The Experience is the Brand

Design vs. Usability: A False Dichotomy

The battle, silly as it is, continues.

There are some good arguments here, namely: the quality of a site’s design has at least as much impact as usability on the site’s overall performance (that is, the site’s ability to support a business’s objectives by helping customers accomplish what they want to accomplish.)

Like any first impression, a bad visual design can undermine even the best usability, just as poor usability can undermine even the most brilliant visual design.

But there are some problematic statements in this article: First, the comment that “In such studies, participants have a set of specific tasks to accomplish, and thus their gaze tends to focus on navigation links, titles, labels, and interface controls such as buttons and form fields,” is misleading. Many studies like this are in fact either open-ended, or loosely directed; participants are asked what kinds of tasks they normally try to accomplish online, and then asked to do those things in the lab environment. In an eCommerce evaluation, for example, users are asked to purchase something they would normally purchase online, but to just do so in the lab.

Setting up a counter-argument to Jakob Nielsen, though, is just too easy and, for the author of this article, intellectually lazy: Neilsen intentionally writes with a bombastic style, mostly because the first 30 years of his publishing life were spent trying to get anyone to listen. (And besides, he never actually asserts that graphics have no effect on his participants’ experiences, he just points out that there is no evidence suggesting that the graphic elements make any meaningful contribution to1 user’s outcomes or preferences.)

Finally, it’s unfair to attempt to ferret out focus-group-like conclusions from a usability evaluation, even an eyetracking one. Eyetracking evaluations require only a dozen or so users in order to produce valid, reliable data; a study in which you wanted to evaluate attitudes and preferences would require hundreds of users in multiple locations in order to produce statistically-reliable conclusions. One reason to do this is to reduce the effects of group-think and self-censorship that often rear their heads in focus groups.

Lips can deceive, but the eyes don’t lie.

All of that is besides the point, though, because it plays into the well-worn meme of design vs. usability. I can understand the roots of this dichotomy (it’s another variation of the liberal arts vs. “hard” sciences debate), but I just don’t understand why it still persists. They are two sides to the same coin, and neither is sufficient to make or break the overall experience.

50% * $0 = $0

For more than a few years now, I’ve been fuming at the fact that US mobile carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc.) charge exorbitant fees to deliver mobile goods. Carriers take up to 50% of the purchase prices for ringtones, wallpapers, and other virtual goods that can be downloaded directly to your cellphone. (In fact, up until a couple of years ago, carriers insisted on taking 50% of the value of any donations made through a cellphone to a charity.)

This is madness.

A bevy of new mobile commerce startups are percolating up right now, but they all face the same problem: they must either build their own payment processing and transfer capabilities (essentially, become a bank), or utilize the carriers’ ability to charge purchases to customers’ cell phone bills.

Verizon’s CEO Ivan Seidenberg was on Charlie Rose last night, explaining how – now that they had built the bestest, fastest, whiz-bangiest network in the world – they wanted to reap the benefits by deploying more applications on their network that weren’t so “capital intensive.”

Translation: we own the pipe, and we’d like to take a piece of transaction that flows down it.

There are two impediments to this strategy:

1. There are lots of other pipes which are just as fast and just as good
2. You might like charging on a pay-per-use model, but no one likes paying that way.

Verizon (and most other carriers) would like mobile payment providers to keep forking over 1/2 of the value of all goods and services delivered on their network. And why not? It’s effectively free for Verizon to deliver 1MB of content, so why not take $1 for it? Why settle for $.25?

There are two reasons why a quarter makes a better business plan: first, the volume of goods and services that vendors and processors can afford to sell on a mobile platform explodes when the transaction costs approach zero. Second, given two delivery mechanisms that provide the same benefit (buy anything from anyone who has a mobile phone, anywhere), users will choose the easiest option.

That means a platform where I can text someone else a dollar amount from my mobile phone is going to get taken up more quickly than an app I need to download, install, and ensure that the recipient already has. (Nearly everyone can text. Amazingly, not everyone has an iPhone.)

If memory serves, there were something like $2 Billion in ringtones sold in the U.S. last year. GDP for the U.S. was about $14 Trillion. Which looks like the better target to you?

Five Point Plan for a Perfect Mobile Marketing Solution

I don’t particularly like mobile couponing.

I don’t think offers broadcast via Bluetooth or WiFi or any other interruptive mechanism have much of a future.

And it seems particularly obvious to me that having to download an app in order to participate in a retailer’s “special offers” is a plan doomed to smallness (unless the retailer wants to give the phone away with the app installed.)

