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![]() ACIA Main Page > People > Mark Hurst (August 30, 2000) |
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![]() See also: Creative Good Good Experience In Search of E-Commerce Holiday '99 Report Dotcom Survival Guide "Defining Information Architecture" conference CHI-Web mailing list Toys'r'Us Who else should we profile? Nominate your favorite information architect. Subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter. ![]() More People The ACIA is sponsored by Argus Associates, a leading information architecture consulting firm. |
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![]() ![]() Mark Hurst
I'd planned to interview Mark Hurst, but
an argument broke out instead. Well, not an argument, but a "spirited
discussion" about customer experience and how it relates to (Mark might
say squashes) other fields like information architecture and usability
engineering. We did a bit of sparring on CHI-WEB, and this interview
seemed like a great way to "take if off-line," as the list moderators
would say. Mark is the founder of Creative Good, and...well heck,
let's let him tell his own story. Lou: In a nutshell, who is Mark Hurst? And what path took you to
Creative Good? Mark: I have bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science
from MIT, with some graduate work at the MIT Media Lab. In the spring of
1995, after graduation, I went to work for Yoyodyne Entertainment, an
online game company and one of the first pure-play Internet companies. I
was one of the first employees hired as the chief game designer. Eighteen
months later, I departed Yoyodyne to start Creative Good in my apartment,
where I still live, in the suburbs of New York City. (Yoyodyne was later
bought by Yahoo.) The mission of Creative Good was, and still is, to make
the Web easier to use -- so from day one I've tried to help companies make
their web sites easier, simpler, more useful, more relevant, more valuable
to their customers. I single-handedly took Creative Good from, in 1997, a one-person
company with no money, to, in 1998, a one-person company with almost no
money. ;) But in those first eighteen months I had accomplished
a
few things: I had
refined my vision of customer experience, gained an unlikely amount of
press, established a happy client base, and partnered with Robert Seidman
on the writing of "In Search of E-Commerce," my first report evaluating
e-commerce sites. That report is now available free here: www.goodexperience.com/reports/isoe/ Around that time I met Phil Terry, who was at McKinsey, and who joined
Creative Good in February '99 as my partner and the CEO of Creative Good.
Eighteen months later (that time period again), Phil and I have grown
Creative Good to 30 people in two offices (New York and San Francisco),
30,000 subscribers to our weekly e-mail newsletter (e-mail [email protected] to
sign up), three free reports on e-commerce with tens of thousands of
downloads, a popular site with
resources and commentary, and a large and happy client base. And most
importantly, we have hired and grown the most capable team I've ever seen
in the Net industry. So that's where Creative Good is today, in August 2000. Lou: Tell us a little more about Creative Good; what kinds of
work does the company do? What are some of Creative Good's success
stories? Mark: The mission of Creative Good is to make the Web easier to
use. Our longer-term mission is to apply our vision to any and all digital
technologies. We're already doing work in wireless, and we plan to do work
in other technologies as opportunities arise. But the goal is always the
same: simplify the technology, make it easy for the customer, and
always create something good. We have a particular term for what we do: we say that Creative Good
creates a good "customer experience." The customer experience is the
combination of everything the customer sees, touches, reads, interacts
with, or otherwise engages. The customer experience is a holistic
combination of everything on a web site (or wireless app, or PDA
interface, or whatever). By taking a holistic view of the experience, our work is extremely
effective; way more effective than if we just focused on one aspect of the
experience, like the "usability" or, if you'll allow me, just the
"information architecture." In our projects, we advise clients how to improve their e-business by
improving the customer experience. We first create a strategy, informed by
industry analysis, organizational work, and user tests (what we call
"listening labs"), then finish by creating prototypes for the new site. We
do no implementation, instead leaving that to the client's internal
resources or a third-party agency. A Creative Good project typically raises the client's numbers by 100%.
