Life Experience Design

No matter how great your product may be, there will come a point where something will not go as planned. Your users and customers will be upset with you, their negative sentiments will fester, spread, and the beautiful construction you built may come tumbling down.

Before that happens, remind people that your product is run by other people just like them. Real, live humans beings with feelings and flaws, goals and short comings. And the great “Oz” they’ve built may lose some of its luster when they see the little, human wizards churning the machine, but that luster will be replaced by empathy and understanding for those humans and their condition. 

Jon Biggs, East Coast Editor of Tech Crunch, asked readers/founders who’ve been “treated unfairly” to reach out to him directly. I once had a mishap with TC, so I sent him a note. He followed up, the associated parties were identified, an explanation was given, and the air was cleared. Some of the “big bad wolf” veneer of TechCrunch wore off in the process, but they became more human as a result — and I’m sure they’re much happier with that result. 

 

Save for the occasional contrarian thinker, we all know that the likelihood of a die-hard politico swapping allegiance just because their candidate lost is never.

Similarly, when we A/B test, and assume that just because A “won” that everyone will be happy with A, we’re fooling ourselves. All you know is that the people who voted for A want A, and the people who voted for B want B; there is zero correlation to prove that, should B gain fewer voters, those voters will jump ship to A if its forced down their throats. If you don’t trust, just visit a rural Evangelical Christian community with some Obama posters in hand and see if the B pickers all of the sudden have heart for A. 

This is why segmentation is the name of the game; you just have to be careful how you do it. Not everyone who picked B can be dumped into the 25-35 year old male with a $75k or more income bucket, much in the same way not all northern urbanites are Democrats.

Dig into personas, understand not just what people want, but why they want it, the benefit they see in the product, and how it will enhance their life. Bucket people based on how they think inside their brains, not superficial demographic data — which means figuring out what it is that makes them tick. It may not be obvious how to take the first step, but it doesn’t have to be hard. The more simple you make a test, the more clear your results will be. 

 

Just kidding, but there is a ton we can all learn about experience design from great, live-performances. Entertaining your audience is really what everything comes down to, evidenced by the flurry of social media hate flung at anyone who has anything negative to say about this performance. 

Relive it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs4vsTiVHAo

You barely even notice the BB10 headline article. Way to own an experience, Samaung, and steal Blackberry’s business-king thunder on their biggest day. Great timing, planning, and with a simple execution. Bravo.

In response to this, I wrote:

“The emphasis on everyone learning how to code is bananas. There are many other aspects that go into creating things on the web, and the longer people refuse to see that coding is only one of them, one that’s no more or less important than the others, we will never evolve.

Could we ever build great buildings if we only had construction workers to lay down the beams? No. We need architects to dream up and design ideas. We need scientists to test new materials and ways of building things. We need urban planners to collect data about what we’ve done and spit it back to us so we can do better.

In the same vain, we need more than just people who know how to lay down the beams of the internet. And the failure to see past that only halts innovation.

I’m sure I sound like an agitated broken record here, but this has got to be my biggest net-related grip of all time. But, thankfully, some people are slowly getting it. I’m happy to see more people/companies put more emphasis on design, data, and other functions… and in the end, those are the people who will win. Actually, they’re already winning.”

I’m not knocking learning how to code, but rather the belief that everyone must.

Ok, Internet Explorer. Since you’ve now made me laugh and cry, I suppose I can overlook your legendarily awful usability to see what you’re up to now.

Well, I would… if I had a PC…

Last night I went a Digital Dumbo event where the founders of Refinery29, Of A Kind, and the General Manager of Gilt Man talked about the changing retail environment. 90% of the conversations circled around the open frontier of storytelling to engage an online retail audience. 

They all agreed this is the way forward. But while the event started with optimism, it ended in cautionary tales and warnings of peril.

The main point: story sells, too much distracts. 

When you’re known as a place to go read, people go to you to read. And after they’re done reading, getting them to buy is hard… they didn’t go to you for that. Sure, you’ll catch some folks, but you’re catching them as an afterthought. And if the products you want to sell are the main attraction, you probably don’t want people looking at them as afterthoughts; especially considering that secondary messaging and use cases only reach a small fraction of a platform’s visitors. 

Video was pegged as even worse than editorial. It sucks you in, engages you, and then drops you when its done; the last thing you’re thinking is “I want to shop,” but rather, “I’m done now, thanks.” Conversion rate killer.

However, on the bright side of things, the whole panel agreed that photos are excellent ways to tell stories. They can capture the essence of a product, the world it came from, the environment in which you see yourself wearing it, and different ways to use it. Within one mere photo, if its a good one, that a user can quickly scan it, receive the message, and get motivated to move onto the products positioned right beside it… and buy them.

