1. It can’t possibly make sense to try to sell someone something by annoying the hell out of them.
2. It can’t possibly make sense to put ads on your site that entice people to leave your site.
3. It can’t possibly make sense to let another company design a huge chunk of any of your web pages.
4. Getting a click isn’t the point…unless your job is to get the click. And then it becomes the only point.
5. All of your ads have already failed waaaaay more than they have succeeded.

Let’s explore principles number 1 & 2 just a bit, shall we? I don’t feel like talking about the others right now because I don’t think I’ll be able to be nice.

Principle #1: It can’t possibly make sense to try to sell someone something by annoying the hell out of them.

Principle #2: It can’t possibly make sense to put ads on your site that entice people to leave your site.

And I find myself at a loss for words, because this is so obvious. But, for your sake, and only because I love you, I will try to squeeeeeeze just a few more words out of myself.

Here’s what online ads are like:

• You’re in a conference room. You’re having a moderately interesting conversation about something that interests everyone in the room. You might actually be getting somewhere. And then…the door opens…and in come three highly vocal, sproingy, and un-exercised Jack Russel terriers who have just gotten onto someone’s counter and eaten an entire birthday cake. (not a chocolate one. chocolate is poisonous to dogs.) Go ahead. Continue your conversation.
• You’re watching TV. Something important, like Project Runway, and it’s just about to start. A commercial comes on. An announcer’s voice says “Hey! Change the channel RIGHT NOW! You can watch a the same show two channels over!”
• You are walking through the Gap, your brow furrowed, heading over to the khaki department to make a final dark olive vs. burnt beige choice and suddenly someone in a monkey suit pops out from behind a display of sweaters, and he’s shoving boxes of banana bread mix at you! You get past him, and a sign drops from the ceiling, missing your nose by an inch, proclaiming “No! Really! you want that banana bread mix!” You swat it away…and you are approached by someone in a Gap uniform who says “I’m here to help you. Come with me.” And the bastard leads you to…a display of banana bread mix.

All of these are totally ridiculous scenarios. UNLESS you are surfing the web. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Jack Russells in the Conference Room! Clearly, when I am looking for a birthday cake recipe, what I want is an adventure at a Hyatt Hotel. And I want it shoving itself in my face.

Don’t do the thing you came here to do! Do something else! Or do the same thing, but do it with our competitors instead!

Shopping for pants? BANANA BREAD!

Now, I know that these all make money.

I’ll get to the whole money thing in another post, because I think ‘they make money’ is a bogus argument. It’s like saying “I have a great view from the top of this ladder” when there is a 20-story scaffolding you could climb right behind you.

But think about the customer experience for a moment:

1. I’ve just entered a search term and am looking at the recipes I’m interested in and BANGO. Hyatt gets in my face.
2. I’m about to look up a phone number and three people are yelling at me to do something else on another site.
3. I’m reading an article and Lenovo is in my face, no matter where I look.

The results?

1. I notice the Hyatt Resorts brand long enough to be totally pissed at the company (and at epicurious) OR I click the ad and have therefore…left epicurious. They get a nickel and lose my eyeballs.
2. I either ignore all of this chaos or end up on another site, having abandoned anywho, when then have lost my eyeballs.
3. I train my eyes to completely ignore the word ‘Lenovo’ for fear of never getting to any content I want, or, you guessed it, goodbye PCMagazine. You get a nickel.

Dumb. DumbDumbDumb. My eyeballs have to be worth more to any of these companies than a nickel.

It’s not fair for me to bitch and not offer any alternatives, but it’s friday and I’m tired. so more next week. In the mean time, send me links of stupid and annoying ads. Really. Make me happy by annoying me more.

OH and by the way I am not arguing for better personalization of ads, and better targeting software, and more robots. Nope. Nosirree bub. You’ll just have to wait for more on that though.

Tamara, Online Marketing Hero! Conqueror of dastardly and complex Google SEO rules! More powerful than a well-constructed differentiator! Faster than a speeding call to action! Thank god she’s here!

So yeah, apparently, I’m a hero. Oh, and a guru. But no pressure.

I was invited to do a very fun interview with Michael Miller, who talked to a bunch of folks who think a lot about online marketing. I haven’t read all the chapters yet, but I’m looking forward to getting it. You can pre-order it on Amazon, of course…but the publisher has also generously allowed me to post ‘my’ chapter as a downloadable sample (link is at the bottom of this post).

I have no idea why they think I’m a marketing hero or guru or whatever (it’s especially interesting considering that I’m not even a marketer), but who am I to say no. I guess the ‘guru’ part means I have to go out and get a photo of myself with my chin on my hand, staring pensively out into the technical distance.

A few of my favorite self-quotes:

I believe success comes from banning the words “user” and “customer” from your organization, because I don’t believe they’re specific enough. I’d much rather see everyone in an organization going around and saying, “We want to create this feature for Maryanne, but we’re spending a lot of time on this other feature for Bobby. Don’t you think we should change our focus back to Maryanne, because we prioritized her?” To me, that’s success, because that laser focus on a very well-understood customer is absolutely magical in an organization.

