I was at a conference where the construction and development team responsible for putting together and constructing the new Minnesota Twins baseball stadium gave a detailed presentation on the project. One of the first things they mentioned is that they required their entire management team to read "Bit Literacy" prior to starting the project so they could come up with a communication system via email and task list tracking system that was fast, efficient, and effective. There was no room for time wasting procedures and methods. The new stadium project was one of the more complicated professional sports stadium constructed in recent history.

Read the whole review.

(Bit Literacy is now a free ebook on the Kindle store and the Apple iBookstore.)

Now Zappos is facing its own crisis: a site-wide security breach that compromised the passwords of all its customers. What has Zappos learned from the Netflix debacle?

Today, Tuesday January 17, is the first business day after the breach. Here is the Zappos homepage, with not a single mention of the security breach:

And here is the blog. Apparently the "ultimate t-shirt design contest" is pretty important because it gets top billing, while the security breach doesn't get a single mention.

No mention in the customer service center, no mention on the "Create a New Password" page, no mention anywhere I can find on the site.

Is it just me, or shouldn't a major breach of customer information be mentioned somewhere on the site?

Update: On Twitter, Zappos_Service responds, "An e-mail was sent to all customers. Here is the link to what our CEO sent all Zappos employees: blogs.zappos.com/securityemail"

My response: "thanks. how can i get to that page from the zappos homepage or your blog (where the t-shirt design contest is now shown)?"

Zappos responded: "Searching 'security' on our website will bring you to a page with the link to that page."

I still find it strange. Yes, an email explaining the situation went out to customers. And a blog post went up for employees. But what if someone wasn't a customer; was there any way for them to find out what happened? (Other than somehow knowing to type "security" in the search form?)

This isn't an insignificant question. As more of our information gets posted to the cloud, these security breaches will become more common - and there should be some better-defined practices for companies to notify customers about what happened. Posting things clearly on the homepage and/or a blog page would be a good place to start.

Tweet

As we entered the room with this installation, our tour guide reminded all of us not to sit down on the bench. "You'd be surprised," she said, "at how often people sit down there and an alarm goes off. Happens all the time."

Walking closer to the bench, I noticed the sign shown in the photo below. It reads: PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH.

I immediately told the tour guide why museum visitors continually sat down on the bench.

Now you're ready for the quiz!

Question 1: Why do so many people sit down on the bench? (Are they careless, malicious, or just too tired to stand? Or is something else at work?)

Question 2: What would be one way to address the problem?

When you have your answers, check my answers (what I said to the tour guide). Feel free to post your answer in the comments below - perhaps you have an even better solution.

This is the sort of quiz I would give anyone applying for a job in customer experience. Consider what it requires to create a solution:

• empathy: being able to see the scene from the visitor's perspective is the most important skill in the process. And it's hard to do - even for the staff of a world-class museum!

• analysis: noting the many different things at work in the scene: context (museum), object (figures and bench), instructions (sign), and subtle cues of position (sign's placement almost directly in front of the first figure people see).

• synthesis: putting it all together to figure out why the problem is occurring, and what the solution might be, is a rare skill.

Note that the quiz doesn't ask you to "list the popular methods you know how to use," or to "define how 'interaction design' is different from 'user experience.'" The skills of empathy, analysis, and synthesis are essential in solving customer experience problems. That's what I look for when hiring someone new.

It's also what you should look for when asking someone to work on your customer experience. (Contact us at Creative Good if we can help.)

Tweet

"Serving the customer well always correlates with earning money," said Mr. Foo. "Do you need a swimming pool in an airport? No. No one asked for that. We are creating the market, creating the demand. People choose Singapore because they can swim."

I flew through Changi last year and was constantly surprised by the total lack of annoyances present in my local NYC-area airports. For example: the baggage claim carousel was whisper-quiet. No squeaks, screeches, or clanks - the luggage just rode quietly around on the track. Same with the luggage cart: the wheels didn't squeak. And the airport hotel was actually part of the airport, allowing me to push the luggage cart from baggage claim to check-in desk. The experience overall was efficient, clean, and in some of the design choices, aesthetically pleasing.

And yes, the airport makes money with this approach. I especially like the validation process for riding the slide:

A four-story amusement-park type slide is even tied into retail. If you want to use the slide, you have to have a receipt from an airport merchant showing roughly $8 and up in purchases. Without that, you can only ride the bottom 1½ stories of the slide.

What will it take for American airports to oil the wheels on their luggage carts?

According to this article (also covered by the WSJ), the French IT company Atos has discovered that its employees are becoming less productive because of the increasing onslaught of email. So the company took the obvious next step and trained its employees in bit literacy to solve the problems associated with info overload.

Or not. Actually the company didn't do the training. Instead, the CEO announced that the company will BAN EMAIL. This is a technology company with 74,000 employees. No more emails - internally, at least, as a few people outside the company still use the tool.

If you work in X business, shouldn't you make sure your employees are good at X?

It's like a newspaper editor, tired of seeing poor writing, say, "OK, everyone, no one knows how to write a proper sentence around here, so no more writing, no writing at all, anywhere in the building. We'll all become mimes instead."

I have never understood why some technologists are so eager to condemn a tool that they haven't figured out how to use effectively:

• A few years ago the techie blogger Michael Arrington got a lot of press for declaring email bankruptcy. (See my response, A geek who can't use email.)

• More recently, a UNC Chapel Hill professor publicly quit using email, forcing his students and colleagues to reach him by text messages, AIM, G-chat, Facebook, Google+, Skype, Doodle, Google Docs, or others of "about 12 different means of contact." I'm not sure how that simplified things, but OK.

• And now the Atos CEO joins their ranks - bringing 74,000 employees with him.

I'm happy for these three gentlemen, if they created a better workflow for themselves by turning off email. But I don't see how banning email is practical for most people, who really do need a single, easy point of contact for the world to reach them - perhaps even to receive notifications from services like Doodle, Facebook, and the rest.

Managing email is a very simple process. It requires a few minutes of disciplined actions each day, which is a small price to avoid the many hours of stress, anxiety, and lower productivity that most users suffer daily. Here it is: Once again, how to manage your email.

For the CEOs reading this, it's really not necessary to ban email from your organization. Just a bit of training - based on what I wrote in Bit Literacy - will do the trick.