archive.Joe Lamantia.com

I’ve posted the slides from my tutorial / workshop Design For Goals at JBoye 09 on slideshare: they’re embedded below.

The structure for this tutorial is part method review (on how to understand people’s goals in a structured way), and part sharing of re-usable patterns found after researching goals.   Since the context of origin for both the goals and patterns was complex international finance, some translation of the raw materials and examples and the synthesized patterns into a realm closer to home for ordinary people is likely in order.

As you’re going through the slides, I suggest using your own activities that involve information finding and making substantial financial decisions as a reference.  Not all the examples that I selected as the basis of exercises during the tutorial made across the cultural barrier between North America and Northern Europe: I was surprised at how many people (in a professional audience) have never bought house or car…  Which proves yet again that this is one of the areas for user experience design to work on as a discipline.

And as we had a small, noisy, and rather warm room right after lunch, I should say big thanks to all the participants and volunteers – everyone – who made an effort to engage.

Even design education is a work-in-progress, it seems.

Mergers and acquisitions activity in 2006 reached record levels, and it’s likely that the pace will increase in 2007.
In the midst of the epic deal-making, companies should look beyond immediate benefits for shareholders and executives, and pay very close attention to the impact of mergers (and other major organizational shifts) on customer experiences. Why? Because acquired customers are easily lost.

Mergers and acquisitions create transition points, moments when avoidable customer experience mistakes sour once strong relationships with loyal customers of an acquired company, and they depart permanently. This is doubly unfortunate: the right customer experience can bridge old and new for acquired customers, and provide reassuring continuity during times of substantial flux in areas such as brands and identities, corporate cultures, organizational structures, supporting enterprise architectures and systems , even customer service procedures.

Well-managed customer experiences offer two kinds of specific benefits. The first benefit is an unexpected (and thus more powerful) refutation of established wisdom from across industries that defines post-merger service expectations as bad. Consider these two examples:

From If more US airlines merge, who would benefit?:
Aviation analysts like Kevin Mitchell of the Business Travel Coalition in Radnor, Pa. … argues that a flurry of mergers right now would raise prices, overcrowd already-packed planes, and create chaos for customer service for years to come precisely because it is so difficult to merge aviation corporate cultures.”

Of course, Wall Street is going to push it,” he says. “What’s good for investors, shareholders, and management may not be good for others: Lots of employees will be laid off, and customers can look forward to 20 to 30 percent price hikes and several years of customer-service [misery].”

And this from FCC clears AT&T merger:

Natalie Billingsley, a supervisor with the California Public Utilities Commission’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates, which advocates for consumer interests, said the new concessions improved the outlook for AT&T and BellSouth customers. But she said consumers would have been better off if the merger had not been approved and expressed skepticism that customer service would improve.
“You hope that service will improve, but it hasn’t been seen with prior mergers,” she said.

The second benefit is balancing the service disruptions common to post-merger integration (sometimes collision is the better word) efforts with a positive experience oriented toward the longer term. This is especially important for acquired customers, who lack examples of how the acquiring company handles customer relationships, and need surety regarding it’s intentions.

Enterprise business process, information architecture, and technology integrations (your SAP or mine…) are notably prone to conflicts that can disrupt customer experiences in dramatic and unexpected ways. Much of the disruption is easily managed in advance by communicating upcoming changes to customers. The rest is best handled by the customer experience equivalent of the detour. While the details may prove complex behind the scenes, the basic idea is very simple: tell acquired customers that things used to work one way, explain that they now work another, then show them how, and support them through the required changes.

Because the idea is so simple, organizations that fail to anticipate and respond to customer experience disruptions during integration efforts neglect the basics of building sound relationships with acquired customers. Neglecting acquired customers from the beginning is a good indicator that the new organization places low value on customer relationships in general. With bad experiences during botched transitions, customer satisfaction declines, relationships sour, and loyal customers leave.

Snapshot of a Disrupted Experience
AmericanBank recently acquired MegaBank, and integrated the two companies’ on-line banking tools. These tools served credit card customers, in addition to banking customers. But since neither MegaBank nor AmericanBank communicated information or plans about the merger (no detour…) to MegaBank credit card customers, the stream of personally addressed emails issued from mysterious sources inside AmericanBank looked exactly like a credit card fraud spam broadcast designed to snare the unwary.
Following the email broadcasts, AmericanBank abruptly redirected traffic from the MegaBank account portal to the AmericanBank website, without notifying MegaBank customers of the switch, thereby mimicking another common tactic in fraud efforts – the decoy log-in screen intended to extract user IDs and passwords from unsuspecting visitors, who do not recognize the difference between the legitimate and fake log-in gateways.

More disruptive for MegaBank customers was AmericanBank’s decision to erase their log-in names and then create new user names in those cases where MegaBank log-ins happened to duplicate those of existing Bank of America customers, effectively displacing them. This particular change would have been troublesome with adequate communication, since user names and passwords present extensive usability and memory challenges, but again AmericanBank failed to notify MegaBank customers of the changes.
As icing on the cake, AmericanBank created new passwords for MegaBank credit card customers as well, again without notification. The combination of new log-ins and new passwords made it impossible for MegaBank credit card customers to access any of AmericanBank’s on-line account management functions.

MegaBank customers trying to use their normal on-line account management tools experienced this series of integration steps as spam broadcasts, hijacked navigation, recognition failure, displacement, and a password recovery loop leading to account lock-out. The only way to sort it out and regain access was a laborious staged phone call that revealed the regular to customer service channels couldn’t handle on-line access problems.

