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From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity:

In 1965, I. J. Good first wrote of an “intelligence explosion”, suggesting that if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs in ways unforeseen by their designers, and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences. The first such improvements might be small, but as the machine became more intelligent it would become better at becoming more intelligent, which could lead to a cascade of self-improvements and a sudden surge to superintelligence (or a singularity).

The implications for human society are interesting:

In 2009, leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers, and roboticists met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds near Monterey Bay in California to discuss the potential impact of the hypothetical possibility that robots could become self-sufficient and able to make their own decisions. They discussed the extent to which computers and robots might be able to acquire autonomy, and to what degree they could use such abilities to pose threats or hazards. Some machines have acquired various forms of semi-autonomy, including the ability to locate their own power sources and choose targets to attack with weapons. Also, some computer viruses can evade elimination and have achieved “cockroach intelligence.” The conference attendees noted that self-awareness as depicted in science-fiction is probably unlikely, but that other potential hazards and pitfalls exist.[8]

Some experts and academics have questioned the use of robots for military combat, especially when such robots are given some degree of autonomous functions.[9] A United States Navy report indicates that, as military robots become more complex, there should be greater attention to implications of their ability to make autonomous decisions.[10][11]

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence has commissioned a study to examine this issue,[12] pointing to programs like the Language Acquisition Device, which can emulate human interaction.

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Tac Anderson put together a nice article about the history of social media, starting with its beginnings in the Cluetrain Manifesto:

At first there was no terminology to describe what was happening. One of the earliest attempts to put a voice to this, The Cluetrain Manifesto,  tried to explain the shift, years before the bubble popped, by pointing out that markets had become conversations. Companies could no longer push messaging at customers and expect them to act like sheep. 

Check out the full article.

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A few weeks ago, I posted about a framework for considering the customer support experience. The framework is composed of four phases: awareness, navigation, diagnosing, and solving.

Pete Hwang, a collegeue of mine, asked if the framework could be shortcut by people using Google:

Framework makes sense. But could you argue that web savvy customers who start with a Google search shortcut the whole thing? The customer experience journey in this case: Customer recognizes they have a problem. Google for error code or best guess at describing problem. View hits on possible solutions… Corroborate entries and take educated guess at likely best solution. Hopefully, solve problem. Otherwise, look toward 2nd most likely answer. If still not solved, try a fresh google search with fresh search terms. The official HP support doc only comes into play as it receives high credibility (high ranking) on Google.

Pete’s point is certainly valid. The framework isn’t intended to dictate a specific support path down which the customer is forced, but instead is a thinking aide to understand their experience and compare the role that different tools play. The way that we’ve used the framework is by describing different support tools within an “AAA NNN DDD SSS” diagram. The letters stand for Awareness, Navigation, Diagnosis, Solution. We repeat the letters simply to remind ourselves that frequently there may be multiple steps within each phase, and that different tools may help get the customer through different phases.

Let’s look at an example. In the picture, row 1 shows what most company’s idealized view of the web support experience looks like. In this idealized picture, the customer thinks first of the company’s web site, enters through the home page, navigates through the site using links, and ultimately finds a web document to solve their problem.

Row 2 shows a common alternative, and the one described by Pete. A customer does a Google search on a product, and again in the ideal world, the Google search’s first result is a link to the support document for that problem.

Row 3 is another alternative – a Google search leads to a web forum discussion. Web forums frequently do exceptionally well in search engine results, so if a forum exists, and the problem has previously been posted, odds are good that a forum result will be high up in the search results.

Row 4 is just a hint of another tool that companies have at their disposal, but frequently don’t take full advantage of. Error messages displayed by software applications or even hardware devices do much to make the customer aware of the problem, but usually do very little to help them find a solution. An error message that was linked back to a support document would directly make the link from problem to solution, and would bypass the need for navigation and diagnosis.

Please let me know if you make use of this framework. I hope it will be of use to you.

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In the technical support documentation space I’ve been recommending wikis as a way to enhance collaboration on support documentation as an alternative model to the traditional approach of having a small cadre of technical writers and experts using a traditional content management tool to publish documents to the way.

