Brand

The Death of “Just in Case” Web Design

Ever since the first web browsers were created in the mid 1990’s people have been endlessly debating on how to design a web site. Or more specifically their companies’ site. At first it was left to a small group of people to make the decisions, because it was probably a fad and why spend time there. Once the fad thing became the next big thing everyone wanted in on the gold rush. Opinions were as common as… Well, you know.

To see how far we’ve come, check out Evolution of the Web an interactive site that shows the progression of Internet technology and human adoption and integration in their everyday lives.

Usability science came along, disciplines were created and the work was put into trained hands. The problem lies in the fact that most corporate web sites, especially ones that are C to C and have a significant traffic, must sometimes serve a dozen or more masters. That calls for scorecards, prioritization frameworks and, oh yes, a check back to what the objectives are.

I’ve sat in so many meetings where business partners want to put things in the interface “just in case” a user may be looking for it. They come up with all manner of wild use cases. They are very creative. Bring them back to reality. Search is what we use when we are looking for something. Navigation is for fast access to what you want or need to do during any given visit. Design is for connecting with a customer so they will want to know more.

The new design trend emerging, one of “Point Solution” is I think fantastic. It fills the digital canvas, is responsive to the device that beckons it to life and incorporates a storyscape of the functionality. It seamlessly combines high impact graphics, video, animation and interactive scrolling. When done well one doesn’t know if we are learning or accomplishing a task. And the doing becomes commerce, crossing an invisible line without being detected. It’s bulletproof for solving one or two use cases, but challenged when there are ten to twenty functions available for customers.

The “Just in Case” design is too broad and the “Point Solution” is too narrow. Designers with the help of business partners must find the middle way between the two. Uncovering the dark data hidden in the click stream married with back end analytics is critical. Start with eliminating all of the use cases that are remote, then progressively work your way toward the desired outcome. Oh yeah, you need really, really good designers.

It takes courage to avoid the “Just in Case” design trap and to stave it off you must have hard data showing it’s the right way to go. It’s best to be able to bring a design to life that has absolutely no hierarchy, only a flow of perfectly quilted content.

The poster child for “Point Design” is the Pencil 53 product site from the company Fifty-three. I love the site but loved the product even more. That helps. Their singular objective is to communicate everything about the Pencil 53. What it is, what it does, why it’s better. My review of the Pencil 53 is here.

Apple is great example of incorporating “Point Design” when they want to be bold about a product, then shifting to a more traditional design for product comparison, shopping and support. Sometimes you need to tell the story on a deeper level. For Apple’s 30th anniversary they created a time line of their products and the people behind them. They allowed a user to click on their first Mac and let Apple know what it meant to them. Emotive memories. They have always excelled at closing that last mile between a person and technology.

Microsoft is also getting in the game. They are simultaneously upgrading their product design as well as their sites. Their Surface experience is excellent and they are working hard to put the brand back on track after years of being completely lost.

Samsung has a very difficult design problem to crack. Parts of their site are absolutely on point while others appear archival but are probably effective at selling, so it may not matter. Remember the data. The Apps and Entertainment section is outstanding at showcasing a breadth of products and covers a lot of ground without being overwhelming.

We see people, read their stories, watch their videos and learn how technology works in their lives for convenience, efficiency and peace of mind.

Outside In: Forrester Customer Experience Forum 2012

Last week a steamy New York City hosted the Forrester Research Customer Experience Forum, Outside In: The Power Of Putting Customers At The Center Of Your Business. The forum content was carefully designed to support and provide real world examples connected to the upcoming book Outside In by Kerry Bodine and Harley Manning. I was stunned at the number of people in attendance. Certainly holding the event in New York contributed, but I think firms are beginning to understand the gravity of the situation. Speed, paradigm shift (sorry), mobile, social and big data are the beacons of change today. As with all Forrester Forums there was a a ton of information, case studies and technology solutions. No one could possibly attend every session, so I boiled down some nuggets that caught my attention.

