The Experience Divide

JonLax, Teehan+Lax

Notes originally by JayGoldman. If I missed your name (or mis-spelt it!) correct it below. I attributed some comments to ?. Also, come and introduce yourself so I know who you are next time!

• Teehan + Lax often gets called into merging companies to help them merge their disparate websites
  • Intranet sites become key to the process to make sure that employees stay informed and manage their fear of losing their jobs
  • Helped two of the largest companies in NA merge
  • Weekly meetings with two of the C-level executives from each of the companies
    • Only comment from the CEO was that the stock price on the mockup was wrong
    • Readjusted the schedule of the next meeting so that they could print off a mockup at 9:21 am so that they could get the 20-minute delayed stock price into the mockups without the execs noticiing
• Jon always felt that if we could prove ROI to the execs, we'd be set but it isn't true
  • BlackBerries have no proven ROI but CEOs will beat you to death if you try to take them
  • Lots of anecdotal evidence that they don't actually provide much value and may cost us a lot in terms of lost meeting time, expensive servers, etc.
  • The cost to the CEO of the merger to get the accurate stock price into the mockups was very high, but he didn't even comment on the value of the information on the site
    • Not an ROI decision: an emotional one
    • His performace is tied to the stock price and so that's what he focuses on
• What if for one year a board of directors didn't use stock price to evaluate CEO performance?
  • Instead they focused on how many innovative products they released, customer and employee satisfaction
  • Would his comments have been the same?
• Why do some compnies succeed at delivering great user experience while other struggle?
  • Very much evolving an answer to this question
  • If Jon finds one, he'll write a book
  • Clients always tell him that they'd like to be 'like Apple'
• Potential Answer: RPV
  • Resources, Process, Values
  • V = rp
  • Values are determined by resources and values
  • GE is more like P = vr because they're driven entirely by six sigma
  • Companies with values of a certain set tend to put processes in places to support their resources
  • Think of your best client, who really 'gets it', and look at how their values align to yours (probably very closely)
• Jim Collins "Good to Great" is one potential model
• Traits of companies that do great UX
  • The CEO is most demanding customer of their own product
    • Apple's typical persona is called Steve
    • Larry and Sergei put a premium on doing the right thing
  • They don't listen to their customers
    • No one wanted the Aeron chair - everyone thought it was ugly and freaky looking but Herman Miller stuck to it and had the best selling office furniture product in history
    • Digital Equipment Corporation was the best run company in America for a decade running but didn't see the PC coming. Their customers said they wanted the next gen mini-computer but they really wanted the PC
    • No great innovative products in history came from "Everyone wanted this so we built it"
    • ?: Customers give solutions but don't give problems.
      • Jason ?: Henry Ford said "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted they'd have said a faster horse"
      • No one would have said "I need a Swiffer"
    • Clients who go out and ask their customers what they wanted on their website have shot themselves in the foot to start off with because now they'll never let go of that
    • James McNab: do you find clients have market research hangovers?
      • Jon: Companies that put high priority on the value "We need to know what the customers want" define process and resources around that. We have very lean and agile processes and go into companies with six sigma and have to try to get them to shed their documentation. Companies who agreed to do that generally turn out to love it because it frees them. Small companies who can only take on five clients a year need to pick the right five.
  • They ignore their competition
    • MapQuest blew Jon's mind, and then Yahoo! and MSN Maps came out and they were cool but they followed it.
      • Seemed to be the peak of mapping software and it couldn't really get better than that
      • All of a sudden, Google appeared with a completely new approach that blew them all away
      • If you go into a market with an incumbent and do what they do, you'll get blown away. If you come in with a weaker product then you'll go under the radar and can gradually improve
  • They obscure business complexity
    • Look at Google's UI for mapping an address (single text field) vs. Microsoft's (lots of individual fields which require you to parse the address)
    • Companies that do good UX spend a lot of time hiding their own disfunctionalities so that users don't have to worry about them
    • "We just work in a complex industry..."
• Have you noticed other things that successful companies do? Email Jon at Teehan Lax .com.
• Michael Jones: the idea of the story at the C level is right but the data fetish comes in more at the mid-management level so that they can justify their own existence
  • ?: How, at the end of this project, do I look good? If you define it more in the sense of "what do you (client) need to get out of this?" then we provide a better UX to our clients. That makes number issues fade away.
  • ?: Nobody asks that question in strategy sessions. It's the 500lbs question in the room. How do you elicit these answers? Whiteboards? Card sort?
  • Rohan: It's hard to ask that question in a conference room full of people. Better to do one-on-one
• Lesa: We can only take the battle so far. We do a "Test and Learn" policy with some clients. We give them our perspective on an issue and then we run it for three months and we test the metrics and prove our point.
  • Jon: You've understood the values of your clients and then create processes and resources to match. Is that the most efficient way to work? It might be the only way to work with that client.
  • Dan Chen: Design by committee leads to a jalopy where everyone has stuck in the things which are important to them.
  • Jon: Ford builds amazing concept cars but the final product is crap because the values of the organization are manufacturing. If you look at Apple, they do much less compromising and the engineers work for the designers rather than the other way around.
  • Dan Chen: In the agency environment it often feels like the clients have us by the balls and we have to compromise to do what they want.
  • Jon: That's horrible. You need to look at where you can effect change. Agencies don't do enough of saying no to clients and telling them you can't do good work for them. Be honest with clients about good both of you can be. If you knew up front that the client saying they want to do great stuff is BS, would you engage?
• Michael Jones: I've worked for places that are basically cheap whores and they'll whore themselves out to anyone. That's a value in and of itself.
• Jason: I wonder if organizational behaviour and their openness is important. Is Steve Jobs open to people walking into his office?
  • David Crow: No. I've heard he's an asshole.
  • Jon Lax: CEO of John Hancock Mutual Funds sat in on their intro meeting and listened for 20 minutes and then said he had to run but it was amazing and he was so interested. He might have spent two hours on the project total, but the impact of that was unmeasurable. He showed it was important and it became important to everyone else. When conflicts came up, they resolved them instead of going up to Keith to fix them.