I’ve been knocking around a blog post idea for the past week or so about how much media and information I consume. I wanted to talk about how my consumption compares to people just 20 years ago — books, music, articles, movies, television, advertisements, games, etc.

Well, this isn’t that post. It’s a heady topic and I don’t feel I could do it justice.

So this is the post to say that I had the idea, and it was a good one, but it’s not going to happen right now.

Right in front are the temperature controls for both the fridge and the freezer that are pretty straight forward. Simple up-and-down arrows and a big digital display for each — a child could figure this out, right?

But wait… is the freezer just barely colder than the refrigerator? No, that can’t be right — if that were true either my milk would be freezing or my ice would be melting… and besides, both defaults are 4. Yeah, everything’s fine — that’s a relief!

No. This is stupid! I should never have had to go through that thought process and my wife shouldn’t have had to ask me about it.

The designers are encouraging comparison by putting the fridge and freezer temperature controls right next to each other, but they’re using the same scale of abstracted measurement for two very different temperatures. ’4′ shouldn’t mean 32° mere inches from where it means 60°. I get that the designers would have had constraints, but I would prefer it if they either used a fixed unit of measurement (Fahrenheit or Celsius) or split the controls by putting one in the refrigerator and one in the freezer.

One more gripe that might support my latter suggestion, do these controls have to be right up front and in the middle? Do users have to adjust the temperature enough to compromise clearance? Don’t get me wrong, I like my fridge, but the controls are confusing and I can barely fit bottles in the middle — it’s a pain in the ass.

Please don't judge my cluttered fridge

Well, congratulations to all us consultants, project managers and designers because, for better or for worse, the marketing guys are here.

 They’re Here… (and they’re very clever)

My wife and I recently resubscribed to cable TV after a couple years hiatus. (She’s 8 months pregnant and insists it’s now a necessity.) One of first commercials that really caught my attention was for the AmEx Rewards program. I’ve always thought their marketing was classy, and this commercial was no exception, but the tone was completely different than what it used to be. It seems more casual, approachable, and conversational. Throughout the 30-some seconds, tweets are shown about what customers (real or fake, I couldn’t say) are spending their points on:

Ingenious. Not only are they “one of us” (a big departure from the My Life, My Card strategy a few years back), but all of our “friends” are excitedly talking about how awesome AmEx is!

Social Media Can Be Divisive

One of the very funniest commercials I’ve seen all year is for the Toyota Venza:

It’s funny and it speaks to a very complex audience. Not only does it target a mature market that sees little-to-no value in Facebook, but it also taps into the more moderate social media user. You know — normal people that don’t find gratification in a number that attempts to quantify my social worth. (Yeah… I count myself among the second group described.)

One of the things I struggle with is the gamification of social media. I’ve mentioned it here before, but I really can’t stand the fabrication of an online persona to win followers or friends. It’s made me very distrustful. I don’t hesitate to remove “friends” in Facebook, I’ve all but stopped using Twitter and I’m extremely wary of any type of “sponsored content”. (The last applies to any kind of content provider, not just social media.)

Every Commercial Break is a Water Cooler Moment

I found one of my absolute favorite social media marketing developments on USA Network while watching Suits. (Great show — totally worth your time.) Throughout the broadcast, there’s a hashtag in the bottom left — “#suits”.

That’s clever, right? Just like at a conference when the MC announces what everyone should be tweeting under, but without the need for contextual awareness. My mother wouldn’t know what the hell a hashtag is, but it’s unobtrusive and it looks like a pretty normal marketing bumper.

The really, really clever part though? During the commercial break, they’ll prompt the viewers with question and repeat the hashtag — “Should character X have done Y to Z?” They’re telling us that we don’t have to wait to talk about the show. Do it right now — there’s a minute to kill while the commercials play out…

Brilliant! Tell viewers how to talk about the show and prompt them with a question that stimulates a passionate response. Bingo bango: a ton of buzz that will feed back into the viewer numbers and people are sitting on the cough through the commercials. USA isn’t just engaging their audience, they’re telling us how to engage each other.

I think there’s going to be a bad reaction when social media users get sick of having sharks in the pool with them, but the way it’s unfolding is really interesting to watch.

In short, once we finish the main goal of a given task, we tend to shift our (limited) attention other tasks entirely, forgetting all about the loose ends we left behind. Some examples Johnson used:

• Leaving turn signals on after making a turn.
• Forgetting to take original documents out of a scanner or fax.
• Neglecting to close parentheses or quotations when typing. (Forgetting to close a block of code sounds pretty familiar…)

He goes on with more good examples and what can or has been done to avoid these “end-of-task short-term memory lapses”, but my mind immediate went to an example of my own.