Customer Experience Needs to be Unified

Consumers are literally all over the map these days. Brands orchestrate platforms on devices and interfaces, but consumers ignore all that hyperbole. They just want to get things done. In his talk, The Unified Customer Experience Imperative, Ron Rogowski (@ronrogowski) spoke about complex customer journeys and the even greater complex challenge it presents for brands to understand and deliver across this new landscape. Things used to be much simpler. He showed this chart that illustrates what brands need to consider.

Consistency has always been a critical path for success. Forrester has tweaked that term and now calls it unified. Unified but not uniform. This is a very important nuance to understand. We wrestle with this notion all the time, having spent a decade plus working the ever-expanding big canvas of a full site, we now must make tough decisions on what to do on handsets and tablets.

This means make it similar, not the same. In order to get better at this, the entire brand will need to begin to understand and inflect their work to meet this new challenge. It will be important to get everyone on board, or we will face a series of never-ending discussions across the organization each and every time we want to add content, features and functionality to interfaces that are not full site.

We will need to continue to listen, collect and categorize the voice of the customer in each channel, but find ways to do an experience mash-up VOC to help inform and guide how we design and deliver experiences in the future. Relevance and real time data should be our mantra.

There has been a lot of discussion about responsive design recently and this forum was no different. It is promising, but there are lots of challenges and some big decisions that must be made. I can’t imagine converting a massive web site to be all responsive, but it does make sense to begin to experiment and learn. Bottom line. Get moving and bring everyone along.

The World is Mobile

We hear it all the time, mobile first. Julie Ask (@JulieAsk) said it right at the outset of her talk on The Future of Mobile. It’s tricky, because if you are an established brand with millions of customers, your full site traffic and usage likely dwarfs your customers coming to you via mobile. Julie explains that designing mobile first doesn’t mean abandon full site or prioritize mobile above all else. It means your designers and CX people for mobile will need to be fully aligned with your full site team. I suggest you make them the same team, otherwise you risk an unhealthy diversion of experiences. Julie has a sharp eye and she trains it on the future. Phones will continue to get more powerful and bandwidth will improve. This will lead to a host of new technologies that will be mobile. She is careful to not restrict these new technology advances to handsets or tablets. They might extend to contact lenses or cardio stents.

No one can say with certainty exactly the order of advancement, but it’s clear that mobile will diverge even further from the PC experience and become the dominant device for service brand and shopping. The landscape will be a convergence of context, intelligence, contextual dimensions and completely new ways to navigate.

Design Still Matters

Understanding how consumers use interfaces is even more critical than ever. This used to be much easier than it is now and so expertise must be developed in house or contracted. It’s time to re-double our usability tools use to uncover struggles within interfaces as well as ensure that users can connect with your brand across devices no matter where they are. Bill Albert of Bentley University, provided one of the most concise summaries of UX tools and when to use them. Loved this chart.

Four years ago I wrote a post on neuromarketing. This is a set of emerging techniques allowing us to get at the physiology of consumers. By measuring heart rate, galvanic skin response, even body movement, we will get better data from consumers to help guide us through design. The equipment is getting better and the costs to field these studies is coming down. Add this to your big data chart.

Big Data is Really Big

Tim Suther of Acxiom laid out a nice summary of how they think about big data. Big data does not mean lots more data. There is already more data than we can mine. We all know what we need is more insights, but that is getting much harder to come by. Big data means new data sources at the most granular level that can be accessed through existing CRM systems and will be largely digital and behavioral in nature going forward. Segments are a thing of the past. People is where we need to go. How people use and interact with today’s social networking experiences must also be included.

No one signal consistently describes or predicts consumer behavior. Activate and evaluate these signals at scale with speed. – Tim Suther

Along with Tim, Richard Char of Citibank talked about their efforts to harness big data and deliver relevant offers. He spoke about Lifestyle Enabled Marketing (LEM) which he uses to push his company to gain a more compete view of the customer. He had a lot of interesting slides, but I think this sums up the shift we are trying to manage through. Somewhere where the arrows meet is where big data will be the most help.