Instead, I think key to a ubiquitous, useful and successful mobile marketing solution (the kind that actually links mobile and mortar), needs to demonstrate these attributes:

1. It must build on the mobile technologies that are most widely used today (that’s voice, and texting)
2. It must be pulled by the user, not pushed by the marketer.
3. It must be timely – which means presented at the right time, but also time-sensitive (i.e., it must expire quickly.)
4. It must fit within the existing flow of a purchase cycle (and, by doing so, cannot interrupt any portion of that cycle)
5. It must allow for the redemption of the offer without additional connective technology (this is really an expansion of #1, but different for some subtle reasons.)

To a lot of people, these are going to seem like obvious constraints. For others, they’re going to seem backward-looking and dismissive of more cutting edge mobile technologies. For the record, I’m envisioning a system where the “integration” of mobile marketing is as seamless and ubiquitous as the integration of paper or TV into marketing, but still allowing for the unique capabilities of the mobile platform (personalization, trackability, etc.)

Some justification is required, so here goes:

1. Nearly everyone in the U.S. has a mobile phone, many people have more than one. All of them are capable of sending and receiving voice (“well, duh,” you might say, but this fact is often overlooked.) Most (90%)+ are capable of sending/receiving text messages. No other technology is as ubiquitous.
2. Interruptive marketing is doomed to fail in the long run because the noise will always quickly drown out the signal. Even a subscription-based service where users opt in to receiving offers has to be judicious about how often messages get sent.
3. Delivering offers when people are succeptible is important – and so long as you are delivering them on-demand, fairly easy. But if your goal is to activate your customer, the offer has to expire. Quickly. (If for no other reason than, with the opportunity missed, a customer will re-opt-in for another chance.)
4. Interrupting the purchase cycle is always going to reduce the number of people who complete it. If you’re asking people to request information or opt-in for an offer, the response has to come back to them immediately… and you can’t be garaunteed that immediacy with any carrier network all the time.
5. Screen-scanning registers and Bluetooth-enabled checkouts are great… but it will be a long time before they’re everywhere. A long time.

This is something of a work in progress, to be sure. I’m trying to center in on some core principles for mobile marketing, though.

The WITOIF syndrome

More than once I’ve had that feeling – an idea so dastardly simple and brilliant, I can’t help but feel ashamed that I hadn’t been able to connect the dots myself. And it’s even more amazing when, in this age when ideas spread instantly around the globe, you find that no one else has thought of it either.

I recently met with a potential client who wanted us to develop a new site for them. Over the phone we’d chatted about their existing business, and a new audience they wanted to reach out to with this offering. They already had many of the pieces they’d need to make it all work, but he wouldn’t share any details until we met in person.

It was vague and fascinating, and I can’t help in those situations but try to put the pieces together myself. I met with him the next day.

Within about 5 minutes of walking in the door, he had shared only the name of the website he wanted us to build – but everything had fallen into place. My head was bobbing up and down – “yes, yes, yes… this makes perfect sense. This is brilliant.”

And it still amazes me: no one is doing this already. And it’s not that no one else has the wherewithal or the pieces to make it happen, it’s just that no one is doing this. No one else has put the puzzle together yet.

Sadly, confidentiality prevents me from sharing any details, but trust me: it’s freakin’ brilliant. Mind you, it’s not going to change the world in any fundamental sense, but it is going to bug the hell out of a lot of people who could’ve thought of it first, but didn’t.

And I wish that I’d thought of it first.

If technology can’t do the job, try lawyers

Microsoft is suing click-fraudsters

While their counsel and others make the valid point that this is more about creating precedent for future legal action, the fact remains that Microsoft’s technological solution to this problem failed, and they’ve fallen back on legal action to “change the economics” of the confrontation.

Translation: it is cheaper and easier for them to sue than to solve the technical problem. And while that works just fine in terms of domestic defendants, it’s going to be much more difficult and expensive for them to find, let alone sue, more sophisticated fraudsters operating out of foreign locales.

The legal aspects of this are no less a cat-and-mouse game than the technological aspects are.

Hey, where’d you get $3 million bucks? I want $3 million bucks

Dell says it has earned $3 million from twitter

This shows, once again, that “social marketing” has as much to do with the traditional themes of awareness and activation that marketers have been coping with for decades.

Actually, it’s been this way for a few dozen centuries.

Why would facebook DO this to themselves?

A couple of days or so into the self-inflicted vanity-land-rush on Facebook, we can only imagine how many trademark-infringing land grabs have been perpetrated, and how long the cleanup will take the armies of lawyers at Facebook and countless firms who find themselves with yet another venue in which to battle.

Was it an IP-rights lawyer who suggested the vanity URL idea to Facebook in the first place, an a self-serving attempt to ensure a steady flow of work for the next dozen years?

Moreover, why invite users to create usernames that differ from their “real” names? It had always seemed that the cornerstone of Facebook’s raison d’être was linking each user’s online presence to their offline person. (Yes, I realize, there are several other Ben Levins out there, and my solution is simple: the winner of a steel cage no-holds-barred wrestling match gets to keep the number off the end of his name.)

