Good User Experience Starts with Good Employee Experience

A few years ago I was enjoying brunch with some friends at the Tavern at Lark Creek, which is rightfully known for excellent food and attentive and friendly service. Part way through the meal I had to excuse myself to use the bathroom. The bathroom was up some windy stairs, and was very nicely appointed, even more nicely treated than the dining room itself. As restaurant bathrooms go it was very pleasant, but I did not give it much thought.

At the end of the meal before hitting the road for a slightly long drive, I decided to make another pit-stop. This time I saw a downstairs bathroom, which was not as nice as the first one I had used upstairs (thought it was not by any means unpleasant). It became clear that I had taken a wrong turn the first time and had used the employee bathroom.

I could have chosen to be miffed that the restaurant didn’t ensure that the guest bathroom was as good as it could be. Instead, I realized that the quality of the employee bathroom was one sign that the restaurant cared for its staff, and recognized that taking care of the EX - the employee experience - is a prerequisite to a consistently high quality UX - user (customer) experience. They realized that “customer centric” does not mean ignoring employees. In fact it’s just the opposite, if you want to offer truly good service to customers, you need to start with treating your staff right.

As Olive Garden President David Pickens puts it, “It’s very difficult for the experience of the guests to exceed the experience of the staff.”

When you look at the company’s that consistently deliver superior UX - Zappos, Amazon, Google, Southwest, Starbucks back in the old days, Levenger, Niemen Marcus, the one thing they all have in common is that they pay huge amounts of attention to the quality of life of their staff, creating a culture and infrastructure of training that help their staff do the right thing, even when there isn’t an exact rule about what to do in a novel situation.

As an extreme example, read the letter that Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh wrote to employees when the acquisition by Amazon was announced. It is manically focused on the culture of the company and the worklife of the staff, superseding just about every other concern. “Culture” shows up 23 time in it, 7 times in association with “unique”, and 21 times with “brand”. In other words, Hsieh makes an intimate connection between the internal culture of the company and the external brand as it appears to customers - he recognizes that the EX is directly correlated with UX.

The Uninspiring Google Books

There have been some interesting discussions around the web following the departure of one of its key designers, citing an over-reliance on quantitative assessment of every design decision. Bruce Temkin of Forrester asks, does “Google’s design need to have more soul?” Helen Walters at Business Week interviewed Google’s Irene Au about their design challenges.

I have been using Google Books quite a lot in the course of researching my own book, mostly to check out previews to see if a particular book is worth getting out of the UC Berkeley library. (Actually I mostly access it through Sente, a rather good bibliography database program, which is able to surf Google Books and Google Scholar along with many other sites, and suck bibliographic information off them.) It illustrates some of Google’s challenges.

Here is what a typical front page looks like:

Click to enlarge

Considering that this is supposed to be the portal into the world’s printed knowledge, can you imagine a less inspiring presentation? There is no excitement, anticipation, sense of wonderment. As Google encompasses more knowledge, I sense a problem: it flattens everything to the same level. Google lacks nuance. (Its acquired properties stand out differently — YouTube, Picassa, Earth, Blogger.)

Now obviously Google is focused on simplicity and speed, and that stripped-down philosophy goes for its approach to aesthetics too. The Google front page is famously unadorned. But with Books they’ve made an attempt to give some starting points for exploration by showing a selection of publications. But they are a motley mix that bears no relation to my past browsing history or anything else that Google might glean from me. (I suppose there is someone out there who is interested in a combination of Jet, Lesbian Chic, The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory, The Nazi Doctors, and Waste Management.) So why bother putting them there? The chance of something being on that grid that is on the topic I’m looking for is one in a million.

Right now they are straddling a middle ground between Google front page and Amazon, and it’s not working. Pick a side - go rich or go minimal.

Inventing behaviors, needs and perceptions

Picking up on my colleagues Robert Fabricant and Jon Kolko talking about the recent IxDA conference, I thought I’d add a few thoughts. I didn’t attend the conference, but their posts about behavior and its place in interaction design struck a chord with me.

