AbleBrains

The Customer Experience Behind SAP Business ByDesign

Its finally happened.  SAP today announced its new onDemand software suite... code named "A1S" the solution will now be known as SAP Business ByDesign.  I was lucky enough to be part of this craziness as one of the Total Customer Experience leads for the company.  Our team's role was multifold and our success was a result of the collaboration with our colleagues in IT, marketing, telemanagment, our volume business initiative, our community and social media teams, and go-to-market teams.  We were responsible for:

1. Helping to conceive of new innovations in the area of customer feedback and validation
2. Assisting in driving alignment and decisions on business process design and  route to market strategy
3. Performing experience design and helping to drive change into the way we engage with customers  - in fact creating a model in which the customer is in the driver seat NOT SAP
4. Helping to drive SAP's Social Media Strategy into new areas (check out Jeff's post as well)
5. Changing the way we "speak" to customers - the very tone of how we say things to customers needed to change.... we needed to frankly be more conversational, plain spoken, impactful, positive yet honest about our short comings - and this is some of the change I,  in particular, am, most proud about.

I am also very proud of the experience design work which Peter Ebert (one of the most prodigious inventors at SAP) and his team did in the areas of design.   Peter and his small team, working extremely long hours, created a compelling customer experience that (1) delights customers, (2) puts them in control and (3) takes the best B2C thinking and integrates it into SAP's B2B model...

As you can see below, the design is clean, efficient and is focused on facilitating customer "moments of truth" in a buying cycle. If you think about your own experiences in buying, there comes a time when you make a decision in your own process and move closer to procuring that iphone or new car  or  home... but you work YOUR process.  B2B customers are no different. Why? Because individuals buy, companies don't. Its an individual who "writes the check." And as much as we want to think of selling software as a logical process, its not. Yes there's due diligence and RFPs and business pain mapping but at the end of the day, its emotional... you WANT to buy, you need to buy, you have to buy... all emotive responses, not necessarily logical. 

SAP Business byDesign has its own portal, its own "Business Center" that is protected currently and is only turned on for countries where we are rolling out first and for qualified prospects.  But here's how the puppy looks. Notice how simple the design is. Notice the self-guided nature of the process.  Three clicks to a best-run business - Explore, Evaluate & Experience - a phrase which for better or worse I coined.  We initially had gone with a guided experience of See-Try-Buy but eventually opted for the E-cubed approach to ensure we included the after sales and service aspect of the experience.  Other things to notice - immediate product immersion.  All of our research tells us to enable the prospect to get in the products early and often.  And the notion of a personalized trial that a prospect can make his own and take into production when he sees fit is another critical competitive differentiator. Community for the first time is front and center in an SAP Web Property as well. This is the first time that the company has embraced social media as a critical element of its GTM strategy.  This will of course continue.

And of course its available in German as well and very shortly in UK English, French and Chinese.  We are getting ready to begin another innovation cycle in advance of volume readiness as Henning discussed this morning. So be on the lookout for some radical changes coming to a hyperlink near you soon. 

 

New Apple Web Site

I like the new Apple Web site... clean, in line with the product portfolio, nav is simple and efficient.  Well done... except is anyone else having this rendering issue with the MAC area of apple.com? Weirdest thing.

How to Manage Design By Committee

We're in the midst of some heavy experience design work right now.. as we work on our next generation teleweb experience.  One of the challenges the team continually faces is the "design by committee" approach here at SAP.  I had written recently on our Action v. Analysis bias and I believe that this issue also stems from our cultural need to precisely analyze as a predecessor to action.  In this instance companies face two issues:

1. Many stakeholders want to give feedback on design.  While we need and encourage such feedback, do designers have the right to say "no thank you" and at what point can they do this?
2. Everyone's a designer - we constantly get content from others, again a great way to get feedback and for sure it has sparked some interesting thinking from our side but if everyone is a designer, then no one is a designer.

So how do you manage Design by Committee cultures and still create compelling experiences for your customers?  Some rules of the road apply here...