While I’m an advocate of opening up the wiki to customer input, there are levels of collaboration that may make it easier for companies to get their feet wet without going so far as to open it up to customer input. The wiki could be used, for example, to allow input from other employees across the company, from R&D engineers to call support agents.
However, whenever I propose this, the established parties usually say “Why don’t we just fix the content management process we have?” or “If all we want to do is collaborate inside the company, we can use the content management tools we have for that.”
Wikis aren’t just another content management tool however. Wikis embody design principles that encourage contributions. When Digg was first implemented, the earliest versions had a two-step process to submit a digg vote. Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, spoke about the impact that moving from a two-step to one-step process had on the site:

There was a huge shift in activity on Digg when we made the move to the one-click digg in November 2005. Once we added Ajax, activity went through the roof on [the number of] diggs. It was just insane. Just the ease of the “one-click and you’re done” made all the difference in the world. Once the users grasped that the content is syndicated to friends, friends’ activities then went through the roof. These small incremental steps in feature additions drove the growth.

The more direct and lightweight the process is for contributing, the greater the number of contributors. And it’s not just pure volume of contributors: a simple contribution at first can then lead a user from passive recipient to enthused contributor. The editors at Wikipedia that devote much of their lives to upholding the quality of Wikipedia all started their involvement with a single, simple contribution at some point in time.

Wikis are perhaps the purest embodiment of the design principles of directness and lightweight processes. Every page has an edit button, so contributions are never more than a click away. The act of adding a few words to a document t is rarely more than clicking edit, inserting those words, and then clicking save.
Contrast that with a typical content management system: As a user who is browsing support documents on the web, and then spots an error in a document, if I’ve already used the content management system before, I have to then:
  1. find/launch the content management system
  2. login
  3. navigate to the document I was already viewing, usually by an obscure mechanism that isn’t the URL of the public document
  4. choose to edit the document
  5. make the edit
  6. save the document
  7. probably go through an edit review process relying then on other people to review the edit
  8. wait for notification that the edit is published
  9. check that the web document reflects the change
If I haven’t used the content management system, I would need to:
  1. Find out how the content is managed, probably by emailing peers until I get an answer
  2. Find out how to apply for a login
  3. Justify my need/right to modify the content (usually a lengthy process)
  4. Find out how to use the system
The two choices differ so significantly in effort involved, that the result is not just a quantitative difference in the number of contributions, but a qualitative one as well: true collaboration among a large group of contributors is unlikely using a traditional content management tool, because only those whose primary job it is to manage content are likely to invest the effort to use it.
By comparison, wiki makes it clear that editing is possible, puts the edit tool only a click away, and removes the step of having to renavigate to the content to be edited. While these steps may seem small, like we saw with the Digg example, small reductions in effort correspond to large increases in contributions.
Side note: I’m currently reading Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions, which inspired some of these thoughts.

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When large companies put technical support content online, the effort frequently comes with a variety of pitfalls. A large company may have dozens or hundreds of products, and each of those products may have dozens or hundreds of support documents, leading to many tens of thousands of support documents.

This can make it exceedingly difficult to find the right help content for any given product and problem. As a result, companies then undertake a variety of web site improvements aimed at helping customers get their problems solved from improving navigation, to providing top FAQ lists, interactive troubleshooting tools, and more.
But how do each of the potential tools affect the customer experience? How do they relate to each other? And what part of the customer experience are they really seeking to improve?
Here is a framework Steve DeRoos and I like to use to think about technical support experiences. To help customers get their problem solved using eSupport, there are four phases of the user experience to consider:
  1. Awareness
  2. Navigation
  3. Diagnosing
  4. Solving
Awareness: How do your customers become aware that you offer self-support help? If you’re recently improved your self-support help (for example, if you’ve recently added forums), how will customers be aware of those changes? Most customers, particularly web savvy customers, will choose to use a website visit over a phone call to get their problem solved. But less savvy customers, or customers who previously had a bad web support experience are likely to gravitate directly to phone support.
However, the more web-savvy they are, the more likely they are to go direct to Google to get their problem solved.

