Going mobile? Smart decision. Analysts keep saying that companies expect a huge increase in mobile interactions with their customers over the next few years.  But designing for mobile isn’t like designing for today’s website.  Here are just a few tips to save your on-the-go users endless downloads, needless frustration–and to keep them coming back for more.

Think Simple Yet Engaging
I mean, really simple.  Remember your users are dealing with those confounded mobile device interfaces on top of your mobile website interface.  Most devices can’t handle large downloads, either.  So use simple layouts with very concise yet very clear navigation, optimized images and video, brief text, and limited options.  

Choose & Prioritize Your Content Wisely
You can’t gear all of your content for mobile, so select your mobile content strategically. Google categorizes mobile users into three behavior types: 

• Repetitive now (e.g. checking stock quotes, sports scores, etc. regularly)
• Urgent now (e.g. looking up directions to an airport)
• Bored now (e.g. playing games or reading entertainment headlines to kill time). 

Identifying content that supports those three behaviors is a good start toward a mobile communication and content strategy.

Keep Consistency with Your Regular Website 
Even tiny mobile screens have room for look and feel.  Tie in the look and feel of your main website with your mobile site so users know they’re in the right place and attribute their positive mobile experience to your brand.

Redirect Mobile Traffic to Your Mobile Site & Promote Your Mobile Site
Unfortunately, you probably won’t work out a deal with wireless carriers such as Verizon and AT&T to include your link as a default destination in their mobile web browsers.  So your users will use their mobile device to visit your main website (the one they see on their PC). Fortunately, you can save them the pain of downloading your huge home page to their tiny screen.  Technology can detect whether users are visiting your main website through a mobile device and automatically send them to your mobile site.

To draw in users who are unaware you have a mobile presence, promote your mobile site vigorously, especially on your regular website.  Some nice examples include CNN.com and Delta.com.   

Many user experience professionals shy away from marketing.  In many ways, who can blame them?  We’ve observed customers ignore banner ads, watched pop-up ads annoy and confuse customers, and read rants by usability pioneers about the evil that ads wield on web design.  We have seen attempts at applying a traditional “broadcast” model of marketing fail in interactive mediums.

But good marketing is more than ads—a whole lot more. Several concepts in marketing jive quite well with user experience.

Integrated Marketing Communications

Relationship Marketing

Customer Relationship Management

The Good: The Communication Experience Is the Marketing
By emphasizing consistency, customization, and credibility, these concepts echo a few characteristics of what I’ve described as customer-centered communication.  

These concepts additionally

• Lead us to view a customer’s interaction with a brand holistically instead of isolated in certain channels.
• Challenge us to effectively apply customer data such as demographics and buying history to improve communications.
• Encourage us to think about building long-term relationships with customers.

The Potentially Bad: User Experience Opportunities
The potentially bad side of these concepts is, of course, their execution. (Remember those banner ads.)  Here are a few ways user experience professionals can help avoid the bad.

Don’t Interrupt Me: Placement and Content 
Because user experience professionals understand how and why customers actually use the channels, we know when and where marketing communication is most appropriate.  We also can inform its content.

Example: A well-placed, relevant, and undisruptive BP banner ad on CNN.com that engaged even a skeptic like me. It shares a similar topic with the article, visually stands out on the simple page, and expands instead of taking the user away from the page.

Don’t Just Tell Me—Show Me
Telling is reporting that you hiked 25 miles on the Appalachian Trail last weekend.  Showing is describing the weather, the scenery, the sounds, the animals you encountered, the soreness in your muscles.  Telling makes you aware of what happened. Showing engages you in the experience. I think showing is critical to making brand attributes clear and to developing trusting, long-term relationships with customers.  User experience professionals can help brands “show” in interactive mediums.

Example: Betty Crocker has been demonstrating brand attributes such as practical, friendly cooking expertise since the 1920s through recipes, cooking tips, cooking shows, promotions for discounted cookware, and more. (Below is a 1951 print ad with tips and a recipe.) These efforts continue successfully today on the Betty Crocker website and its RSS feeds.

Help Me Help Myself: Applying Customer Data
User experience professionals can make the most of customer data across customer self-service channels and applications such as store kiosks, web applications, automated phone systems, and more. We know how to leverage that data to make self-service customized and therefore more valuable and easier to use. 