In the end, MegaBank customers incurred direct costs in the form of service charges to make payments by phone while locked out of the on-line system, late fees for missing payments while sorting out the account access issues, and punitive interest rate raises based on automated application of contract rules triggered by late payments. The complete reckoning includes additional indirect costs in the form of frustration, confusion, wasted time, and the effort required to find a substitute credit card servicer.

All in all, the customer experience of the AmericanBank and MegaBank integration provided clear signs of:

• misaligned business structures
• mismanaged integration
• an unbalanced short term outlook
• poor relationship management
• punishing customers for bad business decisions

From the perspective of an acquired customer, it’s easy to recognize these as symptoms of internal ill health, manifest as indifference or ill will toward customers. Which equates to strong incentive to leave in 2006, and not return in 2007.

For me, the cumulative contextual gap became too great to bridge. The intensity of so many new things made my own substituted context insufficient to maintain the texture of meaning in my home – one of the most personal and significant of settings.

The IKEA Brand
A well-developed brand evokes specific emotional resonances, and does so consistently with each customer’s experiences. Brand designers and marketers carefully choose emotions based on the personality the brand should establish, and the business goals behind it. Brands often try to create connections to the deeply rooted psycho-personal concepts and constructs that shape our basic ways of thinking and feeling. Brands attempt to become associated with “identity“, “lifestyle“, or in the case of IKEA, “home”. The IKEA brand is built on associations with cost-consciousnes s, design sensibility, unconventionality, and ecological awareness. Showcased in the IKEA products furnishing one’s home, these associations are meant to serve as evidence of an outlook and set of priorities for life in general.

Ambition is one thing, and success quite another. Yet by all measures, IKEA’s brand is successful: in addition to superb sales and profitability (secured by the arcane corporate structures that shield IKEA from taxation), it commands tremendous customer loyalty, and inspires irrational behavior that borders on blindly devoted. I create funny stories about the meanings of product names to ease the mysteries of their origins. But other seasoned American retail customers like Roger Penguino and Stacy Powell camp in front of about-to-open IKEA stores for weeks in order to win prizes of modest value.

When Roger Penguino heard Ikea was offering $4,000 in gift certificates to the first person in line at the opening of its new Atlanta store, he had no choice. He threw a tent in the back of his car and sped down to the site. There, the 24-year-old Mac specialist with Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL ) pitched camp, hunkered down, and waited. And waited. Seven broiling days later, by the time the store opened on June 29, more than 2,000 Ikea fanatics had joined him.

From Ikea: How the Swedish Retailer became a global cult brand

The Flat-pack Religion: Mysterious Faith
Penguino’s behavior is unusual by normal standards, perhaps even fanatical, but not unique among IKEA customers.
Christy Powell, 48, camped out for eight nights before the opening of a new Ikea store on Interstate 10 at Antoine in Houston, Texas. Her quest to claim a US$ 10,000 prize meant she sat through sizzling heat, a violent thunderstorm and the din of builders finishing the car park. By the day of the opening, the queue behind Powell had swelled to 700. After a 192-hour wait, she bought just 12 plates and bowls for $18 plus tax.

From Is IKEA For Everyone?

Powell and Penguino’s stories make the IKEA brand’s capacity to inspire people clear. Inspiration is a rare achievement for many religions, let alone a consumer brand. Inspired religious believers test their faith(s) in ways often incomprehensible and certainly too numerous to count. At heart all these demonstrations address the same goal of affirming the consistency of a system of beliefs through personal experience. Like the pilgrim who travels from afar and waits in penitential devotion for entry to a temple or sacred site, IKEA shoppers endure traffic jams, and long lines (in the parking lot, in the store, in the warehouse, to load purchases into cars…) to pay for the privilege of membership in the global community of IKEA.

Penguino is a citizen of IKEA World, a state of mind that revolves around contemporary design, low prices, wacky promotions, and an enthusiasm that few institutions in or out of business can muster. Perhaps more than any other company in the world, Ikea has become a curator of people’s lifestyles, if not their lives. At a time when consumers face so many choices for everything they buy, Ikea provides a one-stop sanctuary for coolness. It is a trusted safe zone that people can enter and immediately be part of a like-minded cost/design/environmentally-sensitive global tribe. There are other would-be curators around — Starbucks and Virgin do a good job — but Ikea does it best.

From Ikea: How The Swedish Retailer Became a Global Cult Brand

However well IKEA may understand my lifestyle – or at least the set of products that might fit into my lifestyle and home furnishing needs – my experiences of disorientation and a sense of being confronted with the alien within an intimate setting are not the sorts of emotions customarily attached to a successful brand. To dispel part of the mystery of this persistent discontinuity, I set off to find out more about where my new Swedish friends came from: It’s a secretive place, full of interconnected and opaque systems.

A World of Systems
Many religions combine elements of mystery and the inexplicable with high levels of systematicity (a particular recipe the discipline of comparative religion works to understand and articulate). In the same way that brands can parallel religions in their capacity to inspire non-rational behavior, brands parallel religions by showing characteristics of systems. From a systems perspective, a brand is a larger whole made up of interconnected emotional associations and psychologically charged concepts that customers experience through many moments, spread across diverse channels and environments (online or transactional, advertising, services, packaging, language, etc.). IKEA’s chosen values – ecological awareness, design sensibility, cost-consciousness – combine together to characterize a modern outlook that balances the enjoyment of novelty and design-enhanced consumerism with longer-term goals. In this system, IKEA partisans can have fun, without sacrificing the future – their own or everyone else’s. It’s a solid compromise that demonstrates the classic characteristics of a viable system (more on this shortly).

