Okay, well, I'm already outgrowing this free blog. I need categories for starters, and I think we should have comments on the same page as the posts... plus, who knows? My blog might be popular enough someday to warrant RSS.... So I'll be switching over before too long... my husband's installing WordPress for me. Stay tuned for a new URL...
I just ran across Barry Schwartz's work for the first time. He's a psychologist who has a written a book called The Paradox of Choice, Why More is Less.
His oft-quoted example of why lots of choice is tricky (and tyrannical)
is that 'shoppers who confront a display of 30 jams or varieties of
gourmet chocolate are less likely to purchase any than when
they encounter a display of six'. He says that too much choice
paralyzes people into indecision, that they would rather walk away and
not buy anything than have to choose.
I totally get what he's saying, but I don't think the problem is
with too much choice per sè. I think the problem is that there is way
too much information and we need help making choices. That's where
relevancy comes in.
Technology can help us solve these problems. If there are too many
kinds of jam, then someone should design a program for my PDA or cell
phone that lets me input dietary and eating preferences, then as I
wander through the store I can be pointed to certain items. So my
eating profile knows that I hate blackberries, love strawberries, am
trying to not eat too much sugar, but need extra fiber. Oh, and I only
buy products from companies that are socially responsible. So as I
walk down the jam aisle, up pops a little alert suggesting one or two
particular brands of jam based on my preferences. Okay, silly
example... but I don't want the solution to this problem to be limiting
my choices! Doesn't that throw the baby out with the bathwater?
Schwartz extends his thinking into higher education in an article
that also argues there is too much choice. I think he has interesting
points to make, but anyone who says things like, 'When I went to
college 35 years ago, we didn't have much choice, but that was
better...' (wanton paraphrasing here...) worries me a bit. Choice is
good! Not being able to make sense of one's choices is bad. Or having
to spend too much time evaluating choices is also bad. That's why we
need relevancy.
On the other hand, I do see his point that too much choice can lead
to me feeling bad if I make the wrong decision. So maybe the key is
helping me to make the right decision so I don't have to feel bad?
I've been sort of avoiding the whole storytelling thing, not so much
because I wasn't interested, but just because it's seems kinda trendy
and buzzwordy.
But now I'm sucked in. Stories make experiences relevant to people
other than the one person who experienced it. We then, in the moment
of the telling, can live that experience vicariously... that's what
makes movies and books so powerful... how they suck us into an
emotional situation and don't let us go...
There's a great new resource about
storytelling that I've been looking at. It talks about why stories
are good and then makes some practical suggestions about how to apply
them in all sorts of business contexts like strategic planning,
knowledge management and branding. Oh, and it provides some tools for facilitating storytelling
in group settings. I mean, why couch business stuff in high-fallutin'
abstract language when we can bring it down to earth and make it
relevant to people? Makes good sense to me.
Looking at it from this point of view, massively multiplayer games
are really an organic form of story creation... the whole idea that the
player is also a producer in that heady constructivist sense, co-creating the game universe as they play.
I want to read this book now: Good Company, How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work. Has anyone? Is it good?
I recently listened to an interview with Greg Easterbook, author of The Progress Paradox,
a new book about how Americans are more prosperous than ever... and
more miserable than ever... Okay, well, at least as miserable as
they've always been, even when they had much smaller houses, much less
to eat, more deadly diseases, and a much less safe environment (like
during the time when there were much scarier prospects than even
terrorism... like thermonuclear war or evil fascists over-running the
planet).
Easterbrook says that the problem is that we don't have guiding
life philosophies anymore (and no, he's not necessarily talking about
religion). What I think he means is that people don't feel connected
to things as much anymore. Religion, nationalism, public service,
volunteering, extended-yet-close families, and living in small,
tightly-knit communities go a long way towards making people feel
relevant. Plus, in an individualistic society, we become much more
concerned about our own well-being than the well-being of our
community, and that just makes us mean-spirited.
So we need to find ways to feel relevant... to feel like our life
matters somehow... Then we'll be happy. Seems simple, doesn't it?
I'd give this book a read if for no other reason that to make
yourself feel better about your life.... (and I might do the same,
though I have to say I have a pretty darned good life).
