NOTE: The goal of this post is not to troll and get attention by posting negative comments about media giant AT&T. Instead this post is intended to help all of us better understand what is happening in the world as we embrace micro-transactive interaction.
At the risk of sounding a little “Hippy”, today our thoughts, beliefs, and consciousness are traversing the digisphere in real-time at the speed of light. Because of this we know things much faster (true or not) and are on the way to becoming a digitally connected meta organism. Patchouli aside, the “Twitter Effect” has been linked to very rapid attendance drop-offs of bad movies (including Bruno), leaving the movie executives stunned and broke. No longer does it take a week or two to hear you really shouldn’t see a movie, it happens instantly. Similar effects have been noticed in politics, and stock trading as well. So what do we do?
We learn!
“The Feed” has the power to share knowledge in a more relevant and timely manner than any other medium that exists today. Try searching Twitter for the answer to a problem instead of Google. I was surprised to find my answer in one search after over an hour working the Google query strings. Even better, The Feed offers responses. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, make a post, ask for a Re-Tweet (RT), or use hashtags (#) to get to individuals who are interested in a specific topic. Connected people are an amazing resource.
So that brings us to the purpose of this post. In addition to being a powerful resource for answers, The Feed is an outstanding tool for gathering insight into customer opinion. The successful companies of today realize that building close, meaningful relationships with customers is the only truly defensible business strategy. In other words, Intellectual Property is easy to steal, but you aren’t going to steal my friends unless I upset them and drive them to you. That’s how social media works. It’s close relationships founded on seemingly insignificant communication transactions that are very similar to those you might have with a friend walking in the park.
When it’s time to address the potential issue of your customer’s viewpoints it’s a good idea to take a long look in the mirror and evaluate how you appear to the public. With the newly available RSS query subscriptions offered by Twitter and Google Blog search it’s relatively easy to set up a series of searches that will provide you a view (a mirror) into the shared opinion of your company (or yourself) by the meta-organism/feed.
We’ve created an example here. It’s an iGoogle page that hosts RSS feeds that are designed to eek out positive and negative views expressed about AT&T. (You’ll need an iGoogle account to subscribe to the tab) but we think it’s worth the price of admission. The story is passionate, dramatic, emotional, and bleak.
In addition to the views into The Feed via RSS windows, we’ve provided a number of links to resources including Hashtags.org, MicroPlaza, Twendz, and TWIST. We would like to invite you to develop your own opinions and discuss them here or on Twitter or FaceBook. What do you think AT&T should do? Do you think these people are all crackpots? Do you think blog posts like this will increase negative comments for companies like AT&T?
We look forward to the discussion.
Screen shot of the iGoogle page.
You can get the shared iGoogle tab here
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on July 20, 2009
Greetings and Salutations,
Our last post stated that the Nike+ site didn’t have an analytics engine running under the hood and I’m happy to say Heidi MS and the fine folks at R/GA have corrected us. In the process we got our learn on too. I’m going to share the dialog so that all may benefit from our interaction. Thanks again Heidi! We are huge fans!
Here is Heidi’s response:
“Thanks for your reply. I am glad to learn about the plugin since I didn’t know of it. I googled a bit but couldn’t find anything.
Here’s the kicker – The results you are seeing (NO CP) are misleading. Why do I know this? I’ve been tracking websites for over ten years and I happen to be analyst on the Nike account at R/GA. All of Nike’s sites, including the new Nike+ site are tracked with Omniture. All the pages in your post are tagged at this point. We wouldn’t dream of launching a website for a major corporation without tracking.
If you want to see if a website is tracked and the tracking tool used, I recommend you use a sniffer/debugger such as HTTP Watch or Charles. They won’t fail you.
And I agree with everything you had to say about tracking behavior. 
Heidi “
Heidi reminded us that Rich Internet Applications (RIA) do not use the same tracking technology as HTML based applications. RIA can interact with web services without a full page refresh. That’s part of why they are so cool and also don’t require Counter Pixels (CP) for traffic analysis.
I fired up Fiddler2 to confirm this and was interested to see traffic resolving to nike.112.2o7.net. This is a screenshot of Fiddler2 in action:
Launching a browser and opening the 2o7.net URL concludes the expedition as seen here:
So consider this a retraction AND an extra congratulations to the R/GA / Nike+ team for leading the RIA community by example. You all get an A+!
