Quick sanity check — am I alone in thinking that every video conferencing product has woeful UX/UI design?

For all the hoopla around Zoom it looks like a first round mockup from a candidate who didn't get the job.

Webex makes the flight deck of a 747 feel welcoming and approachable. Total turd.

Google Meet — or is it Meat? Or is it Hangouts? Or MeetHang? — is ok (once you can find it). Aside from the fact that my Mac does a hovercraft impression every time I use it.

Microsoft Teams has managed to prove to Seth Godin that something purple can indeed be massively boring and indistinctive.

Thoughts?

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I recently received a customer/brand survey that included these questions:

You’re invited to take the first manned flight to mars but there is no guarantee of return. Do you take the flight?

You can take a pill that guarantees you’ll live for a hundred years. Do you take it?

Do you think you’d be better equipped to survive if you travelled 50,000 years into the past, or 50,000 years into the future?

Do you take bigger risks during periods of turmoil or tranquility?

Would you go back and start your life again if it were possible?

We have 4.5 billion years to escape the Milky Way galaxy before it crashes into the Andromeda galaxy. Do you think we’ll make it out alive?

It was totally engrossing. I completed the entire thing — sixty questions or so. And it really got me thinking — and I’m not really a VOC kinda guy, so pardon my ignorance — why are surveys in general so f***ing boring? Is there an unwritten rule I’m not aware of? Don’t we want customers to engage with us and share interesting stuff?

Why can’t we ask questions like:

If you were CEO for a day what one thing would you change?

If our brand was a band, who would we be and why?

Someone please explain!

#customerexperience #cx #design

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Last week I appeared on a list of top thought-leaders and influencers in the field of customer experience, as did many of my connections. The producers of the list have since furnished me with a guide for how to share the recognition. Well...I’m in two minds about that.

On the one hand, it is flattering to be included — it’s nice that my efforts here have not gone unnoticed. I am grateful for the exposure, and if it means that I can create more value for more people or engage a larger cross section of the community in debate and discussion then I welcome it.

However, I must be honest, these sorts of lists are pretty silly. When I think of all the experts — clients, colleagues and peers — whose opinions I find insightful, engaging and valuable but who don’t appear I cringe with embarrassment.

Only an expert is capable of judging expertise, and the people who make these lists are seldom experts — if they were they’d be on the list, not compiling it — so more than a grain of salt is required.

Key takeaway then — I must work harder to support and promote other people whose content and ideas I find value creating and engaging. So this will be a bigger focus for me from now on.

With salt-encrusted gratitude,

Matt

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The French poet Paul Valery once remarked that “Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.”

If you subscribe to this belief, you can’t escape an important conclusion — that business is not a science. There are no recipes that are always successful or consistently lead to predictable outcomes when it comes to making money.

People have become billionaires from companies that have never made a profit. Sometimes increasing prices increases sales, other times it decreases them. We shouldn’t over extend our brand we’re told, but Aerobie — who made the Frisbee-like flying disc I played with as a kid — expanded into making the Aeropress pneumatic coffee machine that sells in the millions.

And yet, both theorists and practitioners in business typically fail to distinguish between the appearance of science, and the reality of it. Crunching data doesn’t make business a science. Highfalutin academic articles don't make it a science. Using technical sounding jargon doesn’t make it a science.

The sooner we accept that nothing is guaranteed to work, the more comfortable we become with taking risks and trying stuff out.

#strategy #startups

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When things don’t go your way do you beat yourself up over it? Most people do.

Maybe you didn’t get the job or win the project. Maybe your big idea didn't take off. It’s all your fault. Or is it? Ask yourself:

Was the decision in your control?
If you’re not in control of the decisions, you’re not in control of the outcomes. You can’t make someone hire you. For all you know they might be making a terrible mistake.

Did you have perfect information?
A trick question, because nobody has perfect information. And if you don’t have perfect information you can’t make perfect judgements. You probably know less than half of the factors at work.

Did you know then what you know now?
We can always look back on things and explain what we did wrong. But if you didn’t have that information at the time, you couldn’t have used it.

Did you give it your best shot?
If you tried your best there is no shame whatsoever in not succeeding. You either win or you learn.

Here’s the reality: good decisions do not always equate to favorable outcomes. We can do our best and not succeed, and sometimes make poor decisions and still luck out. Don't suffer unnecessarily over events beyond your control. Go easy on yourself!