On closer examination, this sort of systems thinking permeates IKEA’s enterprise at every level, from design, operations, and logistics to it’s financial and legal structures. And it happens on gigantic scales: rather than achieve success in a single category of life accessories, IKEA’s avowed is aim to create a comprehensive range of products for the home (perhaps a totality?), as founder Ingvar Kamprad says explicitly in his tract, ‘The Testament of a Furniture Dealer’.

“The objective must be to encompass the total home environment; that is, to offer furnishings and fittings for every part of the home whether indoors or outdoors … It must reflect our way of thinking by being as simple and straightforward as we are ourselves. It must be durable and easy to live with. It must reflect an easier, more natural and unconstrained way of life”

From IKEA: The Philosophy

To realize Kamprad’s goal of comprehensiveness on the level of the individual customer experience, IKEA presents products within an enveloping physical environment of massive scale and all-embracing completeness, synthesizing a bizarre Sims-style furnitureverse that customers navigate via pre-determined paths wending seemingly at random through an endless fractal conglomeration of minutely detailed, yet wholly contrived, living settings.

What enthralls shoppers and scholars alike is the store visit — a similar experience the world over. The blue-and-yellow buildings average 300,000 square feet in size, about equal to five football fields. The sheer number of items — 7,000, from kitchen cabinets to candlesticks — is a decisive advantage. “Others offer affordable furniture,” says Bryan Roberts, research manager at Planet Retail, a consultancy in London. “But there’s no one else who offers the whole concept in the big shed.” …The furniture itself is arranged in fully accessorized displays, down to the picture frames on the nightstand, to inspire customers and get them to spend more. The settings are so lifelike that one writer is staging a play at Ikea in Renton, Wash.
From Ikea: How The Swedish Retailer Became a Global Cult Brand

Overall, one experiences the IKEA store as a self-guided tour through a hybrid landscape composed of deserted last-man-alive-on-earth-sitcom-sets, and impromptu shanty towns created by unseen populations of refugees fleeing brush wars and guerilla conflicts deep in the interior design, home-decor, and catalog-shopping hinterlands. And like all things IKEA, these settings inspire unusual behavior, such as the guerilla filming of Real World satire skits.

Extractive Architectures

Anyone who’s visited an IKEA store understands the obvious parallels to other well-known architectures of control, such as casinos (also here, including a comment that cites the IKEA parallel, [found while researching this post]) and amusement parks. I call this specific variant an ‘extractive architecture’ since the common objective of these forms designed to separate visitors from the outside world – environmental cues like weather and daylight, or social chronological frames of reference – is to cocoon patrons in a fantastical alternate reality that enhances the amount of time / money / attention the creators can extract from their visitors as they pass through.

The logistics behind the massive IKEA stores also reflect system thinking on truly gigantic scales: the IKEA shopping experience relies on a global network of automated warehouses and distribution centers as large as 180,000 cubic meters in size. In aggregate, these buildings – there are 27 of them – would make the list of largest buildings in the world. Naturally, IKEA exerts control over the infrastructure for this strange realm in the same fastidious fashion.

For Want of A Nail, The Kingdom Was Put On Back Order
Given the effort and attention to detail required to create and supply this all-embracing (and also artificial) context and tune it to an extractive purpose, the uncomfortable and challenging strangeness of IKEA’s product names seems like a discontinuity in the otherwise smooth continuum of the IKEA brand. Or, if IKEA’s product names are not carefully managed – meaning little or no effort goes into choosing them – then the practice of naming products is the one aspect of the IKEA experience not to be thought through and carefully designed from start to finish. Which is a discontinuity at a more fundamental level.
Perhaps the most common form of discontinuity IKEA customers experience is simple lack of product availability.
Ikea owns 27 distribution centres like this across the globe, cavernous warehouses where flatpack boxes make their only stop between supplier and store. The system is designed to operate with mathematical precision to shave away at costs. When a Faktum wardrobe is bought at Brent Park, the cash till registers the purchase; the purchases add up until they trigger a warning that stocks are running low; and the message is passed electronically up the line to the nearest distribution centre, from where more can be dispatched. There is no waste of time, effort, or money. The system is perfect.

Except, of course, that it isn’t – or at least it wasn’t the last time I tried to buy a Lycksele sofabed. Ironically for a company so committed to tolerating mistakes, Ikea appears to have automated Kamprad’s ethic of frugality to such a degree that the tiniest human error now cascades through the system, magnifying itself and sparking havoc. A shopfloor worker at Brent Park forgets to mark down that a box has been damaged and thrown out; the automatic trigger is never sent; a shipment of several hundred boxes remains undispatched from the warehouse – and an angry customer ends up driving back home along London’s North Circular, cursing Ikea bitterly once more.
From The miracle of Älmhult

Discontinuities within comprehensive systems, like tax code loopholes, the backdoor in WOPR’s programming in Wargames or Neo’s special powers in The Matrix, matter because they signal internal inconsistency; and often presage changes in system state from stability to instability. Unstable systems often exhibit low viability, meaning they are not “organized in such a way as to meet the demands of surviving in the changing environment”. In simpler language, discontinuity often signals and leads to failure.
Emotional and experiential systems such as brands rely on very high levels of internal consistency. They must exhibit stability and viability at all levels, and across all touch points, especially the context sensitive areas of vocabulary and naming that form much of the linguistic aspects experience of a brand. Given the sensitivity and significance of cultural context, IKEA’s refusal to translate its product names seems counterproductive. However, persuading – or compelling – people to speak your language in preference to their own is one step toward persuading or compelling them to think from your frame of reference. Evangelists of all varieties know this well, and so does IKEA.