It’s the Customer, Stupid

Amazing as it sounds, we are still learning how to deliver great customer experiences. It’s not that no one is trying, it’s that the customer won’t hold still, keeps getting smarter, more fickle and less loyal. Hard to blame them as they are constantly being tempted by the next shiny object and brands continue to stumble.

Forrester’s forthcoming book Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of your Business offers lots of great information and practical approaches to better understand the evolving consumer. But perhaps more important, how to work inside your own company to shift the culture to be more customer focused, and therefore more successful.

They lay out six disciplines of customer experience; Strategy, Customer Understanding, Design, Measurement, Governance and Culture. They posit that getting customer experience right can add billions to the bottom line of businesses. This is challenging to measure and we all know how difficult attribution can be. But having finished this book in galleys this weekend, I’d have to say they have broken some new ground and provided us with a way to think differently, plan and act.

They speak of the rise of the Chief Customer Officer, and indeed this position is beginning to pop-up. I personally believe it will be some time before it’s a common job description and routine hire across corporate America. I do believe it will evolve, forced actually, as consumers become more independent, technology advances and competition changes battlefields from marketing to experiences.

Photo: Steve A Furman

Inside Out or Outside In?

Working teams sometimes get locked in difficult battles when it comes to settling on a creative direction or execution. I’ve noticed that many of these encounters are caused by how the two sides, usually in heated debate, are either looking from the inside out or the outside in. Both are adamant that they are right, and in a way they are.

Inside Out

Brand people come at if from the inside out. They work extremely hard to craft the Brand essence, steward it along and look for ways to find an edge against the competition. This naturally drives them deeper and deeper down into the brand while the customer remains on the surface. Their strength is having a rich understanding of the Brand and how people might be drawn to or influenced by it. I said people, not necessarily customers. When they move to execution they struggle, because they know so much about the brand as well as what their competition is doing, and want to include much of it in the work. The result is often cluttered with not clearly connected phrases and symbols.

Outside In

On the other hand the Customer Experience folks suffer from the opposite syndrome. They frequently look down into the brand from the outside trying to solve a problem or accomplish a task for the customer. Their approach is often very rational and functional. It will get the job done quickly. Perhaps too quickly. Removing friction is their goal and in doing so they miss opportunity to create a bond with the customer and extract extra value.

Resolution

Agencies or even other people within the company can play a role in helping to resolve the problems. Being a diplomat and brokering a compromise can work quite nicely. It’s tricky because there is a tendency to split the difference, which usually means you end up with Frankenstein.com. One solution is to allow each side to put their work in market and let the customer decide. That is more expensive and takes longer. Another way is to look closely at the problem to be solved. In most cases one can spot which side of the field should get priority. Look again at the objectives, research or the creative brief. The nuggets should be there. Make that the tentpole and sprinkle (or hint) the other stuff around it. Mind you this method works best with messaging or communications like emails and landing pages. Once you are in functionality land, all bets are off. I’ve seen it be a very effective device for educating customers on complex features or benefits as well.

Try hard to be the one that steps through the door and looks back at the other view. It will enrich the experience, and it’s always good to take in new scenery.

Graphics: Rafaël Rozendaal

The Soul of a Brand

What’s your soul worth? Bart Simpson sold his to Milhouse for $5.00. I would say he may have left some money on the table. Not to worry, this post is not about any particular spiritual compass, but it is the longest post I’ve ever written, 1,486 words.

Let’s say that a soul, for the sake of argument, is the core of one’s being. It’s how you act and what you say when you’re alone. It’s how you react when you face a crucial moment in your life, in public. It’s not planned behavior. It’s a spontaneous response to your environment. It’s the real you. Your brand.

