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.

Not to be Captain Obvious, but men and women really do shop differently.

The other day, I was listening to ‘the Herd’ on 680 the Fan and Colin Cowherd (the Herd) was going off about airport security and luggage and how he thought it would be SUCH a great idea to have a website where you could buy your clothes online before you left and pick them up on the other side of security when you arrived. Apparently, men have a uniform – khaki pants, blue button-down shirts and loafers. They can just pick out their size and VOILA! Instant outfit. This may work for men, but….

I’ve had several conversations with my husband about this. I can buy him any piece of clothing – pants, dress shirts, shoes, boxers, etc. simply because I know his size. Ah, “would ‘twere that it were” for women. He won’t go NEAR buying women’s clothing. Each type of clothing, each brand, each store has different interpretations of what a size ‘8’ is. Some even under-size to make women feel skinnier. Am I going to buy jeans that SAY they’re size 4 when they’re not really size 4? – heck yeah!

More importantly, men just think differently about shopping. Don’t believe me? It’s well documented…

From misscellania.com

Women go on an expedition. I needed jeans; it took me 6 weeks. Too low at the hips, too tight, too loose in the waist, those can’t be 8’s – they’re too small, too short, too long, TOO AGGRAVATING. To add to my pain, I refuse to shop in department stores – too many choices.

Back to this airport shopping site idea. For men, I can see this working. For women, not so much. I’m wondering if etailers do/should/can market differently to men and women. Should the structure of the ‘women’s’ section of a site be different than the men’s… is it ever? Is it smarter to package outfits (like Rooms-To-Go or Garanimals) for men but provide accessories and upsells for women? I haven’t seen any sites that sell differently to men than women…then again, I don’t shop for clothing online, either. Maybe (cave)men do.

As more and more companies adopt a user-focused approach, those who are new to the field often interchange terms that sound alike, but are really different. One might argue that it’s just a matter of semantics, but when talking with a user-experience professional, semantics can mean a great deal.

Here’s a quick guide to make sure you are using the right terminology:

Usability
Often times people will say we are working on a “usability project”. This could mean a wide variety of things. Is it a usability test? Is it a website re-design focusing on improved usability? Is it a review of an existing site to identify usability issues? “Usability” has become a catch-all phrase, but it simply refers to how “usable” a function, feature, or entire website is.

User Experience
Now the user “experience” of a website or product is a much more holistic view of things. It’s much more than how easy something is to operate. When you “experience” something you are taking in multiple stimuli, all of which impact the initial and final impression of a user.

This honeycomb diagram probably explains it best. Originally developed by Peter Morville of Semantic Studios, it provides an overview of the different facets of a user-experience.

Useful - Ensuring the solutions and features help users achieve their objectives.

Usable - How intuitive the interaction is based on proven theories and design principles (and validated through testing).

Desirable - The website’s balance between efficiency and aesthetics - how well the site utilizes the power of perception, image, identity, branding, and other elements.

Findable - Designing navigation, content, and page layouts so users can easily find what they need and be confident that they’re on the right path.

Accessible - Ensuring that everyone (including those with disabilities) can access the features without problems.

Credible - Designing elements that will influence whether users trust and believe what the site tells them.

Valuable - Ensuring that what we are creating delivers value to the user.

When you examine the many facets involved in creating a good user-experience, you can easily see that it’s not just about usability. So, if you decide to launch into a re-design because you are trying to fix “usability problems”, take a step back for a holistic view of things. There may be other areas that, if you focus on them, can result in not just improved usability, but a dramatically better user-experience.

How often have you gone to the store for a quick purchase that ends up taking hours due to so many options? Finally a book which speaks to something that seems to be so true: More options – an excess of choice – is not always a good thing! Everything was easier back when we had fewer things to choose from. The author, Barry Schwartz, speaks about the over-abundance of choice in Schwartz’s talk at Google or in this shorter TED Talk.

The gist of the message is this: We have always been under the impression that it is better to have more choice since it gives us more freedom, which in turn gives us more happiness. In reality, choices tend to inundate us with so much information that it can be overwhelming and detrimental.

“There’s no question that some choice is better than none. But it doesn’t follow from that that more choice is better than some choice.” Some of the examples he gives are:

1. Shopping: There are at least 75 bottles of salad dressing in the supermarket at a given moment. Do we really need so many?

