A simple test for UX design sensibility

A manager says "the customer understands x," where x is a concept, a complicated control on a UI, or a navigation path through a web site.

• If you respond to that statement without a question and simply wait for the next requirement or instruction, you're a technician.
• If you react to that statement with immediate, polite skepticism and ask how the manager knows that, you're a designer.

You're doing it wrong: American Airlines

I've been writing about other peoples' experience with service failures lately, so it's time to post one of my own. I was flying back from Chicago yesterday after a business meeting. I got to the airport early, at 5:30pm, and noticed there was a flight to Raleigh-Durham that was boarding. I went to the counter at the gate and asked if I could step on the flight. The attendant snapped at me, "I'll have to check." She checked, and said "Yes, you can. It will be $50." Fifty dollars to step on a plane that was boarding, and I'd paid full fare for my ticket! Apparently the attendant was simply checking to see if I was a Platinum/Gold/Rewards blah blah member who merited some small free service. I said no thanks, and walked away.

My own flight was at 7:30pm, and after the obligatory delays, the attendant announced that the flight was ready to board. And, he added, they were looking for three people to step off the flight because they were overbooked. They were offering $300 to anyone who would agree to re-book the next day!

If they had allowed me to move to an earlier flight they would have had an extra seat. American Airline was willing to forego $300 to not allow me to move from the later flight to an earlier flight, and they earned a dissatisfied customer in the process. As a final, perfect note to their general incompetence, the attendant announced, "the bathroom on the plane is out of order, so customers are urged to use the airport facilities before they board."

And the management of AA probably doesn't understand why they're getting beat to death by Southwest Airlines and its culture of customer service.

Want to work on strategy? Don't call it strategy

I used to work at a company that struggled with strategy, as many companies do. The leadership team would issue vague aspirations at the beginning of the year about producing software better, faster, and cheaper, and would forget about strategy until the next end-of-year planning cycle. However, there were strong ownership issues around strategy, and anyone outside the leadership team who used the word "strategy" found themselves with some explaining to do. The "strategy of no strategy" may sound like a zen-like approach to life but it's no way to run a company in a very competitive environment.

I decided that the way around this problem was to pull together some like-minded individuals and develop an innovation strategy, but simply not call it by that name. We would call it an "engagement approach" or "marketing meta-analysis" or something similarly vague that wouldn't hit any leader's hot button, but the content would contain a real strategy. We worked on it for a little while but the business sponsor of the effort left to pursue a developmental opportunity and was replaced by someone who wasn't with the program. I left the company a little while later.

I was reminded of this incident after reading Richard Rumelt's excellent The Perils of Bad Strategy. Rumelt's describes the hallmarks of bad strategy, including (1) failure to face the problem, (2) mistaking goals for strategy, (3) bad strategic objectives, and (4) fluff. The descriptions of each will be familiar to anyone who's seen bad corporate strategies. Highly recommended reading, but I wonder if any strategy-impaired leadership teams will recognize their own so-called strategies in the descriptions.

Stuck in DFW airport

What happens when two videographers' flights are cancelled and get stuck over night in an airport with their video gear? They make a great video. I'm envious.

STUCK from Joe Ayala on Vimeo.

Then they post it on their account at Vimeo and very quickly a million people see it and start commenting on it. Companies really need to understand that their service failures can become public very quickly. Like the brilliant United Breaks Guitars video, a couple of talented media creators got some payback for their treatment from the airlines.

Remarks on Snakes in Suits

Snakes in Suits, by Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, describe the behavior of psychopaths in corporate settings. Hare is a clinical psychologist who wrote a screening tool for psychopathy; Babiak is an I/O psychologist who does research on leadership in organizations. Together, they present a pretty convincing case that corporations, especially those undergoing a lot of changes, are excellent places for psychopaths to work and prosper. Many of the psychopath's traits, like superficial glibness, persuasiveness, feelings of importance, entitlement, and the ability to read people and manipulate them, are mistaken for leadership within organizations. Fascinating read, highly recommended.

Southwest understands customer focus

Flying has become such a chore that I avoid it as much as possible. But sometimes it's not possible. When I have to fly, I fly Southwest. Everybody has heard about the big things Southwest does, like leaving and arriving on time, the high customer satisfaction scores, the profitability when all the other airlines are losing money, and on and on. But there are little things that are never mentioned because they don't really make a big deal about it.

Examples from my own experience. I was watching the queue at another gate as people were preparing to board. People shift restlessly in one place, look at the door to the gate, and try to occupy themselves before getting on. Boarding and exiting a plane can be a little stressful. A flight attendant appeared at the gate and made this announcement. "Folks, a young man on the incoming flight couldn't handle the turbulence, if you know what I mean. Right now, you don't want to get on that plane, believe me. But our crews are working to clean it up and we'll be boarding very shortly." At that moment a baby started crying. The attendant added, "I know just how you feel. That's how I felt when I saw that mess." Everyone in the queue and in the boarding area started laughing. No one was anxious about getting on the plane anymore, and everyone relaxed.

My own flight was delayed getting in and I had a tight connection. I wasn't worried about catching the plane because I knew Southwest would hold the plane until all the stragglers were on board. I had checked luggage so I wondered about my luggage. A customer in the seat in front of me was talking on his cell phone. "I made it, but there's no way the bags are going to make it." At that moment the flight attendant made this announcement. "We're going to hold this flight until all the bags from our connecting flights have been loaded, then we'll be on our way." Rather than creating the hassle of putting the bags on a later flight and letting customer service in the airport deal with it, Southwest chooses to hold a flight and get all the bags on the flight. Huge win.

How do they do this? They think about customers, and what customers worry about. They know that people want information about boarding and delays and bags and dozens of different things. So they arrange some of their processes for the benefit of customers and their needs for information. These incidents happen too often and too predictably to just be happy accidents. They are doing real experience design. They're training and inspiring (and probably rewarding) employees to do things right.

All companies pay lip service to being customer focused. Southwest really gets it, and it shows up on the bottom line.

Your Call is (Not That) Important to Us

Emily Yellin's Your Call is (Not That) Important To Us is a fast, fun read about the customer service/call center business, with a little bit of IVR thrown in. The book does well when it describes the history of customer service. There are some insights into companies that try very hard to get it right, like FedEx and Zappos and Jet Blue. It doesn't do as well with the speech IVR material. She grants too much credibility to fringe players like the MIT profs who want to create "emotional" computers and the companies pushing interactive avatars.

One of the central observations in the book is that customer service doesn't occupy a very high place in the list of priorities at most companies. This I've seen many times in the companies I've worked for or consulted with. Personally, I'd love to work at a company that decides at the highest levels that customer service is a top priority. The challenges of getting customer service right are very hard, even with a lot of support from executives. Without that support, it's impossible.