My latest interactions column, Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design? has just been published.

Our client had the right idea-get feedback on something unfinished in order to improve the finished product. Unfortunately, aspects of the object were so unfinished that people were unable to make the leap from the prototype (excuse me, appearance model) to the real thing, and the outcomes shifted away from usability and aesthetics toward high-level concept validation. Given that, there’s always the opportunity to create something specifically to provoke people around the deeper issues we want to explore.

Get a PDF of the article here. To receive a copy of the article, send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and (if you haven’t given us this info before) tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.

Be sure to read Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research? as well.

Related: Steve Portigal speaks at User Research Friday – Design and Research, Ships in the Night?

Other articles

• Persona Non Grata
• Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me
• The Journey Is The Reward
• Hold Your Horses
• Living In The Overlap
• Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
• Poets, Priests, and Politicians
• Interacting with Advertising
• We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World
• On Authenticity
• The Hard Work Lies Ahead (If You Want It)
• What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting It
• Elevator Pitch
• Kilroy Was Here
• Never Eat Anything Raw
• Content, the Once and Future King

• Listening to customer feedback? Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes (Thx, @susandra) – In '77, 3M decided to test-market. It failed to ignite interest. “When we did the follow-up research, there just weren’t a lot of people saying this was a product they wanted.”
  "We knew the test markets failed, but we just kept saying, ‘Maybe it was us. Maybe we did something wrong. Because it couldn’t be the product—the product was great.”
  To see for themselves how people responded to Post-it Notes, 2 execs cold-called offices, giving away samples and showing people how to use 'em. The responses were more enthusiastic. “Those things really were like cocaine. You got them into somebody’s hands, and they couldn’t help but play around with them.”
  1 more test was in order. They got newspapers to run stories about it. They festooned stationery stores with banner displays and point-of-purchase materials. 1000s of samples were sent to office managers, purchasing agents, lawyers, etc. People demonstrated it to potential customers. It was a huge success, and 3M decided to launch Post-Its.
• Listening to customer feedback? Peter Arnell Explains Failed Tropicana Package Design – Big outcry over the Tropicana packaging design (which this suggests was NOT tested but that's hard to believe) led to a return to the previous packaging.
• Listening to customer feedback? Malcolm Gladwell on the Aeron chair – The Aeron chair was originally despised and deemed ugly. It didn’t catch on for 2 years, and then it quickly became the most popular chair. Everyone came to love it. Gladwell concludes that people find responses about some topics extremely difficult to articulate. While they may think they dislike something (like the Aeron chair), in their hearts they may actually like it. There is a disconnect that causes people to express dislike in their heads while they actually like it in their hearts (and vice versa).
• Listening to customer feedback? Hate Facebook's new look? You'll like it soon enough. – Slate advances the point that people react to change negatively but eventually get used to the change and make it work.
• Listening to customer feedback? Problems With NBC’s ‘Parks & Recreation’ – When do you listen to negative feedback and when do you follow your vision? I think there's an important middle-ground that is often ignored: understanding what lies beneath that feedback and choosing carefully if and how to respond to it, or how to create supporting activities that help get over the barriers that the rejection points to

• Report: Real-world police forensics don't resemble 'CSI' – Even before the popularity of shows like CSI, there was presumably a cultural belief in the "science" behind these techniques. But the report finds that:
  – Fingerprint science "does not guarantee that two analysts following it will obtain the same results."
  – Shoeprint and tire-print matching methods lack statistical backing, making it "impossible to assess."
  – Hair analyses show "no scientific support for the use of hair comparisons for individualization in the absence of (DNA)."
  – Bullet match reviews show "scientific knowledge base for tool mark and firearms analysis is fairly limited."
  – Bite-mark matches display "no scientific studies to support (their) assessment, and no large population studies have been conducted."
• NJOY electronic cigarette – Looks like a real cigarette, complete with glowing tip on inhale, and exhaled vapor that resembles smoke. Gives an inhaled nicotine experience, while messaging to the rest of the world that you are really smoking a real lit cigarette. Paging Erving Goffman?

  Someone was using one a party last week; someone else got out their simulated Zippo lighter (an iPhone app) and lit it for them.

I’ve been doing fieldwork for the past couple of weeks, which often means stopping in at a variety of grocery stores for quick bites to eat or bathroom breaks.

In making the rounds, I saw a couple of things I thought were worth sharing.

Andronico’s, Berkeley

I thought this was an interesting way to extend the function of the mirror, and a good reminder of how much more you gain from feedback when it’s deployed at just the right time and place in a process.






Whole Foods, San Francisco

This was without question the most fragrant cheese counter I’ve ever encountered. I was standing with my back to it, looking at the fruit, and I kept thinking something was wrong somewhere. I finally turned around and understood what I’d been smelling.

Who’s thinking about the customer experience here? What would some alternatives be? Put it near the fish? Or how about near the flowers! A giant plastic dome over the whole thing? Perhaps an information station explaining why cheese can sometimes be stinky…

Andrew points out that Kyoto and Osaka are near each other and that was probably behind the offers from Expedia that I had complained about. Helpful info that I didn’t have, but unfortunately, it got worse.

