About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
First Amazon, now Dorothy Lane Market ends advertising and focuses on offering customers value.
“We realized that we couldn’t give club members the deals that we wanted to give them if we continued spending $5,000 to $10,000 a week on print advertising”
More in this Fast Company article: Dorothy Lane Loves Its Customers
Marqui is paying people to test drive and blog about their content management system.
From Marc Canter on the origins of the idea:
When I first came up with the idea – the question was poised “what if they blog something negative?”
My answer was “that’s a good thing! Can you imagine how powerful it will be for us to listen to and react to that criticism and show that we responded in a timely manner by actually fixing the problems?”
That’ll be worth its weight on gold.
Exactly. People are going to criticize your company’s offerings whether you allows them to or not. By listening to your harshest critics – i.e. most passionate customers – you’ll learn more about what the world expects from you.
I’ll be tracking the Marqui program.
On a related note, we launched the MNteractive Directory earlier this week. The MNteractive Directory is a wiki containing the Minnesota’s interactive design talent.
Wikis, by their very nature, are editable by anyone. Like Cantor, one of the first questions poised was, “What if someone changes something of mine?”
My response is two-fold:
The world is becoming more and more transparent. Therefore we are need to be more responsible and open to criticism and praise. For that is the order – 1. criticism 2. praise.
Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.
There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of ’emergency’ is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning. – Dwight D. Eisenhower
Swap in “project” for “emergency” and Eisenhower’s statement is equally as true. Yes, projects are as unexpected as emergencies. If all the variable of a project were known ahead of time – processes, timeframes, resources – the project would already be complete. Projects are in fact the process for answering these questions.
When I was working for a WiFi startup a couple years back, my product manager spent a good chunk of his days in Microsoft Project. Every day, he would tweak the Gantt charts to reflect the current state of the project, and print out the revised plan.
Then as the plan came off the printer, some new information would arrive making the new plan obsolete.
Lately, I’ve been involved in a number of enterprise software projects all at the early planning stages. Project 1 is starting with a Gantt chart. Like all Gantt charts, it depicts a tiered, linear, hand-off process. This is inherently ineffective.
A more effective, collaborative, and true-to-life model is a weave [WorkingPathways_ProjectWeave.pdf]. The pdf illustrates the weave model I helped a design agency work towards.
Another effective planning model comes from Frank Patrick and has traction in the Agile Software development community: the Hurricane model for predicting uncertain futures. The crux – we know where the project is now and some notion of time it takes to get in any direction, but we don’t know exactly where the project will be at that time. That’s the classic quantum mechanics trade-off: you can measure velocity or precision. Not both.
The most effectively run projects I’ve observed are based 2 principles;
I think Steve Pavlina sums it up nicely:
“No plan survives contact with the real world.”
“If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.” – Thomas J. Watson Sr, founder of IBM
“…fail faster so [you] can succeed sooner.” – David Kelley of IDEO
I’ve got any number of projects in the works at any given time (current count is north of 20). Last year, there was a different twenty. Some of the same, and I’ve found the sign of a good project is one that sticks with you for years. Some of the projects I started last year worked out extremely well (VINE360, MNteractive.com) others were obvious (in retrospect) failures.
Ultimately, my work is to capture and apply feedback to business strategy. Failure gives clear feedback – and it will persist until you listen. The usability evaluations and ethnographic studies I conduct are about listening for failure early. When it’s easiest to accommodate.
Failure will occur, whether you like it or not. As the earlier quotes illustrate, it’s better to find failure fast than procrastinate. For procrastinating failure only puts off success.
A couple years back, Amazon attempted two things:
They found little return on the first, and a found a huge backlash against the second.
Amazon now finances their Super Saver shipping with their advertising budget: NY Times – Amazon Tries Word of Mouth
Holiday Inn just took a page from Amazon’s playbook.
About the Towels We Forgive You, documents guests’ stories of ‘borrowed’ Holiday Inn towels. An excellent idea, capturing the enthusiasm of their most brand-passionate guests and giving the proceeds to charity.
Yet the idea is only being half-executed.
I agree with David Paul at Perceptional Analyzer when he says:
“I think hotels should encourage guests to take a towel or robe anyway. They take it home, use it, see the logo all the time. What better way to stay top-of-mind for when people are making their next travel plans? Sure there is a cost involved, but it’s called the marketing budget.”
I see a similar phenomenon in talking with clients. They want to proceed with a project, and aren’t able to support it in their discreet budget. While other, related budgets have a surplus.
Should redesigning a website or software product come out of product development’s, customer service’s, training’s, or marketing’s budget? Yes.
As should the customer research driving the redesign. As all those departments are intertwined in your customer’s mind, building a passionate customer base will help all those departments. In this cooperative environment, to paraphrase Seth Godin, everyone gets a Free Prize Inside.
Until now there were only 5 responses you’ll receive when asking a store clerk about an item:
That was before Jhanice Nelson.
Nelson introduced a whole response. It’s a response that understands how shopping fits into a customer’s life goals and how their value to a store can be measured in customer evangelism and lifetime purchases.
“You came to me with a wardrobe problem, and I wanted to help you solve it,” she said. Just because she didn’t have anything to sell me shouldn’t stop her from helping me, she said.
Read the entire article by Jackie Huba @ Church of the Customer.
Instead of spending milions of dollars on “The Superbowl Ad”, why not spend that money cranking out beermat campaigns, till you find one that really works? Using beermats in small, test markets, you could easily create 50, 100 (500? Who knows?) campaigns for the price of one decent Superbowl/TV commercial. It would be a simple, cheap and quick way of working out the necessary language to resonate with the beer-drinking public. – hugh @ gaping void
I met a art professor in college who believed everyone had 500 bad drawings in them. Only after getting the 500 bad drawings “out” would you start drawing well. Some professors asked their students to complete 1 or 2 drawings in a 3 hour studio. This professor – 50. Fifty drawings, each from 5 to 20 minutes a piece. Each one to find out what works and what doesn’t. No erasing. If you’re not happy with it, start a new one.
This quick and cheap way to success stuck with me and is one of the underlying principals of Working Pathways. We’re continually asking, “What’s the simplest, quickest, most effective way to reach the project’s goals?”
With this perspective, we’ve reduced turnaround times for some of our client’s research initiatives from weeks to hours. We solicit feedback continually. We provide long-term ‘teach a man to fish’ success.
We’ve all got 500 bad ideas in us, Working Pathways is here to help you get to the good ideas more quickly.
UPDATE: This notion of small, quick, projects paving the road to success is re-iterated by Robert Rodriguez,
“The more experience you give yourself the better prepared you are for the next project…”
This by way of Anita Sharpe’s Thought for the Day, Tuesday, October 19, 2004
The easiest way to collect interesting, usable data from a research effort is to blend into the background of the subject’s life. Media journalists know this – that’s why they’re embedded in the presidential campaigns and in the military actions.
To give honest unselfconscious, response, subject’s need to be comfortable with researchers – as peers, as collegues, as one of them.
Susan Orlean describes this necessity in her recent interview on MPR’s Midmorning. For good data, she schedules at least a week to blend into the background.
The need to commit time to really see into someone’s life is echoed in Tod Maffin’s the Art of the 10-Hour Interview.
The projects here at Working Pathways move much more quickly than those in either of the articles. We are often charged with capturing usable data with less than hour per respondant. With that in mind, here are 5 tips we use for “becoming invisible” in under an hour.
In a highly collaborative working environment, the traditional hierarchical relationship between employees doesn’t exist. The result is peers making requests to one another to move their respective projects forward. More akin to a volunteer organization than a button-down for-profit business.
The best volunteer organizations use a 6-step process to motivate peers in assisting. This is a time-proven process for both getting things done and clearly identifying those individuals that are not at all interested in your project. Use it whenever you need to make a request of someone’s time.
“Hi, this is Garrick Van Buren from Working Pathways. I’m calling for Darrel Austin regarding the AcmeCo Accessibility Audit. Is now a good time to talk?”
This is very similar to my earlier Get Your Email Read post. Notice the “is now a good time…” question. Always provide an out at this point. It’s most polite to do all this upfront. Otherwise you’re wasting your peer’s valuable time and reducing the chance they’ll help you now or in the future.
“I’m working with Darrel Austin on redesigning the AcmeCo.com shopping cart process. We’re about to evaluate the new model with AcmeCo’s best customers.”
“We have evaluations scheduled for early next week and we do not have all the timeslots booked.”
“The good news is store managers like yourself are helping out.”
“It’s going great, and we have one last remaining timeslot to fill before the end of business today.”
This is your opportunity to make a clear, formal request to them:
“Can I put you down for the Wednesday 4pm timeslot?”
If there are multiple ways the person can assist you, start with the option requiring the greatest commitment and wait for a ‘No’ before offering the next option.
If they decline all options – I recommend re-evaluating them as a future resource.
Improvisational comedy, like all team sports is about effective, high-energy, spontaneous collaboration. One of the seven major tenets of Improv is building off each person’s comment and suggestion with “Yes, and…” rather than dismissing it with a “but…”.
“Yes, and…” extends, explores, and enhances the previous suggestion – building trust among all the team members, moving the entire team closer to a successful solution. “But…” stalls the conversation. Cold. Even worse than dismissing the initial suggestion, team members are now second-guessing their solutions to the problems for fear it will be destroyed by the next “but..” This provides a disincentive to solving to the current problem. Turning the team and project into the stagnant, stereotypical office meeting blah. On a related note, questions frequently have a similar effect on teams – see Stop Asking Questions.
In working with different teams, I’ve heard “but..” used in 3 major ways. Though each usage may not contradict the preceding statement, it does stall the conversation and turns a peer-to-peer collaborative opportunity into a unequal power play.
and my own personal favorite: