Jeffrey Rosenberg

An example of relevant QR code usage by Home Depot

Came across a great use for QR codes recently. Home Depot (beginning around March/April of this year, from what I can tell) began rolling out QR codes in print ads and at retail. The example at left is from their Garden Center. Using a QR reader from my smartphone I was able to instantly explore just about anything I would need to know about care and maintenance for these flowers. And as you can see by the screenshot from my phone (right), I could also discover other flowers that would make good companions (to the flowers, not to me - that's another app).

This isn't a solution looking for a problem (as can be the case with technology). This is effective use of a tool to bring relevant content to consumers during the shopping experience, in context, to facilitate and accelerate sales.

AT&T radically simplifies top navigation menu

AT&T just announed its website redesign, and I am instantly struck by the fact that there are only three top navigation selections: Shop, myAT&T, and Support. It's a rather significant move given that top navigation typically includes five - seven options (across sites and industries). My initial reaction (based on experience, not data) is that this re-architecture will yield positive results most notably because it reduces choice, which is scientifically proven to increase action.

Digital's elegant role in a...steakhouse

I had dinner recently at a classic, traditional steakhouse. Anyone who has been to one of these types of places (Morton's, Ruth's Chris, Del Frisco's, etc.) knows that they are elegant and somewhat formal. So I was (pleasantly) surprised when the wine list appeared, loaded on an iPad. I like wine, but I'm certainly not a connoisseur, which means every time a wine list appears in a restaurant I start breaking out in hives over the pressure of having to comb through pages and pages of options. With the iPad, however, the experience was much more intuitive since I could browse by a host of criteria and learn a little bit about each of the wine options I was considering. It was a case of not using technology for technology's sake. They didn't present the food menu on an iPad - salad is salad and steak is steak. Not a lot of complexity there. But wine is different story, and the steakhouse made it much less intimidating.

It also served to make the steakhouse seem more modern without disturbing its old-school feel. Definitely a case where the technology added to the brand experience, but the absence of it wouldn't have detracted from the experience. (An "Excitement Attribute" in Kano Model vernacular.)

Countering top arguments against the social web

Well, we're 1/12th of the way through 2011 and I still find myself having to passionately (sometimes too passionately) espouse the virtues of the social web. (I try my best not to get defensive, which is a challenge, but that's neither here nor there.)

FWIW, here are four random arguments I hear daily against the social web, along with my counterarguments:

1. Online social networking will destroy old-fashioned in-person contact. I believe the social web expands both depth and breadth of relationships, and I don't think it's a replacement for in-person contact for the vast majority. My perspective is that it's pure enrichment: I know more interesting things about more people that I ever would have without social media. It strengthens the connective tissue among my relationships.
2. Twitter doesn't have staying power. So what? Twitter is merely a property / platform. The behaviors it has created will only solidify. Twitter may pass, but only because something bigger and better has expanded on its foundation. The behaviors it has created are becoming part of what we as people do.
3. "Checking in" is a waste of time. Checking in (via location-sharing mobile applications like Loopt, Gowalla, Facebook Places or Foursquare) means different things to different people. To some it's a way of enabling serendipity (my friend is having lunch near me so I'll go say hello), and to some it's a way of sharing something about themselves (I want to let my friends know I'm at the Statue of Liberty). Did we live just fine before location-sharing became possible? Sure. But now we get to share more things with more people and enable even more in-person interaction.
4. I don't care what my friend is eating for lunch. Some content will always be uninteresting to some people across all media. That said, it takes me less time to read what my friend is eating than it does to read the subject line of a junk email, so really, what's the downside? Plus I think it can a) spark conversation and b) lead you to be exposed to something new.

There will always be battles to fight (I'm still fighting battles with Fortune 500 clients about why they should care about their websites); all we can do as digital champions is keep plugging away and picking off the naysayers one by one. Onward.

Verizon user experience fail

 
I understand there are technical constraits associated with how many user sessions can be supported at any given time, and there are security considerations. For instance, American Express gives me the same warning message after a period of inactivity while logged into my credit card account. I can understand and appreciate the reasons behind setting limits on how long my account can be exposed in my browser. But what reason could there be for making me start over every time I don't get everything I need to get done while shopping for cell phones on Verizon.com in 30 minutes (15 minutes of previous inactivity + the extra 15 minutes warning)?