Now this is just what I need! CNET is launching
a digital music guide that aggregates the offerings of various digital
music sites under one umbrella (someone please do this for social
software!). So I no longer have to go to all of the different sites,
trying to remember which companies have made deals with which labels,
which 'indie' labels are attached to which big labels and whether the
label I'm looking for is at all connected to any of the big labels who
have deals with the music sites. Whew! Consumers shouldn't have to
know more about how the music industry is organized than the industry
itself knows... I don't care about their deals -- I just want to know
where I can get the latest Juno Reactor single!
The funny thing is that they're launching this new service under the MP3.com
brand (whom you may remember were sued by, then bought by Vivendi
Universal). Very interesting. And I guess what used to be on MP3.com
(all the real indie artists) is now going to be on Download.com.
Hey wait... I just realized that this new thing isn't what I
thought. I want one place where I can go and get all the digital music
in one place! Who's making that for me? I guess the CNET thing is just
a listing of who does what, how much they charge, whether they stream,
download, or whatever and what devices they support -- useful, I guess,
but not useful enough! Drat, I was excited for a minute.
My last post got me to thinking about my old job at Towerrecords.com. I was hired because my boss was concerned about how many potential customers we were losing. Basically, our 'conversion' rate was going through the floor and he wanted to know why (and wanted to fix it). We knew lots of people were coming to our site, but weren't buying, why?
I remember thinking to myself that maybe they weren't buying because they didn't find anything they wanted, or maybe because they thought stuff was too expensive (aside from failed transactions, the very reasons I don't buy stuff when I visit websites), but I didn't want to say that in the interview, of course. So I agreed to try and fix the problem.
My boss had some good ideas. He thought that people would buy more music if you exposed them to more music, so he wanted me to design a recommendations application. I looked at a bunch of companies in the business of music recommendations (most are gone now), then picked SavageBeast. The thing I and the people I tested liked about it was that you could be exposed to new music by picking a song you liked, then being offered choices that were musically similar to it. (very relevant!). SavageBeast did this by having musicians analyze songs across a whole bunch of different variables, then collated the data into a super snazzy database that also allowed users to refine across various dimensions that were relevant to them. Unfortunately, Tower apparently decided to focus on the core functions and eliminated this tool, but I have an archived screenshot that you can look at.
Anyway, we added our recommendations, but then we were stumped. I knew that we needed to learn more about what people wanted and what they were doing on the site. So I read all of the customer feedback, designed questionnaires, held focus groups and all that business, only to find that people wanted to easily find stuff they liked, have it be at a price point they thought was reasonable, and get it quickly and efficiently. But my boss thought there had to be more to it than that! (more later about how companies often avoid fixing the most obvious problems...)
So we decided we needed some good site analytics. Not just page
views and transaction data, but a real analytics package that showed us
what people were really doing on the site. We looked at dozens of
packages, then finally found one that stood out from the crowd, a
package from Tealeaf Technology that let us see 'transactions through our shoppers' eyes'.
The really excellent thing about Tealeaf was that we could see not only
what customers were successfully doing, but also what they were attempting to do. (yes, obvious privacy issues here, but people could opt out if they wanted).
You wouldn't believe the number of failed transactions I saw
looking at that data! On a weekly basis, there were hundreds of
heart-wrenching attempts of people trying to do business with us and
our site making it difficult, if not impossible. It used to make me
feel so guilty to see someone who had spent 2 hours on the site looking
for music, filling up their basket and trying to check out, only to
have their basket disappear! I'm not kidding. I saw one guy spend
another hour refilling his basket, only to have it disappear again!
Tragic!
All of this stuff led us to replacing our existing search engine with super nifty technology from Endeca... we also completely redesigned our checkout process... (which led to an embarrassing security hole, I guess -- after I left, thankfully). But the site ended up being much, much better... we just needed to understand what was happening. I wish more sites could see how frustrated they are making their customers...
I'll have to tell you more about Endeca later... their technology is all about relevancy....
Retailers of the world, answer this question! I want to buy things from you! But you make it so difficult!
Here's the latest in a long history of failed transactions on various websites:
I need to lose a few pounds. So I downloaded a trial of some nifty
software that lets me track how many calories I eat. Actually, it was
about the 10th trial I downloaded from various companies, but I finally
found some software I liked. So my trial expires and I try to buy a
reg key. I fill out all of my details, but am never e-mailed the reg
key. So I e-mail them. They say they can't process my order because
my order came from outside the US, but I'm using a US credit card. And
I write back, yes, I live in New Zealand now, but I'm an American, have
American credit cards and use my mother-in-law's house as a billing
address. Oh, and I say that I understand that they worry about fraud,
but can I please pay with PayPal? I hear nothing back from the payment
processing people, so I e-mail the 'info' address. Still waiting to
hear back.
