Brand Follows User Experience
What year is this again?
We've stayed away (well, mostly) from rants on VentureBlog. But after having a very similar (bad) experience with two web services, I just can't help myself.
I've been looking to sync Outlook with public services of various types... we live in a time of web services, right? It felt like time to have my address book sync with my cell phone. I wanted to be able to look at my Microsoft Exchange calendar via a public web calendar service, similar to how most webmail services these days allow me to log into my private POP/IMAP mailbox. I want to be as effective outside the office and protected LAN as I am in.
But after installing various bits of software, creating user accounts, setting and unsetting numerous options and syncing for hours, all I've managed to do is erase important parts of my address book and calendar. And while I wasn't a CS major, I'm probably what you would consider a sophisticated user (and yes, I did have backups).
It's 2004 and time for the lessons of the last 10 years to be part of a required licensing exam for website producers: it's all about the user experience. And a negative user experience can often be much worse than no user experience at all. Much like voice recognition software, which is useless until it's practically perfect, there are some technologies that just need to stay in the labs until they're bulletproof. And I'd like to nominate technologies that have the potential to erase large parts of my most important data for that category.
The first wave of the web -- starting with sites like my own HotWired, O'Reilly's GNN and Infoseek -- was a short period of exploring the new medium of web publishing and giving the tool builders like Netscape something to point at. The second wave was the Cambrian explosion with everything from Amazon to Yahoo springing to life. And of course, also everything from Boo.com to Webvan. No market was too small for someone to try to bring online.
The third wave was (is) about the heartiest companies which survived and built scalable businesses out of the wreckage of the bubble. And if there is one unique theme about almost every one of them, it's that they figured out the user experience thing. I'm talking about Yahoo, which first defined page serving time as an important metric; Amazon, which relentlessly sought out the mass market and brought trust and reliability to e-commerce; and of course, Google which refined search to its purest form at a time when website design had become a game of squeeze the most ads on the page as possible.
Hardware and software have become commodities, thanks to Moore's law and the prevalence of programmers around the world. A positive user experience is the only method of differentiation these days. In the early days of the web, I mistakenly believed that brand drove user experience which, in hindsight, was an old media way of thinking. These days, brand (and everything else) follows user experience.
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Something to remember. I think that brands also follow user satisfaction. Meaning that if you can create an offering where the user feels satisfied then you can build a brand around that. It also means that you will dillute your... Read More
Something to remember. I think that brands also follow user satisfaction. Meaning that if you can create an offering where the user feels satisfied then you can build a brand around that. It also means that you will dilute your... Read More
Andrew Anker over at VentruBlog says Hardware and software have become commodities, thanks to Moore's law and the prevalence of Read More
I have spent that larger part of my career working in online product management. So it's always nice to hear people talking about maintaining a product focus during the development of a new service or product. Here is a post on Ventureblog talking abou... Read More
VentureBlog: Brand Follows User ExperienceWhat year is this again?We've stayed away (well, mostly) from rants on VentureBlog. But after having a very similar (bad) experience with two web services, I just can't help myself.I've been looking to sync Out... Read More
I'm not one to think visually, but, like many (most?) people, I appreciate a good picture all the same. Read More
VentureBlog: Brand Follows User Experience All the positioning XYZs, market ABCs, great promotion, smart plays, guerilla marketing, cool names and snazzy branding - in the long run - just won't cut it if the product sucks. Lots of companies get... Read More
Dude, just use OWA to see your calendar while on the road. It works and it isn't a total disaster; it doesn't create yet another copy of your data to become out of sync; and microsoft for all their foibles will at least keep patching it and keep it relatively secure.
Oh and isn't the lesson of the bubble exactly your point -- great user experience will win out over time, trumping brand and hype? In the short term, brand and hype can be dominant, but they aren't sustainable without a great product/service underlying them.
It isn't just a problem on the Web. "Brand follows customer experience" should be the ultimate mantra of marketing, but very few companies Get It.
For example: It costs cellphone companies an average of about $400 to find a new customer. It costs them $10 to handle a call to customer service.
When was the last time you had an awesome experience calling your cellphone company? How much more effective would it be to plow some of those marketing dollars into improving customer service?
Andrew -- purely out of interest, what services did you try, and what phone do you have?
John -- have you ever tried to use OWA on your mobile phone? Even on my P900, it is useless, although admittedly that is just with the standard look and feel.
Part of the problem is that MS has chosen not to support some of the more interesting new standards in this area. I'm able to (almost) effortlessly share my calendar between Mozilla Thunderbird on my PC and iCal on my Mac. The same would go for any calendar application that supported the iCal format.
Martin... I was trying to avoid naming the services because then I'm sure their marketing people will come on the message boards and tell me what an idiot I was for not knowing that I just needed to blah blah blah.
But since you asked, I tried MightyPhone for syncing with my Nokia 3650 cell phone and I tried MyAppointments.net for syncing with a public calendar service. Both erased important parts of my Outlook data. I also looked at Yahoo's calendar, but their current version of sync software doesn't work with Outlook 2002, which is, according to my calculations, approximately 2 year old software that's really popular. Go figure.
That's a great point, thanks for the rant.
In fact, I'd say User Experience is the most powerfull associative mechanism for your brand among your paying customers, both positive and negative.
I don't have suggestions for your syncing issue. I use iCal/iSync/Addressbook and it just works for me.