Indulge me for a moment. Think about the brand you work for or a brand you enjoy. Each one likely has carefully crafted mission and vision statements that in turn spawn carefully crafted marketing and advertising messages. This is not a bad thing. It is in fact necessary to help employees of a company understand the brand, stay focused and perhaps work better together as an integrated team. Now if brands would just go the next step and let their employees inhabit the soul of the brand, things would get interesting.

Prior to Social Media tools, this was almost impossible and never seriously contemplated. Customer Service people were the first ones to take the keys to the brand’s soul. They had to answer the phones and talk in real time to customers. Their first priority was to solve problems. Eventually service was co-mingled with selling. Running a service department is a very tough job. Once upon a time customer service reps spoke from their hearts. Now they need to wrap their personality around canned scripts generated by CRM systems that display pop-ups on screens. Nevertheless, these people are on the front lines of a brand’s soul.

Public relations departments also help embody the brand’s soul. But they are often reigned in by the law department and that nagging “worst case scenario” syndrome. Their role is essentially the same as when they were formed, but their constituents go beyond customers. They speak with/to investors, journalists, career seekers and politicians. The biggest change they face now is the growing number of personal zealots who have a blog, the tool sets they need to learn and the speed at which they must react.

If you’re a pure play brand it’s much harder to be soulful because people interact with your site and not your people. Banks with branches have a distinct advantage over online only banks. Branches are full of people who can easily embody the soul of the brand in a familiar form factor; live humans in person. Apple and Microsoft were fierce rivals, even though Microsoft led market share from day one. But when Apple opened retail stores around the country they immediately gained a distinct advantage. Apple has a face and a body and a voice in the local mall. The Genius bar was Genius.

Not all brands can or should have physical locations. But they darn well better start manning public real estate on the web. By that I mean social networks on and off their own web properties. Some brands have come a long way in figuring out how to use these outposts well, others are learning; still others, the laggards, and are being lapped on the information superhighway. This is NOT a case of ,”I’ll sit by the side of the river and watch the bodies of my enemies float by.” News flash: no one’s floating by.

The British IT services and technology firm, Morse, released a study earlier this year that claim UK companies lose £ 1.3 Billion each year in worker productivity because employees shift their time to Social Media during business hours. They estimate about one week per year per employee. Taken at face value and absent of other thinking this may seem high. CEO’s around the world can now be heard screaming, “Shut down Facebook. Block Twitter.” Not so fast there college. There’s a good reason workers drift off into the social realm during the day. The old school ways of engaging are no longer as effective as they once were. Oh, one more thing. Have you explored the thought process of a Gen X or Y? I love the Brits, but why so negative?

The Meeting is Dead

Corporations have created a meeting-centric culture. From 8 to 5 it’s meetings, meetings, meetings. There’s a reason the meeting has become a staple; it encourages collaboration, it’s often face-to face-which means you can have a rich, quality communication experience, and it can help push for decisions. All this is good and it’s definitely social, but it falls short. Only those in the meeting get to participate and many of the words spoken are quickly forgotten. Whole paragraphs are never even heard because of the side conversations. By the way, if you do publish meeting notes, no one will read them.

The corporate meeting paradigm needs to be completely retooled. Administrative assistants schedule and reschedule meetings all day everyday. They select a physical space where the meeting will be held. That space is reserved exclusively for meetings and needs to be lighted, cleaned, heated/cooled, stocked with white boards, tables, chairs and a phone, at the very least. The meeting space can only be used between Monday and Friday during normal business hours. If you actually attend the meeting in person, sometimes you can call in, you physically have to find your way to the meeting place, taking you away from doing anything else. Someone always leaves an important document behind or forgets to bring enough copies for everyone, but it’s alright because, “We can share.”

Does this sound like something you would design from scratch? Unlikely. But how do we get off this meeting hampster wheel? There have been many attempts to stop the meeting madness. No meeting Fridays, no meeting mornings or afternoons, or no meetings over 30 minutes. Some meeting rooms actually have guidelines on the wall. There they are, the meeting rules in 90 point font neatly framed; create an agenda, arrive on time, be prepared, anyone can contribute, no idea is bad, etc. I’ve even heard of firms removing the chairs from meeting rooms, leaving workers to stand around the table in hopes it would speed things up.

