Outside Innovation

Customer's Site Redesign Exposes the Sad Truth about Corporate Inertia

2009-11-21T10:43:21-05:00

Dustin Curtis is a UI designer. He was fed up with how hard it was to book travel on American Airlines' AA.com Web site. So last May, instead of complaining, he sent them a better UI design. That led to an interesting interaction with a member of the team involved in the design of the AA.com Web site.

Dustin refers to his correspondent as "Mr. X" and claims that he is, in fact, and excellent UI architect and that his identity will be revealed soon.

PROPOSED NEW DESIGN:

Here's an excerpt from the response Dustin received from "Mr. X", then a member of the design team at AA.com, who was, by the way, summarily fired as soon as this response became public last Spring:

"The problem with the design of AA.com, however, lies less in our competency (or lack thereof, as you pointed out in your post) and more with the culture and processes employed here at American Airlines.
Let me explain. The group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out amongst many different groups, including, for example, QA, product planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project planning, and user experience. We have a lot of people touching the site, and a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its content and functionality. Fortunately, much of the public-facing functionality is funneled through UX, so any new features you see on the site should have been vetted through and designed by us before going public.
However, there are large exceptions. For example, our Interactive Marketing group designs and implements fare sales and specials (and doesn’t go through us to do it), and the Publishing group pushes content without much interaction with us… Oh, and don’t forget the AAdvantage team (which for some reason, runs its own little corner of the site) or the international sites (which have a lot of autonomy in how their domains are run)… Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that AA.com is a huge corporate undertaking with a lot of tentacles that reach into a lot of interests. It’s not small, by any means.

Oh how I wish we were, though! Imagine the cool stuff we could do if we could operate more like 37signals and their Getting Real philosophy! We could turn on a dime. We could just say “no” to new feature requests. We could eliminate “stovepiped” positions. We could cut out a lot of the friction created when so many organizations interact with each other. We could even redesign the AA.com home page without having to slog through endless review and approval cycles with their requisite revisions and re-reviews.

But—and I guess here’s the thing I most wanted to get across—simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. You want a redesign? I’ve got six of them in my archives. It only takes a few hours to put together a really good-looking one, as you demonstrated in your post. But doing the design isn’t the hard part, and I think that’s what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done organizations. But those of us who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome, and not many, I’ll bet, are jumping on this same bandwagon. They know what it’s like."

Click here to read the full reply as well as Dustin's ruminations about the fact that American Airlines should be taking its ENTIRE customer experience seriously, because, as Dustin Curtis says, "Customer Experience is the New Brand."

(This was all reported in a great blog post: Why American Airlines doesn’t fly online, and what they should do about it by Paul Smith in his engaging Bitter Wallet blog which focuses on customer experience snafus. I found it via a recent tweet from Liam Green-Hughes @liamgh who is a developer at Open University in the UK.)

Why Visionares are Needed to Keep Companies from Ruining the Customer Experience

Here's my reaction. There IS a problem that is endemic to the way that many large organizations run their Web operations. I just spent the last two days with my Visionaries--the folks who design and evolve some of the best Web experiences on the planet. Here's one thing that these Visionaries have in common: They rule their Web sites with an iron hand. They set the strategy. They manage their own (very small) teams. They do not tolerate a lot of corporate interventions. Most of them have been leading their companies' Web strategies and influencing their firms' business strategies for 10+ years. They have a "Steve Jobs-like" control over the customer experience their companies offer--both online and in terms of many of the other customer-critical processes that impact their brands, the customer experience they offer, and their firms' bottom lines. From time to time, these folks feel like bailing out of their organizations because they are under-appreciated and/or a new boss is put in charge who doesn't "get it." But generally speaking, their commitment is so strong to their customers, they tend to ride out the waves of corporate inanities, protecting their own teams and their authority. They deliver tremendous value to their businesses! The moral of the story: If you want a great customer experience, you need to empower your Visionary Web leader to control the vision, design and execution of your online strategy. The people who have been empowered to do this over long periods of time -- 10 years or so -- have pulled way ahead of their competition.

National Semiconductor’s New WEBENCH® Visualizer Raises the Bar

2009-11-13T10:52:34-05:00

I've always admired Phil Gibson's work and have often pointed to many of his accomplishments as best practices. This week, he did it again! On November 9, 2009, he unveiled the most sophisticated, yet simple to use Web dashboard that I have ever seen to help customers make buying decisions.

By turning a virtual knob to optimize for power efficiency, small footprint, and/or cost of a total bill of materials, design engineers can instantly generate and evaluate the most appropriate options among billions of power supply circuit designs. By turning the dial, or selecting different parameters or filters, engineers can visually navigate a bubble diagram depicting the choices that meet their requirements. They can zero in on a group of designs to compare. Or, by shifting their perspective or their parameters, instantly generate a new set of options. Designers can start from one point in space (input source, output voltage, and output current) and visually shape and navigate to their preferred solution. Phil calls it “designing at warp speed” because you feel as if you're in a spaceship jumping from one set of bubbles to another. The size of each bubble is its cost. The bubbles are arrayed along dimensions of footprint size, number of components, and efficient heat dissipation.

