Corporate Underpants - Recently Updated Pages

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Anonymous — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 03:37:06 CDT

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"User" is a 4-letter word

Anonymous — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 02:19:43 CDT

Think of a cow.
Got one?
Now imagine that we are in conference room full of people and I've asked everyone to think of a cow.
Is everyone on the same page?
Arguably, yes. After all, I didn't just ask them to think of an animal, or even a barnyard-type animal. I asked them to think of a cow. So everyone is thinking about the same thing, right?

Well, what color is your cow? Where is it hanging out? What is it doing? Is it fat or thin?
What about the other people in the conference room? are all of their cows similar to yours, or slightly different? Picture the little imaginary herd that all of you have created together. We've probably got some brown cows, some black and white jobbies, maybe a black one. Some are laying around in the distance, some are up against a fence nibbling hay out of our hands. Some are in a barn, some are hooked up to milking machines. They're fat, they're thin. They're cute, they're gross, they're something familiar, they're completely foreign. They're all of these things all at the same time.

So everyone in the conference room thinks they are thinking about the same thing. But what if someone asks about the hooves of the cows? One cow probably hasn't had its feet looked after in a long time. Another spends most of its time indoors and her hooves get irritated by the cement floor of the barn. Yet another has shiny hooves that are regularly rubbed with organic linament by her proud owner. Each cow is different in her details, and each cow-imaginer can easily zoom in and argue for the importance of his or her cow's hoof details.

Companies do this all the time, every day. Everyone thinks they are thinking about 'the user.' Guess what? Everyone's concept of the user is slightly different. These differences are further hidden by slightly more detailed language, like 'the administrator' (talking about users in terms of roles) or 'the early adopters' (defining segments of users).

So long story longer, this is why personas are so important. And this is why I'm convinced that, in a way, it doesn't matter who your persona is as much as it matters that you have one. The lack of shared focus between a team of people who are all working on the same product can be so detrimental that it can trump any 'bad' effects that could be caused by using the 'wrong' persona. In other words, even if they are building a product for cows, if everyone focused on the exact same horse to build the product, they'd be better off than if they were all focusing on different cows. Why? Because at the very least, the resulting product would make sense end-to-end. And a product that makes sense end-to-end for a horse is probably better for cows than a product that is good for some cows some of the time, and other cows some of the time, and so on.

Whew, the farm is getting full.

One last thing:

If I ask the same conference room full of people to picture a brown cow, a pretty chubby one with a swayed back and a full udder, chewing peacefully on a mouthful of hay in a large paddock that has a few other cows in it, flicking its tail against an annoying horsefly, you're probably willing to give up your original cow and start thinking about mine. It's not such a big deal...it's still a cow, and if I tell you that I've done some research and most of the cows in our target market are paddock-dwellers with swaybacks and active tails, you'd believe me.

Now, when we start to talk about the barnyard features that we should build to support our cow's hoof-related requirements, all of us can zoom in on this cow's hooves and make some sensible decisions. We won't end up building hoof features for indoor cows and udder features for outdoor cows.

By the way, in my experience, stakeholder-type people aren't terribly attached to their own cows. As long as they get to say 'hey, this is what my cow looks like', and they get to add their opinions into the mix, and they get to hear the relevant cow-data, they're pretty willing to give up the black and white for brown, the barn for the paddock, and the oats for the hay.

User is a four-letter word. But cow is not. And neither is "Sarah, the spendthrift."

Anyways, I could have avoided typing this whole thing and simply provided this excellent quote on user experience by one of the pioneers in our field, Dr. Seuss:

"A moose is asleep.
He is dreaming of moose drinks.
A goose is asleep.
He is dreaming of goose drinks.
That's all well and good when a moose dreams of moose juice.
And nothing goes wrong when a goose dreams of goose juice.

But it isn't too good when a moose and a goose
Start dreaming they're drinking the other one's juice.
Moose juice, not goose juice, is juice for a moose.
And goose juice, not moose juice, is juice for a goose.
So when a goose gets a mouthful of juices of moose's
and moose gets a mouthful of juices of goose's,
They always fall out of their beds screaming screams.
SO...
I'm warning you, now! Never drink in your dreams."
Dr. Seuss's Sleep Book, Theodore Geisel, pp 42-43.

s

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 06:36:34 CDT

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Tamara — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 11:46:48 CDT

Corporate Underpants.
Weird name, right?
Not really.

