Creating loyalty through great customer experiences

Brandon Schauer from Adaptive Path wrote a great article last week called The Long Wow, about how to create customer loyalty through repeated great customer experiences.  It encourages companies to go beyond just measuring loyalty (through overly simplistic measures like Net Promoter Score) or instituting "loyalty programs", and spend time to create experiences that delight customers again and again.  To quote from the article:

True loyalty grows within people based on a series of notable interactions they have, over time, with a company’s products and services. No card-carrying programs are necessary: Apple doesn’t have a traditional loyalty program; neither does Nike or Harley-Davidson. These companies impress, please, and stand out in the minds of their customers through repeated, notably great experiences.

As I read through the article (and you should too!), a couple of recent experience came to mind of how 2 completely different companies either made me loyal from the start, or increased my loyalty by doing something small to help me out.

 

1.  Running Revolution

Nothing is more important for a runner than shoes.  After sticking with New Balance shoes for years, I recently decided to try out something new.  But since I didn't know where to start, a colleague recommended Running Revolution, a small boutique shop close to where I live.  I became a loyal customer long before I even bought my shoes there.

These guys get runners.  There are no prices on the shoes -- for them it's about finding the right shoe for you, and nothing else.  They measured my foot with thermals, brought out pairs of shoes that they knew would be a good fit for me, put me on the treadmill and videotaped me to measure bio-mechanics, and I can go on and on.  Suffice to say that I didn't walk out with the most expensive shoes in the store, but I will never buy running shoes anywhere else again.  They made a life-time customer simply by fulfilling my need for a great running shoe.  They know that I will come back again and again, so they don't have to sell me the most expensive shoe in the store right then and there.

 

2. Amazon.com

Even though I'm already a loyal Amazon customer, the repeated great experiences keep strengthening that loyalty.  Small things count.  While browsing around, I noticed that the Overnight 1 Click button was disabled.  When I scrolled over the button, I got this message:

How nice and and completely unnecessary of them!   They could've gotten an extra $3.99 shipping cost out of me, but instead they refused to let me pay extra.

 

I'm sharing this as examples of what Brandon points out in his article -- that through a continuous focus on user needs and building great experiences, you create loyal customers that are so much more valuable in the long run than if your only goal is to squeeze as much revenue out of them as you possible can, right now.  Unfortunately Wall Street doesn't believe in this unique brand of economic "delayed gratification", but I wish more companies would just start doing it and prove them wrong...

Can a social network become too large?

An article in the latest issue of The Economist explores the fact that there might be less to Facebook and other social network sites than meets the eye...  The basis of their argument is as follows:

[There is an] an important limitation for social networks, such as Facebook, compared with older sorts of network, such as the postal or telephone systems. These benefit from Metcalfe's Law, which says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users. In other words, the more people have phones, the more useful they become. This “network effect” leads to rapid adoption and puts up barriers for new entrants.

But unlike other networks, social networks lose value once they go beyond a certain size. “The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded,” says Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster. Despite their name, therefore, they do not benefit from the network effect. Already, social networks such as “aSmallWorld”, an exclusive site for the rich and famous, are proliferating. Such networks recognize that people want to hobnob with a chosen few, not to be spammed by random friend-requests.

This suggests that the future of social networking will not be one big social graph but instead myriad small communities on the Internet to replicate the millions that exist offline.

Although I agree that social networking sites are not perfect at the moment, I don't think the reason is that they are too large, as The Economist suggests.  I want to fall back on one of my earlier posts, where I mentioned the importance of "weak ties" between people in separate network clusters to facilitate the flow of information in that network.  If the future of social network sites is really in "myriad small communities on the Internet" that are not connected in any way, each network in isolation will become pretty useless over time, since there will be no new information coming into or going out of that network. 

In order to have value (or social capital), a network needs to be (1) large, (2) open and (3) have (weak) ties between different clusters in that network.  Alexander van Elsas and Rolf Skyberg writes a lot of about the need for open social network sites, and I agree with their views and their thoughts on how this can be implemented.  The article in The Economist is an interesting read and it does raise some serious questions about the monetary value that is placed on Facebook and other sites at the moment, but I just don't think that smaller, isolated networks is the right way forward.