Phil Gibson is the VP of Technical Sales Tools at National Semiconductor. He is also in charge of National's award-winning Web site. Phil always amazes me with the robustness and completeness of the free Web-based tools he provides to prospects, customers, and partners.

Other e-business leaders may be happy when their customers can use their Web sites to quickly find and buy products. Phil isn't happy unless customers can use his Web site and tools to design, specify, simulate, and test complete circuitry, which they can then purchase either as a complete priced-out Bill of Materials from dozens of partners or purchase an evaluation board and components that are shipped overnight.

The new Visualizer tool is a Flex application that sits on top of a powerful real-time optimization engine. The underlying database includes 25 different switching power supply architectures and 21,000 components from 110 different suppliers (not just National Semiconductor's components), with feeds updating the pricing from a dozen distributors every hour. Engineers can navigate through billions of power supply design alternatives in seconds. In the past, the WEBENCH tool that Phil Gibson's team has been evolving since 1999 has enabled engineers to optimize one design at a time after they register on National.com. This new WEBENCH Visualizer lets engineers navigate and compare billions of design options without having to register first. Once you've selected the one or two designs you want to exercise and simulate, you can register to use the full WEBENCH toolset, which adds more functionality, including thermal simulation.

What interests me about National Semiconductor's WEBENCH Visualizer is:

1. It's a tool that enables customers to create better designs and to make better design decisions.

2. It's a tool that helps engineers (National's customers) do their jobs and helps them make trade-offs based on the criteria that matter most to their customers (electronics manufacturers like Nokia, Apple, and others).

3. It uses a variety of visualization techniques to let customers work the way their minds work (spreadsheets, dials, graphical bubble chart, circuit diagrams, parts and price lists, waveforms) all in one interactive dashboard.

4. It is interactive and iterative with real-time feedback. As I change my mind or try something different, I see the results.

5. Behind the scenes, there's a lot of data and number crunching going on to provide results that are optimized for my changing criteria.

6. There's an entire customer-centric ecosystem of suppliers, distributors and other partners integrated into this dashboard. Over 100 suppliers' products are integrated into one simple dashboard for customers to use to create their designs and their multi-supplier bills of materials.

7. Customers can share their designs with their customers and engage with them in experimenting with different trade-offs.

8. It's a powerful tool that is provided free of charge to customers because National Semiconductor has learned that the easier they make it for customers to design their products, the more of their business they get.

Here's a link to the demonstration on National's Web site: www.national.com/visualizer. That's Phil Gibson's voice you hear as you click through the different videos showing how to use the tool.

Google Android vs. Apple iPhone: Whose App Ecosystem Will Win?

2009-10-30T14:00:00-04:00

The recent buzz about the Verizon/Motorola/Google (An)Droid vs. Apple/AT&T/et al iPhone has revolved around two customer-critical issues and one supplier-critical one (can you guess which is which?):

• Which device+network combo meets customers' usability requirements?
• Which brand evokes the most loyalty?
• Which ecosystem will attract the most apps?

As pundits review and early adopters swarm, I've been noticing a few patterns in the dialog. It's not about the device. Sure, everyone comments about display resolution, keyboard quality (or lack thereof), industrial design, and user interface. But there are also provocative wars of words (and maps) about network availability (in the U.S.—other countries have more pervasive mobile networks than ours). These are the initial barriers to adoption. Do I like it? Can I use it?

But, in the end, the customer's deep emotional connection is with the brand. Am I an Apple sort of person or a Google sort of person? Or both? Right now, and for the foreseeable future, Apple clearly trumps Google when it comes to customers' brand passion and self-image.

To me, the most interesting discussion has been the one about which platform will attract the best and coolest apps. The conventional wisdom goes that whichever platform succeeds as the biggest app-magnet will draw the largest customer base in a virtuous circle.

I beg to differ. I believe that both the iPhone/iTouch platform and the Android platform are spawning amazing innovations in mobile application development and inventive mash ups. Apple has a head start, but Google's APIs always attract huge amounts of brainpower and inventiveness from all over the world. A year from now, we'll see very healthy and dynamic ecosystems of smart, mobile apps on both platforms.

What does this mean for your company? Whether you're an established brand, a start-up, or an aggregator who wants to attract customers to rely on your brand's mobile apps, you're probably already developing apps for (at least) both platforms. The good news is that there are a number of cross-platform development environments as well as cross-platform usage tracking and ad-serving networks available. The bad news is that you'll need to ramp up your mobile development resources if you don't want to be left in the dust. Not having state-of-the art mobile apps is now akin to not having a Web site in the late 1990s. It's embarrassing. Bad for the brand and bad for business if you want your customers to "have it their way."