Navigation: Once the customer has made the decision to use self-support, how do they find it? Do they need to navigate to a product specific area of the website? Can they search and find it? Are there multiple kinds of support content and tools – if so, how does a customer choose which one to use? One example of a tool designed to make support navigation easier is HP’s Automatic Product Detection, a tool that detects what HP products the customer has, and links directly to the support pages for those products.
Diagnosing: When the customer finally arrived at the support content, how do you narrow down the specific problem the customer is having? Is it an install problem or a use problem? If it is a paper jam on an all-in-one printer, is it a paper jam for the printer portion, or the scanner portion? With regular paper or something unusual like labels or card stock?
Solving: When the problem is finally known, what are the steps to solve the problem? How do you insure that the customer follows through on the steps? If there are multiple ways to solve the problem, how do you lead the customer through each of the different ways? How do you know if the problem is resolved?
Having a framework like this helps ensure that all aspects of the user experience are considered. It also helps when considering proposal investments in eSupport: What problem is being solved? What percentage of the user base will it work for? And what is the business impact of improving that aspect of the user experience?
*Bridge photo used under Creative Commons license. Original photo by mozzercork. Shakey Bridge, Cork City, Ireland

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When a large company rolls out social media capabilities on their website, they frequently worry about negative posts. A large company represents to many, a large target. Even the best companies with excellent customer service will have the occasional frustrated, angry customer.

How to deal with this? If the company moderates posts, and filters out anything negative, they will lose trust with their customers. If the company does nothing, and lets negative posts pile up, they could dominate the online community and discussions even if they are not truly representative of most people’s experiences.
It’s not so much whether a post is negative or postive, but whether it is constructive or destructive. A constructive post might point out a flaw in a product, but lead to a discussion about how to improve the product or work around the flaw. A destructive post might point out a flaw in a product and then proceed to personally attack the employees of the company.
Luckily, communities can police themselves. Using comment moderation features, users of online communities and websites can rate comments up or down, or report them for violation of community guidelines (such as inappropriate language).
When the right tools are in place, the constructive members of the community (who generally represent the majority) will tend to vote down destructive contributions. The company who sponsors the community or social media aspects of the site won’t need to be involved in moderation, and so they won’t be perceived as trying to control the conversation.
Pete Hwang, Experience Designer-Strategist at Hewlett-Packard, recently brought to my attention an excellent Wired magazine article by Clive Thompson on “how to open your website to comments without inviting the flood of toxic and inappropriate comments & flamewars that often arise”.

The world’s top discussion moderators have developed successful tools for keeping online miscreants from disrupting conversation. All are rooted in one psychological insight: If you simply ban trolls—kicking them off your board—you nurture their curdled sense of being an oppressed truth-speaker. Instead, the moderators rely on making the comments less prominent.

Pete’s favorite approach to disarming those destructive comments:

Here’s another hack: selective invisibility. It was invented byDisqus, a company whose discussion software handles the threads at 90,000 blogs worldwide (including mine). In this paradigm, if a comment gets a lot of negative ratings, it goes invisible. No one can see it—except, crucially, the person who posted it. “So the troll just thinks that everyone has learned to ignore him, and he gets discouraged and goes away,” chuckles Disqus cofounder Daniel Ha

(It turns out that selective invisibility is a technique that actually dates to Bulletin Board Systems (BBBs) back in the early 1980s.)

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Recently Waggener-Edstrom, the PR firm, released Twendz, a tool for analyzing Twitter posts for topics. It’s a pretty great tool, and they are making it freely available.
I used it recently to search for “photosmart”, a Hewlett-Packard printer brand. You can see that results of that search.
From this search, I get a sentiment ratio (percentage of positive versus negative posts) for “photosmart”, as well as a subtopic sentiment analysis for the top five subtopics. A word cloud also lets me see other common words used. In many cases, the twitter posts also include a link to a blog post with a lengthier description of the problem/question/topic.
Now there’s no excuse for not monitoring your company and products on Twitter.

