The Bolin Marketing Blog

Last night I had the fortunate opportunity to attend the local UPA MN lecture where Susan Dray and David Siegel talked about some of the myths of user research.  Without getting into the details of the presentation, their main message was basically don’t always trust research outcomes, no matter how massive or sophisticated they appear.

We work hard to never stop questioning our approaches to defining customer or user experience problems, in addition to our methods in answering them. But as experience design strategists and designers in agency or consultancy settings like Bolin Digital, we often don’t have the luxury of large budgets to help us inform our design decisions for many projects.

In the methods of our work, we rely heavily upon activity-, user-, and system-centered approaches as models to guide us through the forest of decisions. We hope that one of them or a combination of them gets us to the answer quickly.  Paul and I have also chatted about the common sense approach to design: should we  sometimes  rely on our own experience or instinct to guide decision making (also referred to as Dan Saffer’s “genius” centered design approach)? It seems like even this cost-efficient “gut” check, however, can get us into deep water.

As we continue to grow up in a world of increasingly sophisticated interactions and product experiences, it’s important to understand how we arrive at conclusions about which design paths to take.

All this recent thinking provoked me to ask these questions about design research methods and tools: Wwhat’s the best mix of data and methods?  How much of it is driven by common sense? How do we know when we arrive at the best possible solution?

Aside from all the news about Apple’s withdrawal from Macworld and tradeshows in general, as well as the questions surrounding the health of Steve Jobs, there’s been a lot of speculation about what Apple’s next Big Deal is.

How about an enhanced, more evolved, touch screen iMac? This is not a stretch. HP has it. Or maybe you just call it the iPhone. Will Apple will roll out some application that is more intuitive, more useful, more sexy, more capable of complex interactions than current devices out there? How quickly will non-keyboard gestural interfaces become part of the lexicon of computer interaction?  We’ve seen how the iphone technology works with current ergonomics of human movement. Here are some foreseeable extensions of the idea:

• POP swiping and account transacting (e-money services have been popular in Asia for some time)
• Mobile health monitoring that tracks human movement and vitals
• ‘Smart’ apparel that collects numerous points of data from and for people that wear it
• Any type of research requiring micro viewing

These applications are not only forseeable, but require sophisticated new devices to handle enhanced human interaction. The moment of truth: How will a company like Apple strike out on this front? The pressure is on.

(caption: The movie Minority Report helped us all catch a vision for a world that requires physical movement in our daily interactions.)

If I had one wish for our user experience and design team here at Bolin Marketing, it would be to spend the rest of the year (and quite possibly the next) focusing on how we could extend beneficial online customer experiences that extend beyond the norm: text, image and video content. Smart navigation and interaction design are also (of course) imperative in this equation. But the real silver bullet will lie in smart interaction design that builds a friendly relationship between customers and a company’s products and services.

While working on my draft for part two of my last post on Customer Experience Strategy, I’ve been thinking a lot about how our interactions with products and services have been changing. Then I read Adrian Ho’s post about the psychology of human movement and what this means for companies and their relationships with their customers. Of course, we all think Apple (iphone) and Nintendo (Wii) are leading the charge, with the way they involve natural human gestures as an essential element in how we experience their products. This is the tip of the iceberg. I think it’s pretty safe to say that gesture, movement, and even ritual are becoming part of the lexicon for the design of future customer interactions.

Our Team at Bolin Marketing is always trying to come up with a thoughtful and holistic approach to how we solve marketing problems for our clients. Beyond internet marketing, we’d like to think we’re making big strides in how we can integrate a smart user experience practice as part of the design process for all our clients. But the real challenge is putting this thinking into practice. If ritual, gesture, and nonverbal communication in the physical and digital world are the next frontier for brand/customer strategy, what is the next best way to integrate this thinking into a design process?

There’s a Chinese proverb that states something to the effect of, “If you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other.”  I think that’s a good conceptual framework through which to analyze content management needs.  Content management rhetoric drips of promises of “marketing empowerment”, implying that changing anything on a site through CMS is as easy as rekeying text, and this is the rationale for CMS existence.

Unfortunately, the reality doesn’t often answer the promise.  Rekeying text may be one of the steps involved in making a content edit through a CMS, but the promise fails to address the flexibility limitations of an object oriented data model, the complexity associated with a multi tiered, role based workflow of approvals, and the CMS interface complexity that tends to grow in indirect proportion to functional capability. 

