A Company is “Born”

It was a great night. A dream come true, really. Now that I’ve had a few days to reflect on it, the best way I can describe what happened on Friday night is to compare it to the birth of a child. OK, I know it sounds weird, but stick with me.

201 Fayette Street, Second Floor, Conshohocken PA

Last September we started Think Brownstone. Carl and I had a vision, some basic principles, and a few really great clients. Yet with just a placeholder web page, fake business cards and no real office space, Brownstone was still somewhat under wraps, hidden from view.

Collect all nine colors

Over the last 12 months our company developed. Several incredible people joined our team. We defined our brand with a logo and website. Business cards were printed. An office space was transformed into a Think Space. A date was set, invitations were mailed and anticipation grew.

Lots of great friends

Then on Friday November 7th, 2008, Think Brownstone was introduced to the world. A company was “born”. Thanks so much for coming out and making our First Anniversary Celebration and Open House truly a night to remember. Even more than that, thank you all for your support, passion and trust through the years. We are going to make you proud.

Think Space

Visit our Flickr photostream for more photos from the Open House (thanks Steve!).

TV News Gets It: The Future of Presentations

Don’t worry, this is not a political entry. For all of you who have ever made a presentation with PowerPoint using 60 slides riddled with bullets: We want you to watch this short clip from Meet the Press. This should be the future of business presentations:

See what’s going on here? This is an interactive presentation tool. It is not just ten bullets on a slide in 14-point text. This allows the presenter to do several things:

1. Get his initial point across
2. Demonstrate variations on his point
3. Not just answer questions, but SHOW the answer to questions
4. Involve his audience by letting them play “what if”

Think about this the next time you put together a presentation. We’re all guilty of putting our audiences to sleep with PowerPoint, it’s about time we started devising ways to involve our audiences.

You don’t need an expensive touch screen either. I remember staying up late during the 2000 election because I wanted to go to sleep knowing who our next president was going to be. The late, great Tim Russert got it, he sat at the news desk with a small white board and sketched out every possible scenario. A WHITE BOARD!

Russert and his famous mini-white board

MLB Store Doesn’t Get It: Costs My Wife $6, Me One Cap and Delays World Series

A while ago, my loving wife heard me mutter, “All I want is an old-school Phillies cap, from the late 70’s, where the P had a baseball in it.”  She went on the prowl and found one on the MLB shopping site, ordering one to arrive just in time for game 3 of the World Series. It was quite a surprise, but there was one hitch - they shipped a size small. So we both jumped on line and ordered a replacement for overnight delivery hoping I could cover my head for at least games 4 or 5. Of course, shipping was late and the Phils had to battle the Rays in the rain. Although they were winning most of the game, the Rays tied the score right before the rain delay - most likely because I wasn’t wearing my new old-school cap.

The new cap arrived yesterday, but when I opened it - it was not what we thought we had ordered. When my wife called to complain and ask for the overnight shipping money to be returned, customer service told her, “No Ma’am, that’s what you ordered. If you want to return it, you’ll be refunded the cost of the hat minus $6 for the return shipping. I’m sorry I can’t credit you the return fee.” There are four reasons why this is so wrong:

Note the absence of a size selector pull-down menu

ISSUE #1: POOR DESIGN OF SIZE SELECTOR

The MLB store ran out of all sizes except small. So, rather than give you a size pull down that only says “Small” they replace the size selector with straight text that says “Small.” My wife didn’t see that for the first order and thought the hat was adjustable. We’re willing to accept that mistake.

Visually similar "You May Also Like" items cause confusion

ISSUE #2: POOR DESIGN OF SHOPPING CART

The second time we ordered, we noticed that the cap was size small, but in the margin on the right was an image of the cap. The screen grab above shows a different cap, but the cap that landed in there before was very similar to the cap I wanted. THAT cap had a size selector - so we just thought you chose sizes in your shopping cart. Sure it’s odd, but this is MLB, their key strength isn’t designing shopping carts. When we selected the size and saw two similar caps in our shopping cart, we simply deleted the small size.

ISSUE #3: CUSTOMER SERVICE HAS NO AUTHORITY

Once we figured out what caused the mistake, we didn’t want a free cap, we just didn’t want to pay a $6 return fee again for their poor site design. The customer service rep insisted it was our fault, not because he’s a jerk, but because he has no authority to please the customer. Just a note to all the online merchants out there: things will happen. You want loyal customers. If you fear giving authority to customer service reps, you may be in the wrong business. Don’t hogtie all of your CSRs because one of them may be dumb enough to steal from you. There are better ways to prevent employee theft than keeping them from doing their jobs.

