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Southwest Not Delta or United

Posted on June 14, 2010  Comments (1)

One of the posts highlighted in the last post was one example of how Southwest behaves. It wasn’t a one time thing. It was a common result of the system Southwest has in place where they treat customers like human beings that should be respected (as Southwest does with employees).

Then you have the typical horrible treatment the other airlines practice. Like this example where Delta damages this guys bike and refuses to accept responsibility. That is until they suffered a huge amount of additional ill will over such horrible treatment of James Lawrence, who is participating in 20 half iron mans to raise money to help provide systems to provide water for those in Africa in need of it.

Which is similar to when United broke the guitar of this guy, except United I guess figured more bad publicity really doesn’t matter given that it seems to basically be their business plan. On the bright side if you do a good job of complaining you can actually do well. But thousands of people (probably tens or hundreds of thousands) suffer the results of systems destine to provide horrible service.

Systems of people function in repeatably ways. Based on the horrible service airlines provide you can be almost certain their managers do not treat employees with respect. When organizations treat front line staff as costs that need to be minimized and as unthinking, untrustworthy problems they will almost certainly pass on the bad treatment to customers.

Related: Airline Managers Disrespect Customers – Customers Get Dissed and Tell – Respect for Employees at Southwest Airlines – Very Bad Customer Service from Discover Card

Aligning Marketing Vision and Management

Posted on March 23, 2010  Comments (4)

Why do so many companies market one thing and provide something else? I know it might be easier to sell something different than what you offer your customer today. But if you decide to market one vision, why don’t you change your organization to actually offer that?

I suspect this is substantially due to the outsourced nature of large marketing efforts. It makes sense to me that when you outsource your marketing message creation it isn’t tied to your management system and the two silos can pursue their own visions.

I would imagine marketers would claim they “partner” yada yada yada (and sometimes it actual seems to happen, but not often). As a consumer it sure looks to me like companies outsource marketing to ad agencies that come up with marketing plans that are not in harmony with the real company at all. I can understand putting a positive spin on things, but so much marketing is just completely at odds with how the company operates.

Treating a marketing message as something separate from management is a serious problem. When your marking message says one thing and your customers get something else that is a problem. I think the message is often based on what the executives wish the company was (and the outsourced marketers think it should be), but it isn’t the customer experience the management system provides.

If you believe the vision of your marketing then make sure your organization has embraced those principles. I think, often, companies would be wise to follow the vision their marketers came up with. But instead they tell customers to expect one thing and manage the organization to provide something else. I just don’t see how that is sensible.

Related: Marketing in a Lean Company – Packaging Improvement – Customer Service is Important – Confusing Customer Focus – Incredibly Bad Customer Service from Discover Card
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Worse Hotel Service the More You Pay

Posted on January 2, 2010  Comments (4)

The more you pay for your hotel room the more likely they will charge to provide decent WiFi in your room. Whether a company tries to rip you off with exorbitant prices, or lousy service, is just a function of their lack of respect for customers. Obviously it is cheap to provide decent WiFi (as staying at numerous cheap hotels shows – nearly all offer WiFi completely free).

Most expensive hotels show they do not respect their customers. Some actually do rise to the level of a typical budget, and cheaper, hotels and motels so it isn’t all expensive hotels that fail to meet this low standard. The management of those hotels come from the same school of management thought that produces our bankers.

Jeff Bezos captures one difference between poor managers (prevalent in many spreadsheet focused managers) and lean manufacturing managers with the quote: “There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less.”

Thoughts on: Hotel WiFi Should Be a Right, Not a Luxury

Related: Making Life Difficult for Customers – Verizon Provides Lousy Service = Dog Bites Man – Is Poor Service the Industry Standard?

Lean Inventories Do Not Excuse Failing to Deliver

Posted on November 20, 2009  Comments (2)

Low inventory levels do not mean failing to have products available for customers. Now, if you manufacturing in huge batches and can’t respond to customer feedback then it might mean failure to predict customer demand does mean failure to deliver. But lean thinking has shown how to avoid this problem. People need to adopt lean manufacturing practices and gain the benefits of low inventory levels without the costs of failing to deliver what customers want.

Sorry Santa, We’re Out of Stock

The “it” gifts this year could swiftly vanish from store shelves, as retailers, with nightmares of Christmas 2008 markdowns dancing in their heads, have slashed inventories to some of the leanest levels in recent memory.
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Retailers themselves are battle-scarred by last year’s fourth-quarter fiasco. Following the financial meltdown of September 2008 and amid the most severe economic crisis since The Great Depression, consumers retrenched.

