Improve Web Readability With… Readability December 17, 2009
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Online strategy.Tags: David Pogue, Readability
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Like most people, I have a backlog of things that I want to read. One of the items on my list was an article by David Pogue in the New York Times in November called “Cleaning Up The Clutter Online.” Pogue highlights a free tool for the Web called Readability that reformats Web pages to makes them significantly easier to read. Here’s some of what Pogue said about Readability
With one click, it eliminates EVERYTHING from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else… The text is also changed to a beautiful font and size… It completely transforms the Web experience, turning your computer into an e-book reader. I think I’m in love.
My take: As a user-centric type of guy, Pogue’s description of Readability grabbed my attention. So I gave it a shot. Wow! The application does a phenomenal job of making sites easier to read. You configure it to meet your needs and voilà! Cluttered Web pages transform into easy-to-read pages.
To give you a sense of what this application can do, here are two screen shots of my previous blog post “7 Keys To Customer Experience In 2010” — before and after I applied the readability application.
The bottom line: Hopefully this is just the start to more usability-improving technologies.
8 Ways To Boost Online Gift Cards December 6, 2009
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Online strategy.Tags: Gift Cards
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There’s an article in Forbes about how companies like Home Depot, The Container Store, and CVS are adding electronic gift cards to their Websites. Well, it’s about time. It shouldn’t take a lot of analysis to see that gift cards can be a lucrative piece of online functionality. Why wouldn’t you help customers just give you money?!?
If you are deploying online gift cards, here are some ideas for improving the experience:
- Merchandise it. Make sure that customers can find a clear path to gift cards from the homepage.
- Make it easy to do multiples. Consumers often shop for several people at one time around the holidays, so make the process easy to generate several gift cards in a single session.
- Allow flexible amounts. Don’t lock customers into specific amounts for gift cards (which replicates some offline gift cards), since there’s no reason to fit into their budget.
- Schedule delivery. Don’t make customers wait until the day before a key event to buy a gift card. Allow them to buy it any time they want, but schedule delivery for a later date.
- Create delivery options. Some customers may want to send the gift notice directly from the company, but others may want to email it themselves or hand something to the recipient. Think through these options; even consider offering gift cards through the (regular) mail.
- Encourage gifting. If your company has a rewards program, think about giving customers some type of credit when they buy gift cards. Otherwise, you may want to offer some other incentives for this highly desirable customer behavior.
- Enhance the giftee experience. When someone receives a gift card from your company, it should be the start of a special experience — that fully reinforces your brand. So design the entire experience. A happy recipient will encourage more gifting!
- Don’t forget usability. Poor usability can drag down any gift card offering. Make sure that your gift card functionality is very easy to use. In particular, watch out for the top issues we found in our evaluation of 100’s of Web Sites: text illegibility, inefficient task flow, and obscure privacy/security policies.
The bottom line: Try and capture every gifting opportunity.
Infuse Emotion Into Experience Design October 31, 2009
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Design solutions, Online strategy.Tags: Emotional Experience Design
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The Web is becoming an increasingly important channel for companies, yet online experiences leave a lot to be desired. Our research shows that most sites have poor usability and they don’t reinforce key brand attributes. That’s why I worked with Ron Rogowski (the primary author) on a research report that created a concept called Emotional Experience Design, which we define as:
Creating interactions that engage users by catering to their emotional needs.
Emotional Experience Design is quite different from today’s functional design:
To apply Emotional Experience Design, firms must:
- Address customers’ real goals. People may come to a Web site to get service or buy a product, but that’s typically not the beginning or culmination of their journey. The mother of a newborn with stomach problems isn’t going to a site for information about medication; she’s looking for a way to bring comfort to her baby — and maybe get a little relief for herself. If firms want to engage customers, their sites must cater to these deeper customer needs..
- Develop a coherent personality. Web sites can feel sterile — devoid of a brand’s human characteristics, which are often apparent in other channels. But firms need their online experiences to do even more than just reinforce their brands; the experiences should enrich them. How? By developing a coherent, consistent personality that customers can easily recognize throughout all interactions.
- Engage a mix of senses. Over reliance on text and imagery makes many sites indistinguishable from competitors. Interestingly, most people can’t remember the content of Intel’s commercials, but they can easily imitate the Intel sound.While Web experiences don’t allow users to taste or smell objects, they can and absolutely should engage users’ senses of sight, hearing, and even touch.
The bottom line: It’s time to make emotional connections online.
Good, Old-Fashioned Online Customer Service July 17, 2009
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Online strategy, customer service.2 comments
I decided to go to the “way back machine” and look at a (very old) report that I wrote in July 2002 called “Mastering Online Customer Experience.” Here’s an excerpt from the report:
Don’t Deploy Technology — Solve Problems. While companies hope that online service will reduce costs, they mistakenly scrutinize individual interactions instead of studying the collection of contacts required to solve a customer’s problem… Firms must monitor interactions from the customer’s point of view — from the inception to resolution of an issue.