Quiet the Noise: Optimizing for Specific Channels
Of course, we can make marketing communications highly usable and accessible in specific channels.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of hairstyles. It was the age of cornrows and bows; it was the age of perms and braces. It was the epoch of skater dudes; it was the epoch of tennis queens. It was, in fact, 1989 at Midlothian High School—go Trojans!

You see, Creative Director Wade Forst (proudly sporting the Bo Derek do in his senior tux) and I just discovered we share more than a perfect 10 employer. We also share the same home town—the village (yes, village) of Midlothian, VA. We even shared the same neighborhood for a few years…and the same street…and the same crib. (Well, I used it 3 years after he did).

The Disney ride is right. It’s a small world after all. And, thanks to the web, it’s all the smaller. With just a few searches and clicks, we discovered even Midlothian has quite the online presence:

• The Midlothian Alumni page on Facebook.com: More than 300 members.
• Midlothian High School website: Check out those pep rally pics—the Trojan spirit lives!
• Midlothian, VA on Wikipedia: Claims to fame include coal mining and Aimee Mann.
• Village of Midlothian: It really is a village!
• Ukrop’s: Hands-down the best grocery store in the universe.
• Crab Louie’s: Yummy seafood in a historic tavern.

Big oops! Melissa Read, Ph.D. and I talked today about the 300-page iPhone bill a blogger received and then shared with the world to encourage e-billing. As a former Cingular employee, I cringed to hear this story–and not just for environmental reasons. Receiving a 300-page bill not only kills a lot of trees, it kills the customer experience.

I hope this publicity doesn’t overshadow Cingular/AT&Ts other industry-leading efforts to provide outstanding customer care. When I worked for Cingular, I led a revamp of the online and in-store welcome experience, especially the Cingular Service Summary and welcome collateral for all customers. Changes to the bill itself may be in order, too.

Even without a major redesign of the bill itself, AT&T could address this issue a few ways. Most people are interested in bill details only when there is a problem–not all the time. Some thoughts…

• Clarify messaging to new customers about their bill format.
• Make the default billing setting for customers online, with the option to change to print.
• For print bill recipients
• Make the default setting a summary, with the option for detailed billing or an occasional request for a detailed hard copy.
• Communicate to customers that bill details are always available online, and make details easy to find.
• If a detailed billing customer’s bill is going to exceed a certain page number, then notify the customer with an option to receive it by e-mail or online instead.
• Consider providing print details only for charges that exceed the customer’s normal amount. For instance, detail only the text messages exceeding the plan’s included number.

Okay, maybe communication never truly left … but our awareness of it has grown keen as we shape effective customer experiences in interactive media. Recently, Donovan (Director of User Experience) gave a presentation about web 2.0’s impact on the landscape of user (customer) experience.  He convincingly described how web 2.0 capabilities evolved as a response to user needs and allow the web to become, among other things, the communication medium people envisioned 10 years ago.

In this changed landscape of customer experience, what is communication exactly?  How do we ensure customers not only get our messages but also find them relevant and convincing?  How do we coordinate messages across multiple channels to deepen our relationships with customers?

As a start toward answering such questions, I just published “Rediscovering Communication“ for the online magazine UXmatters.  Please add your insights as we journey through this exciting landscape together.

When it comes to words and the web, you may have heard less usually is more. What you may not have heard? How on earth to do it. Here’s the nitty gritty on 4 tactics for content that’s nice and concise.

• Use the Right Subjects and Verbs
  Writing style guru Joseph Williams recommends viewing each sentence as a story. Readers expect main characters to be subjects and their main actions to be verbs. Not only is this structure more clear, it’s also more concise. In the After example below, Spunlogic is the main character.
  Before: There has been a green initiative launched at Spunlogic.
  After: Spunlogic launched a green initiative.
• Don’t Be Redundant, and Don’t Be Redundant
  Spotting redundancy can be fun, and the fix is easy.
  Obvious: Orange in color, period in time
  Implied: Imagine a picture
• Avoid Meaningless Modifiers
  Basically, you really, really want to stay away from virtually all the various modifiers that don’t add meaning. (Translation: Stay away from modifers that don’t add meaning.)
• Why Use a Phrase When a Word Will Do?
  The more carefully you choose your words, the fewer words you have to use. Here’s an example.
  Don’t use this: Due to the fact that
  Use this: Because

Recently, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched the first phase of an exciting new era in its web presence:

• Radical redesign of its home page.
• More ways to find information–by topic, A to Z list, popularity, lifestage, and more.
• Improved search engine.
• New topic “gateway” pages, such as Healthy Living. 
• 2.0 touches such as RSS, tag clouds, and blogs.

