We’re excited to let you know that in the next few weeks we’re going to be releasing a product. We’re not going to reveal what it is yet but we wanted to discuss some of the challenges we’ve had getting it out.

We have always discussed building something for ourselves. We had attempted to build off our PVR report and create PVR software but abandoned the project when our client work overtook us.

In December we came up with an idea for a Web based product. We began to design it and look for some programmers to help code it.

Since this is what we do for a living we thought it would be a trivial matter to design and build a site for ourselves. Here is what we have learned:

1) Things don’t get done in “spare time”… doesn’t happen. And “making time” is just something people say. Unless you can slow the rotation of the earth you can’t make time.

2) You need to feel the pain. We were very busy with client work in the beginning of the year and every time we sat down to work on our project it would get pushed for the business. We learned that an incumbent business model will always take precedence over a new business model. As a result our heart just wasn’t in the fight.

To do it properly, we needed to reduce our workload by half. This would have meant less revenue. With payroll looming you become pretty motivated. We would have finished in a fraction of the time because failure would not be an option.

3) Building a product would seem like a natural thing for a company like us but it wasn’t a natural act. We are built to service clients and as a result turning that inward wasn’t easy for us. It is the reason our Web site hasn’t changed in 3 years. Or as the saying goes, “the cobbler’s children have no shoes.”

Having been through this process once we have learned a lot about ourselves as a company and the product development process.

Stay tuned for our launch announcement.

 

For the past few years many agencies and clients have struggled with equating their online and offline activities to return on investment. The natural inclination in a business is to try and equate specific value to specific executions. How much did that banner ad return to the business? Will redesigning our site be worth the money?

While the intent of these questions is great, often they are unanswerable or destined for disappointing results.

At Core 77’s Design 2.0 conference in New York, Jeneanne Rae of Peer Insight presented a set of 10 criteria to evaluate companies that delivered excellent customer experience (cX). Peer Insight created a portfolio of companies that met these criteria (e.g. Starwood Hotels, Apple, Target, Progressive Insurance). They plotted a $5,000 investment in these companies and compared the portfolio’s performance versus the S&P 500. The cX portfolio outperformed the S&P(4x revenue growth and 2x profit growth). This is backed up by another study by the Design Council in the UK that found:

“The share prices of companies which invest in design performed up to three times better than the FTSE 100 Index over nearly two years in the run-up to December 2004.”

ROI of user experience or customer experience is a macro business issue, not a micro one. As a customer you are influenced by many aspects of your communication or interactions with a brand. Trying to determine ROI based on specific tactics may cause you to lose the forest for the trees.

Lately, when we are speaking at conferences or talking to clients we find ourselves saying “We couldn’t do this 5 years ago”. Often it’s in reference to a way of working or a way of development that has been enabled by technologies that have come into existence or matured in the past 5 years.

About 5 years ago (pre Teehan+Lax) we worked on a site that was effectively a blog. Blogging software didn’t exist at that time so in order to build this site it had to be coded from scratch. It took about 50 people almost a year to develop it. Today we could build the same site in about 3 weeks with 4 people using WordPress or some other blogging tool.

Recognizing that there are new ways to work and new ways to create is essential in today’s market. In Web 1.0 we viewed site development like software development; a massive scoping effort followed by requirements, followed by many months of development and testing followed by release. Lather, rinse, repeat.

In today’s digital environment users aren’t prepared to wait months for new functions. Microsoft is learning this the hard way, taking 7 years to release their new OS Vista. Sites like Flickr are actually updating code every 30 minutes. We’ve moved from software version numbers to timestamps.

Ask yourself, what has changed in the past 5 years? What can I do today that I couldn’t do 5 years ago? How has development changed? How has the Internet changed? How have my users changed?

Happy New Year. It’s always fun at the beginning of the year to try and predict what the coming year will bring. Here are a few predictions of what we think will happen in 2006.

1) Web 2.0 will become officially misunderstood and overused as a term in the marketing community.

2) Flash will become an application used primarily for video while Rich Internet Applications will favour Ajax methods for development.

3) 1024×768 designs. 800×600 is dead. Let’s go big.

4) Big fonts and headlines to go with higher resolutions.

5) As technology continues to commoditize, value moves up the stack away from hardware and software. User experience and presentation become more important than ever.

6) People have predicted that third screen apps are going to take off for almost 7 years. With no standards and closed systems it still doesn’t seem likely this year we will see huge breakthroughs. More sites will support mobile browsers including devices like PSPs in 2006 but wide spread adoption won’t happen until EVDO and 3G take hold. It is worth noting that Google and Yahoo! have just released some interesting apps.

7) Google will release a travel search product and integrate Dodgeball into a good mobile app. But they will also stumble in 2006 releasing some products that make you say, so what, like Google Base and Google Reader.

8) Apple will release a home media centre. However it will not have any ability to record television like TiVO. You will buy TV and movies from the iTunes Music Store on an à la carte basis. It will be more convenient than cable/satellite but it will be much more expensive.

