Brand Loyalty and the User Experience

I recently attended a brand presentation where the video below was shown. It’s pretty funny, and also (in my opinion) a perfect example of how interactive products and consumer-generated content should fundamentally change our traditional views of customer loyalty. Loyalty in our current environment is fostered through repeated great (user) experiences, not through advertising and coupons…

But even though I like the general point the video is trying to make, I think it stops a little short of the real issue. It is really just saying that we should listen to our customers better. But that's not enough -- we need to understand the customer in ways they don’t even understand themselves, and then build experiences that meet unmet (and sometimes unconscious) needs through repeated, positive experiences that deepen the customer-company relationship.

Uncovering these needs happens not through "Voice of the Customer" research programs, but through more contextual research efforts like ethnography and contextual inquiries (combined with validating quantitative research). I believe this is where traditional Market Research programs have historically fallen short -- although there is evidence that the tide is turning on this topic as HCI becomes more mainstream and user experience research techniques become more accessible.

In my view there can be no more powerful synergy in discovering how to deepen true customer loyalty than a collaborative effort between Market Research and User Experience Research. This view is very much in line with the thinking described in the Adaptive Path blog essay The Long Wow, which I have referenced before.

So in essence, my viewpoint is this: To not realize how important repeated, quality user experiences are to Loyalty would be an egregious misjudgment of what Loyalty really is about with an interactive product.

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...

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!

Anonymity online (or the lack thereof)

There is a short, quirky, well-worth-reading article in the the New York Times Magazine called Not Being There, and it's about anonymity online, or rather the fact that you're not as anonymous as you think...

It first explains the promise of anonymity that the Internet afforded us at first:

The chance to try on fresh identities was the great boon that life online was supposed to afford us. Multiuser role-playing games and discussion groups would be venues for living out fantasies. Shielded by anonymity, everyone could now pass a “second life” online as Thor the Motorcycle Sex God or the Sage of Wherever. Some warned, though, that there were other possibilities. The Stanford Internet expert Lawrence Lessig likened online anonymity to the ring of invisibility that surrounds the shepherd Gyges in one of Plato’s dialogues. Under such circumstances, Plato feared, no one is “of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice.”

It goes on to point out this truth about the perceived benefits of anonymity:

Anonymity, it turns out, can serve two opposite interests: fantasy (an escape from the self) and manipulation (a reinforcement of the self).

In other words, you can either (1) pretend to be someone else that you really want to be, or you can (2) pretend to be someone else who really likes the "real" you, and go on to tell everyone how great you are.  The article then explains how anonymity doesn't really exist online - if you have an IP address, you can be identified!  But it also explains the dangers of thinking you're anonymous online...

Without a physically present audience that we can see or hear, we are left free to imagine our audience however we wish. When we do so, it’s easy to delude ourselves that what we’re talking about determines whom we’re talking to. People don’t think, “There could be a billion people reading this, so I’d better not discuss sex.” Their instincts tell them: “This is a place for talking about sex, so there can’t be many people listening.”

It closes with another explanation of why people seek out anonymity, and why people will probably continue to shoot themselves in the mouth...

Shakespeare’s Henry V, in perhaps the founding act of sock-puppetry, disguised himself in the cloak of a common soldier on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt to rally the restive English forces with a pep talk (“I myself heard the King say he would not be ransom’d”) that few would have believed had it been given in the King’s own name. Leadership is intellectually delegitimizing, and yet leaders require intellectual legitimacy. This is an old conundrum. It has often been beyond the powers of a single identity to solve.

What does this have to do with user experience?  I think sites that play up this false notion of anonymity as a benefit are doing their users a disservice.  It brings up a bigger question for me: Is the next evolution of user experience design not just to fulfil user needs, but also exposing what users don't need and why, even if they want it?

The Amazon MP3 search experience

My colleague Michael Morgan did an interesting evaluation of the search experience on AmazonMP3 Beta, and I wanted to share his thoughts here because I think it's a very good overview of what works and what doesn't...