Doesn’t that sound like something you could say today?!?
Here’s another piece of the report that’s still relevant; a graphic that depicts how individuals make decisions about the channels they use for an interaction:
Customers Explicitly Select Service Channels
Web Satisfaction Snapshot- USAA, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble Top The List April 27, 2009
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Online strategy.Tags: Amazon.com, • USAA, Barnes & Noble, Comcast, eBay, Hilton Hotels, Road Runner, Southwest Airlines, Sprint, Time Warner Cable
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We asked more than 4,500 US consumers about their satisfaction with experiences across 12 different industries: airlines, banks, cell phone service providers, credit card providers, hotels, insurance firms, Internet service providers, investment firms, medical insurance companies, PC manufacturers, retailers, and TV service providers. Our analysis looked at phone, store/branch, and Web interactions.
Here are some highlights of consumer feedback on Web interactions. The analysis looked at satisfaction rates at an industry level and changes from last year’s results, examined satisfaction for individual companies, and compared responses across generations of consumers.
- Highest industry satisfaction: Banks (84%) and credit card providers (84%)
- Lowest industry satisfaction: Heath plans (66%) and wireless carriers (66%)
- Most improved industry: Banks (improved 1%)
- Least improved industry: TV service providers (declined 6%)
- Highest company satisfaction: USAA (93%), Amazon.com (93%), Barnes & Noble (93%), eBay (92%), Southwest Airlines (91%), and Hilton Hotels (91%)
- Lowest company satisfaction: Comcast- TV (60%), Sprint (61%), Time Warner Cable (62%), Medicare (62%), Comcast- ISP (62%), and AAA (64%).
- Most satisfied generation: Seniors were most satisfied for eight of the industries
- Least satisfied generation: Gen Yers were least satisfied for seven of the industries
- Largest generation gap: Airlines (Seniors at 91% versus Gen Y at 73%)
The bottom line: What’s it like when customers go to your Websites?
Navigation Plagues Web Experiences April 25, 2009
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Online strategy.3 comments
In a recently published research report, I examined the results of more than 1,200 Web Site Reviews that Forrester has completed over the last 10 years. It turns out that Website experiences still need a lot of work. To begin with, 60% of sites ended up with ”poor” or “very poor” scores in 2008.
Our expert review grades 25 criteria across four areas: Value, Navigation, Presentation, and Trust. When examining how sites have done in each of these areas, we find that they most often fail the Navigation criteria.
Source: 1,212 Website Reviews Completed By Forrester Research
As sites have become more complex, they’ve piled on content and functionality (more Value) which has made it more difficult for users to find what they need. Here are the five criteria which sites failed the most in 2008:
- Is text legible? (18% passed)
- Is the task flow efficient? (22% passed)
- Does the site present privacy and security policies in context? (30% passed)
- Do page layouts use space effectively? (31% passed)
- Are category and subcategory names clear and mutually exclusive? (34% passed)
The bottom line: Firms should consider an “ultrasimplicity” strategy.
Experiences That Satisfy Consumers, 2009 April 15, 2009
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Call center customer experience, Customer experience, Online strategy, Store/branch strategy.8 comments
I just published a report called The Experiences That Satisfy Consumers, 2009 that examines consumer satisfaction with Web, phone, and in-person experiences. My analysis looked at more than 100 companies across 12 industries. Here’s an overview of the results:
Only hotels and investment firms cross over the 80% satisfaction mark in every channel, while health insurance plans and TV service providers don’t even make it to 70% in any channel.
The report also analyzed changes from last year, differences across generations of consumers, and satisfaction levels for individual companies. As I did with last year’s report, I’ll create separate posts to examine satisfaction with Web interactions, phone interactions, and in-person interactions.
The bottom line: Consumers aren’t as satisfied as they should/could be.
Off Topic: Ushadidi May Improve The World February 8, 2009
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Online strategy.Tags: TED Conference, Ushadidi
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At this year’s the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conference, which always provides a glimpse into the future, one of the projects mentioned was Ushadidi — a “crowd sourcing” mobile phone platform. This platforms allows individuals to report and confirm activities in a specific region. Their collective input — through mobile phone, email, or the Web — provides a real-time depiction of what’s going on. According to co-founder Erik Hersman:
We have the capacity to report eye-witness accounts in real time. There is information overload. We think we can tap into the crowd to get a better understanding of the probability of something being true.
Here’s the Ushadi implementation for tracking atrocities in the Congo:
My take: I have two angles of feedback on this: the technology and the social impact. Let me start with the simple observation, this is cool technology. This effort combines some very interesting things: the collection of diverse data feeds, social technologies for validating information, and rich Internet technology to support visualization, analysis, and drill-down.
