A couple days ago I was browsing through my image files. I found two customer satisfaction surveys that I had captured with SnagIt  – one from Zipcar, the other from Levi Strauss & Co.

Seeing them together was amusing – one horrendous and one wonderful. Zipcar’s one is a fantastic example of how a customer satisfaction survey should be done. Levi’s is an example of how a survey can contribute to dissatisfaction.

In truth, I’m loyal to both companies. Zipcar makes my life better and understands designing a service to make people happy.  A long time ago, I worked selling Levi jeans to customers at their flagship store in San Francisco. I wear Levi’s event today, and I love I can walk in and buy 514s or 511s knowing they fit like I want them too.

This is a classic example of a how an old brand with a great history needs to be more aggressive in learning how modern companies use technologies and how to have a conversation with customers.

Levi’s survey should never found it’s way to customers. The survey either shows too many hands in the pot or at worst a company without a vision for the future, leaning on the crutches of bad data.

I’m not going to go into every aspect of the surveys but I typed out some thoughts about the differences between the two.  You can click on the images to see the surveys.

Length – Long is Wrong

The quickest way to judge a survey is by its length – roughly, the number of questions asked. Long is wrong. Short is right. Zipcar has nine questions. Levi has 33, which means a person has to do 22 more clicks and more “cognitive work.” And Levi doesn’t even offer to buy you a coffee for your time.

The longer the survey, the more pressure to justify every single question. Also, I believe long surveys produce inaccurate data. Each successive question turns people into automation monkeys trying to get towards the goal of clicking submit if they don’t abandon all together the survey to eat a banana.

Form Design – The Organization of Questions

Zipcar has nine questions, but the last seven questions are grouped together into the third and final question. These last questions have the same rating scale. Redundancy is eliminated making these questions easier to fill out. Levi didn’t even try to group questions and they could have. For example, questions one through seven have the same rating scale. That’s needless repetition.

Net Promoter

Zipcar’s first question is the wonderful Net Promoter. They’ve implemented it in a great way too – a vertical scale instead of a horizontal one -  which is easy for the user to scan. The rating text – to help standardize responses – is clear (1 = never, 5 = maybe, 10 = Absolutely!).

Levi also asks the Net Promoter, but buries it in question 22. By the time you get to it, you’ll want to lower your rating by a few notches.

Language and Confidence

Levi’s questions are needy and insecure. For example, they ask you to rate the quality of the images on the website and so on. It’s like the company is asking,  “If you don’t  like this, I’ll try something else. I did my best. Don’t hit me!”

On the other hand, Zipcar is confident, asking straightforward questions you feel they have already thought about. They are just checking in with you, and not asking you to validate them.

Here is how they each set up their surveys. Zipcar entitled their survey “how’s our driving?” and the intro to the survey reads, “Are we headed in the right direction?” Ties into the brand, right? Absolutely.

Levi’s  on the other hand starts out with the bland, “Customer Satisfaction Survey” and leads with “Thanks for visiting Levi’s.com.” Where is Levi in that? Nowhere!

Privacy Policy

Privacy policies are important for obvious reasons, but that doesn’t mean they should be a key element of every interaction with a user. It’s letting the legal team poke your customers in the eye. Zipcar has a privacy policy in their footer of the page and avoids sticking it in the survey. More importantly, in their brief intro, they ask you to just shoot them an email if you have any concerns – legal or whatever.

Your brand is your privacy policy. If your customers need to ask, they are unsure about your brand and they not likely that loyal to you. When they ask to read the privacy policy, they are in affect stating, “I use your service, however, I keep it in the back of my head you might screw me because I don’t really trust you.” And when your company wants to put privacy policies everywhere, they are saying that they don’t trust themselves either.

Pointless Brand Dilution

Finally, Levi’s logo sits next to the survey company’s logo at the top of the questionnaire. I have no idea why Levi allows this. That’s poor form, either pointing to bad contractual negotiation or general lack of brand control. Either way, it shouldn’t happen, especially for a company that relies so heavily on its brand.

Meanwhile, Zipcar is zooming ahead, finding ways to please customers, as with their recent addition of FasTrak to Bay Area cars that prevents me from fumbling for dollar bills when crossing the Bay Bridge when driving north for a day of hiking.

Last weekend I was re-reading Sketching User Experiences by the Bill Buxton, who I admire for various reasons, two being he doesn’t mince words and he loves the outdoors.  He seems widely loved too;  I once met his Bloomberg Businessweek editor Helen Walters, and she gushed about him. So, I decided to see what content YouTube had up by him. I found a presentation he gave entitled “Design Thinking in the Wild” at Institute of Design Strategy Conference, May 2008. (The ‘wild’ being in corporations and in practice.)

