Des Traynor wrote an excellent article for .net Magazine called The death and rebirth of customer experience:

Customer service online has been relegated to “handling complaints”. Sites like to boast about how quick they can respond, but it’s rare you’ll hear any boast about what a great shopping experience they had online.

Online businesses are obsessed with user experience, optimisations, page rankings and much more. Yet a thousand of their customers could walk past their offices every morning, and they wouldn’t even recognise them.

In our quest towards total commerce automation, we’ve failed to bring the most important part of commerce with us. The customer experience.

The personal contact and connection that is needed to bring customer experience back to online retail reminds me of Dan Frommer’s thoughts on the intersection of commerce and editorial content. In Commerce as content, shopping through art he writes:

[T]he best wave of new e-commerce companies may also be the ones that are great content producers. That means: Clear writing, attractive photography, and good design. I haven’t done the math, but it seems to me that great content with devoted readers could be a heck of a lot more effective at generating sales than just buying banner ads on random websites.

He goes on to give some great examples of quality editorial content. Both these articles are indicative of a welcome shift away from product-based to context-based e-commerce.

Product-based e-commerce sees the product as the unit of measure, and the user experience is built around presenting products in the best possible light to convince a customer to buy them.

Context-based e-commerce sees the a customer’s unique situation as the unit of measure, and the user experience is built around delighting them based on who they are and how technology can help improve their lives. Quality, personal, context-based content serves as the bridge between product and customer.

Horace Dediu recently wrote about iCloud and, among other things, discussed what happens when “value moves from selling things to ‘getting to know you'”. That phrase is a perfect way to summarize this shift. In getting to know us, e-commerce sites can move away from just selling us stuff, and instead sell us ways to become better people.

Dan Frommer has a nice graphical overview of Apple’s September quarter results. As he points out in a follow-up post:

Weaker than anticipated iPhone sales last quarter forced Apple to miss earnings expectations tonight “” a rare showing for the company. As a result, Apple shares are getting whacked right now, down about 7% in after-hours trading.

Here’s the thing about those “weaker” iPhone sales. If Apple released the iPhone 4S in September like most people expected, the 4 million units they sold last weekend would have happened in time to beat analyst expectations (note that Apple still beat its own guidance).

Instead of releasing something sub-standard to keep the analysts happy, Apple decided to wait until the hardware and software were both ready and up their own quality standards. That’s what long-term strategy looks like.

I love the Automattic Creed that all their employees have to sign before they join the company:

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know ther’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything.

I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company.

I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

(h/t to @SwimGeek for the link)

This is going to sound like such a lame “management guru” thing to say, but it’s true: the cultural fit of the people you hire is more important than their past experience or absolute skill level. I’ve seen this time and time again. If I have a choice between hiring someone who is highly skilled in their work but doesn’t display humility and a genuine drive to learn more, and someone who knows enough to know that there is much to learn and they’re hungry to get there, I’ll choose the latter every time.

We recently went through an exercise to define our team values, and in many ways it’s similar to Automattic’s creed. I won’t bore you with the whole thing, but here are the main points. This is how we want other people to describe our team:

• We are zealots about quality
• We have autonomy to do what’s best for the product, its users, and our business
• We have a high fix:complain ratio
• We have a healthy work/life perspective
• We are empathetic to the core

The relationship between a healthy culture and doing great work is causal, not simply correlation. Good culture is the prerequisite for great work to happen, and actually causes it. Alan Cooper recently address this issue in a great article called The pipeline to your corporate soul:

If you want to improve the quality of your website, app, or software, you need to also improve the quality of your organization. You need to ferret out the people who play politics but don’t get things done. You need to squash bureaucracy that stops innovation with doubt and red tape. You need to eliminate the energy drains, systemic distortions, and toxic people that force others to act like corporate drones instead of like entrepreneurs with a vested interest in success.

If you put a bunch of talented, energetic, ambitious people together and make it easy for them to collaborate and do great things, they will. I haven’t seen a single example of great work preceding a clearly defined and healthy culture – even if it’s just an unspoken understanding between two startup founders. Spending time on getting your culture right is worth the effort.

Hey Microsoft, I’m sensing that you’re trying to tell me something about updates?

One of the principles of UI design that I always look out for is error prevention. Good design anticipates any errors that a user might make, and then makes it impossible to make those errors.

Apple’s new iCloud settings screen, shown below, is a case in point. It doesn’t allow you to check the box to sync your photo stream until you update iPhoto to the version that supports it. It would have been easy to forget about this detail. They could have allowed users to check the box anyway, and let photo stream syncing just not work until iPhoto is updated somewhere down the line.

This might sound obvious when you see it done right, but it’s not always easy to anticipate errors. Sticking with the Apple/iOS theme, let’s look at the Omnifocus iPhone app. The app now supports location reminders on iOS 5, which means that you can set it to remind you to do something when you arrive at or leave a specific location. I wanted to try it out, so I set up a reminder to go off when I leave work:

The problem is that the iPhone’s GPS location tracking system needs to be turned on for Omnifocus in order for this to work. I didn’t realize that I didn’t have it turned on for this particular app, so nothing happened. The reminder just didn’t go off. I only discovered my mistake later that evening when I played around with the settings some more.

Designing for error prevention would have prompted me to turn GPS location tracking on for the app before allowing me to add a location-based reminder.

