Business Evolutionist

What should WSJ.com do?

Two of my favorite bloggers recently offered up compelling, and opposing, views on what the Wall St. Journal should do with its website.

First up, Fred over at A VC, wrote:

Rupert Murdoch should make the WSJ as free to use online as Google is. And he should do that the first day he owns the paper. Why isn't the WSJ the force in the online world that is it in the offline world? Easy, because you have to pay for its content and anyone who has spent time doing business online realizes that less than 10% of anyone's audience (even if your audience are rich people) will pay for online content.

Fred seems to think that they increase the pages views enough to generate enough in advertising to make the $75 million in subscriber revenues. I think he is probably correct with this, the concern would be how many ads they'd have to place and how it might distract from the readability of the pages. I'm quite sick of animated dancing characters trying to sell me a mortgage and similar attention-spam. I think if they went to a ad-supported revenue model, they'd have to keep their audience in mind set some pretty strict guidelines as to the types and quality of ads they'd accept (just like in the paper version). Where I think Fred nails this is it that is indeed rare to see a WSJ reference on a blog, so they are sacrificing community participation.

Next up, Rob over at BusinessPundit, wrote:

First of all, yes, some free content is good. You need to prove that you have some value so that people are willing to pay for the rest of what you offer, but when you make everything free, you get the downward spiral of quality that tends to be so prevalent on the web. When you shift from paying for content to attracting eyeballs and selling ads, the value proposition changes from we have quality content to we have the attention of many people. Thus, your product decisions focus less on quality content and more on content that will attract the attention of many people.

Rob makes the assumption that if the content is ad-supported, that the quality will suffer - that they'll somehow stop producing the quality content that the WSJ is known for. It is VERY rare that I disagree with Rob, he's a very smart guy, but I think there is a touch of faulty logic in his argument. The weather channel, for instance, is ad-supported content, but that doesn't change their weather forecast: "People prefer to look at Sunny and 70, so we'll just show that all the time." or "Our traffic spikes with there is a threat of sever weather, so we'll show a chance of Tornado's every day". If the Weather Channel stopped offering accurate forecasts, they wouldn't have any viewers.

Again, I think both Rob and Fred make very compelling cases for their side of the argument... however, why not do some combination of both?

1.) Continue with subscription model, but make all the content free after 5/7/14 days. The value of their content declines over time, who wants financial news from a week ago? Subscribers could link to articles, knowing that they'll be publicly available after a few days, so the link will work for everyone eventually. This is what Wired, Fast Company, Business 2.0 and others do - you can't see the content for free until some number of days/weeks after the initial publication. Subscribers will see it right away, others will have to wait. You can maintain the exclusivity of the content with this model, because only some people will see it right away.

2.) Pay for participation. Give all the content away, but charge to participate in discussions and build a WSJ social network, where you have access to analysts, writers, editors, etc. The power behind this would be in the facilitation of developing relationships between like minded individuals. Think of this as an exclusive version of LinkedIn.

3.) Give some of the content away, charge for the premium stuff. Not all of their content relates directly to the market, they have great articles during the week about careers and travel, and so forth - why not just give that stuff away for free? Tie this to number 1 above, and they could make everything free after some number of days.

4.) Build a set of premium tools and charge for those. My guess is that people who read WSJ care about the financial markets, so why not give the articles away for free but charge for additional stuff - summaries, company and/or industry trackers, email alerts, etc. Let subscribers build a profile on the site that enables the WSJ to help them manage the complexity of the market and their investments. For instance, if someone cares about the consumer packaged goods industry - build me a custom view that includes articles about that. They could have custom Specialty Editors that could provide in-depth industry pages that would highlight all the important stories and events for that given industry. Not as many people would sign up for this, but I'm sure they could charge a premium price for it - if the tools were good enough.

5.) Make a few articles free every day, so that bloggers can link to and discuss them. The more people they expose to the quality, the more people should subscribe.