Employee 2.0

People (employees) change faster than companies. Great companies figure out how to keep people passionate about their work, and understand the importance of retaining their most passionate people. In today’s economic environment, firms need as many people as possible engaged, because:

The number of people willing to start something is smaller, much smaller than the number of people who are willing to contribute once someone starts something. — Clay Shirky Here Comes Everybody

Increasing employee engagement is critical to creating differentiation. Many firms conduct employee opinion surveys to measure the engagement of their employees. The Gallup Survey does just that and they have years of data that shows engaged employees drive company success. According to the The Wharton School, a highly engaged culture:

Has respect for individuals – Employees participate in decision making
Practices transparency – Employees have access to the same information as everyone else (within reason and the law), and exposure to senor executives
Empowers employees – Team members feel a sense of purpose, authority and responsibility
Promotes team building – A sense of identity, culture and values, feeling of equality emerges

First and perhaps most important, it allows people to glean knowledge and solutions from the largest team available; the entire company. This is important for large firms. There are smart people all over the place in big companies, but anyone of us probably only engages with not more than 25 of them at any one time. In a firm with 10,000 employees that’s .0025% of the workforce!

Kill the Physical Meeting

Give birth to the Social Meeting. Use social technologies and the social graph to give and get information, and exchange ideas that solve problems. It’s not a replacement for face-to-face meetings, we will still need those. But let’s not spontaneously call a meeting when we can use simple web tools to accomplish that and more.

Setting up an internal social network is a great way to train employees on how to be social in a corporate setting. Don’t worry that someone may say something that’s rude or boring. They already do that using e-mail today. Turn it on and turn them loose; behind the firewall of course. You will see who your social stars are in very short order. Recruit those people, point them to the public social properties and you are well on your way to giving your brand a soul.

Brands that will survive and thrive in this brave new social world will be viewed by consumers as having a soul and not selling it. Don’t end up like Bart Simpson.

Artwork from the Simpsons – Matt Groening & Fox

Dilbert Cartoon – Scott Adams

A Social Org Chart – Steve Furman

The Digital Planet – Brands Should Prepare for Arrival

I’ve spent some time pouring over Razorfish’s latest study FEED: A Digital Brand Report. In the past they have studied how consumers alter their behavior to adapt to new digital technologies. In this installment they look more closely at how consumers interact with brands online. With each one of these studies I read the stepping stones to the digital age grow larger and come closer together. Here is what I think are the most important findings and insights.

The Emergence of Digital Primacy

We are at a tipping point in how consumers live their daily lives. Digital is becoming first and in many cases the most important channel to consumers. Please fasten your seat belt, we are departing Planet Analog. We will navigating a broad and exciting cosmos to our final destination, Planet Digital. The analog world was safer and more familiar of course. We were cocooned and protected. But man will not be bound. Individual humans are painfully aware of our physiological boundaries (mortality) and limits. But the human race wants more. We gravitate to things that are boundless and infinite. It’s not a surprise we are embracing the digital world. It allows us to topple previously unscalable walls and sets us free to more easily travel and connect.

Digital Fluency is the new Language

Being online was once a privilege reserved for computer scientists. Browser development made it easer for more people, but you had to learn to be a netcitizen. Online was used primarily for communication and getting information. But the digital language continued to evolve and more people could do more things. A big step, but digital was still largely a place for companies that had the funds to invest and develop. The average person’s browsing experience (speed for instance) was better at work than at home. Now we are fully fluent in digital. It’s fast, easy and everywhere. Personal computers and other devices offer a much better experience than the locked down corporate environments. The language of digital adapted to people, and people, especially the young, didn’t have to go to class to learn it.