It holds great promise to make science-based health information easier to access than ever.  And I daresay it’s revolutionary for a federal government website. Remarkable when you think about the staggering amount of useful information that CDC houses–everything from outbreak updates to AIDS prevention to swimming safety. 

CDC 2.0 takes public health to the next level, indeed.

Last night, Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path spoke inspiringly to a group of user experience professionals, CHI-Atlanta, about “Experience Strategies.”  Not any ordinary presentation. It reminded me why I care so deeply about user experience and rekindled my vision for it to be not just good but innovative—for it to not just compete but leapfrog competition.  I’m sharing a few high points here and will share more in another post.

Take an Experience-Based Approach
Peter talked extensively about what this means, especially for products–applications, websites, devices, etc.  It’s easy to get mired in technology and features without truly understanding the problem we’re trying to solve and envisioning the experience we’re trying to design.  In the words of Steve Jobs:

When you start looking at a problem and see a simple solution you don’t understand the problem. You keep looking and see how complicated it really is and you are halfway there. The really great person will keep going to find the key underlying principle and create a beautiful, elegant solution that works.

The stage of looking at the problem is one of the most critical and often the most overlooked.  Looking at the problem takes research with real customers/users, understanding the competitive landscape, understanding the brand’s system of customer touchpoints (channels, etc.), and more.  Reflecting thoughtfully on all these considerations helps us find that key underlying principle.  And all this takes time.  (I’m reminded of the CHI 2006 keynote address given by Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit, where he discussed the culture of innovation.  He views every touchpoint with customers as an opportunity for innovation.)  One of the most compelling examples Peter mentioned was the Nintendo Wii.  Rather than staying in the same features and graphics game as PS3 and XBox, Wii changed the game by introducing physicality—and has outsold the competition in huge numbers ever since.

Employ Experience Strategy
So how do we apply an experience-based approach?  Largely by articulating an experiential goal and sticking to it. Peter also noted it tends to be where business value and experience opportunities align.  This doesn’t have to be expressed in reams of documentation.  It can be a few paragraphs or a few words.  Its purpose is to remind everyone what the end experience should be.  Peter artfully described many examples, but I am simply noting a few here:

• Kodak camera (in 1884): You press the button, we do the rest.
• Flickr: Articulated on their About page. 
• Google Calendar: Shown on the AdaptivePath blog.

Think Systems—And Leverage Them
Perhaps my favorite part of the presentation, Peter described how a customer experiences not just a product but a system.  The system is comprised of the brand/company’s processes, or channels (web, paper, IVR / call center, store, etc.), or more.  The product is just an interface to access the system.  For example, the iPod itself doesn’t have much functionality.  It’s the iPod device (to access the media) and iTunes software (to manage and buy the media) together that make the system, albeit a system Apple tightly controls.  A more complicated but still tightly controlled system is Target’s prescription bottle and communication system.

More complicated still are the multiple channels of a financial services company he encountered when designing its website.  The danger there, Peter warned, is treating the channels as silos, not as a system.  This partitioned view results in a fractured experience for the customer. It burdens the customer to figure out the system, rather than burdening the system to help the customer.  I cannot stress how important this point is for large companies and big brands, especially those offering services.  Designing the experience for a single website or application is good.  Designing the experience across channels is what leapfrogs competition.  

Welcoming the Customer with Communication Done Right
In Part I, I described the challenges large corporations face in communicating effectively with customers throughout the customer lifecycle.  I also showed an example of addressing these challenges through content management only, not communication, in customer support. Well in Part Deux, I’m happy to present an example of meeting these challenges well at the critical “welcome” stage.   

Enter the Cingular Service Summary (CSS).  This document (generic version shown) reaches the hands of every new customer and every customer who upgrades/renews a contract—well over 50 million customers since its release in 2005, about 750,000 customers a day.  This highly personalized, dynamically generated document is printed on the fly in the stores, e-mailed to customers, and posted on the website.  It has two purposes:

• Summarize what the customer bought
• Educate the customer about specific issues and questions (bill amount, voicemail set up, etc.) in an easy-to-understand way.