I picture big companies as if each one of them was really some kind of huge person. A giant resembling a businessperson in a suit. To the casual glance, and from the outside, they often seem impeccable, well put together, professional, thoughtful, perfectly groomed, confident, and capable—just like a person in a well-cut business suit of the finest fabric. Their logos glint on their lapels. It seems impossible that they could fail at anything.

But companies do fail all the time. I’m not talking about the ones that fail spectacularly, like Enron or Edsel. I’m not talking about spectacular failures at all. I’m talking about the everyday failures that face us in the form of the ever-blinking 12:00 on the vcr that no one can figure out how to set. Failures in the form of cell phones that have so many features they make the people who use them feel stupid. Web sites that ‘obviously’ have all the information, or products, or services we could want—but make us tie ourselves in mental knots trying to find the single thing we need or want right now. Why are so many companies like that one brilliant teacher you had in college. You know—the one who clearly knew more about the subject than any person really should, but no one in the class could understand a single thing he said.

I’ve begun to realize that companies can do stupid things even when all of the people working in the company have the best intentions. It’s become all too easy for a company to hire incredibly talented people who research, design, and develop products that people find annoying or pointless. Most talented people don’t want to create annoying, pointless products. So if they want to create great products, and they try their darnedest to do just that, what happens?

Well, behind each giant’s perfect suit there lurks some rather alarming underwear. Beneath the glossy exterior, there’s some serious scaffolding holding together unwieldy chunks of corporate infrastructure. Look a little closer at that polished giant. Unsightly bulges caused by legacy policies and systems are stuffed into pressure stockings. Groups that have been forced to compete with each other for funding are shoved together and chafing. Teams that are fighting for online real estate are struggling with other teams who are sure their features are more important—causing the unsightly effect of ‘two pigs wrestling under a blanket’ where there should be a smooth field of fabric. Corporations can look very polished from the outside, yes. But all too often, when they release products, they can’t hide their unsightly underpants.

Are your corporate underpants showing? Well, do the browse pages and search pages on your web site look so different that it's clear they are owned by different groups in your company? If so, you might want to take a closer look.

Customers don't think about sites as a series of 'pages' or 'features.' They think of the holistic experience. So humor them.

Create the holistic experience before you add more features
Present an integrated site design
Erase all signs of your corporate underpants

This site is about corporate underpants. Comment on underpants already explored. Create your own page exploring a pair not yet in our 'online drawer.' Maybe we'll get to the bottom of this.

Wikis v. Blogs: tech underpants

Anonymous — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 12:55:55 CDT

OK, I can't wait to hear what you guys have to say about this.

So now, evidently, there are these new tools that allow regular people (even silly customer experience people like me) to create wikis (aka, web sites that are easy to build, edit, and collaborate on without much fuss). Which makes me think about a new set of underpants: technical underpants.

Wikis are intended to be collaboratively created and maintained. Basically, this means that on most pages on this site you can click the 'easyedit' button and do whatever the heck you want to what I have written. Or, I can 'lock' pages, which will still allow you to comment on my words of wisdom even though you won't have the opportunity to muck up my fabulous prose.

Together, we can create a taxonomy (aka a navigation structure) to the pages. We can decide there will be a category called 'knickers' (if we want to) for european corporate underpants issues. All of our work will end up on pages that can be navigated to with the left-nav links and/or the tags that we add to them.

Blogs, on the other hand, are designed to allow a single person (or identified group of people) to add daily (or so) to what becomes a long stream of thoughts. Many individual's blogs are like a long journal, filled with lots of entries that are around a paragraph or two long. These entries are available long after they lose their home-page placement, but in most of the blogs I've seen the only ways to get to previous entries is to use a monthly archive link (e.g., now that it's May, you can click a link to see the April entries) or with a search. But these methods aren't great if you don't know when an entry of interest was created, or if you have no idea what to search for (this movie blogger that you love used to blog on books, but not since last year. How would you know to search for 'books' unless she told you?).

So blogs are great for following a stream of consciousness, or for highly date-relevant entries, but they turn out not to be so great for topics like...well...for example....corporate underpants. Just because I want to talk about search engines in April and home pages in May, the information about the search engines doesn't necessarily become 'old' once May rolls around. Hence, I waited for a wiki option. Sure, some of the content will get old--but the site won't become a long scroll that makes it as tricky to get to a previous posting as it is to remove the middle sheet from a new roll of toilet paper (btw, I don't recommend you try this.)