Visualization of quantitative data -- bad examples

I'm a big fan of and RSS subscriber to Smashing Magazine -- they have some great articles on design, and I always find myself reading all the way through most of their posts.  With that said, I have to voice my disappointed in their recent article on chart and graph generators.  It's probably not even their fault really -- I applaud the hard work they did on pulling together a bunch of Flash, AJAX and CSS based chart generators that are available online.  But the fact is that most of these tools are completely useless unless you know how to visualize data properly, and that is, sadly, a skill that is not taught enough.

All of these tools create pretty flashy charts, that’s for sure, but does it really help to tell the story of the data?  Why would you ever need a donut chart or a 3D stacked cylinder chart?  What does that add to the data that a simple 2D bar chart can’t show you?

If you're not familiar with Edward Tufte's work, you should definitely check it out.  He coined the term "data-ink ratio", in which he argues, to quote from Wikipedia, "against the inclusion of any non-informative decoration in visual presentations of quantitative information and claims that ink should only be used to convey significant data and aid in its interpretation."  Below are some examples, from the Smashing Magazine article, of how "non-data ink" is so overbearing that it completely overshadows the data:

There are so many things wrong with these charts, but let me just point out the 3 main issues really briefly:

• Unnecessary usage of area.  The eye is not good at comparing the relative sizes of areas.  On the first graph, can you easily tell if France or Canada is bigger?  We are good at comparing lengths though, which is why bar charts are almost always a better option than pie charts.  (And by the way, what on earth is the hole for on that first chart?).
• Unnecessary and incorrect usage of color.  In the first chart, different colors are assigned to each country.  Since this should have been a bar chart and not a pie chart (as per my first point), different colors aren't needed, and just adds non-data ink to the graph.  If you're going to use color, then don't use highly saturated colors as in these graphs -- it's uneasy on the eyes and in many cases indistinguishable to people who are color blind.
• Unnecessary usage of 3D.  3D effects should just never be used, period.  It clutters up the charts, and also often results in occlusion -- where some data points are hidden behind others.

We need to teach analysts the techniques to create simple and straight-forward charts that let the data shine through.  All these primary colors and 3D stuff have nothing to do with the data.  A great resource on this is Stephen Few's book Show Me The Numbers -- I highly recommended his book to anyone who spends any time making charts for business presentations.  Ok.  I'm glad I got that off my chest...

Measuring the effectiveness of content on e-commerce sites

I've been thinking about the different ways to measure the effectiveness of content/text on e-commerce sites, and more specifically, how to select the best version if you have a variety of different alternatives in front of you, each with its own group of fans who want to get it on the site right away!  Since the "Voice" of a web site can be such an abstract, arbitrary decision, how can we apply methodologically robust research methods to help make these decisions? 

First, I would define "effectiveness" in this context as the optimization of the following 3 concepts:

• Do users understand what you are trying to tell them and what action they should take to be successful in their task?
• Are you invoking the desired emotions with your content?
• Does the proposed content result in higher conversion rates than other alternatives?

It's so important to combine the user perception data (the first two bullets) with business metrics (the last bullet).  From my experience the only way for user experience researchers to affect change is if we can show the positive impact these changes can have on engagement/revenue metrics.

It seems to me that you will be well served by using the following 3 methodologies to measure the relative effectiveness of different versions of the same content.  This is also a really nice way to progressively reduce the number of alternatives down to the best solution:

• Usability testing.  Start with several different version of the content (~10), along with the current version (if it exists).  Ask users in a lab setting what they understand the content to mean, and any other thoughts they have on the way it sounds.  This should help narrow down the alternatives to 4-6 possibilities.
• Desirability testing.  Use the Desirability method, but adjust it for use in large sample online surveys by turning it into a between-subjects experimental design.  In the survey, users are asked to rate the content on different brand and design attributes.  This way you can determine what emotional response the content extracts out of users.  You'd also be able to ask users which version of the content they'd prefer, and why.  This method has the added benefit of large numbers to give you confidence in the statistical significance of the results.
• A/B testing.  Once you've narrowed the alternatives down to 2 or 3, live A/B testing can help you determine which of the alternatives perform better from a revenue or engagement perspective, by looking at differences that can be attributed purely to content changes.  This obviously works easiest when the content is directly related to a revenue-generating task, like the call to action on a checkout page, for example.  But it's not just about revenue -- there are great ways to measure metrics of engagement with the page, which is just as powerful.

