General Electric’s SixSigma has been pounded into the minds of business students for countless decades. SixSigma is all about the endless quest for perfection. “The central idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can measure how many ‘defects’ you have in a process, you can systematically figure out how to eliminate them and get as close to ‘zero defects’ as possible.”

One of the major principles of SixSigma is timing. You’ve all heard, “there is a time and a place” … well, that couldn’t be truer if you follow SixSigma. It makes sense, too. Think about it, if you have a manufacturing company that relies on parts supplied by multiple vendors, it is incredibly important that parts are delivered exactly when they are expected. If they are delivered too soon, then there might not be enough storage to house them, and if they are delivered too late, then the entire process is behind schedule and everyone is losing money - assembly starts later, people are sitting idle and eventually, customers receive their goods later than expected.

So, if timing is so important, why is Zappos breaking this major rule and still enjoy amazing success? Specifically, they tell their customers that shoes will be delivered in three or four days, but more often than not, they are delivered over night. Apparently, over delivering in this case has a positive effect on customer perceptions and experience.

I wonder if customers that are on the road and can’t be home for three to four days and plan the delivery of their Zappos shoes accordingly would continue to have the warm-and-fuzzies about the company if they are not home to accept the delivery.

I also wonder if Zappos would benefit from more or less customer good will if they delivered when they said they would.

Finally, I wonder what Zappos’ reaction would be if they received 800,000 pairs of shoes three days ahead of schedule. Would they be pleasantly surprised, as their customers with early delivery?

Sometimes, over delivering pays dividends and sometimes it doesn’t. In fact, over delivery can cause serious problems.

Know your customers and understand their pressures. Finding opportunities for over delivery that create happy customers is always gold. Zappo has done just that and to prove it, their sales are up from $70 million to $1 billion in just five years.

Keep your customers happy and the rest will follow. Go figure!

Labels: Business Differentiation, Business Strategy, process, SixSigma

Jared Spool Gives a compelling and somewhat radical argument for why user-centered design never works - or at least why it hasn't worked yet, and why user-informed design is the new name of the game.

Labels: Design, user experience

Trebuchet+Flaming Piano+Compact Car. Enough said.

A father and son team of musical super-sleuths has discovered that the geometric patterns carved into a number of blocks decorating Rosslyn Chapel (familiar to any of you who suffered through read The DaVinci Code) are actually cymatics, patterns formed by sound passed through a resonating membrane covered with small particles. Thomas and Stuart Mitchell have translated these patterns into a piece of music they're calling the Rosslyn Motet. Their work will debut at the Chapel on May 18, 2008 but you can watch the video below now to hear some of it and learn more about how they did it.



For more on the fascinating world of "acoustical archeology" check out this article on the Chichen Itza "chirp," an alleged "sound recording" embedded in a Myan temple.

There is an interesting article published on Boxes and Arrows a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to share with you. The article is titled “Extreme User Research” and it’s by Daniel Lafreniere.

Extreme User Research talks about gathering user data by interviewing “surrogate” users, not users themselves. This to save time and money.

We’ve had great success with similar techniques, it’s great to see that procedural patterns are beginning to develop around these activities. It becomes easier to convince clients that stuff like this is a good idea when more and more IAs are following a similar path to user need/behavior discovery.

As discussed in the article, the benefit of doing stuff like this is also to create data and knowledge that backs your design decisions. When just user surrogates are interviewed, however, we are missing out on several opportunities. Yes, it’s a lot more work and more money to interview real users and other constituents, but if it’s possible, we should always aim to collect data from them as well. It makes the overall picture more complete and it gives people (especially if you fold in key stakeholders into the interview process) a sense of participation – which leads to buy-in. The extra work (even if you have to eat the time) is worth the extra texture, unearthed dimensions, and overall buy-in.

We normally interview different groups of people for different reasons. For example, when we do Higher Education, we interview faculty, staff, the president, deans, current students, alumni, prospective students, and so on. Each group provides different perspectives – and all perspectives are incredibly valuable. For instance, the administration will tell us “recruiting” is the priority, meanwhile faculty and staffers are internally focused on with current students and their own information concerns. These two groups often have competing interests and this interview process helps bridge the two.

I agree with Daniel, however, if there is only one group, and one group only to interview – aim for the internal group that has the most day-to-day contact with your end user. This group will often be in the best position to expose the patterns – but be careful to tease out the differences between fact and opinion.

Great piece. Read it.

Labels: information architecture, usability, user experience, user research