So. Wikis? Blogs? Thoughts, people?

semantic underpants

Tamara — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 19:38:30 CDT

"Optout" as a button name. Classic undies. No, thank you for adding a very weird word to my vocabulary.

Pretty customer-friendly, huh?
This is part of a text block that is the first, and arguably main, source of information given to customers to help them select a computer.
Guess where I got this? (hint: it's pretty ironic.)

guess #1
guess #2

Web advertising underpants

Tamara — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 15:00:18 CDT

Ok, Web advertising is starting to drive me insane. Back when I worked at Amazon a few years ago, there was a version of the search results page that put sponsored links into the middle of the results. This basically means that you could search for something like "nail polish" and see a list of 5 or so results and then a blue box with links like "Lots of Discount Nail Polish!" and "Nail Polish for Everyone." This box was followed by more search results. Because Amazon search results are so detailed, the sponsored links often (to my eye) seemed simpler and much more applicable to what I searched for than the long list of Amazon results. It was tempting to click on one of these sponsored links.

Unfortunately, I don't think it was totally clear to everyone viewing the search results that these were actually not links to products -- or even pages -- on Amazon. If you clicked "Nail Polish for Everyone" you ended up on another site entirely because this link was actually an ad. It seemed wacky to me to put these simplified ads in a place where they'd be the most attractive links on the page, because they were so simple and direct. After all, Amazon wants to sell you Nail Polish (and books, movies, t-shirts, and lawn mowers related to nail polish) -- so why make it so attractive and easy to zoom off to another site, no matter how much they got paid for each click on the ad? It made no sense to me.

Now I work for clients who are facing the same issue. Companies that build a Web strategy around advertising revenue have to figure out how to integrate ads into their sites. And they face a lot of issues, including:

Everyone who has ever built a Web page has probably participated in training users to ignore the right-hand column. It's become a 'blind spot' because it so often contains ads. Case in point...have you even looked at the right column of this page yet? And when you do, surprise! It's...ads!
Lots of users even ignore the left-hand column of pages--unless, at first glance, they find that it contains site navigation.
Any ad that stretches across the width of any page will effectively cut the page off. If users see long ad (much like the 'something to add or update' bar below this text, only an ad...) they think the page is done. Most won't look below the ad.
Many internet advertising consultants are advocating in-line advertising. The basic idea is that there are blind spots, so you have to put ads in the 'non-blind-spot' if you want anyone to see them. Essentially, this means you have to intersperse them with the content in the middle area of the page. Well, this is great--but isn't putting ads in a particular place the way we got these blind spots in the first place? Seems awfully circular to me.

Seems to me that Web advertising -- and users' opinions of ads on Web pages -- must be changing. Of course, I have zero data to back this up, which is why I'd LOVE to see some comments on this page. But things have changed a lot since the 'early days' of Web advertising, and they must be having some effect:

Users are getting more and more sensitive to clutter.
Advertising is getting more contextual and therefore is, in some ways, turning into a feature. Again, check out the google ads on this page--pretty relevant, huh? You might even call them...dare I say it...helpful? I'm certainly not going to say they are well-designed, but this will happen.
There's way too much choice both between and within Web pages. People want to find what they are looking for, dammit. If site X looks promising and I click a link on it and suddenly I'm on site Y, that's not so helpful. I have to start all over again trying to find what I was looking for and/or do what I wanted to do. By the way, if you haven't yet, you MUST read The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schultz. Another page on that coming soon.

So I don't really have an answer, but I must admit I'm totally frustrated when I talk to clients and they tell me "well, we have to put the ads here because our internet advertising consultants say that this is the most profitable spot. They have eyetracking data and every time we push back based on customer experience they haul out the eyetracking data." This drives me NUTS. But I also must admit that for some reason eyetracking data has always driven me nuts--I think it's because it looks at what you already designed and rates the relative value of each design element. Again, this seems like tail chasing. Excellent designs are holistic. And eyetracking can easily reflect what users are forced to do due to a flawed design. In other words, Sally might be looking at this area a lot because she can't figure out where else to look to find what she wants. This certainly doesn't mean that the area she's looking at is well designed. (so there. harumph.)

So anyways. What do you guys think? Anyone got interesting insights? Heard good new stuff? Do tell!!!

We need more underpants

Tamara — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 13:34:44 CDT

"Technology" is totally uninteresting to regular people.

