes over at IDEO last week. Johannes is in charge of bringing some quantitative flavor to IDEO’s magic, and he’s up to some interesting stuff. After our morning coffee conversation, though, a few ideas stuck with me:

1. User churn

Me and the team at EchoUser have been getting more involved with start ups of late, helping them with usability, general user experience and the like. General start up concerns revolve around reducing “user churn”, or in other words, “how to keep users interested and encourage ongoing usage of our product/service.” It turns out that this is a sticky problem, especially when it comes to balancing the needs of new users (who might get “churned”) and “habitual” users who already use the product on a regular basis.

Our work inevitable hunts for what we’ve come to call “the aha moment”, or that one particular experience that helps turn a casual/new user into a habitual one. Of course, we all know it’s probably not one single experience that does the trick, but the simplification is helpful nonetheless.

In talking with Johannes I drew out what usage paths look like for a given product:

user churn paths

Ideally, you want users to take the path going up and to the right, because this means they’ve had their “aha moment” and have now become habitual users.  And for start ups looking to raise funding from VCs, being able to say “our usability work has shown we can improve user churn by X% because we can guarantee an aha moment” is a very good thing.

2. Switching

Then it was Johannes’ turn to pick up the pen. He drew this, which deals with a marketing concept called “Switching”:

User switching

Basically, switching refers to the idea that many people, when trying out a product or service, will tend to switch between different ones - this is represented by their degree of “loyalty” to a given product.  The general point is to try to get users to either extreme, either 100% loyal to one product, or 100% to the other (to me this is a little simplistic, given that it’s a zero-sum outcome, but more on that another time).

It’s interesting to note that the Churn graph is a loose inversion of the Switching graph: users who have yet to experience their “Aha!” moment are less likely to become 100% loyal to a particular product - and therefore more likely to switch (as well as churn).

We’re finding more and more that startups have to balance design changes that appeal to both habitual users and new ones, changes that try to straddle the divide between 100% loyal and “I’m not so sure just yet”-loyal.  The balancing act is an interesting one to say the least, and we’re using our usability special sauce to make it that much easier. More to come.

Living in San Francisco it’s all too easy to get wrapped up in the social media bubble.  There’s always a new service to use, an iPhone app to try out, a social network to join - it’s a constant game of catch-up, and I have to be honest that some days I positively hate it.

That said, I’m constantly learning about myself and my friends (and total strangers) by being so immersed in all this web 2.0 stuff. Who knew that I’d love broadcasting short messages to the world about what happens to be on my mind (good and bad)? Or that I’d feel compelled to log each entry into a cafe, office, or surf spot with one of my location-based apps?  If you’d asked me 2 years ago, the answer would be have been a definitive “not me!”

But things are different now, and as I adjust to a life where I’m always connected, I’m starting to rub up against some social “seams” I had totally ignored. For example, it turns out that not everyone I know on Facebook wants to know when I’ve “checked in” to a bar or cafe - especially when I change locations a half dozen times a day. Equally surprising is that my friends who use Google Buzz complain about the same, which is weird because it means that they monitor Buzz religiously since I barely ever notice new Buzz notifications!

So while I’m theoretically meant to use these tools with abandon and feel free to send out the minutae of my life to anyone who cares to pay attention (which isn’t always that many people), it turns out that what I actually have to do is carefully tip toe through the social media minefield, censoring myself as I go.

I wonder if social media tools will eventually take into account the social seams they’re potentially bowling right over, and try to maintain a little social order and sensitivity. For now, I’ll be sure to tread lightly…

It’s almost as if the speakers and panelists at South by South West 2010 had all prepared together beforehand. Time and again, no matter what the topic of the panel, the same theme came up again and again:

Gaming is where it’s at.

From the more obvious cases, like Dennis Crowley’s location-based Foursquare app (effectively a multi-player game replete with rewards and badges), to the more esoteric, like crowd-source astrology platform GalaxyZoo, more and more examples of game-based platforms are popping up.

While it’s clear that certain web-based services can benefit from a game-like component given that typical incentive structures simply aren’t there (like the social need to be recognized as a “local”, represented in Foursquare as becoming “Mayor” of a particular place), it gets really interesting if/when applied to other examples. Like tacking on a game component to a hospital’s internal report tracking system to encourage nurse diligence, or rewarding taxi cab drivers for picking up fares on time, or rewarding kids for reading newspaper articles online - the list is endless, which I have to admit is slightly scary.

In the Augmenting Maps with Reality panel, one of the audience members asked what the endgame (pun intended) of this “life as a game” is meant to be: will every part of our lives be represented as a game? Will I be competing - with myself or others - when I go shopping for groceries (10 points for buying kale!), buy a drink at the bar (minus 5 points for the carbs), or meet 3 new people in one day (You’ve received the social butterfly badge!)?

The panelists’ answers were mixed: Dennis Crowley thought it was totally fine that social interactions are rewarded through a game platform, while Flickr information architect Kellan Elliott-McCrea felt that games are an intermediate step - that a world where we need such explicit, constant incentives to do basic activities is likely the poorer for it.  Casey Stengel’s quote, “Most games are lost, not won” comes to mind, along with apocalyptic visions of our Pacman-like future.

Thoughts? Is gaming here to stay, and if so, is it a good thing?

Does not compute image

This morning, while recruiting participants for an upcoming startup usability study, I stumbled upon a mythical creature I didn’t think existed. After chasing it through the underbrush of the internet to no avail, I eventually gave up, disgusted and disheartened, for the creature was gone - potentially forever.

And the creature in question? That rare breed of human who doesn’t have access to a DSL connection.

I know, I know, breathe in deeply - I didn’t think they existed, either. But it turns out that this kind of person is out there, and we have to plan for them accordingly.  More and more I find that people respond to my online recruitment ads, often for a remote study that needs screensharing and the like, without having the necessary technological hardware to actually complete the study. Like that story where from the band of monkeys eventually one will write Shakespeare, sometimes potential participants make it into the pool when they really shouldn’t.

It would be easy to blame the participant - I mean, who doesn’t have DSL access these days in the U.S., anyway? As it turns out, quite a few people don’t, so in the end it really is our bad as user researchers, not the participants. We need to make sure we’re designing studies - and recruitment procedures - that aren’t exclusionary from a technological perspective, even when we’re building a product or service that requires (relatively) advanced technology.

Examples of non-traditional recruitment abound: Etan once stood in a BART station for hours to recruit BART riders, while Mick loitered in a Best Buy (with permission of course) hoping to snag potential wireless hub buyers. The main problem, however, is that these methods, while often very effective, are time consuming - and expensive.

So how to recruit in an internet-ready world, when we’re not all on the same technological page?  Any thoughts? Examples?