Digital Consumers / Digital Commerce

These data points are telling indeed. We are beyond a trend here folks. Consumers have landed on a new planet and there is no return space shuttle back to the old place. Will brands follow and set up shop to serve these new colonies?

Has an experience you have had online ever changed your opinion (either positively or negatively) about a brand or the products and services it offers?

Has that experience influenced whether or not you purchased a product or service from a brand?

Have you ever made your first purchase from a brand because of a digital experience (e.g., a web site, microsite, mobile coupon, email)?

If you are a brand you are probably doing things online. Or at least you think you are. You have a web site, send e-mail, add functionality regularly, maybe even dabble in mobile. Great. Now go back through your last three annual expense plans. Do they show yearly increases of funding devoted to digital development and marketing? What’s your Social Media expense line? Do you discuss digital as often as you discuss broad media advertising, direct mail or the call center?

Consumers are making digital their preferred language. If brands don’t learn to speak it and fluently, they will have a very difficult time communicating with their customers. Let me re-phrase. They will lose customers and employees on a steady basis until only a few corporate non-believers are left to perform one last analog act; turn out the lights.

FEED 2009 is available directly from Raorfish here. The illustration style chosen for this report is quite a departure from past editions, and I really didn’t find them very compelling. I Tweeted about that and one of my friends, who works at Razorfish, read that Tweet and immediately sent me good old fashioned hard copy. It’s a perfect bound book in a compact trim size. In my opinion the illustrations work much better in that form factor. Maybe there are still some flickering lights back on Planet Analog.

Charts and Data: Razorfish FEED 2009. Digital Primacy and Digital Fluency are concepts from FEED.

Globe Image: Social Networking Wiki

User Generated Content Disrupts Brand Search Results

In a June 8, 2009 article from Marketing Vox and Nielsen BuzzMetrics SES Magazine entitled Turning Blogs and user-Generated Content Into Search Engine Results, Chris Aarons, Andru Edwards and Xavier Lanier state:

25% of search results for the world’s Top 20 brands link to user generated content

This is probably at once exciting and frightening for companies. Frightening for CMOs and CEOs who are not connected, and exciting for the pockets of social mavens emerging inside their organizations. Prior to Social Media conversations, brand-posted content dominated search results. But we are in a new world. A world where consumers can express their experiences immediately through social media technology. These customers far outnumber the employees of even the largest brands, and so, their self-generated content will dwarf what firms can create and they will do so at a staggering pace. When you couple this with the fact that consumers trust their friends recommendations at a 90% rate and other consumer opinion postings at 70% (Nielsen Study on Global Advertising), we may now be at the tipping point for who influences whom. Consumers still trust brand sites at a 70% level, but if user generated content continues to hijack search traffic, the brand site will likely not be the first place consumers visit after they have entered their search terms on Google or Bing.

Here’s a sobering thought for you advertising types out there. What if just prior to every TV commercial you spent millions of dollars on was aired, two consumer made commercials about your brand where shown first. But you have no idea of the content nor any clue who made them. I’ve just struck fear into the hearts of thousands.

What does this mean?

The carefully orchestrated messages brands weave and broadcast in the traditional mediums will have less influence on business results because consumers will get consumer perspectives first. Since consumers surround brands (sorry brand stewards it’s not the other way around) there is no way to stop this landslide of content.

What to do about it?

Influence the user generated content. If consumers see what others say about your brand, then take steps to improve the odds that what is said is positive. More effort will be needed to reach out into the community and demonstrate that brands genuinely think and feel what their customers think and feel. Brands that humanize their messages and practice empathy at key customer touch points will influence user-generated content. No customer experience occurs in a vacuum or inside the clinical environment of a marketing campaign, so don’t pretend it does. I’m beginning to shape a concept I am tentatively calling Customer Context. More to come on that.

Inspiration for this post came from the Socialnomics blog entry Statistics Show Social Media is Bigger than you Think. Thanks for compiling a great list of stats.