I just read Christine Perfetti's interview with Gerry McGovern published in the UIE Newsletter.
There's a super-duper diamond of a gem in it:

"
Q: Do new design approaches, such as Rich Internet Applications and AJAX, change the way teams design for content?

A: I’m afraid I’m no expert on technical issues. Without technology we’d still be living in caves, but there is always a danger that technology becomes the end and not the means.

I tested a series of headings and summaries with 2,000 people in 12 countries. Some summaries and headings never got a single vote. These extremely poor performing headings and summaries had one word in common: technology. [emphasis added]

I’m wary of web teams that can’t stop talking about the technology. Morning, noon and night, it is the customer you should be thinking and talking about."
(from The Importance of a Customer-Centric Design Approach: An Interview with Gerry McGovern)

OK, how ridiculously right-on is that observation--and it's not even an observation, it's data driven!

Why do I love this? Because:
1. these types of headings exist out there. we in the tech world think everyone is interested in what interests us. and it just isn't true.
2. he tested these headings all over the place and the results were the same.
3. it's one of the most simple, creative projects I've heard of in a long time.
4. it's the one-sentence equivalent of a smack upside the head.

Also, it's another way of looking at something that's been bugging me lately: in two separate consulting projects i've had in the last 4 months, I've been in meetings where I've heard this:

"We need some of that AJAX stuff on our page!"

Oy vey. Listen up, all you companies out there. You NEVER need "more ."

Technology for technology's sake is never what customers need. What customers need is content and tools that will help them achieve their goals. If a new technology is one way to help them do that, then great. If you have to wrack your brain to figure out why adding a schmancy new technical widget will help your customers, don't do it. There are much better ways to spend your precious resources.

Want to add something to your site just for the sake of adding it? Ok. Add more cowbell.

ps. check out mcgovern's home page. how great is it that he asks "Is your website rude? Your customers hate organization-centric content."

Sounds like he's just as anti-underpants as I am.

PNL = URL underpants

mark — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 12:18:51 CDT

This is one of my favorite underpants problems--partially because it has such a good name: how great is "PNL does not equal URL"? Catchy, geeky...it's got it all.

So what am I talking about? It's simple. People in charge of the profit and loss (PNL) for a chunk of a company are usually very territorial, for good reason. They want to make sure that they don't leave their organization's fiscal fate up to anyone else, because, after all, it's their own job on the line. And what's one of the ways to maintain control? By making PNL=URL, that's how. In other words, if I'm in charge of a division of a company, I'm likely to want to maintain as much control as possible over how my division is represente on the Web. Which means it's highly likely that I'm going to choose different types of interfaces and interactions than other people in the same company, because they are trying to solve somewhat different problems for the same-or different-customers.

But if I'm a customer, I just want to do what I want to do as simply as possible. I want to buy that thing, or find this info, or get some contact information. I spend my day interacting with all different kinds of companies, and that's hard enough...every time I go to a Web site, I have to reorient myself to their way of presenting themselves. When I finally get oriented to a company, I really don't want to be forced to continue to have reorient myself as I encounter different departments.

If I drive from Washington state into Oregon, I don't expect all the roads to work differently, the signs to be in a different language, and the rules of the road to be radically different.

But if I surf to a site where PNL=URL, then my needs don't matter as much as each manager's needs to protect their turf. The managers aren't really at fault...they really ARE responsible for creating the best possible experience for customers. But there's a price to doing this in silos. While it may seem that customer experience is compromised if the site is 'forced' into some pattern of internal consistency, the truth is it's necessary for the customers. I'm not advocating ridiculously strict style guides and arbitrary constraints--I'm advocating that there be some power in the organization given to a person or group of people who are focused on the end-to-end experience supported by a site.

Let's look at some PNL=URL madness:

Amazon.com vs. Amazon Media Library: one of these things is not like the other one!

amazon.com

amazon.com/library

From a friend: the American Girl Doll site's home page vs. the 'club' page (his daughter, who is 7, has actually started a redesign. I'm going to try to get images and post a page on her ideas!)

www.americangirl.com

club.americangirl.com

And what do things look like when there isn't a PNL=URL problem? They look like my favorite of the search engines...clusty.com. I love clusty because it clusters search results, which means it does something helpful--it suggests to me the next step in my search, instead of making me choose it's choice for the 'best' link or making me wrack my brains for my next search term.

I betcha there are different groups working on Web search and shopping search. But check out the experiences:

clusty web search results

clusty shopping search results.

Add your own examples!