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If the last year has taught me anything, it’s that my philosophy around customer experience is often at odds with other people's. I’ll explain the differences, starting with the big one:

I believe CX is mostly about not losing, rather than winning. In fact, “winning” on customer experience is almost impossible. Here’s an analogy from cycle racing:

“Races are rarely won on descents but can be lost.” You can’t typically gain enough time going down mountains to win, but you can easily lose enough time / crash. CX is the same. Why can’t you win?

What matters is total value, which emerges from four inseparable sources: the product or service, brand appeal, awareness, and the broader continuum of interactions we call customer experience.

If someone has a better product, CX tweaks won’t help much. Yellow Pages can’t beat Google by improving their CX.
If another brand has much higher awareness, people will buy it and never have your customer experience.
If someone has already decided “I want X brand” because it appeals to them more, again you’re out of the running.

That's why you can name plenty of famous brands that have a poor CX, but can’t name a single non-famous brand that offers a non-competitive product and a great CX — they don’t exist. See what I mean?

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If you’re a service professional, freelancer or consultant of any kind, you only need to do three very basic things — one at each stage of an engagement — to make your customer experience stand out.

1. Ask what matters most
When discussing the engagement ask your client what is most important to them about it. More often than not their answer will surprise you, and this valuable insight will set you up to succeed.

2. Occasional discretionary effort
No need to go overboard, but aim to do one or two things that make their lives a little bit easier. Anything helpful that you didn't have to do — but did anyway — will be appreciated.

3. A sincere gesture of gratitude
Whether it’s a thank you card, a celebratory dinner, doing someone a favor down the line, or some other thoughtful gesture, showing your appreciation for the opportunity to work together makes a big difference.

These may seem breathtakingly obvious, but trust me, they are not common practice. The biggest opportunity of all when it comes to customer experience is attending to the absolute basics that are too simple or menial for most people to bother with.

#customerexperience #cx #customerservice

The most profound realization I’ve come to in recent years is something we all know intuitively, but don’t consciously reflect upon: that most of what happens in the world is beyond our control.

We don’t have much say over what competitors or governments do, when new technologies appear, or major upheavals will occur. These things — and many other factors that determine our success — are unpredictable. As such, our skill does not determine our outcomes. Skill plus chance does, where chance often has greater influence.

With this in mind, there's often more to be gained by focusing on the chance side — increasing the likelihood of serendipitous encounters by meeting more people, experimenting, exploring widely, and thinking probabilistically — than on the usual activities. Strategizing, analyzing, and building deeper specialisms may seem like logical ways to become more successful, but they reach diminishing returns surprisingly quickly.

This realization is immensely liberating. Most of our anxiety is caused by attempting to know the unknowable and control the uncontrollable, then punishing ourselves when our plans don’t work out. It’s only when we let go of all those pressures that we can fulfill our entrepreneurial potential.

Come on in, the water’s nice and warm!

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I’m gearing up for a virtual keynote later today, entitled “What designers do and why it is the best job in the world.” The audience? A group of 8 to 12 yr olds on a tech summer camp. I hope they don’t burn me too hard in the Q&A.

I’ve had a lot of fun putting this presentation together. It’s a very interesting challenge trying to approach your discipline completely fresh through the eyes of a child, and it has done a wonderful job reminding of why I love this field so much.

My six reasons why it’s the best job in the world:

1. You can design anything — No idea is too big or wacky. You can be as creative and crazy as you like.

2. You can make the world a better place — Solving people's problems or making their life more fun.

3. It’s all about people — You spend your time learning about other people, working together with your friends, and making new ones.

4. It’s never boring — There are always new challenges, opportunities and ideas. You use different skills every day.

5. The world becomes more interesting — Everything can be an inspiration.

6. Anyone can do it! — If you have ideas, enjoy solving problems, like arts and crafts, and want to make cool stuff, you are a designer already, you just don’t know it!

Wish me luck! 😅

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Many people believe that a business idea has to be unique, special or clever to succeed. In reality though, as Robert Reiss once remarked, most of the time succeeding in business is like playing Scrabble. You add your little bit on top of what already exists and get the points for all of it. You might even get a triple word score.

There's nothing wrong with taking what's already out there and just making it better. In many situations a product or service only needs to be a few percent better to be chosen by a customer almost every time.

The more experience I get the more I realize that too much cleverness can be worse than too little. Very thorough, detailed analysis and a precise, unique feature set provide a comforting illusion of certainty, but every entrepreneur will tell you it doesn't work that way. There's an old Yiddish proverb to that effect — "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans."

