B2B/B2C online strategy and enterprise eBusiness blog

This is surely making the rounds, but I wanted to draw attention to customer service with humor as demonstrated by Google Transit’s Joe Hughes. This is such a great way to give a large company a human touch, particularly with the sense of humor. The PR/buzz surrounding this is also going to be an added bonus.

Although it’s been out since sometime in 2006, I just discovered Google’s Firefox Browser Sync plug-in. I’m in heaven because I have 3 machines that I work with on a daily basis: my personal G5 iMac (at home), my G4 PowerBook (work), and my Dell Windows XP Laptop (work). Firefox is my primary browser on all three machines and thanks to this plug-in, I can finally share all of my cookies, bookmarks, browsing history, and passwords between all machines automatically.

It simply stores this information (in encrypted format) on my Google account. It also lets you optionally choose what not to sync.

This is particularly useful (especially for bookmarks) because I tried to manually keep the same bookmarks/hierarchy between machines but it would always get out of sync by doing it on my own. Now with everything automated, it doesn’t matter which machine I use because they all carry the same settings.

Yesterday I covered step 1 of DMAIC, the “Design” phase as a part of the larger Six Sigma for Web Development topic. Moving right along to step 2 after design phase is implemented is the task of measuring the success or usability of your design. Since the design phase of a website usually isn’t released to the public, you must execute qualitative and quantitative surveys/studies.

What is a qualitative survey?
A qualitative survey or study is where you have a small group of participants who you have carry out tasks on your website in a one-on-one setting. This is most often a usability study ran by a facilitator (or yourself). A group of 10 people over the course of two days will give you plenty of data to determine whether or not the design phase of DMAIC was a success or needs considerable work. The point of these surveys or studies is to do a deep dive with each individual spending 60-90 minutes with them understanding how they navigate the site, identifying their frustrations, and determining whether or not they can even complete the task at hand.

You will pick up a lot of small “fixes” from a qualitative study that will add up to an excellent list of incremental improvements you can make. You should also identify any major disconnects the site has in its navigations or the tasks that individuals are asked to complete.

What is a quantitative survey?
A quantitative survey is more about volume, or quantity of responses. These are going to be questions like, “On a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being very satisfied, please rank your overall satisfaction with this website.” You won’t get the deep dive like in a qualitative study, but you will get a very good overall ranking from a larger group of participants. Usually, you want about 200 responses to be statistically significant in a quantitative survey.

Perform a qualitative study first.
In my experience, I would recommend performing a qualitative study first. If you do a quantitative study first you may see your overall rankings suffer, but you won’t really know why. It essentially reinforces the point that you will need to do a usability/qualitative study anyway. The qualitative study is always going to deliver rich feedback that your team can prioritize and execute. This data is so powerful that once it is implemented, the quantitative study should help identify any remaining problem areas. If there are significant drop-off areas or low rankings, you can individually tackle and evaluate these sections.

Structuring the Measure, Analyze, and Improvement phases of DMAIC
Additionally, the use of web analytics to see how these people from the quantitative study are navigating your site is an added bonus. This is how I would structure the these three phases of DMAIC:

1. Ensure your conversion funnels being tested are fully functional and compatible on the platform in which you will be testing.
2. Execute a usability (qualitative) study
3. Evaluate results of usability study, prioritize development and design tasks, and implement changes
4. Integrate web analytics into your site at this time — the reason why I say to do this here is because your navigation may significantly change as a result of the usability study and any custom integration points you worked on before may need to be redone at this phase. Hopefully, you’ve got the navigation dialed in at this point and won’t be changing too much more than some interface design components at this point.
5. Execute a quantitative study of 200+ participants. If you work for a large company, soliciting employees from other divisions who are not close to your products is an ideal way to do this. Otherwise, a friends and family test will also suffice. The key is getting people to perform tasks on the website who are not familiar with your products. If you have your own employees do the testing, the results will be skewed because they will not be relying on the website for product information — generally, they already know enough about your products to bypass any pain points the website may have.
6. Evaluate results of quantitative study, prioritize tasks, and implement any necessary changes. You may be able to launch your site at this point while continuing to implement rolling changes based on the quantitative results.