6.) Allow other sites to license their content. Imagine if some/all of the WSJ content was available on Yahoo, like Reuters and and AP stuff - WSJ would still get some money for the content and they would get increased exposure. If they also added advertising revenue, they could really increase profits.

Okay, these aren't the greatest ideas, however, I don't think this is an either / or situation. I think they can do both. I don't read the WSJ (print edition) often - mostly when I'm traveling, but I always enjoy it when I do. The quality of the content is great.

What do you think? Free? Subscription-based? Some combination of the two? Something else? What should the WSJ do?

The truly desirable electric car

I first read about the car a year ago, in Wired. A fast, battery-powered, sports car, that looked like a sports car. (check out a video from Sundance Channel - click view more, then Drive 4)

Let's face it, most of us buy cars (and almost everything else) for truly emotional reasons. There probably isn't a guy alive who wouldn't love to drive one of these - including yours truly.

As cool as this, the idea behind it is incredibly simple: cool car body + rechargeable batteries = a year long waiting list that you have to pay at least $30,000 to get on.

More proof that there are very few new ideas, just curious people who add 1 + 1 and come up with more than 2... (you've got your chocolate in peanut butter... )

My questions are:

With all the trouble the Big 3 US automakers are having, why didn't they come up with something like this? GM did, but then abandoned it.... sadly. It didn't look like the Tesla, but still...

With gas over $3 a gallon, why isn't the government doing more to subsidize development of things like this?

Dear Capital One

Dear Capital One,

Thank you so much for continuing your correspondence, your persistence in this matter is to be commended. Most people would have given up on me by now, but not you. Your optimism that I may write or call you one day is astonishing... especially given the fact that I don't think I've given any indication that I will. I've been trying to figure out what I did or said that would cause you to have such expectations.

Oh, that's right. I didn't do anything.

Somehow you got my name... and you somehow feel that gives you permission to write me every week, sometimes twice a week. Somehow you feel that you have the right to waste my time. Somehow you feel you have the right waste all the electricity my paper shredder uses eating your junk. Somehow you feel that you have the right to waste the all that paper with your "generous" offers.

You don't.

If I wasn't interested in your service the first, second or 100th time you wrote me, what on earth gives you the hope that the 101st or more might interest me?

I do, however, have something (besides my wallet) that might interest you.. an idea: instead of spending all that money on mailing lists, paper, people stuffing envelopes, and postage, why not do something worth talking about instead? Why not randomly pay peoples bills for them (don't advertise it, just do it)? Why not commit all the cash you spend on marketing to prevent identity theft? Why not allow people to put a certain percentage of their "rewards" to some worthwhile charity and provide matching dollars? And finally, become the number one lobbyist for health care reform (the number one cause of bankruptcy in this country)?

In the meantime, please stop writing me. Let me rephrase that: STOP WRITING TO ME!

Sincerely,

Jon

P.S. if you know anyone who works at Citibank, American Express or Discover, please share this letter with them.

Don't steal this CD...

I have this pet peeve: the security packaging on CDs - I find it totally annoying.

The reason they do it is obvious - to prevent theft. However, why not just enclose the CD in one of those theft prevention devices that they remove at the register? I can't imagine that people can steal something they can't open, right? The plastic wrap and security tape don't stop someone from stealing a CD, it just slows them down a bit. A handy pocket knife could have that stuff off in a matter of seconds (I'm sure thieves don't care if they slightly damage the case, right?).

However, I think it is a great reminder of how NOT to treat the people buying your product - remove all barriers to using/enjoying your product or service.

If you consider how few people are probably stealing CD's (less than 1% of the CD buying public? does anyone know?), that means that a vast majority of us have to spend time removing that crappy packaging and security tape before we can enjoy our music... using a knife or something for quick removal of the packaging isn't really an option if you care about the case.

