EffectiveUI & Qwest Featured at Forrester Customer Experience Forum

Rebecca Flavin, our CEO and one of our clients, Stephanie Copeland (Vice President Business Market Solutions at Qwest Communications) presented an awesome session today at the 2009 Forrester Customer Experience Forum. The session was packed (in fact, it was the most attended session of the hour) – it was my first real attempt at being an iPhone videographer, so please excuse the shaky nature of it :

How a User-Centered Approach Can Attract Customers, Drive Revenue & Deliver Competitive Advantages

Today’s enterprise executives are asking themselves:

What impact do customer-centric applications have on brand perception and ROI?

How can businesses harness the power of Web 2.0 applications to increase customer loyalty, despite a struggling economy?

How can greater user experiences serve to empower customers by driving a greater adoption of services?

Is this the right time to focus on improving the customer experience?

abstract:

Today’s enterprise executives are asking themselves:

• What impact do customer-centric applications have on brand perception and ROI?
• How can businesses harness the power of Web 2.0 applications to increase customer loyalty, despite a struggling economy?
• How can greater user experiences serve to empower customers by driving a greater adoption of services?
• Is this the right time to focus on improving the customer experience?

apologies for the shaky video and framing – was my first iPhone video recording
done

Apple’s iPhone 3Gs will Change Your Life

It is quite nice working for a company that is constantly adopting new technologies. I can justify purchases of new gadgets to myself saying “its for research, after all I’m in the biz” :D One of my favorite gadgets of course is the iPhone.

I went out and bought a first gen iPhone 3 days after launch. I would not go so far as to say the first iPhone I bought changed my life, but it did considerably change how I used a device. Before the iPhone, I owned every other smart phone; Treo, Blackberry, Nokia 9100, Palm, sidekick. All of these devices just wound up being a big bulky phone. I never really used the “smart” features because they were inconvenient. But the iPhone was different. It had less features, but all of the things it could do I found extremely useful. Mail, TXT, Maps, Stocks, Camera, ipod, Calendar, Safari, Weather, and my favorite feature of all time, visual voicemail.

Then the 3G iPhone I bought last year made improvements, but they were honestly moderate at best. As a user, I could care less about the 2.0 SDK (but as a software services company, we LOVED the new busines opportunities the SDK brought us). The app store was introduced, but the applications offered were more novelty than really useful. Even today, I own probably 50 apps from the store and i still use the native applications 99% of the time on my device.

Yesterday, I bought the 3Gs (32gig, black). I instantly noticed that performance significantly improved. But my old iPhone’s performance was not half bad, so I really didn’t care about it. I played with voice control, I can see how useful it will become for me, but certainly not life changing. Then, I played with the camera. All I can say is WOW ! The quality of the 3 megapixel pictures and the video is jut awesome. Don’t get me wrong, my sony camcorder and canon camera produced MUCH better quality, but they mostly sit on a shelf at home. I don’t use them because they are inconvenient. (That’s the second time I said that, maybe I’m just really lazy).

I can’t tell you how many times I thought to myself “I wish I had my video camera right now”; and I’ve thought that in my personal and professional life. Often times at work, something special is happening in a workshop or strategy session where I wished i could have captured the moment. And there are countless times that is true with my two daughters at home. This new device allows me to capture those moments ad-hoc. That is life changing for me. I have one device that will always be with me and it acts as my personal assistant, my communications device, my information portal, entertainment & content management hub, and now will serve as my documentarian. Best of all, the features and the software are all elegantly designed. Everything about the iPhone is engaging & useful.

It is VERY rare in life that I am satisfied with technology. My dissatisfaction is the primary reason why I started EffectiveUI in the first place, to help fill the gap I saw between what people wanted from technology and what businesses were actually building. The folks at Apple have done an amazing job at respecting all of our desires for technology that “just works” – I’m in awe Apple, well done…

[Minor Update and Rant]
Just found out that AT&T no longer includes SMS with the iPhone data plans- the folks at the AT&T store failed to tell me. SMS just was turned off on my account with no notice. I missed several important messages. AT&T’s lack of customer focus can damage consumers’ impressions of Apple…

Could Apple enter the cloud computing market? Could Adobe help?

This is total speculation, but I believe it would be very possible for Apple to enter the cloud computing space. A recent article in the Charolette Observer (found via a mac rumors artile) is claiming they are offering Apple a huge tax break to set up a billion dollar server farm in North Carolina.  