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Jared Spool
Gourmet Experiences on a Fast Food Budget
Key Insights:
1. Mastery of tricks and techniques across your team are key to great designs. Having a big toolbox and mastery of the tools is the most important factor for great design.
2. Methodology and dogma are unimportant to great design. In fact, focus on these takes valuable attention away from what maters.
3. Rewarding people for failure encourages learning. Throw a big party with champagne and caviar. Spend three minutes making fun of the failure and twenty minutes explaining the lessons learned from the failure.
Notes
  • A hamburger and a hotdog cost the same whether you do it on a fast food budget or design it to be a gourmet burger.
  • This begs that question, what’s makes something gourmet?
  • And how can we apply it to web design?
  • You take them apart, and see what gets you there
  • Meticulous Preparation
  • How Do The Best Teams Create Great Designs?
    • The teams with bad design didn’t have different goals than the teams with great stuff. They all have the objective to make great stuff.
    • There is a spectrum… in the middle of this spectrum there is a Process
      • Tricks
      • Techniques
      • Process
      • Methodology
      • Dogma
    • Process: Some teams say “we don’t have a process”, but that’s not true. Any team that eventually produces something has some sort of process. They just aren’t paying attention to the process. (Like a cook who says she doesn’t have a recipe for making something. There is a recipe, it’s just not explicit/conscious.)
      • This is fine when things are going well, but not good when things are not going well.
    • Process: To the right on this spectrum there is Methodology.
    • Dogma: And beyond Methodology is Dogma (unquestioned faiuther independent of any supporting evidence.) Lots of things we do become dogma: “It has to be Web 2.0”, “it has to have social media”.
      • They had a theory, that those organizations with great experiences had some sort of dogma that they adhered to.
    • But on the other side of Process there is Techniques.
      • Many great recipes have a roux. (flour and oil over low heat.) By itself, it tastes terrible, but it makes many recipes great. The roux is useful in many instances. If you can do it well, then you can make the recipe well. It’s a technique. You have to be good at it, and to get good you have practice and maybe a little coaching.
    • All the way at the left end is Tricks. Tricks aren’t always “right”, but they are effective. It’s easier to use the wrong tool to get the job done, than it is to go get the right tool.
    • The Best Teams
      • Don’t have a methodology or dogma
        • The struggling teams often tried following a methodology without success
      • Focus on increasing the techniques and tricks for each team member
        • They were constantly exploring new tricks and techniques for their toolbox
        • Struggling teams have limited techniques and tricks.
    • University websites…
      • Every department maintains it’s own websites. Each college, admissions, etc. So there is a different look and feel for each part. How do you resolve that?
      • The standard answer is to use templates.
        • But there is no evidence that templates result in quality design.
        • It is an attempt at a methodology, and in some cases becomes dogma.
        • Each page has it’s own purpose. The business school is different than the admissions which is different from the school of nursing.
        • There only people who care if the pages look the same are the people who have responsibility for the university website.
          • Students don’t care if a page looks different.
      • Instead, focus on tricks and techniques.
    • The Three Core UX Attributes For Great Experience Design
      • Started with 150 different variables, studied hundrends of teams, only three attributes really matter.
        • Vision
        • Feedback
        • Culture
      • The Three Questions
        • Vision: Can everyone on the team describe the experience of using your design five years from now?