ISSUE #4: GAME 5 WAS DELAYED FOR TWO DAYS BECAUSE OF RAIN

This wouldn’t have happened if I had my Phillies cap on.

Apple Gets It - It’s the Little Things

I’m not always a huge fan of Apple’s Mail client, but for a series of reasons that can be rolled up into the master excuse of “Sometimes Phil is kinda lazy,” I use it.

I was a huge Mac fan back when a color 8″ monitor caused crowds to gather and the folks in the university computer lab I ran would wait in line to use the Mac II with the 20Mb hard drive. But then I joined the corporate world and the PC became my friend.

We’ve made the welcome decision to standardize everyone at Think Brownstone to Macs. It’s been a learning experience (yes, there are things you need to learn how to use on a Mac) but it’s also been like a reunion with a long lost friend. The kind of friend that brings you small gifts you’d never think of buying for yourself, but once you get it, you never put it down…

The other day, I emailed an old friend asking for his mailing address. When I hovered over it to copy/paste it into my address book, I saw this:

Just what I always wanted!

It even found matches between the content of the email and any fields in my address book and suggested existing contacts to add the address… phone number… email address to.

You see, it’s smart enough to recognize patterns… phone numbers, emails, addresses… and it knows that hovering over it is usually the precursor to the acts of highlight, copy, open address book, paste, rearrange into correct fields (zip, area code, etc.). So my new Mac has just saved me a frustrating series of clicks, drags and edits that I’ve done a thousand times before. I’m oh-so-happy.

I know, I know, you lifetime Mac users are snickering at me… “Silly PC Phil, Macs are our friends.” You’re right, this is very friendly. It kills me because a computer is just a tool. There’s no reason that any computer I touch can give me little bouts of joy like this… It shouldn’t be specific to a Mac - but it is… I’m just grateful it’s there.

fivethirtyeight.com - Sometimes Gets It, Sometimes Doesn’t

It happens every two years. During a Senatorial or Presidential election cycle, I get a little obsessed and I end up having to check in on the pulse of the nation way too regularly. Every time this happens to me, I find a few web sites that feed my need for political crack. This time, it’s FiveThirtyEight.com. And it’s not just me: for a blog launched in March 2008 to be in Blogpulse’s top 10 linked to blogs is quite an achievement.

FiveThirtyEight.com is run by Nate Silver, a baseball statistician best known for developing a system to forecast the performance of baseball players. The power of this site is not so much the blog entries, but the collection of charts and graphs displayed on the edges of the site. You see, Nate has a method for compiling all of the political polls into a model and predicting the elections if they were held today. This isn’t as simple as averaging a bunch of numbers. For instance, we learned in 2000 that the electoral college can be more important than the popular vote. We also know that some polling agencies are more or less reliable than others.

To account for all of this, Nate weighs each poll based on its past performance vs actual results. After that, it gets much more complicated. Those of you into predictive modelling porn may want to look here - just scroll down to “Process Overview” and keep reading.

Nate has a clear bias in his blog entries, but he goes to great lengths to keep the stats balanced. It’s clear when it comes to handling data and predictive analysis that Nate Gets It. But when it comes to visuals, sometimes Nate Gets It, sometimes he Doesn’t Get It.

I routinely check four things on the site: the Electoral Vote pie chart, the Win Percentage pie chart, the Obama vs. McCain Projection Map, and his “Today’s Polls” posting. Sometimes I venture deeper and try to pretend some of the more complex stuff makes sense to me.  For instance, I really want to know what everything in this chart means:

what do the two red bars mean?

The primary message of this chart is clear: Democrats are going to dominate the Senate this year. Where I get confused is the zebra striping on the chart combined with the two red lines. On all of his other charts Red = Republican and Blue = Democrat, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what he intended here. The first red bar seems to say that’s where there is less than 100% chance, but why the other red bar at 25%? Wouldn’t it make more sense to highlight the part where the first likelihood is below 50%? Or maybe I just don’t understand the significance of the two red bars.

Then there’s this chart, which is so important that it sits right under the projection map:

Blue spikes = Happy Dems... I guess

All the words make sense, but I feel like I’m missing something. This chart is important to statisticians, but I feel like a child looking at it saying, “More blue simulations = happy dems… I guess.”

FiveThirtyEight’s charts are simple and get the point across, so this isn’t a classic case of what Tufte calls chartjunk. I may also not be the typical audience for the site. Clearly charts like this are important to the site, and I applaud Nate for displaying things visually. I’d love to buy him a copy of this. I think he’s too busy right now to read it.