Ongoing quantitative studies (The “Control” phase)
Consider companies like OpinionLabs to implement an ongoing quantitative study for your site. With their software, you can even obtain qualitative results from people from individual pages or sections of your site. This information is powerful and the ongoing measurement of satisfaction of your site will be an important way to continue to improve overall satisfaction and conversions.

Bricks and mortar retail stores do not just put products on the shelf and leave them for eternity. They are constantly trying new end-cap displays, custom product displays, promotions, and adding/removing products to optimize their layouts. Website visitor’s usability experience and requirements will also change over time. The same sites built in the late 90’s are laughable today. You need to be able to change with the times and this is why the control phase is extremely critical.

As a continuation on the topic of applying Six Sigma methodologies towards web development, design, and usability, this post focuses on step 1 of the DMAIC process, “D” (Define):

In the “Define” phase of web development, this is where you identify the key components your customers need in order to navigate a conversion funnel. This concept can be applied to many types of websites, but here is an example of how this applies to an e-commerce website:

Defining attributes for e-commerce sites
A primary goal of an e-commerce site is to generate revenue. This means you’ll need a storefront, the ability to add products to a cart, and the ability to securely purchase these products online. Compatibility and usability issues aside, this is usually a significant area of oversight for many web developers, marketers, and managers.

How would your online store compare to bricks and mortar?
If you think of a bricks and mortar business, you can associate their aisles of products with your online store. Moving further down their path, you will also find shopping carts to hold products and cash registers to process transactions. What many sites fail to realize is the sales component of a store. A bricks and mortar business has the benefit of sales associates who can help customers with questions about products and with how to find products in their store.

Websites lack the human component. Don’t just focus on the tail end of your conversion funnel.
Websites on the other hand lack this human interaction, so it’s up to the “Define” phase of Six Sigma’s DMAIC process to identify the key components that will help drive consumers to the sales funnel. This is typically going to be a product search engine, product comparison tool, and a product catalog (outlining more in-depth information than the online store). If a customer can’t figure out your product or service if it were sitting on a shelf in a bricks and mortar store, then don’t expect them to be able to understand it online.

Leverage retail environments when building an online experience
If you have an advantage of selling products online that are also sold in retail stores, you can piggyback off of your learnings from the retail experience. What benefit does a sales associate play and what is the process that the associate walks the customer through the conversion funnel? At which point does the associate hand the customer off to the purchasing portion of the funnel? Use this experience and information and convey it online — it’s a necessary feature.

Failure to define the complete components of a conversion funnel will be identified with qualitative surveys
Avoid tunnel vision from the beginning when building a site. Whether it be e-commerce, social media, etc., don’t forget that the majority of your visitors will not be experts in the product or service you are trying to sell them or get them to use via your website.

My next post will discuss quantitative and qualitative feedback for the “Measure” phase of the DMAIC process.

A few weeks ago while analyzing the results of an internal test on a new web design we’re testing, it was brought up about how manufacturing is guided by Six Sigma standards. It was suggested the website live in a similar realm of excellence.

What is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is a rigorous and disciplined methodology that uses data and statistical analysis to measure and improve a company’s operational performance by identifying and eliminating “defects” in manufacturing and service-related processes. Commonly defined as 3.4 defects per million opportunities, Six Sigma can be defined and understood at three distinct levels: metric, methodology (DMAIC/DFSSstructured problem solving roadmap and tools) and philosophy (Reduce variation in your business and take customer-focused, data driven decisions).

Can Six Sigma be applied to web development, design, and usability?
This is a very logical question. Yes, it can be applied, but achieving it is another issue altogether.

Pulling from Jakob Nielson’s November 2003 post, Six Sigma engineering relies on a five-step process called DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control). He was really ahead of his time in this article. A google search does not pull up much information on applying six sigma to web development, design, or usability. This tells me the concept has not been discussed too much and it makes sense — the web is still in its infancy, and the more experienced developers within organizations today are now moving into upper management where they are beginning to look at the website from a higher view within the company.