Robert’s argument is that the true medium of interaction designers is not technology, but behaviors.

I definitely agree that behaviors are an end-result that we are seeking to address, whether it is by allowing them to stay the same (a new product does not require an alteration, which helps people adopt it) or by altering behaviors in part or in whole.

I’m not sure that behaviors rise to the level of medium, however, since we do not manipulate them directly. Changing behaviors may be an end goal, but we use an intermediary (software, physical products, services, brand, etc.) as our influencer. We are like writers: their end goal is to create a new universe in the reader’s mind and to perhaps draw them into action or a new way of seeing the world. The words are the means to that end, the medium, and the writer can hope that the reader responds the way they intend, but has no real control over what they end up feeling, thinking and doing. But I don’t know that writers would see reader emotions and behaviors as their medium per se. This is one of the interesting things about design and writing though, people constantly surprise you with how they’ve re-interpreted your work. It is both humbling (to realize the limits of our control) and also wonderful (to realize how creative people are).

In the case of interactions, the altering of behaviors can either be seen or used as a push, where the change is forced, or as a pull, where new behaviors are enabled and opened up that had previously been inconvenient, impossible, or simply unconsidered.

But there is more to it than behaviors; perceptions also play a large role, and we want to affect both of them. Perceptions lead to behaviors, and behaviors lead to perceptions; they are a loop, each building on, reflecting, and altering the other.

This is particularly true when talking about trying to create social change, as Robert is. Project M is as much about changing perceptions as it is about behaviors, as the two cannot be separated.

To tie this a bit into Jon’s presentation about synthesizing research, this is often where the rubber meets the road of determining needs, and then conceptualizing solutions that will allow new behaviors (and perhaps perceptions) and therefore satisfy those needs.

Often when analyzing user needs we are looking for needs that they did not express explicitly. We are therefore to an extent imagining, even inventing, what their needs are. Not blindly or randomly, of course, as Jon argues there is a chain of logic that needs to lead up to the determined needs, it’s just not always the familiar A+B=C logic. But this is not a mechanical process, there is a level of informed intuition required. The more breakthrough the need insight, the behavior change, and the product concept, the more intuition is necessary.

Furthermore, through our designs we are seeking to create new behaviors for people. Out of those new behaviors will come new needs, for every product introduces new problems directly or indirectly, even as it solves existing problems.

I think some people get uncomfortable with the idea that we are in the business of creating needs, changing behaviors, and changing perceptions. It smacks too much of marketing and manipulation. That can be true, and some people will use these methods for cynical ends. The methods in themselves are not inherently good or bad, just as words that writers are craft are not inherently good or bad. It is up to us to use them in ways that we think will benefit people and improve the world, rather than just to sell more stuff to supposedly gullible consumers.

The fact is, we influence behaviors and perceptions with everything we create, whether we intend to or not, and maintaining the status quo is just as much an influence as changing things. But we can kid ourselves if we maintain status quo that the world is created “out there” and that it is the way it is because of user choice, and we are just fitting into it.

If we seek to actively change things, our role becomes less implicit. Our responsibility thereby becomes more explicit. That is where things get tricky because, as Robert and Jon state, we do not have a model about behaviors (or perceptions) that can help us predict outcomes well enough to make our responsibility feel comfortable.

Simple is Not as Simple as it Seems

An article in the New York Times says customers are being more attracted to “simple” products:

And, as it turns out, the buyers of consumer electronics could very well have been a leading economic indicator. Over the last year, they chose to buy two inexpensive and simple products, the Wii and the Flip, over competing gadgets bristling with more features.

But the article conflates two different definitions of “simple”

• Doing a focused function or small number of functions (i.e. it’s “simple in what it does”)
• Being easy and intuitive to use (i.e. it “simple to use”)

The article cites a number of examples including the Wii, the iPhone, the Flip camcorder, and the Sonos multi-room music system. These products represent a spectrum of the different meanings of simple, but the article conflates them all together as though they were equivalent. If you’re making decisions about how to approach a new product design, this is a very dangerous thing to do.