So we usually double the sales, or conversion rate, or whatever it
is the client wants to improve. I don't know of any other methodology, or
any other company, that can deliver such consistently dramatic
improvements. Lou: I want to probe further about customer experience, but if I
don't challenge your claim of 100% improvement first, the readers will
never forgive me: How exactly is it that you know you double your clients'
numbers? What sorts of science do you use to measure and validate your
results? It seems like you face the nearly impossible task of
quantifying or completely removing other factors, such as the exponential
growth of Internet users or the results of a good marketing campaign. Mark: Results that dramatic, tied to the day the changes launch,
are hard to ignore. One recent client was monitoring a particular
conversion rate on their site. For three months straight it held steady at
a certain percentage. Marketing programs came and went, and the conversion
rate remained the same. (Remember that Internet growth and marketing
campaigns won't change the conversion rate, since if the on-site
experience is bad, the same percentage of people will abandon the
site.) So Creative Good finished the project and delivered the prototypes, and
the client's design team got to work implementing. A month later, the
changes went live on the site -- and THAT VERY DAY the conversion rate
doubled. Not a tiny five percent jitter -- but a huge step increase by
100%. During the months before the relaunch, the conversion rate was one
constant number. The day our changes went into place, and during the
following weeks, the conversion rate held steady at double the old rate.
That's a pretty strong case for Creative Good -- which is why the client's
CEO thanked us for doubling the number and promptly hired us again. Lou: OK, back to customer experience: it sounds like one of
those new-fangled "disciplines," like Mark: Apples and oranges. Market research takes surveys; there's
certainly a place for that in the product development cycle. Some
companies in the industry make plenty of money conducting online surveys
and feeding clients interesting numbers. I don't think that methodology
has much depth or value to it, but sure, once in a while a survey is
interesting. Usability engineering, having grown up in the age of software,
incrementally improves the tactics of the technology interface -- which is
a fine process, but more suited to software than to web sites or other
experience-based technologies. And information architecture... well, I guess we'll get to that one
later in the interview. Flame suit on! Customer experience, as I said before, recognizes the customer's
engagement with Web technology as a holistic combination of
factors. Our customer experience work is created for the Net only, not for
consumer products or software or libraries or anything else. The other
methods you listed were not born on the Net and therefore tend to be less
effective. Lou: But how can your work be holistic if it's geared toward the
Net only? It seems that a holistic approach by definition would address
other factors of the customer's experience. For example, I might use the
LL Bean site with their catalog in hand. Or consult the guy in the next
cube to help understand a benefits policy that I'm reading on the
company intranet. Does customer experience acknowledge the broader array
of actors that make up an information ecology? Mark: My point in saying "holistic" is to differentiate customer
experience from the other methods you mentioned. Usability engineering
tends to be more narrowly oriented to the TASKS that the user might
perform on the site; information architecture tend to be more narrowly
oriented around the INFORMATION the user might try to find, and how that
information is organized. Customer experience focuses on everything the customer sees, touches,
etc... what I mentioned above. That means we look at tasks, we
look at information on the site, but we also look at the marketing and
messaging, the merchandising, the use of graphics and other technologies,
the relationship of the site to any competitors' customers may have seen
-- and about twenty-two other factors. That's what I mean by holistic.
Customer experience is broader than other methods, and (since the Web is a
multi-faceted medium) it fits better on the Web than other methods do. Lou: Is the field of customer experience an art or science? Or
both? And a question similar to one we information architects constantly
face: how do you measure improvements in customer experience? Can you
point us to any tools or techniques? Mark: I think the question gets at the old discussion between
qualitative and quantitative work. The short answer is, customer
experience is bigger than that question. It's like asking, "is running a
company qualitative or quantitative?" It's both. Yes, there are
qualitative methods to guide us: past experience, proven heuristics,
things like that. And yes, there are quantitative tools: "running the
numbers," monitoring certain metrics. But customer experience isn't
defined by its tools. It's a way of seeing, a way of working, that
draws on many different ideas and tools. Incidentally, it's not important whether we call it "customer
experience," or "user experience," or "the holistic view of customers and
technology," or "flying squid." So long as we don't use words (like
"usability" or perhaps "information architecture") that are already known
to describe something different, the words aren't important. What's
important is not the term but the thing it points to: the
perspective that we take to creating technology. This is what I'm trying to get across to the industry: the
perspective that the industry takes to technology is mostly
misguided, and customers suffer, and ultimately the technology industry