9) In-car systems will become hot towards the end of 2006. Satellite radio and iPod integration will allow for new content and functionality distribution to the car. However, the car industry will drag its feet, so getting factory installed systems will push into, at least, 2007.

10) Online sales will continue to set records but new e-commerce players will not come from large offline retailers but from many small players. While cheap e-commerce enablement has been around for several years, 2006 will see more niche e-commerce sites like Etsy appearing.

For our last email of the year we wanted to take a moment and reflect on 2005. It has been an interesting year. There is an energy this year that hasn’t been present in the industry since, well, the boom. We were joking earlier in the year that “the bubble is back.”

We thought we would take a moment and look at 3 trends that defined the digital channel in 2005.

Web 2.0
Obviously the big buzzword of 2005, Web 2.0 is a misunderstood but powerful trend. Tim O’Reilly has done the most thinking on the subject and his conference created the term. His definition is required reading to understand what Web 2.0 actually is.

Folksonomy
Clay Shirky popularized this word to describe collaborative organization schemes (read the article, listen to the MP3). Sites like Flickr and Del.icio.us take advantage of tags to mark up and organize content. Look for more of the user defined Web in 2006.

RSS
RSS really came into its own in 2005. 2 years ago I had email and instant messenger open all the time. My RSS reader has joined the party. The best way to keep track of sites since PointCast (like we said, the bubble is back!).
In our January newsletter we’ll take a look at 6 things to focus on in 2006. Happy Holidays.

When working on client projects you allow for a series of review and revision cycles. The idea is to give clients and agencies a controlled way to work through design issues while controlling scope.

We are working on a project right now that is going through this but we are discovering that with each successive review the user experience is not getting better, if anything it’s getting worse.

We realized that this is true with almost every project. More reviews is detrimental to quality, time and budget. But why does the most productive feedback come from the first review?

One of the conclusions of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink is that we make very good decisions in an instant. As a society we believe that logical, process driven, thought is better than instinctual decisions. We don’t trust our “gut” especially in a group business situation where decisions need to be rationally supported. But, often our first reaction or decisions are far better than ones we agonize over.

We become profoundly worse decision makers the more we think about it. Whether you call it losing the forest for the trees or analysis paralysis, reviewing things 4 or 5 times just makes the project longer, more expensive and produces a worse product.

We also become worse decision makers the more information we introduce into the process. It seems counter intuitive but we make better decisions with less information.

What if…
1) Projects only had one review and revision per major deliverable.
2) In reviews, changes could be made but at the end of the review the change list could not have more feature additions than feature removals. So for every change that added something you would need to remove something. Ideally you would have a deficit in that you would remove more than you added.

Single review projects, could be better and cheaper than multi-review projects. Any clients want to give it a try?

Last year at CES everyone was talking about portable media players. While getting a demo from Archos I couldn’t get past one nagging question, “When the hell would I watch this?”

With Apple’s entrance into this space with the video iPod the question still hasn’t been answered. Jobs himself has admitted that he doesn’t really know why someone would want video on an iPod but is prepared to let the market evolve.

Think of your day, when do you have time to provide undivided attention to a small screen? If you commute you may have some time to watch a short video or catch up on your missed TV shows. But most people don’t have that undivided attention time in the day. Your ability to consume this content is constrained by lifestyle.

Whether it is downloadable clips or streaming television the technology is very cool. In fact the ability to deliver video to devices has out paced the consumer need. Portable video is being driven not so much by consumer demand but by corporate need to find new revenue sources.

The consumption patterns for these devices will not be what we think. In the short term people may find that watching the latest episode of Lost on their iPod is cool but in the long term these devices will find uses that we are only beginning to consider.

We’ve become increasingly disillusioned with user testing. User testing involves putting screens or prototypes in front of users in a test lab and watching the decisions they make or collecting the opinions they have about proposed site structures or designs.

When companies started to crash in 1999-2000, user testing became popular with clients and agencies. In order to avoid an expensive failure like those of the dot com era user testing attempted to prognosticate user acceptance of new sites and features.

We quite enjoyed user testing as part of our process early on but then something happened. User testing became a political tool. As soon as clients and agencies saw that data from tests could steer development, user testing became a way to manage risk, manage political agendas and kill innovation.

User testing kills innovation because the fact is, people don’t know what they want. I was reminded of this while reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink. He tells the story of the Aeron chair and how it almost never came to be. The Aeron chair is the most popular chair in the history of office furniture. But during testing it bombed. Customers hated the way it looked. If Herman Miller (the manufacturer) had listened to users, they would have missed the largest business opportunity in furniture history. More than that, listening to customers would have killed one of the most innovative designs ever.

Instead of user testing, try:
 
1) Working with a design team that employs user centered thinking not user centered testing as their basis.

2) See if features and designs work in the real world by releasing early and releasing often.

3) Build sites with an eye to continually optimize them. This way decisions aren’t permanent. Something isn’t working, you change it.

Remember no data exists about the future. User testing may give you insight but it doesn’t predict success or failure.