That’s when stores hit the markdown panic button, slashing prices upwards of 75 percent. The result was the worst holiday selling season since 1970, according to The International Council of Shopping Centers.

But although leaner inventory levels should drive profit margin gains this holiday, “retailers might not have enough inventory to fully satisfy demand,” said Citigroup retail analyst Deborah Weinswig, in a research note. It is a risk they are willing to take.

“They would rather lose a sale than take the markdowns they had last year,” said Goldman Sachs analyst Adrianne Shapira.

The retailers need to design their systems with lean thinking in mind (not lean – as in cut expenses without thought). And they need to work with suppliers using lean manufacturing principles.

Related: Be Thankful for Lean Thinking – Guess What? Manufacturing in the USA is a Good Idea – Tesco: Lean Provision – Zara Thrives by Ignoring Conventional Wisdom – Operational Excellence – lean manufacturing articles

Credit Card Company Tries Providing Value

Posted on September 23, 2009  Comments (0)

Most credit card issues seem to use business models based on tricking customers into paying high fees. PartnersFirst is focusing on providing value to customers. A Different Kind of Credit-Card Company

PartnersFirst is a different kind of credit-card company. Started in 2007 with funding from Western Alliance Bancorp (WAL), the fledgling firm has three key tenets: keep rates steady, eliminate fees, and rigorously evaluate the risk of potential customers. PartnersFirst mainly makes money from the interest it charges borrowers, whereas most credit-card companies also rake in huge fees. “I realized that there was an opportunity to give cardholders a square deal and still make a profit,”
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Credit-card companies have made billions on affinity cards over the years – but regulators and lawmakers worry that consumers get raw deals. Critics say colleges put their financial interests ahead of those of their students, encouraging them to rack up high-cost debt. “Affinity cards started simply as a product that alumni associations could offer members, but alumni boards realized they could bargain for more cash up front,”

The companies involved in banking and credit cards in the USA have been hostile to customers for quite some time. I have been waiting for someone to decide to provide value to customers and take a fair profit. Hopefully PartnersFirst will continue this model, though I am suspicious, if they succeed they will be bought by another financial firm that is too-big-to-fail in order to once again restrict competition via their standard practice of buying any competitors instead of providing value to customers.

Related: How to protect yourself from your credit card company – Don’t Let the Credit Card Companies Play You for a Fool – Retail Credit Card Fees Much Higher in the USA

YouTube Uses Multivariate Experiment To Improve Sign-ups 15%

Posted on August 17, 2009  Comments (2)

Google does a great job of using statistical and engineering principles to improve. It is amazing how slow we are to adopt new ideas but because we are it provides big advantages to companies like Google that use concepts like design of experiments, experimenting quickly and often… while others don’t. Look Inside a 1,024 Recipe Multivariate Experiment

A few weeks ago, we ran one of the largest multivariate experiments ever: a 1,024 recipe experiment on 100% of our US-English homepage. Utilizing Google Website Optimizer, we made small changes to three sections on our homepage (see below), with the goal of increasing the number of people who signed up for an account. The results were impressive: the new page performed 15.7% better than the original, resulting in thousands more sign-ups and personalized views to the homepage every day.
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While we could have hypothesized which elements result in greater conversions (for example, the color red is more eye-catching), multivariate testing reveals and proves the combinatorial impact of different configurations. Running tests like this also help guide our design process: instead of relying on our own ideas and intuition, you have a big part in steering us in the right direction. In fact, we plan on incorporating many of these elements in future evolutions of our homepage.

via: @hexawise – My brother has created a software application to provide much better test coverage with far fewer tests using the same factorial designed experiments ideas my father worked with decades ago (and yet still far to few people use).

