Giving as an Indirect Driver of Sales

Recently ABC’s 60 Minutes program ran a piece called, Coming Home about citizen soldiers coming home from active duty service to find that their jobs, titles, and salaries were no longer there – even though they are entitled to it by law.  In the piece a few companies, who are honoring their commitment, talk about the hardships of this on their businesses due to the short notification periods, long deployment times, and the frequency with which the reservists and national guardsmen are called up.

While no one would argue these points, especially when you add the current economic crisis on top of it, there are companies who honor these commitments beyond just compliance with Federal law.  One such company is Sears.  Sears has long track record of support for the military and all of its service members.  As part of their commitment they not only hold open the jobs of employees on active duty, but also voluntarily pay them the difference in salaries and maintain all benefits, including medical insurance and bonus programs.  Details on all of the different support programs are available on the Sears Military Support page.

But in an environment when retailers are forecasting double-digit declines in sales for the holiday season you have to ask yourself,: “are there merits to a policy like this beyond being a good corporate citizen?”

The answer: You bet!  The following are two non-exclusive approaches that can benefit both company and individuals alike.

1.    Amplify Organic Messages of Support

As we’ve found in our interactive marketing work, this type of goodwill can be invaluable toward gaining purchase consideration.  As an example, word of Sears support for service members was first published in 2003.  A few sites like snopes.com picked this up, posted the claim, and established its truth.  From there a few other sites picked it up and Sears’ policy was subsequently passed around via emails unaided with messages like, “Sears has been very faithful in their financial support of our troops.  Please consider sending some business their way.”

It tends to make a comeback each holiday season with someone picking it up, sending it to a few friends, and so on in the natural lifespan of these things.  This is great longevity for a message and about as good PR as you can get.  But imagine if you were to utilize the social networks and grass roots tools available today to amplify that message.  How much further could that message of support go?  How many more people might see it and be compelled to do some of their holiday shopping at Sears?

Targeting popular blogs that would be receptive to your message would provide significant exposure to a community that is very likely to act upon the suggestion.  In the Sears example above, military blogs would be a great starting point.  Once posted on these sites, tools like Digg and Reddit can help to publicize these stories to wider audiences.  Sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter also provide avenues within which to gain public attention.  The creation of pages/applications, badges, and messages of support across status feeds can grow awareness of your message within new demographic segments who may not frequent current advertising channels (online and offline).

While all of these things could occur naturally, savvy marketers will help to facilitate these actions.  A key social media strategy that we frequently employ at Roundarch involves energizing your biggest supporters and giving them a voice to be your advocate to a wider audience.

2.    Create Win-Win Support Programs

A second approach, which we’d suggest using alongside the first, is to develop charitable programs that are in-line with the core values of your company.  A few examples of programs like this are L.L. Bean’s charitable programs that focus on conservation and outdoor recreation or Merck’s commitment to improve health worldwide through numerous education and vaccination programs.  This holiday season Sears has expanded its Heroes At Home program to include a Wish Registry component similar to pay it forward.  In their program military families in need can register to receive a portion of the overall donations submitted (total donations are divided equally between all registered, qualified families).  Visitors to the site can choose to donate to the program to help fulfill a wish for the families.  On Christmas Day, registered families are given Sears gift cards that can be used to purchase those items that will make their holiday better.  The reason this works is because Sears already has a strong commitment to the military and the motive is altruistic.  This type of program is win-win in that it benefits Sears in that some of the money donated will come back to them in the form of sales but it also improves the lives of the 29,000 registered military families with a loved-one stationed overseas and in harms way.

Finally, it’s important to remember when considering any type of charitable or donation oriented program is that these cannot be forced.  These programs are successful when based on the goodwill your company has created through its dedication to specific causes.

The Phizzpop Design Challenge will kick off today in Chicago.  Roundarch is one of four teams given three days to strategize, design and build an experiential Web application based on the latest and greatest Microsoft Web technology. While not limited only to the browser, the contestants will primary use Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft’s next-generation development platform for Rich Internet Applications. They will also be using Microsoft’s new suite of tools for interactive software design and development, Expression Studio.

