This is a bit off topic, because it’s of the dead trees variety, but this headline came across: Newspapers, reeling from slumping ads, slash jobs.
The timing isn’t as good as hopped, considering we’re in this thing called a recession, but this happened because a lot of newspapers treated their web properties like their print properties. Sure, the web have some very real expenses — those servers don’t come cheap, and there is that pesky thing called electricity — but it’s much less expensive than paying people to run the presses, a lot less expensive than cutting down a bunch of trees, and don’t get me started on the costs of dropping off one of those newspapers at everyone’s doorstep.
So by charging more, sites like Craigslist.org and Move.com ate them alive.
I like print!
I love print!
But print, as quick as it as happened, is dead as in George Carlin dead.
Companies keep on charging us the same for a digital product as they do for a product that has manufactured (software distributors like Adobe, publishers like the Wall Street Journal). At one point or another, we’re all going to wise up, yo.
They should take a page out of the ESPN’s book. ESPN is one of the most profitable entertainment entities on the planet, and they know how to play in multiple mediums better than anyone on the planet.
ESPN.com is an amazing (and the leading sports site), ESPN the network has about 20 or so properties it seems, and the print magazine has all but killed Sports Illustrated, because they are covering the whole media package.
I pay more for their Insider product than for their magazine, because I get the magazine for free as part of their Insider service. $4.95 a month, and more often than not, I read much more of their Insider content online. They have none of the legacy costs, and they’re able to leverage much more of their content (have you tried fitting a video clip on a newspaper page?), and get a higher CPM from their advertisers.
I imagine there isn’t a single newspaper executive that has thought of any of this, especially the management over at the Tribune, a company that owns many outlets of both video and print content, yet integrate none of that.
I was stuck on an airplane most of Thursday evening, so I cranked up the iPod Touch to watch “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.” To this day, it astounds me how funny and usable the interface is for the guide in the movie.
How many of us have conceptualize our designs this way? How many chicken scratches and doodles actually grow up to become a real product? Here are the paper sketches that were the beginnings of Twitter from Jack Dorsey’s Flickr.
Some of us work for in-house UX groups and others work for agencies. Having been both an “innie” and an “outie,” I can vouch for the fact that I learned a lot more during my experience working for an agency. Here are the pros and cons.
Pros:
1) The variety of projects makes the work interesting and keeps you on your toes. You never work on one project at one time. You juggle multiple. You learn the nuances of many different kinds of technology and use models.
2) You sharpen your ability to think strategically in your design approach as well as selling your ideas. Since you are presenting your work to new stakeholders on a regular basis, you must justify design decisions with usability goals, business objectives, and/or metric indicators. Everything you put out there has to be polished and your best work. It’s like being a new employee every couple week and you have to prove yourself to a new set of bosses.
3) You learn to work and adapt with many different organizations and teams. Every organization has a different working style and organizational structure. That affects communication and approvals. This requires that you are quick on your feet, since you’ll be constantly drilled by clients. Even when they love what you do, they still drill you.
4) You become a walking encyclopedia of the best on the web. Because of the variety of projects you are exposed to, regular research and analysis are part of the job, even when you are not on the job.
5) Shorter time lines means quicker decisions and launches. After working at an agency, I get impatient at how slow decisions are made and how long it takes in-house groups to develop.
Cons:
1) Lots of pressure to always deliver the best work. When large companies pay tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, they expect you to bring your A game and think outside the box EVERYTIME, so the pressure is intense.
2) A shorter time line and finite budget creates pressure to be extremely efficient. Agencies make their money by being billable, therefore most of your time should be billable. There’s little down time to try out different ideas. Also, when companies hire an agency, they need it done yesterday, so you’re expected to be super creative at breakneck speed.
3) Pay is not as good as working for a large corporation with an in-house group.
I no longer work for an agency, because now I can charge more working for myself. However, I think the experience is valuable. I’m so glad that I did it. Best learning experience I ever had.
She’s is a Business Analyst/User Experience Consultant in San Diego, CA. Ha has worked for Hasbro, NPR Music, Fisher Price, KCRW Media Player which received an Honorable Mentions from the Webby for Best Practices. Ha has also designed games and Business Process Applications.
Welcome aboard! If anyone else wants to contribute, let me know at pat@usabilitycounts.com.