Now I'm left hanging! I want this software to control my wanton eating habits! They're letting me down!
Please, DietOrganizer,
let me buy your software! Please understand that some of your
customers live outside the U.S., but that we still find your products
useful and would like to buy them!
I find it amazing how many companies spend so much time and energy
trying to recruit new customers instead of focusing on the people who
have already been 'converted'. Seems silly to me.
Stephen Downes sent a link (in his OLDaily newsletter) to this paper
on Dave Pollard's 'How to Save the World' site... It covers a lot of
stuff related to innovation, including the whole 'necessity is the
mother of invention' angle. I like this part:
"Innovation Starts with the Customer: If successful innovations
must address an urgent human need, then the front-end of the innovation
process should be situated at the point of contact with the humans
expressing that need, i.e. the sales and customer service people in
businesses, not the R&D laboratory or the marketing department."
Posted at 09:00 am by Lisa
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I realize that some of you are going to look at this blog and think
that I'm re-hashing a lot of the same tired stuff about
customer/user/learner/audience-centricity that we've been hearing for
years (well, for the last 5 anyway...). And yes, you'd be right.
The thing is, I have benefited from many of the innovations that people
with this mindset have brought to the world these last few years. And
I like them. I'm getting spoiled. I find it difficult, if not
impossible, to go back to the old way of taking whatever companies and
organisations deigned to give me...
The worst shock I had moving to New Zealand last year (well, aside from the bandwidth caps) was that I couldn't bring my TiVo. You can't imagine my anguish, having to go back to watching television in the old irrelevant, tv-station-centric way.
I think people have gone along with the program, taking what they're
given, but I have this idea that we are on the cusp of change... I
think people are going to start gravitating, in increasingly larger
numbers, towards companies and organizations that provide them products
and services in a flexible, mobile, and relevant fashion. Ultimately,
relevancy is about convenience... why would I deal with someone who
makes things inconvenient when I'm one click away from someone who
cares enough to give me what I want, the way I want it? (I always hear
that Burger King refrain when I say this... but wasn't that idea
revolutionary? Not having to have secret sauce on your burger if you
didn't like it? Now what do we expect as a result of this change in
thinking?)
If you spend any time at all reading this blog, you're going to
learn that I'm really into video games and learning. Yesterday, I had
a great talk with Constance Steinkuehler,
who is a PhD student (among other totally amazing achievements) at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, looking at how gamers learn in
Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) environments. She's looking
specifically at the game Lineage,
which is an incredibly involved universe of relationships between
players. We talked a lot about how people learn life and relationship
skills in these environments, how they are often safe places to try on
different perspectives, and just how darn interesting the learning,
self-discovery, and sometimes related life changes are in these
environments ...
Her supervisor is Dr. James Paul Gee, a very interesting fellow whose work I've been reading a lot lately. He wrote the book, 'What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy',
and leverages his background in lingusitics, education, and as a gamer,
to try and understand what all of the game designers in the world are
doing right when it comes to motivating deep learning. There's a
great introductory piece by him at http://www.ub.es/multimedia/iem/, (enter the site, then click on 'Games as Learning Machines' -- the frames won't let me link it directly for you).
Constance also told me about Quest Atlantis,
a project that uses a massively multiplayer 3-D environment to 'immerse
children, ages 9-12, in educational tasks'. I love the fact the
learning can be made relevant to kids by leveraging things they are
already passionate about, like games...
So, so interesting!
This is the kind of thinking I'm talking about... Apparently people are demanding wi-fi and
almost half of Marriot's 2700 hotels already have it. "When we first
started rolling it out, we were probably ahead of most guests' needs,"
says Marriott spokesperson Scott Carmen. "But we wanted our guests to
feel comfortable when they are working from the hotel."
See? They knew what business people would want even before they knew it
themselves. Sure, those other hotels have high-speed connections to
the rooms, but people like their mobility...
I struggle a bit with whether this is relevant or just frightening.
TV execs have taken a good look at their fleeing audiences and decided
they need to dedicate a channel to gamers.
One thing is for sure, the guy in this article who says that watching
someone play video games is as exciting as watching someone read is
lying. I like watching other people play -- much of the benefit, none
of the work (plus I have terrible hand-eye coordination, so action
games don't last long unless someone else plays). When playing RPGs or
adventure games, my husband and I often fight over who has to play in
the same way we fight over who has to drive...