Now, I can see 2 issues that make this a pretty difficult task, and it's the reason why the above 3 methods should not be used in isolation.  In combination, they help tell the whole story.

• It is difficult to know what users really read on a page.  In the first two methods you pretty much have to show people what to read -- that doesn't happen when they visit your site organically with no-one looking over their shoulder.  This is why A/B testing is so important as it gives you a sense of how behavior will change based on content.
• It is difficult to isolate the effect of content changes from the other influencing factors on a page.  This is the really difficult part.  How do you know that conversion/engagement improved because of the content and not of some other factor on the page, like visual design changes?  That is why it is important to keep the rest of the page exactly the same, and also why usability and desirability testing is important to bring out the perceptual data from users.

This is of course by no means the only way to do this, but I think it's a good approach that balances methodological rigor with the dangers of not overdoing it.  I'd be curious if anyone has any thoughts or ideas on how to improve on this approach...

Designing live concerts: U2 show how it's done

If you're a designer (or just into good design) and a music fan, I'd like to recommend the book U2 Show.  Despite the uninspired and nondescript title, this is a book about how the various U2 tours were designed -- from Boy all the way through Elevation.  The book explains the countless hours that go into stage design, lighting design, sound & speaker stack design, and a whole bunch of other areas (and it has some great photos too).  I really enjoyed the window this book provides into what goes into the design of a large rock concert, and it showed me again that basic principles of good design translate to all media forms.

Here are a couple of quotes from tour manager Willie Williams.  First, on how the PopMart tour came into being:

There was also a very direct (and very rare) brief to me that this tour would be ‘design-led’, rather than being intimidated by scale or logistics.  Having proved to themselves and to the world with ZooTV that, in terms of what can be toured, ‘anything is possible’, U2 were of a mind that the only limits to be placed on the creative ambitions of this tour were to be financial ones.

On the impossible design requirements given to the sound engineers:

Mark Fisher’s frustration with years of stage design constrained by traditional loudspeaker stacks led him to propose that we should keep the huge video screen free from clutter by placing the entire sound system in one central ball.  Most sound engineers would have resigned on the spot, but Joe O’Herlihy rose to the challenge of mixing a live show through what would essentially be a mono PA.

I like how they talk about the huge differences between the PopMart tour and the Elevation tour:

After the broad, churchy strokes of the Lovetown show and the sensory assault of Zoo TV and the garish, high-concept japery of PopMart, here are U2 playing their songs hard, straight and in your face.

It goes into detail on the simplicity of the Elevation stage and lighting design:

Video is not something that can simply be added to a show, a fact that is the downfall of many otherwise potentially interesting stage productions. We are so conditioned to look at television that moving camera pictures automatically become the focus of attention.

Because of this they went with what they call "Unmediated iMag", which means that the screens showing the band members will be static cameras, and showing everything in black-and-white to avoid distraction from what is happening on stage:

This proves once again what I have always believed to be the single most important purpose of visual design: to allow the content  to shine through elegantly, without distraction.  Pick up this book at Amazon if you're interested -- with more than just pretty pictures it brings a great design perspective to the enormous live concert industry.

Great reading on social networks and new media

My favorite blog right now is the wonderfully titled Alexander van Elsas’s Weblog on new media & technologies and their effect on social behavior.  I'm struggling to keep up with all the great things that Alex writes, so I wanted to give a quick summary of some my favorite posts here, as an introduction and to get my own head around it!

In Facebook will be no match for Google, he talks about Google's recent purchase of the social conversation site Jaiku, as well as Google's own social networking venture called Orkut.  Alex makes some really great points about why he thinks Google has a much better understanding of social networks than Facebook does:

Google doesn't have to build a social network as its primary strategy. Unlike Facebook, Orkut is simply another means to an end. Google is the connectivity on the web, and Orkut only is one aspect of that strategy. Think Gmail, think Google earth, thin iGoogle. All major Internet platforms than can easily be integrated into one compelling service for the user.