Bolin Digital’s president, Dane Hartzell, cites surveys he took part in during his participation in the eBusiness Executive council comprised of interactive directors for many of the largest consumer brands in North America.  When asked if they would recommend their current CMS, whether they be home grown solutions, enterprise level big-players, or otherwise, 0% said they would.

How can each be so dissatisfied across the myriad of solution providers, technology platforms, and broad ranging internal support/administration capabilities?  I personally believe the answer lies within the failure to acknowledge specific needs of each interactive property, and match the solution to that need.  If XYZ corporation has entered a license agreement with a big player CMS, even short lived marketing properties are expected to sit atop that CMS.  High fidelity design and highly interaction oriented web applications tend not to play well with CMS solutions.  At the other end of the spectrum, if I were developing an online property whose purpose was provide access to tens of thousands of content pages, each with shared components, I sure as hell wouldn’t want the entire site hard coded and static (no CMS), especially if there were tiered regulatory approvals required prior to publish.

CMS needs often find their way into a project requirements checklist as a single decision point- does the property need a CMS, or doesn’t it?  How can we better scale the solution to the actual lifespan of the property, the dynamic realities of its existence, the needs of the folks who manage it, and a long list of other considerations?  And in the case of simple web applications, how can we simplify management as much as possible? 

We don’t claim that our content admin tool (we don’t refer to it as a CMS) is the end-all, be-all, as we don’t believe there is such a solution.  The point being the solution is scalable, and we will tend toward starting simple.  Marketers need to weigh the CMS needs of a web app on a case by case basis.  On a continuum of simple (think WordPress, Drupal, Joomla) to complex (Microsoft, Oracle/Stellent ECM), know that if you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other.  A long list of functional features tends to come along with complexity, lack of flexibility once implemented, high cost, training, and ongoing support.  Whether you’re an agency, an IT manager, or a client side marketer, are you scaling your content management approach appropriately?

I must admit, I’m sometimes a late adopter when it comes to the newest online trends, tools or chatter about technology. I see this as a strength: it’s good to be skeptical and somewhat critical before jumping on any technology bandwagon. I wasn’t among the first to use twitter, facebook, or myspace, and I JUST finished organizing my personal financial outlook on Mint.

Mint is the perfect tool for people (like me) who have spent an inordinate portion of their lives talking about getting their financial housekeeping in order. It’s amazing. Initially offered as a great personal savings-and-expense management tool, Mint now allows users to track investments and custom categorize individual expense items in a simple, easy-to-use interface. It make suggestions on maximizing savings and indicates if and when expenses are outside my usual spending trends. And as an interactive designer, I appreciate the elegant interface and crisp, clean identity. Centralized self-administered personal finance management for the first time. Talk about exceptional customer experience.

Mint - the revolutionary personal finance organizer.

Granted, I still have to go to each account to move money around. Hmm, another great concept. Is Mint headed in that direction?

There’s been a lot of discussion here at Bolin Digital and Bolin Marketing about what distinguishes Customer experience strategy from brand strategy. How are they different? How are they the same? Does one encompass the other when it comes to interactive marketing?

Let me go out on a limb, kind of: brand and customer experience are vastly different models of thinking about engaging audiences. Okay, maybe that’s not a revolutionary concept. All you have to do is buy into what the guys at Adaptive Path are saying in their latest book. I encourage you to read it, and then think about how traditional brand development has to change, or become something else, in order to connect and drive real value for intended audiences. Brand strategies are typically

• Developed from the center of the organization outward
• Describe attributes of how the organization is different
• Communicate the organization’s perception of itself
• Involve stakeholders close to the product, service, or offering
• Are communicated from the organization to the audience
• Speak in a voice that is characteristic of an organization

Customer experience strategies should really, however, come from a different place. They usually

• Take into account the customer’s perception of a product, service, or company
• Are extremely empathetic to the customer’s needs, wants, opinions and perceptions
• Account for language and concepts that the customer understands
• Involve serious ethnographic research and audience participation
• Create ongoing feedback loops with customers
• Engender a culture of customer-centricity in everything an organization does.

We’ve heard it over and over. Companies want to differentiate. Old methods of differentiation are not so different any more. Customer centricity is the new black. There has been so much talk these days about customer centric approaches for everything from product design to marketing communications. The ironic thing is that very few organizations have begun to put any of this to practice.

Next time we’ll discuss some examples of how brand strategies fail to see the whole picture. We’ll also review some examples of organizations who have make customer experience the heart of what they do.