And look! I said ‘corporate underpants’ in a real interview! I have no shame.

What corporate underpants means is that your org structure shows on your web site. If you can trace back each of your major navigation paths to a VP, you’ve got a problem. Just because you have these different P & L centers doesn’t mean that it’s going to make sense to Maryanne to go to a different place for each of them. Corporate underpants can show up on a site in a lot of ways. It’s making decisions about your site that are more about your internal organization and your internal goals than they are about the customer experience.

And this one, in which I crack myself up:

Marketing is a critical part of the stakeholder group that should be creating personas together, because marketers have so much great information about customers that they can bring to the table. Just like customer-centered design, the earlier marketing is involved, the better. If your job was to market the Pinto, not so much fun, right? Wouldn’t it have been great if you had been involved earlier and been able to say, “You know what? The market would really prefer a car that didn’t explode.”

Download Tamara’s Online Marketing Heroes Chapter (pdf)

Why? because it’s free, silly! Makes a great gift.

Charles Handy (who I must admit I never heard of before–he’s the founder of the London Business School and a professor at Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker School of Business) came on to do a little sidebar story and I fell ass over teakettle in love. I was also jealous. Because he NAILED it much better than I could:

Bigger isn’t always better for business.

You’ve got to read it in his own words…but he’s basically saying that he can’t figure out why businesses always want to grow, grow, grow. And I totally agree. Great quotes:

If I were to visit a symphony orchestra and ask them about their growth plans for the future, how would they respond? They would talk about their plans to extend their repertoire and to bring their work to new audiences, not about increasing the number of violinists. The same holds true for a school or a hospital. Once they get to the appropriate size, they strive to be better not bigger.

This makes so much sense. Think about it. Why are there so many startups out there? Why did the founders of your company start the company in the first place? I bet it was because the alternatives sucked. Either no one was fixing a very specific problem for specific people (think MySpace vs Facebook), or some huge company was solving it in a half-assed way (think Word vs Google Docs).

And then what happens? “Wow! This is working! Let’s do more features! Let’s get more customers! Lets drive market share by pushing more people into the funnel! Once they show up, let’s expand what we are doing for them!”

And voila, you’re on the path to creating something that works well sometimes for some people–and you’re opening the door to another little company that can come in and sweep up behind you.

And I can hear you: what about growth? scale? profits?
What about great examples like Google and Facebook? They’re HUGE.

My answers: What if your company and product could be and stay the best at solving that problem you identified? What if you worked on it until you absolutely nailed it? What then? No one could sneak in behind you doing it ‘better.’ You intellectual capital would be impossible to reproduce. You would get to know your customers better than anyone else could ever know them.

And what about the examples? Well, apologies to buddies of mine who work at Facebook, but it’s getting really, really top-heavy in my opinion. Why was it so popular when it launched? I think it had to do with the benefits of being inside the protected four walls of universities. I think it ‘nailed’ (bad choice of words, perhaps) the goals and needs of a very specific target audience. It wasn’t screaming with ads. There weren’t thousands of new applications on there. It was protected from the grabby reach of grownups who want to sell crap.

And now? Yup. Insanely popular. Great for contacts in many ways. Very good UI, which keeps people from the freedom that leads to sparkly bright pink with orange text myspace pages. But. But but but. Obviously, there’s a tipping point somewhere in there. Let’s see what happens, shall we?

And as for Google, exactly how many of the features they have do you use? Maps? Sure. Shopping? Maybe. Wanna know how many more there are? Well, see for yourself.

By the way, how many of you out there find the Google search results really awesome? Not me. Great for speed and convenience, but I have a REALLY hard time believing that this is the best way to present the glory of the world of information that is available at our fingertips. It’s the best way to show links that have won the ‘game’ of SEO. So we’re back to the grabby grownups who sell stuff again. They are SO annoying.

Another lovely quote form the Handy segment:

An executive in the project I am working on at the Drucker School in Claremont, California calls the business he created a “bonsai” organization, after those small Japanese trees. These trees need to be trimmed and reshaped, but they don’t grow beyond their ordained size.

So, once you start itching to grow, because you’re bored or feeling all imperialistic and stuff, what do you do? Create a forest, but don’t grow your little perfect jewel into a silly-looking redwood.

And his final point:

…if we aren’t careful, organizations can become the prisons for our souls.

Yup. You grow and grow and grow your business, and you end up with exactly the kind of corporate atmosphere that you probably ran screaming from in the first place. And sadness ensues.

All quotes from here: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/02/25/bonsai_business/

Here’s the deal…he’s got a great point, and I actually kinda furiously like the article because it reflects what annoys me about persona efforts (not personas themselves).