Footnote: Click here to learn more about Omniture’s 2o7.net domain.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on July 9, 2009
Deploying a new or revised application can be a scary process. Are you confident your user-centered inquiry captured all of the needs? Are you certain your customers will like the new system better?
Typically, we’ve found the more expert the user—meaning the greater the amount of time they have invested in understanding your application’s complexities—the more likely they will be averse to change.
We’ve developed application UX for military pilots and there are few people who have spent more time learning an application (think thousands and thousands of hours). The good news is there are ways to insure your new release is a success.
Make sure your updates reflect real user improvements
Changing to a different platform is NOT a good reason to ask the customers to use a new application interface. You must learn how and plan to better serve them. Observation is your best tool: watch your customers work and look for opportunities to improve their workload efficiency (we call this workload assist), their decision-making efficiency (we call this cognitive assist), and provide them tools to forecast and measure the impacts of their decisions (we call this real-time performance assessment). Having used the above techniques with our cranky pilot user groups, we saw very positive results.
Enhancing your site is a marketing event. Be prepared to sell it
For your upcoming deployment plan on having a number of communication channels open to educate and engage your customers. Your goal is to solicit feedback, and develop trust. Nike+’s new “beta” site is a perfect example of the power of conversation.
Here is a shot of their existing site (not authenticated):
Notice the strong “hero” content talking about the value propositions of the new beta version. They even provide a link to the new version immediately below. It’s important to convey to your customers what they will be getting in this change and how it will impact them. Nike+ has done an excellent job with this.
Here is a shot of the new Nike+ beta site (also not authenticated):
The new site picks up where the old site left off explaining value and benefit for users. We won’t go into the specific benefits of the new site; suffice it to say they spent the time and learned what the users needed.
Teach the value to authenticated users
Once your customers authenticate into your system, you have enough data to be able to show them how your new system will better serve them. Take this opportunity seriously: Show them.
Here is a screen of the old Nike+ interface (authenticated):
Note the link-callout stating “see your runs in the new Nike+ beta.” This link provides a direct comparison of the dashboard pages and exposes the customer to a real-time comparison of the applications. It is also a “vote” button.
This is a good time to mention one of the strongest tenants in this approach: NEVER TAKE AWAY THE OLD SYSTEM. You have to wait like an observant parent for the child to discard the item before you can make it disappear. This is because the old system is their safety net. The really exciting part of this approach is that we can measure the users who have opted to use the new interface moving forward and those are SOLID conversion rates. If, after you deploy a new app using this technique and you don’t get many people willingly converting to the new application (voting that it’s better for them), call us. You more than likely missed a real need in your redesign or aren’t clearly communicating the improvements to your customers.
Provide feedback mechanism
The following three images really just show various views throughout the site, but notice two elements that remain consistent. The “feedback” tab on the right of every page (the last image shows an expanded view of the features) and the “Beta” flag in the upper right corner. Feedback is extremely powerful. Enable it, respond rapidly to the feedback and build trust that you are serving the customers’ best interest. Also, don’t disqualify this input channel just because it’s qualitative in nature. While accuracy of submissions will vary, bug notifications tend to be pretty accurate (something they can react to) and feature requests tend to be lofty but always worth validation. Our favorite part of this approach is the customers’ ability to send congratulations to those who developed the site. As developers/designers/strategists/etc, we need to realize we are part of the application ecosystem too. Kudos go a long way for both parties in building trust and respect.
Note the “return to classic” link on this page. Always provide an escape hatch for those who aren’t quite ready to convert.
This image illustrates the feedback toolset. It’s a third party app and very well done.
Measure measure measure
You can see at the bottom of each screenshot that my browser is reporting NO CP for all of the pages. This may be because Nike+ is using a beacon free traffic analysis tool, or more likely have forgotten to add analytics to their ecology. It’s important that the systems we design capture as much data about the use of the system (and its data) as it does capturing its core data (the data it was designed to share/collect). What we’re saying is the movement between data points by users is as valuable if not even more than the datapoint itself. These measurements can be formed into insights that can help you build a stronger relationship with your customer. That’s something the competition cannot steal.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on July 8, 2009
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