As the web becomes more of a vital tool for most businesses today, upper management (who often times knows little about how exactly a website goes together or how to build a successful site) is seeing the value in applying other business practices and methodologies towards the design, testing, and execution of their websites.

Why Six Sigma is difficult to achieve in web development today.
In manufacturing, the amount of variables encountered in an assembly line is not as vast as a complex website. Manufacturing doesn’t deal directly with consumers, either, and the manufacturing process has very strict processes and tolerances for how things are assembled.A website is dynamic in nature and also navigated and operated by your customers — customers who may not know a thing about your product and have had no training on your website. Manufacturing lines are staffed by duty-specific workers, trained to perform specific tasks accurately and efficiently.

A website on the other hand can be navigated in millions of different ways and combinations by millions of different people. Testing each of these combinations is impossible and will result in you testing your website into eternity without ever releasing it to the market. Add on top of this a team of people who are most likely very diverse in their backgrounds: developers, designers, and marketers — each come with their own education and experiences and often time have no visibility into what their other team members’ job responsibilities really entail (how many developers do you know that can truly do graphic design? how many designers do you know that can write complex database queries?).

Accept the variables in web development, and apply the concepts of Six Sigma
The key is applying the Six Sigma mentality to web development, design, and usability so you can get the best balance of accuracy and conversions. The problem most developers and designers have is that they get “tunnel vision” and focus exclusively on just one piece of the entire web application. This is a problem for any type of site which has multiple conversion funnels (sales, registration forms, contact forms, etc.).

Next Segments:

1. “Define” in the DMAIC process

More on this topic over the next several days as I cover each phase of the DMAIC process in individual blog posts in an effort to keep the posts spread out and on-topic, rather than one long, rambling post. I’ll provide links at the end of this post as each phase of DMAIC is evaluated.

I came across this post while scanning my RSS feeds and it made me think about the group of designers and developers we’ve got. The “silo’d” effect is really common in web development. Project manager, developer, designer…and the only links in between are a task list with due dates. While this is effective for some companies, I don’t believe it lends itself to an outstanding online experience, whatever the desired goals might be.

The end-user savvy developer & designer
Having developers who are usability-savvy and having designers who are development-savvy (may not be experts, but understand the general concepts of abstracting out CSS classes and approaching it like a developer would) is the perfect blend of talent. It’s why I’m also not a huge fan of completely separating design elements from development elements in the code on a site.

A designer who’s primary responsibility is interface design and usability is of much higher value to me if they know some code and can navigate around some of the simpler concepts with languages like PHP. Likewise, a developer who understands the value of making an effort to build a usable application is also highly desired. It’s less work in the long-run for everybody.

It’s hard to go into too many specifics without divulging our internal projects, but the above article was a really great overview as to why you’ve got to encourage collaboration and hire individuals who take interest in what the other aspects are of web design and development. Sprinkle in some marketing savvy amongst the designers and developers and you’ve got a very efficient team. It gives the project manager more time to spend with the individuals to brainstorm ideas rather than being the “bridge” between design and development.

Silos are bad in many areas of business, web development is just one of them
I prefer working with people who themselves don’t act like their job responsibilities are in a silo. This is true in many aspects of business, not just web development. It’s a concept that many developers don’t fully realize and as a result, they may be limiting their potential growth within their organization/career path.

I recently upgraded from a Blackberry 8700 (on the T-mobile network) to an 8703e on the Sprint network. The primary reason was so that I could get a local phone number for business as well as access corporate e-mail, etc. Previously, I did not have cell phone service with my 8700, just enterprise e-mail service. Now I have the best of both worlds.

My main gripe right now is that the phone quality is really poor. I can’t tell if this is the design of the Blackberry or if it’s Sprint’s network. Calling my wife’s cell phone our or home Vonage line with my old Nokia 6820 on Cingular’s network results in a much better quality call that doesn’t drop. In a week of use, I’ve experienced poor phone quality and more frequently dropped calls. Apparently it’s also difficult for people on the other end of the line to hear me at times, whereas with my Nokia, they can hear me just fine.