Overview

Some of the high points include DRM (Digital Right Management) Free music that can play on iTunes and Windows Media Player, a nice collage of fun facts (Top MP3 songs, Top Artists, and Artists Spotlights), and very inexpensive full albums and single tracks (.89 to .99, compared to iTunes costs of .99 to 1.29). As a comparison, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, a 26 track album costs $16.99 on iTunes but only $7.99 on AmazonMP3.

First Impressions of the Finding Experience

I really liked the Top MP3 and Top Artist Spotlights as I found this engaging and a place where I would come back to check who is in the Top 25 week to week. However, the music search experience is mediocre. The default sort is by relevance but I found the list of music arduous to comb through. After applying the ‘Best Selling’ sort, I had an easier time traversing the list as the songs that I knew (i.e., the popular ones) were at the top. The "sort by" setting does not stick from session to session so that is a bit annoying.

Albums are presented like all other merchandising is on Amazon, off to the side and on the left. After initial discoverability issues, I did find the albums as this was what I was originally looking for. There are not many reviews as the site is new but the music is very old so they could have easily used the CD reviews. I was initially unimpressed with Amazon’s search experience.

Final Thoughts

The Finding experience needs some work but I think the value and abundance of cheap DRM-free music is enough for me to come back and at least try it out. I don’t think there are any breakthrough experiences with respect to Finding, but there are other aspects that make this service compelling. Although I was not compelled to buy any music right away, I do think the new service as a few things going for it:

• Value. Songs are very inexpensive compared to iTunes DRM-Free tracks that sell for $1.29
• Abundance. Unlike the iTunes Store’s DRM-free tracks that only come from EMI, AmazonMP3 has secured 2 million DRM-free songs by more than 180,000 artists from over 20,000 major and independent labels
• Engagement. Publishing top 25 lists on songs and artists is very interesting.
• DRM. All songs are DRM-free, encoded at 256 kilobits per second, in comparison to iTunes' low bit rate, DRM saturated site.

A great user experience on Wine.com

A craving for a South African Pinotage led me to Wine.com last week, and I was extremely impressed with the site and the overall experience. Here's why I liked it so much. I think these principles should be top of mind during product design and development:

1. An online search experience designed around the natural offline experience. Even though there is a search box to look for a specific wine, it is not very prominent. Instead the "Shop For Wine" page is designed to help you find the wine you need based on price, location, varietal, etc. I was able to find South African Pinotages <$20 in less than a minute. You are able to add and remove filters in any order you'd like. I like this experience because they thought about the type of users that are going to come to the site, and what their needs are going to be. Buying wine is a browse & taste experience offline -- and they recreated that experience online through a really good browse experience.
   
2. Progressive product information disclosure. Once I got to $20 and Below > South Africa > Red Wine > Pinotage, a description appeared underneath the breadcrumb: Pinotage, a crossing made by the South Africans, is a hardy, rustic grape, with gamey and smoky mixing with wild berry flavors. Underneath this one-sentence overview was a "read more" link which exposes a dynamic layer pop-up on the page itself so that you can read more about the varietal without having to leave the page (more on that later). The search results gives you the information you need, and clicking into a specific wine leads to a world of additional information. But they don't dump it on you all at once -- progressive content disclosure is a difficult concept to get right, but they do it perfectly here.
   
3. Dynamic page elements allows maximum interaction without having to leave the page. I mentioned the "read more" link about the varietal in my second point, but I also noticed a great interaction element that I haven't seen on any other sites before. Clicking on "Add to cart" doesn't take you to your shopping cart -- it has a dynamic element that provides feedback about your action, but allows you to continue to shop without ever leaving the page. Below is a short video of it -- notice how the number of items in your cart updates automatically as well.
   