The sooner we can swap conjecture for data the better, which usually means spending less time on up-front analysis, and getting something into people’s hands sooner so we can see what works and what doesn't.

You can do very well as a competent scrabble player in business. Often better than a chess grandmaster whose endless strategizing over-complicates everything.

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There are two versions of every success story. Story A is a detached analysis of the expert judgements that led to victory. Then there's Story B: how the people involved came to work together in the first place, without which nothing would have happened.

Think of any significant event — how you met your partner, won your biggest client, or ended up working with your co-founder — and you’ll see that most of them spring from serendipitous encounters.

As such, the more people you know, and the more people know you, the better. The more interactions you have, and the more people you have them with, the more likely such events are to occur. But how do we create the most value for those in our network?

The key is to always act as a host in life, not a guest.

An exceptional host:
Genuinely wants to be helpful
Makes others feel welcome and valued
Caters to individual needs
Is generous with their time
Creates an environment where relationships can develop

It’s not hard to see how the host mentality pays off. It's human nature to reciprocate, and empower those who create value for us. It's also a rare example of advice that works equally well in our business and personal lives.

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If you work in customer experience it's vital to understand the difference between three things that often get lumped together: dissatisfaction drivers, satisfaction drivers, and growth drivers.

Drivers of dissatisfaction are often category-wide — common causes of frustration for all buyers. These are the most opportune areas to attack if you're looking to improve relative ranking among competitors.

Drivers of satisfaction tend to be unique to a brand — unexpected flourishes that convey thoughtfulness and attention to detail. These are the most opportune areas if you want to improve positive memories of an experience.

Drivers of growth are usually unmet needs — reasons customers choose another brand instead of yours. These are the most opportune areas to attack if you want to increase market share.

See the problem? Focusing on satisfaction drivers (as we’re often encouraged to do) won't necessarily help you grow, or lead to an offering that's markedly better. In reality, attacking growth drivers and category-wide causes of dissatisfaction is often where the money is!

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Adoption barriers are a crucial consideration for any business. For startups they can be the difference between success or failure, and for businesses looking to grow, lowering them can increase conversion and acquisition.

Since many adoption barriers are experiential in nature, systematically lowering them is also a worthy goal for many CX programs, one that can yield solid, provable returns.

This worksheet covers them all, broken into three categories.

Experiential barriers: accessibility, fallback options, learned behaviors, the MAYA principle, training and expertise, and trialability.

Financial barriers: financial risk, switching and upfront costs.

Operational barriers: compatibility, distribution, network effects, functional risk, installation, and competing underlying technologies.

Work through them systematically, slap your forehead in disbelief at the obvious stuff you're missing, then get to work.

Download it straight from the post or here: https://lnkd.in/gWiCzTs

Good luck!

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Book Update 2 - M.C. Escher does marketing.

Writing and promoting a business book is an exercise in Escher-esque marketing: The content sells the author, the cover sells the contents, and the broader promotion plan sells all three. The author must build a profile before launching the book, with the book then building the author’s profile in turn — like a circular Newton’s cradle.

This means a would-be author must be clear on a few things before embarking on their book project: How do I present the contents in a compelling way? How do I capitalize on the book beyond royalties? How do I build my profile and promotional plan in advance, to reach critical mass at launch?

Having bungled all three to various degrees in the past, this time things will be different. How?

One big change we've made is to define the "packaging" of the book — title, subtitle and blurb — upfront, months before writing the book itself. Why? Because after you've written the book you're too tired and too close to the subject matter to see it objectively. It also allows you to test ideas and build a focused marketing plan that can run over two years, not a few months.

Not only this, since titles and subtitles are my kryptonite, I've hired an advertising wizard to help. Mischief managed!

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Book update: The pre-mortem.

Since we agreed our deal with Random House, the first big steps have been pre-mortem meetings: one among the writing team, and another with our editor.

I made all sorts of mistakes with my first two books, and spotted many, many opportunities to improve. The function of these pre-mortems was for the team to share our collected observations, learnings and concerns — and put plans in place to address them.

I’ll spare you the gory details of what’s gone wrong before, since I'll expand on these as we go. But to give you a rough idea, issues span everything from coming up with good titles and foreign rights sales, through to coordinating activities with the publisher. The upshot is we’ve got very good plans in place to avoid past problems entirely (or at least make better mistakes this time) and a team that's already benefitting from a diversity of experience, expertise and resources.