What I would LOVE is a clickthrough for each chart with a short primer on what the chart is telling me, where the numbers come from and what the significance is. Don’t change your charts, Nate - just let novice statistics geeks like me in on the hard stuff.

US Airways Doesn’t Get It

OK so, I’m quite sure we’ve all had our share of complaints with airlines – and this isn’t your typical “they lost my luggage/my flight was canceled/the service rep was so rude” rant. That would be like shooting fish in a barrel, and we know that the user experience on that end leaves a lot to be desired. But there is another way that US Airways (in particular) doesn’t get it, and it has to do with the bone-chilling process of trying to book award travel with frequent flyer miles.

Most people who have tried to book awards travel with US Airways will tell you that throughout the process, you get the feeling like they don’t really want you to succeed. In response to that, some have said to me “well, of course they don’t – why would they want you to be able to fly for free?” and my response to that is, if that were true (and I sincerely hope it’s not true, though I have my suspicions), they shouldn’t have the program in the first place. So, giving them the benefit of the doubt, it should concern them that we feel that way – that we feel like we’ve faked them out if we actually manage to book a flight. Not good.

Part of this comes from the way that the Dividend Miles section of their website is set up.

ISSUE #1 - POOR INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE/LINK STRUCTURE

Now, you can pretty easily find out how many miles you’ve earned by clicking “My Account” under “Dividend Miles”, and you can book travel by clicking “Book Award Travel”. Pretty straightforward. Finding out how many miles you’ll need to score a trip is a bit more difficult – that is under ”Use Miles”. Not only did that take me several minutes to find, but it wasn’t a result of a logical thought process, like “based on the title of this choice, I have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to get when I click it.” It was instead a result of thinking “well, what I’m looking for so far hasn’t been anywhere I’d expect it to be, and since there is no other choice that makes sense, I might as well start clicking them all until I stumble upon it.” That, for starters, made me feel like US Airways didn’t really want to reward me. They wanted me to get frustrated and give up.

ISSUE #2 - SMART CLICKS vs. LESS CLICKS; CONFUSING NAVIGATIONAL REDUNDANCY

I realize there are more things you can do with miles than just book award travel, but I bet I know what happened there. “Book Award Travel” is a logical subset of “Use Miles”. Instead of making “Use Miles” the first choice, someone said “well, the most common thing that people want to do is book award travel, so let’s bubble that one up to the first selection under Dividend Miles”, even though it also exists under “Use Miles.” Two points about this kind of thinking: first, the old adage of “how many clicks does it take to do XYZ” starts to fall apart when you’ve got really complicated sites with a lot of functionality on them. Everyone wants their function “ONE CLICK AWAY!”, which results in a lot of mismatched things being moved to higher levels in the hierarchy. Second, this results in the kind of navigational redundancy that you don’t want – the kind that confuses people. See, “Book Award Travel” was one click away, but by the time I figured out how many miles I had and refreshed myself about how many miles you need (and a few other things), I had spent so many more clicks than if those things had just been organized intuitively. It’s not about how many clicks - it’s about smart clicks. I’m fine with a few more clicks if I’m making logical progress – then it’s mindless; it’s not work. Get Carl White talking about that subject at some point – it’s a huge pet peeve of his.

ISSUE #3 - CHANGING THE RULES WITHOUT TELLING US

But this is the one that kills me, and it’s really more about marketing and perception than anything else. Back when I was attempting to book my flights, the award chart (when I finally found the bugger) said that coach tickets were 25,000 miles for a round trip ticket excluding holidays, etc. That’s all it said. I was as far off-season as you could get, and every single combination of flights I punched in said that I’d need 50,000 miles. I called customer service and got a few different people, all of whom had different answers ranging from “that must be a mistake on the website, it’ll only take 25,000 when you book it” to “actually, that means 25,000 miles each way, even though it doesn’t say it” – so not only was the policy not communicated to customers, it wasn’t even communicated properly to customer service.

Let’s revisit that one statement, however – “actually, it’s 25,000 miles each way.” I had booked award travel before, and that was not the case. The website wasn’t telling me this was now the case. The metaphor for how I felt was this: it takes a LONG time to amass enough mileage to earn a flight…this was the equivalent of running a marathon, thinking you’re at the end of the race, and someone happily tells you “congrats, you’re half way!”