Phone quality problems aside, my life is just about perfect with this phone. E-mail, internet, ssh client, AIM, Yahoo! IM, Google Chat, Gmail, SMS messaging, and the ability to look at Word/PDF attachments makes traveling much more convenient. It’s a great enterprise phone for the business user, but still lacks the following:

• mp3 playback
• video playback
• HTML e-mail support
• no camera
• web browsing experience is OK, but still is not a “true” browser, despite its emulation capabilities

I still am highly anticipating the iPhone. However, with just about all of my life consolidated into one device (I forward my calls from my old Nokia on my Cingular account to my BlackBerry, now), I may wait until the second generation iPhone instead. This is almost good enough for me to not really need the iPhone, but it still doesn’t quite do everything. I have yet to purchase a true iPod (I just have an iPod Shuffle), so the iPhone essentially solves that need, plus gives me the added benefits of being able to do just about everything else I could ask.

For now, The Blackberry continues to be an excellent tool for business use.

I’m sitting in the Boston airport living in the wonderful world of customer service in the airline industry.

When checking in at the kiosk today, my reservation wasn’t found either when I used my credit card or when I entered my confirmation number. I proceeded to wait in line for an agent to help me. While waiting in line I witnessed the classic display of not servicing a customer:

A man, his wife, and 2 kids were checking luggage. I heard him ask why his seats were no longer next to each other (for his family) on the flight. The agent replied with, “I don’t know” and refused to help offer an explanation or reconfigure his seating arrangement. I could see his frustration, but because it was not worth his time to pursue it further (2 antsy kids clawing at his feet), he reluctantly lunged his bags onto the scale for the agent.

I couldn’t help but wonder why the experience at the airport check-in counters is always like this from airport-to-airport. It was as if this man had personally wronged the agent behind the counter!

On the flip side of the coin, I was dealing with a cancelled flight. I really wish the kiosk would have told me it was cancelled and that I would need to use those mysterious-looking black phones near the kiosks that are only designed to dial into customer service — a simple notification would have saved 10 minutes of my time waiting in line. Instead, I.waited, only to be told to use the phone to rebook my flight. Fine.

I spent more time on the phone on hold, at the airport. The agent on the phone couldn’t figure out why the flight was canceled, so this made me more confused. He could have put me on standby to fly me to an airport within an hour of my house (instead of the one only 15 minutes away). This one wasn’t cancelled. Since it was only standby, I didn’t want to check my bag and not get on the flight. Because the cancellation was “weather-related”, Delta couldn’t get me on another flight because “all other airlines will experience the dame weather-related issues.”

Unsatisfied with this answer, I thanked the agent for trying and proceeded to call American Express business travel (through our office). I hopped in a cab to get driven to the united airways terminal while I booked a flight over the phone for a flight out this evening that wasn’t cancelled. After getting my confirmation # seconds before getting to the kiosk to check in, I was all set.

The AMEX business travel agent was fabulous in accomodating my travel needs and dealing with my distracted attention span while I hustled from terminal-to-taxi-to-terminal-to-kiosk. Likewise, united airways was curtious during check-in too, and fielded my stupid questions about the weather causing delays.

Delta could take some customer service lessons from other folks in the industry. The airline industry in general could do a better job managing traveler expectations during inclimate weather situations as well.

I’m traveling this week for a web usability study and before my trip, I made a stop by the iTunes store to load up on some new music. Apple, who I normally praise for excellent usability and simplicity in user interface design, has made a rather annoying usability blunder in their iTunes store.

