It’s About the Customer

Recently, I tried a new appli­ca­tion called Media­Bridge from Digi­marc. The basic con­cept is that if you have a quick­cam or scan­ner attached to your PC, you can access extra con­tent through a URL embed­ded within a news­pa­per or mag­a­zine page. Inter­est­ing con­cept as one could see this being used in Inter­net direc­to­ries or for more infor­ma­tion on a par­tic­u­lar arti­cle. How­ever, the focus here has been on adver­tis­ing and adver­tis­ing alone.

Wired is the first pub­li­ca­tion to test it out and there are ample ben­e­fits to the adver­tis­ers. First of all, they can track what pub­li­ca­tion has prompted some­one to go to their site and sec­ond they can tar­get read­ers of those pubs with dif­fer­ent mes­sages. Inter­est­ing con­cept but what’s the advan­tage to the customer?

Unfor­tu­nately, Digimarc’s approach is not that uncom­mon in our indus­try. Design­ers build sites that are beau­ti­ful eye candy requir­ing tons of plug-ins and then won­der why more peo­ple are not using them. The answer is quite sim­ple: cus­tomers do not like to down­load plug-ins and a recent study showed that cus­tomers do not even care that much for graph­ics on a page.

In a rever­sal of what is hap­pen­ing in the print world, Inter­net con­sumers want text. So why do more and more sites insist on hav­ing such things as slow flash movies at their entrance? Quite sim­ply because they do not pay atten­tion to what their cus­tomer want. In a recent edi­to­r­ial on his Flash weblog Fla­zoom, Chris McGre­gor is call­ing on all Flash devel­op­ers to focus on the customers.

At the same time, Jakob Nielsen, “the guru of web page usabil­ity”, is talk­ing about using Cus­tomers as Design­ers. The mes­sage here is sim­ple: Focus on your cus­tomers and they will focus on you.

This may sound like a rant on my part but it’s some­thing that’s been brew­ing over time. Too many com­pa­nies have taken their cus­tomers for granted (the “if you build it, they will come” phe­nom­e­non) and have then won­dered why their pro­jected growth was not hap­pen­ing. In a word: Not enough work on usabil­ity and too much focus on design.

The gen­e­sis

But in a way, this is not an unusual phe­nom­e­non. Back in the mid eight­ies, when desk­top pub­lish­ing tools became avail­able, peo­ple at the fore­front of that rev­o­lu­tion felt the need to use most of the tools. As a result, many pub­li­ca­tions would come out with dif­fer­ent fonts for head­lines, story, sub-heads, etc… often mak­ing the newslet­ter or mag­a­zine almost unread­able. To a large extent, the apoth­e­o­sis of this phe­nom­e­non was the rise of Wired as a pub­li­ca­tion, and their almost unread­able Mind Grenades. Yes, they were pretty to look at but they were low on con­tent and high on graph­i­cal treatments.

Over the years, Wired has become more con­ser­v­a­tive in its lay­out but the dam­age didn’t stop in print. Tak­ing what they had learned about badly com­mu­ni­cat­ing in print, Wired pushed the enve­lope fur­ther on the web by using a num­ber of icons and less than obvi­ous names for their sec­tions. It was fine in the name of exper­i­men­ta­tion and the folks at hotwired even­tu­ally pulled back from their to cre­ate more under­stand­able sec­tions but many took it as the rea­son for cre­at­ing over-bloated pages with bad navigation.

How­ever, I have to admit that most of us back in those days were check­ing out Hotwired to see how far the medium could be pushed. It was excit­ing and since few of us had had many years of expe­ri­ence, we spent count­less hours dis­sect­ing what was work­ing and what wasn’t.

One step for­ward and one step back

Hotwired went back to a more tra­di­tional look (at least by their stan­dards) in 1995–1996 and started orga­niz­ing its con­tent around sec­tions that made a lit­tle more sense. In the mean­time, plug-ins came out, Java came out and we all felt a need to imple­ment the lat­est tech­nolo­gies on our sites. What we didn’t real­ize at the time was that while we were putting Java Tick­ers and 2.0 fea­tures on the sites, we were clos­ing the door for a few more peo­ple who did not have the tech­nol­ogy to look at our sites. With each iter­a­tion of a new browser, there was a mad race as to who would imple­ment the lat­est and great­est exten­sions and we ended up with sites that were, for the most part, unus­able by a lot of people.

This is when the split started between two schools of web page cre­ation: the inter­face design­ers, who were argu­ing that the web was more like a soft­ware appli­ca­tion and that the role of a web page was sim­i­lar to that of soft­ware and should have a clean design that was trans­par­ent to the user (I remem­ber argu­ing that we should never be happy when a user talked about our design because it meant he or she had noticed it) and the graphic designer group, who believed that the beauty of design was more impor­tant than its functionality.

On the inter­face side, peo­ple started look­ing at whether a site scaled back grace­fully, all the way to the lynx text browser. As a result, some­what more boring-looking pages were born but users were com­ing in, get­ting the infor­ma­tion they wanted, and get­ting out.

