Archive for February, 2006

February 25, 2006

The Death of Customer Service

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CitiFinancial is running television ads touting its “Simplicity” credit card and the fact that if you have one of these cards, and call customer support, and press “0″ … you’ll get a real person. How has the world come to this?

February 25, 2006

I Take Terrible Pictures

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Seen in Shirlington near my office, and if I didn’t take such terrible pictures you’d be able to tell that the license plate is one of those special plates you can get in Virginia for making some sort of additional contribution. On the bottom beneath the license tag number is printed the phrase, “KIDS FIRST.” And that’s what makes this one of the best license plates I’ve seen …

February 24, 2006

Whatever

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A blogging cruise. How freaking tacky.

February 19, 2006

Blogging Is Over; Long Live Blogs

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How do we know blogging is over? As Daniel Gross points out in Slate, it’s the subject of too many magazine articles, media conglomerates are spending too much money on it, early investors are gleefully cashing out, and “the clueless and the greedy” are rushing to the trough in hopes of grabbing a few leftovers.

To which I say: thank god. This whole “Web 2.0″ bubble has been an irritating sideshow, a tired retread of the mid-90s being played out by people who should know better.

The problem is that too many people are associating “blogs” — a simple interactive publishing tool — with “blogging,” the overhyped media sector. And then it all gets lumped in with all these other so-called Web 2.0 tools.

And then those people completely miss the point that what’s interesting about all this is a change in mindset toward user-created content — how they do it (through blogs, “tagging” applications, vidcasts, whatever) is almost immaterial. Tools are going to come and go. We can talk about del.icio.us and Technorati and Flickr and blogging platforms until we’re blue in the face.

But the only really interesting phenomenon out there right now — what’s bringing it all together — is MySpace. It has over 56 million members and growing. It has 50% of the web community market (10 times more than any other single site, including Yahoo, Craigslist, and LiveJournal). Its traffic is neck-and-neck with Google. (reference here)

It brings all that other stuff — photo sharing, blogging, videos, audio — into one place. And the ease with which it allows groups to form puts other web community sites to shame. (Think MySpace is just a place for teens to hang out? Then check the “Business & Entrepreneurs” category in groups. Sure, lots of junk, but also some rather active groups for business owners and professionals.)

MySpace doesn’t get a lot of respect from the Web 2.0 types because it seems like a lot of juvenilia (and it was bought by Rupert Murdoch) but they don’t seem to have noticed that it’s already done much of what they want to do — on a huge scale. Whether it lasts and grows, or completely falls apart, doesn’t even matter. It’s created an experience that is going to shape the expectations of an entire generation.

February 16, 2006

Katrina Artists

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Association blogger Shawn Lea has also created a site called KatrinaArtists.com for artists affected by Hurricane Katrina to promote and sell their work.

February 11, 2006

Usability, Experience, and the Art of Burritos

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Using their websites, it’s easier to find a BajaFresh than a Chipotle restaurant. David Gammel cited these examples in a demonstration of the importance of website usability during a session at ASAE’s technology conference. He wrote:

Both sites have a store locator feature. Only BajaFresh makes it easy to find and use that key functionality. I asked the people in the room, “Who has the more usable site?” Answer: “BajaFresh!” Then I asked, who probably paid more for their web site? “Chipotle!” A usable burrito site doesn’t have to be an expensive one.

David makes a good point, but it’s not the whole point. It would be the whole point if the purpose of these websites were simply to push burritos. And it’s easy to think that that must be the whole point, because that’s what these restaurants do, right?

Well, not really. Saying Chipotle sells burritos is like saying Starbucks sells coffee.

Chipotle, while it starts with a tasty product (I’m an admitted fan), doesn’t sell burritos — it sells an experience. Chipotle is the “hip” burrito joint, with the funky interiors and the loud music and the margaritas and the busy lunch crowds and the rapid, friendly service that preserves quality by offering a really limited menu. If the only purpose of its website was to help you find the one nearest you, it could just Googlefy itself with a simple text box in the middle of the screen ready to look up your zip code.

But no, the Chipotle website is part of the Chipotle experience. That burrito zeppelin they’ve got flying around right now is kind of annoying but it’s definitely eye-catching (and won’t last forever because they change their page around relatively frequently). The whitespace, the funky Flash-driven circular menu you have to decipher — David is right, it’s a usability nightmare, but it’s fun in a way that the straightforward corporate-looking BajaFresh site most definitely isn’t.

By the time you find the Chipotle nearest you, you’ve already gotten immersed in the Chipotle experience, which is in fact its “brand.”

What has providing that experience gotten Chipotle thus far? Well, it has devoted fans all over the world as you can see at sites like ChipotleFan.com (where you can find your “burrito soulmate”) and ChipotleLovers.com. There are no sites for BajaFresh fans that I could find in the first few pages of a Google search. And Chipotle gets blog mentions galore — kind of hard to gauge this comparison-wise because “chipotle” doesn’t have to mean the restaurant, but using links, Google Blogsearch finds 719 links to chipotle.com and only 100 links to bajafresh.com.

Numbers-wise, Chipotle just had a very successful IPO last month, and it exceeded BajaFresh’s market share in 2003.

David raised a very good point about the importance of making key functionality usable. I’m just saying it’s not the only point. The purpose of a website is not just to make it easy to find things. It’s representative of the whole experience offered by an organization or company. It is, in fact, your organization. As we are giving our organzation’s website a much-needed redesign, that point is very much on my mind.

UPDATE: Just noticed that David responded, and I think we agree more than he thinks: I agree that Chipotle could also have changed its website to showcase its locator more than it does without losing its “hipness.” However, I stand by my contention that in any comparison between these two sites — a comparison that I didn’t choose but am merely commenting upon — Chipotle wins, hands down. The BajaFresh site, any way you look at it, simply sucks.

On a related note, I’m somewhat bemused by the commenter on David’s post who points out that a search for “Chipotle locations” brings a link to a volunteer, fan-driven site — and seems to think that this is somehow a problem. Oh, if only associations had those kinds of fans.