The First Key to Success – Counting to One

Like design, branding involves creating an illusion of clarity out of that which is fundamentally indeterminate.   Whether you are publishing a blog or building iPhone apps, you are looking for a singular, but simple and strong, idea at the center.  Or to put it Altman’s terms, you should learn to count to one.   “We don’t buy a shampoo that doubles as a face wash and a hand soap,” she writes.  Consumers want to believe, whether it is true or not, that “certain brands and certain products perform best at certain tasks.”   Domino’s Pizza built their mega-brand on a single promise – delivery in under 30 minutes.  There was no mention of whether the pizza was also delicious.  Less successfully, Advil tried to position their product to the marketplace with two core benefits. Fast. Strong. Advil. “Do you remember that campaign?” Altman asks.  “Of course you don’t.  Neither does anyone else.”

Practicing this sort of reductionism is harder than it sounds.  Odds are that your product or website does more than one thing well, or at least that you want it to.  For instance, if you think your express passport service is both easy and fast, you will be hard-pressed to give up one of those benefits.  You may make the mistake of naming your service ABC Passport Express as a result.  “ABC” connotes easiness and guarantees good phone book placement (a valuable business benefit before Google came along in 1997), and “express” sounds fast.  Good, right?  No, in fact, because you will probably  lose out to your more focused competition, RushMyPassport.com, who commits to the single benefit of fast turnaround.  Being perceived as having one clear benefit usually wins the battle for the prospect’s mind – which is all that matters.

The name, "ABC Passport Express," simultaneously promises ease and speed of service, not to mention the benefits of being local area specialists as captured in their tagline. The result is generic.

RushMyPassport.com focuses on one core promise, speed of turnaround time, and creates a coordinated impression that this is what they do - get you your passport fast.

The Second Key to Success – Work Fast and Loose (at least at the beginning)

Ok. So now you can count to one, but how do you arrive at the right one? The most sure-fire way is to start with the many.  Ideas are cheap, so you should generate lots of them, and you should do it fast.   The design firm IDEO, more famous for their brainstorming methods than any other design firm in history, once re-designed that most familiar and time-tested of objects, the supermarket shopping cart, in only 5 days.   “Maybe we should acknowledge it’s kind of insane to do an entire project in just a week,” said Peter Skillman of IDEO, as their team proceeded to do exactly that – on national television!   The project was done in response to a challenge set forth by the producer’s of ABC’s television news magazine, Nightline, in 1999. One of IDEO’s key premises is to throw lots and lots of ideas out in the early phases – then cull them down to the key ideas later. In The Art of Innovation, Tom Kelley shares the IDEO brainstorming rules which are written on the wall during brainstorming sessions there. Go for Quantity. Encourage Wild Ideas. Be Visual. And always, always – work fast and loose in the early stages, because winning ideas will get refined in the later stages.  And, guess what? Winning ideas can come from anywhere, so generate lots of them!

And if we return to the Brandmaker Express method that Altman writes about in her book, we will find an approach for generating names and taglines that is very much in the spirit of IDEO.   For each naming challenge, Altman and her team design a set of creative workshop exercises to generate lots and lots of ideas.   The workshops are run twice, once with the employees and internal stakeholders at the client company, and once with a team of ‘creative souls’ (an eclectic group of creative professionals who do this as a moonlighting gig.)  The workshop games are developed on a custom basis for each product being named, but there are a few favorites which appear over and over.  For instance, to generate tagline ideas there is usually an exercise to write an attention-grabbing headline like you might find in a famous publication, but the publication that serves as a setting is varied based on the tone of the product (e.g. NY Daily News for “sensational” headlines, NY Times for straightforward and sophisticated.)  Then she might add another exercise to push the creativity further, such as “Now in Three Words,” where the headline has to be compressed to it’s 3-word essence.  There are also specific exercises for arriving at names, such as “Word Smash,” which involves taking two English words that fit the concept and shoving them together to make a nonsense word – like Celebrex or MaxiPro. The point with these games is to do lots of them, coming at your naming challenge from several angles.  As you are doing the exercises, you should be furiously writing down the things that your brainstormers are saying in response to the challenge.

The Third Key to Success – Synthesize the ideas into a few powerful concepts, then visualize them

My favorite part of working with Altman is when the professional graphic designer she hires comes back with about 20 full-color 10 by 14 print-style ads with names, taglines, and corresponding imagery.  This is where the ideas from the brainstorming are synthesized and come to life, and this is also the appropriate time to critique the ideas and vote on them as a group.  The book has many insights on how to get to the right 20.  For instance, find out the dealbreakers early.  Maybe your CEO hates purple so there is no use in developing the purple people eater concept that someone threw out in one of the brainstorming exercises.  Concision is essential.   You should develop taglines that could tell the story of the site (along with a name and a logo) if everything else on the page was removed.  And she provides several known pitfalls that lead to writing bad, consumer alienating taglines.  Rampant use of the gerund, e.g. using a verb with no subject and adding “ing” to the end, as in Nokia’s “connecting people,” is a big no-no.   Altman calls this kind of tone “self-congratulatory, self-praising, and seriously superior.”  She also likes second person taglines, not first person.  Telling your customer what you are trying to do in a first person tagline is not the point (e.g. Lucent’s “creating value through true convergence.”)   Second person taglines, like “you deserve a break today,” bring the customer into the brand’s narrative.