Related: Combinatorial Testing for Software – Statistics for Experimenters – Google’s Website Optimizer allows for multivariate testing of your website. – Using Design of Experiments

Akio Toyoda’s Message Shows Real Leadership

Posted on July 26, 2009  Comments (12)

Speech by Akio Toyoda

Since the birth of Toyota, the company’s philosophy has always been to “contribute to society.”
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“Contributing to society” at Toyota means two things. First, it means, “to manufacture automobiles that meet the needs of society and enrich people’s lives.” And second, “to take root in the communities we serve by creating jobs, earning profits and paying taxes, thereby enriching the local economies where we operate.”
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Toyota has overcome many challenges during its seven decades of business. What has made this possible is the way we make our cars under our “customer first” and “genchi genbutsu” principles
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Rather than asking, “How many cars will we sell?” or, “How much money will we make by selling these cars?” we need to ask ourselves, “What kind of cars will make people happy?” as well as, “What pricing will attract them in each region?” Then we must make those cars.
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Through these processes, I would like to make Toyota’s product development and product lineup more region-focused. We will change our policy from achieving “a full lineup everywhere” to “a lineup necessary to meet the needs of each region”. We will also launch new vehicles that anticipate consumer needs and are exciting to drive.
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At the press conference in January, I talked about my desire to become “a president who is closest to the frontlines, or gemba.” I believe that the essence of management lies in the gemba, and Toyota employees play a vital role there.

Once again Toyota shows they are the type of management I want to invest in. In my last post I discussed another: Jeff Bezos at Amazon. Google management is another management system I am glad to invest in. Toyota, Amazon and Google are 3 of my 12 stocks for 10 year portfolio.

Toyota continues to show they are an exceptional company that doesn’t waver due to short term pressures. They know the management system they have in place is excellent. They always try to improve. And they react to evidence that shows they have room to improve. They then access the situation and move forward.

via: Toyoda on Toyota: A New Regime, A New Future

Related: New Toyota CEO’s Views (2005) – Interview with Toyota President (2006) – Deming Companies – “2007 has been a difficult year for Toyota” – No Excessive Senior Executive Pay at Toyota – Webcast on the Toyota Development Process

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Zappos and Amazon Sitting in a Tree…

Posted on July 23, 2009  Comments (6)

Amazon is acquiring the unique company – Zappos: we have written about Zappos previously: Paying New Employees to Quit. Jeff Bezos uses the webcast above to talk to the employees of Zappos. Excellent job. The letter from Tony Hsieh, the Zappo’s CEO, to employees is fantastic. This is a CEO that respects employees. These are leaders I would follow and invest in (and in fact I am glad I do own Amazon stock).

First, I want to apologize for the suddenness of this announcement. As you know, one of our core values is to Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication, and if I could have it my way, I would have shared much earlier that we were in discussions with Amazon so that all employees could be involved in the decision process that we went through along the way. Unfortunately, because Amazon is a public company, there are securities laws that prevented us from talking about this to most of our employees until today.
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Several months ago, they reached out to us and said they wanted to join forces with us so that we could accelerate the growth of our business, our brand, and our culture. When they said they wanted us to continue to build the Zappos brand (as opposed to folding us into Amazon), we decided it was worth exploring what a partnership would look like.

We learned that they truly wanted us to continue to build the Zappos brand and continue to build the Zappos culture in our own unique way. I think “unique” was their way of saying “fun and a little weird.” :)

Over the past several months, as we got to know each other better, both sides became more and more excited about the possibilities for leveraging each other’s strengths. We realized that we are both very customer-focused companies — we just focus on different ways of making our customers happy.

Amazon focuses on low prices, vast selection and convenience to make their customers happy, while Zappos does it through developing relationships, creating personal emotional connections, and delivering high touch (“WOW”) customer service.

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Pixar Movie Management Magic

Posted on May 29, 2009  Comments (1)

image of Walle - PixarImage of Wall-e, from the Pixar film of the same name.

Pixar’s secrets on display in ‘Up’

“I think it comes down to two basic things: one is that we’re run by artists. … John Lasseter is a film director, as opposed to being from a business school or whatever. He has that side of him as well, but he’s always approaching these things as the same way we are.

“Second, we have some pretty great people that they’ve managed to collect here. This is our 10th film, and every film has just gotten better and better, whether that be in animation or special effects or lighting. And it just all comes together to make for some really fantastic stuff.”
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“One of the things that I really love about [Pixar] is that no matter what you do, if you’re a production assistant or a producer or a marketing executive or running the kitchen, everyone here thinks like filmmakers,”
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Like, I didn’t work on ‘WALL-E,’ but I feel like it’s mine, you know? And I want that to look great and be great. And then I want that bar to be higher and for us to be challenged.”

Pixar has done a great job of creating the right climate for the business they are in. They make movies and have been very consistently successful. Many of those strategies are useful concepts for everyone. Create a climate that promotes pride in work. Create a climate where everyone sees how they contribute to the end product. Hire people you trust and let them do their jobs. Seek continual improvement. Respect people. Customer Focus. Innovation (for example: Pixar Is Inventing New Math).