2. Healthcare: Every ailment now has multiple numbers of treatments. Drugs are now being marketed directly to us because we are now consumers of our own healthcare.

3. To Work or Not to Work: Modern technologies (laptops, PDA’s, blackberries) allow us to work at anytime, anywhere. This causes us to always have to choose whether or not to work.

Obviously, choice is a wonderful thing. But at a certain point choice can actually be a hindrance. People agree that there are too many choices in every category of consumer good – from clothes to washing machines. According to Schwartz, “People have more decisions to make than it is worth their time and trouble to be making.”

Too much choice can have detrimental effects:

• Choice can lead to paralysis – too many choices cause you to actually choose NONE!
• Overabundance of choice can cause you to make the wrong decisions since you end up selecting based upon one parameter (i.e. looks) over a more meaningful parameter (i.e., quality). How many of us have selected a sub-par bottle of wine due to its snazzy label?
• Choice can lead to regret. If something isn’t perfect, it is easy to imagine that an alternative would have been better. Regret reduces the satisfaction you get from good choices. Anticipated regret prevents you from making choices at all – you are so sure you are going to make the wrong choice that you don’t make any choice.
• We evaluate our experiences based upon what we expect them to be. More options raises our expectations – causing us to expect perfection. These high expectations ultimately lead us to less satisfaction with results, even if they are good results.
• The longer we mull over a decision, the more we comprehend the pros and cons to every option. This knowledge makes us more likely to suffer from our choice after it has been made.

So what does this mean for creators of interactive products? We should always be mindful of the perils of abundance. Interaction designers are essentially “choice architects” since we provide users options to navigate to different places and execute various actions. Therefore, we should always keep in mind that choices can have a negative effect on our users. Within reason, we should try to anticipate what is best for the user rather than inundate them with options. Since choice can cause paralysis leading users to actually choose nothing, we should organize options so that if users do nothing, they actually get what is in their best interest.

Behavioral Research gets to work on some pretty exciting projects. Here’s a sneak peak of our in-world User Experience testing.

1. We study how users search for islands …

Click:

2. We test what users think they can do…

Click:

3. We test user expectations…

Click:

We’ve discovered some amazing things. Marketing in world is not just about design. It’s about optimization with your target audience in mind.

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.

I watched the movie ‘Click’ last night. Not so much because I was wanting to see it but, rather, because there wasn’t much else on.  I found it surprisingly relevant to my line of work and was inspired to write this post.  If you haven’t seen it, the premise is this: a stressed out Architect (Adam Sandler) is trying to get ahead at his firm by working hard for his smarmy boss (David Hasselhoff).  He gets frustrated one night due to the stress of balancing work and family.  He then flips out because he can’t find his TV remote so he sets out to buy a universal model. 

The only store open is a Bed, Bath and Beyond where, during his search for said remote controller, he comes across a door marked Beyond (I found this funny in and of itself – never thought about what the ‘beyond’ was).  Behind this door is Morty (Christopher Walken) – the resident ‘scientist’ of the ‘Beyond’ department.  He shows Mike (Adam) this new ‘universal remote’ and Mike soon discovers that the remote can control everything … EVERY thing.  He can turn down the volume of the dog, pause his kids, fast-forward his wife nagging at him.  He soon gets caught up in fast forwarding through all of the hassles of life so he can get his work done and get promoted.

AH, but this isn’t what I wanted to talk about.  After a while, the remote starts to ‘learn’ Mike’s preferences and reacts automatically to life’s situations.  Every time his wife starts yelling – fast forward.  Every time he goes to get ready for work – fast forward.  He can’t stop it.  It’s the way the remote is programmed.  So, Mike’s remote was supposedly programmed to be ‘smart’ … to learn his preferences and react automatically thus making his life easier.  But what happens is that his life becomes a huge mess.  He changes his mind about wanting to fast-forward through things, but the remote can’t unlearn. 

This so-called ‘personalization’ or artificial intelligence has been around in various forms for quite some time.  There was talk in the 70s about AI.  When the internet boomed personalization and customization were the rage.  Now Microsoft is coming out with a search engine feature  that will try to ascertain what you MEAN when you search the internet by comparing it with items on your desk top.  All of this makes the assumption that computers can predict your future behavior by examining your past behavior. 