These kinds of user experience issues made me switch a long time ago....
Hear, Hear! CEO's and marketing people for far too long have been given credit for creating the brand of Internet technology companies, when, for the most part, they have nothing to do with the brand's creation. It is the user experience and the people that create that user experience that create the brand. The founders of Yahoo! created their brand. Hotmail's brand was created by whomever thought of the user experience of accessing your email anywhere. Let's give credit where credit is due.
P.S. Having worked closely with the leaders in the field of multi-point synchronization a couple years back, I am fully convinced that these products have been mis-categorized. They are not synchronization products, but are data encryption products... encrypting your data so even you can’t access it.
Just buy a Treo600 - It hotsyncs to Outlook Lotus etc etc straight out of the box........
WOW!! I am a neophyte here- but an energized one! My search for more information about the people that were talked about in Moneyball, led me to this blog. I had to enter since the idea of branding has gone so far off-track. Branding as it was originally known was a mark of ownership, an indelible mark left a branding-iron on cattle. It wasn't the mark that moved people, it was what the mark meant. It's what people thought of or felt when they saw the mark. What they thought or felt was based on their PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE with the owner of that mark.
Like baseball, I am now coming to realize that the gross inefficiencies and laziness that accompanies decisions made by companies in the pursuit of business development is not the inner workings of my own insanity. (Ranting....)
Here is my own definition of "brand(ing)": The emotional residue one is left with after interacting with a corporate entity.
In their book, Priceless, Diana LaSalle and Terry A. Banton sum up the core issue facing business; "Nearly all business people today would agree that understanding the customer and giving them what they want is one of the greatest challenges to success."
But businesses by and large do an awful job. Here are just a few stats:
4 is the number of businesses that close their doors every 10 minutes
At least 50%, but a much more objective measure I have seen is 90% of all new product launches fail
Why? Dr. Paul Nutt (an unfortunate last name for a professor)at Ohio State University, maintains an on-going study of business performance as measured by decision making, records the folowing:
33% of decisions are driven by ego
81% of decisions are driven by edict/or persuasion
66% of those making decisions never explored alternatives once they made up their minds
This is on a par with what has been happening in baseball for so many years. But, as Michael Lewis points out- if there are such large blind spots in baseball, where statistics are more readily available, is it any wonder that businesses by and large make such deplorable decicions?
So what is lacking in most of the decisions that are made? Evidence. In hiring sales and marketing people the vast majority of companies always ask for the same thing, experience in our industry, with our software, with our product category, etc.
Am I insane? My reaction to that is- that is so stupid. What I want is someone that can demonstrate sincere curiosity, intellectual and emotional honesty and believes that there is a systemic way of approaching product development and sales. The idea is to creat something of value and in the process there should be a great experience for everyone involved. If that is true, then getting more of the same ideas, more conventional wisdom won't generate the difference required to create the value.
Anyone that has read Moneyball and identifies with the fact that our market measurements are in fact contributing to the delinquency of business decision making- I would love to hear from you and if you totally disagree with what I'm saying- I'd like to hear from you even more so.
Well I think whe ID software release Quake on a try-before-you-buy method of marketing/sales, the user experience pushing the brand was proven.. I just don't know why it takes so long for this to sink into some people's heads.. I had first hand experience of being in a highly funded failing dotcom, and was even in the center times square when the crash occured.. And the things being said here remind me a lot of the headlines in fastcompany and the hype that soon followed, that just fueled the magazines that were still eager to make an income on the blues of others.. To resolve that which couldn't be resolved..
I believe the problem is the lack of value for the people, but I wouldn't give the time of day to another suit as long as I live.. They just suck the life out of anything before it can grow into anything.. Its all about taking advantage of something when really to make it work you have to see eye to eye..
For instance, I once went in on a venture with two guys, and a friend of mine who was a lawyer. HTe lawyer suggested that we equate the votive rights of the stock.. But one said "nu uh, this is my company".. However the lawyer had been in a company once before where the one with largest percentage of control died, his wife took over and the company went down the tubes.. Now if you can avoid be tempted by greed, you might be able to get a successful deal, but greed is the root of all evil.. IF you don't learn it now, you will..
You got to believe that not everyone is into dog-eat-dog.. That's what sucks about venture capitalism, the technologies that come as a result of such funding, unless they are well developed ahead of time, do not amount to much after all the pressure from the vc's to produce a scaled return on the investment in a short time.. And the VC's want instant gratification.. I guess you've probably read the account that about 9 out of 10 software projects are overdue and 7 out of 9 fail.. I think that's due more to pressure from VC's and executives than due to problems with the developers.. If you give the developers enough time to go through a design phase before making the product, then you will have better luck..
That's what sucked about the dot-coms, it was not always clear what the objective was and evveryone arrogantly assumed they knew better than anyone else.. With more power to the CEO, which didn't know how to manage their own Email..
Coming from the midwest around some of the national labs, the feeling I got while in New York is there was almost no techies, most were tech wnnabes that were quickly changing their majors to computer science because their own jobs began to look "no fun".. Who here would want to go back to being a sales person or an accountant..
It reminds me of the space ribbon from Star Trek 6, some got swept up in it, and some were ripped away.. It was like quiting heroine.. And still some are caught up in the romance of that era, wake up its gone.. There is no way you can get back to that.. Do something useful for a change and stop ranting about it..