The Suitcase Interactive Inflight Meal

Can an iPhone app prove to your customers that you care about each one of them individually? Let’s take a look at AT&T’s new iPhone application, Mark the Spot, to help us answer that question.

“AT&T Mark the Spot is an application that provides customers a means to provide feedback on network user experience to AT&T,” the applications description reads.

Admittedly, when I first found the app, my first thought flicked to the coverage issues that AT&T has allegedly been known for in some areas. After I downloaded the app and showed AT&T all the spots in a 30-mile radius of where I live that I’ve had problems, a strange feeling washed over me. It was a feeling of calmness and satisfaction. I had just been able to tell AT&T my problems. The fact that they came out with this app means that they must care about me as an individual. That being said, I don’t know if they will pay attention to my blips or if they all go to “File 13″ somewhere. At that moment however, I felt good about my mobile service provider.

This got me thinking about other brands and services that I’ve worked with here at Suitcase Interactive.  All of my prospects and clients started swirling in my head.  Then, I had an epiphany.  We as consumers spend millions of dollars every year buying the latest and greatest technology, and all we want is to know that companies are listening to us. Even Microsoft has picked up on trying to make customers feel like they are being heard with their “Windows 7 was my idea” campaign.

Combining this simple fact with the world’s most popular phone, and BAM! (Thanks to Emeril Lagasse for getting this key phrase stuck in my head!) You’ve got a customer experience that improves your relationship with customers. It gives users a chance to have fun using their iPhone and they are able to get the feeling that they matter.

Jess Roberts
Director, Business Development

There’s been an increasing amount of discussion and promises made about the prospect and capabilities of real time search in the last little while. It’s definitely where things are headed – web 3.0, or 3.5, or 4.2? We’ll see when it gets here.

There are good examples of real time information in a few places right now, if you want to get a look at what this idea is all about. Dig Labs (http://labs.digg.com/stack) is a great example, Twitter is pretty close. But what the technology hopes to promise is a bit different – and cooler –than what the current possibilities look like. Imagine real time search as a dynamic search engine across the entire Web, and not just localized to a specific site’s content. Imagine opening Google, using it to search Twitter, and seeing your results come out of the broadband firehouse as they were tweeted? I’m picturing a slider that the user could adjust the flow of info with; the far left gives you updates every minute or so, a slightly more static picture into your search. But crank that slider all the way to the right and you’d get a kaleidoscopic and constantly shifting, morphing portrait of what the world is tweeting about on that particular subject at that absolute second in time.

Sure, there’s a pretty comprehensive back end to making this happen, but still – think about it – the Internet flowing before the user like something out of a William Gibson novel or the Matrix.

Kevin Rosmanitz

Build a user experience with clear success events for brand measurement purposes.

Would I call myself a user experience expert? Probably not. Do I feel I have some great experience and insight into the matter that may help online marketers? Absolutely!

At Suitcase, we work with a diversity of brands. Retail brands, financial brands, telecom brands, travel and tourism brands…. And the list goes on. The experience of each brand needs to be vastly different and must deliver an experience appropriate to that brand. With that in mind, marketers must strive to establish clear and specific goals that can be used to measure the effectiveness or “success” of any digital communication or website. These benchmarks, often called “success events”, must look  beyond site traffic and unique visits to clearly identify a path or set of activities for users to accomplish that, in doing so, will have indicated a successful experience.

As experience professionals, when architecting an effective user experience, we must coach our clients to consider the many potential “success events” within the experience.  My first introduction to success events as a concept came from our partners at Omniture . They really hit home with their point that a website must have loftier goals for its performance beyond site traffic and visitors. Bringing users to the site should be only the first part of the process.  Of course in theory I agreed with this simple and straightforward point. But the way he was talking about it made something click for me. It opened my eyes and got me excited. What it meant was that, if we really focus on these success events, we can better measure the conversations users are having with our clients’ brands.

Here’s the thing: If we are clever enough to entice a visitor out of the vast crowds surfing the massive webosphere (which in itself is a huge challenge and a topic for an upcoming post) we must then guide that visitor to perform whatever specific task the brand wants them to complete. We must engage them in a conversation. So to start that conversation we could ask them to watch a company video, play with a cool widget, or the easy engagement to measure.. ask them to buy something.

As user experience professionals, we must realize that we’re not just designing a website or the pretty graphics that comprise a rich user interface. No. We’re architecting and designing a system of communication that persuades real people with real information needs to travel down a very specific path towards a measurable outcome. And at discrete points along that path, we’re dropping in specific activities for them to accomplish that can be used to measure where they are at in the conversation, and entice them to continue.

Whatever the case, lets measure the conversation they are having with your brand. When you know what your client is going to measure within the experience, then you can build your IA/UX (information Architecture and User Experience) around those “success events”. If its done any other way I feel the project with lack insight and the end result could be dry and boring and also there will be no clear measurement on how effective your end to end experience performed.

