I hate the rain.

I mean, I'm all for renewing of the earth, circle of life, blah blah blah. I'm also all about sharing that intimate time when you and someone you care for listen to the raging thunderstorm outside... the rain hitting the roof, the thunder in the distance, and then the window-shaking detonation that reminds you that Nature isn't screwing around.

Hated it in the military, hated it on hikes when I lived in Hawaii, and particularly hate it when it's 33F here in Chicago and I have to walk to work from the train in a downpour. I know "hate" is a strong word, and maybe I really don't know what true hate is, but yea. Hate being in the rain. So I babied up and caught a cab outside the Metra station. Hey, it's like 4 whole blocks. Did I mention it was raining?

Anyway, I stepped out o the rain and into a nightclub on wheels.

I'm not kidding. 0635, and suddenly my world was hanging disco balls, a flashing blacklight, garland streaming everywhere, bright flyers. Welcome to Sid Bennett's Happy Ride. "I'm a nightclub on wheels, man!" he exclaims, as I snap an iPhone pic.

In their excellent book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath tell us that for something to stick in your mind, to warrant sharing and recall and action, it needs to be one ( or more ) of these four things:

- Funny
- Novel
- Genuinely useful
- Sexy

Sid's cab experience was 3 out of the 4... and if I swung that way, maybe it'd be 4. He was sporting a cowboy hat, and oozed confident calm.

I stepped out of the cab ( after my amazing 4 block ride ) and into the Argo Tea that occupies the street-level space in the building I work in, and proceed to have the following conversation with the barista:

"Heya, morning," I say.
"Morning, how are you?"
"I'm great... I just had the craziest cab ride. A dude in a cowboy hat, who's cab is all done up inside like a nightclub. Really made my morning."
"NO WAY! I've been in that SAME cab! so have some of my friends. We call him every time we go out..."

...and so on.

In Chicago, tea shop baristas are not known for their predilection for cabs to get from point A to B, and probably by extension neither are their friends. The fact that the first person I spoke with about my unique experience claimed to have had one herself, and so had many of her we-don't-usually-take-cabs-but-hey-it-was-a-nightclub-on-wheels friends had as well, was amazing.

Sid Bennet has taken probably less than a $30 investment and made apparently a cast-iron brand for himself in a city as large as Chicago. Impacted so many of us that the person serving up my iced ginger peach tea at 630am had heard of him and reached out for his services.

How's your branding going? How much do you spend? How many people turn aside from others who do the same boring thing you do and choose -you- ?

Just curious.

Happy Ride Co.
Sidney Bennett, President.
for a cab in Chicago, call 312-613-4812

He's a nightclub on wheels, man.

Labels: Brand, DIG, nightclub on wheels, Pete

Labels: DIG, feed, ideas that could get me fired, Pete

Wisdom from various places around the web, none written by me:

“1,000. 1 to screw it in and the rest to argue about what a ‘light bulb’ really represents, what is meant by ‘screwing it in’ and to DTDT.”

“ 1 person to conduct an ethnographic study how people currently change light bulbs 1 person to conduct a card-sorting exercise around the different types of light bulbs 1 person to draw a storyboard of the light bulb user journey 2 persons to moderate & take notes for a usability test of changing light bulbs 1 user test participant to actually change the lightbulb “

“Why are we assuming screwing in the light bulb is the right answer? Let's do some studies to see if we can redefine the process of changing light bulbs, or of gathering light altogether”

" ‘How many would you expect it to take?’ asked the UX expert”

“None. That's a development / engineering problem.”

“It depends.”

And my favorite-

UXAs can be kind of silly. But the job itself can be amazing, sometimes.

