As many fields, products, and services are becoming commoditized, it’s become increasingly important to plan and implement a great customer experience. Much of this involves planning and gauging how your business makes your customer feel. Creating those “wow” moments aligned with your strategy is key.

The role of prototyping in McDonald’s and Apple

Two key examples were explained and demonstrated in E-myth Revisited and Subject to Change: McDonald’s and The Apple Store, respectively. Both stories involve building physical prototypes of each business and refining them until they ran as smoothly and customer-friendly as possible. Steve Jobs had several versions of the Apple Store built in a giant warehouse so that his staff could test several possibilities. And whether you like McDonald’s or not, Roy Kroc worked with a prototype until he could perfect a McDonald’s business that works for franchisers.

Working on prototypes in a professional services environment

The heart of what I want to do is offer a service, and that’s a tad trickier because I don’t have a physical product or storefront to mock up and prototype. Also, offering a professional service in a creative and technical area is messy. Some efficiencies can be factored out into processes and procedures, but those same efforts can stifle innovation if taken too far.

Adaptive Path had a compelling solution to the problem of prototyping services, described in Subject to Change. They draw comics that mock up key touchpoints in the customer experience. These comics show what’s going on in the customer’s head, how the customer interacts with elements like the website and phone, and what’s going on overall in the customer’s “story.”

Balance between prototyping and execution

While this planning is helpful (and I encourage it), sometimes it’s best to jump in too. I plan on jumping in to some ideas and innovating on the fly more this year. I will try my best to plan as much as possible, but it is time for action in addition to planning and setting up all of my GI Joes.

I will be working for an actual customer or two, work with them to refine the service, all on the fly. It’ll be really tough, but if I play my cards right, much of the discovery will only need to be done a couple times.

We must balance planning and execution. Each is important, and each is really hard work. At some level, your execution is also a prototype that always needs to be refined, only if you’re willing to inspect it and improve it.

Working with both requires curiosity, insight, introspection, and creativity. Wish me luck.

Technorati Tags: adaptive path, book, books, business, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, design, e-myth, glass case, internet marketing, marketing, prototype, prototypes, prototyping, subject to change

Consider this example for ColdFusion on Wheels. There is a main feed with all site updates:
http://feeds.cfwheels.org/cfwheels

When I burned that feed, I signed up for “cfwheels” as my feed URL.

But if you want to subscribe to the blog only, you can subscribe to this feed:
http://feeds.cfwheels.org/cfwheels/blog

I signed up for “cfwheels/blog” as my feed URL in that case.

And here is the screencasts feed:
http://feeds.cfwheels.org/cfwheels/screencasts

Et cetera, et cetera.

It’s a very nice way to show the user what they’re subscribing to and where the URL resides in the information space.

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, design, feedburner, glass case, google, information architecture, internet marketing, mybrand, url, urls, usability

You’ll notice that they don’t really explain it. They show the info that you need to know and help you get to the next step, which is gravatar.com. And gravatar.com does a really good job of explaining how it works.

Sometimes the best way to explain something is to not explain at all.

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, design, github, glass case, gravatar, interface design, internet marketing, ui design, usability

1. Silverback by Clearleft

They give us a sentence, 6 bullet points, and a dead-simple diagram showing what it does. They even show us a video demo that was created using the product itself. Brilliant.

2. iPhone by Apple

The product is so great that their TV commercials don’t do anything other than show the product in use. And it sells itself. When I first picked one up myself, there were no surprises on how it would work.

3. Getting Real by 37signals

37signals lets you read their book online for free. If someone really wants to endure the eye strain or read it slowly, it’s there for the taking. But those who love having a memento or reading a print version can buy those. This works especially well for 37signals because they have other products that others may want to check out.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, internet marketing, marketing

Don’t get me wrong: the words are important. They’re what search engines see. People still need to read some.

But in this visual YouTube generation, people need to see that your product or service meets their needs, not just read about it.

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, Design, flash, glass case, internet marketing, marketing, web marketing, Writing

A single web page addresses a single topic. As the amount of information on your site grows, each page’s ability to walk this fine line grows more important.

Include the right amount of information—no more—and give the visitor a clear set of next steps. (You may have heard of these next steps referred to as “calls to action.”)

Even as a writer, you are also a designer.

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, Design, design, glass case, ia, indexed, information architecture, information design, jessica hagy, Writing

Take a look at the primary photo used on the home page of BackLinkPageRank, a link exchange service.

