The Experience is the Brand

50/50 Chance of Salvation

For some unknown reason, amber and I started receiving the Oriental Trading Company catalog about a year ago. Our fates were sealed the moment we gave in to temptation and placed an order. (If you happen to be reading through the archives of our album, you’ll come across these beauties that I made with my own two little hands.) Now a new catalog arrives monthly, with the pace quickening the closer we draw towards Halloween and Christmas.

One of my simple pleasures in life is leafing through the catalog at the breakfast table. It isn’t that I necessarily need or want a set of twelve blue grass dresses for my next tiki party, or a box of twenty four individual wrapped sets of candy vampire teeth. Rather, I get immense (and perhaps, perverse) joy at seeing how the catalog writers manage to string together 3-7 unrelated words into the name of a product, apparently with little concern for forming grammatically correct phrases. Verbs, adjectives, proper nouns: these are mere pick-up sticks, to be scattered randomly in the hopes that they might transmit a semblance of meaning. Witness:

• NEON MACRAME FRIENDSHIP BRACELET CRAFT
• NYLON PATRIOTIC ROCKET WINDSOCK
• JUMBO INFLATE MONKEY

I read these, and in my mind I’m hearing, “Jumbo!…Inflate!…Monkey!” It’s like some demented free-association word exercise. Amber and I sometimes indulge ourselves, and I’m particulary fond of coming up with my own creations:

• GIANT RUBBER STAR TRAVEL CRAFT
• CUTE SQUEEZE KITTEN BALL
• STRETCH SILVER FISH

But sometimes, the items and their descriptions cross over from the ridiculous to something completely bizzare, almost frightening. Flipping towards the back of a recent “clearance blowout” issue (half of the items in there were completely new, negating the very concept of a “clearance” sale), I came across this gem:

HOLIDAY RELIGIOUS JELLY BEAN TREAT BAGS

In case you don’t want to follow the link, what you get is a bag full of red and green jelly beans. Might be good for Christmas, and seemingly innocuous. Until you read the description:

“Each with a special meaning. Red represents our sins. Green represents a chance for a new start. Fat Free. (Approximately 9 pcs. per 1-oz. poly bag with header, 16 bags per unit) Candy is non-returnable.”

Now I’m Jewish, so it’d be no surprise to me to learn that that’s what the red and green in Christmas actually stood for. I find it a little bit strange that a jelly bean would be used represent either sin or redemption (I mean why not Red Hots and mints?), but I’ll even let that one pass. No, what gets me is that, on average, there are nine jelly beans in each bag. Which means that each bag is off-balance, inherently sinful or redemptive. This isn’t really the kind of message I want to be giving when I’m passing out treats at my next office Christmas party.

The Sound of One Man Meeting

Yesterday I scurried off to a client’s location for two meetings set for the afternoon. About the time I arrived, I learned that the first one had been cancelled. OK, no problem, cancelled meetings are pretty much “found” time for me, so I set down to do some work.

And so a couple of hours later I grabbed my laptop and notepad and headed off to what I thought was my second meeting of the afternoon. I arrived at the conference room first (that’s usually the case), set up and waited. And waited. 15 minutes after the meeting was supposed to start, I emailed the meeting organizer:

Me: “So, I’m in [the conference room] now. Are we meeting? Has it been changed?”

Her: “The meeting’s on Thursday.”

Yesterday was Tuesday.

Me: “Oh. Ok then. Great. Thanks. See you then.”

*grumble*

Now frankly, I’m to blame for this. The meeting request came in, and I transcribed it by “hand” into my Outlook calendar, mistakenly putting it down for Tuesday instead of Thursday. So really, it’s my fault.

But it isn’t, really. I’m using Outlook. My company uses Outlook Exchange for meeting and resource scheduling, email, address books, etc. It’s really nice, especially since 90% of the company is on WinXP machines. (I myself used to be on a Mac, and miss it badly. I’d gladly put up with the scheduling inconvenience if it meant getting my Mac back.)

The thing is, the meeting organizer is also using Outlook. She’s also connected to an Exchange server, only a different one. And the two servers don’t talk to one another. As far as I know, two Exchange servers in seperate network environments can’t talk to one another. So when meeting requests come in from this person (or anyone else using exactly the same software as I am, but on a different server), it doesn’t look like a “normal” meeting request (which would be recognized as such by Outlook and automatically placed, in the correct spot, on my calendar), but instead it just looks like a plain ole’ email. Time, date, location and subject of the meeting are all dumped into one dumb text field, and I have to manually retype them all into my calendar.

This is pure idiocy. I’m not even asking for every scheduling application out there to come up with and use a single calendar/appointment format. I’m asking two instances of the same damn piece of software to talk to one another.

Don’t even get me started about making my calendar viewable to my own collegues, so they can see if I’m busy before sending a meeting request. Microsoft provides a public Free/Busy service to which I can publish my calendar (or at least, the times when I’m busy and when I’m free), but anyone else who wants to see my schedule not only has to be using Outlook, they need to have a Microsoft Passport account, and they need to follow some extremely tediouis instructions in order to get it working.

Ridiculous. So if I want to share this information with another person, I need to:

1. Sign up for a .NET passport account
2. Sign up for the Free/Busy Service
3. Modify my Outlook settings to publish & read Free/Busy information to & from the public service.
4. Authorize each individual I want to share my information with to view my calendar (or authorize everyone who uses the free/busy service.)
5. Send them an invitation to sign up for the .NET and the service
6. Wait while they complete the first three steps above.

And after all that, their meeting requests still won’t import directly into my calendar.

When is a persona not really a persona?

Henrik Olsen spins a good yarn about developing personas for a Scandinavian tin can manufacturer. As he quickly points out, he didn’t exactly do it the right way. Instead of interviewing actual customers of the site, he interviewed people who spend most of their time dealing with customers of the site. This is an OK way to do it, if time and budget are limited (though experience has taught me that it takes pretty much the same amount of time to talk to customer service representatives, as it does to find and interview actual customers.) One might more accurately call the artifact of this effort a provisional persona, rather than a full-bodied persona. (See “Getting from Research to Personas“.)

Now, let me just come out and say that personas are a tool, like a hammer. They’re a really good tool for understanding how people behave, but they’re not the perfect tool. (Nothing is.) Personas can’t tell you, for instance, whether to color combination you’ve selected is appealing (try a focus group.) Personas can’t tell you whether the check-out process on an eCommerce site is architected correctly (for that you’re going to need usability testing.) To me, personas are really good at helping you choose features, the depth of their functionality, and the specific design directions that your site needs to take.

Provisional personas will work too, but you’re trading accuracy for time/budget savings. That might be worthwhile in the short run (especially if you’ve got to get something launched by a specific, looming deadling) but it might wind up costing you a lot more in the long run. When forced to settle for provisional personas, I usually insist that usability testing occur at multiple points during the design phase.

There is one major risk of relying on provisional personas: too often, the result is a set of personas the reflect the kind of customers to whom you want to be selling your products. Or worse, they reflect only a certain type of customer (maybe just the ones who are the most vocal.) In both instances, you’re working with your blinders on, perhaps missing the forest for the trees. In either case, you’re getting a filtered view of your customers, which is never as reliable and informative as the real thing. Factor this into your development process, and highlight the risk appropriately.