American Airlines Finds A Way

Several posts ago I commented on a recent experience traveling United Airlines. It was a mixed bag, as anyone who travels by air these days knows is a generous statement. But I recently had an experience with American Airlines that proves a great customer experience can be delivered regardless of the state of an industry, or the attitudes of C level executives.

My oldest son is an Aspie (Asperger’s Syndrome). See my earlier post here for a more detailed explanation. He is an experienced air traveler, but if there is a gate change or things don’t go as expected, he gets rattled and confused. To avoid this I obtain a gate pass and accompany him through the concourse and then wait until he boards the plane.

He was recently booked on a flight from Chicago to Philadelphia but we couldn’t get a seat assignment. We went to the airport, checked his bag and instead of the self-service check in machine giving him a boarding pass we got a slip of paper instructing us to go to the gate for the seat. Here is where American personnel really delivered. The coach check in line was extremely long, so an American employee directed us to the First Class check in area where there was no line. Have you ever noticed that the First Class check in countertops are made of granite vs. the formica you get in coach? And instead of the cattle maze being flat, black straps, they’re velvet ropes. Sorry, back to the story. I was immediately issued the gate pass, and was told that there were blocked seats on the flight and to explain the situation to the gate agent. He notated my son’s status in the system so they would know when we got to the gate.

Once at the gate, we learned the flight was oversold and they were asking for volunteers to take a later flight that connected through Dallas. When I explained to the agent about Julian’s situation, that he couldn’t really handle connecting flights, and his bag was already checked on this flight, she said she would do all she could to get him a seat.

During the wait she used the public address system to update us on the status, even calling Julian’s name to remind us she hadn’t forgotten about him. She did this several times. As small as this sounds, it meant a lot to Julian. He was able to stay calm and hopeful. As the flight was boarding, she happily called his name and handed him a boarding pass. To top it off, it was a First Class seat, 6A!

A great customer experience goes a long way to keep customers loyal. In many cases it is just as important as price. Hats off the the thoughtful American Airlines employees, who on this day, took the extra time to put the customer first. If you are someone that interacts with consumers on behalf of your company it is critical to remember the following. What a customer experiences defines the brand. Maybe American really does know why we fly.

Apple’s Site Search Drives Brand Consideration Through Prospect Experience

Apple has always been one of my favorite brands as well as my first choice in computers. I have long admired their web site for how on brand it is, the clean look, crisp copy and easy navigation. My one criticism is that it doesn’t even try to remember me. They never present a home page informed by where I have gone on their site or what I may have purchased from them (and it has been a lot over the years). The same can be said for their email marketing programs. Not a premium placed on targeting the content to me. Great emails to look at, but rarely do I click through and browse or buy. However, their site search capability has caused me to think about overlooking those shortcomings. If you visit the Apple site they have the normal search box in the upper right hand section of the page. Looks like what you see everywhere. But when you start typing everything is different.

I started typing in iPhone. As I was typing a flyout appeared immediately below the box, populated with real time search results that changed with each letter typed. But these search results look more like a web page or a software window. They are categorized, contain descriptions and images, and in some cases prices are displayed. You can always link to a full results page, which is also improved over a normal search results page.

Here is what I got when I typed in iTunes. If you key in something that is not on the site it says “no shortcut was found” and directs you to another page where you might get a “did you mean” suggestion. This is similar to how the Spotlight feature built into their software works.

This experience enhancement gives consumers yet another glimpse into what it is like to own a Mac before owning one. Apple understands how important it is to manage the customer experience (or perhaps prospect experience, as their market share is still small) at every interaction. This is particularly important online, as consumers have a short attention span and are jaded quickly if something doesn’t work or live up to their expectations. Obviously this is much easier to accomplish when you are searching your own site and products vs. the open Internet. But Apple has executed with elegance in design. Apple is now the third largest manufacturer of computers behind HP and Dell. In their stores they have all but eliminated the cash register, as the advisers on the floor can use a hand held device to ring your purchase and email you a receipt. Seems they are always about bringing innovation to someone else’s expertise.