ACKNOWLEDGE IT, AND YOU OWN IT - HIDE IT, AND YOU’VE BLOWN IT

What is my point? Well, part of me just wants the cathartic release of blogging about this publicly. But the other part walked away with this: this episode happened right when gas prices were exploding and we all started feeling it, big-time. The fact that US Airways had changed their policy behind the scenes and not clearly communicated it made me angry for a few reasons, but probably the biggest was that I felt insulted – I felt like they thought I was too stupid to understand this simple equation: higher cost of fuel = higher cost of flying. Instead of owning it, and issuing a kindly and professional “we’re in this together” statement saying that the rising price of fuel that was affecting us all meant there would have to be some policy changes, there was silence – and what felt to me like an attempt to fool me into thinking that tickets could readily be had for 25,000 miles (turns out that those elusive fares are now called “mileage-savers”) , which was, and still is, misleading at best. So instead of being mad at the situation (whatever its cause), and being mad ALONG WITH the airline, I was simply mad AT them.

The lesson: always err on the side of treating your customers as intelligent human beings who can connect the dots. You can choose to communicate early and openly, or take the risk of being seen as dishonest and like you’re hiding something. And if you ARE hiding something…well, what goes around comes around, my friend.

AFTERMATH - A FEW IMPROVEMENTS

After this episode, I promptly canceled my US Airways mileage card (I now have an “anytime miles” card that is airline-independent…they don’t even know when I’m booking award travel! Tee hee!). However, I revisited the US Airways site for booking award travel before writing this to see if it had been updated in any way. Although the travel chart still doesn’t define what a “mileage-saver” is, when you try to book dates there is now a color-coded key telling you which dates are mileage-savers (25,000 miles round-trip), which are standard (50,000 miles) and which are blackout dates – a vast improvement from last time, when there was no explanation as to what those things even meant, let along indicators on the calendar. Picking dates was kind of like pin the tail on the donkey, but not nearly as fun.

For those who are curious:

Blackout Dates = any date within two weeks of something remotely interesting happening in the city you’d like to visit
Standard Dates = any other date that would be somewhat convenient to fly on
Mileage-Savers = a small handful of dates, always in the middle of the week, that would require taking a heap of days off from work to take advantage of (sucker!)

EPILOGUE

I still think the fact that roping people in by saying “25,000 miles for a round trip ticket!”, and then making it more difficult than panning for gold to find dates that apply, is dishonest. Another lesson: make people feel like they’re being abused or lied to, and they’re not going to like you very much. When people don’t like you very much, they will go elsewhere whenever they can.

P.S. We finally did book a flight - originally we were trying to fly to Santa Fe, but kept picking other cities until we found one that had a mileage saver opportunity…never again!

TED Gets It

Quick - think of someone remarkable in technology, entertainment or design. Go here. See if they spoke at TED. Chances are, they have.

Birthday idea: send me to TED

Since 1984, TED has been promoting good ideas and inspiring others. I found TED when zefrank mentioned he’d be speaking there.

If you find yourself distracted by the site for more than ten minutes, subscribe to their blog, follow them on Twitter. Then, once you’re fully immersed, try to reverse the spinning lady.

Alcatraz Island Gets It

Earlier in the year, my wife and I visited San Francisco for her birthday. We were relieved when we arrived, since the trip came on the heels of a shockingly counter intuitive experience attempting to book award travel on US Airways. At the time, they REALLY didn’t get it, although I see that they’ve made some progress since. I’m planning a separate post about that, and hope to get to it soon - so I won’t elaborate here.

Anyway, on to San Fran. One of the things I wasn’t able to do the last time I was there, which everyone always said was essential, was take the Alcatraz Island tour. Due to a disconnect between where our Frommer’s guide said to catch the ferry and where it actually was (every trip we go on with one of those books, we always find ourselves in at least one or two jams based on incorrect information), the day started off a bit rocky. After a nice jog over to the correct pier, we stood in line for the ferry and it was then, sweaty and panting, that we started to look around and get concerned.

The seagull didn't have to ride the ferry

If you’ve ever done the trip, you know that you need to get tickets in advance - they’re rarely available for walk-ons (we had purchased them a few days before over the phone - and even that is only possible in the “off-season”). Boats leave approximately every half hour for the duration of the day, and they are PACKED with people. For someone who is not a fan of big crowds (well, being in them, anyway), I watched our boat fill up to the gills and thought about all of the other boats that were over there already… and all of the boats that would arrive after us… I wasn’t optimistic about the impending experience on that tiny island (with a good portion of it not even accessible to visitors). We decided to suck it up and hope for the best.