Bill Buxton on sketching experiences, Institute of Design Strategy Conference, May 2008 from IIT Institute of Design on Vimeo.

His driving thesis was organizational design is the central task of companies that want to innovate and create great products.

He led in by saying most organization’s culture screws designers.  In order to be affective, designers needs the right environment (and status).

Buxton drilled this thesis home from various angles. He used as a reference model construction+architecture to highlight how work ought to be divided up. The skinny: only 17% is construction, leaving tons of space for design. Design is about experimenting and thinking/prototyping out ideas. Time is needed for that.

He also said this:  “A design managers product is the organization.” That’s beautiful. He said Steve Jobs gets it; he is a great design manager. An acquaintance, who works at Apple as an interface designer, concurs, “Apple gets it. Most organizations don’t. You have to put interaction designers in charge of stuff.”

Buxton dismissed the “designer genius” thesis, but also made it clear that every person is not a designer. He refuted Don Norman’s idea that everyone is a designer because they paint their house by quipping that this would mean everyone is a mathematician because they count change when leaving the grocery store.

You don’t need geniuses. You need high placement in the organizational structure. He highlighted something that I first heard mentioned in the documentary Objectified. Steve Jobs didn’t bring in new people when he was brought back to Apple. He worked with the same crew, which included Jonathan Ives, who had been at Apple since 1993. The implication is that Ives therefore had worked in an environment that didn’t help him. Then came Jobs, who empowered his team, because, as a good design manager, he got design.  And the rest is history.

Buxton said IDEO is successful not so much because of the people but that when they get hired in, they get hired from the top, so they are situationally powerful from the start. He says the placement in an organization is the key prerequisite. Designers can’t work at the bottom of an organization.

Buxton joked that Microsoft had designers reporting to the programmers. This poke at his employeer made the audience laugh. Buxton said he had to speak honestly for people to take him seriously but of course the situation is better at Microsoft, and, of course, he doesn’t report to a programmer.

I’ve seen how placement in hierarchy works either for or against consultants we’ve work with. These consultants have ranged from the  fantastic to the abysmal. The hapless ones can be “successful” despite themselves because of higher placement. And the fantastic ones, even though savvy with navigating politics, can’t do there job fully because they aren’t placed high enough. Consultants generally are bounded by the hiring boss. Instead of being a collective resource, they enter into a circumscribed space.

The larger point though is not about designers being placed higher and have more power up but about how the organization is designed, which he says is more important to get right than designing products. Organizations that are designed well will product great products.

One reason why is that good ideas come from diversity – a heterogeneous group. (This important point was first drilled home to me by Cass Sunstein in his book Designing Democracies.) Creativity doesn’t happen in on person’s neo-cortex. “That is so 5-minutes ago,” Buxton said. Good managers understand that ideas don’t happen in a brain.  They happen by our social and cultural intelligences mixing and through the tools we use and the physical spaces we share. “It’s the diversity of people with many different experiences  producing a lot of ideas of which you cut away at until you find The One. Design, after all, is “the most destructive profession. You start out with a million and end up with one.” You need the ability to throw out ideas – your own ideas.

And to do that as a designer, you need an organization that supports idea generation and idea destruction.

I remember the first time I read books by authors such as Orhan Pamuk, Hermen Hesse, Milan Kundera, Graham Greene, Gabriel García Márquez, Albert Camus, Haruki Murakami, and many others. The pulled me into a new world and gave me new ways  “to see.”

In order to “see”, you have to look at the darker side of life too. Dystopian novels specialize on dissecting that darker side.

ILLUSTRATION: R. KIKUO JOHNSON

The current issue of The New Yorker has a must-read piece by Laural Miller, “Fresh Hell: What’s behind the boom in dystopian fiction for young readers?” Miller reviews a handful of young-adult dystopian novels. Here a are few she mentions:

• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins where young children from different districts compete in gladiatorial matches to the death televised to the entire public.
• Uglies by Scott Westerfield where “all sixteen-year-olds undergo surgery to conform to a universal standard of prettiness determined by evolutionary biology.”
• The Maze Runner by James Dashn , where “teen-age boys awaken, all memories of their previous lives wiped clean, in a walled compound surrounded by monster-filled labyrinth.