Sometimes I shop for products over a period of days, weeks, months. One of my online shopping behaviors is to leave a browser tab open for the product I am considering for days. Verizon.com doesn't let me do that. And even if there is a good reason for it, it doesn't matter because I would imagine I am not the only one frustrated by this constraint, and Verizon can't explain the rationale to everyone. Wireless companies already make it hard enough to shop online for cell phones and plans by not enabling efficient means of researching and comparing products. But not allowing users to keep a product page open for 30 minutes takes inefficicency to a new level.

Can Foursquare get by designing for NYC?

I recently went to buy a new cooler and was surprised by the lack of selection. There were standard hard shell coolers and several soft shell coolers, and a variety of sizes, but nothing that fit my specific requirements: 1) soft shell, 2) big enough to hold lunch and drinks for four people, 3) outer compartments for napkins, plasticware, keys, and cell phones. The first two requirements are simple and were easy to fill. Surprisingly, though, the third requirement could not be met by the available selection. Yes, each soft shell cooler had an outer compartment, but only one big compartment that spanned the width of the cooler.

So I began to wonder to what extent cooler manufacturers conduct ethnographic studies on consumers. If they observed me any one of the numerous times I have gone to our neighborhood pool this summer (and last summer, and the one before that, etc.) they would see that every single time I set down our cooler, I immediately search for a place to put my keys and cell phone, clearly not pleased with my options. Given the fact that we all have our cell phones with us everywhere we go, I would think a separate cell phone compartment would be standard issue.

All of which brings me to my main point about Foursquare. The two times I have seen Foursquare's founder and CEO Dennis Crowley speak (Social Media Week and Mashable's Media Summit), and in several recent interviews, he has maintained that if they design their product for New York City - a highly complex environment - Foursquare should work anywhere. And that may be true for location precision and trending algorithms.

But I wonder about the extent to which suburban use cases are represented in their business strategy and what Crowley refers to as their ambitious product roadmap. How much of it focuses on location vs. use cases and user types? A 40-year old Dad in suburban Georgia is going to use Foursquare differently than a 28-year old single female in Manhattan. I'm concerned that the focus is on the latter (with additional focus on helping local merchants grow their businesses).

Both user types (and numerous others) can be addressed by Foursquare (either explicitly as part of its feature set, or implicitly as part of its architecture - to allow for a range of behaviors rather than prescribing behaviors). But these different use cases and user types can only be addressed if they are considered by Foursquare, which I hope is the case because I love the concept. But to avoid hitting an untimely plateau in user growth (user growth is occurring at a phenomenally-high rate right now) I think relevance will have to increase for a wider audience, the requirements for which can only be identified (accurately) by their team going out and observing first hand the behaviors and needs of different user types within different user scenarios - in different locations. I don't think building for NYC will be sufficient to grow to their full potential.

A company's biggest social media asset

A recent article in Ad Age highlighted the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' first foray into leveraging social media for this year's Oscars. (The Grammy's also integrated social media in their awards last month; Mashable wrote a story on it.) The Academy is executing what seems to be a few really on-strategy initiatives to build interest and involvement prior to, during, and after the broadcast, including seeing how your predictions stack up against the community. They also have a Facebook page where fans can interact and check out behind-the-scenes photos and videos. (Of course try using Facebook search to find the page. Just try.)

It seems like they are taking the right steps and thinking strategically about how to initiate a social media presence. And they launched a new website to accompany their social media strategy. However, in the Ad Age article, David Berkowitz of 360i makes an interesting point: "Right now their site seems stuck in a time when the web was a lot less social." He notes that the Facebook page is a fantastic social experience, but that their newly-launched website is quite static.

Along with my colleagues at Goodman&Company, I just completed a website strategy for a leading global business software company. The initiative is focused on the company's website (as opposed to other web properties, like social media platforms), and the strategy we developed is very progressive and innovative. I won't characterize it as "web 1.0" or "web 2.0" or "social". It simply supports the goals users bring with them to the site and enables the types of interactions in which buyers of complex enterprise software engage.

If you are in charge of identifying potential software vendors and ultimately for recommending a particular vendor on behalf of your company, you are going to be doing research on various software options and the companies that make the software, comparison shopping among vendors, exploring costs, talking with peers both in and outside of your company, presenting to upper management, collecting the input from colleagues, etc. The web can play a role in all of these interactions at some level. Building full capabilities against all of these interactions would be a very 1998 thing to do. We recognize that some of these interaction can be facilitated online, some can be supported online, and some can be enabled online. We also recognize that what various users need to accomplish vary by such factors as seniority, role, industry, need, context, and buying stage. But that's not the point.

The point is that the company's website itself - and any company's website - can and should be a place for interaction among various audiences to take place. Facebook and Twitter cannot be the only place that "social" happens. If you make social interaction a key tenant of your user experience strategy and bake it into the site's DNA, it will amplify all of your social media efforts (not to mention drive customer engagement). And it's not about inventing yet another place where someone has to create a new profile and a new social graph. You can leverage existing social networks and embed them into your site experience by leveraging OpenID, OAuth, Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, etc.

Most people separate social media from the web, as if the web wasn't social from it's inception. The web was founded on social principles. Don't forget your website when building a social strategy.

Latest Simon Fuller creation - another innovative content model

Simon Fuller, creator of American Idol, has invented yet another model for interacting with content. Early next year he and his company, 19 Entertainment, will launch a new star search program called "If I Can Dream", which will follow the lives of five aspiring stars that will brought together in a house in Hollywood. There are several aspects that makes this concept unique:

• Distribution. This isn't your typical TV show. In fact, there's no TV involved at all (at least in the early stages). Rather, the audience experiences the content via the program's website, Hulu, MySpace, and radio.
• Audience participation.  It goes way beyond post-show voting (American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, etc.) to leverage real-time interaction with contestants via Twitter, Facebook, etc. It allows for interaction via emerging social network and mobile platforms.
• Availability. The program takes time shifting to a new level not only by providing packaged content on Hulu, but by providing around-the-clock streaming on the program's website, allowing the audience to experience live programing on their own schedule. Time shifting has been around for decades, but it has always been about watching things that occurred in the past. "Dream" will allow the audience to experience the program live whenever they want.
  

This is clearly a new model for entertainment consumption and interaction. Today’s youth will never understand how we sat on couches and watched pre-recorded shows at times selected by broadcasters.

Marriott.com's bold website redesign

In mid-November of this year Marriott.com relaunched with a new design (I just came across it yesterday while booking a room). The home page is not only a radical departure from their previous home page, but from widely-accepted home page convention, as follows:

• It's very visual. I don't mean that they have a lot of photos, but rather the primary means of navigation is visually-oriented, much like visual search (see Bing.com). But also much like cover flow found in iTunes and various iPhone apps.
• It's highly simplified. By my non-scientific count, approximately 75% of links - and therefore available user options - have been removed from the home page, which should widen the conversion funnel.
• It's layout is progressive. From my perspective this change has huge implications. It demonstrates that the web may finally be breaking from its newspaper-like structure. One of the many things the iPhone (and now Android) have done is to tear down many established principles of interaction design to create a new set of interaction behaviors. These also impact web expectations. As does Bing's visual search. As does CNN's new home page. As do Rich Internet Applications. As do desktop widgets.

According to Marriott's blog, Marriott.com drove $6 billion in revenue in 2008. Making such a radical change overnight to a website that has that much financial impact is a very big bet. I will be interested to see whether this improves performance; my best guess is that it will.

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• Bing Launches Visual Search (mashable.com)

Re-thinking the pay-at-the-pump interface

If you could redesign any given pay-at-the-pump interface, do you think it would end up looking anything like they do today? Would there be a Yes, No, Cancel, and Enter? Think about that for a second. In the time it took me to fill up my car this morning I had designed in my head an interface that, in addition to the number keys, had two buttons: red and green. In my mind they were big - both together occupied the space between the Debit and Yes keys on the photo (above). The screen above the keypad (not pictured) told you which one to push depending on the step in the overall process.

There are all sorts of requirements behind these systems related to transaction processing, pricing logic, and steps in the purchase process. They can all be solved by 10 number and 2 selection buttons - touchscreen or otherwise. I have to give all existing interfaces a thumbs-down.