Mark Ferry, one of Roundarch’s Technical Directors, will lead the 3-person team in a challenge to design an application that applies to Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympic Games. No details around the specifics of the challenge have been released, making the event quite exciting (and challenging) for all involved.

The winner of this regional contest will move forward to additional rounds cumulating in the Phizzpop finals which will be held at the SxSW conference in Austin, Texas.

Meet the teams.

Left to right: John Peebles of Avis Budget Group, Aman Datta of Roundarch, Ray Picard, Jeff Westover and Ben Kiker of Interwoven.

Aman Data, Vice President of Roundarch, and John Peebles, Vice President Online Marketing at Avis Budget Group, presented Roundarch’s upcoming redesign of AVIS.com to a group of industry and financial analysts at Interwoven’s analyst day today in New York.  Avis and Roundarch discussed the Q1 upcoming relaunch of AVIS.com as well as several innovative changes that are being advanced in the market today.  One of the key innovations is the development of an “extra” site experience.  Customers can now perform a full reservation process in a single rich widget.  This widget is currently featured on www.rentacar.com and will be used on many Avis partner sites in the future.  The widget, developed in Adobe Flex, is one of many innovations that Roundarch and Avis are bringing to the travel market.

In our crusade for the grail of design innovation, nature’s 4.6 billion years of (re) evolutionary design supplies us with the perfect template.

Design innovation isn’t just about having the “big idea” (more about that and the role of research in my next post) - it’s a process, a funnel that produces success equal only to the cumulative failure required to achieve it. Not clear on that? Let mother earth and arguably the most successful innovation of all time, you and me, bring it into focus. You’ll notice there seem to be rules, patterns actually, to producing innovation, and massively successful designs (like homo sapiens and the ubiquitous iPod) have harnessed that power.

Looking at the geological time line starting with the Hadeon Eon (when earth’s crust took form) to the modern day, cycles of creation exemplified by the Cambrian and Permian eras have ushered new life forms into existence only to be followed by periods of mass extinction that have wiped most of them from the face of the planet. Nature has provided us with a compelling template for distilling successful design practices that produce innovation – a powerful suggestion of patterns that make up what we can call the universes’ law of design. It reveals a design funnel and a set of basic guidelines that innovative organizations, like Apple, have embraced as their own.

Bill Buxton’s “Sketching User Experiences” provided a first look at a design funnel. The design funnel that overlays earth’s geological timeline and the creation of man, is essentially an extension of this and surfaces key insights into repeatable innovation design:
1.    Innovation is the product of a refinement funnel – And that funnel starts wide and long, with and explosion of options that flow through cycles of reduction ultimately producing a single point of desirability and viability – the design solution. In a presentation at SXSW, Apple’s chief engineer Michael Lopp, explained how design flows through this funnel (that maps to Apple’s 10 to 3 to 1 design approach). As intense as it my seem, every Apple system feature is born in a set of 10 different detailed designs, all of which are genuinely valid options – not just those mock alternatives design firms typically push out to clients as a smoke screen to show “a lot of work and hard thinking”.
2.    Each cycle is marked by detailed design – This may shock a community that is fully bought into a notion of high level or “conceptual design” where low fidelity sketches/wireframes are the prevailing means of vetting the desired direction. I’m not suggesting here that we get rid of them, only that detailed design is an essential ingredient of the conceptual stage. Very much the same way thousands of actual living organisms, and not just sketches of potential organisms, were needed to make effective evolutionary decisions.
3.    Invest time up front – The era of modern man is only a spec on the grand scale of creation. Nature has clearly spent much more time and resources on the initial stages of design choosing to privileged detail and diversity over efficiency. This is clearly a tension for traditional design work. More often than not we find ourselves rushing through low fidelity conceptual designs to hone in on that one solution we push through to detailed design. Nature’s advice? Always give yourself more time for conceptual design and make sure you get the right amount of detail to support reductive decisions.
4.    The coin for innovation is failure (read: learning) - The same way that explosion of life on earth was followed by extinction (by the end of the Permian era over 50% of all land creatures and 95% of all sea creatures had been wiped out), innovative design is also marked by creative spurts and a selection process that pushes aside the undesirable and unviable. Successful shortcuts are as rare as they are likely to succeed. That means you need to bank on going through the motions - if failing is not an option then you can’t be serious about innovating.
5.    Innovation is expensive – Running the numbers on the resources required to generate thousands of life forms, most of which ultimately discarded by evolution, will show that true innovation has a price tag. The funnel can be long and mistakes need to be made. There is no way to sugar coat it, the bottom line is that real innovation requires resources and commitment. If it’s any solace though, the silver lining is the upside for return on innovative designs is tremendous.