1. Encourage the feedback from a diverse range of stakeholders - gain as much as possible - it always helps
2. Own and drive the conversation - keep reminding your stakeholders of the ultimate end goal of the experience - for example, is it usability for usability's sake or is it to drive sales! And provide a framework for those conversations. We use feedback updates in which we gather feedback but don't necessarily react to it.
3. Teach your stakeholders what the fundamental principles of the experience you are trying to create --  by having a thorough understanding of the experiential goals you are designing toward, I believe that everyone will eventually align around a design that is customer-centric yet meets your business objectives.

At the end of the day, to borrow a term from the ancient Rabbis, the best way to manage design by committee is to put a "fence around the design"... in the fenced-in space, there is room for change but no change beyond the fence.  In that way one protects the integrity of the design yet enables the "committee" to participate in its evolution.

Ancient Manuscript teaches machines how to talk to people.

Ambidextrous magazine, Stanford University’s Journal of Design, has printed an excerpt from the last chapter of Donald Norman’s not-yet published book, The Design of Future Things.

The excerpt, entitled “How to Talk to People”, is part of an ancient manuscript Norman uncovered, written some time in the 21st century, trying to teach machines patience in their interactions with people.

In short, a hilarious, tongue-in-cheek, deadpan must-read.

Download “How to Talk to People” (pdf, 583 kb, 4 pages)

Via Experientia

User-driven vs. Expert-driven Innovation

A few days back, the NY Times ran an article on user-driven innovation. It poses the question, what is the role of user-driven innovation?  Some are ardent advocates of the notion that end-users and consumers should be involved in the co-creation and ongoing innovation of products and services. From the times article:

Eric von Hippel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. Mr. von Hippel is the leading advocate of the value of letting users of products modify them or improve them, because they may come up with changes that manufacturers never considered. He thinks that this could help companies develop products more quickly and inexpensively than with their internal design teams.

“It could drive manufacturers out of the design space,” Mr. von Hippel says.

While I believe that co-creation is essential, that customer input is critical to the quality and inventiveness of products and services being developed, I think von Hippel's assertion that "it [user-driven design/innovation] could drive manufacturers out of the design space " is  flawed.

I could not for the life of me, ever be an architect. I don't have the skills. Further, I wouldn't trust any one BUT an architect to design my house for me. They are expert!  I also would never allow my plumber to do my electrical wiring and vica versa.  So the idea that users can REPLACE designers and innovators doesn't work for me.  There is a fundamental need for those with the talent and capability to play the expert role - especially in design and innovation.  There is a qualitative difference between the Wisdom of Crowds and the Wisdom of a Few and the that qualitative differences must be leveraged at different points along the design and innovation lifecyle.

The Wisdom of Few more often than not is leverageable at the conceptualization stage - to "invent the initial idea" whatever that realm of design may be. But users can then be quickly brought in to get their feedback and modify the design as needed.  That's not to say that users cannot also come up with great initial ideas... but more often than not I see users further down the use case chain...acting in a Wisdom of Crowds capacity to expand upon an initial design concept, provide feedback and coming up with incremental improvements to existing designs.

Again from the Times...

Citizen product design is still unsung, but it has already become a force in software, especially gaming software. “Counter-Strike,” a player-created “mod” (for modification to the original game) of “Half-Life,” became as popular as the original game. Apache, the popular open-source Web server software, or the Firefox Internet browser, with its thousands of add-ons and plug-ins, also depend on users to develop innovations. Large companies like I.B.M. are increasingly turning to open-source techniques in their own software development.

Is open source development the same as user-driven innovation?  To my way of thinking its not.  Its an extension of a core development team not to users but to other developers.  Yes, they may use the software Open Source techniques enable one to amplify development and innovation resources for sure, but again, these folks are experts in their domains. Not sure open source qualifies as a reasonable analogy here.

I guess what I am struggling with is the notion of user-driven innovation as separate and apart from the notion of "expert innovation".  A patent lawyer who likes word working and develops a new type of  saw which stops on contact with the human skin (SawStop).. is he a JUST A USER? I see him as innovator and entrepreneur in his own right,  who built something novel but has leveraged previous innovations to do it  - the table top saw,  and a novel use of measuring the electrical capacitance of human skin as a way of indicating contact with the saw. But this innovation was substantial enough to develop an entire business around.  Taking this to the extreme.. Einstein was a patent clerk... are the fantastic innovations around special and general relativity.. the notions of a "user physicist" or an expert in his own right? Where is the line in the sand between user and expert driven innovation? Is it the marketability/sustainability of an innovation to stand on its own?