suffers greatly in the long term. There is a better perspective that is
GOOD for customers, and ultimately GOOD for the industry, that's new,
that's better, that's
sometimes painful to adapt to, but that creates good technology in the
end. Whatever new label one chooses, this is the
perspective that Creative Good stands for, and which only a few people in
the industry seem to be able to see today. Lou: When you spoke at last April's "Defining
Information Architecture" conference in Boston, some of us came away
with the feeling that you see customer experience as much broader than
more recognized fields like usability engineering and information
architecture. But if that's true, doesn't that mean a site can have lousy
usability or a poor architecture and still provide good customer
experience? Mark: The question doesn't compute. The only gauge of success
for a web site is, do customers have a good enough experience that they'll
return, and encourage their friends to come, too? Usability and
information architecture are wrapped up in that experience; but so is the
marketing, the messaging, the graphics, the layout, the business plan, the
tone of the writing, everything. This isn't software, where
usability -- the efficiency of a user's task -- is the key determinant of
success. This is the Web, where everything is wrapped up into one
package! So if you ask, "If I take out usability, what happens to the
experience?", you're viewing the site through the old lens of usability
again. Instead, view the site from a different perspective -- from
the angle of the customer experiencing it in all its aspects, all its
contexts, and THEN ask, "Is this a good experience?" After you
answer that, you can try to
understand how usability and information architecture contribute to that
experience. Lou: I guess I'm still struggling to make that connection -- I'm
trying to get a sense of how any sort of specialization fits into your
broader practice of customer experience (assuming it does at all). Do you
analyze a site from a CE perspective and then say "OK, here's an
information architecture problem that we'll fix; there's a usability
problem..." and so on? Do you have IA, UE and other professionals on staff
to do such specific work? And what then would a customer experience
professional actually do for a client? Mark: Creative Good almost never hires people with formal
training in information architecture or usability, unless they show an
eager willingness to learn a new way to look at technology. No, we don't
break things down into information architecture and usability problems;
everything we see is a customer experience issue. We simply teach our
employees to see technology through the eyes of a customer. Once our
consultants go through our customer experience training program, they're
ready to handle just about any important issue on a site. Given some time
to gain experience, our team members handle these issues as well or
better than formally trained information architects or usability
professionals. Lou: OK, here's a long (and even more contentious) question, so
please bear with me. We both recently participated in a CHI-WEB
thread that debated the value of how tabs are labeled on the Toys'r'Us web site. I argued that mixing apples and oranges in the tabs probably confused
users. You said that "groupings, like many information schemes, can be
helpful, but they must be subservient to getting the right things in front
of the user in ANY order, whatever order is best for the customer's
goals." I don't know that many information architects would disagree, so
I was surprised with your later contribution to the thread: Ouch! Is it really your experience that information architects are
inflexibly focused on navigation at the expense of everything else? And if
so, how is it that we can be so blind to all the other factors that impact
users' ability to find the information they need? Mark: What do you mean, "I don't know that many information
architects would disagree"? ;) You disagreed explicitly in your
first comment on the thread: Your point, as you put it, was that the page risks "losing the value in
any of its groupings." Maybe so, but I'll sacrifice a grouping's value for
the benefit of the customer's value. My point was that groupings
aren't important, if there's some other organization (or disorganization)
that makes the site better for the customer. In other words, the
customer, not the information architecture, is the key. Lou: Without any data to go on, I'm still not convinced that
the Toys'r'Us approach really helps users, especially those who come to
the
site actually looking for stuff -- I'd bet that such users are better
served by a more consistent "finding-oriented" architecture. But back to
that thread: you seemed to imply that information architects follow
(sometimes
blindly) some set of rules. What the heck are those rules anyway, and why
can't I find them? Mark: Apparently, "don't risk the value of groupings" is one of
those rules! ;) More to the point, let's go to the source, the best book I know
that describes information architecture online: "Information Architecture
for the World Wide Web," by you and Peter Morville. Go ahead, link to
that Amazon
page!
As I said, this is a great book about information architecture, and I
enjoyed reading it back in 1998. In particular, Chapters 7 and 8 contain
helpful methods and ideas for site development. However, I don't agree
with everything the book says. One quote in particular exemplifies the
disconnect that information architecture has with the customer experience.
This is from page 37: I respect you and Argus, but Lou,
that just isn't true! I've sat through hundreds of user tests, and users
do not form mental models of the site's hierarchical structure.