The Ikea path to self-fulfilment is not, really, a matter of choice. “They have subtle techniques for encouraging compliance,” argues Joe Kerr, head of the department of critical and historical studies at the Royal College of Art. “And in following them you become evangelists for Ikea. If you look at [police] interrogation techniques, for example, you see that one of the ways you break somebody’s will is to get them to speak in your language. Once you’ve gone to a shop and asked for an Egg McMuffin, or a skinny grande latte, or a piece of Ikea furniture with a ludicrous name, you’re putty in their hands.”
From The miracle of Älmhult

Still, forcing me to speak a foreign language at random does nothing to convert me to your way of thinking. Like medieval Catholics who recited the liturgy in Latin without comprehending it, I may appear to be a convert to IKEA’s wacky religion by referring to my new Swedish friends using the hard-to-pronounce and impossible-to-spell-properly-with-an-English-keyboard names they inherited from their homeland, when in reality I am merely mouthing the phonemes of a sacrament I do not in the least understand.

With a little research, I discovered there is a system for naming IKEA’s products:
“There is a system,” Maria Vinka, one of Ikea’s 11 in-house product designers, is saying, wedged into an easy chair in Älmhult’s own branch of Ikea, as she attempts to explain the fiendishly complex logic by which the company names its products. “For bathrooms, it’s Norwegian lakes. Kitchens are boys, and bedrooms are girls. For beds, it’s Swedish cities. There’s a lady who sits there and comes up with new names, making sure there isn’t a name that means something really ugly in another language. But it doesn’t always work. We gave a bed a name that means ‘good lay’ in German.”
From The miracle of Älmhult

All of the many systems comprising the IKEA enterprise seem opaque to varying degrees. The ownership structures that channel IKEA’s massive revenues and profits to destinations unknown, and shield the interlinked companies from taxation, regulation, and oversight are especially convoluted, and serve to maintain very low levels of transparency and tight control by Ivar Kamprad and his family.

…Kamprad set about creating a business structure of arcane complexity and secrecy. Today, therefore, The Ikea Group is ultimately owned by the Stichting Ingka Foundation, a charitable trust based in the Netherlands. A separate company, Inter Ikea Systems, owns Ikea’s intellectual property – its concept, its trademark, its product designs. In a labyrinthine arrangement, Inter Ikea Systems then makes franchise deals with The Ikea Group, allowing it to manufacture and sell products. “The big question is who owns Inter Ikea Systems,” says Stellan Björk, a Swedish journalist, who in 1998 wrote a book, never translated into English, detailing the extraordinary opacity of the company’s organisation and the extent of its tax avoidance. The answer to Björk’s question seems to be that no one knows. “It seems to be owned by various foundations and offshore trusts,” Björk says – some based in the Caribbean – “through which the family controls it.” The motivation behind all this mystery, the company insists, “was to prevent Ikea being split up after his [Kamprad’s] death [and] to ensure the long term survival of Ikea and its co-workers.”
From The miracle of Älmhult

And further:
The IKEA trademark and concept is owned by Inter IKEA Systems, another private Dutch company, but not part of the Ingka Holding group. Its parent company is Inter IKEA Holding, registered in Luxembourg. This, in turn, belongs to an identically named company in the Netherlands Antilles, run by a trust company in Curaçao. Although the beneficial owners remain hidden from view–IKEA refuses to identify them–they are almost certain to be members of the Kamprad family.
From IKEA: Flat-pack accounting

A Little Help From My New Swedish Friends
In Part 1 of this essay, I talked about the mysterious context of IKEA product names, how I’d developed a habit of recontextualizing the names of the IKEA products, and ended by noting that after encountering too many at once, the names became a source of discomfort rather than inspiration for whimsical enjoyment.

In this second part, I went looking for some information on IKEA’s product naming practices to bridge this gap. I found out that IKEA chooses names as prosaically as most other household accessories designers shepherding a brand experience for retail consumers; by borrowing from the deep and localized reservoirs of their root culture. I also found a series of interconnected but opaque systems – financial, logistical, philosophical, branding, experiential – that show their own strange form of symmetry and internal consistency.

I’m left feeling a bit like an IKEA shopper who’s completed their first trip through one of the iconic blue and yellow stores, and is now outside, blinking in the sunlight, bemused and a bit puzzled by the comprehensive strangenesses I’ve just encountered, but looking forward to spending some time with my new Swedish friends.