The Flip camcorder is very simple in what it does. It has removed all but the most essential functions of being a video camera, which has a knock-on effect that it is easy to use just because there is very little to learn about.

The iPhone is far simpler to use than any other smartphone out there, but it is very complex in what it does. With the App Store, that complexity grows every day. Indeed, if Apple had come out with a greatly de-featured smartphone, it would not have been a smartphone at all.

The Wii is not significantly easier to to set up or less complex than the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3, but they have put their emphasis on a different kind of game play than the “technical” type of games with steep learning curves that tend to dominate on the other platforms. This makes it easier to get started with playing the games themselves.

Which brings us to an important point: at the same time these devices are removing things, they are adding others. In the case of Flip it faciliates spontaneous use in a way that traditional large and expensive and complicated camcorders do not, and it can be customized with a very cool website to make it more of a fashion accessory. The iPhone added a new interface paradigm with its multi-touch, gesture-based touchscreen, and was able to push back the layered complexity that the wireless carriers tend to impose. The Wii brought joy back to video games with control accessories that use physical movement beyond one’s thumbs, and which encourage more personal collaboration and competition than one gets from a first-person-shooter.

These additions have allowed the products to open up new market opportunities and reach customers that have stayed away from less convention gadgets in each category. But it’s not just the removal of things to make the devices simple that’s achieves this, at least as important is the judicious addition of evocative capabilities.

Sonos is in some ways is a counter-example: It’s well designed and much simpler to use than the usual cobbled-together solutions for get multi-room audio using a PC as a music source. If simple was all it took to appeal, then they should have done much better. In fact it took additional complexity — creating an iPhone app that allowed the iPhone to replace Sonos’ custom-built remote (which also contains a scroll wheel and a color LCD, not unlike an iPod — to goose sales, according to the article.

The common denominator throughout all of these is ease of use, and a new twist on the experience of using the product. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that “simple” just means removing functionality. Sometimes that’s appropriate, but other times it’s exactly the wrong thing to do.

NY Times article

Public Bicycles in Paris

There was a definite up-tick in bicycle usage in Paris that I noticed on this visit compared to a few years ago. High gas prices have probably contributed to that - gas is $10/gallon equivalent there, so quit complaining about $4. But also the mayor of Paris has instituted a fantastic bicycle rental system called the Velib.

It works like this:

Stocks of bicycles are placed all over Paris at special rack stations.

You walk up to the touchscreen kiosk and register (placing a 150 Euro/$225 deposit on your credit card in case you don’t return the bike). You can buy daily, monthly or yearly subscriptions. There are additional fees per hour of using the bike. For the first 30 minutes it’s free, it’s 1 euro for the next 30 mins, and then the fees going up very steeply after that. So the pricing scheme is heavily biased toward short “rentals” and rides rather than keeping it for the day.

The kiosk lets you register, pay, and has a map

The bikes themselves are custom-made and are very cool looking in a retro way. All curvy and brownish-gray they are extremely size adjustable so they fit lots of people. They have generous splash guards, a basket, dynamo-powered head and tail lights, internal-hub gearing (so no delicate derailleurs to break or maintain) and cable locks for quick locking up. Because of their distinctive looks no-one is going to steal one and claim it belongs to them. Supposedly they are impossible to maintain outside of the service because they require custom tools, a further disincentive to theft (not to mention the deposit on your card).

People from all walks of life ride them, from young to old, people in business attire or people out doing shopping. You see them everywhere. And I think I only saw one person using a helmet…. Despite the craziness of riding in Paris traffic the Velib has proved a smashing success. It appears many were skeptical about it given how free bike schemes have not done so well in other countries. But the city has put an impressive amount of resources behind it. Not just development of the custom bikes and kiosks themselves, but there is an amazing infrastructure of staff and trucks at night that redistributed the bikes so they don’t get bunched up in certain areas, and of course clean and maintain them.

Would love to see something like this in San Francisco but I have my doubts about how well it would work. Paris is mostly flat, SF definitely is not, but there is also not the respect for communal property in SF that there is in France, and the bikes probably would not get treated well. Not to mention no-one would want to pay for it…