   
   
   
4. The experience doesn't end once you place an order. Let me just say that this is a company that understands wine-drinkers, and aims to provide a total experience with their products.
   • Once you place your order, you have the option to download and print "Cellar Notes", detailed descriptions of the wine you just bought, with an area to write down your own notes.
   • The wine arrives with a welcome letter that also gives you 1c shipping on your next order.
   • The box includes labels for your wines that you can hang on the bottles to make them easy to identify

This is only the second time it's ever happened to me that I become a loyal customer after my first interaction with a company (the other was Vonage, if anyone is wondering...). This experience was designed to be consistent online and offline. It was designed to never let technology get in the way of your goal -- to buy the perfect bottle of wine. And let me end with this picture of the brilliant Simonsig 2003 Pinotage that was the perfect ending to this story...

7 User Experience Lessons from the iPhone

Below is a really good presentation by Stephen P Anderson about what UX teams do. I think this is a great summary of the misconceptions that sometimes exist about the industry, and our true purpose

It also talks about the iPhone and the fact that it doesn't have an enormous amount of new features, instead it's the great user experience that makes it such a cool device. The 7 lessons Stephen points out (with my interpretation in brackets) are:

1. Place better experiences ahead of more features (fix the things that are broken)
2. Start with actual experiences (always do your research on how users act and interact)
3. Solve the real problems (don't create "fixes" for problems -- spend some time to eliminate the root cause of the problem)
4. Play to think (false starts are ok as long as it leads you to a better idea)
5. Treat interfaces like conversations (don't show users everything at once -- show them only what they need to complete their task)
6. Lead with a vision (don't be discouraged by existing process such as engineering limitations -- if people catch the vision they will make it happen)
7. Obsess on the details (sweating over seemingly insignificant interface and cosmetic elements can make all the difference in the world)

Stephen's one-sentence explanation of what UX teams do? We make things work for people. I like that a lot...

BTW, the quotes from the slideshow are all from a Time magazine article about the iPhone.

Experience Is the Product

I really enjoyed this article in Business Week:

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jun2007/id20070622_697183.htm

I especially appreciate the section that talks about how the Kodak camera became one of the first consumer technology products. Here at eBay we often discuss the fact that the auction format can be inherently difficult for users to understand -- especially first time users -- which makes the design so much harder to get right. Kodak had the same problem, and marketed the camera with the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest.” Here is a discussion about what happened next:

Take another look at that phrase—"You press the button, we do the rest." Eastman marketed the camera based on this promise of experience. But in order to achieve that result, Eastman couldn't just design a simpler product. That would only address the first half of the phrase.

On its own, a simple camera is meaningless, because the entire photographic process (loading a camera, exposing the light-sensitive material, removing that material, processing the material, printing images from that material) could not get any simpler. Eastman's genius was in designing his system so customers could do what mattered most to them—capturing the image ("You press the button"). Eastman located other functions elsewhere in the system ("We do the rest"), allowing the Kodak camera to be remarkably straightforward to use.

In order to meet his goals for delivering the desired experience, Eastman developed relationships with his customers that ensured they remained satisfied. He couldn't think of Kodak as a product, but as a service. This necessitated a factory unlike any seen before, one that could handle complex processing and printing capabilities. Investing in such an operation was an immense risk, but necessary if Eastman were to deliver on his promise to "Do the rest."

I think this points out an important design principle that is also true for web design -- enable the user to do what matters most to them, and hide everything they don't need to do in the back-end. Now, figuring out what should be shown and what shouldn't is a whole other story of course, and not easy. But it is a worthy goal. A couple of technology examples that get it right come to mind:

1. Putting a CD in your CD-ROM drive automatically pulls in meta-data about the album -- artist, album title, song titles, etc.
2. Intuit's TurboTax connects with your employer's payroll supplier to pull in your salary and other tax information -- reducing the possibility of user input error.
3. Amazon allows 1-click ordering -- automatically uses your default Credit Card and Address information to fulfill your order

Something to think about as you use the web every day -- what actions that sites ask you to do could be taken care of at the back-end without user input?