Note here that I’ve lately come to believe that people who are annoying are giving you a gift. They are showing you their true colors. It’s up to you whether you believe them and act accordingly (by, like, not working with them or dating-and-trying-to-change-them or whatever) or you choose to ignore the clear signs. I’m not saying that Steve is annoying (though I was annoyed.) I’m saying that, annoying or not, he’s showing us what many people really truly think of personas. Our choice whether we consider this a gift or a large dose of itching powder in some inopportune article of clothing.

And wait a second…I am NOT trying to flame Steve Portigal. He’s actually made things quite fun again. I disagree with him on his conclusions, but I think his is an awesome cautionary tale–it just took me a minute to get over being annoyed so I could realize that. And while I am not trying to flame him, I do think that his argument is terribly flawed, and would like to continue talking about what I think the real issues are (and I think the real issues are around communication inside organizations–see the end of this post for the challenge to Steve to debate this stuff.)

Oh, so here are key sentences in Steve’s last paragraph—and I don’t think I’m taking things out of context, but if I am, then yell at me and I’ll try to fix it:

If [personas are] the best way to have to keep the organization focused on a “real” customer, then we have larger organizational problems that need to be addressed.”

EXACTLY. Most companies totally have really big organizational problems. To me, that’s exactly what personas are helpful at solving…it’s not about using cardboard cutouts. It’s about what’s keeping a bunch of smart people from creating something great, which is usually related to a huge communication problem that makes people think they’re talking to each other when they are really talking past each other.

With personas, we’re going down the wrong path.”

Well, I think we’re doing a lot of stuff wrong when it comes to creating, using, and talking about personas. but, to quote Peter Merholz’s ‘Personas 99% bad?’ response: “The thing is, when you read the article, it becomes clear that Steve is talking not about personas, but poorly conceived personas.”

Rather than create distancing caricatures, tell stories.”

Er, stories about who? Real people doing the stuff they do now? So, stories that describe how things are NOT working today? And so then some magical mystical thing happens when people read these stories and suddenly the solution becomes wonderfully clear? Or stories about how we imagine real people doing stuff better in the future with our yet-to-be-created product? So, imaginary stories with real people as characters. But then aren’t we risking automating the misery? For example, if we are trying to solve something for a bank, and we use a real teller to tell a story about the future, we’re guaranteeing that the tellers still do the task, right? What if there’s a better option?

Don’t deny the need to do in-person research with real people. Look for ways to represent what you’ve learned in a way that maintains the messiness of actual human being.”

Yup, you need research. BUT, heretically, I think there is a major 80/20 rule when it comes to creating personas, which is very helpful when it comes to the ‘cost’ of doing personas. And that is that 80% of the benefit of personas comes from just creating them using the internal assumptions or embedded knowledge of a team. Assumptions that you can’t see can and will hurt your project. The far-and-away-most-helpful-and-practical value of personas, in my experience, is in bringing agreement and focus (and keeping them) in a team. Actually, to be more clear, bringing agreement and focus to an executive team. So even if I work with a client to create ad-hoc personas in a couple of hours–personas based on goals, not demographics or psychographics or whatever–then I do it, and it always helps. I talk more about this in my cow analogy posting, if you are interested.

And…ummmm….HOW? I would LOVE to hear new ideas on how to ‘represent what you’ve learned’. It’s tricky tricky tricky–because of another issue I have yet to blog about which is that different people in your org need different information at different times (just like actual customers!). And their jobs are not about understanding and remembering data. So it’s all about translation…

 How do you recommend translating messy (or tidy) data to the people who need to understand and use it?

So clearly I believe that personas don’t exist on paper (or silly dolls or cutouts or horrifying stock photos or whatever). Just like photos don’t actually capture the souls of the photographees. Personas are all about fixing a huge problem in companies, which isn’t really a problem of whether they are focusing on Jenny Jeans Buyer. It’s the problem that they all think they are focused on customers, and the right customers at that, and they aren’t.

Steve Portigal is finally showing us, clearly, the problem with having ‘other people’ create personas (meaning, not the critical stakeholders working on the project). Personas that are just ‘thrown over the wall’ and land on people’s desks, like the one that landed on his, usually don’t work. Why?

Because you can’t solve a communication problem with a cardboard cutout.

If you could, we wouldn’t need marriage counselors, now would we, and Hallmark would have a very interesting additional section in the greeting card aisle.

Steve’s article is an excellent cautionary tale for anyone who wants to try personas: I think once people in your company think personas are bullshit, you are skeeee-rewed (when it comes to using personas ever again). It’s not easy to do ‘new’ personas ‘the right way.’ Steve’s article is the perfect example of why you really only have one chance to make a good impression when it comes to a personas effort.

Since I’m so late into the whole fracas, I can reference a bunch of the discussions:

Peter Merholtz’s awesomely calm ‘Personas 99% bad?’ reply. I’m impressed, because I’m terrible at being calm. My favorite part (besides the excellent use of the word ‘vitriol,’ which gets extra points in my book):

Steve could have taken two paths — either delineate what it takes to create a truly productive persona, or present other tools that successfully accomplish the objectives that personas fail to meet. However, he does neither, so at the end of the article, you’re simply left wondering, “Well, if personas suck, how do I make sense of my user research? How do I build empathy across a product team?”