A few days later I received email from Expedia

To: Steve Portigal
Subject: Steve, here is your itinerary confirmation for your 01/02/08 Osaka trip
[deletia that makes reference to our Osaka trip multiple times]

Even more concerned than before, I wrote them and received this message

Dear Expedia Customer,
Thank you for contacting us.

We regret that your experience with Expedia.com was not satisfying. Comments such as yours are read by numerous people within Expedia and help shape our policies and practices as we learn and grow.
If you have further questions, feel free to reply to this e-mail or contact Expedia customer services at 1-800-397-3342 and reference case ID 36793797.

In other words, I submitted a complaint and they aren’t going to act on it, unless I submit it AGAIN. Okay, I do that.

The next message is even worse.

Dear Expedia Customer,

Thank you for contacting us.

Kyoto, Kyoto-fu (Change name) Expedia.com itinerary number: 121380781812

If you have further questions, feel free to reply to this e-mail…

No actual communication. Is anyone out there? I try again.

Dear Expedia Customer,

Thank you for your immediate response.

Please accept our apologies for the misunderstanding with your hotel reservation. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Your itinerary serves as a confirmation of your purchase, and we’ve sent an updated copy of it in a separate e-mail. You can also access your itinerary online at any time. Here’s how:
…

Again, no one is addressing my key question: why does my Kyoto reservation keep getting referred to as my trip to Osaka? Once more into the breach…

Dear Steve,

Thank you for your reply.

Please accept our apologies in regards to the misunderstanding with your reservation. We regret any inconvenience that may have occurred and would like to assure you that every reservation is important to us.

Your problem may stem from incompatibility between your browser and our system. We have already escalated this technical issue to the appropriate department.

In the interim, your hotel reservation at the Hotel Monterey Kyoto is confirmed while the “OSAKA” tag line have caused you such inconvenience, the printed itinerary of your reservation is still binding and a confirmed reservation for a hotel in Kyoto, Japan and not in Osaka.
…

So somehow my browser is causing them to send me email messages about a different city? The crucial piece of info (thanks, Andrew), that these are nearby cities, never appeared, and a spurious technical issue was blamed (it’s not a browser issue; perhaps they want to blame the model of car I’m driving for the emails they are sending?) but at least a human being intervened and confirmed that what I thought I bought was indeed what I bought.

Great job, Expedia people! Ridiculously poor support to go with a rather silly system! Let’s hope we don’t have an actual problem at any point.

CBC News has a tool on their masthead to report a typo.

Some people like to report typos (I’m one of them; I also like to be notified of typos). But there’s also a comment here on ways to listen to customers; CBC perhaps noticed some patterns in type of feedback they were getting and decided to create a channel just for that type of input. As well, by offering that link they are encouraging people to participate in the site on a very simple level, as typo submitters.

We’re sorting out the accommodations for our Dec/Jan trip to Japan, and I noticed this distressing bit of interaction with Expedia.

After booking our hotel in Kyoto, we get an itinerary named (loosely) Kyoto, and details of the hotel (including its name, which has the word Kyoto in it), and just generally good confirmatory feedback.

Further on down the page comes the upsell.

Osaka? But we’re not going to Osaka?! This caused a definite brief panic verifying the rest of the information in the itinerary to be sure that Expedia didn’t just put us in some other hotel in some other city.

Tip: if you provide automated upsell information that appears to reflect some contextual understanding of your customer, make sure it’s right, or you will cause them distress and extra work, reducing confidence

A number of months ago we had an unfortunate experience at the usually stupendous local restaurant, Cafe Gibraltar. Our reservation, made long in advance for dinner with out-of-town visitors, evaporated. The error was theirs but I was made to feel as if I was somehow in the wrong, and it really created some awkwardness on what was supposed to be a special dinner.

I wrote a letter about it and didn’t hear back until recently. But wow, what a response!

Some times we make mistakes, as is human, but not properly dealing with our mistakes is unacceptable. We are only as good as those who represent us.

Seemed a good time to post a great apology after Sunday’s NYT piece about the Southwest employee who is in charge of writing apology letters to passengers – the “senior manager of proactive customer communications.”

Some interesting innovations in products (both aimed at kids) that help you complete a feedback-less task more effectively.

Squidsoap [via Strange New Products] is a pump that puts black ink on your hands when you pump out the soap; your hands are clean when they are free of ink (and happily, also free from invisible germs and gunk).

Listerine Agent CoolBlue is similar to good ol’ Disclosing Tablets; it stains the placque on your teeth so you can see where you need to go back and brush.

Cleaning is a great category for this sort of thing; as we are more afraid of germs that we can’t detect, we need some mechanism in our tasks to ensure that we’re completing them properly. Consider vacuuming; one way to know you’re done with the carpet is that you stop hearing the noise of dirt shooting past the rollers.

I’ll be keeping my eyes open for other examples like this.

These feedback forms in the SFO Long Term Parking bus shelter are always empty. Someone has written Ha Ha Ha as a sarcastic bit of feedback, presumably about the implied hypocrisy of an unmaintained feedback mechanism.

There’s a phone number (that would ideally be covered by feedback forms) that you can call from a telephone (if you’re carrying one) or a courtesy phone (once you get into the airport itself, a 10 minute drive away), for parking information. Parking information? You’ve already parked, if you’re seeing this. The sticker is out of sync with the feedback form holding function.