PS: If you’re wondering what the future holds for IKEA consider this:

The Ikea concept has plenty of room to run: The retailer accounts for just 5% to 10% of the furniture market in each country in which it operates. More important, says CEO Anders Dahlvig, is that “awareness of our brand is much bigger than the size of our company.” That’s because Ikea is far more than a furniture merchant. It sells a lifestyle that customers around the world embrace as a signal that they’ve arrived, that they have good taste and recognize value. “If it wasn’t for Ikea,” writes British design magazine Icon, “most people would have no access to affordable contemporary design.” The magazine even voted Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad the most influential tastemaker in the world today.
From Ikea: How The Swedish Retailer Became a Global Cult Brand

PPS: For reference, IKEA names products in the following fashion:

• Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish place names
• Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names
• Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names
• Bookcase ranges: Occupations
• Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
• Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names
• Chairs, desks: men’s names
• Materials, curtains: women’s names
• Garden furniture: Swedish islands
• Carpets: Danish place names
• Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, sailors’ language
• Bed linen, bedcovers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones
• Children’s items: mammals, birds, adjectives
• Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms
• Kitchen utensils (cutlery, crockers, textiles, glass, porcelain, tablecloths, candles, serviettes, decorative articles, vases etc.): foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions
• Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish placenames

Translation from original in German by Margaret Marks

I used to think of each IKEA product I brought home as a sort of foreign house guest. They came from a far away country. Each was different than the others in size, shape, and appearance. And all had names I didn’t understand and couldn’t associate with anything familiar. Some of these guests left soon after they arrived. But many – the ones that fit in well with the rest of the household – stayed longer. These joined the group I call “my new Swedish friends”.

A name should carry some depth of meaning; it should tell you about the friend it identifies. But my new Swedish friends had mysterious names that told me little about them. To make up for this disconcerting lack of context, I created my own stories and meanings to enrich their quirky names. Imagining the story behind the name of each new arrival became part of the ritual of welcoming them into the home.

Cast of Characters
Here are the meanings I imagined for the names of several of my new Swedish friends:

• Lekman: A comic-book villain in the Swedish version of Superman
• Grundtal: Original name of the monster in Beowolf
• Kvartal: How you feel after drinking too much and taking a taxi home over a bumpy road.
• Anno: The mascot of the Swedish National Park system. Wears a pointy gnome hat.
• Noen: Breakfast bread typically served with preserved fruit spreads; popular with retired Uncles.
• Aspudden: An unpleasant medical condition treated with pungent ointments
• Kvadrant: Quality control instrument for steam-engines used by boiler makers
• Expedit: Replaces “Schnell!” when Das Boot is dubbed into Swedish
• Stolmen: Botany term identifying a plant part that the Victorians illustrated in comprehensive horticultural guides, but permitted only married scientists above the age of 45 to view while under direct supervision from technical librarians
• Variera: The weather in Stockholm during early spring
• Rationell:An underground art-film collective active during the height of the Swedish Beat Movement, in the late 50’s.
• Stave: Notorious industrialist and briefcase manufacturer in the Prewar era
• Kludd: A folk-music instrument played by minstrels in the Middle Ages
• Komers: Last name of a famous aviator: Tom Selleck met this man with while prepping to film “High Road To China”. Like many Swedes, Komers was taciturn; however, this does not account for Selleck’s terrible performance.
• Snitta: Slang for bitchy
• Ordning: Standard name for the Auditing department in large companies

Assigning a story or meaning to each name became an anticipated, necessary step in the cycle of choosing, buying, installing / assembling, using, and then accepting each IKEA product. Whether humorous, whimsical, or simply random, creating context for the products made them ordinary and familiar.

Context Is King
In terms of customer experiences and consumer practices, this behavior is re-contextualizing products with an existing context, one that for some reason is not sufficient or acceptable. For each product, I created a web of cultural associations – albeit fictionalized ones – to replace the expected but missing network of connections I’ve come to expect and rely on to make judgements about the things I incorporate into my life.

Why does the missing context for simple household items matter? Part of my habit comes from the fact that I enjoy making up stories and speculating about the provenance of all sorts of things: it’s part of explaining the world as I find it. Crafting stories for their origins also offsets the frustrations of being a consumer left to manage everyday household needs with strangely incomplete items, like shelves sold without mounting screws, or curtain rods not packaged with hanging hooks. Knowing something’s origin – even if I’d just made it up out of whole cloth ten minutes ago – gave me a modest positive feeling of surity and confidence when confronted with the unknown.

Stories About Rome Not Being Built In a Day Were Not Built In a Day: Or, The Effect of Intensity On Cultural Fabrics
The IKEA brand evokes a strong set of values and an outlook on lifestyle decisions that is well known and easily recognized. Those values and the implied outlook successfully transfer to the individual products sold by IKEA. Thanks to the umbrella of the IKEA brand, the lack of context for my new Swedish friends wasn’t troubling. As long as we were introduced one at a time.

But ersatz culture is not as durable and satisfying as the real thing, as the creators of fantastic constructs of all types know well [MMOG, Yugoslavia, Iraq]. While moving and fitting out a new living space with home office furniture, kitchen accessories and many other inventive and affordable , I met *many* new Swedish friends *all at once*. Bringing so many IKEA products home emphasized their strangeness in a challenging way. In response, I made up quite a few new stories in rapid succession, to knit them into the fabric of the familiar.

Still, I was troubled because I was aware of having to make up so many stories at the same time. And since I’d just moved, the larger environment that had to incorporate so much newness in a concentrated dose was itself in flux. End result: the influx of the cumulative strangeness of names, the substitution of artificial context for real, and the intensity of newness on several levels outweighed the strength of the contextual associations my new friends retained from IKEA’s brand.