Graphpaper’s Research + Interpret + Produce = Design. This is a great discussion of why persona-creation has to be collaborative, and why: …in my view, the primary benefit from creating personas is bestowed upon those who actually make the artifacts, via the thinking, collaboration, and conversations that occur during their creation.

Joshua Porter on Personas and the advantage of designing for yourself. Nice (long! but who the hell am I to talk.) scholarly look at what we really mean by personas. However, my perspective as someone who comes in and helps with product strategy, earlier than when design happens, means that I don’t agree that there are a lot of other ways to ‘summarize your research and learning about your users.’ (not a direct quote, but this is the drift of the second to last paragraph). With execs, I simply haven’t found a better way to do this. Politics get in the way.

Portigal’s stuff on personas: Gotta say it, saying ‘personas are user centered bullshit’ in a preso about how not to suck at research is too easy. Why? Because I don’t see a topic in there about ‘how to communicate the research in a way that non-research-pros will actually understand and remember it.’ That’s my challenge to you, Steve. That’s the debate worth having.

And I will end this in the only way that seems appropriate:

Harumph.

Which is a damn good thing for me, because when I get excited, I get a terrible potty mouth (or, now that I’m all validated and shit, I should say a ‘fabulous potty mouth.’) I love this study (and the conclusions) because it’s so great that:

• They did the study at all. I mean really. Would YOU have thought of it? Gotta love the Brits.
• They found what they did—that swearing can actually humanize a workplace.

Now, granted, you don’t want to swear around customers. But being able to be yourself at work with your colleagues (and, for example, use words that you use at home) makes tons of sense. Work really should be fun, shouldn’t it? And we’re all adults here, aren’t we?

Case in point: when I was interviewing at a certain very gigantic online retailer that starts with ama and ends with zon, I dropped the F-bomb. I had NO idea I had done this until around a month into my illustrious career there. Interviews have ‘loops’ there, so you talk to around 5 people. One of them is from another group. And, when I talked to this guy (you know who you are, B.L.) I must have gotten excited about something and said something like “bad web design drives me fucking nuts!” or “I’m so fucking psyched to work on stuff that lots of people use!” or “I mean, it’s fucking exciting that people are starting to think about CUSTOMERS!”

Something innocuous. Nothing like “you, my friend, are a fucking dork.” (which he isn’t.)

SO, after the interview loop, there’s a ‘debrief.’ (talk about dirty words! It’s hilarious to me that people selectively ignore totally silly words like ‘debrief.’ I always think of a bunch of people getting in a room and dropping trou when I hear this word. But then we all know that I seem to be unusually focused on underpants, especially at work). Everyone got together, apparently, and raved about how marvelous I am. Then, B.L. said “uh, well, she dropped the F-bomb during our interview.”

Silence.

In unison from everyone else in the room, including the VP who would become my exceptionally tolerant boss, but excepting the ubiquitous HR rep, said: “So?”

And so I was hired. When I heard this story, I told B.L. I knew what went on in the debrief (debrief! tee hee!). Forever after, I looked forward to seeing him in the halls. It would go like this:

• Me: Hey! How the fuck are ya?
• B.L.: Good! How the fuck are you?!

See? The terrible F-bomb helped establish a great camaraderie between me and the manager of a whole different team.

More recently: I was doing a workshop with a new client. They are actually the client of a client, and their offices are in the south, and I kept telling myself that I need to watch my mouth. Usually, with new clients, I warn them that I have been known to drop the f-bomb when jazzed about something. For example:

• “wouldn’t that be fucking COOL?”
• “If I hear one more person say they need more web 2.0 on their site, I’m going to go fucking postal”
• “uh, how fucking DUMB is that site?”

(The latter only in reference to a competitor’s site, of course).

When I’ve had prep conversations with the client, I can almost always get a sense of whether my ‘casual tone’ will be ok. And, without fail, it HAS been ok (except for twice: a government agency and a group of university administrative types. Interesting, no?). But I didn’t know in this case.

Well, turns out this client was just as human as all the others. So much so, in fact, that by the end of the workshop we were cruising through some expletive-ridden reviews of competitors’ sites (very well-deserved) and getting a lot done.

And then, for some random reason (and it will make sense appropos to this stuff in a second), the movie ‘Signs’ was mentioned. Something like ‘wow, man, that was a SCARY movie!’ and I said ‘yeah, scary for lots of reasons. Mel Gibson, I tell ya. We chosen people do NOT approve.’ (For those who don’t know, “the chosen people” is one way we Jewish people sometime refer to ourselves, tongue firmly in cheek.)

Uh oh! Religion! I followed this by blurting out something totally inappropriate:

You can say fuck at work, but you can’t mention Jesus. Politics are a total no-no. However, I’m allowed to make reference to Jewish stuff.

