AIAIO: Our Blog

Editor’s note: today marks the first of our UX Critic features, where we’ll be giving rapid-fire critiques of multiple players in a single industry vertical. Today we start with online photo-stamp creation, for soon-to-be obvious reasons….

One of the subtly fun developments of the online era is the introduction of photo stamps, where individual consumers can custom-create official US postage. Having started and stopped a few years ago, the segment has commoditized nicely, with even the US Post Office offering its own online and offline stamp-creation tools.

This writer, having recently had a baby, and having been sent by the new mother to buy stamps at the post office and found a fairly abysmal selection of 42-cent stamps, decided to make his own. (The original image can be viewed here; the stamp snapshots are included below.)

First stop: Zazzle, the popular custom printer. Zazzle’s online tools are easy to use and extremely fast. I was able to upload multiple images, move and size them with ease, and compare multiple images atop each other. Their discount pricing model kept costs reasonable ($12.95 a sheet for 10 sheets of 20 stamps). I liked the 24-hour turnaround time. But the large ZAZZLE.COM imprint on the stamp turned me off, so I kept looking.

I next went to photo.stamps.com, the official outlet of the US Post Office. But their stamp layout, a large square, didn’t serve my image well. (It should be noted that zazzle.com seemed locked into a horizontal layout–not useful for vertical images.) The site required registration for anything beyond basic image positioning, so I was unable to compare pricing without going into the FAQ–they turn out to be $14.95 for my quantity. They also don’t ship for 3-5 days.

Last stop: yourstamps.com. Their site identified my image as horizontal and created a layout that matched–nice! They had custom borders and designs–nice! But they don’t have discount pricing, making my order nearly twice as expensive ($18.95/sheet) as stamps.com and Zazzle. Worse, the site logo switched twice midstream, from Fujifilm to Cooper Imaging and then to Epixel, making me nervous about placing an order there. Finally, the site needs 7-10 days to process orders, even for local pickup. Too many negatives despite the visual appeal.

In the end, despite that ZAZZLE.COM imprint, their site had the most compelling offer. They gave the best price, layout, and turnaround time, and their tool was a cinch to use. Even a few of these would be good differentiators; having them all on one site is a real victory for the Zazzle team.

Some user experience examples I’ve seen lately, all while eating and drinking:

Good: JambaJuice’s queueing system. Unlike Starbucks, where one has to remember what the heck one ordered, then scan the baristas as they call out your drink (me: “tall caramel frappuccino light no whip”), if Jamba Juice has a wait, the cashier asks the buyer for a name. That name gets put into the order system, so the Jamba Juice drink preparers look at the screen, and say, “David?” Only after they’ve identified me do they check that they’ve made the right drink.

Bad: These pizza boxes with ads on them. Good for the advertiser, and fairly innocuous on the consumer end, but a terrible thing for the pizza parlor.

I got lunch from a place that handed me one of these boxes today. I then brought it to a conference call, where my coworker so loved the look and smell of my lunch that she got a slice for herself. But did she go to my pizza joint? No, because when closed, my pizza was from Blockbuster By Mail Get Discounts On In-Store DVD Rentals. A good marketing opportunity wasted.

Good: The widespread adoption of CRM systems at local restaurants. Thanks, no doubt, to the success of sites like OpenTable and SeamlessWeb, the majority of restaurants in Manhattan keep computer systems that maintain lists of phone numbers with addresses attached to them. Now, when I order a meal from a usual spot, I don’t have to reiterate cross streets or apartment numbers; my phone number is all they need to identify me.

Bad: Styrofoam plates and cups are still routine with many of my deliveries. We need more green delivery.

Good: The just-right chewiness of Ricola Breath Mints.

Bad: Those breath mints’ side effects.

My wife and I went shopping this weekend for a product about which we know virtually nothing. We hit four stores to look at varieties and learn how it works. This is an item where first-time buyers usually go in cold, so to the retailers, we were typical clueless shoppers.

Store #1 was full of customers, employees, and stock. We spent a long while (15, 20 minutes) looking around the overstuffed sales floor and were never approached by an employee. Finally we asked for help, and the woman behind the counter shrugged, and said, “Maybe in a few minutes someone can help you.” She did not offer to help us herself, nor did she attempt to ease our wait. As soon as she turned away from us we left.

Store #2 was as busy as store #1, but had clear aisles for browsing and an inviting atmosphere. Sales clerks had their hands full, yet when we made eye contact with one, she responded with, “I’m with a customer, but I’ll make sure someone gets to you as soon as we can.” Moments later she approached us, saying, “My client stepped away for a minute, I’m still with her, but can I help you in the meantime?” She worked with us until the client returned, politely refocused on the other customer, then came back to us a second time when she was free. She patiently walked us through different products, pros and cons, noting her favorites–which seemed unbiased by price point or commission.

Store #3 was quiet, and a saleswoman approached us immediately. She answered a few questions, then faded into the background, letting us explore without pressure. Each model was on display in several colors and with varying options, making it easy to compare styles. A few minutes into our shopping, the saleswoman returned to us with a print catalog and handy photocopies of each product’s dimensions. On the sheet she had handwritten the prices of each item we were considering, too, so we could review at home and make a decision on our own time.

Store #4 had the smallest display collection we’d seen. Half the items had no tags displaying product names or pricing. The store seemed to have very few sales staff, and after a few minutes, we shrugged and left.

At home, we reviewed our one piece of printed literature, and spent time measuring and discussing our options. We looked around online sparingly, since we’d seen so much in person.

Guess which stores are most likely to get our business.

From our flu-infested president (and reluctant blogger) Alex Schmelkin came this email last week:

I’m lying in bed with two horrendously uncomfortable pillows. Down feather nonsense. Popped onto amazon. Found the cheapest synthetic pillow. $9.99. Cart. x2. One step checkout.

The amazon ecommerce mobile site is phenom. It’s fast. Super easy. Recognizes you’re coming in on a mobile and serves the correct pages. Login in. Has all your addresses and credit card. Search. Checkout.

Alex sent this email to the team as both a cajoling boss and an impressed consumer. Lying in bed, playing with his BlackBerry, he went dit-dit-dit through the world’s largest online store and completed a transaction as easily as he’d send an email.

This is the future of ecommerce. It’s already happening in Asia, and it’s a matter of time before it gets here, spurred on in part by the iPhone. Simple, clear mobile interfaces. Fast-loading pages. No-nonsense engines and processes. Nothing but goal-oriented transactional functionality.

Look for much more of this in 2008 and ’09. And try it, too. Usage drives evolution.

Many members of our team love 1024-pixel designs. So do many of our clients. And why shouldn’t they: the real estate is vast, giving room for airy designs that fit lots of information above the fold. The results support their desires, too; our websites are uniformly handsome and easy to use.

Unfortunately, the average user doesn’t have the same 30″ cinema display as our creative director. (Alas, neither do I. But I digress.) Visitors to Ai’s sites are mostly in the 1024×768 camp, but narrow displays appear on a regular basis.

It can be easy to disregard these folks, to say, “Ah, well, the guy in Jersey with his screen set at 800×600 because he doesn’t like to squint, he can scroll to the right, lots of other sites make him do it.” What’s not so easy is to imagine the financial pain that could come from ignoring them. This forces us to be even more creative with our designs.

Thus our information architecture and graphic design teams ensure that all essential functions of the website appear within that 800px window, from major navigation links to add-to-cart and checkout buttons. Imagine the chaos, not to mention the customer service inquiries, if those smaller screens had to scroll right to hit “continue.” At Ai usability and accessibility are of prime importance.

In my days as design director at Economist.com, we set a tiny three percent limit on browser compliance. (This was back in the Netscape-versus-Internet Explorer days, as we debated dropping Navigator from our QA routine.) As I liked to cite to our tech and ad teams: “Three percent sounds like a small number. But 3% of a million is a pretty big number.”

These variables are what make web design difficult, and fascinating. Accommodating myriad screen widths, several popular browsers (currently IE, Firefox and Safari), two major operating systems, and layering on mobile constraints–consistency is nearly impossible. What’s important is a solid, confusion-free user experience that works regardless of a visitor’s variables.

One of my small contributions to Ai is championing the minority. Our websites already reflect the core values of universal user experience. The challenge is in pushing ourselves farther into universality with every site we make.

Usability maven John Rhodes published a clever piece last week entitled How Direct Marketing and User Experience Are the Same. The cited examples are quite good and worth contemplating (Rhodes is often right when it comes to UX matters). Particularly for ecommerce sites, the direct-marketing correlation is strong.

Something the article did not do, though, was reverse the angle. The piece focused on how the technical details of UX work are similar to the fundamentals of direct marketing. But direct marketing also has a lot in common with the qualitative side of user experience work. To wit:

• Simple, clear instructions maximize conversions. In any direct marketing appeal, the endgame is straightforward and easy to spot–as with the majority of UX-centered processes.
• First impressions are lasting impressions. Consumers decide in seconds whether they have a good or bad feeling about a product, company, or website (especially a website). Similarly, a good piece of direct marketing leaves consumers with a positive feeling that either leads to a sale or is retained until a later conversion opportunity.
• Understanding and relating to the end user is key to long-term success. Like a good website, a good direct marketer will fine-tune and localize messages over time, creating a more intimate and useful dialogue that leads to greater response rates.

One aspect that may not be the same is the value of the individual viewer. A user-experience expert would cite the necessity for all users to have as positive an experience as possible. Conversely, some direct marketers are looking for scale above all else, and are unafraid to sacrifice some people in order to reach others effectively. This is good for short-term sales, somewhat less so for customer retention and positive recall. Which, of course, is where UX comes in.