He closes with this excellent observation:

While Facebook is building walls around their service, trying to increase the value of their network (instead of value for its users), Google is becoming the major operating system on the Internet (Search, Social Networks, mail, RSS) and Mobile (Google Phone, Jaiku). Given this strategy I would put my cards on Google, not Facebook. No way they will be able to match that. The big question now becomes whether or not Google will be able to integrate all these services and still remain open as a platform thus providing more value to its users.

In The end of a defensive music industry era he examines Radiohead's decision to let fans decided what to pay for their music -- which I agree is a good idea, however from an earlier post I do wish they had a better site for this...

And finally, in 10 ways to improve web 2.0 and move into an era of true interaction, he continues a discussion that I got involved in last week as well, and makes some really great points about how to get to the next evolution of the web.

Check out Alex's blog and subscribe to his feed -- he's a smart guy and we can all learn from him!

Visual design clutter index for web pages

I'm currently working on a project where we're trying to come up with way to establish a visual design "clutter index."  The goal is to see if there is some threshold beyond which web page clutter impacts actual business metrics like conversion and click-through rates.  The challenges are widespread of course, and mainly focused on the following 3 areas:

• The definition and measurement of clutter.  There are a variety of ways to measure clutter on pages, ranging from the completely objective (e.g., % of white space on a page) to completely subjective (e.g., how do users rate the page on a clean vs. cluttered scale). 
• The definition of conversion.  Since some pages on an e-commerce web site are revenue-generating, and others aren't, an important question is how you define conversion.  For revenue-generating pages (e.g., pages with a "checkout now" button) this is easy -- did the page result in a sale.  For other pages, like product information pages, this measure won't work, so some other measure of engagement with the page becomes necessary.
• Controlling for other influencing factors.  In conjunction with to first 2 points comes the problem of causality vs. correlation.  Assuming you have your definitions of clutter and conversion nailed down, how can you be sure any changes you see in conversion is caused by clutter (causal relationship), and not some other factor you are not accounting for (there's correlation but no causal relationship).

The way to go about it is to take as many measurements of clutter as you can, throw it into a model with a variety of conversion metrics, and see what comes out.  You also have to find a way to account for other influencing factors so that you can control for that in your model.  Easy, right?  Ok, so there are a lot of open issues, but they're definitely not insurmountable.  I also believe it's a worthy pursuit, the hypothesis being that there are clear business reasons for keeping designs and interfaces simple. 

And apparently we're not the only ones thinking about this...  Ruth Rosenholtz and her colleagues at MIT recently wrote a paper (Measuring Visual Clutter) where they seem to have developed what they call a "clutter detector" for a variety of interfaces, mostly offline (desk clutter, map clutter, etc.).  They describe some of their challenges in doing this as follows:

The fact that one person's clutter is the next person's organized workspace makes it hard to come up with a universal measure of clutter. Rosenholtz and colleagues modeled what makes items in a display harder or easier to pick out. They used this model, which incorporates data on color, contrast and orientation, to come up with a software tool to measure visual clutter.

On the issue of subjective measures of clutter:

Although there was a fair bit of disagreement among the people being tested about what constituted clutter, when the researchers compared results from their clutter measure to those of their human subjects, they found a good correlation.

I'm still digesting the paper, but it's a fascinating read so definitely check it out.  Thoughts on how to approach this for e-commerce web pages are more than welcome by leaving a comment or emailing me at rian at ux-sa dot com.

Radiohead's great idea ruined by bad user experience

Radiohead is practically giving their new album away for free in an interesting experiment where they allow buyers to make up their own price for the album -- even if that price is zero.  I am very interested to see how this turns out and what the median price is going to be, but before they can sell any of the albums, they need to be able to get users through their site!