To be continued in Part 2

What fol­lows is a brief tale of cus­tomer dis­tress and redemp­tion, fea­tur­ing a cast of char­ac­ters includ­ing sev­eral well-known play­ers in mod­ern drama:

• Sir Qual­ity Con­trol Failure
• Queen Fickle CRM
• King Unsta­ble Sup­ply Chain Management
• the Sin­is­ter Duke Con­flict­ing Mas­ter Data, who suf­fers from dis­so­cia­tive iden­tity disorder

Fret not read­ers, for this yarn has a happy end­ing in a wind­fall for yours truly.
Chap­ter 1: Sir Qual­ity Con­trol Fail­ure

For a brief period in 2005, JoeLamantia.com hap­pily relied on a Dust­buster to help keep things neat and tidy. When the machine died sud­denly after two months of ser­vice, we felt sad­ness at hav­ing placed faith in yet another defec­tive con­sumer good. These feel­ings turned to relief when Black and Decker promised to send a replace­ment within “7 to 10 days”.

Chap­ter 2: Queen Fickle CRM
Four weeks went by. We called again: our records had been “lost”, so another order was placed. Emo­tion­ally unre­li­able CRM sys­tems will some­times decide to break up with you, but — lack­ing the con­fi­dence to tell you directly — leave you find out in awk­ward ways like this. Not to worry for us, how­ever, we would have another dust­buster in “7 to 10 days”.

Chap­ter 3: King Chron­i­cally Unsta­ble Sup­ply Chain Man­age­ment
Four weeks passed. When we called again, the order­ing sys­tem was down for the week­end, and no infor­ma­tion was avail­able. While their enter­prise class SCM sys­tem with five nines uptime was out, the magic of post-it notes — which rarely expe­ri­ence down time, except dur­ing peri­ods of humid weather — allowed Black and Decker to assure us we would receive a replace­ment in “7 to 10 days”.

Chap­ter 4: Duke Con­flict­ing Mas­ter Data
Four weeks passed, leav­ing JoeLamantia.com sorely in need of dust­bust­ing capa­bil­ity. We called a fourth time, to learn our replace­ment was on back order, and would arrive in “7 to 10 days”. As a cour­tesy, we’d been upgraded to a more pow­er­ful model — pre­sum­ably to help us pick up all the dust accu­mu­lated over the past three months.

Chap­ter 5: Wind­fall, and Happy End­ing
The next day, we found three dust­busters, all dif­fer­ent mod­els, shipped from dif­fer­ent places, with dif­fer­ent order num­bers, and dif­fer­ent cus­tomer IDs on the labels, wait­ing on the front porch.

Wind­fall

This weekend, some of my earlier posts discussing the user experience of Lotus Notes surfaced in the Notes community. Ed Brill – in a posting titled Mary Beth has been taking on the critics – referenced my mention of how the head of the Notes UI team was employing user research as a bridge to customers. Ed complimented the design team for reaching out to critics in public. This is a well-deserved pat on the back. Yet it falls short of recognizing the more important point that direct user research should be a basic component of any company’s overall strategy and planning for long term success (or survival).

Why? User research helps build customer relationships, further design efforts, and identify new business opportunities when applied across audiences (internal and external constituencies) and perspectives (marketing, sales, product development), and with an eye for needs beyond immediate feedback. This sort of engagement with customers of a software product (or any kind of product) should *not* be special or noteworthy – it should happen all the time. Continuously. I’m thinking of Jared Spool’s remarks during his keynote at UI10, to the effect that the user experience perspective is most successful when it it is a basic component of a company’s culture, and thus an assumed aspect of every initiative.

In fact, in a socially transparent, networked, and aware environment like the current FuturePresent, user research serves as a fundamental, indispensable form of research and development that companies and organizations must support as part of their portfolio of methods for seeking broad based environmental feedback (also here). I’ll go so far as to say that user research may move beyond the realm of essential corporate R&D, and qualify as genuine basic research.

BTW: maybe it’s just me, but isn’t it a bit ominous that the tag line for Notes 7 is “Innovate. Collaborate. Dominate.” ? Sounds like something the Borg might say if you asked them how to make breakfast…

Amazon is offering new Text Stats on “Readability” and “Complexity”, and a Concordance feature, both part of their comprehensive effort to translate the physical book[store] experience into the online medium. The new features build on existing capabilities such as Look Inside, Wishlists, Recommendations, Editorial and Customer Reviews, Citations, and Better Together to create a comprehensive book buying experience. In the same way that bookstores include kiosks to allow customers access metadata and other information on the books for sale in the immediate environment, Amazon is offering on-line capabilities that simulate many of the activities of book buyers in a bookstore, such as checking the table of contents and indexes, flipping through a book to read passages, or look at select pages.

The new features appear on product pages for books, as well as other kinds of works. [Try this intro to FRBR for a look at the conceptual hierarchy differentiating works from items, and it’s implications for common user tasks like finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining items.]

Text Stats may be experimental, but it’s hard to feel comfortable with their definition of complexity, which is: “A word is considered “complex” if it has three or more syllables.” To point out the obvious, English includes plenty of simple three syllable words – like “banana” – and some very complex one syllable words – “time” “thought” and “self” for example.

The Text Stats on Readability seem a bit better thought through. That’s natural, given their grounding in research done outside Amazon’s walls. But with clear evidence that US education standards vary considerably across states and even individual districts, and also evidence that those standards change over time, I have to question the value of Readability stats long term. I suppose that isn’t point…

The Concordance feature is easier to appreciate; perhaps it doesn’t attempt to interperet or provide meaning. It simply presents the raw statistical data on word frequencies, and allows you to do the interpretation. Amazon links each word in the concordance to a search results page listing the individual occurances of the word in the text, which is useful, and then further links the individual occruance listings to the location within the text.