Mobile apps are rich, interactive tools that enable customers to interact with your company and your services anywhere and anytime, without having to search and browse. Customers who value the information or services you provide will download and use them. Cool apps may win Word-of-Mouth buzz, and bring you new customers. But their main purpose is to foster loyalty and brand passion with your existing customers. So you'll probably justify your investment through customer retention, mindshare and walletshare, rather than customer acquisition. But, as you present your mobile apps business case, don't forget to consider your customers' metrics. How much time are you saving them? How many steps are you saving them? How much added convenience are you providing? What leg up are they getting vis a vis their competitors or in crowd?

Local Motors: Reinventing the Car Industry from the Outside In

2009-10-23T14:00:00-04:00

One of the most inspiring "stories" at the Business Innovation Factory's fifth annual summit, BIF-5, in Providence, Rhode Island was told by Jay Rogers, the founder of an innovative new American car company, Local Motors (www.local-motors.com). Jay is an ex-marine whose grandfather instilled in him a passion for cars. His grandfather owned, among other companies, Indian Motorcycles. Jay grew up in a car-mad family. His experience fighting in Iraq convinced him that the U.S. needed to shed its dependence on foreign oil. So he has invented a new kind of car company.

The cars are made out of easily assembled, lightweight composite materials to reduce fuel consumption. The car chassis is licensed from an existing mass-producer of cars (the first one uses a BMW chassis). The "proprietary open source" car designs are contributed by world-class industrial and automotive designers participating in open competitions on the Local-Motors Web site. The designs are submitted, evolved, voted on, and critiqued by car fans, designers, and prospective customers (customers' votes count more). The car designs are specific to each region of the country. The community also participates in the design-to-build phase through an open prototyping process for each new model. Each phase is photographed, commented upon and posted, with trade-offs discussed.

Once each local car model is in production in its micro-factory, each customer helps assemble his own car at this local sales/manufacturing facility/service location. (Think Build-a-Bear for cars!). As Jay Rogers explained: your car is the second most expensive investment most people make in their lives; why shouldn't you have an amazing experience and an amazing car?

The first car being manufactured is a rally car designed for serious off-road desert/Baja/Dakar challenges. It is called the Rally Fighter. It was designed by Sangho Kim.

Which car will be the next one to be built is being hotly debated by the active LocalMotors community members. There seems to be a lot of interest in the Boston Bullet, designed by Mihai Panaitescu.

You can reserve your spot in the manufacturing cycle for $99 (refundable or transferable), lock in your build date with a deposit of $5,000. Your custom car will cost $50,000. You can also have designers compete to design the unique vinyl skin for your car by sponsoring a skin design contest. You set the tone and guidelines, offer $200 for the winning design, and take advantage of having hundreds of world-class designers vie for the privilege of "skinning" your car.

When I met Jay Rogers and chatted with him about writing a case study about Local-Motors, I told him that what he was doing fulfilled a vision that one of my clients had described to me 20 years ago. In the 1980s, Skip Walter spearheaded the team that designed DEC's multi-million dollar success in office automation, DEC's All-in-One Office System (which was customer co-designed). One day we got to talking cars, and Skip described his vision of the future of the automotive industry. Eventually, he said, car dealerships won't be places where you go to buy cars that are already on a lot. They'll be just-in-time micro-factories where your car can be custom-configured and assembled. The same factory can handle service. No more wasted inventory. Much more customer engagement. It tickles me that Jay Rogers is fulfilling one of Skip's dreams.

The Anatomy of Innovation

2009-10-20T21:33:16-04:00

I really enjoyed completing my case study about Nature Education's groundbreaking Scitable platform for science education. Many people are happy to showcase their innovative projects. But few people are as forthcoming as Vikram Savkar in taking me behind the scenes.

I gained a good understanding of the steps required to innovate within a large organization:

Hire an outside renegade.
Have him build and sell his vision.
Let him create his own team.
Locate the team off-site.
Take a blank slate approach.
Create a blueprint with an integrated cross-functional team.
Have the team implement the technology, the content, the user interface design, the business plan, and the marketing plan in parallel.
Leverage your corporate technology group by agreeing on design standards up front and having them conduct architectural reviews throughout.
Engage customers as hands-on advisors throughout the process.
Design your information architecture around customers’ activities towards their goals.
Build in instrumentation that lets you measure what matters to your customers as well as your sponsors.
Beta test with friendly customers and invite them to invite their friends.
Promote via the Internet and social media.
Make it easy for customers to tell you what role(s) they are playing.
Let customers see what activities they’ve performed, so they can pick up where they left off; profit from your ability to track what activities customers in different roles are doing.