Users aren't concerned with how a site is constructed, but instead are
interested in how to fulfill THEIR OWN GOAL. Guess what that means: where
appropriate, sites should break their hierarchy to fit whatever
organization that customers find most useful. The customer
experience, not the information architecture, is the ultimate guide to
building a site. If we take page 37 at its word, then on Toys'r'Us we group the tabs
into all the nice and neat groupings; after all, that's what customers
really like, to understand how the architects organized all the
information, right? Nope. Good information architecture, but not the best
customer experience. On the other hand, if we base our site development on a customer
experience-based perspective, sure, we'll base the site on a
well-organized model, but we'll be more concerned in the end with what the
customer will find most useful. Lou: That reasoning (and, really, customer experience as a
whole) seems to work for sites where experience is the goal, such as
entertainment sites or retail sites in highly-competitive niches. But is
such a customer-centered approach always appropriate? For a site that's
research-oriented, users aren't always the best judges of whether or not
they've found the content they need. They may be happy with what they
found, but don't realize that they've missed some truly relevant (and
possibly more accurate) content. But your customer-centered approach seems
to suggest that it's OK for ignorance to be bliss. Mark: The opposite case is more likely. I've seen how
task-oriented usability works, and I've seen how our customer-oriented
method works, and it's usability that often mistakes customers'
failure for success. Here's how: the usability test moderator asks the
user to complete Task A. The user completes Task A successfully, and so it
goes down as a positive mark for the site. A customer experience-focused
listening lab would have shown that the user didn't need or WANT to do
Task A in the first place! We've seen this in client engagements, too. One recent client conducted
three, count them THREE, batteries of usability tests on its site. Those
task-oriented tests showed that the site was performing well and in good
shape. We ran one day of listening labs, where the customers set the
context of the test, and immediately found strategic problems with the
site. The client was surprised and happy to find that there were much
bigger improvements to make, which traditional usability tests had
completely overlooked. Before I get flamed too badly, let me say that I do respect usability
tests. After listening labs, usability tests are the most effective way to
get customer-driven feedback on the site. I'd choose traditional usability
tests before I'd run focus groups (which are almost completely ineffective
for on-site feedback) or online surveys (which aren't much
better than focus groups). Lou: You've described the "page paradigm" as the most
consistently accurate predictor of customer behavior on an e-commerce
site. This sounds like an incredibly important factor; would you give us
an overview of the concept and let us know how we can learn more? Mark: This is a nice follow up to the previous question. The
"page paradigm" -- again, call it what you want, but what's important is
the thought behind it -- came from our user tests in preparation for our
Holiday '99 report (free download at www.creativegood.com/holiday99).
We noticed in tests that most online customers have a particular goal in
mind, and they click on anything on a page that appears to take them
closer to fulfilling the goal. If nothing on the page appears to do that,
they click the Back button on the browser. The implications of the page paradigm are fairly simple. Figure out
what's important to your customers on each individual page, and then
construct each page in a way that the most important things are most
easily accessible. And delete everything that's not important. It's a
great way to focus and simplify a site, page by page. The page paradigm is also discussed in our most recent report, the
Dotcom Survival Guide, which is also a free download, available here: www.creativegood.com/survival. Lou: How do you see customer experience evolving in the coming
years? Mark: The Web-via-PC will become less important, relative to the
rise in devices (cell phones, PDAs, and others) that access the Net. The
customer experience will be increasingly holistic, made up of many more
different interfaces and devices. The only constant in all this change
will be the bit. The technology customer experience for the next ten years
will be defined by the bit: its inherent properties, its seepage
into all areas of life, its increasing numbers, and people's ability to
engage all of that. I have developed a new perspective that allows people
to engage and thrive within the bits: it's called "bit literacy." We have
a training program at Creative Good that teaches bit literacy, and I plan
to write a book on it within the next year. Finally, if people want to stay abreast of developments in customer
experience (and bit literacy), they should sign up for the free e-mail
newsletter I send out every week or so: just e-mail [email protected]. We also
publish much of our customer experience knowledge base, including my daily
commentary on customer experience, at http://www.goodexperience.com. Lou: Thanks very much Mark, I hope this was a good experience
for you and for the readers as well. I'm looking forward to your book, not
to mention our next CHI-Web wrasslin' match... Mark: Thank you, Lou! Here, let me get you out of this
headlock... ;) Lou: (...mmmph...) |
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![]() The ACIA is Sponsored by Argus Associates, Inc. Copyright 2000 All Rights Reserved ![]() |
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