We had a "put the burden on the customer" experience yesterday with the credit card machine my wife uses for her business. She changed the deposit bank account for credit card transactions after 7 years of doing business with this company, nothing more. This change required, in order:

1. A call to the merchant service


2. Completion of a 5 page document


3. An inspection of the business by the merchant service - they actually sent someone to investigate.


4. Finally, and this really blew me away, another phone call to the merchant service to reprogram the credit card machine. We actually spent 90 minutes in the salon yesterday on the phone with terminal support reprogramming the credit card terminal. Sure, she could have had a technician come and do this, but the fastest option was doing it herself over the phone.

Recall that she did nothing but want the funds from the credit card transactions to go into account 'b' instead of account 'a'.

I was blown away by this. To make matters worse, the first attempt at updating the terminal failed. After a 40 minute 'download', we got an error message that indicated that there was not enough memory for the new version to run. So, another call to terminal support, another download and another 30 minutes and all was good... to change account numbers.

I can understand the need for fraud prevention, surely, however this was just ridiculous. I can only imagine what this whole experience cost both parties involved (my wife and the merchant service).

This raises a simple question that I think every company should ask themselves: what are the pain points of dealing with us?

It is simply a matter of friction: the more you introduce, the more more you frustrate people.

So, what do you think? Do you have examples of companies that have introduced friction? Better yet, do you have an example of a company that has removed friction?

My note to Levi's...

I just want a pair of jeans. I've just told you that I'll spend $44 dollars with you, but you don't want to make that easy for me... do you?

Here is my note to Levi's (sent Tuesday):

I can't seem to find 511 jeans in size 30x30 - do you make that size? If so, when will they be available online at the levis store?

Thank you!
Jon

The reply (received Thursday):

Thank you for contacting The Levi's® Store Online. We appreciate your interest and the opportunity to assist you.

Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to view the inventory we will carry in the future. We recommend that you periodically check our website to see if we have the item(s) you inquired about. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

For information on Levi's(R) products or sizes that are not currently featured on LevisStore.com, we suggest you call our Consumer Relations team at corporate headquarters. The phone number is 1-800-USA-LEVI (1-800-872-5384.) You may also e-mail your inquiry to questions@levi.com. If possible, please include a style number with your inquiry.

Thanks again for contacting LevisStore.com and sharing your thoughts with us.

Sincerely,

Customer Service
www.LevisStore.com

Well, you say you appreciate the opportunity to assist me... and I do appreciate your reply, truly. However, if all it takes is a phone call OR an email to consumer relations, why don't you do that for me real quick?

Imagine if instead of the email I got back, I got the following note:

Thank you for contacting The Levi's® Store Online. We appreciate your interest and the opportunity to assist you.

We've just been in touch with consumer relations and they've put aside two pair of 511 jeans (size 30 x 30), just for you.

Simply call 1-800-USA-LEVI (1-800-872-5384.) and give them your name or email address. They'll complete your order in 5 minutes and you'll have your new jeans in time for the weekend!

If you experience any trouble completing your order, just let us know and we'll get it resolved right away.

Thank you again for contacting Levi's.

Sincerely,

Customer Service
www.LevisStore.com

Talk about simple. Even if the reply would have been that they don't have any jeans in my size, that would have been cool as well. They could have said that they searched high and low but couldn't find any. Think about all the options available to them - they could offer to notify me when they do have my size, they could try to upsell me to a custom pair of jeans, etc, etc.

I'll still buy these jeans (whenever I happen to find them) - being thin means its hard to find jeans that fit right. It just strikes me as a tad odd that Levi's comes out with "Skinny" jeans but can't seem to provide inventory for a skinny person.

How about it, have you ever gotten an email back from a company that demonstrated them going the extra mile?

Don't ask, or please tell...

I posted recently about an email that I thought was great; our team leader asked us what was next for our great team and what we wanted to work on.

Well, assignments have been handed out and I didn't get what I asked for. Okay. The assignment I did get will probably turn out to be very cool, however, it isn't what I asked to do. What makes it odd is that I didn't get any explanation as to why I didn't get to work on what I asked to do. It's glaring problem that everyone acknowledges needs fixed.