Cashiers: Guides to the Debit Card Machine

It’s insane that no matter how many times I’ve used them, I almost always forget a step somewhere when using my debit card to checkout from a store. It normally goes like this:

• I put my items up on the counter
• Get greeted/ignored by the cashier
• Swipe my debit card and enter my PIN

From here I typically get distracted by any number of things; chatting with my wife, monitoring prices as they scan, that annoying kid on register 7 — whatever. Meanwhile a monochromatic, passive-matrix screen is prompting me for more information:

• Do you want to make a donation?
• Do you want this entire purchase on one card?
• Do you approve X amount?
• Do you want cash back?

No matter what the tiny green screen says, I’m not going to see it unless I’m looking directly at it, and that’s frustrating for everyone involved. The person behind the counter has wait for me to notice the lull in activity or politely point out that I’m not paying attention, and I have to feel like a moron for forgetting to babysit a machine. What’s more, you can recognize the especially frustrated employees because they don’t even wait for you to mess up, they’ll prompt you through the entire process in a droning “I’ve-said-this-1000-times-today” voice before you even open your wallet — “It’s going to ask you for X, you need to Y before you Z“.

I can’t really blame them — if I turn my head away from the machine, I’m likely to forget all about it and it’ll be up to the cashier to bring me back to task. Once I got a little huffy and said to the cashier, “The stupid thing should beep at me, or have a blinking red light or something. Doesn’t it drive you crazy?”

She just smiled at me politely, because it DOES drive her crazy but there’s nothing she can do about it.

“GoDaddy is a f*cking labyrinth — how many minotaurs did you have to kill?”

There were laughs, but really… what’s wrong here? Two experienced users, a software engineer and a web developer, both had such a hard time with GoDaddy that they sat around and whined about it?

GoDaddy is successful and resourceful. They’ve been doing business on the web since ’97 and have tons of e-commerce experience. So, how could they possibly botch the domain renewal experience so badly? It’s a pretty business-critical transaction, isn’t it? I took screenshots throughout the process because the experience just screamed “complain about this in public“.

I originally went through the renewal process and was ready to checkout before I realized I didn’t have my wallet with me, so I just left it for later. When I came back, the home page looked like this:

Obligatory disclaimer that I've added the red arrows

Notice that I’ve an item in the cart (top-right) and a domain expiration notice (left), but why am I still being prompted to log in (top)? If I’m not logged in, how you know this stuff about my account?

Finding my domain would have been easy enough through the Account button, but I just went straight to the cart from the top-right link and was rewarded with the real impetus for this post; the Upsell:

Several screens stitched together in Photoshop to show the whole gauntlet

These (nearly 3) screens really changed things for me. After a few seconds of earnestly reading product descriptions, I concluded that GoDaddy was trying to trick me into buying more. I went into defensive mode — they were a hostile and aggressive salesman trying to take advantage of me. Normally I experiment with interfaces, I click things to see what happens, but not this time. I cautiously scrolled to the bottom of the page only to meet a pair of confusing buttons, “No Thanks” and “Add & Continue”.

Wait a minute… I want to continue but I don’t want to add anything — if I click “Add & Continue” will something else be added to my purchase? If I say “No Thanks” am I backing out of the entire purchase or just the extra junk? At this point, all trust in the process has been shattered — I wanted to finish and get the heck out of there as soon as I could, which takes us to the payment screen:

It should go without saying that I added the red arrows and path, but I evidently said it anyway.

What a mess… I’m still being asked to log in even after I’ve completed that step, so I’m feeling a little more shaky about all this. And then there’s the form — everyone likes eyeball acrobatics, right?

It really took effort to finish the form, mostly when I got to Step 4 with the terms and purchase summary. I don’t mean that it was hard, I’m saying it took a lot more thought than it should have. Payment forms aren’t new — I completely understand that good ones can be a challenge, but go copy someone else’s if you don’t feel up to solving this problem. I really wonder what the percentage of cart abandonment is — is it possible that users feel like they’ve invested too much to turn back now?

The confirmation screen had some room for improvement too, but I’d prefer to wrap my post up with the customer survey I completed (out of masochistic curiosity). I just want to point out the first and third questions:

I stitched together all the options for the third question.

So, they recognize that the surveyed could possibly be building/supporting a website, whether for others or for themselves, but they don’t have a single tech-related option under the industry question? I guess “Professional” is close, but that’s a pretty broad umbrella for web development…

Could they have meant “Which of the following best describes your website’s industry“? Either way, how useful could this survey data be if the questions are either misleading and/or its answers are incomplete?