For the corporations and other copyright and trademark holders out there, consider this just one more top-level domain you need to register.

It’s not that I don’t care about what you have to say

So why don’t I have comments turned on? It’s a completely reasonable question, and in some ways by writing this I’m undermining my own answer, but here goes.

When I first started blogging, one of the most aggravating aspects was the commenting system. Not just because it invited the most down-market spam imaginable, but because each and every comment seemed to beg a reply. Or rather, I couldn’t help but reply to each and every one.

And so each post became a nearly endless conversation, confined within the meager bounds of my little blog.

Markets are conversation, I admit. And it isn’t that I’m trying to avoid the conversation, nor is that I’m solely interested in making a statement and not dealing with the aftermath. There’s a place for ongoing commentary, the back-and-forth reply and counter-reply of a good old fashioned debate: it’s called The Internet.

Self-publishing has become so simple – the barriers are so low, they don’t even exist – that I just don’t feel obligated to provide a forum for others to express their reaction to what I have to say. That sounds a lot more elitist than I mean it to be, so let me try again:

If what I have to offer inspires you to respond, you have the means to do so in far more engaging, open and interconnected venues than I can offer.

And if what you have to say invites a reponse you’d rather keep between the two of us, then there’s ways to do that too.

[Update: 7/28/08]: OK, I’ve relented. In a word: WordPress. The experience of migrating taught me a lot about the dangers of leaving commenting open (If you’re curious as to what 9 years of trackback spam looks like, comment here and I’ll post it), and the ways in which collaborative filtering has made it possible to effectively avoid the work involved in moderating comments.

Still, I imagine that if the volume grows to any considerable degree, I’ll have to reconsider the issue.

(Yet Another) Gold Rush is On

(Update: 12:01:05 – facebook.com/ben.levin)

Tonight, Facebook starts letting users (and business with enough fans) claim their own “vanity” username. Why is it that, even when the word “vanity” is used blatantly and without shame, it inevitably draws a huge crowd of eager participants?

Brand owners and trademark defenders are all gathered around their machines right now, anxiously awaiting midnight.

It’s like Rocky Horror for the nerdiest of online advertising wonks.

It’s all rather clever of Facebook though – they get a whole mess of free advertising as every soap bar and bottled beverage plants their facebook vanity URL in their offline advertising, and facebook can attempt to position itself as the central hub in any brand’s online social strategy.

The paradox, though, is that Facebook can only succeed (that is, become the dominant social tool), by failing: that is, to become ubiquitous, it needs to disintermediate itself, to melt into the background as a toolset rather than a branded destination unto itself. As a business strategy, though, that’s just as likely to disintermediate them from their revenue stream, unless they become focused less on selling advertising space, and more on selling tools for communities to organize themselves. (Think of Facebook more as an eBay than an AOL, if that makes any sense.)

Ooops, gotta go… it’s almost midnight.

If someone visits your website and they have javascript turned off, do they really exist?

Every few weeks, the conversation here turns to web analytics. Not because anyone but a handful of us are really so deeply interested in the subject, but because there’s a pertinent question about a campaign or site we’re developing, and we can all agree that “the numbers don’t lie.”

I’m a big fan of Google Analytics, not least because the feature-to-price ratio can’t be beat. (“Nothing a month” is a very palatable price point.) Never the less, it has it’s drawbacks. But everyone does.

• CoreMetrics, SiteCatalyst and their brethren can be difficult to implement, and costly. Their price point puts them out of the reach of most small and medium size businesses.
• Log File analysis packages like ClickTracks work well, if the logfiles are well formatted and collecting all the data they need to be. Which isn’t always.
• Google Analytics has a couple of blindspots, most obviously the fact that it relies on Javascript, so if you have visitors to your site with Javascript turned off, you don’t know what you don’t know.

But if you’re worrying about whether or not the data you do have is 100% accurate, let me set your mind at ease.

It is not.

And yet, life will go on.

Instead of trying to nail down which metrics package is absolutely the best of the best, and cheap, and flexible, and always accurate, ask yourself these questions:

• Can I compare this campaign to the last one? Am I measuring success in the same way?
• Can I compare performance among my advertising venues based on the quality of traffic they send to my site (especially important when your business is not an eCommerce-driven one, and most sales happen offline.)
• Over time, can I tell if I’m improving? Are people coming back? Is that even what I want?

Note the common theme among these questions: you’ll have to pick a tool to measure with if you have any hope of getting to specific answers that are reliable over time. And while everyone has blind spots, focusing first on those areas you can see will help you build a better experience over time.

Next up: Tracking activity off-site