Over the years I have had the pleasure of dealing with some really great companies. My web hosting company is Verio and I am very loyal to them. They deliver good value and excellent service. Even in a crisis they performed well. I remember during Hurricane Katrina some of their servers went down, affecting my website. But they handled the whole situation with honesty and professionalism.

I have always been impressed with my newsletter provider, Newsweaver. Now, I publish a very basic text-only newsletter, and their system has many more options, but whenever I have had an issue their staff have been wonderful.

I’m demanding as a customer but also quite loyal once I feel the company I’m dealing with is treating me with respect. My training and profession is as a marketer and communicator and I believe these two disciplines are essential on the Web. However, I have to say that there is a dark and manipulative side to marketing and communications that has often held sway for the last 30-40 years.

This dark side is based on a deep understanding of human psychology. It knows that we are highly irrational and emotional and that if you press the right psychological buttons you can get people to pay more for lesser quality.

Amazon is one of my very favorite companies. I have bought all sorts of things from them over the years. I have never had a bad experience with Amazon and I have had some exceptional experiences that I will never forget. I remember once I got a CD case without a CD. I sent an email and got a very quick reply apologizing and saying a new CD was on the way. But what was amazing was what they said next: save the postage, don’t bother sending the CD case back. That’s trust. That is true branding.

“Before, if you were making a product, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into shouting about a product, and 30% into making a great product,” Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, recently told Charlie Rose. “So you could win with a mediocre product, if you were a good enough marketer. That is getting harder to do. The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies…the individual is empowered… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other.”

As a marketer and communicator, are you in danger of becoming the needy child in the room? The game has changed. Are you still shouting with big graphical billboard ads and soft, soapy, meaningless language?

The customer isn’t king anymore. They’re dictator. Highly impatient, skeptical and deeply cynical of traditional marketers and communicators. But in an information-saturated, time-starved world, they are more than willing to be loyal if treated with genuine respect.

Charlie Rose interview with Jeff Bezos
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11138

The essential problem with the Frequently Asked Question is that it is not useful or helpful. In Ireland it is mandatory to pay an annual license for your TV. I’ve just moved house so I need to find out how this affects my license. I go to the TV licensing website and am presented two choices: General FAQs and Online Service FAQs.

At least I know what FAQ means. However, I have found that many ordinary people have no idea. It’s a real IT term and is completely foreign to millions of people.

But there is a much deeper issue here, one that I only realized a couple of months ago. We were testing a task with a bunch of IT professionals and the website was failing miserably. A major point of failure on the website occurred when these professionals arrived at a page and needed to click on a “FAQ” link to progress. Practically nobody did.

When we dug deeper we found that the IT professionals being tested just didn’t see the FAQ link as being the right one to click on. It was the first time they had tried to solve this particular task. They didn’t know whether it was a frequently, moderately frequently or infrequently asked question. The link “FAQ” is simply not a good signpost.

When I scanned the links General FAQs and Online Service FAQs I had no clue what to click on. And what’s more I absolutely hate FAQs to begin with, and I know lots and lots of customers hate them as well. They generally consist of a long list of randomly ordered questions all beginning with useless intros like “How do I.” What I needed were links like “Moving House”.

The reason why FAQs are so unsuccessful is because they reflect organization-centric language and thinking. The organization knows if a question is frequently asked or not, but how can a customer know?

It’s the same with links like “Tools” or “Resources”. These are internal ways of classifying things. They do not reflect the way the customer thinks. You don’t go to a hotel website and click on Tools in order to find the Book a Room tool. You don’t go to an airline website and click on Tools in order to book a flight. You don’t go to Amazon and click on Tools when you want to buy a book.

What do you do? If you want to buy a book you click on Books. If you want to buy a laptop you click on Computers & Office and then Laptops & Netbooks. There are tools that support the buying process but they should not be reflected in the architecture. A customer is not looking for a tool. A customer is looking for Desire by Bob Dylan. They want to fly from Dublin to London. They don’t think: ‘I need to find a tool to help me do this.’

We should never classify based on the content type (FAQs) or the tool. We should instead classify based on the task the customer wishes to complete.

The root cause of most confusing menus and links is organizational language and thinking. Take, for example, the FAQ. Over the years, I’ve found that most customers don’t even know what an FAQ is. That certainly surprised me because I thought everyone knew that FAQ meant Frequently Asked Questions. I thought everyone knew that, just like everyone knows that the logo is a link to the homepage.