The $100 laptop user experience

Check out Steve Hamm's piece on the 100 USD  laptop being developed by Nick Negroponte.  They've entirely rethought the "desktop metaphor".. chucked it in fact and are using the "indvidual" as the underlying metaphor to align the design around.  Make sure you check out the slide show. BTW, it also offers innovative capabilities around mesh networking and a hand crank to charge the sucker.

In fact, the user interface, called Sugar, may turn out to be one of the more innovative aspects of a project that has already made breakthroughs in mesh networking and battery charging since Negroponte unveiled the concept two years ago.

Sugar offers a brand new approach to computing. Ever since the first Apple Macintosh was launched in 1984, the user interfaces of personal computers have been designed based on the same visual metaphor: the desktop. Sugar tosses out all of that like so much tattered baggage. Instead, an icon representing the individual occupies the center of the screen; "zoom" out like a telephoto lens and you see the user in relation to friends, and finally to all of the people in the village who are also on the network.

SMS Interfaces

Over at Experience Curve is a post on creating Text Interfaces:

Beyond voice, probably the simplest and most ubiquitous technology on the mobile phone is text (SMS), North America has been a bit of a laggard adopting this technology but in the last year or so has really started to use text. I think the voting on American Idol might have been one part of the tipping point for texting in the US. I’ve certainly seen a rise in the amount of people using text, but being in San Francisco my experience may not be mainstream. Here’s some interesting text interfaces:

• Starbucks has just announced an sms based service to find stores in your area, just text your zipcode to 697289 (’MYSBUX) , and they text you back with 3 store locations.
• Google has a significant SMS interface, just text your query to 466453 (’GOOGLE’), try the term sushi followed by your zip code, or weather NYC - see this page for their sms queries
• A Dutch company has a mobile Tamagotchi style video game called “virtual parenting” that uses  text and IM as the interface to raise this virtual child, read more about it at the social architects blog
• Dodgeball.com (purchased by google last year) allows you to text your location to it in the form of “@name of venue” and it then texts friends who have opted in with your location, basically trying to enable spontainous social get togethers on the fly
• Lots of so called Alternate Reality Games (ARG’s) use text messaging, in an article about the design and implementation of ARG’s Dave Szulburski thinks that SMS and text interfaces will become more prevalent.

These are all great uses of Text as an interface and is an area where Europe and Asia are clearly  ahead of the Americas.  When I head to Germany on business virtually every  TV commercial I watch has a Text call to action.

What about using Text as an enterprise software environments? Well, works fine for exception based/event based systems where notification is the primary action, but not well suited for transaction based systems. What about on the Web?  Where in terms of the customer web experience is texting well suited?

Let me know your thoughts?       

 

Female Web Designers v. Designing Web for Females

Holly Buchanan over that grokdotcom writes on whether firms should hire more female web designers...

I specialize in marketing to women online. One questions I often get is, "If I'm targeting women, should I get a woman to design my website?"

My answer is always, "Hire the best web designer money can buy." Really good web designers understand and design for their audience. Less skilled designers may default to what they know, or worse, what they like. That's where you enter the danger zone. The further the designer is from your target audience, the harder they'll have to work to put aside their own likes and biases.

I agree with Holly that you should hire good designers regardless of gender... but I think the better question to ask is, "what should I do to alter my design to better speak to women?"  More importantly why should you care?  Well for starters, women-owned businesses continue to grow at an amazing rate. According to the Center for  Women's Business Research, the estimated growth rate in the number of women-owned firms was nearly twice that of all firms (17 percent vs. 9 percent).  Nearly half of all privately held U.S. firms are women-owned. That means 10.6 million firms are at least half owned by women. These firms employ 19.1 million people and generate nearly $2.5 trillion in sales.

A question we are asking ourselves is how much do we need to alter our existing web experience and planned web experiences to better talk to women executives and entrepreneurs?  I can tell you that we all have biases based on our own experiences. Who we are places filters on our perceptions that no amount of "outside-in" thinking will cure

One of the most important insights from the University of Glamorgam study is that each of the sexes preferred websites designed by their own sex.   (Check out the discussion at molly.com for a great debate on the subject.)