A pre-mortem — ensuring you learn from the past and tackle known risks early — is a valuable exercise on any project, and creating a book is no exception. I highly recommend doing this well in advance of putting pen to paper, and coming up with a rough project plan.

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I’ve never made a big song and dance about this because for us it’s really about doing what feels right rather than a marketing thing — in fact I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it before — but Methodical donates 1% of revenue regardless of profit to 1% for the Planet to support grass roots environmental causes.

We believe that you can’t really claim to be customer focused unless you’re also doing your bit for the environment, since ultimately every customer is also a citizen of the planet we share.

Earlier this year — although it feels like forever ago now — I was fortunate enough to speak in Australia, which at the time was reeling from the wildfires that made headlines around the world. We also donated a meaningful chunk of the speaking fees from that event to recovery efforts through the same organization. As you can see the money is being put to good use!

A minor correction to the post above — I actually deserve 0% of the credit. As ever Ben Smith and Megan Butler are the reason anything actually gets done at Methodical, and they were responsible for seeing this through, so kudos to them.

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Having clear customer and business goals for your customer experience project helps align your team, stay focused on the priorities, and prove your impact. But what could or should those goals be? And how do you measure your progress?

We're sharing this worksheet to help tackle a big issue we see with these kinds of projects — defining clear success criteria.

Use it, as we do, whenever you’re starting a new customer experience, service design or UX project, or have an idea for improvements. There’s also two completed examples to refer to.

We want to help the community succeed however we can. It’s high time we expanded the original set of worksheets that came with my first book to cover more aspects of what it takes to succeed with these projects. It’s a great opportunity to share even more of what we know in the most practical way we can.

You can download it here.

Any questions, comments or suggestions for improvements just shout!

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I’m delighted to announce that Random House have bought the world rights for my third book.

Better still, it isn’t actually “my” book at all — I’m teaming up with renowned investor, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist Csaba Konkoly to co-author a definitive guide to thriving in an unpredictable world.

Scheduled for release in 2022, we’ve allocated nine to twelve months for additional research and outlining, followed by an intense three to five months preparing the manuscript — allowing ample time for production and international translation prior to launch.

I’ll be sharing details of the writing process as I go, and various ideas that will be appearing in the book, amongst the usual stuff.

If you’ve read either of the first two books you’ll be in for a treat — this one will be an even bigger leap forward.

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Incongruous tendencies — traits that we don’t naturally associate with one another — are what make people interesting.

Think of Walter White in Breaking Bad — the family man and high school teacher turned homicidal drug lord. Or Richard Feynman — the physics genius who played the bongos, cracked his colleagues' safes for a laugh while working on the Manhattan project, and often did his work in strip clubs, scribbling equations on napkins.

How about Warren Buffett? The avuncular billionaire still lives in Omaha in a house he bought for $31,000 in 1958. These people are interesting because they defy our one-dimensional mental models of what a teacher, physicist, or investor “should” be like.

The magnetism of irreconcilable tendencies can also be true with brands and products. In their halcyon days, for example, what made Bang and Olufsen so special was the juxtaposition of clean, teutonic aesthetics with playful interaction design.

Eccentricities and idiosyncrasies are more likely to be strengths than weaknesses. They make you, your brand, or product interesting, so don't be afraid of them.

There is tremendous upside in simply being interesting — far more than being dull just to fit in or appear "professional".

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Outside in — that’s the mantra. We must be guided by our customer’s needs. I can picture you nodding along.

Unfortunately though, to achieve brilliance you need something more than customer and market insights can provide: artistry, boldness, and a willingness to take risks.

Think about the world’s most influential creators. Are they “customer-centric” or are they actually taste-makers? Do they lead or do they follow? Do they make what people want, or do people want what they make? Do you think their process is more outside in, or inside out?

Damien Hirst — A dead shark in a tank? Inside out.
James Dyson — A fancy vacuum cleaner? Inside out.
Elon Musk — Reusable space rockets? It can’t be done! Inside out.
Jobs / Ive — “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Inside out.
Paul Rand — "If you want options, go talk to other people." Inside out.
Tinker Hatfield — A sneaker based on a French building with a silly air bubble? Inside out.
Jim Jannard — "We can't wait for society." Sold Oakley Sunglasses for $2.1bn. Inside out.

Outside-in is a safer path to mediocrity. Inside-out is riskier path to greatness. Research may illuminate the problem space but creativity and courage separate the good from the great.

Who dares wins.

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