By the way, Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder, paid $5 million for Pixar and sold his share for $3,700 million of Disney stock (he is the largest shareholder of Disney – approximately 7%). Pixar Movies include: Toy Story, Monsters Inc. and The Incredibles.

Related: Tilting at Ludicrous CEO Pay 2008 – Better and Different – Innovation Examples

In-N-Out Burger’s Six Secrets for Success

Posted on May 26, 2009  Comments (1)

image of In-N-Out Burger book cover

In-N-Out Burger’s six secrets for out-and-out success

Listen to Your Customers — One of the company’s mottos is “Our customer is everything.” Applying that belief led to the company policy of preparing burgers just the way customers asked for them. Some of the customer favorites became popular and were eventually adopted as the restaurant chain’s “secret menu.” By listening to their customers, In-N-Out created menu choices other stores couldn’t duplicate.
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Treat Employees Well — The Snyders always held their employees in high esteem, paying them higher wages than competitors and calling them associates to make them feel more connected to the franchise.

“They believed in sharing their success with their employees,” says Perman, noting that In-N-Out associates make $10 an hour working part-time and starting store managers make $100,000, plus bonuses tied to store performance. The company benefits package is also generous. Such treatment engenders loyalty from workers.

“They have the lowest turnover rate in the fast food industry, which is notorious for turnover,” says Perman. “They say that the average manager’s tenure is 14 years, but they have managers who have been there 30 or 40 years.”

Keep Things Simple and Consistent…

The fundamental idea of respecting people is something most executives seem to have no interest in. Treating employees as the critical partners in organizational success is just something that doesn’t leap out at you based on the actions of most managers, unfortunately. And that poor management damages the performance of the organization.

Read more about In-N-Out Burger management practices in Stacy Perman’s new book In-N-Out Burger: A Behind-the-Counter Look at the Fast-Food Chain That Breaks All the Rules.

Related: Respect for Workers at In-N-Out Burger (Nov 2006) – Building a Great Workforce – Another Year of CEO’s Taking Hugely Excessive Pay – Respect for People, Understanding Psychology – People are Our Most Important Asset

Revealed Preference

Posted on May 16, 2009  Comments (1)

Revealed Preference: the preference consumers display by their action, in contrast to what they may say they prefer. While surveys may be useful people often say they will do one thing and actually when given the choice to do so, don’t.

Normally what matters is not what people say they want but what they actually will choose. For that reason revealed preference is a better measure than stated preference. Stated preference is often used as a proxy for actual preference (which may be fine) but it is important to understand that it is just a proxy for actual preference.

See more explanations from the Curious Cat Management Dictionary.

Related: Packaging Improvement – All Models Are Wrong But Some Are Useful – Dangers of Forgetting the Proxy Nature of Data – Confirmation Bias – Be Careful What You Measure

Joel Spolsky Webcast on Creating Social Web Resources

Posted on May 4, 2009  Comments (1)

Joel Spolsky webcast on creating Stack Overflow (with the goal of providing answers to professional programmers) using ideas from anthropology. Once again he provides great information. This is particularly interesting for software development but also just a good presentation for understanding the importance of customer focus and systems thinking.

What they focused on and did:

  • Voting – Reddit… (see our management Reddit)
  • Tags – lets you see what you want and to block tags you don’t want to see.
  • Editing – letting users edit the questions and responses. For a technical question and answer system this is very useful (based on my experience).
  • Badges – people like to earn “credit” (psychology)
  • Karma – “people are willing to do for free what people are not willing to do for small amounts of money” (psychology)
  • Pre-search – provide quick view of previously answered questions
  • Google is UI – Assumption: “the front page is Google search” – build based on the idea people will search via Google
  • Performance – 16 million pages a month with 2 web servers. They are using the Microsoft stack, not open source.
  • Critical mass – they focused on getting a large user base on day one of the beta site

Related: posts related to Joel Spolsky – Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus – Information Technology and Management – What Motivates Programmers?