The new rush of dystopian novels, although bleak, are not as dark as adult dystopian novels because they hold out hope for the young audience they written for – promising a “new, better way of life [that] can be assembled from the ruins.” Miller, says the books are taken by the young generation consuming as a reflection of current reality. “For young readers, dystopia isn’t a future to be averted; it’s a version of what’s already happening int he world they inhabit.”

I find it fascinating that a generation is gorging on these novels.

So, What can product designers learn from dystopia?  Certainly, there is something around human behavior that the books help elucidate.

As the world gets washed over in social technology, the emergence of new social behavior provides a fertile ground for designers. If discerned early, the behaviors of a new generation can make a product delivered at the right time widely successful. And conversely, a product delivered at the wrong time will languish. Concerning technology, the rule of thumb has always been to launch a new product in the correct technology environment. If CPU’s are going to be 3x faster when you launch in 2 years, then build whatever you are doing for those speedy CPUs.

The same applies for behavioral environments. Yet there isn’t a Moore’s Law of behavior that I know of. Hence, the importance to hone your intuition about culture. There is a bleak side of life – where social pressures are brutal and human rights violations stream over YouTube.

Inspired by the dystopia, I’ve translated two classic deliverables into versions that are bleaker. It’s a first stab and rough, but here they are.

(1) Ugly personas and (2) Dangerous use cases

Ugly Personas: Personas, which are archetypical representations pulled from observing people tend to be rosy. Gina, the busy, professional mother who multi-tasks while raising two daughters. Bla-bla-blah. People aren’t always lovely.

It would be nice if a few personas were “ugly personas”that represent some archetyical awful customer – the dictator who buys the iPad. It’s harder to get at because people observed or talked to tend to be nicer. The nuances and little moments where awfulness live away from the spotlight and get missed by researchers.

Dangerous Use Cases:
Personas can feed into writing use cases, the scenarios of how you’re customers will interact with the product. The basic formula for a use a case is actor + system = goal. As with personas, use cases tend to be hopeful. A knife is used for cutting fruit not stabbing people. A cell phone is used for seamless communication, not a device that makes you run over people or send hate messages.

Dangerous use cases are where your product is used in negative ways.

It might seem odd to do suggest doing this. Shouldn’t product designers design for the best? Yes but it’s harder then ever to ignore the negative parts of humanity because the horrible things that happen across the globe are a click of a link away.

My thesis, then, is by assembling and tinkering with the ruins of the environment, you can build something better suited for it. Instead of basing optimistic design on optimism, base design on, say, the chaotic psyches of a teenage world.

What might emerge from an analysis that has some bleakness built in, might be surprising wonderful.

This piece is a stab at thinking this through. Comments welcome from anyone who comes across this post.

In the last year, a few of what have developed into my most devoted friends, are from Asian countries. When I have a dilemma in my life, I float it around to friends, and increasingly I see how people from other cultures have fresh answers.

Great competition, cliche picture

All this has made a point very clear: other cultures have solutions for your own world if you ask. So, I totally got it when I found through someone I was following on twitter about a design competition for emerging market citizens to solve first-world problems.  The tag line is funny and poignant:  The rest saving the West.

It’s embarrassing that such a competition seems novel. But it is, and it’s totally wonderful. As an American, I can’t enter. I don’t like that but I  say enthusiastically, “Yes, help us. Everyone help everyone.”

But don’t help us with obvious things like the stupid obesity picture put on the competition’s website – that’s getting cliche! – but help us on more subtle day-to-day issues that we in the West assume have been solved.

As a side note: I realized, happily, that the definition of design thinking as floated by Tim Brown seems to be culturally independent.

On a related note. The April 15th edition of The Economist has a special report on innovation in emerging market.

The Panelists

Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist at Amazon, among other things.
Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist for Core Search, Microsoft
Todd Levy, Co-founder and Head of Product and Engineering, Bit.ly
George Zachary, Partner, Charles River Ventures
Kevin Burton, Founder/CEO, Spinn3r

Here is an unsorted list of snippets of information from last night’s talk The Real Time Web : Imperative or Insanity?:

• 40k tweets per minute tweets AND also 40k bit.ly urls made per minute. The parity is interesting.
• George Zachary of Charles River Ventures has invested in both Twitter and Yammer (Twitter for enterprise)
• George Zachary will invest in squirrels if they have a good business idea.  He said this (and it made the audience laugh including me) when he said he wasn’t sure why 95% of the entrepreneurs who approach him are male. VCs, he said, don’t have a bias in who they invest in if it makes sense as an investment.
• Hilary Mason, chief scientist at Bit.ly, has a blog post about lack of woman in technology.
• Systems competence (reliability of network) is a critical barrier to entry. You can steal ideas and you can steal the feature sets behind those ideas, but you can’t steal system competence nearly as easily.
• Charging for a service  is a friction to the user. This is an obvious point, however, like many obvious points, it’s easily forgotten.  Bit.ly decided not to charge regular people a minimal cost like $9.99. Instead, they’ll provide services for the enterprise and price accordingly.
• The real-time web is getting us back to more natural behaviors (conversations are synchronous, emailing are not)
• Posting on Facebook is neither personal nor public;  it’s a third dimension. Example given was a person who posted on Facebook a list of reasons he was thankful for people over the past year.
• Avvo – reviews about lawyers has been sewed (only) twice.
• Emerging problem to tackle: websites for reviews of people.
• Tokyo Cabinet is a great database system for certain problems; downside is only the one guy who understands it completely speaks Japanese. Time for a robust community to form!
• Twitter is popular in part because of the “illusion of audience”. Why do I tweet? Because I think all of my 1000 followers are listening to it.

There is an interview with Prith Banerjee, director of HP Labs, in the recent McKinsey Quarterly about how HP structures its research to achieve innovation. Four highlights below.

#1: Balance Different Business Needs Using a Portfolio

Managing innovation through a portfolio approach took HP Labs two years, Mr Banerjee. That’s not bad for a large company. The point of the portfolio was to balance the needs of business units with the long-term growth of the company depends on innovation.

Research is divided into three areas, each getting 1/3 emphasis.

1. Basic research that might “change the  state-of-play.” This work is given five to fifteen years.
2. Product  research that is tied to an existing product and has a time line of 6 months to 18 months.
3. Applied research blances the extremes of basic and applied research. This segment has business impact but has a longer time line of two to five years.

#2: Get Close to the End-user, who doesn’t live in America (“the next billion”)

HP has its seven labs around the world. The reason R&D is in India and not  Palo Alto isn’t because of the cost of labor. The reason is to bring the researchers close to the end-user. Researchers need to be part of the context they are developing for.  India has a billion people, 70% of whom have cell phones but only 5% of whom have a computer. Computers are comparatively expensive, Mr  Banerjee says, yet people can afford comparatively expensive items (scooters, TVs) if the items have a perceived value.  Computers are not perceived as valuable enough to own. Obviously, HP Labs would like to solve that problem and that’s why they have a location in India.

#3 Managers Must Create Incentives

Providing the right incentives and measuring the impact of R&D is difficult. Management’s task is to create incentives and not a list of goals from the top, which nobody listens too, Mr Banerjee said.

HP has a board in which researchers can pitch big, aspirational ideas. The board is composed of 1/3 lab directors, 1/3 technologists from across HP, and 1/3 business unit people. For an idea to get approved, the different groups have to align.

#4 Measuring impact with the $100 Test

Measuring impact of R&D doesn’t work if you try catalog every little item that got transferred to business units. Why? Too many little transfers get counted as successes. What to do? HP uses the $100 Test. Each CTO of a group is given $100. (I wonder if they actually get $100 for this game? ;) ) They are asked to allocate portions of the $100 to the technology transfers from R&D that had an impact.  Mr Banerjee’s examples was something that allows HP to solve digital printing problem would get $30, while some incremental that improves a laser jet printer would get $1.

Basic summary. Innovation depends walking the line between long-term and short-term objectives while giving line employees incentives to bring their passions to work.

(After free registration, a video and transcript of the interview can be found at the article McKinsey Quarterly.)

Twitter is beta testing with a small subset of partners a feature to let multiple people easily post on a company’s behalf. Blogs, such as ReadWriteWeb, have said that this feature already exists from third party companies:

“And the hot Contributor API is something that CoTweet has been doing for a while.” Link.

I think the feature is entirely new.

After reading Twitter’s blog post about Contributor, I realized the so-called already-in-existence hadn’t existed yet because Twitter has paid attention to user needs.

Here is the post by Twitter product team member Anamitra:

“… a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.”  (My italics.)

Now, go to the Twitter pages of JetBlue or ZenDesk who use CoTweet (and also Hootsuite). You’ll see posts “from CoTweet” or “from Hootsuite.”

Honestly, that’s really funny. It’s like me writing a letter to a friend on paper and signing off, “Miss you, Pen” or “See you in a week! Love, Pencil.”

The tool being used shouldn’t become more important than the person writing it. Anamitra wrote it this way:

“[Contributors] enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses.”

The inclusion of “authentic” and “conversation” is central here.
Somebody smart at Twitter is paying attention to details and helping companies become more human by implementing their NEW Contributor feature.