Most user experience professionals learn early on that user centered design (UCD), or some variation thereof, is the go-to approach in the effort to generate usable, useful and joyful designs. I obviously don’t challenge the importance of the user and the need to make sure they are represented through out the design process (although I do admit an over zealous obsession with the end user has the potential to produce myopic design).

But we should consider evolving that approach to one that assumes user representation as a given, and more importantly, borrows from earth’s evolutionary heritage to articulate the design dynamics for achieving repeatable innovation. Call it Innovation Centered Design (ICD) - driving success for both you and your customers.

First, a disclaimer. I’m by no means a political junkie. While I’ve been as captivated by this recent election as anyone, I don’t intend to spark any political debates. When challenged with a political argument, my most likely response is something like “Yeah, maybe, but isn’t Desperate Housewives about to start?”

Photo courtesy of Scout J

That said, there are a few lessons from Barack Obama’s campaign that apply to our world of user experience consulting.

Those of us on Obama’s email list were barraged with messages. One thing every email had in common was a specific mission: get you to do something. It was often to make a donation, but not always. There were invitations to local gatherings, encouragement to contact voters in neighboring swing states, etc. Regardless, it was always obvious and easy to take the next step.

It’s a good strategy to keep in mind in our design work. In any given Web page, email, advertisement, whatever—make it clear what the user is supposed to do next.  If there are too many competing messages, or the call-to-action is somehow camouflaged, we’re making the user work too hard.

There’s no substitute for good graphic design. All of the Obama materials were consistently beautiful throughout the campaign. From the website, to the signage, to the downloadable desktop wallpapers—it all looked great and portrayed a distinctive brand.

I would argue that if you took the names off of almost any other candidate’s collateral, they would be very hard to tell apart. Not so with Obama. They managed to make it feel fresh and contemporary, but still retain the expected “patriotic” color palette. The attention to detail was impressive, down to the electronic tickets emailed to attendees of the Grant Park rally.

The lesson here is clear: work with smart, talented creatives. Involve them from the beginning, and encourage them to be the stewards of the brand throughout the process. This is our approach at Roundarch.

As interesting as the ubiquity of Obama branding was throughout the campaign, was its absence at the election night rally. While Obama supporters had plenty of swag on hand, the stage was devoid of it. The only decoration was a row of American flags. The message to me was, “The sales job is over. Now it’s time to do some work.”

Back to the emails for a minute. When I received an email, it was from “Barack Obama.” The same thing was true with campaign posts on Twitter–they had his name on them. I even got a couple emails from “Michelle Obama.” Now, I’m not naïve enough to think that she sat down and

tapped out an email to me while Malia and Sasha’s chicken nuggets were cooking. However, a communication from a “person” always feels better than one from a vague entity, such as, say “RNC email subscription service.” (OK, I made that up.)

Similar efforts to connect personally with constituents can be found on the Obama website. One of the main navigation items is “People,” which features dedicated content sections for specific audiences, e.g., “Small Business” and “African Americans.” Each group even gets its own clever version of the Obama logo.

In addition, there’s a prominent banner addressing “Hillary Supporters”–clearly reaching out to an audience that needed to be embraced.

How can we emulate this approach? Remember that’s it’s all about people. Be sure to know your audience. It’s impossible to develop a good solution if you don’t know the motivations and context of your site’s users. But it also means that you should get to know your clients. Communication will be smoother and more productive if you understand each others’ perspectives.

Finally, back up your work by “signing” it. Put your name on your documentation. Here’s a free tip–maybe a custom footer that says something like “I’m (insert name) and I approve of this wireframe.”