Building a Great Workforce

Posted on April 13, 2009  Comments (0)

How P&G Finds and Keeps a Prized Workforce by Roger O. Crockett

“We actually recruit for values,” says Chief Operating Officer Robert McDonald. “If you are not inspired to improve lives, this isn’t the company you want to work for.”
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The P&G strategy starts on college campuses. The Cincinnati company dispatches line managers rather than human resource staffers to do much of its recruiting.
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For the few who get hired, their work life becomes a career-long development process. At every level, P&G has a different “college” to train individuals, and every department has its own “university.” The general manager’s college, which McDonald leads, holds a week-long school term once a year when there are a handful of newly promoted managers. Further training—there are nearly 50 courses—helps managers with technical writing or financial analysis.

Career education takes place outside the classroom, too. P&G pushes every general manager to log at least one foreign assignment of three to five years. Even high-ranking employees visit the homes of consumers to watch how they cook, clean, and generally live, in a practice dubbed “live it, work it.” Managers also visit retail stores, occasionally even scanning and bagging items at checkout lanes, to learn more about customers.

Going to visit the gemba, the actual place is incredibly important, and far too often ignored by managers today.

The emphasis on life long learning (in practice, not just words) is also very wise. In my experience far to little emphasis is placed on continual improvement of what many companies will say is their most important asset: their people. If you don’t invest in education of your staff that is going to harm your long term success. The investment P&G makes shows a respect for people.

Related: Jeff Bezos Spends a Week Working in Amazon’s Kentucky Distribution Center – Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno – Respect for People, Understanding Psychology – Ohno Circle
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Customer Friendly Terms of Use Language

Posted on March 19, 2009  Comments (0)

The Aviary web site provides a very nice example of customer focus. They provide the legalese version of the terms of use and then explain what this actually mean in is simple terms. Good job. Legalese example

2. SITE CONTENT. The Site and its contents are intended solely for the use of Aviary Users and may only be used in accordance with the terms of this Agreement. All materials displayed or performed on the Site, other than content developed or posted by User (“User Content”) including, but not limited to text, graphics, logos, tools, photographs, images, illustrations, audio and video, and animations (“Content”) are the property of Aviary and/or third parties and are protected by United States and international copyright laws. As between you and Aviary, however, you own and retain sole and exclusive right, title and interest in and to all of your User Content (subject only to the limited license therein granted to Aviary under this Section 2). The Services may enable Users to develop derivative works based on other Users’ Content. In the event you use the Services to develop a derivative work of another User’s Content with that User’s permission, as between you and the User who developed the original work, you own and retain sole and exclusive right, title and interest in and to your derivative work, and the User who developed the original work retains the sole and exclusive right, title and interest in and to the original work. In the event you permit other Users to use the Services to develop derivative works based on your User Content, as between you and the User who developed the derivative work, you own and retain sole and exclusive right, title and interest in and to your original work, and the User who developed the derivative work retains the sole and exclusive right, title and interest in and to the derivative work. All trademarks, service marks, and trade names which appear on the Site (other than those appearing in any User Content) are proprietary to Aviary and/or third parties. You shall abide by all copyright notices, information, and restrictions contained in any Content accessed through the Services.

Readable example

  • We own our website.
  • You own your content.
  • If you allow another user to make a derivative, you still own your work.
  • Please don’t disregard our copyright notices. :)
  • Some content may be licensed under Creative Commons.
  • You can download anything on the site for personal, non-commercial use only. Other uses are not OK (unless you purchased the work from the creator).
  • Just because we let you use our applications doesn’t give you any property ownership in the applications. You are just granted a license to use it.
  • Aviary is allowed to display within Aviary, any work you make available to everyone to view.
  • Additionally, we can allow the work to be used by a third party in a way which promotes Aviary (for example, using the work alongside a newspaper article about Aviary).
  • The content you contribute may not infringe on the property rights of others.

Related: Making Life Difficult for Customers – Gobbledygook – Complicating Simplicity – User Happiness with Search Engines

What Managers can Learn From Open Source Project Management

Posted on February 23, 2009  Comments (1)

What managers can learn from Open Source by Murray Cumming

Motivation: People work on open source projects because they enjoy it. These happy developers are productive developers. Managers of open source projects must ensure that the developers feel valued and fulfilled. They must minimise the tedious aspects of the work to ensure that development remains interesting. Otherwise, projects fail.

Although money can provide some incentive it does not provide as much. Managers who say that money is the greatest motivator are justifying their own poor performance. Managers of proprietary software, just like managers of open source software, must ensure that their developers are motivated properly. It is not enough to think that they should feel motivated.
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Open source projects have the benefit of direct feedback from users. Systems such as bugzilla and open mailing lists make it easy for customers to express their needs. That is the necessary first step to satisfying those needs. See the Structural Solutions section.