          • Vision turns out to be absolute key to success. It’s a stake on the horizon with a flag. If we can clearly see the flag, then we can instantly look and see if any baby step we take will take us closer or further from the flag. And everyone can see it.
          • A really good vision is stuck in the sand, but we can move it. Then we just move towards the new location.
        • Feedback: “In the last six weeks, have you spent more than two hours watching someone use either your design or a competitor’s design?
          • The organizations where people spend significant time watching people use the design create significantly better designs.
          • It needs to be everyone on the team.
          • No longer do you have opinion wars, because now you actual experiences.
        • Culture: “In the last six weeks, have you rewarded a team member for a creating a major design failure?”
          • When we have a design failure, we learn something.
          • All the really important lessons in life come from failures.
          • Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment calls.
          • At Intuit they reward people. They throw a big party with champagne and caviar. The CEO makes a speech. They spend 3 minutes making fun of the people, and 20 minutes talking about the lessons learned.
          • Organizations that are risk averse make crap.
      • Five Second Page Tests
        • A simple technique
        • Can be done in less than 10 minutes
        • Can use page mock-ups or real site
        • Example: Buying a Notebook Computer
          • You’re ready to buy a new notebook computer
          • You consider a computer a big purchase
          • How much technical support will you get if you experience problems?
          • CDW: Technical support
            • New Customers
            • Existing Customers
            • Create Login
            • Rated: 2
          • CDW: Customer Support
            • Chat Support
            • E-account
            • Rated: 3
          • Crutchfield: Technical Support
            • Free technical support
            • 30 day return policy
            • Rated: 5
        • Designers often intend pages to have a single purpose
        • We use this technique when users complain that pages are too cluttered or confusing
        • Identifies if pages quickly communicate their purpose
      • Paper Prototype Testing
        • Design is in flux
          • Team needs to try ideas to get feedback quickly
        • Team can participate in study
          • They are at a point where they can make changes
        • Good resource: Paper Prototyping (book)
    • Quality Ingredients
      • In and Out: Sells burgers, shakes, and fries.
        • There is a secret menu. But they are all burgers, shakes, and fries.
        • They have a machine that slices the potatoes into fries just seconds before cutting them.
        • They have a butcher on site. The meat is freshly prepared.
      • Inuit Inuksuk: Arrangements of rocks to show that someone had been this way before. Lets the solitary hunter traveling alone for weeks or months to know that they are not alone.
        • The Amazon Product Review is like an inuksuk: it lets someone know whether people have been this way before. Not all Amazon reviews are technical in nature, many of them at an inuksuk: just to let you know that other people bought and liked this camera.
        • This is also what having testimonials about.
        • Colleges are now experimenting with having students blog about their college experiences.
          • Colleges even have content for the parents: an inuksuk for the parent.
    • Creative Approach
      • At MIT, students submit CSS designs. They choose 365 a year, and the MIT homepage changes every day. The content is the same, it just moves around.
    • Cooking Up Gourmet Experiences
      • It’s not about the money you spend, or dogma or methodology.
      • You need to focus on developing great tricks and techniques across your team.
        • Don’t let methodologies and dogma boy you down.
      • Look for opportunities for creative approaches.
    • Website: http://www.uie.com
      • Newsletter: UIEtips (free weekly newsletter)
    • Blog: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks

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I’m a fan of Adaptive Path and their work, so I was excited to see this talk by Peter, who comes from Adaptive Path.

Key insights:

  • Creating a “north star” is all important from a design perspective, because it is key that everyone can understand if their baby steps take them in the right direction or not.
  • It’s easier to move the north star as circumstances change if it has just the necessary amount of detail.
  • Plan for “The Long Wow”: your product experience should keep creating wow moments over time, not just all when the box is unwrapped.
Notes:
Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World
Peter Merholz
Adaptive Path
  • Approached by O’Rielly to write a book.
  • Media is a mess
    • Craigslist took the classifieds
    • Everyone took a piece of the ads
    • Blogs are taking the readers
  • Music is in metamorphosis
    • iTunes is the #1 retailer
    • Labels are loosing their grip
    • Live Nation – focused on live events, not CDs
  • Travel is turbulent
    • The three top quality carriers are all low-fair airlines
  • Predicting the future has never been easy, but it’s never been more difficult
  • Predicting the future won’t work.
  • Instead, seek approaches that will continue to work no matter which prediction come true.
  • [Story about how Kodak invented not just a new film system, and not just a new camera, but a whole new customer experience. When Kodak has paid attention to customer experience, they have done well. When they lost focus, they stumble. Kodak: “you press the button, we do the rest”]
  • The way a company builds things:
    • Inside Out: Data à Logic à User interface
  • But the way a user sees things:
    • Outside In: User Interface à Logic à Data
  • The customer really only sees only the user interface. Anything that happens inside of that, we don’t care about. It might as well be magic.
  • Example: Google Calendar
    • There were lots of other calendars out there.
    • Google wanted to do something exceptional
    • They created a vision
      • Set out to build a calendar that works for you
        • Fast, visually appealing, and joyous to use
        • Drop dead simple to get information into the calendar
        • More than boxes on a screen (reminders, invitations, etc.)
        • Easy to share so you can see your whole life in one place
      • Designed for the consumer world where not everyone has a calendar (or one on the same system)
        • Open APIs
        • Invitation for everyone
    • This vision occupies a middle ground
      • Not so highly level as to be useless (“A world class calendar”)
      • Not so specific that every action has to be evaluated against dozens of requirements
      • But provides guidance: if it takes 19 steps to get something into the calendar, that’s clearly not drop dead simple.
  • Example: TiVo
    • “It’s entertainment, stupid”
    • Not “build a better VCR”, but make it easier, better to watch to TV.
    • TiVO users would say “I can’t imagine going back to the old way of watching TV”
    • Now vision is more cleaned up
      • It is reliable
      • It puts me in control
  • Example: Flickr Vision
    • We want to help people make their content available to the people who matter to them.
    • We want to enable new ways of organizing photos and video.
  • Does Your Experience Have a North Star?
  • Focus on the lives of customers
    • Companies tend to oversimplify their view of people
    • 4 old ways of thinking
      • At worst: “a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash” (from The Cluetrain Manifesto)
        • This is exactly how cell phone companies and cable companies treat people
      • Homo Economicus: Highly rational, maximizes utility, quantity!
        • But we’re not all Spock. We make emotional decisions.
        • This leads to feature wars: our competitor did these 10 features, so we have to do those 10 features and then 2 more.
      • Type A Personality: Task oriented, Goal Driven, Efficiency!
        • Services like wasabi help people understand their relationship to money as compared to neighbors and peers. That’s a better goal than simply trying to make things most efficient.