This was a really painful user experience for me, but GoDaddy has to have a team of designers, right? Maybe a UI/UX professional or two? I know I didn’t really go into any depth on the problems, and I certainly haven’t proposed any solutions, but why hasn’t any one of the dozens/hundreds/thousands of people working with GoDaddy questioned their process?

I think it bears repeating: we were sold.

I don’t think anything unbecoming was done or said, but it was totally unexpected in that setting. I’d imagine it’s like most natural birthing centers — it’s steeped in gentle understanding, unbound patience and motherly acceptance — just about the exact opposite of the hard sell. I think their soft sell is extremely effective because it converts people, not just sales.

Breath of Life clearly understands their clientele and do everything they could to reinforce that fact. From staff and decoration, to birthing rooms and those little informational flyers — they get ‘us’ and, for want of a better word, they exploit that knowledge. And it clearly worked on me — here I am, blogging about just how delicious the kool-aid was. They might be marketing themselves with a gentle hand, but they’re doing it all the same. Check out their in-house demo video:

I really don’t mean to come off as cynical because I plan on having my baby here, but I can just picture the project briefing for the video:

1. The narrator shall say “you” or “your” no fewer than 75 times
2. There must be at least 3 testimonials about the speed and ease of water birth
3. References to the mother’s body shall be made no fewer than 15 times
4. At least 20 babies must be seen; 80% of which must have chubby cheeks
5. No fewer than 4 men must reinforce the positive emotional experience they had

I didn’t share any of this with my wife (I don’t want to spoil her experience) but it’s hard to put these thoughts out of mind. Yes, these seem to be caring and trustworthy people, but they’re pulling our strings just as much as (if not more than) any other for-profit company out there.

Last February I unintentionally put off some coworkers with this post. (In hindsight, I could have sung my praises for Dan in a better way.) I feel that the awkward conversations that followed help clear things up in the office, but they also led to my immediate abandonment of Twitter (of my own volition) and a decreased interest in blogging.

Much to my detriment.

There’s a lot to gain from putting yourself out there and I plan on taking advantage of it once again, but I’m feeling pretty mindful of the experience I had and of the poor examples other people /companies provide. My only concerns are; 1) time, and 2) letting myself fall into the gamification of social media — I don’t want the number of comments/followers/retweets/whatevers to become the justification of any renewed efforts. I recognize that there’s a lot to gain from competitiveness and popularity, but it just feels disingenuous to who I am…

It was a nice coincidence that I saw Jonah Lehrer’s You Know More Than You Know this morning.

P.S.

I’m not dead – I’ve just been really busy and/or distracted.

1. My “client” is the company I work for. There’s a team of people that take pride in what what we do, which can be very motivating.
2. “Normal” client-work often included a lot of hand-holding, which I do not miss. Yeah, I still have to make sound arguments for my ideas but I don’t think I’ll ever have to explain the difference between a search box and the browser’s address field.
3. IE6 was a real factor in my client-work — it still represented about 10% of the viewers. To my absolute delight, Loop does not support it. (Hell yeah!)

I’ve largely spent my time redesigning a number of forms (still one of the more challenging parts of web design, if you ask me) as well as a few pages. I almost feel guilty with the amount of time and energy I’ve gotten to put into the redesigns — the client-work I did never afforded me the luxury of user interviews or extra design time to improve the experience. I think that speaks to the biggest difference I’m seeing between client-work and app development: when presented with the Triple Constraint (Cost, Time and Quality), many clients focused on Cost alone, whereas Loop focuses on Quality and works with the constraints from there.

I really do love what I’m doing and the people I do it with, yet there’s something of a skill gap that I’ve got to close. Everyone has been very understanding and helpful, but for the foreseeable future I’ll be pushing myself to learn  ASP.NET and C# (with some brushing up on jQuery for good measure).

A few members of the Loop team during Hawaiian Shirt Day (I'm hidden in the very back-left)

I’m very excited about learning new things and meeting new people — overall I’m extremely grateful  for the opportunity, but I’m still a bit nervous — 7 years is a long time, especially in the tech/knowledge industry, so I worry about a bunch of stuff:

• What kind of skill gaps do I have? Will I be thrown to the fire? Will I be over-coddled?
• What if I say the wrong thing and upset someone? Will I be branded for life as a jerk?
• What if any of the millions of little habits I’ve developed over the years is a taboo there? Are headphones considered rude? Is it bad form to surf for tech news during lunch?

The list really goes on (and becomes more inane as it does), but I fear that I won’t be getting much sleep tonight.