You know what? That is TOTALLY TRUE. Everyone agreed. Think about it. I don’t have anything witty and insightful to say about this, beyond the fact that it’s interesting. Even I’M very very careful about any mention of anything religious. That’s right. EVEN ME. I weaned myself away from saying things like “jeee-sus BIRD.” (not so offensive I imagine due to sheer ridiculosity. It’s a favorite I got from my dad and use heavily in non-work life. It’s very satisfying. You should try it.)

Always OK:

• Arrggghhh.
• D’oh
• Shizzle (a la Emily H)
• Rats! (another personal favorite)
• Crap!
• Poppycock!
• Flapdoodle! (thanks for those last three, Sonia–from whom, by the by, I’ve heard MUCH worse, and at significant volumes)
• Cattywompus (as in, that design is totally cattywompus)
• Any brand name that sounds like it could mean something swearish, like “Frappuccino!”
• Bonkers

Always ok (and a damn good reason to get less anal about swearing, so that we don’t sound like geeky uptight kindergarten teachers):

• Darn
• Oh fudge
• Sugar
• Heavens to Betsy!
• My stars and garters!

Generally ok:

• Damn
• Jesus (let’s face it. this has become embedded in our language in a non-religious way)
• Shit (with furtive look around room to make sure no one clenches)

Often, one discovers, ok:

• Fuck!

Never really ok:

• Jesus Christ!
• I’m a republican! (this one is geographically specific, but definitely relevant in Seattle).
• I’m a democrat! (in other places, I can only assume.) (SEE? even in a BLOG this starts to get queasy!)
• Shut UP! (it’s a late-breaking one but totally true. Sonia, of see-above fame, pointed this out. You just can NOT say Shut up at work. And I think she’s right, for the very same reason I think we should be able to swear at work. Swearing isn’t really the problem. The problem is finding effective ways to communicate with each other.

Favorites still include:

• Fuck a duck.
• Fuck ME. (not as a directive. As a statement of annoyance.)
• And, of course, my trademark “Bite Me.” Which my longer-term, know-me-very-well clients will surely recognize.

Wow. This should do interesting things to my search engine rankings, no?

TA: ….The other thing for marketers to remember is that personas are not about targeting. For targeting, you you’d want to figure out what kind of magazines Henrietta reads so you can publicize your value proposition to her in a way she will see it. For experience design (and in this case, I’m talking about ‘product’ as the web site designed to sell face cream) is really about how she wants to shop for and select a face cream. What kind of questions does she have that need to be answered in order for her to make the decision to actually press the button and purchase?

SM: When you think about it that way, it makes perfect sense because customer segments and personas basically have two different purposes in the organization. You need customer segments to focus your marketing activity and target your communication. You need personas to be able to design the right kind of user experience. So, you are implying that the use of real customer data in creating personas helps to bridge the gap between segments and personas, right? You can use the data in the segments to help create the personas.

TA: Yes, you can, and you should use data to create the personas, and this definitely includes all kinds of data collected by marketing. But what if you don’t have the data? Lots of companies can’t afford to collect lots of external data. This may sound a little bit heretical, but there’s another way to think about data. The knowledge of the customer base that exists within the organization and all of the different brains is valuable data - just as valuable as the external data you collect.

The first thing I think is so helpful about personas is it gets all that knowledge on the table. Once you can share all the knowledge and assumptions that internal stakeholders have in their heads, you can make sure everyone is aligned in their thinking. The power of that agreement is so strong that in some ways you get 80% of the benefit of the personas right there. If you’ve been in a company for a while, the stuff in your head is not completely ad hoc. It’s stuff you know and have absorbed. Having said that, there are several ways that real data can be really important. If you are in an environment that is very data driven and people won’t even listen to you unless you have data, you need to bring in ‘real’ data.

Read the whole interview on Sally’s blog.

Arguably, yes. After all, I didn’t just ask them to think of an animal, or even a barnyard-type animal. I asked them to think of a cow. So everyone is thinking about the same thing, right?

Well, what color is your cow? Where is it hanging out? What is it doing? Is it fat or thin?

What about the other people in the conference room? are all of their cows similar to yours, or slightly different? Picture the little imaginary herd that all of you have created together. We’ve probably got some brown cows, some black and white jobbies, maybe a black one. Some are laying around in the distance, some are up against a fence nibbling hay out of our hands. Some are in a barn, some are hooked up to milking machines. They’re fat, they’re thin. They’re cute, they’re gross, they’re something familiar, they’re completely foreign. They’re all of these things all at the same time.

So everyone in the conference room thinks they are thinking about the same thing. But what if someone asks about the hooves of the cows? One cow probably hasn’t had its feet looked after in a long time. Another spends most of its time indoors and her hooves get irritated by the cement floor of the barn. Yet another has shiny hooves that are regularly rubbed with organic linament by her proud owner. Each cow is different in her details, and each cow-imaginer can easily zoom in and argue for the importance of his or her cow’s hoof details.