Small details matter.

Dhanji Prasanna wrote a great article about his experiences on the Google Wave team, and the difficulties of working in large development teams. He brings a particularly interesting perspective to UI engineering:

To say we should have been better prepared or organized is to miss the point – large teams starting on a new project are inherently dysfunctional. One common consequence of all this chaos is that experienced engineers seclude themselves to their area of expertise. At a company like Google, this generally means infrastructure or backend architecture. A major externality of this is that fresh grads, and junior engineers are shunted to the UI layer. I have seen this happen time and again in a number of organizations, and it is a critical, unrecognized problem.

UI is hard.

You need the same mix of experienced talent working in the UI as you do with traditional “serious” stuff. This is where Apple is simply ahead of everyone else – taking design seriously is not about having a dictator fuss over seams and pixels. It’s about giving it the same consideration that you give any other critical part of the system.

I’ve experienced this first-hand, and I’ve also seen what happens when backend developers are forced to do UI work (which can happen for a variety of reasons). I’ve heard developers say that they don’t like to do UI work because “it’s not real programming”. They prefer to focus on the real stuff, not this fluffy CSS/JavaScript thing.

Whether or not their perception is accurate is only one part of the discussion. What I want to point out is this: If you make backend developers do front-end work that they’re not passionate about (or worse, work they find embarrassing to do), they’re not going to be motivated to expand their knowledge and do a good job. That’s unfair to everyone and disastrous for the product.

It’s essential to have dedicated UI engineers in an organization so that everyone can focus on the technologies that they’re obsessed with.

I know I shouldn’t be surprised when corporate executives say silly things without the slightest sense of irony, but it still floors me every time. Here is Andy Lees, the head of Microsoft’s Windows Phone business, talking about the iPhone 4S in the Seattle Times Newspaper:

From a pure hardware perspective, I was surprised they’re not giving the consumer more choice. People want a variety of different things.

When you read that statement next to this Apple press release, you’re left scratching your head:

Apple today announced pre-orders of its iPhone 4S have topped one million in a single day, surpassing the previous single day pre-order record of 600,000 held by iPhone 4.

If you say something like “people want a variety of different things”, you should probably back that up with the number of Windows Phone phones (is that how you’re supposed to say it?) that have been pre-ordered or sold. I haven’t seen that press release from Microsoft.

Update (10/13): Looks like we now have those numbers. Horace Dediu reports that Windows Phone has sold just a few more units in 3 months as the iPhone 4S sold in 24 hours:

During the last quarter for which we have data (ending June) I have an estimate that Windows Phone sold only 1.4 million units (Gartner’s sell-through analysis suggests 1.7 million). That gives Microsoft a 1.3% share of units sold (Gartner 1.6%), a new low.

The other problem with Andy’s statement about people wanting more options is that it’s just, well, not true. Harry Marks aptly points to this TED talk on the paradox of choice, and quotes Barry Schwartz:

With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all.

You want an iPhone? Here it is. Choose your storage size and have fun. You want a Windows Phone phone? Here are a variety of models to choose from. Try to enjoy figuring out which one is best for you.

All of this reminds me of a classic answer on Quora to the question Why is Dropbox more popular than other programs with similar functionality? Michael Wolfe makes the point that Dropbox is so successful because it focuses on one thing, and doing that one thing really well. That one thing is a folder that syncs your stuff. That’s it.

“But,” you may ask, “so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!”

No, shut up. People don’t use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs.

The root cause of the problem is the lingering fallacy that more features = a better product. For all the talk about the importance of simplicity, and the growing list of successful products that just do a few things well, we just can’t seem to get rid of this belief that more = better. Andy Lees also falls into this trap in the Seattle Times interview:

The more capabilities we add into our phone, the more delightful it becomes to use because you seem to have more at your fingertips without this clutter and confusion of the other platforms.

More capabilities = less clutter and confusion? Really? To bring this all the way back to Design and the problem with this type of thinking, here is Scrivs in Focus:

The best designs always have a singular focus. The prettiest designs might have multiple things you can focus on, but that doesn’t make them the best designs.

We live in a time where there is so much happening around us that when we are able to use anything that has a singular focus it makes it easy. When we don’t have to make a decision on how we are supposed to use a design it makes it easy. You can’t beat focus. More features don’t beat focus. More doesn’t beat less unless the less is crap.

Turns out that when it comes to technology, in most cases people don’t want a variety of different things. They want one thing that works really really well. And that’s why the iPhone 4S got more than one million pre-orders in a single day.

Cennydd Bowles makes a good point about the intangible benefits of user-centred design in “Why aren’t we converting?”:

I do suggest seeing user-centred design as something wider than just a means of optimising a conversion rate. While there may not be a noticeable uplift in any specific metric, the raw material of design is frequently intangible: trust, loyalty, engagement, etc. These things are much harder to measure, but they still make themselves felt indirectly in other metrics: support costs, referral rates, customer retention, and so on. Separating the effect of design from these long-term figures is, of course, pretty much impossible, but the long-term aggregated data makes it clear that the effect is genuine (see Apple, etc).

It’s a real shame that the results of UX can’t always be measured in a direct uplift in revenue and/or conversion metrics. But it shouldn’t be an excuse not to invest in good design, or worse, to resort to dark patterns.