With this strong and growing mix of features, Amazon both translates the bookstore experience on-line, and also augments that experience with capabilities available only in an information environment. The question is whether Amazon will continue to expand the capabilities it offers for book buying under the basic mental model of “being in a bookstore”, or if a new direction is ahead?

Here’s a screenshot of the Text Stats for DJ Spooky’s Rhythm Science.

Text Stats:

Here’s a screen shot of the Concordance feature.

Concordance:

I got caught in an on-line opinion survey trap last week. The setup: In exchange for 10% off my next purchase, a Banana Republic cashier told me, I had to answer a few questions about my shopping experience. Retailers often solicit opinions from customers in return for a variety of rewards. It’s common enough that there’s an understanding on the amount of information requested, in exchange for the expected reward. So I thought I was safe…
Twenty screens later, after answering more than fifty questions and with no end in sight, I was feeling a little cranky. Even my wife was irritated; I was holding up grocery shopping for dinner guests. Very quickly, the reward for my time shifted from a coupon, to using Banana Republic as an example of an on-line survey experience that undermines your brand.
The full survey ran more than thirty five screens, and ended with an error message. Very professional.
Thumbnails of the whole survey:

For kicks, I posted the screenshots to Flickr. If you run the slideshow, you can see where I became frustrated and started to give spoiler answers – like wearing a size 98, or spending $10 / year on clothing.
Why was the survey experience bad?
1. They didn’t make clear how much time they were asking for. The opening screen said 10 minutes, this is misleading for a 100 question survey. If you’re asking for my time, respect me enough to be honest about what’s required.
2. They didn’t make the real purpose of the survey clear. From the shopping experience itself, the questions quickly shifted to my age, income, marital status, and education level. This is a transparent attempt to feed data mining and demographic needs that relied on an amateur segue to turn the conversation around and ask for personal information.
3. They contradicted the experience I had in their store. The store staff were nice enough to keep track of the umbrella I left in a fitting room, and return it before I left, which was thoughtful. Consistency is the core of a successful brand, but the survey experience was inconsistent.
How does this damage Banana Republic’s brand?
1. Banana Republic left me with a series of negative impressions that work against their brand values: I now feel I was chosen to participate in a survey under false pretenses, a survey that offers me little value in return for important personal information that is inappropriate to ask for in the first place.
2. Banana Republic closed a growing channel for conducting business with a customer. I may purchase more from their stores — if I have no other retailer at hand, and I need business clothes to meet with a client CEO the next morning once again — but I’m certainly not willing to engage with them online.
Merchants in all areas of retailing work very hard to encourage customers to form positive associations with their brands. Fashion retailers work especially hard at encouraging customers to associate values, such as trust and respect, with a brand because these values serve as the foundation for longer term and more lucrative relationships with customers than single purchases. Every experience a customer has with your brand — every touch point — influences this network of associations, reinforcing or weakening the link between a brand and the feelings that customers have about the products and the company behind it. A simple test any retailer should use when considering bringing an experience to customers is wether the experience will reinforce the right brand associations.
Loyalty programs, and their offspring the online opinion survey, are good examples of the intersections of customer interests and retailer interests in an experience that can reinforce a customer’s perceptions of the brand and the values associated with it. Many retailers manage these kinds of programs well.
Just not Banana Republic.
The error message at the end.
Error Message:

I wear size 98:
Size 98:

Related posts:

Lotus Notes has one of the most unpleas­ant and unwel­com­ing User Expe­ri­ences this side of a medium-security prison where the war­den has aspi­ra­tions towards inte­rior design and art instruc­tion. One of the most painful aspects of the Notes expe­ri­ence is the default set­tings for font size and color in the email win­dow. The default font size (for Macs) is on the order of 7 point type, and the default color for unread mes­sages is — iron­i­cally — red. The com­bi­na­tion yields a user expe­ri­ence that resem­bles a bad skin rash.

I call it “angry red microNotes” dis­ease, and it looks like this:

Over­all, it has an unhealthy affect on one’s state of mind. The under­tones of hos­til­ity and resent­ment run­ning through­out are man­i­fold. And nat­u­rally, it is impos­si­ble to change the default font size and color for the email reader. This is fur­ther con­fir­ma­tion for my the­ory that Notes has yet to escape it’s roots as a thick client for series of uncon­nected data­bases.

After three weeks of suf­fer­ing from angry red microNotes, I real­ized I was lit­er­ally going blind from squint­ing at the tiny type, and went to Google for relief. I found niniX 1.7, a util­ity that allows Mac based Lotus Notes users the abil­ity to edit the binary for­mat Notes pref­er­ences file, and change the font size of the email client. I share it in the hopes that oth­ers may break the chains that blind them. This will only solve half the prob­lem — if some­one can fig­ure out how to change the default color for unread mes­sages to some­thing besides skin rash red, I will hap­pily share with the rest of the suf­fer­ing masses (and appar­ently there are on the order of 118 mil­lion of us out there).

But will it always be this (hor­ri­ble) way?