Companies do this all the time, every day. Everyone thinks they are thinking about ‘the user.’ Guess what? Everyone’s concept of the user is slightly different. These differences are further hidden by slightly more detailed language, like ‘the administrator’ (talking about users in terms of roles) or ‘the early adopters’ (defining segments of users).

So long story longer, this is why personas are so important. And this is why I’m convinced that, in a way, it doesn’t matter who your persona is as much as it matters that you have one. The lack of shared focus between a team of people who are all working on the same product can be so detrimental that it can trump any ‘bad’ effects that could be caused by using the ‘wrong’ persona. In other words, even if they are building a product for cows, if everyone focused on the exact same horse to build the product, they’d be better off than if they were all focusing on different cows. Why? Because at the very least, the resulting product would make sense end-to-end.

Highly-quotable, professionally-worded conclusion you should use in your next meeting with your boss: A product built to make sense to a single horse is probably better for cows than a product that tries to make sense to a huge variety of cows. Well, especially if that product is software or a web site. Which would be weird, but there you have it.

One last thing:

If I ask the same conference room full of people to picture a brown cow, a pretty chubby one with a swayed back and a full udder, chewing peacefully on a mouthful of hay in a large paddock that has a few other cows in it, flicking its tail against an annoying horsefly, you’re probably willing to give up your original cow and start thinking about mine. It’s not such a big deal…it’s still a cow, and if I tell you that I’ve done some research and most of the cows in our target market are paddock-dwellers with swaybacks and active tails, you’d believe me.

Now, when we start to talk about the barnyard features that we should build to support our cow’s hoof-related requirements, all of us can zoom in on this cow’s hooves and make some sensible decisions. We won’t end up building hoof features for indoor cows and udder features for outdoor cows.

By the way, in my experience, stakeholder-type people aren’t terribly attached to their own cows. As long as they get to say ‘hey, this is what my cow looks like’, and they get to add their opinions into the mix, and they get to hear the relevant cow-data, they’re pretty willing to give up the black and white for brown, the barn for the paddock, and the oats for the hay.

User is a four-letter word. But cow is not. And neither is “Sarah, the spendthrift.”

Anyways, I could have avoided typing this whole thing and simply provided this excellent quote on user experience by one of the pioneers in our field, Dr. Seuss:

A moose is asleep.
He is dreaming of moose drinks.

A goose is asleep.
He is dreaming of goose drinks.
That’s all well and good when a moose dreams of moose juice.
And nothing goes wrong when a goose dreams of goose juice.

But it isn’t too good when a moose and a goose
Start dreaming they’re drinking the other one’s juice.

Moose juice, not goose juice, is juice for a moose.
And goose juice, not moose juice, is juice for a goose.
So when a goose gets a mouthful of juices of moose’s
and moose gets a mouthful of juices of goose’s,
They always fall out of their beds screaming screams.
SO…

I’m warning you, now! Never drink in your dreams.”

- Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book, Theodore Geisel, pp 42-43.

Anyhoo, back to 2001. Everyone was abuzz with personas excitement. That very excitement was really what led to our book. We conducted two workshops at UPA in 2000 and 2001, which were very well received, and we were approached by Diane Cerra from Morgan Kaufmann to write the book. She had heard about us from Jonathan Grudin, who is on MKP’s advisory boards. The advisors keep their ears to the ground to let the publisher know who is doing good work in new areas, so the publisher can pounce and ask them to write books.

We laugh when we look back now. At that time we were also working with Holly Jamesen, who moved on to bigger and better things before we wrote the book. The three of us were absolutely sure it would only take us a few months to write the book. After all, we just needed to write up our notes. We had done so much work for our workshops that we already had the lifecycle model figured out. We bragged that we could do it in 6 to 9 months.

Ha.

Four years later, John and I were still slaving away every weekend at the Bellevue Public Library. We opened and closed the place. We had an organized scam to make sure we could get one of the study rooms for our own private use all day long. We had it down to a science.

Why did it take so long? And why write a blog about it taking so long? Well I’m glad you asked. It took so long because both of us had been involved in, or heard about, or seen, a persona effort that failed miserably. Many of them actually. And the more we dug and the more we worked, the more we realized that the devil is in the details in a major way when it comes to personas.

And that’s why the lifecycle turns out to be so valuable. Because it’s not just about creating personas. It’s about keeping them alive and actually using them to do good work. And that’s the hardest part.

There are lots of ways to create reasonable personas. In fact, most of my consulting business is based on the amazing value of ad-hoc personas, which do not require any research (gasp!) and can turn around a product strategy within a day or two. Using good, well-created personas is another thing entirely.

This is what I told myself, and still tell myself, when I think about the sheer volume of our volume. It became far larger than the 250-page guide we initially envisioned. It became a reference book that you can (and should) skim at first and return to when you get into a persona-based conundrum.