This is where it gets good. When we arrived, there was a large group waiting in line to take our ferry back to the mainland. Although the process for loading and unloading passengers was orderly and efficient, I still didn’t have a lot of hope for what awaited us inside the prison. When you actually get inside, you wait on a single-file line to get your audio tour. This sounds worse than it is; you wind through exhibits with plenty to look at and can grab some great introductory reading material, so it goes by pretty quickly even though there are a lot of people moving through. Also, I’ve been to a lot of museums abroad and have always been relieved to see audio tours and directions in English - I’ve thought about how rare it is to see multilingual accommodations in the U.S., and thought that the amount of supported languages on the signage and in the audio tours was downright neighborly.

Now, the audio tour is not “optional” - you don’t have to pay extra for it (I have always felt that these things should be included in the price of admission - it’s unfair to make patrons choose whether or not they want to spend the money for additional information and context…the instructional designer in me just cringes at that). You also don’t have to use it, but when you look around, everyone who is seems to be enthralled and knows exactly where they’re going, so that’s a strong incentive. Without it, the experience would be seriously diminished.

First off, the audio tour is extremely well done - real commentary by former prisoners and guards, and kept to nice bite-size chunks that aren’t too high-level or so detailed that you’re thinking “oh, come ON…” (quite the opposite of the audio tour at St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague). But here’s where it gets brilliant. Whoever designed the tour put a LOT of thought into it, in terms of how the audio would guide users through the prison and be timed perfectly to give them a personal experience while also being able to maximize the amount of people that could be there at a given time. It’s fairly linear but it is still user driven - you can start/stop it when you choose and replay certain sections if you like. When you’re finished you really feel you’ve “done it” all, and from there you can explore on your own although you don’t feel like you need to see anything else indoors - at that point it is more about exploring the rest of the island on your own. In contrast, at St. Vitus I didn’t know where to go next, had no concept of how long it would take me to be able to see “it all”, kept running into people as they milled about willy-nilly, and had to wade through a lot of superfluous detail to find out what I was actually looking at most of the time.

Even though there were literally many hundreds of other people on the island with us, it never felt like a crowd because movement was deftly facilitated by the tour. Again, I’m not suggesting that it was a passive, zombie-like experience - we moved around and past some people, skipped some things, and some people skipped past us. So, you could be as constructivist as you wanted to if you were so inclined, but if you wanted some structure and direction (which we were grateful for), it was there - and most people tended to avail themselves of it. As a result, even though I figured there was going to be an inevitable crush of people at some point along the way, when we got to the exercise yard, we were able to be out there all by ourselves - the picture below proves it…I was really stunned.

Hundreds of people there, but we still got this photo

This experience was no accident. It was obviously very carefully designed, and I was grateful for the attention to detail and the smart planning that went into it. The fact that we were able to enjoy a quiet contemplative walk around the perimeter of the island after the guided tour amazed me even more.

When we got back to Philadelphia, we went to check out Eastern State Penitentiary – which also has a great, and similar, audio tour (narrated by Steve Buscemi, no less). Eastern State is a more solemn and introspective tour when you’re there (unless it’s around Halloween)…and sometimes that is indeed what you want. I’m not sure that I would have wanted this type of structure in the audio tour at the Barnes Foundation Gallery. But for the sheer volume they’re able to move and keep the experience intact, Alcatraz gets a gold star.

Apple Doesn’t Always Get It

Apple almost always Gets It. Design is integral to their brand and important to their customer base. But my recent experiences at the Apple store have demonstrated to me that even the mighty can slip.

We all know your users will always enter into an interaction with expectations for how things work. These expectations are based on conventions (good or bad) that your users have been conditioned to accept.

As a retail store consumer, when I walk into a store I feel compelled to execute my transaction at the counter with an object resembling a cash register. At an Apple store, you can go to anyone in a Genius t-shirt to complete your purchase. This is a great idea. Why shouldn’t I be able buy stuff from the folks on the floor? They’re smart enough to teach me how to set up my wireless network, they should be able to run my credit card through their nifty wireless devices. It’s Floor Clerk 2.0. Great idea, but bad execution…

Still looking for a good case

You see, nobody told me I could buy things from FC2.0. I went to the things that look like cash registers. For ten minutes, I stood in a huge line of frustrated customers at the counter until FC2.0 walked up to the line and told us we could buy stuff from any of the t-shirt clad FC2.0’s walking around the store. I left the line, found the closest FC2.0, and walked out in three minutes flat with my booty: a black and funky iPhone case that expressed my unique style and personality. Read more »

Making Things Simple

Seth Godin observes how people communicate and turns them into simple rules of marketing:

“If you want people to embrace your version of the future, talk about it like it’s right around the corner, not on another planet.” - Seth Godin permalink