I have a few guesses as to how people here see UXAs ( heh ) But this came up recently, in an interview. The person I was interviewing asked about the various roles we have here. I have a stock answer for this question, but in the heat of the moment inspiration took me, and I put out something like this:

“What we do here is part science, but also part art. I’m probably not doing either term much justice... but it seems like it breaks down this way: Product Managers can be muses, the sources of inspiration, when things go well. UXAs and Taxonomists are like composers, hearing the music of a design in their heads, and they’re the first ones to actually write the notes down onto paper, to give it any form at all that can be acted upon. Then we walk that music through... The Creatives, Copywriters, and Developers are musicians, taking the basic music as we write it and giving it color, sound, and light. They riff on it, improvise on our original thoughts so that the whole thing is greater than the sum of its parts. The Project Managers are maestros, conductors guiding us all.”

Of course the interviewee looked at me like I was crazy. I get that, now and then. : )

My question... What’s your role in all of this, and how do you see it? When your own particular lightbulb goes on, how do you express it to the world?

Extra credit for how you see the other roles in our little Keebler Tree.

Labels: DIG, lightbulb, out there, Pete

Labels: anthropology, DIG, Pete

The worst has passed, and you now have a story to annoy your kids and grandkids with.

“Hey you kids, this snowfall is ‘perilous,’ according to the artificial intelligence know-it-alls we have ‘predicting’ the weather today. But it’s pretty lame next to The Great Snow-mageddon of ‘11. Have I ever told you that story?”

“Only about a zillion times, Grandpa.”

“Well, sit yer ass down and listen again…”

Most of us in my social circle had this experience: Monday we heard stories of the local supermarkets being out of things like bread and milk. We were warned to leave work early Tuesday afternoon. By early Tuesday evening things were starting to “look kinda hairy,” and by Tuesday night people were abandoning their cars on Lake Shore Drive en masse, seeking shelter in Hoth-like conditions on foot without a tauntaun.

Wednesday was mostly spent trapped in your abode, though the intrepid, crazy, or very fortunate might have ventured out a bit. Shoveling a small place for the dog to pee. ComEd and Comcast fell down in lots of places. By Wednesday evening, the spark of normal connectedness started to show again. Some people still had no power, and thus no heat. But by Thursday life was mostly back to as close to normal as was normal for you. The power was probably back on, the internet back up, and the dogs had places to walk.

We had a few days heads-up, and we here at SHC had accommodating management encouraging preparation and safety.

So… what’s something you wished you had done better, or knew about, or learned? Or what’s something that surprised you in a good way?

My own answers: I’m kind of a wingnut, here; I was pretty well prepared. Even if the power had gone out, the internet dropped off, and gravity stopped working, I had redundancies. Something I could have done better was not head out with a few friends late Tuesday for White Castles; that was dumb. I was very lucky, and of course WC was closed.

Something that surprised me in a good way: I ran a shelter for the Red Cross in my area, for the first time evah, and I learned people come to disaster shelters for aid, for relief on one of the worst days of their year; but others also come out to be helpful. They bring toys for kids, and DVDs, laptops, and projectors for everyone to watch movies with. They bring things they’ve baked, blankets, cans of soup, and stuffed animals. They open their homes to strangers and say “you can come stay with us, so you don’t have to sleep in a gymnasium on a cot.”

In my corner of the world, it was the “best” kind of disaster; I had a heads up it was coming, it lasted a day or so, and was just rough enough to teach me some valuable lessons without anyone getting hurt.

How about you?

Labels: DIG, Pete, snowpocalypse

President Bartlet, being a nerd.

"Well, we find that customers who engage with the experience, use filters on the search results and subcat pages, tend to convert more. If we find a way to increase engagement with the filters, I think we can up conversion. Let's take a look at that."

This snippet overheard recently on a phone call for the Conversion Task Force I sit on. My ears perked up. As a child I'd had a Jesuit education, and logical crazytalk tended to remind me of stern looks, and brandished rulers.

I was disappointed by the choruses of "Definitely!" that came next. Visions of raised wooden rulers followed, and I thought I heard someone mutter a Hail Mary.

Post hoc ergo proptor hoc

What?

The above is a bit of Latin that described a logical fallacy; translated it comes out to be 'After the fact, therefore -because- of the fact." It's the idea that just because something follows after something that came first, that first something caused the following occurrence. It's crazy talk, of course. Ask any Jesuit.

I have a teacher friend of mine that recently pointed out another instance of this. Apparently, kids that take AP Physics do better in college. So in an effort to help more kids do better in college, my friend's school was trying to shoehorn as many kids into AP Physics as possible, adding extra sections.

Eeeeeeeps.

AP Physics probably doesn't cause better grades, and shooting kids through high-end physics classes if they shouldn't be there is probably no way to move the college GPA ball.

Similarly, I'm not sure people convert because they diddle with our filters, or convert less because they don't. I think it just as likely that people who come tothe site looking to convert readily make use of the filters to narrow their choices, whereas peeps who had no intention of converting didn't touch the filters because they really weren't so invested.

I am assuming some things myself, here. And I think our filters do need a bit of tweaking, and ironically conversion would probably go up if we made them easier to use. But "getting more people to use our filters so that they'll convert" sounds wrong to me. There's also some thought around the idea of putting these filters up higher in the visual hierarchy, moving them from the left up to just under the header.

Labels: DIG, experience design, Jesuits, Pete

Labels: ideas that could get me fired, long tail, Pete, user experience

Yesterday at the SHC Social Media Summit, kudos were given to the Zombie vertical effort pulled off by a rogue splinter faction of UX zealots. Let's talk about that for a moment.

First, some history. By some accounts, Sears is an international retailer with a rich history, but not as much modern zing as a brand might want. At least a brand who's stated goal is to sell lots of stuff to lots of people. We -do- all sorts of innovative things online, but that's probably not the public perception.

To lots of peeps Sears is still where you might go to buy your dishwasher, or where your mom goes, if your mom is as old as my mom. Which let's be honest is kind of old. "They've always been wonderful to me, Peter. Did you know that during The War they were the only place I could get kerosene?"

"The War"? Kerosene?

Anyway. Just before Halloween UX Sears released a little gem, a zombie vertical page aimed at servicing the zombie demographic for all their shopping needs.

www.catalog.sears.com/zombies

Image-wise, this was kind of "a departure from the brand message" of the company that was able to bring you petroleum distillates during the Big One. It was also crazy successful. It's early in the day here, and I can't seem to find anyone here yet to get me some numbers, but with no advertising, on our test-test server that we're having "engagement challenges" on, no budget, and no work done during normal work hours, the effort had about a zillion media mentions... mainstream, web-nerd, and advertising industry venues.

Like I said, -crazy- successful. Why? Let's take a look.

7 Reasons the Zombie Vertical rocked

1. First: zombies Topically, this was a win. It's still a win, months later. The zombie thing still has juice. Lots here for everyone- the gaming enthusiast, the political satirist, the survivalist. Sometimes the stuff you sell lacks a certain panache... but who doesn't love zombies?

2. Soooooooo different. So different This is where a lot of the Magic Happened. "Zombies? Sears??" The incongruence of the brand and the idea, what was expected on the web and what we actually did and put out there for real normal people to see, this had a powerful effect. Word spread like, ahem, a virus. A zombie virus.

3. We weren't selling anything What? Nothing? Counterintuitive, but still kind of a wicked-powerful idea when used correctly. We didn't try to really sell anything on the page; it was clearly just for fun, and to play around with engagement ideas. This earns us a little buy in ( heh ) and credibility.

4. It was produced by a small group of zealots It seems like it's easier for a small, motivated group of slightly-off people to do amazing work than it is to get similar results from a humming, well-running and benefit-laden corporate organization. The people that did the zombie vert were on their own time, with their own equipment, and had only one ( albeit key ) executive champion. They weren't told to do this; it was an idea that some people came up with it and were allowed to run with. That authenticity came through at every level of the experience. The team was definitely "well versed in the vernacular of the genre," this burned through in every bit of the experience, and the people who were into zombies loved it, and helped carry word of it forward.