Now on to the social benefits. News from around the world is tainted by controlling governments, partisan journalists, and a lack of credible data. So people (and governments) form their opinions based on less-than-reliable anecdotes. In this environment of unreliable information, genocides like Darfur, Rwanda, and the Holocaust are allowed to continue. If people around the world have accurate information about these situations, their collective outrage will hopefully serve as an enormous deterrent in the future.
There are also some other potential benefits to society. We’ve heard a lot about the outbreak of diseases like bird flu and SARS around the world. Real-time information about patients and symptoms would help to alert medical experts about the the spread and severity of those diseases.
The bottom line: I’m rooting for the Ushadidi project to succeed.
Chosing The Right Design Agency, Miami Style January 23, 2009
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Online strategy.Tags: 1800mattress, Design agencies, Fountainebleau, Internet Retailer
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Earlier this week, I spoke at the Internet Retailer Web Design Conference in Miami. The venue, the Fountainebleau, was spectacular and the event was great. There was a lot of good insights for online retailers. And at every gathering spot like meal tables, I found an open flow of tips, tricks, and best practices being shared amongst previous strangers.
My speech was called “Choosing The Right Design Partner.” The other speaker for the session was Bill Kane, who was previously the VP of IMS & Web Development for 1800mattress where revamped the 1800mattress.com site with the help of TELLUS.
I started by comparing design agencies to Harvey Dent, the hero turned villain (“Two-Face”) in Batman. My point was that design agencies can be very helpful, but there’s no guarantee of success unless you actively manage the entire lifecycle of the relationship.
I shared Forrester’s WAVE methodology for evaluating design agencies which looks at firms’ current offering, strategy, and market presence; showing results from our Q2 2007 evaluation, but not harping on the results since we are in the middle of another evaluation.
I spent most of my time discussing our approach to evaluating the firms’ current offerings. By looking at the results from our evaluations of agencies’ usability, branding, and personas, I made the case that none of the firms are anywhere near perfect and even the better agencies don’t do a great job ALL of the time.
Then I gave my advice on how to manage the relationship after you’ve selected an agency. The most important point is that you need to have a strong project manager assigned to the project in your firm (as well as a strong one from the agency).
Bill Kane followed my speech with his lessons learned in building a site that supports 1800mattress’ multichannel environment. He reiterated the importance of active management on the client side of a project. Bill’s now a consultant out on his own and he’s got great experience implementing large-scale multichannel projects. Contact him if you need help: wkane1@aol.com.
Here’s a copy of the presentation: Choosing The Right Design Partner (.pdf).
Besides the content stuff, the trip had some other highlights. I got to have dinner with my brother-in-law and his friends at Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink which was a lot of fun. I also caught up with some Forrester clients at the event, which was also great. But the coolest part of the trip was watching Obama’s inauguration speech. Internet Retailer showed the speech on the large screens in the main ballroom and served lunch to us at our seats. It was fun to share the moment with several hundred other people.
The bottom line: Kudos to Internet Retailer for a great event.
PNC Bank Breaks Through Gen Y Blindspot December 3, 2008
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Design solutions, Disruptive customer experience strategies, EBD #1: Obsess About Customer Needs, Financial services, Gen Y, Innovation, Marketing to Gen Y, Online strategy.Tags: IDEO, Online infusion, PNC Bank, VirtualWallet
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Last year I proclaimed that Banks Have A Gen Y Blind Spot. Well, that’s no longer true for all banks. It turns out that PNC enlisted IDEO to help engage Gen Y and created a new offering: VirtualWallet. According to a recent BusinessWeek article, PNC has signed up more than 20,000 customers (70% from Gen Y) and is on track to break even in two years.
Here’s how VirtualWallet is described on the IDEO Website:
[It is] a family of banking products that provide customers with seamless access to their finances and intuitive, tangible, and direct control of their money. Centered on electronic transactional banking, it is designed to both promote and optimize banking activities with features and visualizations that support the mental models and lifestyles of its Gen Y customers
My take: I really like VirtualWallet. It shows what you can do when you explicitly focus on Gen Y. The long-term success will require ongoing nurturing by PNC, but the initial approach makes a lot of sense because:
- It applies a strategy called online infusion. While it’s a financial offering, online features like a money slide bar to graphically indicate available funds, a “Savings Engine” that helps customers establish rules around spending, and a playful instant transfer feature named “Punch the Pig” are core to the value proposition.
- The online experience implements many components of the four strategies we’ve defined for engaging Gen Y: 1) Immediacy, 2) Gen Y literacy, 3) Individualism, and 4) Social Interactivity.
- There’s a mobile component. While this wouldn’t make sense for many banking applications based on overall mobile usage, it’s almost a requirement if you want to target Gen Y; many of whom view their cell phone as their primary digital device.
- The approach starts with customer needs. While this is not novel for projects that involve IDEO, many companies aren’t diligent enough in starting with a solid process for uncovering the true needs of specific customer segments. By understanding Gen Y behaviors, the bank can actually charge fees for anything more than 3 checks per month.
The bottom line: Gen Y will be getting a lot more attention from banks.