- Ryan Gill

CEO / Partner
Suitcase Interactive

Suitcase has a bit of a storied history with the Canadian Marketing Association’s annual fund-raising golf tournament. We won’t talk too much about the good times side of things, but will mention that we’ve been involved as a headline sponsor and participant for four years now, and every year seems to surpass the one before. 2009 was no exception.

The weather was perfect and the setting serene, as six of us headed out to enjoy a great day of golf at the Silvertip Resort in Canmore. Funds raised from the sold-out event and auction went to support the Scott Smed Memorial Foundation, the Ronald McDonald House of Southern Alberta, and the National Advertising Benevolnet Society.

Kevin Rosmanitz

Check out this blog, written by one of the designers at Valve, a gaming company. He talks about how they came to the final design for the box art of one of their hugely successful games, Left for Dead.

It’s a great example of how taking the time to find a memorable way to convey your message visually is way more effective than jumping on the simplest execution of a graphic + headline. It’s also a great example of both a visual metaphor and the impact of having copy and imagery compliment each other.

The funny thing is, artistically, almost all of the early iterations of their work look better than the final product that they went with, but the final product is much more memorable because of the reasons above.

Check it out here:

http://www.l4d.com/blog/post.php?id=2353

Kevin Rosmanitz

A lot of marketing hinges on other marketing, its a response to a competitor’s position, either directly or more subtly.  Brands hone in on their individual personality as much by identifying how they differ from competitors as by what their own unique characteristics are. Usually the ‘brand wars’ that stem from the maneuvering and counter-maneuvering of different companies in response to the other take place pretty quietly, and probably aren’t really even noticed by most people ’cause the marketing is buried in all that other static out there. But in this case, this game was played out in the open, for everyone to see.

Audi in Beverly Hills, I think, put up a billboard to announce the release of a new vehicle, the A3 it looks like. The billboard was a direct challenge at their number one competitor, BMW, who then took the opportunity to respond in kind with a billboard of their own. I think its a great example of how ‘creative’ isn’t complicated; its simple, direct, and *pow*, its easy to get.

Kevin Rosmanitz

(Click the pic for a larger image.)

As Internet junkies we pride ourselves on creating compelling experiences that the user feels immersed into. So when visiting Burton’s flagship store in Chicago I really appreciated how the designers and architects of the space succeeded in pulling off the same thing in the real world.

The Burton store is located downtown in the central shopping area, close to some historical city blocks where you can see some beautiful brick and mortar buildings perfectly meshed in with newer, modern architecture. The shop itself is a narrow, three story brick infill sandwiched between a couple of larger multistory buildings. It’s very cool to see a lifestyle brand like Burton executed across an entire environment like this - you get to experience Burton, and for hardcore snowboarders I imagine it might be akin to a devout Catholic stepping into the Sistine Chapel.

The wood in all the media displays and product shelving was reclaimed from places like mines and old gain elevators. This is the kind of wood that they aren’t really making anymore. The reclamation of this material is definitely fantastic from the perspective of sustainability, but for Burton a great side effect is that it looks awesome and authentic.

Check out the graphics on the side windows. Since the building is cuddled right up next to a white concrete neighbor, the architectural group that thought out and designed the space created treatments for those windows that played off of the white next door, even further establishing the sense that you’ve stepped into a shop up in Whistler, Lake Louise or Vail, instead of just off the street of the hot and humid hustle of downtown Chicago.

The brick walls inside feature a gallery of previous and current Burton athletes, as well as a timeline of news and history related to the company’s role in shaping snowboard culture. Very cool.

I wandered upstairs and was invited by their assistant manager, Clay, to grab an Amp energy drink and to hang out as long as I wanted to. There was a coffee table full of cool art and design books, and Clay even asked me if I wanted to watch a different video on the HD screen in there.

Nice shop, cool people, and great attention to what makes the Burton brand so dominant in snowboarding. The whole thing was totally authentic.

Click for larger images.

Kevin Rosmanitz

One of Suitcase’s longer term clients is the Burger Boat company, based out of Mantiwoc, Wisconsin. A few of us went out there recently to show them some concepts that will update their online presence, and to take a tour of their facilities, right on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Burger is dedicated to creating some of the finest yachts in the world. The Burger motto is ‘anything goes’, and in our tour we were able to see first hand the extraordinary attention to detail the company commits to creating floating luxury. Check out some of the images below to see how they take the finest raw materials and work them into pieces of usable art. It was a fantastic experience and a remarkable look into a remarkable company.

Click for larger images.

