Bits and Users: How the On-Line Customer Experience Shapes Business
Mark Hurst, Creative Good

Meeting report by Nerija Sinkeviciute-Titus ntitus@baychi.org

Mark Hurst began his presentation with the story of Creative Good, the company he started in New York City during the roaring dot-com economy. They quickly grew to more than 30 people, moved into a beautiful office space, and planned for big things. With the internet economic collapse, all of that fell apart. They had to give up their space, lay off staff, and come up with a new plan for the company.

Mark took a trip around the country, which allowed him to think about user experience in new and different ways. He realized that user experience was a much richer exploration than user tests and web sites.

Mark noted that HCI community suffered from tunnel vision when it came to user experience. Experts of HCI have focused on such business-related topics as usability testing and information architecture tools, but most often neglected the organizational and strategy issues, as well as facts learned from case studies. The HCI professionals don't even consider other user-related topics such as off-line customer experiences (travel, banking, health care), product design, non-commercial experiences (art, music, urban development, religion), and discernment.

As a natural next step, Mark offered his audience a model of user experience called ROSE (Results, Organization, Strategy, and Experience).

First, UE should start and end with results. Currently, success is measured with the wrong metrics. Instead of using traditional measures such as time-on-task and task success, we should look at the business metrics. For example, we should ask whether sales improved, whether the conversion rate increased, and so on.

The second component is getting to know the organization. The changes can only be implemented if the larger team in the organization buys into it.

Next, the HCI community has to realize that user experience is not about tactics. User experience is a strategic discipline, and we should worry less, for example, about how many levels of navigation a web site should have. Mark's Gateway case study exemplified how HCI professionals can achieve significantly better results when focusing on strategic problems instead of poking at the tactical ones. What's more important, we get respect and trust when we produce significant results, such as an impressive 40% conversion rate and an increase in sales of several million dollars per month.

The fourth point is that experience is much broader than task-based usability, web sites, or technology alone. It applies much more broadly to our everyday lives.

After talking about the ROSE model, Mark showed some entertaining examples of bad user experience taken from his This is Broken web site and sparked a quick and lively discussion among the audience.

Finally, he briefly overviewed the methods that Creative Good uses in their practice. First, they try to understand the business context. They review the documents, interview the team, evaluate the site, and generate hypotheses. Then they run listening labs, which are open-ended user tests that help them generate the customer experience strategy. The point of these listening labs is to have a user take control of the test and the interaction, allow tasks to arise so the user feels involved and in charge. Finally, the wireframe based on that strategy is created and presented to the organization.

During the Q&A session, Mark and the audience offered solutions and explanations for the bad user experience examples shown earlier and discussed where the discipline of user experience should stand in marketing and business.

He asked everyone to notice elements of bad design, take pictures, and send them to him.

Original Announcement

The on-line user experience drives the success or failure of any on-line initiative. From e-commerce sites to on-line financial services to enterprise-wide wireless applications, on-line projects must serve the user's needs as much as those of the business. Drawing from past evaluations and consulting projects, Mark will describe the importance of the on-line customer experience.

Mark Hurst founded Creative Good in 1997 as the world's first user experience consulting firm. He runs Creative Good with Phil Terry in New York City.

Mark is also the founder and host of the Gel conference (Good Experience Live), which was first held on May 2, 2003 in New York City. Gel 2004 will be held on April 30, 2004 in New York City.

Hurst's Good Experience newsletter has tens of thousands of subscribers worldwide.

Previously, Hurst was director of product development at Yoyodyne, an early internet marketing firm founded by Seth Godin and later bought by Yahoo!. Hurst began his Internet career as a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab. He holds holds bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from MIT.

Digital Storytelling: Story of a Movement
Scott Rosenberg, Salon.com

Meeting report by Nerija Sinkeviciute-Titus ntitus@baychi.org

Scott Rosenberg of Salon.com kicked off his talk by showing an illustration of a hedgehog and a fox. There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus that says, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Scott pointed out that the time of foxes (the wave of hype and promises) has passed, and the hedgehogs have come to stay. The digital storytelling movement is standing strong because it holds onto one big idea: Everyone has a story to tell, everyone has a voice, and technology can help.

Scott explained that stories are alive, they have a will of their own, and we can't control them. The names of authors can get lost, and the interpretations may vary. One instance of digital storytelling is Haiku poems. They represent instant internet folklore and are powerful means to express ideas and emotions. (They were even quoted at Microsoft's antitrust trial!) Scott gave several examples of Haiku error messages, such as this one:

Yesterday it worked
And today it isn't working
Windows is like that

Scott mentioned a few important dates and names in the digital storytelling movement. The late, well-respected Dana Atchley founded the Digital Storytelling Conference and Festival in 1995 and promoted the creative application of technology to the ancient art of storytelling.

According to Scott, digital storytelling is a populist ideal because it is cheap and easy to do. Web sites and personal videos are just a few examples of such creations.

Scott went on to say that stories are the form where we can fill our lives. Stories protect us from chaos. Even though they are an essential part of our lives, it is rather difficult to define what a story is. A story interacts with a teller and an audience and is influenced by both.

He also explained what happens when stories go digital. For one, they become easy to copy and share (think Napster). Disintermediation is another aspect of digital storytelling. Stories become accessible to the world without the commercial media—the obvious middleman. Scott pointed out that this global explosion of stories is not a bad thing. One shouldn't worry that we would become "slush pile readers"—a term from publishing. No one is forced to read stuff on the web, but it gives its creators and authors an opportunity to connect to others.

Web logs (blogs) are one of the most widespread means of digital storytelling. They are an easy form of communication with the world, not requiring much in a way of tools and technologies. Their main characteristic is that they are updated very frequently. They enable us to hear the voices of people many thousands of miles away very quickly. They are the tools that help us check the pulse of the actual community.

But the commercial media is worried, because it loses an element of control in the area of presentation of information. According to Scott, the media should relax, because the traditional ways are not going to wither and die anytime soon.

As digital storage gets cheaper and cheaper, the ability to digitally store life increases. The downside of this explosion is that the time to review what we have stored is less and less. Scott thinks that digital storytelling is an answer to this problem—stories become key to pulling together bits and pieces. Narrative connects video and pictures.

Scott also pointed out that we should take seriously the power that the digital tools give us. The web turns us all into journalists. We are also coming ever closer to the point where our voices and pictures stay and make us immortal in a sense. He quoted William Gibson, who described the time when "it is natural to see the dead and hear their voices."

The Q&A session touched topics such as the issues of authorship and trustworthiness on the web, disintermediation, and problems with the preservation of information.

Original Announcement

Stories are not "just for kids": Narrative helps us organize our memories and share our experiences. Over the last few years, digital tools to create and distribute stories have dropped in price and come into the hands of a wide public. Digital cameras and digital video have made each of us into a rich-media archivist, and the internet has created a universal platform for distributing our tales. The digital storytelling movement is a low-hype, high-value effort among artists and educators to use these tools to empower individuals and build communities, turning us all from members of an audience to tellers of our own stories. This talk will tell some of this story and explore some of the issues it raises.

Scott Rosenberg is co-founder and managing editor of Salon.com and has also served as Salon's senior vice president for editorial operations since October, 2000. Before joining Salon, he was the San Francisco Examiner's movie and theater critic for nearly ten years. He won the George Jean Nathan Prize for his theater criticism and started a column covering digital culture in the early 1990s.

Rosenberg grew up in Queens, New York, and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Literature from Harvard University. He maintains a personal web site and a weblog. You can reach Scott at scottr@salon.com.