      • Sheep: Docile and gullible, Stories and messaging, Preferences!
        • It’s really disrespectful
        • Our customers are sharper than that
    • Not all wrong, not really right.
    • We are evolving our approaches.
    • What’s been missing?
      • The messy complexity of life
      • People regularly mix and match products with little regard for “suggested use”
        • We use products the way they serve us.
      • They challenge social and cultural boundaries in unexpected ways.
        • Picture of monk using cell phone
        • Picture of Proposal written on highway overpass
      • We want to understand people as people
      • What’s missing?
        • Emotions (people can’t bear to throw away their old, broken iPods because they had such an emotional attachment)
        • Context (understanding the context in which customers really use their product)
        • Meaning (people tie their identity to their product: I’m an iPhone user, an Android user, etc.)
    • Do you understand your customers as people?
  • Embrace the complexity: Use systems to support experiences
    • Just expose the minimal amount of complexity to our customers that we have to
    • Experiences cross boundaries
      • Some dysfunctional companies forbid “watercooler” conversations, forcing employees to go through management chain.
    • Iterative approaches
      • More effective
      • When we try to plan everything in advance…
        • We don’t end up where we planned to be anyway
        • Even if we do, we find out that isn’t where we need to be
    • Prototyping and making
      • Story of original Palm: put a block of wood in his shirt pocket to mimic the device. Pretended to enter data using a stylis.
      • Story of mocking up a medical device using a film canister, paper clip, and magic marker to stimulate size and shape of device.
    • Deep/wide collaboration
      • Teams that are cross disciplinary are very helpful
      • Example: the Target ClearRx system. A “safer drug delivery system” that encompasses a new pill bottle, a new type of label, a color coded system. It involved the bottle, the pharmacists, the marketing, the training team, the supply chain, software, a new labeling system. Contributed to a 14% increase in drug sales, and won many awards.
  • Engage in design as an activity – develop an organization capacity for design
    • 1: Design as aesthetics (a vodka bottle – it’s pretty)
    • 2: Design as a distinct role (the guy who is the font geek)
    • 3:
    • 4: Design as a rock star (the power of design to save the day / good / profitable )
    • 5: Design as an activity
    • Design is an activity that an organization ambraces, that everyone can be involved in.
      • Product owners, managers, developers, people with design in their title, strategic planners
    • Benefits
      • Idea fabricator
      • Reframing the fuzz: the wall you run up against in the middle of your product
      • The Long Wow: how you get customer loyalty
    • How Do You Create Loyalty?
      • Traditional answer: give them a loyalty card
      • Meaning more means repeatedly creating notably great experiences.
      • Notably great experiences are punctuated by a moment of “wow” when the product or service delights, anticipates the needs of, or…
    • Peak-end rule
      • People average the peak (best) experience as well as the most recent experience, and average the two.
    • The Long Wow
      • Product is a platform for delivery
      • Plan for wow experiences over time
      • Example: compare the pedometer that packs in all the features up front, or the Nike+ system that has no screen or UI, but lets you access the data via a web interface… so that the interface can be improved, it goes way beyond what the other pedometer can provide.
      • “Powersong” capability of Nike+ : the song that helps you make that last half hour.
      • Can set up contests to compete with your friends. You don’t have to run at the same time or place. “The last one to run 100 miles has to buy lunch”.
  • Survey of 362 firms
    • 95% say they are “customer focused”
    • 80% say they deliver a “superior experience”
    • 8% of companies’ customers agree that the firms deliver a superior experience