From great leadership to a missed opportunity.

My point is this: as a leader, if you're going to open the floor to suggestions - which I think is great leadership - either follow the recommendations that you're given or take the time to explain why you can't or won't or aren't, etc.

Nothing is worse than not knowing. If my ideas are bad, fine. Tell me. I'm an adult (we all are). If the timing is wrong, explain that to me.... but mostly, if you don't trust me enough to have a say in the future direction... DON'T ASK ME!

Does perfect exist?

I mentioned in a previous post that I was reading a book called 'The Evolution of Useful Things', here is a little snippet that I love:

Here, then, is the central idea: the form of made things is always subject to change in response to their real or perceived shortcomings, their failures to function properly. This principle governs all invention, innovation, and ingenuity; it is what drives all inventors, innovators, and engineers. And there follows a corollary: since nothing is perfect, and indeed, since even our ideas of perfection are not static, everything is subject to change over time. There can be no such thing as a "perfected" artifact; the future perfect can only be a tense, not a thing.

I love that passage.

What do you think? Is the future perfect relegated to the status of tense, or can it be a thing?

Trust

Had several interesting conversations regarding my post about the home depot survey. One of them was a with a regular customer who said that service is hit or miss. He mentioned that there is one employee who is very knowledgeable, the rest aren't that great and one employee is downright rude.

One of the other discussions was about the brand. I was chatting with Fouro, prior to my post, and mentioned that I didn't care for their slogan: "You can do it. We can help" .

If you put those two conversations together, it doesn't add up. They say they are going to help, but they don't. They've lied.

It occurs to me that trust is something that takes a lifetime to build and maintain, but it only takes a second to destroy.

One of the reasons they need a survey? They've lied to too many people. They've forgotten what business they're in.

We've all tackled some type of home improvement project, some more grand than others. If I'm in the middle of installing a new faucet in the kitchen or laying down a linoleum floor in the bathroom, the last thing I want to do is run back out because they didn't tell me I might need a trowel for applying the embossing leveler.... or whatever.

Sure, you could argue that it is the job of the manufacturer to help with that stuff, however, I think that the hardware store (HD or Lowes) ought to "help" make sure that I have everything I need before I leave the store.

Save the money on the survey Home Depot. Send each one of your employees home with a customer and have them watch the customer work on the project they're buying supplies for. Actually, you could skip that altogether if you just hired people who truly loved home improvement projects.

Here are some interview questions:

1.) Which of the following magazines do you subscribe to?

• Better Homes & Gardens


• Dwell


• Architectural Digest


• Etc.

2.) What is your favorite show on HGTV?

3.) What was the name of Bob Villa's assistant on This Old House?

4.) What is the name of the guy who replaced Bob Villa?

5.) What is the difference between treated and untreated lumber?

6.) etc.

As much as I hate to use Wal-Mart as an example, their IT deparment does something very cool...

...before Wal-Mart's people actually write and deploy an app, they make the developer work in the job the app is being written to support. If Wal-Mart devises a new point-of-sale system, for example, software team members have to spend time working the cash registers first. Design empathy for software development is, of course, a wonderful thing.

Intuit, the makers of Quicken and Turbo Tax, have a cool program called "Follow me home":

Year after year, Quicken employees learn first hand from customers how to improve the product by visiting them in their homes. Through this "Follow Me Home" program employees learn how people use Quicken, what they like about it, and more importantly what they don't like about it. Wendy Padmos of Calif. was one of dozens of volunteer participants in last year's program.

"When the Quicken team came to my house, I thought they just wanted to find out how they could better advertise to me and people like me, but it wasn't that at all," said Padmos. "It was much more customer-focused. They wanted to know how I used their product, what was important to me, and what was not important to me. I told them I would like the ability to see my current spending against my average spending over the last 12 months, and now it's in the product!"

What do you think? Wouldn't businesses be less likely to need surveys if their employees understood customers better? What ideas do you have to help businesses better understand their customers?

What to ask... more importantly, when.