However, the FAQ has a deeper problem. From a customers’ perspective it is essentially a useless link. It is a classic example of organization-centric language. I was trying to renew my TV license recently and was offered two choices: General FAQs and Online Service FAQs. Which should I choose? On another website I was given two different choices: Frequently Asked Questions; Most Frequently Asked Questions

You’re a visitor to Ireland and you’ve hired a car to drive around the country. You want to go to Mallow in Cork and on the way you see a signpost stating: “Frequently Visited Towns.” That’s really helpful, isn’t it? Do you follow the sign or not? It will be the first time you’ve been to Mallow, but maybe Mallow is a frequently visited town. How do you know? Of course, you don’t know. How could you? The Irish road authorities know. They’ve got the data, so to them it makes some sense. But to you, the traveler trying to get to Mallow, it’s a useless sign.

How about the link “Useful Links?” Is that a very useful link? What are all the other links? Useless Links? And what about “Quick Links?” Are the other links Slow Links? And what about “Tools”? Is that helpful? When you go to an airline website are you looking for a tool or are you looking to book a flight?

It’s incredibly hard to create clear menus and links that are truly customer centric because there is an intense pressure to be organization-centric. We were trying to simplify the links in one website recently and an IT person became quite agitated. “We have to have a Tools section,” he said, “because that’s what we look after and we need that section so that we can have proper control over it.”

But if we have a Tools section, shouldn’t we also have a section called “Stuff,” or “Content” or “Information” or “Infinity and Beyond”?

The web team’s single greatest challenge is to truly think like and use the language of the customer. However, there is great pressure is to think like and use the language of the organization.

I do a lot of presentations. I have a presentation folder and inside that folder are names like “Microsoft” or “Cisco” or “HP”. This works for me because I’m preparing a Microsoft presentation and calling it “Microsoft” is logical from my point of view. However, how useful do you think it is if I send a copy of my presentation to Microsoft and it’s still named “Microsoft?” What I really need to do is call it something like “Gerry McGovern Presentation”.

Naming things based on your internal working structure is fine in certain cases. But when you want to make these things public you need to rethink how you organize and name them.

You’re a manager in a restaurant. It’s raining. A customer walks in and almost slips on the mat in front of the door. You’re very busy at this stage, but you make a mental note: “I must change that mat.” About 15 minutes later another customer comes in. She, too, almost slips on the mat. You rush up to her, apologize profusely and then change the mat.

People are slipping on our websites right now but, because we don’t see them slip, we don’t change the mat. I’m one of the biggest offenders. Over the years I have left content and applications on my websites that had problems that I was vaguely aware of, but they just didn’t seem important enough to warrant any action. Even when I became clearly aware of the issue I didn’t react with enough urgency.

Why was that? Why was I so complacent? I would like to think that if I was running a restaurant I would have apologized to the customer and changed the mat. Why don’t I do that when it comes down to managing a website? I think a core part of the problem is the lack of real feedback.

I’m not actually seeing the customer slip. I don’t actually see real people use my websites.

Customers are hugely impatient on the Web. When they slip, their first impulse is to hit the Back button. Jared Spool wrote an excellent article in 2009 called the “The $300 Million Button.” In it he explained how the removal of a registration button from a particular step in a purchase process resulted in a dramatic improvement in sales.

The Web team had created the registration button so as to make it easier and faster for regular customers to buy. But people absolutely hate registration. New customers felt they would be spammed if they registered. One potential customer summed up their feelings as follows: “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.”

The regular customers didn’t feel much happier. “45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10,” Jared wrote. “We also analyzed how many people requested passwords, to find out it reached about 160,000 per day.”

The Web is so important today. And yet many of the web teams I deal with are way down the management hierarchy. Intranet teams, in particular, tend to get negligible resources. That needs to change because the reality is that the Web is central to the present and future success of most organizations.

One of the ways we make that change happen is that we start developing much better feedback mechanisms for our websites. At a most basic level, we must find ways to regularly (weekly at minimum) observe our customers carry out top tasks on our websites. That’s how Jared Spool discovered there was a problem: by watching customers trying to buy.

According to Wikipedia, “Living things are systems that tend to respond to changes in their environment.” Let us embrace our customer environment. Let us observe and evolve. The rewards are very substantial.

The $300 Million Button
http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/?link=tips20101405_article

I once had a chat with a frustrated content management salesman. He believed in simplicity but had great difficulty selling it. “Customers may need simplicity but they always end up buying complexity. If we don’t have all these extra fancy features, they simply won’t buy.”