Heuristic for categorizing features:

Group by how they satisfy user needs and not simply by other functional characteristics.

Reading books helps feed passion; they are my “mashes”, a new word I just learned that means, “an intense and usually passing infatuation; also, the object of infatuation.”

Books make me feel closer to culture because books are a conversation with someone who was so intensely interested in some subject they wrote a book about it. It’s a simple point but not to be overlooked.

Below are seven ways I find new books. This discovery period is important as I like to pretend books come into life at perfect moments, bringing intellectual serendipity.

Académie Goncourt

Seven ways I find new books to read:

1. Spy. I will crane my neck and contort myself to see the spine of a book that someone is reading. I just read the Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler after I saw a woman reading it on the train. I made two not-really-necessary trips by her seat on the train in order to see what book she was engrossed in.
2. Browsing – it’s everything. When I lived in Barcelona, I sprinted through many novels. I learned the art of browsing at a bookstore named Laie. It was a period of feeling insatiable; every book seemed to give me something I had wanted without knowing I needed it. This feeling spurred me to read and hunt down new books. I read dozens and dozens of new authors from Peter Hoeg to Graham Greene, from Roddy Doyle to Daphen DuMaurier, from Salm Rushdie to Banana Yoshimito. The key was to browse without a thought of what I wanted, just to keep open and be ready to pounce.
3. “Chain” when you can. I like to read books, or authors, who were mentioned in other books or magazines because it somehow provides a reassuring context. For example, after reading Foreign Policy magazine, a magazine I’ve written for, I picked up the book, Intelligence and How to Get It by Richard E. Nisbett and Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Nudge I hadn’t know about even though I became a Cass Sunstien fan after reading another of his books, Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do.
4. Amazon recommends. I’ve been using Amazons best-of-breed recommendation engine more. It’s automatic “chaining” or, as I like to say, crowd-sourced serendipity. Finding books this way is not as satisfying though.
5. Friends and people. I like to ask people that I end up having a conversation with what they are reading. There is something intimate about going to find a book that a practical stranger has told you about the day before. It feels like they’ve slipped you a secret note and you’re a spy on a mission.
6. Prize winners . You’ll be surprised how few authors you know after looking over the winners of a few of the more notable literary awards. Nobel Prize in Literature, The Man Booker Prize, or Prix Goncourt. Pick an unknown author to let yourself uncover another world.
7. Book reviews, fall back. Cutting and insightful book reviews are a pleasure. On this front, you can’t go wrong by reading the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

SnagIt by TechSmith has been released as a free beta for the Mac. I played around with it for a few minutes on a photo of Akira Isogawa. I’m very happy that a  favorite PC software tool has been ported over at last.

Snagit beta for mac on a photo of Akira Isogawa

Lars Bastholm, Ogilvy’s  relatively new Chief Digital Creative Officer.

I like him because he came across as human, empathetic, non-pretentious, and eager-for-ideas, characteristics I see as a must (versus a nice-to-have) for any would-be leader in a world covered in an internet web.

Lars Bastholm speaking at Adobe

Mr Bastholm started his talk by telling how on his first day as Creative Director in the new office he was carried out on a stretcher after throwing out his back. That’s embarrassing for anyone but also utterly human. I’ve embedded below a video of him I found (an interview, 7:52 min long)  so you get a sense of him. He also said, “Flawed is the new flawless.” I usually run in the other direction when I start to hear something playing off “_____ is the new black”, but I agree with this susinct statement.  Showing flaws is one of internet’s greatest services.

What he said was not new to anyone participating or paying attention to how everything is playing out online. The tags for anyone speaking on this subject, where duly referenced: listening, conversation, consumer has the power, and so on. But as a high-up at a big firm, he had his finger on the correct pulse and was aware of the considerable hype too.

He listed his 6 principles of social media, paraphrased they are:

1. Look at marketing as the beginning of conversation
2. Closely monitor social media conversation and be ready to respond.
3. Provide tools for users/consumers to participate in conversation.
4. Be sure to leave space for interaction.
5. Conversation is over when the consumer says it is.
6. Listen and learn from the feedback loop.

How these are implemented, of course, means everything.

The question I asked him during Q&A:
“You said social media is a conversation and that the conversation is not over until the customer says is. People at companies are busy and want to end campaigns and get on with a new project. How do you prepare clients for the continuity implied by a conversation?”

Answer: He suggests to companies they set aside innovation budgets that allow them to experiment and learn

Here is the video I promised above.