There is an interesting article in the April issue of Inc. magazine; 'Goodbye and good luck'. The article discusses an emerging fascination with exit interviews - "someone's leaving, lets find out why..."

First of all, why wait for someone to leave to find out what employees are thinking? Next, if you have a turnover problem and you’re considering spending money on an exit interview program, don’t you think that there is a larger problem to solve first?

To the first point, this is something I've written about in the past on several occasions. One of my favorites was the mailman post:

One of the things I talk about in the book is getting to know you're employees - treat them like the individuals that they are. Don't know what made me think of this, but I'd bet that the mailman knows more about an employee than their manager. Think about it, in a given week/month my mailman sees the following magazines come to my door:

• Business 2.0
• Wired
• Hockey Digest
• Four Four Two (soccer)
• Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc....

I think he has a pretty good idea about my interests.

Want to get to know someone? Find out what magazines they subcribe to...

Why not talk WITH your employees regularly? How about a monthly or quarterly 1 on 1 where you ask them some of the questions contained in these exit interviews.

The article contains several great questions, some not so great. One example, the first question, is:

If the CEO left unexpectedly today and you were put in charge, what are the first things you would change?

Now, I'm not naive here - some percentage of the employees wouldn't have a clue how to lead a large organization or chart its course. However, most employees have two things in common - one, they all want to be heard... that is just human nature. Second, I'd bet most employees have some ideas about how to improve some aspect of the business.

To the second point, if you have a turnover problem, perhaps you haven't created a culture where employees feel connected to something worthwhile. If it is just a job, and people aren't deriving anything other than financial compensation, you will have people who are going to seek greener grass. Two organizations that I like are Google and Will Vinton studios. Everyone is familiar with the 80/20 philosphy at Google, where employees get to work on there own stuff one day a week. At Will Vinton studios they have a program called The Walkabout (good article at Fast Company)

To attract the very best artists, and then to give them plenty of reasons to stay, Vinton has instituted programs and policies that are designed to show his support for the artists he hires. The Walkabout, for example, is a program that allows employees to take a 13-week paid hiatus, or Walkabout, that gives them the time and the freedom to work on their own projects. Every year, the program results in two or three short films, as well as many other personal projects. The logic behind Vinton's decision to implement the program is unassailable: The best people will find a way to produce their own films, whether he wants them to or not. So why not make it harder for them to leave his company by encouraging them to produce projects of their own on his premises?

What do you think - are exit interviews worthwhile?

The Design of Everyday Things

That is the title of a great book by Donald Norman - 'The Design of Everyday Things'. I only wish that I would have read this book years ago.

The book introduces four major design principles:

Conceptual Models - good design is a an act of communication between the designer and the user, except that the ALL the communication has to come about by the appearance of the device itself. The location and operation of the controls require a conceptual model - an obvious and natural relationship between their location and the operation they control so you always know which control does what. When designers fail to provide a conceptual model, we will be forced to make up our own, and the ones we make up are apt to be wrong.

Feedback - in design, it is important to show the effect of an action. Without feedback, one is always wondering whether anything has happened. Maybe the button wasn't pushed hard enough; maybe the machine has stopped working; maybe it is doing the wrong thing; Without feedback, we turn equipment off at improper times or restart unnecessarily, losing all of our recent work. Or we repeat the command and end up having the operation done twice, often to our detriment. Feedback is critical.

Constraints - The surest way to make something easy to use, with few errors, is to make it impossible to do otherwise - to constrain the choices. Failure to design with constraints is one reason for all those warnings and attempts to give instructions. One of the cool examples from the book is where he talked about threading a reel of film through a projector, contrasted by inserting a tape into a VCR...

Affordances - a good designer makes sure that appropriate actions are perceptible and inapropriate ones invisible.

There was a good story early in the book about a phone - I can't seem to find a good picture online...

I recently spent six months at the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, England. Just before I arrived the British Telecom Company had installed a new telephone system. It had lots and lots of features.