I was surprised to see UX Magazine's short but glowing review about the site Radiohead set up to allow users to buy the album.  They say that it "tells the story clearly but keeps a stylish edge."  I personally don't think it does either of these things.  Of all the screen shots I can show to prove my point, I'll settle on this psychedelic beauty:

I'm assuming the colors mirror the cover art, so let's forget about that for a minute.  The bigger problem is that it takes quite a bit of playing around to figure out what is going on here.  You can either order the "Discbox" at a fixed price, or make up your own price for the download option.  But the interface doesn't tell you this until you're right in the middle of it, and even then it's not very clear:

The basket simply has an open text box and a question mark which tells you "it's up to you" when you click on it (if you're wondering, clicking on the question mark on the second screen assures you, "No really, it's up to you").  Now, I'm all for quirky content, but this is just a little bizarre.  And I'm not just saying that because I've been on the site too long and the colors are giving me a headache -- the navigation is really quite strange and labyrinth-like.

Anyway, I think this is a great concept -- let's see what happens when we let music-lovers determine the value of the music they listen to.  My guess is that die-hard Radiohead fans will be willing to pay a lot more than the curious masses saying to themselves, "Can I really get this for free"?  But maybe that's the way it should be -- let the fans support you, and be confident that casual listeners will turn into die-hard fans once they listen to your stuff, and then they'll pay you next time.  If only they would get the user experience right...

What's wrong with web 2.0?

There are a few very interesting posts on web 2.0 that I'd like to point your attention to.  First, there is Seth Porges' well-written reminder about how lazy we all are in The Futurist: Will Human Laziness Burst The Web 2.0 Bubble? 

He starts by defining the problem:

If the defining trait of the first Web cycle was the stupid animated GIF, the current “It” sites all have one thing in common: They are, to varying degrees, reliant on user-generated content. Without your neighbor/classmate/sister/girlfriend’s tireless devotion to keeping her profile up-to-date, MySpace would merely be a place for FOX to promote its properties. Without a horde of news junkies yearning to see their username in digital print, Digg would be an ugly page of yellow and white (and their new profile feature would be a joke).

He then goes through a thoughtful observation about how people migrate from one social networking site to the next -- first Friendster, then MySpace, and now Facebook.  He concludes:

And that is why the Web 2.0 era will come to end sooner rather than later. Because if there is one immutable law of humankind, it is that we are really, really lazy [...] The point is, it is hard work keeping up with these things. And there will be a point down the line when, even if it’s not done in a collective shrug, the Web world will just say “screw it”, and update their pages more and more seldom, until Facebook resembles Friendster.

Then the brilliant Alexander van Elsas stepped in with a great post called  The flaws in web 2.0 and how to correct them.  He agrees with Seth's laziness theory up to a point, but then he disagrees (and this is where user experience comes into play):

But, I don’t think that is the only reason why web 2.0 is flawed. A much more important reason why most web 2.0 platforms will not be sustainable in the end is that they were essentially not build to provide true value to its users, but instead they were build to create and leverage the value of a large network! The larger the network, the more value it creates to the platform owner in terms of advertisement revenues and of course the possible take over by one of the larger companies which have too much money to spend anyway. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t really help the user. Users are putting much more energy and creativity into the networks than they get out of it. Be honest, have you really gotten as much value from other (often unknown) “friends” on Facebook, Myspace etc than the amount of effort you have put into this?

I agree with his opinion that we're currently not getting as much value out of social networking sites as we should, but I disagree with his viewpoint on why that is the case.  As I've written before here and here, the social capital embedded in networks are extremely beneficial to users - if they have the right connections (read my earlier post for an explanation of structural holes non-redundant contacts).

In my opinion, the network is what it's all about for the user -- the network is the need.  That is where they will draw their information benefits and control benefits from.  The flaw is not that social networking sites focus too much on the network, it's that the user experience does not allow them to tap the full potential of their networks.  As I've written before:  access and use of the resources in a network are dependant on an actor being aware of their presence.  If an actor is not aware of ties or relationships between him and other actors, he cannot use the resources available to him. Social capital then seems not to exist, and will only come into existence for that actor once he becomes aware of it.  The user experience needs to help with this discovery for social networking sites to become truly valuable and fulfill the user needs that Alexander talks about.

As for the solution to this dilemma, I am in full agreement with Rolf Skyberg on the creation of an open social network (read his brilliant post on the topic here).  But only if we get the user experience right, and that is going to be the tricky part, of course.  It needs to be an experience and an interface that allows people to identify the most important actors in the network, and tap into the benefits of those networks easily and without boundaries.  And it needs to do that without relying on too much user input because, come on, we're lazy!