Behind Companies

It’s like Mac Power Users‘ workflows series for the 80s. It’s humbling to realize how easy things are these days. 28 years ago, you were writing code that ran straight into the CPU. Everything else is so abstracted these days that you can get away with never understanding some of these concepts if you start with something like PHP or JavaScript like yours truly.

This makes me thankful for all the work that brilliant developers have done over the years to make this as easy as pie to pick up. It’s all still going on, but we don’t have to see it.

Jay Haynes:

If you combine these two statements and add the missing words, you can clearly see what Steve Jobs was saying: “customers don’t know what products (i.e. solutions and technologies) they want, but they certainly know what job-to-be-done (i.e. customer experience) they need to accomplish.”

This is profoundly different than saying “customers don’t know what they want,” meaning that they don’t know what needs they have. Companies make this mistake all the time. Here is a simple example. If you asked a thousand cooks what products they wanted, they would almost certainly never come up with the microwave, which would require extensive technical knowledge and expertise.

Interesting perspective that Ron Johnson happened into success at Apple by not understanding what made them successful. Steve Jobs was clearly a fan of the Jobs to be Done framework¹, but misapplied, you get what Ron Johnson did: trying to copy the external features without understanding “why”.

1. The Innovators Dilemma was the only business book he read, as was discussed in his biography [↩]

Nik Fletcher:

One example of what we call “White Lies” is found in Analog. When the user shares a photo to an online service, we obviously have to prepare the image that’ll be uploaded. But given that Analog is a very consumer-focused app, we questioned the need to say “Exporting Image” – for the target audience we felt this was an implementation detail that didn’t need to be disclosed. Instead, we simply say “Uploading”, and once we start the actual upload, the progress bar appears.

Pasquale D’Silva

There’s little consideration about how it all fits together outside of a static comp. You tap a button and the form just …appears? You swipe to delete an item and it just vanishes? That’s super weird and un-natural. Nearly nothing in the real world does anything as jarringly as just swapping states. It would feel like a glitch.

Great piece by Pasquale on an oft overlooked aspect of UI design. Our UX team recently acquired a Nexus 7, Microsoft Surface, and Kindle Fire HD for testing, and what’s the most jarring is the lack of detail to the physics of the interfaces. On iOS, even the interface beyond the canvas is taken into consideration, how you can drag the bottom of a page up and you see the blank area.

These minute touches are what take an interface from feeling functional to completely obvious and natural.

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Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Zeldman had Anthony Casanela, founder of Squarespace on The Big Web Show. Definitely worth a listen to get some insights into how he bootstrapped the platform from his dorm room to multi-million dollar business.

I’m a huge fan of the Jobs to Be Done concept, which looks at products as serving a “job” in your customer’s lives. Ross Belmont has done a great job of pulling together a guide to interviewing your customer with jobs as the lens.

As with many things, online advertising started with the most noble intentions:

“We wanted them to have this incredible offering,” Clausen said. “The idea was to extend the experience and allow them to go and have access to something they never thought they would.”

Many remember the copy on that first banner — “Have you clicked here? You will.” — but mistakenly think it led to an AT&T page. Instead, McCambley and Kanarick built a webpage that collected the early sites of great museums of the world. (Artists were early adopters of the Web.) AT&T would enable people to tour the great works of The Louvre, the Warhol Museum and others. The brand would be, as Modem founder GM O’Connell preached, a service.

“You have to remember back then it was hard to get on the Internet,” O’Connell said. “Most people, if they had access, it was through dial-up modems in the home. It was more about discovery, enlightenment and kumbaya than we’re here to measure the effectiveness of this banner versus the other.”

Last week, I managed to get myself stuck in the great American Airlines System Outage that grounded the entire AA fleet for several hours and cancelled hundreds of flights. “Black Swan” events like this and how companies respond are a real teller of their true soul, and there’s something to be learned.

I did manage to rebook in 10 minutes on US Airways¹ using the delightful Hipmunk iPhone app, which I highly recommend keeping around.

However, once I arrived at the US Airways terminal, it was all down hill. There was no Air Conditioning in the terminal, and zero acknowledgement from the US Airways staff. As boarding started, the gate staff asked multiple times for everyone to “board quickly” because the flight was running late. As people boarded, the overhead bins were full and people would have to go 10 rows further back, and then return to their seats. The attendants were visibly frustrated and constantly telling people to “hurry up”, as if people were boarding slowly because they didn’t want to take off.

In short: US Airways knew how to put everyone in a foul mood, just feeling generally upset about being on that plane. There was nothing wrong with the experience, it was just a matter of the travelers having a positive or negative association with that portion of their trip.

Turn that back around to American Airlines, who is definitely not known as one of the “hip” carriers like Virgin America or Southwest. They’re about as “average” of a flight experience as it comes. Even so, they still found a way to delight after causing headaches. Submitting a refund request was as simple as filling out a form on their website. I expected it to be a week and I’d have to follow up with a phone call when it wasn’t processed. However, 15min later I get an email back from a service representative that the flight would be refunded.

That was enough for me to walk away just annoyed with the added stress from the trip day. However AA said they wanted to make it up to customers, so they issued a $150 flight voucher for the inconvenience. All of a sudden, the entire situation became one that made me feel good about the airline. I knew it wasn’t their fault, but they still went above and beyond.

Black Swan event or not, it’s the day to day minor interactions that will define who your company is, not mission statements and pretty logos. Take the time to find out what people expect when they interact with you, and then surprise them with a delighter that will bring unexpected joy to their day. Even if they don’t explicitly thank you for it, the positive associations they will form with your company are priceless.

1. If you want to get technical, they are now the same airline. [↩]

I love the analogy Dan Lyons, in leaving ReadWriteWeb and mainstream tech journalism in general uses about the state of online journalism:

Media companies need a new way to make money — one that doesn’t depend on advertising. But so far nobody has come up with anything. That wouldn’t be so bad, if at least they were aware of this problem. The truly scary thing to me is that publishers either aren’t aware of this, or won’t admit it.

Instead of inventing a new business model, media companies keep trying to tweak the old one. By that I mean they keep trying to invent new kinds of advertising. It’s a pointless exercise. They’re like blacksmiths who are responding to Henry Ford and his automobile by trying to create a better horseshoe.