On the designer side, peo­ple con­tin­ued to look at ways to enhance the expe­ri­ence, adding all kinds of sounds and plug-ins to cre­ate more inter­ac­tive sites. Those sites looked great but needed users to keep up with the lat­est tech­nolo­gies in order to use those features.

A mid­dle group started look­ing at tem­pla­ti­za­tion and auto­matic browser iden­ti­fi­ca­tion (the smart way to do things but I didn’t real­ize it back then) and serv­ing dif­fer­ent pages based on what plat­form the con­sumer was using. Ulti­mately, that last group was right in that it can now go on and imple­ment new pre­sen­ta­tion schemes offer­ing the same con­tent in dif­fer­ent format.

Why this diatribe?

Ulti­mately, this issue is one of cus­tomer focus. Back in those days, we didn’t have many cus­tomers to cater to (the web was not as main­stream as it is now) so we were afforded the chance to make mis­takes. How­ever, now, there is lit­tle room for those mis­takes and there is an estab­lished body or work (and a few corpses) to look at when mak­ing deci­sion. Ulti­mately, how­ever, it’s about the customers.

Another exam­ple

I used to love Kozmo for their quick deliv­ery and their clean inter­face. Then they decided to redesign the site to cre­ate more space for them to sell other prod­uct. From the inside, I’m sure it made sense: try to sell more prod­ucts to each cus­tomer com­ing in the door. The prob­lem, though, is that this redesign slowed down their sys­tem to a crawl. When I was happy with Kozmo, I didn’t care much about Urban­Fetch, Kozmo’s biggest com­peti­tor in New York. How­ever, the long time it took to load a sin­gle page on Kozmo’s site con­vinced me to take a look at Urban­Fetch. I did, their site reacted faster and I started order­ing more from Urban­Fetch than I do from Kozmo. Why is this rel­e­vant? Quite sim­ply because I am now putting my dol­lars some­where else because a redesign pushed Kozmo one step back. As a result, their attempt to sell me more resulted in my buy­ing less from them. Not a good trend and I hope for them that I am more of the excep­tion rather than the rule. But some­how, I doubt it.

Back to the end-user

I’d like to pro­pose a some­what rad­i­cal idea: take every­thing your com­pany is doing and explain, for each of those com­po­nents, the ben­e­fits to your cus­tomers. For exam­ple, why is a cookie for your ad impor­tant? Answer: it allows us to bet­ter tar­get cus­tomers, hence pro­vid­ing them with ads that may appeal to them and be related to what they are inter­ested in. It’s a bit of a stretch but the cus­tomer derives value from being pre­sented with some­thing that is more along the lines of their interest.

So what about Digimarc?

In the case of Digi­marc, who’s the end user? It’s the reader of a mag­a­zine. Why should that reader use such a tech­nol­ogy? Because it enhances the mag­a­zine. Just keep­ing the tech­nol­ogy as a way to bridge paper ads to web pro­mo­tions doesn’t really enhance the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence but how about using it as a web to link to more info. For exam­ple, if you were a sub­scriber, you would get a ver­sion that allows you to delve deeper in a story. I would scan the page, it would send me to the publication’s web site, where I would find such things as links to the com­pa­nies men­tioned, links to other arti­cles about the sub­ject in this magazine’s archives, etc (fur­ther­more, the pub­li­ca­tion can sell adver­tis­ing on these online pages to adver­tis­ers that are already using the tech­nol­ogy in the print edi­tion)… This would add real value to the expe­ri­ence, truly cre­at­ing a bridge between the print con­tent and the online one. The con­cept is good but the imple­men­ta­tion right now needs that kind of tweak. If you’re an adver­tiser using that tech­nol­ogy, try to push the mag­a­zines to fol­low that con­cept through, hence unlock­ing extra value for you.

Con­clu­sion

Of course, focus­ing on the cus­tomer is no guar­an­tee of com­plete suc­cess but it goes a long way in tak­ing you there. Tech­nol­ogy is always intru­sive, the ques­tion is how do we make it less so and there­fore increase usage of that tech­nol­ogy. Of course, there will always been a few peo­ple out there try­ing out every­thing new (I am one of those peo­ple) but those of us who do are already favor­ably pre­dis­posed toward tech­nol­ogy. In other words, we are not the right kind of focus group. If you are a tech­nol­o­gist or a techophil­iac, you are not the right per­son to judge whether this will work with the mass pub­lic. Ask some­one around you who doesn’t use tech­nol­ogy as much as you do (par­ents, friends, peo­ple at the cor­ner store) about how they feel about a par­tic­u­lar con­cept and start align­ing your thoughts with theirs. Look at what you’re doing crit­i­cally (does this make sense to some­one with aver­age or low com­puter skills?) and focus on your cus­tomer. It’s a tough prac­tice and it’s often a frus­trat­ing one, as you will find that what may have seemed obvi­ous to you isn’t to other peo­ple. But the end result will be that your cus­tomers will love you for it and will keep com­ing back.