So here’s how to use our book:

• Read the acknowledgments. They are both amusing and touching.
• Read Alan Cooper’s intro. it’s great. More on the whole Alan Cooper connection in another posting, coming soon.
• Skim chapter one. It’s got great stuff on where personas came from, and some good ammo if you need to convince others in your company that personas are a valid method.
• Read chapter 2. It’s short. And it sets up the whole lifecycle idea.
• Skim chapters 3-7. These are the meaty, how-to-actually-do-it chapters with instructions for practical methods…and suggestions for how to predict and avoid roadblocks.
• Flip through the invited chapters. They have wonderful insights, but they are outside of the main content of the book. The most readily practical chapters are the one on Reality and Design Mapping, which describes a method that I use all the time. If you are a marketer, check out the last chapter on personas and brand.
• Remember where things are. And remember that when a persona-related question burbles to the surface of your brain, there’s likely to be an answer for you in the book.

So there. That’s why the sucker is so freaking long. And that’s how to use it. More on personas soon. Sneak peek:

It’s a new persona era out there.

• People know what personas are, kinda.
• Many have tried to create them, or hired people to create them. Diatribe on hiring external folks to create your personas for you coming soon.
• Many have been totally psyched about personas and then completely crestfallen when the personas ‘don’t work.’
• Personas are still one of the best tools I know of, and I know of a lot of UX tools.
• The big secret is that the personas themselves don’t really matter, and they don’t even really need data to help organizations. They need data to help organizations build great products, but they don’t need data to help the organizations themselves. And that’s a huge deal. And heresy. And worth a longer discussion.
• There is hope.

Stay tuned.

The conference was held at the Mogens Dahl Institute in Copenhagen: “In a newly redecorated stables from the early 1900 hundred, the Danish conductor Mogens Dahl has designed an institute dedicated to concerts, lectures, chorus activities and musical experiences.” I didn’t take any pictures while I was there, but I found some online:

Figure 1: The cobbles and windows of the Mogens Dahl institute, day and night views. Day shot: Erik Refner, on aok. Night shot: mogensdahl

Inside the entryway, there was a large cobbled patio and a wall of floor to ceiling windows on the right. Behind the windows was the conference area. The room - essentially, the
majority of the building - used to be a barn. Now it is a whitewashed open space, with a balcony wrapping around the 2nd floor, and an A-frame ceiling that reaches up at least 30 feet at its peak. The room was furnished with rows of chairs, a small stage and screen, and a piano.

Figure 2: On the left, the interior of the Mogens Dahl Institut. On the right, the same space filled with people, as it was during the conference. Photo credits: musikbibliotek and mogensdahl

The facility is actually a concert hall. Benjamin Gundgaard, who created the conference, let me in on a little secret: we were going to start the conference with a song.

A song.

Think of the last conference you went to. Can you even IMAGINE ’starting with a song’? How horrifying, right? It brings visions of the dreaded coworkers-singing-sad-version-of-happy-birthday-to-you-at-work. Ugh. I hate that. For some reason, I go into anaphylactic shock any time anyone bursts into song in an office setting.

The director of the Mogens Dahl Institute took the stage and said that, because this is a musical place, starting with the song was a custom he was going to insist on. He went to sit at the piano at the back of the room. Apparently, in Denmark, it used to be the custom to start meetings with a song. I got the impression that it’s certainly not as widespread a custom as perhaps it once was, but the other conference attendees greeted the surprise with only a small titter. Everyone got song sheets. (thank god, they were in Danish. I was exempt).

Prepped for my typical reaction (somewhere between gritting my teeth and vomiting), I figured the only professional thing to do was avert my eyes and go to my happy place. So I looked out of the wall of windows onto the cobbled courtyard. And then something totally surprising happened. I loved it.

The piano sounded great in the space, and then, a few bars later, everyone in the audience chimed in. Not with the pathetic warbles that say ‘well, I’m trying, but clearly I find this as ridiculous as you do, which is a good thing, because I’m positive I would sound like crap anyways and who needs that embarrassment.’ No. this was real singing. There were sopranos and altos and basses and other things I don’t know the names of. The whole room vibrated with it, this crystal clear song in Danish. Turns out I found a brand new happy place.

So, what does this have to do with user experiences?

Well, perhaps nothing. But perhaps a lot. Let’s see what kinds of lingo we can relate to the experience:

Delight. I was totally delighted. Which makes me think that maybe the element of surprise - and the layers of surprise - add to delight. First I was surprised that we were doing a song at all (the idea of which I like quite a lot actually. The thing I dread is what the singing usually sounds like). And then I was totally surprised at the willingness of the audience to participate. And then, whammo, I was totally surprised by the fact that I suddenly found myself listening to something completely lovely. I wonder, can delight happen without surprise? If you buy something online and find yourself ‘delighted’, isn’t a large measure of that delight related to your surprise? If you expect something, can you really feel true ‘delight’ when it happens? And if you do, isn’t it because deep down you really expected something to go wrong?