The telephone instrument itself was unremarkable. It was the standard twelve-button, push-button phone, except that it had an extra key labeled "R" off on the side. (I never did find out what that key did.)

The telephone system was a standing joke. Nobody could use all the features. One person even started a small research project to record people's confusions. Another person wrote a small "expert systems" computer program, one of the new toys of the field of artificial intelligence; the program can reason through complex situations. If you wanted to use the phone system, perhaps to make a conference call among three people, you asked the expert system and it would explain how to do it. So, you're on the line with someone and you need to add a third person to the call. First turn on your computer. Then load the expert system. After three or four minutes (needed for loading the program), type in what you want to accomplish. Eventually the computer will tell you what to do--if you can remember why you want to do it, and if the person on the other end of the line is still around. But, as it happens, using the expert system is a lot easier than reading and understanding the manual provided with the telephone.

Why is that telephone system so hard to understand? Nothing in it is conceptually difficult. Each of the operations is actually quite simple. A few digits to dial, that's all. The telephone doesn't even look complicated. There are only fifteen controls: the usual twelve buttons--ten labeled 0 through 9, #, an *--plus the handset itself, the handset button, and the mysterious "R" button. All except the "r" are the everyday parts of a normal modern telephone. Why was the system so difficult?

A designer who works for a telephone company told me the following story:

"I was involved in designing the faceplate of some of those new multifunction phones, some of which have buttons labeled "R." The "R" button is kind of a vestigial feature. It is very hard to remove features of a newly designed product that had existed in an earlier version. It's kind of like physical evolution. If a feature is in the genome, and if that feature is not associated with any negativity (i.e., no customers gripe about it), then the feature hangs on for generations.

"It is interesting that things like the "R" button are largely determined through examples. Somebody asks, 'What is the "R" button used for?' and the answer is to give an example: 'You can push "R" to access loudspeaker paging.' If nobody can think of an example, the feature is dropped. Designers are pretty bright people, however. They can come up up with a plausible-sounding example for almost anything. Hence, you get features, many many features, and these features hang on for a long time. The end result is complex interfaces for essentially simple things."

As I pondered this problem, I decided it would make sense to compare the phone system with something that was of equal or greater complexity but easier to use. So let us temporarily leave the difficult telephone system and take a look at my automobile. I bought a car in Europe. When I picked up the new car at the factory, a man from the company sat in the car with me and went over each control, explaining its function. When he had gone through the controls once, I said fine, thanked him, and drove away. That was all the instruction it took. There are 112 controls inside the car. This isn't quite as bad as it sounds. Twenty-five of them are on the radio. Another 7 are the temperature control system, and 11 work the windows and sunroof. The trip computer has 14 buttons, each matched with a specific function. So four devices--the radio, temperature controls, windows, and trip computer--have together 57 controls, or just over 50 percent of the ones available.

Why is the automobile, with all its varied functions and numerous controls, so much easier to learn and to use than the telephone system, with its much smaller set of functions and controls? What is good about the design of the car? Things are visible. There are good mappings, natural relationships, between the controls and the things controlled. Single controls often have single functions. There is good feedback. The system is understandable. In general, the relationships among the user's intentions, the required actions, and the results are sensible, nonarbitrary, and meaningful.

What is bad about the design of the telephone? There is no visible structure. Mappings are arbitrary: there is no rhyme or reason to the relationship between the actions the user must perform and the results to be accomplished. The controls have multiple functions. There isn't good feedback, so the user is never sure whether the desired result has been obtained. The system, in general, is not understandable; its capabilities aren't apparant. In general, the relationships among the user's intentions, the required actions, and the results are completely arbitrary.

I think just about anyone would enjoy the book - whether you design things or not.

One thing I've learned is that good design is invisible. We tend not to think about it. Poor design, on the other hand, is obvious and painful... and can be life-threatening, as Mr. Norman points out in the book (he actually consulted on the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant).

So, what are some everyday items that you think are poorly designed? What would you do to improve them?