While this theory holds true in many aspects of life, I don’t find that it does in ‘searching’ behavior.  At any given time, I may change my mind or focus or may be searching for something I may never search for again.  I may have documents on my computer from work that have nothing to do with personal searches.  I balk at the thought of someone – something – trying to second guess what my intentions are.  It’s like the former coworker of mine who insisted to me that we could tell what our users wanted by looking at what they did via our web logs. 

Examining past behavior only tells us what people did, not what they want to do.  I simply don’t understand the constant push to try to get computers to do something that, quite frankly, a lot of humans can’t even do.  Why should we expect a computer to know what we’re thinking and what we’re going to do?  Why would we WANT them to?  I certainly don’t.  Disagree?  Just watch ‘Minority Report’.

I’d like to use this post to start a discussion about the future of the web.  While Web 2.0 is a label given to the evolution of the online medium, most of the ideas often associated with that label really aren’t new. 

I spoke about this at a recent event - how Web 2.0 is more about a collection of principles than a bunch of features.  I also mentioned that if the web was to continue to evolve, we needed to stop thinking about ideas in terms of “features” and more about creatively addressing user needs and business challenges with original thought - thoughts around architecting interactive strategies aligned with how users interact and consume information on the web today.

I’ve been in the industry a little over 8 years now, and it seems that most of the ideas that have been generated over the last few years are not dramatically new.  During the dot-com days, and its subsequent aftermath, a lot of great ideas were built up due to the newness and excitement around the medium.  But like a kink in a water hose, technology limitations prevented those ideas from flowing and there was a corporate thumb over the nozzle, blocking the ideas from getting through.  Over the last couple of years, the kink has loosened and budgets are shifting toward interactive.  As a result, many of the ideas being implemented today are ones that were fighting for existence a few years ago.

My point?  I believe this new flow of old ideas has caused the stagnation of original thought.  We got so excited that we finally pushed through an idea we’ve been passionate about that our focus shifted away from coming up with new ones.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying there aren’t any new ideas today.  The Web 2.0 movement has caused people to start the ideation process again. But, for the most part, these ideas are being conceived by a small percentage of people.

The larger percentage of ideas being generated by companies and agencies today are either jumping on a fad bandwagon, recycled ideas from years past or the replication of a feature already being used by their competitors or the latest cool site. Unfortunately, this often results in the misapplication of the idea - either not aligned with user needs, the business objective or both.

Maybe it has always been this way and always will, but I do think the web is at a growth stage where the time is right for a surge of new ideas.

So now what?  How do we shape the future of the web without staying attached to the past?  I’ve got a few ideas, but I want to see what you think.  Discuss…

There’s a theme in Monty Python movies -a comedic tactic, if you will- to take light of people who say one thing but really do/mean/say another. It really IS quite funny. Those of you familiar with Monty Python and the Holy Grail will find these scenes familiar. Those of you who are not (for shame!), here’s an example of what I mean…

First Scene - Arthur

Guard: Who goes there?

Arthur: It is I, Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, from the castle of Camelot. King of the Britons, Defeater of the Saxons, Sovereign of all England!

Guard: Pull the other one!

Arthur: I am. And this is my trusty servant Patsy. We have ridden the length and breadth of the land in search of Knights who will join me in my court at Camelot. I must speak with your lord and master.

Guard: What, ridden on a horse?

Arthur: Yes.

Guard: You’re using coconuts!

Arthur: What?

Guard: You’ve got two empty halves of coconut and you’re banging ‘em together.

Arthur: So? We have ridden since the snows of winter covered this land, through the kingdom of Mercia, through —

Guard: Where’d you get the coconuts?

Arthur: We found them.

Guard: Found them? In Mercia?! The coconut’s tropical!

The Black Knight

Arthur: Now stand aside, worthy adversary.

Black Knight: ‘Tis but a scratch.

Arthur: A scratch?! Your arm’s off!

Black Knight: No it isn’t.

Arthur: Well, what’s that then? [Pointing to the knight’s arm lying on the ground.]

Black Knight: I’ve had worse.

Burn the Witch!

Bedevere: What makes you think that she is a witch?

Mr Newt: What, she turned me into a newt!

Bedevere: A newt?

[pause]

Mr Newt: I got better.

Bring Our Yer Dead!

Dead Collector: Bring out yer dead. [Hits gong]

Large Man: Here’s one.

Dead Collector: Ninepence.

Old Man: I’m not dead!

Dead Collector: What?

