I recently had an opportunity to drive a hydrogen fuel cell car and a Smart car while visiting Mercedes-Benz’ tech center in Palo Alto. They had on hand an “F-Cell”, an A-series car fitted with a hydrogen fuel call drivetrain, and the Smart was one of the models that have been available in Europe for years but just came for sale in the US recently.

The fuel cell model inherited the attributes of the regular A series: small on the outside, big on the inside (it’s a 4 seater and room in the back was impressive), and more premium level materials and design than Americans expect in their small cars (though the A is not a budget car). The fuel cell drivetrain moved the car along at a pace fine for getting around town (we didn’t take them on the freeway). A “turbo” mode could be engaged to provide more pep, at the expense of economy.

The drivetrain had a fair bit of whine coming from the electric motors, I’m guessing this was because the prototype wasn’t fitted with much sound dampening. Otherwise it felt very normal to drive and handled just fine.

Mercedes is not making any promises on availability, these are strictly test beds. About half the hundred-plus  F-Cells are in California, I think helping Mercedes meet Californias air regulations.

It would be great to see the A-series here in the US, given how gas prices are going and congestion on the roads is just getting worse every year. As clean diesel is now more widely available, the turbo diesels would especially be great.

 

The Smart car was an interesting experience. I really like the exterior styling, and the interior is better than the original, more toned down and mature (think half way between a Mini and a Civic). It’s only a 2-seater, and it was snug.

Speed was ok, nothing great; it only weighs 1800 lbs, but the engine is just 71hp, and 0-60 is 14.1 seconds. The biggest problem was the gear change. The automatic box took ages to make the shift (a couple of seconds or more) during which time no power was going to the wheels it seemed, and the car coasted. This made shifting while accelerating a frustrating experience.

“You’ll get used to it,” said my chaparone. And I did…by not accelerating very hard and minimizing the obviousness of the lag. But not a great solution. And it doesn’t give a warm fuzzy that the car has the speed when you need it to get out of a jam. (I don’t think anyone buys a Smart with sporting pretensions and I certainly wasn’t judging it against hot hatches).

The weird thing is that the Smart doesn’t get that great gas mileage — 33mpg in town and 41mpg on the highway. There are other bigger and only slightly more expensive cars (the Smart starts at $11,500) that get similar or better mileage and which don’t require premium fuel like the Smart does. If Mercedes had introduced it years ago before the Mini took hold, before Scion was widespread, and before innovators like the Prius, Yaris or  Fit appeared, then it would have been more distinctive. Unless you place a premium on fitting into tiny parking spaces (the Smart is over 3ft shorter than a Mini!) or being the unique kid on your block, the case for the Smart today  doesn’t seem that compelling.

Creating good user experiences (UX) over and over again means creating first good employee experiences (EX - I’m trademarking that!). That’s the lesson from Southwest airlines according to an NY Times article about retiring co-founder Herbert Kelleher:

Over the years, whenever reporters would ask him the secret to Southwest’s success, Mr. Kelleher had a stock response. “You have to treat your employees like customers,” he told Fortune in 2001. “When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us.”…

[W]hen you look at a company like American, with its poisonous employee relations and its glum customer base, and compare it with Southwest, with its happy employees and contented customers, you can’t help thinking that Mr. Kelleher was on to something when he put employees first. “There isn’t any customer satisfaction without employee satisfaction,” said Gordon Bethune, the former chief executive of Continental Airlines, and an old friend of Mr. Kelleher’s. “He recognized that good employee relations would affect the bottom line. He knew that having employees who wanted to do a good job would drive revenue and lower costs.”

This isn’t really surprising for a service company like Southwest, but the same rule applies, I believe, to companies that make products. Employee happiness often comes from walking the walk — in other words not just making big pronouncements about how much you love your employees (Kelleher wept when talking about his employess in his going-away speech), but in seeing those through in actions big and small. And often it’s the small ones  that show how you actually mean. It’s kind of like what they say about ethics - it’s what you do when nobody’s looking.

These small touches to how you treat employees are often the most intimate ones, and they communicate how deeply felt the relationship is (or not, as the case may be). Southwest, for example, seems to give its flight staff a great deal of autonomy when it comes to how they intereact with passengers, but bounded by some established guidelines. This has famously led to some staff singing the safety announcements and adding comedic commentary (I once heard one say “There may be fifty ways to leave your lover, but there are only four ways off this big bird!”). It also probably led to the more recent episodes of passengers getting walked off planes for risque clothing…just goes to show that what constitutes a “good” UX is different for different people.

While any company can luck out with one-off good experiences, a long term systemic philosophy of treating employees right fosters a mindset that is focused on thinking about the needs of others, which ideally translates into the products the employees create for the company’s customers.

Cable TV companies are famously indifferent to user experiences, and my provider, Comcast, recently showcased one example. They finally started allowing previews of on-demand movies, but check out how they managed to  mess up the experience:

That giant blue box stays on screen for the entire duration of the preview, obscuring a good chunk of it (even more for non-widescreen previews than what you see here). It’s really distracting.

You wouldn’t see something like this if Southwest ran a cable system.

