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.

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

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.  

User experience is like a delicious cake.  (And I love cake!)   Just as a cake requires a variety of quality ingredients, user experience requires the “good stuff” from many disciplines, ranging from cognitive psychology to communication to information architecture to visual design.  And just as a master pastry chef knows how to combine these ingredients in the right way, user experience experts know how to combine the best and most pertinent aspects of these disciplines, “baking” them into a satisfying experience.

An important, yet sometimes forgotten, ingredient in user experience is effective words.  It sounds so basic—precisely why it’s so important.  Like flour in a cake, words are almost always a part of user experience.  Below are a few principles and simple examples to make a website or interface wordalicious:

Concision – Pick the right words, not more words.
Users don’t typically read; instead, they scan.  Therefore, it’s critical to make the most of the words in an interface by selecting them carefully.   For example, the headlines on news  websites, such as cnn.com, convey the crux of each story in very few words. 

Clarity – Say what you mean.
Again because users scan, it’s important to pick words that are clear to the targeted users.  Generally, simpler words are better than more complex ones. Even if the targeted users are well-educated, they will recognize simpler words more quickly than complex ones.  For example, e-commerce websites say “shop” or “buy” rather than “procure.”

Tone and Brand – More than words.
Just as graphics and colors give a website a certain look and feel that conveys a company’s brand, words convey a company’s brand through tone. One way words create tone is through their connotation—their implied, subjective meanings beyond the dictionary meanings.  It’s important to pick words and phrases with connotations that resonate with users and are consistent with a company’s brand attributes.  For example, Virgin Mobile creates a fun, informal tone through wording, even in its log in instructions.

My wife was perusing Art.com the other day looking to fill the walls of my 9-month old baby’s room.  As I was looking over her shoulder, I couldn’t help but notice how well certain aspects of their interface were designed from a usability perspective.  But then I thought…is it that the page is “usable” or is it “persuasive”?

It’s both really.  But the thing that caught my eye the most was how simple the visual layer was and how it created a perception of usability.  Are there only a few items on the page that make it simple?  NO.  And that is the beauty of it.  In a recent blog post, I talked about the Misconception of Clutter and this site does a great job of illustrating my point.  There are actually a lot of items on each page.  But Art.com has done a great job of stripping away fancy creative elements that don’t serve a purpose and uses the power of visual design to create not just a simple, usable page; but one that subtly persuades users to follow a path towards making a purchase.

They use lots of white and very light grey tones as the base color for the site.  What this does is allow the color they use for their primary calls to action to really pop.  It really makes the eye focus on the primary action, which is Add To Cart.  There is something about that shiny orange button that creates a gravitational pull towards clicking it.  Something about it brings me back to the old dot-com days where anything that looked interesting, made me want to click it just to see what would happen. But the reason why the button brings attention to itself is not just the shiny gradient color, but the absence of color around it.

My point with all of this is that I think the role of the creative designer is often underutilized when it comes to website design.  Everyone wants the site to look good and be consistent with the brand, but the creative designer plays a much more important role in User Experience design.  How information and interaction elements are presented visually are critical in helping the user clearly understand them, as well as persuade them into taking the action we want them to take.  Designers aren’t there just to make things look pretty…although if it’s pretty enough, it might make me want to click it.

Alright, so the nursery rhyme goes slightly differently. Regardless, I couldn’t resist talking more to the Agile process; since another big dogs has realized the benefit. Adobe (of all folk) has announced the success of using an iterative process in the development of CS3.

Clearly, no one process will rule all. But I still reassert that I like the idea of incremental process.

Do a little…
review…
improve…
repeat…

Most modern processes have such a concept, whether TQM, Six Sigma (DMAIC), BPI, or Lean. I couldn’t imagine going into product development anymore that would last 2 months or more without an iterative based approach. It is too easy to misinterpret, miscalculate, and misunderstand client needs and intentions.