For instance, proprietary application server projects such as BEA and WebSphere seem deaf to the frustrations of their customers, but the open source JBoss project is happy to hear about those problems and avoid them in its own product.

Standards/Consensus: Open Source projects must conform to, and reuse, accepted, up-to-date standards. Proprietary projects, without the benefit of high visibility or feedback are free to make inferior decisions.

Don’t miss this great essay by Paul Graham: What Business Can Learn from Open Source. And you know what else? I don’t think open source projects use the annual performance review.

Related: Open Source: The Scientific Model Applied to Programming – Dangers of Extrinsic Motivation – What Motivates Programmers? – Open Source Management Terms

Newspaper Innovation In Kansas

Posted on January 29, 2009  Comments (1)

The newspaper industry is facing challenging times. One success story is the Lawrence Journal-World in Lawrence, Kansas. I first heard about their efforts years ago:

Watchful Eyes on Kansas Media Innovations, NPR, 2005

Many media companies hoped that convergence — combining television, print and online resources — would help them survive. Instead, many companies have lost money on online journalism. In Lawrence, Kan., Dolph Simons’ Journal-World newspaper has taken ambitious news-gathering approaches to local issues.

The Newspaper of the Future, by Timothy O’Brien, New York Times

Lawrencians buying tickets for University of Kansas football games can visit the same site, LJWorld.com, and find photographs offering sightlines from each of Memorial Stadium’s 50,000 seats. Law aficionados can find transcripts of locally significant court cases posted on the site and participate in live, online chats debating the pros or cons of some cases – sometimes with experts who are involved in the proceedings.

A related Web site, lawrence.com, is aimed at college readers. It allows visitors to download tunes from the Wakarusa Music Festival, find spirited reviews of local bars and restaurants and plunge into a vast trove of blogs
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The steward of this online smorgasbord is Dolph C. Simons Jr., a politically conservative, 75-year-old who corresponds via a vintage Royal typewriter and red grease pencil while eschewing e-mail and personal computers. “I don’t think of us as being in the newspaper business,” said Mr. Simons, the editor and publisher of The Journal-World and the chairman of the World Company, the newspaper’s parent. “Information is our business and we’re trying to provide information, in one form or another, however the consumer wants it and wherever the consumer wants it, in the most complete and useful way possible.”

The company has continued on an path of customer focus and innovation. There work shows what can be done by understanding what need you fulfill for customers.

They understand what they offer customers (and it isn’t just paper). They understand the technology related to their business (not the technology of their past methods of working but the technology possibilities related to serving their customers). They understand the realities of the marketplace. And they have divined a strategy based on this knowledge (they have innovated). And finally, the Lawrence Journal-World has maintained a constancy of purpose.

Related: Zipcar Innovation – Innovation Strategy – Information Technology and Business Process Support Continue reading →

Lame Move by Google

Posted on November 2, 2008  Comments (0)

Google does great things and makes good decisions most often. However a recent move on their part has ended very lamely. As part of what their 10th anniversary celebration they provided a search of the 2001 index (the oldest index they could find to search now). This was extremely cool.

Now if you go to find it so you can try it out you will be disappointed. Search for it on Google you will find a link to Google Search 2001 which gives you a page that says: “The page – www.google.com/search2001.html – does not exist.” Is it amazingly lame that Google took the search down, has it has the first result on searches, and has no explanation on that page of what it was about.

It would be cool for them to leave it up (it was interesting). And I would think they could make a great deal of money showing ads (I can’t remember if they did show ads). But not leaving a page at that address (which was linked to over 95,000 times) explaining what the page did and that it is now offline is very lame. Breaking 95,000 links is bad enough for some pointy haired boss that believes the internet is made up of tubes but for a well run internet company to do that is pitiful.

This move shows Google in a similar light as Gap when managers shut down the Gap’s web site for days (in 2005). Google failed when exiting the video business (DRM issues), then realized their mistake and recovered. The fix for this would take all of 1 hour. Someone just has to put up a page discussing what the page was for and that the search has been discontinued.

But really they should explore if it is better to just make it live – maybe it doesn’t but I would certainly want to look into that option. If not, I would put up some interesting results from the experiment (though if the choice is just a 1 hour solution or nothing then just put up a page in 1 hour) and link to commentary about the search and interesting things people found. This would be an interesting task for an intern, or someone else, and could provide an interesting and popular page. but most importantly at least not breaking 95,000 links (plus all those who go to the page from search results pages) is the minimum Google should do.