“Feature / function innovation has long been the mainstay of technology companies and the primary sort key of competition for many of us,” John Dragoon, Chief Marketing Officer for Novell, wrote as 2009 drew to a close. “And while many technology companies continue to innovate in this area at astounding rates, customers aren’t demanding the type of innovation they can’t consume, use or integrate into their business.

In 2009 Dragoon had noticed a new trend emerge. This involved “Innovation around the technology business model. Innovation around how technology is developed, sold, supported, integrated and used. Innovation that helps them manage the cost, complexity and risk inherent in their IT environment. Innovation that helps them leverage and extend what they have. Innovation that delivers a more compelling customer experience.”

This is indeed a new type of innovation and it will only grow with the rise of cloud computing and web services. When customers are buying software or other products as a service, they are much less likely to buy complexity. One of the reasons feature ‘arms races’ arose was because customers wanted to ‘future proof’ their purchases They might not need a particular feature right now but were worried that they might need it in 12 months time. Such a reason is not nearly as relevant once you’re buying a service; you can simply add to the service if you need to.

The world has become very cluttered and there is now a lot of value in simplifying things for the customer. I have often seen these simplicity tipping points. For example, blogging exploded when blogging software became so simple even a writer could use it. There are just so many opportunities out there today to make the customer’s life easier; and the rewards are very, very substantial.

Simplicity these days is often a faster and much more adaptive process. As Dom Sagolla, one of the creators of Twitter, states, “The simpler you make your idea, the easier it is… to understand the market and get it out there”.

In a rapidly changing world simple is more flexible, simple is more adaptive. However, larger organizations, in particular, find it very difficult to be adaptive. That’s one of the primary reasons why their websites go through big lumbering redesigns every couple of years. The organization can handle a redesign because that’s a project and they are structured to handle projects.

What the organization actually needs is a process of continuous improvement of top tasks. It needs to regularly review and remove. It is often the process of taking away that truly gets to the essence of simplicity. The new innovation is about taking away and stripping down. It is not about focusing on the lifecycle of the product, but rather focusing on the journey of the customer as they go about their daily tasks.

Innovation does not have to be some flashy new thing. It can also be some pared down old thing.

SIMS is a hugely popular simulation game. They wanted to improve sign up for optional registration for those who had purchased the game. At one stage they tested two sign up pages, one of which was 40 percent more successful. Now, 40 percent is a huge, massive difference.

I have shown hundreds of web professionals the two pages and asked them to choose what they thought was the most effective page. About 80 percent of people go for version B. This maps well to the voting that occurred on the site Which Test Won? (Well worth visiting if you’re interested in this sort of stuff.) The people who go to Which Test Won? tend to be in the business of managing websites.

The problem is that it was Version A that was actually 40 percent more successful. And this is far from a unique occurrence. To our eyes, Version B looks better, but the cold hard data shows that Version A massively outperforms it.

Our world is changing radically. The age of intuition, gut instinct, opinion, and natural creativity is on the wane. These are romantic notions and we love to believe in them, but when the data comes in they are being increasingly proven not just to be wrong, but horribly wrong.

The worst way to design a website is to get five smart people in a room drinking lattes and posting post-it notes. The longer you leave them the worse the website becomes. The next worst way is to get 10 customers in a room drinking lattes and giving their opinions on the new design. That model is really, truly broken.

The relentless march of cold, hard data can be seen everywhere. There is huge resistance to this evidence, but resistance is futile. Take poker. “Phil Hellmuth Jr. may be the world’s most decorated gambler,” TIME wrote in July 2010. “But last year it all began to fall apart. Hellmuth, 45, lost money and failed to make the final table of even one tournament for the first time in more than a decade.

“Was it his cards? No, Hellmuth says, pacing the floor of his suite at New York City’s Plaza Hotel. He blames the new breed of math nerd, those guys using a mountain of sortable data from the millions of hands played online to dominate the game. “The reason I won 11 bracelets is my ability to read opponents,” he explains. “These new guys are focused on the math. And they are changing everything.”

The world of human behaviour is much more observable and measurable today. Computers can crunch data like never before and we spend more and more time in the online world, a perfect place to be measured and observed.

I voted for Version B, the page that was much less successful. It’s scary. How can our opinions be so wrong so much of the time? But that’s not really the question. Rather, the question is: How can we use the data to make better decisions?

Time: Attack of The Math Brats

SIMS Online Game A/B Test

A major publisher has for the last 30 years published technical books that can be up to 200 pages long. When they started moving their books to the Web, they found that the same 20 pages in each book get the vast majority of visits. A huge number of pages never get read at all.