What the hell does that photo have to do with their service? Are free link exchanges fun for the whole family? Will your little girl laugh with glee as you gain low-quality links back to your site?

I’m hoping that the designer of this site thought, “Well, it’s better than empty space.” Then they would have at least a little saving grace.

But in this case, a better choice would have been leaving the space empty.

Technorati Tags: bad, bad design, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, Design, design, glass case, internet marketing, scammer, scammers, stock photo, stock photos, unprofessional

I had noticed on the label that it fit most plastic grocery bags but didn’t investigate it any further. When I got home, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it had holders for the handles of the bags, and they fit my bags very well.

As people are becoming more environmentally conscious, this is an amazing way to appeal to everyone with a very useful design.

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, design, glass case, product design, product review, product reviews, simplehuman, trash can, trashcan, utility

Good news! A usability test can be done anywhere, and you don't need expensive labs or equipment to reap the benefits.

This week, I’d like to point you to an article by Jared Spool called The $300 Million Button. Jared was hired to study the user experience of a $25 billion retailer’s web store. During his studies, he found that customers were being tripped up during a key part of the store’s check out process.

To sum up the direct results of his finding, Jared writes the following:

The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.

Finding the places on your site that are confusing your customers can yield similar results for your business (though probably not at that scale).

I’ve seen it firsthand myself. Improve the experience, watch more business roll in.

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, jared spool, uie, usability, user experience, user interface engineering, user testing

Yahoo! photo-sharing site Flickr is a vast collection of imagery captured by talented photographers. And there’s a great way that you can tap into the community’s talent to improve your presentations and blog posts with better imagery. Even better, you won’t be breaking any copyright laws if you follow these steps.

Why do I need Flickr for my blog posts and presentations?

Seth Godin’s Really bad PowerPoint (PDF) makes a great argument that PowerPoint slides should contain imagery that supports the story that you’re telling. Your slides should not contain a sea of bullet points. Read the PDF. It’s only 10 pages, and it’ll change your career for the better.

But the challenge after buying into this method is searching for good images to use. If you start putting images from Google Image Search in your blog posts and presentations, you’ll often end up breaking copyright law.

Steps for using commercially-licensed photos in Flickr

Flickr solves this problem by giving its users the option to use Creative Commons licensing. This allows for users to indicate how others can reuse their work. They have the right to reserve all rights to the photo, allow for modifications to their work, restrict to only non-commercial reuse, allow for commercial use, etc.

Unless you’re making presentations for a hobby presentation or blog, you’ll want to search for photos that are OK for commercial use.

So, without further adieu, here’s how to search Flickr for photos licensed for commercial use:

1. From the Flickr home page, click the Search button. You don’t need to enter your terms yet because we need to do an Advanced Search.

   

2. On the Search screen, click Advanced Search.

   

3. So now this is where you want to enter the terms that you’re looking for. I’m going to enter “monster trucks,” but I’m not going to run the search quite yet.

   

4. Before searching, go to the Creative Commons section at the bottom of the form.

   

   From here, you’ll want to check the boxes next to Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content and Find content to use commercially (unless your presentation or blog isn’t for commercial purposes, of course).

5. Now you can finally click the Search button.

That was pretty easy, eh?

Giving credit where credit is due

Most users on Flickr will indicate on their photos that they at least want credit for their photos. Even if they don’t ask for it, I do so by default. It’s only fair, isn’t it?

So I’ve selected this photo to use in this blog post:

And this is how I would give credit for the photo at the bottom of my blog post:

Photo credit: Flying monster truck by Mafue. Some rights reserved.

As you can see, I’ve done these important things in the attribution:

• Linked the photo title to the photo’s page on Flickr
• Linked the Flickr user’s username to his profile
• Linked to the Creative Commons license attributed to the photo by the Flickr user

Remember, link love is a way of thanking people.

You can find the Creative Commons link on the right side of the photo page under Additional Information.

You may want to leave the Flickr user a comment on his or her photo as well. Thank them! I always prefer to let them know that their work is being used so there aren’t any surprises in the future. The trouble up front is well worth it.

Spice up your marketing

If you end up using this tip, be sure to let us know how so in the comments!

Technorati Tags: Blogging, cc, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, creative commons, flickr, legal, marketing, photos, pictures, powerpoint, ppt, seth godin