Large Man: Nothing. Here’s your ninepence.

Old Man: I’m not dead!

Dead Collector: ‘Ere, he says he’s not dead.

Large Man: Yes he is.

Old Man: I’m not!

Dead Collector: He isn’t.

Large Man: Well, he will be soon, he’s very ill.

Old Man: I’m getting better!

Large Man: No you’re not, you’ll be stone dead in a moment.

Dead Collector: Well, I can’t take him like that. It’s against regulations.

As funny as this is on the big screen, it’s not so funny when it comes to real life. Now, I’m not accusing people of lying, but people do have a penchant for believing that they do one thing, when they really do quite the opposite. For instance, think about how you would ride a skate board or a scooter - do you push with your right or left foot? Do you wear name tags on the right or left side? In what order to you eat the food on your plate at dinner? Think about how many people are in jail because of faulty eye-witness testimony – victims convinced of what/who they saw? What people think and what is actually true are often different things.

This gets me thinking. How should we listen to users? We know we should, but how much should they dictate what we design? The trick, I believe, is to hear not just what they’re saying, but what they’re NOT saying, and how they’re saying it. Basically …. we need to interpret what they’re telling us.

A good book about this is “Are Your Lights On? How to figure out what the problem REALLY is” by Donald Gause and Gerald Weinburg. It covers techniques for how to get at the real problem. It’s such an easy trap to only take your users’ word for what they need or want and design solutions based on that. Think about where Apple would be if they just ‘listened’ to users without really hearing what they were saying … without figuring out the real (right) problem to solve. As Henry Ford is attributed to saying “if I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse”. Or maybe two empty halves of coconuts

Back in June, NBC’s dotcomedy.com launched The Lunch Break Show, a new diversion for those of us that eat at our desk to save time during the day. Arby’s was the sole sponsor and the site is plastered with Arby’s branding and links to their TV commercials. Although it seems to have hit the news release channels back in June, I only recently stumbled across it and found it interesting enough to share the links and some thoughts for any of you who might have missed it the first time around.

The Concept:
The top of the original press release states quite obviously where the idea came from: “According to a recent survey by Kelton Research, nearly 60 percent of office workers in the U.S. spend their lunch breaks at their desks looking for distractions.”

So, it seems that NBC and Arby’s decided to go after this target market by throwing together a 30-minute collection of short segments taken from the previous day’s comedy shows on NBC and inviting office workers to ‘tune in’ between 12:00pm and 2:00 pm to watch the show while eating lunch at their desk.

The Experience:
Open http://www.thelunchbreakshow.com/ in a browser outside the time of 12:00pm - 2:00pm and you will see a page that explains quickly what the show is about and a form to register for email alerts each day before the show begins that only requires a Zip Code and an Email. There is also a countdown to the next show.

Open http://www.thelunchbreakshow.com/ in a browser between 12:00pm - 2:00pm and you will see the video which loops through the 30 minute segment repeatedly, along with a funny little PANIC button.

Thoughts:
I love the idea, it got me interested enough to try it out, but I had some problems with the experience.

Design - I enjoyed the website design and loved the funny little Panic button that pops-up a screen with numbers and lines all over it to make it look like you are doing something important.

Email Reminder - The email comes at 9:30am for me, and there is no way that is going to help me remember the show at lunch. It is buried in my email by that time, and I have to consciously think about the show and go and dig up the email to find the link. (If I haven’t bookmarked or tagged it already)

The Video – The video has some great spots in it each day, and I can always find something to chuckle at. However, you can’t pause it, rewind it, or skip ahead. Here comes the rub. I get what they are trying to do. However, I find it hard to believe that the same people who are clicking around online for entertainment at lunch can’t pause and rewind TV at home with some sort of DVR. I found it very frustrating. A colleague came up to me and asked a question during the show, and I missed something I wanted to hear, and couldn’t pause it or rewind it and I wasn’t about to wait another 30 minutes to catch that segment again.

So to wrap things up, I enjoyed the website and the video, but ultimately got turned off by the lack of ability to interact with the video. I wonder what their drop-off statistics look like because it feels as if they missed the mark a bit on how their demographic would want to interact with the site once they actually got there.

Links:

• To give credit where credit is due, I stumbled across it here at MediaPost in an article that gives a few facts about the campaign.
• The original press release
• Lunch Break Show FAQ