Throughout the campaign, I was impressed by Barack Obama’s composure. When personal attacks or outlandish statements came his way, he never seemed to get off track. He took a breath, smiled, and responded in a thoughtful manner. It left me with a feeling of trust.

At Roundarch, we value “soft skills” in our consultants as much as hands-on design skills. That means strategizing with a client, building consensus within a group, communicating the pros and cons of multiple options, and in general making smart, confident recommendations. Being able to explain and defend your thought process is critical. You may not always win over the audience, but if you demonstrate preparedness and passion, at the very least you will win respect.

Did you see the election night rally? Chicago is a great city. It has all the big city attractions–business, culture, recreation, physical beauty–and as a bonus the people are generally pretty nice and normal. I’m somewhat biased because I’ve lived here for 35 years, but visitors and transplants I speak with echo the same opinion. Sure, some people complain about the weather. But hey, it was 72 degrees on November 4.

The instructions for this are a little more complicated, so I’ll save it for a future blog post. Oh, make sure your family is awesome too, just in case someone starts poking around.

These are certainly interesting times. And if you make a living driving innovative web projects like Roundarch, then things just got a whole lot tougher. In the past week, three of my most senior clients cited the Sequoia presentation as an indication of their bearish outlook for the future. Everyone seems to be preparing for the nuclear winter which in many companies will include spending and hiring freezes, layoffs, and a tendency to play it safe rather than make bold strategic moves. At Roundarch, we have believed for quite some time in the transformational nature of rich internet applications, and our clients who have deployed them across the enterprise have achieved outsized gains vis a vis their competitors. Is it still possible to create competitive differentiation using rich internet applications in these difficult times? We think so. Two quick facts: the iPod was launched shortly after 9/11 and Fortune Magazine was launched in 1932. We believe that turbulent economic times are the perfect time to launch transformational technologies. Several of our clients are using this time to build rich applications that should revolutionize their marketplaces. But even if you can’t convince your management to make bold moves, there are many ways to keep innovating using the rich internet as a tool of differentiation. Uris and I are looking forward to discussing how AVIS, A&E, Motorola and others are doing just that in our talk on Tuesday (Nov. 18, 9:00 am - 10:00 am). For example, AVIS and Roundarch have created transactional banner ads (in Adobe Flex) that allow AVIS customers to complete a full reservation without even visiting AVIS.com. This innovation completely changes the traditional strategy of pushing everyone to your URL. They also have a full page version that they are deploying on affiliate sites. In both cases, AVIS is using rich technologies to completely challenge the status quo and doing it without breaking the bank.

The title of the talk is “Building Successful RIAs for the Enterprise in a Climate of Financial Uncertainty.” It is a mouthful. Perhaps a better title should have been “Thrive vs. Survive” which is core to our message. We strongly believe that those companies that use this economic downturn to push even more innovation will take significant share from those who just try to survive.

AdobeMAX

I recently had the chance to present at two different user experience conferences. While the venues were different, the subject matter was the same—user experience documentation for rich interfaces.

First was the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, back in September. I had a packed house for a three-hour workshop. Then just a few weeks ago, I covered the same topic for a smaller crowd, in a one-hour presentation at Web Builder 2.0 in Las Vegas.

Why this topic? As the work we do at Roundarch moves away from the “page” metaphor and toward richer, more interactive experiences, we designers are faced with moving beyond the site map and static wireframe. We need to be able to communicate more fluid interfaces and interactions.

Sometimes this means documenting very detailed functionality and almost infinite “states,” or representing motion in a static medium. But it can also mean stepping back to paint a broader picture—establishing and communicating the fundamental approach for a site’s interactions - to build consensus before the detailed work begins.

My presentation covered several highly-visual documentation techniques, which attempt to communicate the exact right amount of information—to the right stakeholders—at the right points in the project. From presenting a high-level concept map or user experience brief to an executive, to producing a usable functional spec for visual designers and developers, to building a proof-of-concept prototype, we touched on a wide range of deliverables. Supporting each example were tips on when and why to use a particular documentation method, best practices for design, limitations and challenges, and special considerations for rich Internet applications.

Links:
Web 2.0 Expo
Web Builder 2.0

For an outside perspective on the New York workshop, take a look at this attendee’s blog entry.