Another legal and medical publisher spent a long time trying to figure out what its customers’ top tasks were. One area in which they publish is family law. After much discussion it dawned on them that there are really only two tasks that matter: Getting married; Getting divorced. If you went to their current website these tasks would have been very hard to find amidst all the clutter.

Have you heard of website creep? The new website launches and the top tasks are fairly visible. But there is an immediate and relentless pressure from the tiny tasks within the organization. They all want to be on the homepage. They all want to be a news item or an ad. They want more links. And they will press and press the web team to give them these things.

Little by little the tiny tasks clutter the homepage, the other major pages, the navigation and the search. And of course once these tiny tasks are published there is absolutely no incentive to review or remove them. Thus as the website gets old it gets worse. What is the classic solution? A redesign.

A classic web redesign is like taking a raving alcoholic and sending them to rehab for a month. (Giving a website to a marketer or communicator is like giving a pub to an alcoholic.) They come out looking clean and redesigned. However, the underlying problems have not been addressed so six months later you’re back in the same mess.

We have to find a way to keep the tiny tasks at bay. I remember talking years ago to an executive from the US Environmental Protection Agency. “Our top tasks such as Clean Air and Water, we often don’t have enough web resources for,” he said. “But the smaller programs and particularly the programs we want to kill, well they’re publishing like hell.”

Let’s say there was a program called “Saving Badgers in Alabama.” It worked. In fact, there are now too many badgers in Alabama. But the team responsible is avidly publishing lots of cute pictures of baby badgers. The tiny tasks know they’re tiny and they will fight like hell.

We need to show how the tiny tasks lead to:
Poor search results by adding more and more pages to index
Confusing menus and links adding more and more links
Cluttered layout by adding more elements to the homepage and other key pages
Out of date information because there’s simply too many pages

The tiny tasks reduce customer satisfaction, sales, productivity, efficiency. They negatively impact every metric that really matters. The top task is the elephant in the room. The tiny tasks are the 800 mice in the room.

I was recently testing some website tasks with a customer. At the end of the tests I asked him if he had any observations. He said he was impressed by the way this organization was showing a real willingness to observe and respond to its customers’ needs.

Getting test participants, while never simple, is far from impossible. Once customers know that the purpose of what you are doing is to make their lives easier, they almost always respond well. Many may not have the time or inclination to do the tests, but they will recognize your efforts.

On a recent trip to Sweden I asked my colleagues Fredrik Wackå and Martin Vikesland why they thought IKEA was so successful. “They never make the customer feel that they’re the problem,” Fredrik replied. “It’s so easy to return things,” Martin stated. “You don’t need a receipt or anything.”

There are many great companies out there who are truly customer centric. Recently, I had a great experience with Citrix, makers of GoToMeeting. I had a problem downloading the latest version of their software. The support was absolutely superb. It was a difficult problem to solve and it took a while. Never once did the support person try to hurry things. Never once did they try to pass the blame on by implying that it was somehow my fault.

We use GoToMeeting a lot for remote testing. For testing websites, remote testing is cheaper, faster and better than traditional lab-based testing. It’s revolutionizing testing and will ensure that testing and general customer observation will become central to the web manager’s job.

The Web is self service and if you’re a manager in IKEA, Starbucks, Wal-Mart or McDonald’s you will manage by being around your customers; by observing them and continuously improving based on those observations.

Remote testing websites is better than lab-based testing because it is less disruptive. The classic problem with any test or experiment is that the experiment itself impacts the subject’s behavior. You bring someone into a lab where there’s cameras and lights and people watching and you ask them to use a computer that is not their own and then tell them to “just act natural.” With remote testing it’s their own computer and you’re only there in voice. It’s much, much better.

What we will find is an explosion in testing and observation. It will become central to how web teams work. The day will be planned based on the results of yesterday’s test results. The Web will be used for this constant interaction with customers. A continuous process of incremental improvements and fine tuning will occur.

This strategy will result in better websites that are simpler and a better fit what the customers actually want. The Web customer demands that we move beyond old school PR statements like: “we listen,” “we care”, “it’s simple.” By actually using the Web to listen, observe, respond and adapt you can show that you care by creating simpler websites.

Because remember: as soon as you say “it’s simple” then it’s not. Because if it actually was simple, the customer could just do it.

I was at dinner with some friends when one of them said:
“Did you see the Google homepage today? They’ve put a background image on it!” Everyone looked on in disbelief. “Look, I’ll show you,” and he loaded Google on his iPhone. “Oh! It’s not there now.” There was a sigh of relief.