Want to save the world? You can do it one friend at a time with an application called Causes. You can join an already established cause, or start your own. Helping get friends to join the cause raises its ranking within all of the causes, and the ranking system that shows not only what you have done, but what others have done within the last day, week, month and all time.
More importantly, you can donate to a cause, and the application shows how much money has been donated to particular causes, and add content via videos and comments about that cause. You can also edit the content that is contained within your user profile, and encourage your friends to donate. Because of this, some of the causes have already raised thousands of dollars.
The usability of this application is the best I have seen so far out of the applications — the amount of detail in the application for this outstrips applications by some of the professional companies that are part of the MySpace platform. The only knock against it was the first time I visited the application, it was broken from stability issues.
Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):
So some of you have probably been following my misadventures with United Airlines. After a few calls, they were awesome at correcting a airline ticket where I didn’t include the full name of the passenger (she has an Anglicized name that also appears with her Chinese name on her passport), and I didn’t find out until later that I needed to include the full name.
Not to throw just United Airlines under the bus (pun intended), but most of the other sites didn’t point out the the following requirement: that whatever name was listed, it should be exactly the name on any identification. This isn’t necessarily the airlines’ fault — all of the airlines are following guidelines set forth after 9/11.
The issue for some of the sites is that this requirement isn’t obvious enough: if someone like me, who never reads the text on a site, misses this, I can’t imagine how many others have fallen prey. And with the frustration over customer service and airlines in general, passing the buck of the travel sites with the airline companies has become almost sport.
Here are a few screen shots from my favorite airlines:
No indication.
Does indicate, but in legalspeak.
No indication, but does have an indication that you can refund the flight if there are changes within 24 hours of booking further down the page.
Perfect. Someone at the other sites needs to copy this exactly. An additional improvement would be to add a link to the polices for changing flights. They should have additional text that reads something to the effect “even in the event of a mispelling.”
Expedia does cover this under the rules and restrictions, and on the screen where you have to enter a traveler, but not next to the text entry area (and the rule is actually covered up by a popup window. Travelocity is much like Orbitz, where the explaination text is right next to entering the name.
From Copyblogger:
Hulu‘s a pretty good site — lots of video from companies that want some kind of control over the content, which is much more than YouTube is giving them. The site’s is version 1.0, so the interface feels a bit clunky. Most importantly, where’s the search box?
I made the screen capture small without a highlight for the primary reason that if you are on a content-heavy site, that search box better be easy to find. Like Google easy to find. Like YouTube easy to find. Like News.com easy to find.
Can you find it?
To my surprise, United Airlines is working with on the airline ticket issue. They understood my frustration, and want to resolve it because it is something that falls through the cracks. What they don’t know is this trip is for my friend’s 40th birthday. The irony of this is that my friend’s name is so rare, I don’t see how anyone can claim that we’re changing it to someone else.
If this goes through, I will tell everyone I know about the wonderful customer experience I had with United Airlines. Now they are going to work with Air Canada to change this. At least I didn’t spend $5,000 for a ticket like someone else did on Delta.
Companies don’t reach out to customers enough, and it even happens in the line of work that I do — we promise the customer X and the customer receives Y. It’s truly becoming a world where companies are taking the tact of “this is what you are going to get.” Seth Godin has a post on this regarding voice systems titled, “Should you fire the voice mail guy?” I now deal with them all the time when booking travel, and always have issues with them because I have a slight speech impedement.
Customers desperately want a great customer experience, so much so that word of mouth sites are very successful (i.e. Yelp).
Another story I relayed to a client: there have been studies done that when dealing with a website, the last thing people want to do is pick up the phone (or, can you spot a phone number anywhere on eBay or Amazon for customer service). They don’t want to send an email. What they really want to do is find an answer right then.
Additionally, people forget that internal customers are just as important as external customers. Read on over at Signal vs. Noise. When running an intranet, the less people bug you for a document and the more they can find on their own, not only does it make them happier with their job satisfaction, it saves the company or organization money and makes the more productive.
Case in point: When I was a product manager at Escrow.com, we added reams of frequently asked questions, rewrote every single email so it was easy to understand, and guess what? Not only did customer touches drop 33 percent (customer touches defined as an email or phone call into the call center), but walk-up business to the site went up 25 percent per month, to the point where Escrow.com is now a profitable business.
Happy customers mean more customers. More customers mean more happy customers. You know what I mean?
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