Newness. If there is nothing new under the sun, then maybe the way to give people the feeling of ‘newness’ and ‘freshness’ is to bring back something they’ve forgotten about. Lord knows the song thing threw me off balance completely. And maybe you have to be unbalanced to enjoy things. (Yup, I’m going to leave that sentence just as it is.) How does this relate to online customer experience?

Never underestimate the level of disappointment or discomfort your users expect.

We’re all too used to being made to feel stupid by new technologies. It’s going to take quite a lot to make that deep, bone-level dread go away. One way to make your site seem new and fresh is to surprise the hell out of people by making the experience less torturous than they predict it will be.

Art. Things that are beautiful are…valuable. And surprising. And delightful. Think you’ve got the perfect site? I bet you a million bucks you can find someone who can make it more beautiful. And I bet you another million that person will NOT be a coder, marketer, biz dev person, or anyone else stuck in the current organization.

So anyways, I finally get into a cab. We’re smack dab in the middle of, not only a downpour, but Copenhagen rush hour (who knew?). I tell the cabbie where I’m going and he starts to snort unhappily. I ignore him.

After a little while he says “your trip is bad.” Given the language gap, I assume he’s saying “It’s too bad it’s raining - it must be ruining your trip.” So I answer “oh, no, the rain is fine. The trip is nice actually.” And he says “No! Your trip, it’s bad. I take you 7 minutes over bridge and it take me 40 minutes to come back over bridge. Bad trip.” And more snorting.

My first inclination is to guilt, which I’m working on. And I was successful this time…I stopped myself from saying “Oh I’m sorry…I’ll give you a tip don’t worry.” Instead I shrugged and looked out of the window in a manner I was sure conveyed “what a ridiculous thing to say to a paying passenger. Isn’t your job to take me to the place I need to go? And if you don’t want to go to a particular place, wouldn’t it have made much more sense to ask me where I was going before I got in your cab?” As I got angrier, I shifted my gaze and facial expression to continue my silent tirade: “I am a professional traveling woman who needs to give an important, amusing and informative presentation. I’m ignoring you on purpose now.”

Of course, when we finally got there, I paid and gave him a tip. (I used to be a waitress and will, therefore, be a compulsive overtipper until the day I die). But I was still rumpled and annoyed and, clearly, thought about it some more.

If you are going to offer a service, especially a paid service, don’t grump at the person who willingly takes you up on that offer and decides to pay for your service. If there is something you don’t want to do, tell them up front. Most reasonable people don’t really want to pay someone to do something they really don’t want to do (um. Actually, I think I may have to take that back. But I think you still get the point.) If you don’t want to do it, fine. I’ll go find someone else. But snorting and harrumphing at a passenger because there is a traffic jam on a Copenhagen bridge at rush hour in a rainstorm is counterproductive on so many levels it’s hard to count them. The passenger gets annoyed, or upset, or guilty. The driver gets to vent his frustration, but it changes nothing about his situation - and the amount of time he’ll be stuck in traffic. It does, however, probably reduce his tip.

If you are grumping at some of your customers, or have a group of customers or customer behaviors that you think of as ‘annoying’ or ‘expensive,’ it’s probably your problem. They don’t want to be annoying (in most cases). They want what they paid for. If you don’t offer it, or offer it halfheartedly, you shouldn’t say you do. And if you do continue saying you do offer something that you don’t really support, stop snorting at your customers. You’re the one being annoying.

I read an interesting book called Angel Customers and Demon Customers. The basic point of the book is that some customers cost your business a lot of money…often through increased customer contacts, fewer lifetime sales, less satisfaction with your products. And many companies end up throwing a lot of money at the problem, trying to reduce the contacts or up the lifetime sales. But Angel Customers and Demon Customers suggests that you actually measure which customers are costing you a lot…and which are bringing in a lot of money…and then pretty much abandon the ‘Devil Customers.’ It’s about as Machiavellian as retail gets, I suppose. But at the risk of sounding like some online version of Ayn Rand, I think they are on to something.

I’d switch the language around a bit though. I’d say: If you identify a particularly expensive or “demonic” set of customers, look more closely. For some reason these people think you are offering something you actually don’t offer (a particular level of customer service, or a type of product, or high-touch help with the shopping experience, or whatever). And yes, you should focus most of your attention on keeping the great customers as happy as possible. But why not figure out how to fix the perception problem? Why not offer a clearer explanation of what you do and don’t do? If prices are low because you don’t staff a lot of customer service reps, what’s wrong with telling people this? If your products are actually not that great for certain applications, why not say it?

Instead of abandoning demonic customers, spend some time figuring out what makes them into demons. Someone has to throw water on the little fuzzy Gremlins to make them into nasty things with big fangs (and now I’m totally dating myself by giving cultural references that make sense only to people who were in high school in the early 80s, but hey, we have no secrets). I bet 80% of the Gremlins are annoyed because you threw water on them…whether you realized it or not.