I toiled to redesign this document during a past life with an excellent team at Cingular Wireless (now AT&T).  I’d like to give it a final salute before it evolves into its AT&T form.  Here are a few reasons why I think the CSS is an example of communication mostly done right:

• Concision – Largely because of the reasons listed below, we reduced the original CSS from 2 pages (front and back) to 1 page (front and back).
• Personalized, relevant information – Thanks to sophisticated technology and complex user scenarios, the content of the document changes depending on the user’s account and transaction type.  Also, we deleted information that didn’t summarize the transaction or educate the customer.
• Clearly organized and prioritized – Like information is consolidated in clearly labeled sections. 
• Polished visual design that clarifies the document’s organization – Clear headers, shading, icons, and more make the document easy to scan, and they clearly convey priority.
• Legalese and technical jargon minimized; plain language maximized - At least as best we could with a service as complex as wireless. 
• A start toward consistent, cross-channel communication – This document appears in e-mail and on the web.  It also served as the basis for redesigning materials sent to customers who order online, over the phone, and through other channels.  

Results? Increased customer satisfaction on industry-wide measures and cost savings from reduced calls to the call center.  Also, in surveys customers reported remembering and keeping the CSS, whereas before they reported not realizing they received one.  The document was such a success that Cingular’s Chief Technology Officer (now the CIO for AT&T) mentioned it in his editorial about customer-driven innovation.  

Doing communication right isn’t always easy, but it pays for everyone.

Staying Customer-Focused in Customer Support
In our ever-changing, high-tech marketplace, companies face more challenges than ever in communicating effectively to customers.  Many large companies are tasked with developing and managing communications that:

• Address the customer lifecycle, from winning new customers to providing customer support to deepening customer relationships.
• Encourage and support use of automation and self-service channels, such as the web and IVR, to save costs.
• Preserve consistent messaging across communication channels and yet are optimized for different channel formats.

In trying to accomplish this huge task, good old-fashioned communication can get lost.  That’s because most companies approach this task only from a technical or system perspective of content management, not communication.    Analysts at Forrester and KnowledgeStorm have noted the problem, saying companies need to focus on how content is used so that it’s effective, not just how to “manage and search” for content.  

However you describe it, the problem comes down to whether the content communicates.  This blog series will describe a few simple examples and some solutions.

Customer Support Example: Voicemail Instructions
Let’s say you’re a wireless customer and want to know how to change your personal greeting.  You tried on your own with no success, so you check your wireless service provider’s website hoping for some quick help. (If you can’t get help quickly, you’re going to call the company.) You get to a voicemail page under a section called “Support.” Unfortunately, most of the page defines voicemail (You already know what voicemail is, you’re trying to use it!) and explains its benefits (Again, you already know! You’d like instructions on how to use the benefits.).  Not the communication you need! Eventually, you find a link for voicemail instructions that opens this, only larger.

First, let’s give points for trying to make the instructions visual.  Unfortunately, you get a crick in your neck from turning your head to the left and trying to read the blue headers.  And as you try to follow the flow chart, the zig-zag lines combined with the scattered boxes give you a slight headache.Formatting aside, these instructions suffer two other communication problems: 

System Focus Instead of Customer Focus
These instructions are system-focused, not customer-focused, so they include the wrong information type.  These “instructions” are actually a diagram of the voicemail system structure.  This may work for the rare customer with some technical understanding of voicemail or IVR systems, but not most customers.  And if you find the personal greeting option in this diagram, then you have to trace your path back to the main menu to figure out which options you have to select and in what order.  A customer focus would lead you to include not structure but process, ideally concise step-by-step instructions written from the customer’s point of view and formatted so they’re easy to read.

Information Overload
The other communication problem is information overload—too much information is presented at once. You’re using these instructions just to find out how to change a personal greeting, not how to do everything in the voicemail system.  You have to sort through much irrelevant information to find the personal greeting option.  What would help?  Breaking the information down into small, manageable units.

At this point, dialing the phone seems much quicker than understanding these instructions.  So you call your wireless service provider for help, adding to their costs for maintaining call centers.  You tell your friends about your experience, damaging the provider’s reputation.  And all this could have been prevented with some good, old-fashioned communication.