Related: web pages should live forever – Search Share Data Checking the ACSI – Ways for Google to Improve Continue reading →

Don’t Do What Your Users Say

Posted on August 11, 2008  Comments (0)

In, Don’t do what your users say, Hanford Lemoore, provides a nice illustration of why customer focus is important but must be done with care.

in UI design it’s important to understand that what a user says and what a user is telling you can be two different things.
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I got a good variety of comments back. Constructive thoughts. But I noticed an interesting trend: The most common thing suggested was “Add an undo to the game.” It seems almost everyone who tested the game had asked for an undo option.
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I wanted to find the root cause of the “undo” request. I had some friends of mine host a playtest party at their house
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During the party I got a lot of great feedback. Just watching someone play my game and see them learn from their mistakes was an incredible experience. But mainly I was watching closely to see if and why anyone was going to request an undo feature. What I saw was surprising.
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After the user test is was clear to me that the root cause for undo requests was that the controls were too sensitive for the average player. There were a few other things that were revealed too. People really loved solving the puzzles in the game — the first time. But if they had to restart, they really did not enjoy redoing the puzzles they had already solved. This was another cause of wanting an undo in the game.

This is a great example of looking for the root cause and going to the gemba. You must focus on customers but you must bring thought into how you react. Just doing what they say is likely a bad idea. Ignoring them is also bad. But listening and learning and then adjusting is good.

Related: Pleasing Customers – Confusing Customer Focus – What Could we do Better? – Good Customer Service Example – Find the Root Cause

Google Knows it is a 2.0 World

Posted on June 27, 2008  Comments (1)

You can accomplish a great deal by just talking to people. Google Public Relations:

I did not really expect it, but the next day I got a call from Jeffrey Korn at Google California. He explained that he was the one responsible for building the Google Bookmarks and Google Web History tools. The problem with my extension was something I hadn’t imagined: a scaling problem. Hehe, Google had scaling problems :-) .

The gBrain extension creates a lot of bookmarks. Several thousands a month. And the Google bookmarks system was never made with this amount in mind. What made things worse (and I didn’t knew that), the bookmarks are connected to the normal web search. Whenever you use the web search, it checks it against your Google bookmarks. You can easily imagine what problems can come up when you have a several 10 or even 100 thousands of bookmarks…

Jeffery also made a few suggestions how the extension could be changed to make use of their Web history service instead of the bookmarks system. This would avoid the scaling problems. I may consider it some day.

But why am I telling this? Because I’m amazed how Google handled this. Instead of just blocking my extension at their side, or sending me a cease and desist letter they contacted me and asked.

Good for Google. I do find it a bit funny they had a lawyer contact the guy but still Google’s reaction was much better than most companies would be. Companies like Google, Amazon, Lego, New York Times are taking advantage of technology to leverage community efforts to improve the value of their service to customers. This is an important innovation management needs to acknowledge and manage. Or you can be like the poorly managed journal publishers or music industry that are destroying their organizations futures.

Related: Funding Google Gadget Development – Innovative Marketing Podcast (Lego) – Innovation at Google

Pleasing Customers

Posted on March 10, 2008  Comments (1)

Why is 37signals so arrogant? by Don Norman

The Brash Boys at 37signals Will Tell You: Keep it Simple, Stupid. Brash is an understatement. I was quoted in the article because of my article arguing that simplicity is highly overrated: the tasks that we do require tools that match the requirements, and these add complexity.
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Yes, they are arrogant — and proud of it: “Arrogant is usually something you hurl at somebody as an insult,” Hansson said. “But when I actually looked it up — having an aggravated sense of one’s own importance or abilities’ — I thought, sure.” Park concludes his article by saying “Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt. ‘I’m not designing software for other people, ‘Hansson says. ‘I’m designing it for me.’ ” “I’m not designing … for other people.” I think that simple phrase speaks volumes. Thank goodness most companies recognize that this attitude is deadly.

I don’t agree. Not compromising leads to solutions that are unlikely to be all things to all people. But with an intelligent and knowledgeable leader will lead to excellent solutions for those that share desires. Now I don’t think this is the best strategy, especially for growth. But it can be an excellent strategy for startup, innovators and those seeking 1,000 fans.
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