5. Word of mouth only We didn't put up a banner ad. Didn't get space in the circulars, or TV ad time. We really didn't tell the public at all. But we sure as hell told our friends. All of them, on Facebook and Twitter, and some other places. The singularly powerful sentiment of "hey, check this out..." from a loose-tie-friend echoed thousands of times is more effective than the most expensive advertisement campaign. People turned the downside of having no budget on its ear.

6. Smart, shareable, discoverable content Give people interesting stuff, stuff -designed- to be shared and talked about, and you have so much more of a chance of that actually happening. The idea "of course our stuff is awesome" generally, sadly, isn't enough... it has to actually -be- awesome. Also, within the zombie vert experience there was discoverable content, "easter eggs". This is huge, and is a technique for growing engagement that makes a lot of traditional marketing people nervous.

7. Management didn't kill it Not that they could because, well... ( wait for it... ) they're zombies! Bazinga! Very few people knew about this little opus before it exploded onto the interweb, but when it did the suits were calling and people started to get Very Nervous. But cooler heads ( or just Heads with More Political Clout ) prevailed and when traffic spiked and people we ( meaning SHC ) couldn't control were saying all these ( almost entirely positive ) things about our brand, we let it go. And go it went. Or something. It did well, and brought in a lot of traffic, and piqued a lot of interest.

Some interesting tidbits to consider:

Everyone loves a success If this failed to win, or worse brought some sort of negative attention to us, it'd be harder to leverage it FTW in the future. The fact that the zombie vert did so well went a long way to build a heaping spoonful of sugar to help the medicine of a "web experience that is decidedly off brand message an potentially harmful to us in the marketplace" go down.

Some business units were a little miffed "Why weren't we told?", "Why didn't we have input?", "Why did you feature -that- particular product?" and so on. Much win pretty much silenced these voices, but some of the risk in a project like this is that if you don't pay homage to the usual stakeholders and something goes well, they might be a little raw they didn't have input, or that you dared to do something without consulting them. If your effort tanks, these are the people who dance and pass out 2x4s at the ass-whooping party. In high school, they were the hall monitors, people who got perfect attendance, and ran for student council.

Followup would be cool. Engagement would be cool. A permission asset would be cool. I'm definitely not saying we should do another zombie thing. I -am- saying that it'd be cool to retain the eyeballs of the interested people who rushed to our site to see what was done, so that next time we can help make them part of the fun. I don't mean collecting their names to spam them, or send them a "heads up" to watch for something "new and exciting"... I mean make them part of it. Actually talking to these people, the ones that opt in somehow, is pretty important.

Train this team, for the Next Thing And there will be a Next Thing. The very net one might not be as popular, but developing this kind of skillset on your team is golden.

To sum up:

* Your subject matter might not be exciting, but you can talk about it in a sexy, exciting way. Do so.

* Do something people don't expect; play against your brand perception

* If your job is to sell something, take a break from that, and just give something away.

* Nurture the small band of zealots you have

* Don't advertise. If your idea is cool, it will fly on it's own. "Advertising" is lame.

* Design your content to be sharable; technically and with compelling excellence

* Give things room to breathe. when you have that first urge to take it down, don't.

And remember, when everyone else is out of kerosene, try Sears. It's a great tool for fighting zombies.

; )

Labels: mom quotes, Pete, Social media, zombies

Due to the fruit-fly lifespan of even the best twees, Solis implied Old Spice dropped the ball by not continuing to milk their idea of having The Man Your Man Could Smell Like do more viral vids for release on YouTube.

Andrew leans over and whispers "But that's not what they were for."

"You don't do the last job, " I reply, nodding and verbally retweeting master criminals everywhere. "You do the next job."

That's why we learn from the Zombie thing, and continue to practice that kind of awesomeness. But we don't do another Zombie Vertical thing.

Labels: criminal wisdom, Pete, Social media

Labels: Crepes Friday, Pete, quality, UX