 

Apple has an interesting competitive advantage here. They have loads of cash in reserve ($29 billion) and manufacture hardware, OS  and software. They have already proven their ability to scale services (iTunes). I would find it ridiculous if Apple has not at least talked about it internally. Analysts are already touting cloud computing as the future of computing – and Apple is usually a leader in computing trends. 

 

Now, here’s where I think things would get really interesting. Apple buys Adobe. Adobe has an incredible multi-platform strategy in its Flash and Open Screen projects. Apple has  struggled with Web 2.0 deployments (MobileMe leverages AJAX and is still not even close to being good software). Apple really needs to get its web software strategy in gear, and QUICK.  So Apple buys Adobe – decides to fully support the Flash Player in the iPhone, MobileMe, and they create great SaaS server management tools; all leveraging Flash. Apple would also pick up the awesome Creative Suite products, PDF, Livecycle, etc. 

 

Think about how powerful this could be

Apple OS Web Servers

                  +

“Apple Quality” Management Software

                  +

Adobe Flash Client

 

I realize that there could be a slight culture clash between Adobe and Apple; you should never under-estimate how hard it is to integrate teams. But if they could all get on the same page, Apple + Adobe could revolutionize they way we think about software in the cloud and pose a real threat to what Microsoft is doing with Azure + Silverlight.

Why Our Website Sucks

First, “suck” is too strong a word. The original goal when we developed our site 3 years ago was to show what we do rather than try to describe what we do with fancy marketing copy. The site certainly does that – we often hear:

“I went to your website and instantly understood what an RIA is and how you guys were different”

 

effectiveui.com 5/12/2009

 

Ironically, we’ve even been asked, by several very large software companies, to license our tile navigation components for their own use. 

 

I’m certainly not trying to defend the user friendliness of site – it certainly suffers from usability issues and it can be a bit challenging to fully navigate all the content we have up there. But I don’t think it is a necessarily a clear example of a Flashtastrophe (as claimed here)  . I think you either love it or hate it. 

 

So, how did a self-proclaimed, user experience agency wind up with a site that has challenges?

 

Wrong Tool For the Job

Our initial objective for our website to show what we do. That meant we had to come up with a flash-based, “RIA” solution. However, HTML is often the better tool to create a marketing website. We preach to our clients “just because you can, does not mean you should” and our site is a direct contradiction to that philosophy. We were stuck between 2 opposing business objectives.

 

Plumber’s Sink Syndrome (aka cobbler’s shoes)

As we’ve grown our company the last 2 years, our website has always been something we’ve wanted to re-address. We’ve continued to hire amazing design talent, telling ourselves that we’d put these great experience designers to work on our own site. However, the demand for our services has been larger than we could have ever hired for, and our own marketing initiatives have had to suffer. Trust me when I tell you that Rebecca (our former CMO and now CEO) and Chris (our director of marketing) have been begging for time from our design talent. Just as a great plumber has no time to fix their own sink, we have had no time to properly focus on our own site

 

 

Too Close

The people at EffectiveUI (as you could imagine) all have very strong opinions on what our site should be. People passionately dislike the current site. In fact – we use our website as an interview question for designers and developers. We ask “so, what do you think of our site?” – If we hear “I love it”, it almost always excludes that person from being a great fit. Once we had an interviewee say “EffectiveUI my ASS!”  – although he didn’t have the skills we were looking for, he certainly had the right hutzpah. These passionate opinions have made it difficult for us to get consensus on what the site should be. The team is all a little too close to our company and what “they” want from the site – it is VERY difficult to take the proper, objective view of the site’s goals when its your own site. I believe this is the reason why most other interactive agencies’ websites suck as well :)

 

 

Outsourcing was not an option

If we did not have the time or the objectivity internally, why didn’t we outsource it? We debated this for quite some time actually. Outsourcing is the logical choice. It allows us to focus on our customers and brings in an objective third party to help us drive consensus across the organization. But, to be blunt, we were worried about the negative PR we would receive if it ever got out that we outsourced our own website. We ultimately decided that we had to figure out a way to do it internally.

 

 

Once we started treating our website re-design as though it were client driven, rather than an internal project, we started to see some great progress. 

 

No excuses – I know that the site needs work, and that we have let it go for far too long. But cut us a little slack, the rest of our portfolio is pretty awesome :)

What Do You Do Guaranteed?

This is the BEST thing I think I’ve ever seen … 

(thanks tim wood for introducing me to this!)