Kevin Rosmanitz

You can find more from Kathy Sierra, the great presenter that put this talk together, at her blog Creating Passionate Users. She guided her audience through a series of super-entertaining points on how to push passed glass ceilings, limits, and any other kind of barrier that might be keeping you ’sucking’ and preventing you from ‘kicking ass’.

Here’s the points:

1. According to Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, “Outliers”, it takes about 10,000 hours to become an expert at pretty much anything. That’s a lot of hours. Sierra talked about looking for patterns in the process so you can work on shortening the time it takes to get ‘kick ass’. One shortcut is deliberate practice, this is the same methodology an athlete uses to get better. You can play the game to improve your game, or practice specific skills to accelerate your adaptation of those skills. Seems simple, but I bet people don’t think to take that concept into their work life.

2. Practice your strengths. The pro athlete thing comes to mind again. Most people think all pro athletes practice their weaknesses. Not true. Tiger Woods, for example, spends 80% of his time working on his strengths. Your skill set, or brand, or whatever, is likely a bit different, but give it some thought - its your strengths that got you were you are, so keep honing them. Imagine if the thing you became known for became the thing your competitor became known for. Not good.

3. Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard. Make it easier for users to have a breakthrough than to stay where they are. She used the example of exercise: is your treadmill gathering cobwebs in the corner? It’s not in the corner because you don’t use it, you don’t use it because it’s in the corner. Take all the chairs out of your media room, throw in some exercise balls, move the treadmill in front of the TV. You’ll probably start exercising. Simple stuff as far as UX is concerned, but it makes sense - easy paths, less clicks, use of color to motivate direction, blah-blah-blah.

4. Get better gear, or offer it to staff. Sometimes expensive equipment is more effective because it does the job better. Faster computers are more efficient. Its not your staff that’s unproductive, its the ancient machines they work on. A computer that is 30% faster will give you an employee that is probably 10%-15% faster. I liked this point. You don’t see craftsman fudging brilliant work with crappy tools. Larger monitor means you see more pixels means you get more done. Anyone that has gone from using a single monitor to a dual monitor setup knows the benefit and will likely never go back.

5. Total Immersion Jams. Less camp, more jam. Think about what it would be like 16 hours over 2 days versus 16 hours over 2 months. She used the example of Ad Lib Game Development Society, a group of developers that all worked for different large companies. They would get together for a weekend and build games. Their goal was not necessarily to be good, but to get things done:

“The surest way to guarantee nothing interesting happens is to assume you know exactly how to do it.”

8. Change your perspective. Don’t make a better x, make a better user of x. A better book in your mind could have more content, be denser, and be more complicated. You haven’t really helped the user, you’re only helping yourself. Less is more, right? We all know that. A great quote by Antoine de Saint-exupery,

“In anything at all, perfection is attained not when there is no longer anything to ad, but when there is no longer anything to take away.”

9. If you want to make incremental improvements, ask your users. If you want to make breakthroughs ask OTHER people’s users.

10. Be brave. Don’t shy away from things that are different and challenging.

11. Rethink Deadness. Henry Ford said that if I’d asked his users what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. The assumption is that faster horses = more money. Re-examine things you’ve sent to the dead pool. Horses were declared outdated, but are now they’re a $40 billion industry. It wouldn’t have too bad for ‘ol Henry to also consider faster horses. Look at things people consider dead or obsolete, look for new ways to make them fascinating or unique.

12. Change the EQ. Incremental improvement: move the sliders. Breakthrough improvement: add sliders that fit that product. Combined sliders from one domain to retail store, come up with new initiatives. She talked about a skateboard store in San Francisco that merged modern art with that sport. Its immensely popular and succeeded by adding that new slider ‘art’.

Be amazed. Even in tough times. “Everything’s amazing now, yet no one is happy”, according to Louis C, a very hilarious comic that was on Conan O’Brian. You might need to click this twice if it won’t play as an embed, but its funny and worth it.

Kevin Rosmanitz

This seems pretty straight forward, but I’ve been thinking about that statement and what it means, or should mean to agencies and to clients. I think its the kind of thing that we all talk about as being best practice, but at the end of the day, when you’ve finished making sure that all of the things your new site needs to say to its user are built into it, this simple notion is something that could be lost in the shuffle.

The point is that you don’t need to ask for the sale at every given point of dialog with a customer, or user. The speaker that tossed this bit of advice out there went on to finish the thought by reiterating that, in the online space, we’re creating a relationship. Its a relationship with a brand, a product, or just with the site itself. Every time a user makes a click they’re building a stronger bond. If they give you any information at all, they’ll likely be back. Research shows this.

So the point is that its more important to nurture that then it is to continually prod them for the sale, because by doing that, you’re ensuring a sale down the road, versus turning someone off of you or your brand, perhaps forever.

Simple stuff, web basics, but something I think we might tend to forget - or rather clients might help us tend to forget.

Kevin Rosmanitz