The last point that was made, which is a testy one if you ask people like Fred Wilson who prefer open, peer-based marketplaces to curation, was that caché still rules the roost. Brands want their stuff in Barney’s and Bergdorfs, and on Fab.com and Gilt, because it means something. It makes the brand look good, and opens up more doors for them, geting them inside the myriads of retailers who want a piece of the glitz, and the press that loves to cover it. And the way these cachéd merchants and platforms get their accredited panache is though their curatorial eyes. This, the panel claims, and I agree, will always have an edge over the click collectors like Amazon, eBay and other non-discriminatory marketplaces. 

The moral of the whole story, is that stories are important. Stories sell. But it takes the right story, delivered in the right, non-distraction, value-added way. And a deft hand in creating it. 

Fast growing Q&A platform Quora is turning a sharp left and headed towards becoming a blogging platform, with the promise of giving every author a built in audience. How? If you use Quora to blog about outdoor photography, your post will get integrated into Quora Q&A sections about outdoor photography… where there’s an active audience waiting for written content to feed their brains. 

But is Quora driving into a ditch?

“The internet was supposed to allow anyone to set up a web page and share their knowledge with the world. But in practice it’s too difficult and takes too long and almost no one does it. Blogs are easy to start, but unless the author is famous, it takes years to build a following. More than a billion people use the internet yet only a tiny fraction contribute their knowledge to it.” - Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo

I’m confused… is Quora claiming to make it easier to “contribute knowledge” or to help those who already contribute knowledge find an audience? Either way, I smell trouble.

Of the billion people on the internet, 20% or 200 million of them blog — I’d call that fraction hefty rather than tiny.

Unscientifically, I’m going to say, generously, that 5% of those people make good content. Thus, so what if the other 95% of articles don’t get read? They’re probably never going to get read, which means Quora is chasing a problem that doesn’t have a solution… and may not even be a problem in the first place.

Either way you slice it, there are more than enough people blogging, and most of them don’t have audiences because they don’t write anything worth reading. I’m not quite sure how Quora solves any “need” on either side of that coin.

Now, I’m not saying that its not a good thing to help *good* bloggers find an audience — au contraire — but that’s a different need that the ones I think Quora is trying to say they’re providing a solution for, at least from the quote above. Which is a shame, because I actually think that need is a real one, and their inability to articulate it well (or just oversight of it) means that they probably won’t do a good job solving it. 

I’m not saying what Quora is doing is wrong, not at all, but its a bit dubious whom they claim to be doing it for. 

Several popular e-commerce platforms are using editorial content as a part of their strategy. The obvious reason to focus on such a strategy is because people don’t buy things from a store daily, but they read and view content from their favorite sources daily— and if your store can also be that content provider, you’ll theoretically catch more sales.

Furthermore, the most effective push to get a product flying off the shelves is placement in the right blog or news source. But could an editorial source push its own content off shelves? Or is that a business model too incestous to work? 

Well, folks are trying. Its hardly a trend yet, but Net á Porter and its brother company Mr. Porter have been toying with this model for a while, with upstarts like Refinery 29 following in their footsteps. And, to a more non-obvious degree, Fab. 

But wIll these hybrid content/product platforms continue to rise? Is it even possible? 

Let’s take Refinery29 as an example. It was essentially a blog from launch to 2 years in, with 100% of revenue coming from advertising, as to be expected. They’ve now added products for sale, accounting for 20% of revenue; they hope to grow it to 40%1. Can they make it happen?

Well, here’s the kicker: the way people discover editorial vs. products is vastly different. The lion’s share of web editorial traffic comes from the sharing of links; maybe 10% of a sites visitors will be regulars, with the remaining 90% coming in via discovering the “hot” articles that the original 10% spread through social media, other blogs, email, etc. Conversely, shoppers discover products mostly via entering an online store through homepage and navigating from there; sharing a product page is a very rare occurrence. Just take a gander at your Facebook or Twitter feed and count the ratio of article/photo/video links shared vs. pages leading to products for sale. Yeah, super heavy on the former.

The outlier is Fab.com. They don’t produce “editorial” but people share their products as such. 50% of their page views and sales come from people sharing product pages — an extremely rare activity that only happens when, like Fab, you have products that are so unique people share them as conversation pieces, like they would with content. Fab’s product line tries to be 100% products like this. It works for them.

Not every e-retailer can have a Fab situation, unless they’re going for curated product lines from undiscovered designers creating flashy, avant-garde items, but that doesn’t meant that the next Amazon won’t be born out of this strategy. They key to making the content / product thing work, as with any situation when you meld disperate user habits into one funnel, is in understanding the nature of how people use, differently, each type of platform, and combining them in a way so that they work as yin and yang.

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1 http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/28/refinery29-invades-san-francisco/