Their latest feature seems to be showing you an up-to-date “album price” that dynamically adjusts as you purchase songs from an album. For example, take a look at this screen shot of the new Avril Lavigne album, pre-purchase:

Now, after making a purchase (of track #1, “Girlfriend”), look at the screen shot (I’ve highlighted the area that changes):

The “Complete My Album for $9.00″ is now showing based on me having purchased track #1 from the album. While this may look like a great convenience feature on the surface, it is horribly annoying if you’re picking and choosing multiple tracks to buy. The reason why it is annoying is because each time you click “Buy Song,” it spawns a refresh of the entire album page to update the “complete my album” price. This is a problem when your track list is scrollable (due to multiple songs). Because the entire page refreshes, it doesn’t remember your scroll-to-point, and starts you back over at the top.

This may work for individual album releases — but it really breaks down on larger album compilations and iMixes
This becomes particularly annoying on larger, compilation albums or in the iMixes area of the store where you’re always going to pick and choose your favorites out of 10’s or even 100’s of tracks. Previously, I could just zip down the list and click “buy song” on each line item and it would queue up several purchases for me within a matter of seconds. Now, with this new design, I have to click “buy song,” wait for the page to refresh, re-scroll to my previous location, and click “buy song” again on the next track I want…and repeat.

Will it increase conversion to full album purchases?
I hope they are evaluating whether or not this helps convert to sales of entire albums (I secretly hope it doesn’t so they ditch this new functionality). I really don’t see how it will considering people probably pick and choose what they want, rather than buying a song or two, then convert to purchasing the entire album.

Usability shouldn’t get in the way of consumers spending their money with you
If I were Apple, I would eliminate this feature for now because it’s such an inconvenience and makes it painful for users purchasing multiple tracks. It can always be added later when the iTunes browser can support Ajax or dynamically update content within a page without forcing an entire page refresh. For now, it’s a big pain point for me that makes spending money difficult — usability shouldn’t get in the way of consumers spending their money with you.

And just like that, Google buys DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion. There are many naysayers about this deal but as an advertiser, I love it. If Google can integrate the DoubleClick ad network into their existing ad management tool, this will be huge. Last week I attended an executive dinner hosted by WebTrends which had a few prospective clients as well as existing clients (like myself). During our discussion, we got on the topic of managing banner advertisements alongside SEM campaigns.

Tying SEM to Banner Advertising (and vice versa)
For someone like me who wants to show banner ads to people who have previously searched for terms, this is huge. Tying search to banner campaigns has been the missing link. As web marketers, we know that banner ads have an impact on search. We also know that people who search are checking out multiple sites, comparing prices, comparing features, and trying to get as much information as possible about a topic. As a brand advertiser, we can now start to merge our online strategies for banner ads and search marketing into one comprehensive, intelligent campaign. This benefits us from a budget standpoint, but will also help us target consumers to give them the most relevant advertising as possible.

Privacy advocates of the world unite in horror
The privacy advocates will certainly be opposed to this, but that’s fine — I trust Google enough to Do The Right Thing. That said, this now opens the door for companies like WebTrends and their Dynamic Search product to fully integrate banner advertising into their product since it will be part of a search engine. Of course, it will probably be a while before there is a central management interface for DoubleClick and Google AdWords, but a guy can dream, can’t he? I really look forward to the day I can tie banner advertising and search engine marketing to actual data, to see how one effects the other. Then we can start getting a true understanding of how our entire online advertising strategies are performing — from e-mail, to banner ads, to search ads.

Banner Advertising will become accessibile for small businesses on a limited budget
Let’s also not forget the network of sites Google has now “purchased” to run ads on. This may be an extension of banners available to AdSense customers, too. Sprinkle in video ads and the YouTube aquisition and Google has one powerful empire of online advertising. If they do it correctly, they’ll even make it accessible to the Common Man so small businesses can compete with the big guys. For online publishers, it will hopefully become easier to focus on producing a quality website without having to play the balancing act with several ad servers, Google AdSense, in-house ad sales, etc. to generate the most revenue. This is the quandary we’re (SuperMotors) in right now. Who has the time to constantly adjust pricing floors on various ad networks each month depending on the inventories of the various ad networks? Not us, but we have to do it anyway. It’s a never-ending battle.
It’ll be an interesting year for online advertising.