As I walked home I was worried. Google is supposed to test everything, and maybe they were about to introduce a background because they had found that that’s what customers actually wanted. And if that was the case then it would undermine a lot of the ideas I had developed over the years.

I thought these ideas were based on understanding what people actually do on the Web; not what they say they do in focus groups. Not what they think they do. What they actually do.

The core of what I had learned was that people are highly impatient and very, very task-focused. They want clarity, not persuasion. They often respond negatively to old school marketing hero shots and fluffy, warm, meaningless language.

Google is the perfect service for this new customer. We love Google because it is unashamedly a search engine. It has come across as having this relentless focus on helping us find exactly what we need as quickly and easily as possible.

I remember the excitement when Google launched. The other search engines were getting more and more cluttered and filled with graphic ads. Rumors were circulating that these search engines were selling placements in the actual search results.

Google changed all that. It put the customer first, not the advertiser. Even as it rapidly expanded its services it kept its homepage really simple. There must have been intense pressure from these new services to get on the homepage. But most of the time Google resisted.

One of the reasons Google seemingly introduced this new background was because of “Bing envy.” Bing (the Microsoft search engine) has a big colorful background. Well, that’s one of the reasons I don’t use Bing. I need to search. I don’t need distractions. To me, Bing doesn’t come across as serious about search. It feels like a brochure more than a search engine.

There was an immediate backlash on the Web to the Google background. Within no time “remove Google background” became a top 10 search in Google. (Consider how many millions of searches it requires to get into the top 10.)

Twitter went wild with tweets like: “BLOODY GOOGLE! Is there a way to NOT have a blooming background picture?!,” one tweet said. “Glad I’m not the only one who hates the ridiculous Google Background Image. I’m sick of having stuff thrust on me like this,” said another.

Google claimed this was a 24 hour experiment. It stopped it in less than 10 hours and basically apologized. At least Google still listens and responds to its customers. I use Google all the time but the day it stops simplifying my life is the day I’ll move.

Some years ago, HSBC Hong Kong had what they thought was a reasonably straightforward mortgage inquiry form. It had 17 fields requesting:
• Property information (address, price)
• Applicant information (name, occupation)
• Loan information (amount, repayment period, etc.)

They were getting 2 enquiries a week through the form. They felt that they could do better. They turned to Brett King, a friend of mine, who has just published an excellent book called Bank 2.0. Brett and his team convinced them to radically simplify the form.

They reduced the number of fields from 17 to 3: Name, Email and Phone number. The simplification process met some resistance. People said that the old form gathered data that integrated well into the internal system. People felt that the new form would encourage frivolous enquiries from the likes of Donald Duck and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

They finally launched the new form. There was no publicity or special promotion, so the basic number of visitors to the mortgage pages remained the same. However, enquires jumped from 2 per week to 180 per week. And yes, they did indeed get mortgage requests from Arnie. Despite such frivolous enquires, new mortgage business directly connected with the new, simpler online form reached $20 million in the first quarter after its release. With the old form they were doing less than $1 million a quarter.

The HSBC team then thought they should tackle travel insurance. 2% of travel insurance applications at this time were coming through the web channel; they wanted to double that. So they looked at the application form. It took just 2 weeks to redesign the website into a single 1-page application form. It took 4 months to get the compliance and legal department to sign off on the change, because they didn’t like the simple approach – it lacked the detail they were used to. So how did that go? HSBC now receives more than 75% of their applications for travel insurance online.

The essential challenge of the Web is to become customer-centric. To truly succeed on the Web the organization must shape itself around the customer. This is very difficult for any organization to do because at heart all organizations are tribes. And the one thing a tribe does not like to do is shape itself around the stranger, the outsider.

The customer is a stranger, an outsider, and the customer is more in charge on the Web than the organization is. This is the essential shift in power and control that organizations must embrace if they are to thrive on the Web. The customer isn’t just king anymore. The customer is dictator. Impatient and always in a hurry.

If you simplify things for the customer then they will respond positively. That’s easier said than done because simplifying for the customer requires creating extra complexity for the organization. Nobody likes to have their job made more complex. What is even more problematic is when something you do to make life easier for your customers makes life harder for one of your colleagues. That makes you unpopular within the tribe.

I once overheard a Starbucks regional manager berate a server. Seemingly the server was handing out lattes that weren’t fully foamed up to the top. The manager pointed out that people paid a lot for their lattes and expected them to be perfect every time.
“Why did you not hand it back and request that it be properly filled up,” the manager asked? “Did you think that you would become unpopular with your colleagues? Always, always remember, the customer is out there, outside the counter, not in here, inside the counter.”