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This was one of the better presentations at WebVisions. I felt like it had some pretty concrete actions to take.
Best takeaway: By putting myself out there for feedback on my company, the many benefits include gaining more followers, learning what my customers want, being able to engage in a discussion. I gain more by listening than by talking.
Making Whuffie
Tara Hunt
  • Dunbar number: 120-150 – the number of people we can really know at any point in time
    • Will: based on tribes and communities
    • As a result of the internet / we b 2.0 / facebook+myspace+blogs the dunbar number is raising
    • This doesn’t leave room for the one way messages of corporations / advertising
  • Some companies greeted enthusiastically, some companies are barfed upon
  • Cory Doctorow / BoingBoing
    • DOWN and OUT in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
    • In the science fiction future of Cory, instead of money, there is something that he called whuffie
    • Roughly equivalent to social capital: reputation, access to resources, favors added up (reprocity), followers, levels of trust
    • High whuffie score = good reputation
    • You can buy stuff with your whuffie
    • But… not really fictional or futuristic. It’s here and now.
    • It’s how we decide to friend people on Facebook (based on looking at existing friend relationships)
    • To raise your whuffie, you need to establish relationships and credibility
  • 5 ways to raise your whuffie
    • 1. Turning the bullhorn around: instead of just speaking, listen
      • (Will: I wonder what would happen if I solicited input on HP printers and HP website)
      • The silence will smack down your whuffie
      • 8 ways to turn the bullhorn around
        • 1. Get advice from experts, but design for the needs of the novice
        • 2. Respond to ALL feedback, even when you have to say “no thanks”
        • 3. Don’t take negative feedback personally: people want a better experience, they want to keep using your product/website, they are taking the time to give you feedback to make things better
        • 4. Give people credit:
          • mention contributions in blog posts, tweets, or videos.
          • Name a product or feature after the contributor (or let them name it)
          • Send journalists their way
          • Send a gift certificate or special coupon code
          • Schwag and schtuff
          • Upgrade their account
          • Give the contributor more responsibility
        • 5. Point out and explain changes as you make them
        • 6. Make small, continuous improvements
        • 7. Go out to find your feedback
          • Use Google Alerts, Radiant6, or similar tools to seek feedback
        • 8. Ignore the haters (“Don’t feed the trolls”)
    • 2. Become part of the community you serve
      • Figure out who it is you serve
        • What problem are you solving? For whom?
      • Join the community… not for market resource, not to sell them something… to learn what makes them happen. And why they would give a damn.
    • 3. Create truly amazing customer experiences
      • Create love, joy, and laughter.
      • We can design for them.
      • Automagic: a user experience so seamless that it feels like magic just occurred.
      • http://lilgrams.com
        • Tag: “Automagically share your baby’s memories”
        • GrowthGRam, StoryGram, FoodGram, WordGram
        • Automagicness starts with sign: can signin with Twitter account or Facebook connect.
        • You can sync up with your social network accounts
        • And then pick people in those accounts who should receive notifications
        • Estimates dates from EXIF data, and combines with child’s age to guess:
          • First father’s day
          • First solid food
          • Etc.
      • Quicken for iPhone
        • Automagic spending update
        • Automagic account update
        • Automagic ATM finder
      • Tripit
        • “The best way to organize and share your travel plans”
        • You forward your confirmation email, from any airline or travel service, and Tripit creates a uniform itinerary, accessible via web, print, or iPhone.
      • 4. Throwing sheep: fun, lightweight activities that encourage participation, but don’t really do much else.
        • FB: poking, “I like this”, twitter: nudging, virtual gifting, kudos.
        • Makes it an easy way for people to participate, get comfortable
        • Example: Dopplr:
          • Personal velocity meter (silly and fun – people were twittering about it)
          • Carbon footprint
      • 5. lighten up: the ability to inject fun into the most serious & professional interactions
        • Examples:
          • funny 404 page errors
    • 4. embrace the chaos
      • The fear mongers: legal, public relations/corporate communications, IT
      • Understand the need for security… but need to balance it with the need for openness… because that is what people are demanding. We are in a new era of building trust
      • Benefits of embracing the chaos
        • You’ll be better prepared for the unexpected
        • You’ll join in the conversation that is already happening and be welcomed for this move
        • It will bring the opportunity for collaboration
        • It will make your ideas stronger that way
      • In the old days, you had one chance to get the message just right
      • Today, you have multiple conversations and iterations to build that message with your customers and audience
    • Whuffie is part of the gift economy. You don’t hoard it, you give it away.
      • What can you give away that won’t leave you broke?
    • #5: embrace your higher purpose
      • Do well by doing good: in the core of what you are doing, you are giving back.
        • Example: Stonyfield Farms: makes good yogurt, but does good things for the world by doing it. Sustainable production, organic.
        • Craiglist
      • Think customer-centrically
        • Take off your marketing hat, your finance hat, and step into your customers hat. What can you do for them?
        • Look at the “not customer-centric” slide on slideshare
        • Customer-centric is:
          • You send customers to other websites
          • You measure how many people refer their friends to you as success
          • When budgets get tightened, you tighten operational costs (not design, customer support, etc.)
          • Your only customer service policy is to do right by the customer
          • Your customers are doing things with your product you never dreamed and are posting videos.
          • Influencers are adding you as friends on social networks
          • You work with your competitors towards better customer experiences for all
      • Making new things accessible to people:
          • Blogger (enabled amateur journalists)
          • YouTube (enabled amateur videographers/actors)
          • Flickr (enabled amateur photographers)
      • http://Akoha.com: Pay It Forward Mission Card
  • If you combine all of these five whuffie factors, you will become whuffie rich
  • Leads to better word of mouth, repeat sales, customer loyalty
  • Which leads to increase sales and profits
  • Discussion…
    • Q: How to staff up to participate in this?
      • A: It’s everybody’s job. At zappos, everyone is empowered to be social. It’s not one person’s job, not one department’s job. It doesn’t mean spending five hours on twitter, it means being ambient.
      • The big companies spend a hell of a lot of time internally focused. They spend so much time in meeting talking about stuff that doesn’t matter instead of going to barcamps, tweetups, or webvisions conferences.
    • Q: You can’t have a top down mandate to achieve something like the Southwest airlines safety rap. So how do you achieve it?
      • A: You can’t mandate it. You have to cultivate the culture. That takes time, it requires hiring the right amount of people, and it takes time to apply across the board.