Part of the story also speaks to “Bugalaunch” - the death march to release depriving team members of precious sleep, social lives and undoubtedly personal health. Too often it is the unceremonious end to a project to be rewarded with Bug Hell; which I think exists somewhere around the 222nd layer of the abyss.

This made me realize that it makes the job of motivating developers very difficult, since they never really get a clean, clear reward of a product delivered well and gracefully. I mean, in a traditional Waterfall approach, the chances of something going bad and erasing months of hard work is high. Why not allow for incremental “showing off?” The Agile method allows developers to demonstrate the exceptional work they do gradually. If the project does go awry (for whatever reason), the customer would now be aware of all the good work that happened before a major hurdle is reached. They will therefore be more sympathetic, appreciative and understanding of the hard work it then takes to right the project and overcome the hurdle.

Of course, my developers should beware, because I do like the 20 bug rule too.

I’m a picky eater. Always have been. It was a major miracle for my mother to get me to even taste a green vegetable (unless, of course, it was smothered in cheese). In fact, I only considered corn and potatoes as valid, edible veggies. God forbid she try to pawn brussel sprouts (the vegetable of the devil) or rutabaga on me. Though I eventually got over my aversion to nutrition (NOT brussel sprouts), I still maintain some of my eating oddities.

Among them is my sheer disdain for ‘Stuff in Stuff’. I’ve only found one other person who understands this concept, as it has its nuances. In fact, I’m not sure I can fully explain, but here goes: Chocolate chips in cookies, casseroles, chicken cordon bleu, or stuffed shells do NOT constitute Stuff in Stuff. However, nuts in brownies (or any dessert), celery in potato salad (or egg salad or macaroni salad or ANYTHING for that matter), and anything in Jello, DOES. See the difference?? Most don’t. Stuff that ‘belongs’ in other stuff, that blends and melds with other stuff, is NOT Stuff in Stuff. As a whole, it creates the Stuff. Stuff that doesn’t match or can be ‘picked out’ (ok, so salads are an exception, but that’s a dish where EVERYTHING is separate) is Stuff in Stuff.

If you ever see me with a little pile of something at the side of my plate , you’ll know - THAT was Stuff in Stuff. And I don’t like it. Nor do I like anything in life that doesn’t belong with the other stuff that surrounds it. I like things to be consistent, contextual and meaningful. If it doesn’t belong - if it doesn’t create one concept -  then don’t put it in there! It’s Stuff in Stuff.

Of course, I can translate this easily to website content. For instance, if you have a page on your company’s mission, then don’t include information on your history and your board of directors. Too many times I’ve seen that page. It’s almost as if people throw stuff in other stuff simply because they have it and don’t have any place else to put it.

So next time you have that half-a-bag of leftover walnuts, PLEASE resist the urge to put them in your brownies. Save the world from Stuff in Stuff. Unless, of course, you LIKE nuts in brownies. But then you’re just weird.

I’ll try to handle this as tactfully as possible …

Out of the blue one day, a friend of mine declared – with index finger extended – “isn’t it amazing how your finger fits perfectly in your nose?”.  Uh, well, sure.  Not that I’ve ever tried it, of course =).  Finger-in-nose activities aside, he’s right.  I had never thought about that before.  This divine design is no accident.  It’s only until you break your finger and it swells up or you have a splint on it that you notice how perfectly it was *designed* in the first place.

The same holds true for web or interaction design – or any design for that matter.  We walk through doors every day, but we don’t realize how well most doors are designed until we pull on a door that should be pushed, because it had a handle on it (which affords pulling).  As user experience architects, our designs probably won’t ever earn outward praise from users, because ‘good’ simply means it works as it should – seamlessly and to the users’ expectations.  There’s also never one *right way* to design something.  It’s only when something doesn’t work (or something breaks) that design gets noticed.

So, the next time you pull on that push door, or you can’t figure out which way to go at the airport then stop and think about why the design is broken, and what could be done to make it better.