So I can't answer the question, what we will do to alter our experience to better speak to women in high tech ... I have no friggin clue if the color palate will change or if the tonality of our content will be altered but I can tell you that we are using a relatively gender balanced team to get there.

How much control should we give users?

I was reading some posts on creating customer control and the notion of how just how much control to give users is a hot topic in the customer experience team lately.  Liked it so much that I want to lift liberally.

The question on our minds is just how much control to we empower users with?  Should we swing to the far end of the curve and always operate on the notion that more is a good thing?

There is the ongoing trend toward more-is-better for the products we purchase. More choices, more options, more control. In the book The Paradox of Choice,  Barry Schwartz looks at how the overabundance of products today makes buying even toilet paper stressful. We shut down when we're faced with too many choices, even when those choices are about relatively simple things.

 

So how much control should we give users?  The main point is to focus on the relationship between user control and user capability.  As user capability (knowledge, skill, expertise) increases, so should control -- at least for a lot of things we make, especially software, and especially when we're aiming not just for satisfied users but potentially passionate users. The big problem is that we make our beginning users suffer just so our advanced users can tweak and tune their configurations, workflow, and output.

Rule of thumb...

The amount of pain and effort should match the user's perceived payoff.

In other words, the user has to think it's worth it. Yes, another "duh" thing... but if it is that "duh", then why oh why haven't some of the biggest producers on the planet taken it to heart? How come SAP and Oracle software takes a PhD to use? How come I find myself in hotel bathrooms staring at the shower faucet, wondering how annoyed the front desk will be when I ask them to help me take a bath. How come I can't turn off automatic Capitalization in Word? (trust me, it's not as simple as it seems...)

User Control in Web 2.0

I realize that part of the Web 2.0 "sensibility" is that users are in charge, but I'm pretty sure even Tim O'Reilly doesn't mean that Web 2.0 means the inmates should be running the asylum. There's an ocean of difference between user contribution and user control.

I'm sometimes afraid that the Age of User Participation will lead to the Age of Too Many People Doing Things They Are Not Qualified To Do But That Everyone Is OK With. Amateur Mash-up videos on YouTube? Hell yes. But what's next... amateur minor-surgery mash-ups? (that is actually, scarily, already happening, and I won't even link to it).

Does putting users first mean putting users in charge????

Even the poster kid of community-based business, Threadless, does not really put its community in control. In charge of voting on t-shirts, yes. In charge of whether Threadless is successful, yes -- but no more so than most businesses--they all live or die on whether customers want their product, experience, or both. But the Threadless community does not do the company's books, decide who to hire, choose their factory location, etc. The community has a very strong voice, and the Threadless guys listen--and respond--much better than most, but the company still controls the company. User contribution, not user control.

Creating Passionate Individuals 

In the end, having more control and capability represents a higher-resolution experience. It's part of what makes being GOOD at something so much better than being bad or even average. And it's that high-resolution experience that inspires people to passion. (A passionate snowboarder is usually on black-diamonds, not the bunny slope) So we should be trying to give users more capability and control...and encouraging them to take it. But we must balance that with the learning they need to take that responsibility without being overwhelmed.

At the end of the day, the more we help individuals learn and improve, the more control they can handle... and appreciate. By putting the individual first, it's our job to give them the responsibility they want, but only when we know they're ready to handle it.

An Anthrolpologist Pens the Web 2.0 Anthem

Amazing to see so much play around Mike Wesch's video The Machine is Us/ing Us.  Even Vinnie references it.  I posted on it a couple of weeks ago.

Vinnie says

Take a look at this fabulous video put together by faculty and students at Kansas State U pioneering a field called Digital Ethnography.

I kind of feel that I sit between 2 worlds.... the world of enterprise software and the world of design/Customer Experience which leverages ethnography to deliver world class design.  So I have the luck of being able to play in both worlds AND have the chore of merging the two.

So then what is digital ethnography?  Its being an ethnographer but using digital tools and techniques to conduct ethnographic research.  So what's ethnographic research? Check it out.