Lynn Altman uses print-style ads, along the lines of this one for monster.com, to present name and tagline concepts.

So by now, I hope you’re convinced that it’s time to think like a marketer, not a business development person or -god forbid- a designer, when you are naming and positioning websites.  Don Norman, in a recent interview in upstart UX magazine, Want, said outright that the distinction between designers and marketers is really very small.  They both ask the same question, “How do we make it so that people will enjoy the product?”  And if you are wondering who is more creative – marketers of designers? – you should sit in on one of Brand Now’s creatives-only brainstorming sessions and you will realize that we are indeed talking about two sides of the same coin.

1. Serious Play

by Michael Schrage

This is a slim book and a quick read – but it’s number one on my list.  In fact, it virtually provides me with a grand unifying theory of implementing a UX culture at a large company.  My mantra at Wiley is “always put a design deliverable in front of the specification and have it tested in a valid way.”    By ‘design deliverable,’ I mean model, or prototype, of the end product -something vivid enough for a potential user of the product to actually imagine the experience of using it.   Schrage persuasively explains the value to any organization of becoming a “modeling culture,”  one in which every conversation happens around real designs and not in the abstract language of marketing and business plans.  If you are in a highly design sensitive environment (I’m imagining Apple, but I don’t really know), maybe your company already is a modeling culture, but most large corporations aren’t even close.   This book also conveys an important emphasis on experimentation and tolerance of failure at the institutional level.  A Director of User Experience should buy multiple copies of this and give them out to business leaders in their company as holiday gifts.

2. Designing Web Interfaces

by Bill Scott & Theresa Neil

This book was published by an arch competitor earlier this year, but I just can’t say enough about its value.  Most amazing to me is how I pick this up infinitely more than its predecessor – Designing Interfaces.   Why?  Well, basically because of it’s emphasis on rich interaction on the web.  This book has taken what used to be considered “nice to have” techniques associated with the likes of Flash, Ajax, and fancy Javascript and proven why moving beyond the ‘page’ and ‘form’ as the only building blocks of design will be the future of the usable web interface.  What’s more, the book is a practical guide to designing and specifying such rich  interactions as drag-and-drop, in page editing, progressive disclosure, and tons more.   These techniques are still not mainstream, and your average IA still seems to shy away from putting rich interactions into their wireframes (perhaps long conditioned to getting too much pushback from programmers about using the fancy stuff), but this book demystifies and categorizes the techniques, and provides plenty of context about why they work as well as the risks of using them.  Bill Scott works at Netflix, a true pioneer in rich but usable web UI.   This book is invaluable for the UX professional who is trying to push their organization’s web interfaces to the next level.

3. Observing the User Experience

by Mike Kuniavsky

Now on my third copy of this, you’d think I’d have learned my lesson not to loan it out anymore – but it’s just so damn useful!    I used to be a commercial usability consultant, so I wasn’t expecting to use this book nearly as much as I do.  But an in-house Director of User Experience has to do a lot of improvising when it comes to reaching out to users.   For instance, I’m largely a qualitative guy but I find I have to write and review a lot of survey instruments all of the sudden.  Where do I turn? Kuniavsky.  If I have to create a comparative grid of competitor sites and their features, where do I turn to make sure I’m doing something valid and useful? Kuniavsky.  If someone is running a focus group and wants a few pointers on moderating or recruiting? You guessed it. Kuniavsky.  Card sorts?  Ok. You get it by now.   The fact is, I do a lot of DIY studies now, and even more often, I’m in the position of advising others on how to do their own user research.  This is where having a book like Kuniavsky’s really comes in handy – all the basics are in there in a form that’s easy to communicate to others.

4. Web Analytics: An Hour a Day

by Avinash Kaushik

Here’s one major difference between being a user experience professional who works at an agency or consultancy versus one who works at a company – you are still around after the site is designed, programmed, and launched.   It won’t take long before you develop a keen interest in web analytics.   The most holistic and sensible voice in modern web analytics is indisputably Avinash Kaushik – who advocates cutting through the crap and paying attention to what matters.   The Pre-Avinash universe was one in which websites were managed by looking at whatever reams of traffic data the monitoring tools were capable of spitting out, without being able to answer even the most basic questions about who was visiting the site and whether they were having a good experience or not.   What’s even better is his success at breaking analytics out of it’s marketing silo and incorporating user experience values (not to mention, common sense)  into the field.   This book has directly influenced an initiative at Wiley to manage websites and improve them incrementally – constantly adapting to the changing marketplace – rather than relying on a cycle of periodic redesigns.   The new version Web Analytics 2.0 is due out soon, and I can’t wait.

5. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

by Al Ries & Jack Trout

This one’s a bit of an outlier, given my theme, but a large part of my role is talking people out of ideas for new websites and features.   I probably add as much value if not more for what I advise not to do online than what I do in shaping what gets done.  This book clearly lays out conventional marketing thinking and makes it clear why companies make the same mistakes over and over.    While the book isn’t written with websites in mind, every principle is just as applicable to what we do online as it is for other types of product marketing.  Sample law:  The Law of Leadership teaches you that it is better to be first in a new category than to try to enter or dramtically improve your position in an existing category.   The book also teaches that working hard and delivering quality solutions is important – but not nearly as important as working smart and winning the battle of the prospect’s perception.   The best UX people contain shrewd marketing minds and no other book gets you ramped up faster than this one.