References:

The Sinatra of Southwest Feels the Love, NY Times

Org Chart 2.0: Built for User Experience Systems

 

I was recently shopping for a new bike helmet and I was struck by a realization: Is there another category with lower differentiation amongst the different brands?

Above is a representative sampling of helmets from four different manufacturers: Bell, Giro, Louis Garneau, and Specialized. I’ve removed the logos. Can you tell one brand from another? I certainly can’t. (Answer at the end of the post)

The bike helmet category, so far as I can see, is primarily style driven, as all the helmets have to meet minimum safety standards determined by a couple of third party organizations. The differences in weight and comfort between the lower end and upper end helmets (a price range of $40 to over $200) are marginal. The major difference is in the amount of cooling — the upper end helmets have larger vent holes — but contrary to a few years ago even the middling helmets are good in this respect. The $60 Bell I picked up cools much better than my five year old $100+ Specialized.

A significant incentive in many bike purchases is what pro’s are using, and having bragging rights to the latest gear. In that case you would expect more obvious differences at the upper end — if there’s isn’t a strong visible tiering, or a strong brand identity through the product design, then only a tiny number of people will be able to spot that you’re wearing the latest and greatest, which dilutes the incentive to spring for the expensive stuff.

Bell Sports owns Giro, who was the originator of the bare-styrofoam helmet that dramatically reduced weight over the older style that had a hard plastic shell. Typically when a company acquires another one they want to keep a differentiation between them, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Based on my experience, the two brands seem tailored for slightly different shape heads (Giro = rounder, Bell = elliptical). Other than that they are largely the same. Between the two of them they dominate the category; I don’t have stats but I’m guessing 80%. Perhaps they’re just a bit complacent due to their almost-monopoly?

It’s odd that in such a style driven category that all the manufacturers have basically converged on a single aesthetic and stuck to it. In fairness, designing anything to go on the head is a tricky and highly constrained exercise and one of the most difficult things to design, but this level of conformity is still very odd. How about a little choice so we don’t all look like racer wannabe’s with Trilobites stuck to our skulls?

(Brands answer, clockwise from top-left: Giro, Specialized, Louis Garneau, Giro, Bell, Bell)

Fifteen years ago yesterday, the World Wide Web became official and was put into the public domain. In honor of that fact, one of our colleagues at frog (thanks Ben Tomassetti!) brought in a birthday cake for it today:

(Thanks to Cary Gibaldi for the photo) 

Note the nerd humor with the binary numbering of the years…there are 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don’t. I can’t say that it actually was the “moistest cake I’ve ever tasted”, but, like the web, it was free, so I’m not going to complain.

This blog post at SiliconValley.com from yesterday sums up the situation nicely:

It could easily have gone differently. Fifteen years ago, the management of the CERN physics lab in Geneva could have decided that this World Wide Web thing that researcher Tim Berners-Lee was working on might have some proprietary value down the road and put it under lock, key and license. But they didn’t. Fifteen years ago today, they put it into the public domain and changed history. Of the many Web milestones we celebrate, that makes this one special.

The CERN directors took some convincing. “The difficult part was explaining to them the true nature of what the Web was going to be,” Berners-Lee’s colleague Robert Cailliau told the BBC. “We had to convince them that this was going to take off and it was a really big thing. And therefore CERN couldn’t hold on to it and the best thing to do was to give it away. We had toyed with the idea of asking for some sort of royalty. But Tim wasn’t very much in favor of that.”

 

There is an interesting article in the April 2008 Harvard Business Review about how to be a successful services company, and one of the examples they talk about is Progressive Insurance. They talk about the two features of Progressive which are most distinctive and visible - their white vans, and how they list competitor’s rates alongside their own. As the article describes:

When someone insured by Progressive is involved in an auto accident, the company immediately sends out a van to assist that person and to assess the damage on the spot… Customers love this level of responsiveness and give the company high marks for service.

But customers are very price sensitive about auto insurance and so would not pay more for this service in their monthly premiums. So why does Progressive do it? Because it cuts down on fraud. Turns out most insurance fraud happens when people make claims on accidents that never happened or which were staged. This results in expensive legal costs. By dispatching a representative to the scene immediately, Progressive helps prevent this type of fraud, and even discourages it pre-emptively because people will expect a representative to show up and therefore not even attempt fraud.

 

It’s not that Progressive is determined to go one better than rivals to win the business. In fact, Progressive’s is the lowest quote only about half the time. What Progressive does believe is that is quote is the right one given the probability of that person’s getting into an accident - a probability that the insurer is best in class at determining. If indeed its quote is spot-on, then allowing a competitor to insure the customer at a lower rate is doubly effective: It frees Progressive from a money-losing propoition while burdening its competitor with the unprofitable account. Thus a level of service that looks downright altruistic to the customer actually benefits the company.

In other words, potential customers self-select not to use Progressive, but still come away feeling impressed by Progressive’s service and trustworthyness. If at some point in the future when their driving record has improved they may return to Progressive’s site and see that their price has improved, and potentially switch. So it’s a win-win for Progressive and buyers, only Progressive’s competitors lose. The perfect scenario!