Facebook and MySpace: Comparing Visual Designs

Based on the controversy it stirred up, many of you have by now probably read "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace", Danah Boyd's article about the class differences between Facebook and MySpace (she also posted a response to critiques here). I think it is a courageous article, but I'm not going to write about her views here. I want to comment on one particular section that sparked some thinking for me, and it's around the differences between the visual designs of Facebook and MySpace. Danah says the following in her essay:

Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and "so middle school." They prefer the "clean" look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is "so lame." What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as "glitzy" or "bling" or "fly" (or what my generation would call "phat") by subaltern teens. Terms like "bling" come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I'm sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but aesthetics are more than simply the "eye of the beholder" - they are culturally narrated and replicated. That "clean" or "modern" look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I'm drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

It's that last sentence that got me thinking -- the notion that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are reproduced in online identities and the way we use the Internet. I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think that it paints the full picture. Could it just be that MySpace pages are ugly because users have such control over their pages that they can make it look however they want, and to be frank most people are pretty bad designers? If you look at the color schemes, layout and readability of most MySpace pages, it's pretty horrible, but I suspect it's just because users don't know any better. And the inconsistency everywhere you look is what makes it look so "messy". People's mental models are set up to look for patterns, and when they don't find it (like on MySpace) it leaves them with a pretty uneasy feeling, even if they're not sure what exactly it is that they're feeling...

Facebook, on the other hand, gives users almost no control over look and feel. You have immense control over the content on your page but you're pretty much stuck with what it looks like. There are even certain content containers that you can't move around on the page, which, in my opinion, is a good thing. It means that pages have a consistent visual design and users know what to expect and where to find information, which dramatically increases the ease of use.

When it comes to personalization, you can give users control over design and/or content. MySpace allows both, Facebook allows mostly content personalization. I think Facebook chose the better route...

The Science and Art of User Experience at Google

I recently came across this internal talk at Google about some of the UX elements of the site:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6459171443654125383

It's almost 30 minutes long and a pretty dry format, but I found it interesting nonetheless -- check it out if you have a chance. It's a good overview of Google's relentless focus on UX. What I found most encouraging was hearing that, like most companies, they don't always get it right the first time. When you see the final products you forget about the several failed iterations they went through, and the hours of design and usability testing that went into creating the final versions.

For example -- the simple "one box" home page wasn't a deliberate move by the company, it was mainly due to laziness -- the founders didn't know a whole lot of html and didn't want to learn. But the simplicity of the Google home page ended up being their most distinct feature and certainly one of the biggest reasons for the site's popularity.

They also speak about some of the things they just didn't plan for -- like how initial usability testing revealed users who never started interacting with the home page because they were "waiting for the site to load." It just didn't dawn on users that the simple home page in front of them is the whole site. The designers then added the copyright (c) Google message at the bottom of the page, mainly to show users that site has fully loaded and they can start typing...

Good to know that no matter how good you are at what you do, you can't always get it right the first time. And, of course, user involvement is essential in the iterative design of products...

User experience and the brand

Here is a nice article about the challenges a lot of designers faces when it comes to the brand attributes they have to adhere to:
http://www.uxmag.com/design/303/dont-let-branding-kill-your-brand

I fully agree that for online brands, the user experience is the brand. You can't separate the two from each other.

The way users feel about their experience is inseparable from the way they feel about your brand. This maxim holds true for brick-and-mortar experiences as well as for digital interactions. A restaurant with great food but incredibly long lines and a bad wait staff will experience brand damage. The user experience is bad, and people will look elsewhere. The same thing will happen if your users get baffled by confusing menus, hard-to-read text, and perplexing layouts. The user experience is bad, and people will look elsewhere.

The way a user feels when they come in contact with a brand interaction point will implicitly shape their image of the brand itself. This realization is a powerful tool for user experience professionals and can help snap clients and peers out of static thinking.

I also agree, and have seen first-hand, that the way to cross this divide is to bring the Marketing function closer to the design process. I want to take it a step further and say that one of the most effective ways to do this is by involving them in user research -- especially ethnographic research like in-home visits. Once you see a user struggle with your product, and realize that they blame the company for their bad experience, not the designers (and blame you pretty loudly and creatively in some cases...), it is a real, undeniable wake-up call. No-one sees our business in the siloed way we do. It's all one experience, so how we design it directly influences brand equity.