Anyone, I'd probably watch this channel a lot. Someone should record some for me and send it to me here.
With another version of music-on-a-stick technology, you can now buy a little resuable keychain hard-drive from a vending machine and download an audio recording (on the spot!) of a concert you've just been to (well, only at one place in New Jersey at the moment, but it's a start...). It's interesting, because it's like legal bootlegging... Why have people make crappy recordings and sell them when you can make a nice recording and sell it to them? And it's immediate, too! Catch them on that high as they walk away from some soul-stirring musical experience, then let them share the experience with their friends. Very clever. Relevancy makes good business sense.
I told John about Replay Radio last night, one of many emerging relevancy applications.
Why is it relevant? Because much like TiVo (or
other PVRs, of course!), Replay Radio changes the broadcast paradigm of
me having to watch/listen to something when they feel like airing it
for me to a paradigm where I can capture it and listen to it whenever I
feel like it. You can set up radio shows that you like and Replay
Radio will capture them for you whenever they're on. Then you can
listen to them on your PC or transfer them to some other device.
With Replay Radio, you can also capture recorded streams. I
capture conference proceedings and other interesting things and listen
to them on my (nearly) daily walks. I love mobile computing... it's
all about relevancy... getting stuff where and when I need it...
I told some colleagues about my blog last night and they raised a
couple of reasonable points. John worried that in a too relevant
world, people would stop being suprised, challenged, piqued... He
remembered going to the record store, buying albums based on their
cover art, taking them home and being exposed to an
entirely novel, unexpected experience. He feels that if he had made
selections based on known relevancy, he would have missed out...
Phil worried that students would define relevant education as the
kind that is accomplished with the least possible effort and the
maximum amount of gain.
I said that relevancy is not just about giving people what they
want, but also anticipating their needs, which may be contrary to their
wants (just then, anyway). So, John might think he doesn't like
hip-hop, but I know enough about him to know that he likes good rhythms
and smooth vocals, so I suggest something catchy from 50 Cent or
whomever... and voilá, John likes it!
Likewise, with students, relevancy is all about scaffolding... the
idea that learning is fostered by exposing students to learning
opportunities that are just hard enough, but not too hard. (Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development).
These learning theories assume that this happens in social interaction,
but I wonder if it couldn't also happen in AI environments (but I
digress...). But yes, regardless, students can't always be given what
they think they want, they need to be given what they need. But we can
do it by placing those learning experiences in a meaningful context for
them, allowing them to connect what they're learning to what they know
already. That's still relevant.
There is one phenomenon that I worry about... something funny happens in collaboratively filtered environments like Memigo, Blogdex or even Amazon.com...
once a group starts gravitating towards particular things and those
filter to the top and everyone reads them, then the group ends up
exposing itself to a limited number of options, to a limited sphere of
news or whatever. Where is the friction, then? Do we need it?
I happened across this ZDNet article this
morning, reporting on various new developments in search technology,
including a new player in the translation domain called LanguageWeaver.
They say, "Only 8 percent of the world's population speaks English as a
primary language, but about 80 percent of Web sites are in English."
Talk about irrelevancy on a global scale. LanguageWeaver, of course,
helps solve this problem by offering on-the-fly translation for Arabic,
Chinese and many of those other difficult, non-Roman-alphabet-based
languages (using a 'new, statistical/cryptographic approach') . They
say the quality is as good as a human's first draft. Impressive. Maybe
someone who speaks one of these other languages can give it a try and
report back to me.
Also in this article, Google apparently plans to merge its Orkut
social network with searches, in order to provide 'experts' who can
help with the more intricate queries. In the meantime, if you want
social software with your search, try Eurekster...
Buried deep within this Forbes Magazine article about
people arguing over channel turf is a tantalizing bit about a nice
Georgia Republican who tried to 'attach a provision that would let
cable and satellite providers give consumers the option of choosing and
paying for those channels they want to see, known as a la carte
pricing.'
They've been talking about this for a long time, do you suppose they'll ever actually do it?
Or will Netflix have taken over the world by then? Movie downloads are just the first step, I'd say...
Now if we could only get TiVo in New Zealand -- I'd be happy person.
No matter what the topic, Mr. Spock always had something to say about it. Here's a good one:
"What you want is irrelevant, what you have chosen is at hand."
- from Star Trek VI, The Undiscovered Country
How many times have I heard that from an online retailer?!
Posted at 05:17 pm by Lisa
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