In Beyond Notes 7.0: IBM Lotus sketches ‘Han­nover’ user expe­ri­ence Peter Bochner of SearchDomino.com says this of the next Notes release, “Notes has often been crit­i­cized for its some­what staid user inter­face. Accord­ing to IBM’s Bis­conti, in cre­at­ing Han­nover, IBM paid atten­tion “to not just the user inter­face, but the user expe­ri­ence.“

Okay… So does that mean I’ll have my choice of dis­eases as themes for the user expe­ri­ence of my col­lab­o­ra­tion envi­ron­ment?
Accord­ing to Ken Bis­conti, IBM Lotus vice pres­i­dent of Work­place, por­tal and col­lab­o­ra­tion prod­ucts, “Through improve­ments such as con­tex­tual col­lab­o­ra­tion and sup­port for com­pos­ite apps, we’ve gone above and beyond sim­ple UI enhance­ment”.

I think sim­ple UI enhance­ment is exactly what Ken and his team should focus on for the next sev­eral years, since they have so much oppor­tu­nity for improvement.

Several very unpleasant experiences I’ve had with the Lotus Notes webmail client during the past few weeks have brought up some questions about mental models; specifically how users respond to challenges to their mental models, and how resilience plays a part in how changes to mental models occur.
The IAWiki defines a mental model as, “a mental model is how the user thinks the product works.” This is a simplified definition, but it’s adequate for the moment. For a deeper exploration, try Martina Angela Sasse’s thesis
Eliciting and Describing Users’ Models of Computer Systems.
In this case, the model and the challenge are straightforward. My mental model of the Notes webmail client includes the understanding that it can send email messages. The challenge: the Lotus webmail client cannot send email messages – at least not as I experience it.
Here’s what happens my mental model and my reality don’t match:

1. I log in to my email client via Firefox – the only browser on the Mac that renders the Notes webmail client vaguely correctly – (I’m using webmail because the full Notes client requires VPN, meaning I’m unable to access anything on my local network, or the internet, which, incidentally, makes it difficult to seem like a credible internet consultant.) again, because it’s frozen and crashed my browser in the past ten minutes.
2. I realize I need to respond to an email
3. I do not remember that the Notes webmail client is incapable of sending out email messages
4. I open a new message window, and compose a chunk of semi-grammatical techno-corporate non-speak to communicate a few simple points in blame-retardant consultantese
5. I attempt to send this email
6. I am confronted with a cryptic error message via javascript prompt, saying something like “We’re really sorry, but Domino sucks, so you can’t send out any messages using your email client.”
7. Over the span of .376 seconds, I move through successive states of surprise, confusion, comprehension, frustration, anger, resentment, resignation, and malaise (actually, mailaise is more accurate.)
8. I swear: silently if clients are within earshot, out loud if not
9. I switch to gmail, create a new message, copy the text of my message from the Notes webmail window to Gmail, and send the message to some eagerly waiting recipient
10. I close the Notes webmail client, and return to business as usual.
11. I forget that the Notes webmail client cannot send email messages.

Despite following this same path three times per day, five days each week, for the past five weeks, (for a total of ~75 clear examples), I am always surprised when I can’t send a message. I’m no expert on Learning theory but neither lack of attention nor stubbornness explain why seventy-five examples aren’t enough to change my model of how Notes works.
Disciplines including systems theory, biology, and sociology use a concept called resilience. In any stable system, “Resilience generally means the ability to recover from some shock, insult, or disturbance.” From an ecological perspective, resilience “is a measure of the amount of change or disruption that is required to transform a system.” The psychological view emphasizes “the ability of people to cope with stress and catastrophe.”
Apparently, the resilience of my model for email clients is high enough to withstand considerable stress, since – in addition to the initial catastrophe of using Notes itself – seventy-five consecutive examples of failure to work as expected do not equal enough shock, insult, and disturbance to my model to lead to a change my in understanding.
Notice that I’m using a work-around – switching to Gmail – to achieve my goal and send email. In
Resilience Management in Social-ecological Systems: a Working Hypothesis for a Participatory Approach , Brian Walker and several others refine the meaning of resilience to include, “The degree to which the system expresses capacity for learning and adaptation.” This accounts nicely for the Gmail work-around.
I also noticed that I’m relying on a series of assumptions – email clients can send messages; Notes is an email client; therefore, Notes can send messages – that make it logical to use a well established model for email clients in general to anticipate the workings of Notes webmail in particular. In new contexts, it’s easier to borrow an existing model than develop a new one. In short order, I expect I’ll change one of the assumptions, or build a model for Notes webmail.
Here’s a few questions that come to mind:

1. What factors determine the resilience of a mental model?
2. How to measure resiliency in mental models?
3. What’s the threshold of recovery for a mental model?
4. Put another way, what’s required to change a mental model?

Based on a quick review of the concept of resilience from several perspectives, I’m comfortable saying it’s a valuable way of looking at mental models, with practical implications for information architects.
Some of those implications are:

1. Understand the relevance of existing mental models when designing new systems
2. Anticipate and plan the ways that users will form a mental model of the system
3. Use design at multiple levels to further the formation of mental models
4. Understand thresholds and resilience factors when challenging existing mental models

From a broader view, I think it’s safe to say the application of systems theory to information architecture constitutes an important area for exploration, one containing challenges and opportunities for user experience practitioners in general, and information architects in particular.
Time to close this post before it gets too long.
Further reading:
Bio of Ludwig Bertalanffy, important contributor to General System Theory.
Doug Cocks Resilience Alliance
Garry Peterson’s blog Resilience Science

Related posts: