Jared Spool: The work that we've been doing at UIE over the last few years, all of a sudden, two things have sort of just really jumped out. One is that, suddenly, out of nowhere, everybody was focused on mobile. Mobile devices have been around for a really long time, but nobody was paying attention to it and nobody thought, well, our stuff would end up on mobile. Then suddenly, it did. We saw this. It was part of what was happening in board rooms. Our work, we get into executive suites quite often. We're talking to CEOs and C-level folks, and they're all talking about mobile. They're about what they have to do on mobile. At the same time, we notice that they're all talking about user experience. They're all using the phrase user experience or customer experience. They're talking about, "Our user experience has to be much better than it is, has to be more important." Again, been doing this for 30 years, been talking about this for 30 years, but suddenly, now, this is a big deal. We set out, a few years ago, to try and figure out why now, what is it about now? So what I thought I would talk about today is what we found out in that research. To start that journey, I want to start here with a Coke bottle. It's actually not the Coke bottle I'm interested in, it's the cap. See, it has this red cap up here and if you take off that cap and you look underneath it, there's a 12-letter code. That 12-letter code is intended to be used on a website. Here, it says mycokerewards.com. If you go to that website, mycokerewards.com, what you will find is a place where you enter the code, it awards you points, and then you can use those points to buy luggage and movies and gift cards and, most importantly, more Coca Cola. But when they first launched this site, if you decided to go look at this on your iPhone, it didn't look like that, it looked like this. [laughter] Jared: It said, "Sorry, you don't have Flash," and then gave you instructions on how to get Flash for your iPhone, which you could try that all you wanted... [laughter] Jared: ...but that wasn't going to get you anywhere. It was interesting that this what they'd made for a design decision, right, that it worked on the desktop system, but it didn't work on the phone. How much more likely are you going to be next to a phone when you open a Coke bottle than next to a desktop computer when you open a Coke bottle. It isn't just Coca Cola that ran into this. Around the same time if you went to the Fox Weather website, you got a message that said "Alternate HTML content should be placed here." [laughter] Jared: I hope you've brought some. [laughter] Jared: This content requires the Adobe Flash Player, get Flash. OK, that's not going to work. I can tell you. You can spend a lot of time trying to get Flash for that phone, it ain't going to happen. I was walking down the street a couple of years back in Washington, DC. On a telephone pole was this sign. It said, "Mike Panetta, shadow representative." Now I always suspected that there was a shadow government in Washington, DC. [laughter] Jared: It never occurred to me they had to run for office. But I guess they do. What's interesting about this was this QR code that appeared in the bottom right hand corner. This was one of the first times I'd ever seen a QR code, particularly on a political campaign. I'm like, "Oh, cool! What do you get when you click on this?" I fired up my phone and found the QR app and loaded up. What I got was the upper left hand corner of Mike Panetta's website. [laughter] Jared: The rest of his website apparently is in the shadows. [laughter] Jared: I'm not sure this is the experience they wanted. Also a few years back, I was in, of all places, Lapeer County, Michigan. Don't ask me why. It involved a hood and drugging and... [laughter] Jared: ...I just woke up there naked. But...I walked into the Lapeer County Bank and Trust Company and there they had this sign that said, "Let your fingers do the banking," and this picture of someone doing banking on their website on what seemed to be a 1990s Nokia phone. [laughter] Jared: Which is pretty damn impressive. I went off to try and figure out, well what would it look like on my 2007 iPhone, and it looked like something you couldn't use, quite amazingly. We were doing an event at one of our conferences at a Marriott. In order to connect to the WiFi, which by the way I know many of you are trying to connect to the WiFi. We apparently have used all of the Internet. [laughter] Jared: It's being rationed out, so you will get your turn at some point. But here, at this event, if you want to connect to the WiFi of course you know that the only thing that will be useful is clicking on that little red button right there. Once you click on that little red button, you get brought to a screen, which then you're not supposed to click there or there, but instead you're supposed to enter a 10-digit code in that little box at the very bottom. Of course, these screens are all unreadable and they're very hard to use. It turns out that lots of websites have problems like this. We're trying to figure out, "Well, why are all these websites so bad?" We realized that there's actually a law of nature that explains this. It's called Sturgeon's law and Sturgeon's law was created by this guy. This is Theodore Sturgeon. He's a science fiction writer. He was at a convention and they were doing a panel. During the convention, they had a Q&A. During the Q&A, someone gets up and says that he's from a mainstream media outlet and he says, "Dr. Sturgeon, I wonder if you could answer this question that's always been puzzling me?" He says, "Why is 90 percent of all science fiction writing complete crap?" Theodore Sturgeon thinks about this for a moment. He leans forward to the microphone and he says, "Well, 90 percent of everything is complete crap." [laughter] Jared: That's Sturgeon's law... [laughter] Jared: 90 percent of everything is complete crap. It turns out it's pretty much true. If you go to all the restaurants in Detroit, 10 percent are really awesome, but 90 percent they're not that great, right? With any experience it's going to be that way, 90 percent is complete crap. Web technology and mobile technology, it's not immune to these things. And 90 percent of things are complete crap. We just tend to gravitate towards the 10 percent that are decent, so we don't expose ourselves to the crap as often as it exists in nature. We can see this, right? This is an email that I got from United. Those of you who follow me on Twitter know I have a loving relationship with United. [laughter] Jared: I was very excited about this email, because it was the first time they had actually used color, fonts, and anything HTML-ish. They had been using text email generated from a mainframe computer. Only the year before, they had switched from all upper case to mixed case. [laughter] Jared: This was a huge advance for them. I was very excited because there was this button that never existed in the email before. It said, "My Account." I'm like, "OK, cool. I want to go check out my account." I click on that button and immediately I get a screen that says, "No, you did not make a mistake." [laughter] Jared: Which is completely comforting, because most of the time that I work with United I feel like I have made a mistake. [laughter] Jared: It says, "No, you have not made a mistake. We've redesigned our website. Unfortunately, the URL you requested is no longer valid." I had just gotten email 10 minutes before! [laughter] Jared: That's one hell of a content strategy. [laughter] Jared: Don't keep it around too long. Expire that sucker! [laughter] Jared: Now, this is a company that's advanced in its technology usage now. They are really going out there. For instance, they're the only major airline to provide the schedule boards at the airport, for people who are both landscape and portrait. [laughter] Jared: I want to go back to the flash thing for a moment and the Coca Cola stuff, because I unfairly picked on them. If you go to the site now, it doesn't look like this. In fact, shortly after I had taken it they had updated the site. It now looks like this, which is better but it's still really hard to use. In order to enter my 12-letter code, I have to put it in that little space there. In order to put it in that space there, I either have to sign in here or I have to log in here. These are really tiny things. Most people can't see them in that Pin, zoom, and try and navigate the site. It's really difficult. OK, this is the Coca Cola Company. This is not some high tech organization. What option would a high tech company do, like someone who makes and sells mobile phones like Verizon Wireless? They basically do the same thing. In fact, it's not just them, it's also AT&Ts iPhone page is too hard to read. And, in fact, Apple's iPhone page is almost unreadable on a phone. I guess the thinking is if you have an iPhone, why are you looking at the page. [laughter] Jared: But it doesn't just stop there. You're sitting in a cab going to the airport because you're going to hop on an Air Canada flight and you want to check in on your phone. Well, to check in you have to find this little control down at the very bottom which gives you a list of every country in the world, even though the phone knows exactly which one you're in at this very moment. [laughter] Jared: Then you get brought to a page that's unusable on a phone to do your check in. Lots and lots of organizations are doing this, but not everybody, not everybody. Boston.com is a puzzlement. We started looking at boston.com when we first started doing our analyses of the websites in 1996, it was one of the first sites we looked at. For years, we used it as the posted boy of how not to do a website. Today, their desktop site still sort of fits that mode. But their mobile site is gorgeous, it's beautiful. It's easy to read, the headlines are there, it's not cluttered with ads, it's really a lovely, wonderful thing. Same with the New York Times site, it's well done too. It's clear we know how to do this stuff now, but we only do it on a small percentage of things and that's Sturgeon's Law, most sites still are not accessible easily on the web because Sturgeon's Law is one of the things that's happening. We're thinking that the reason that these executives are so aware of this is that they now have these phones and they now have iPads and they're now walking around with these devices and they want to use these things and they bring up their own company's stuff and they say, "How come this looks like this?" Just saying to them, "Well, Sturgeon's Law," probably isn't the answer they want to hear. [laughter] Jared: Here's the thing about Sturgeon's Law, we get to choose which side we're on. We can decide whether we're in the 10 percent or we're in the 90 percent. Most of the people who are in the 90 percent are only there because they haven't given it any thought. But if we want to we can be in the 10 percent. Now, with all the advancements that are happening with responsive design and mobile toolkits and things like that, we can be in the 10 percent without a whole lot of effort. It's much easier than it ever has been to be in the 10 percent. But it's a decision, it's a decision we get to make. We're thinking OK, this is one of the things that's causing this awareness of mobile and UX in the boardroom is this thing that's coming in and saying, "OK. Sturgeon's Law is kicking in and people are beginning to see the effects of it." But it turns out that's not the only thing. There are other things that are doing this. One of those things we call market maturity. This is a Wang 2200 word processor. It was a device that stood about yay tall, yay wide, yay deep, and when it came out in 1978, it cost $14,000, it had four processors, it was quad core. [laughter] Jared: Four Z80 processors. All it could do is word processing that was it. Just out of curiosity, how many people here weren't even born in 1978. Ugh, man. I've got to tell you, it's one thing to be older than most of the people you're presenting to, but it's now I'm in this age where my projects are older. [laughter] Jared: I worked on this thing. OK. [laughs] That sucks. [laughter] Jared: Here's the deal with the Wang 2200, you couldn't use it by just walking up to it and using it. You could never figure it out. You had to take training. You had to go to Lowell, Massachusetts, it's about an hour outside of Boston, into a building known as the Wang Towers. I could not make this stuff up if I wanted to. [laughter] Jared: In the Wang Towers you would take a one-week basic class. In the one-week basic class, through drill and practice, you would learn how to load a file, how to save a file, how to print a file, and how to change the ribbon on the printer. If you stayed the second week for the advanced class, you learned bold and italics. [laughter] Jared: Italics was hard, because you had to change the little plastic daisy wheel on the printer, it was tricky. That, what it was like in 1978 to learn how to use a word processor. Everybody was OK with this, because the companies that were paying for these things got huge productivity increases. Because the alternative to a word processor was typing everything on paper with carbon sheets, so this was way better than that. They were happy to pay for people to go to training and pay for these people who used to be secretaries to become word processing specialists, which gave you a 20 percent raise. Because if they didn't, some other company would hire you right away with a 20 percent raise because they didn't want to pay for the training. You had to do that to protect your investment. So everybody was happy with this until computer technology got cheaper and you could get a $2,000 box and an $800 piece of software, it was called WordPerfect. You could learn how to use this. So many people bought this that you no longer had to travel to learn how to do it, they would bring it to your desk. There were videos and there were courses and there were audio tapes and consultants. You would get little cardboard things to put on your keyboard and little cardboard things to put around your monitor and little cardboard things to put around your bathroom mirror. [laughter] Jared: All of these things were there to explain to you how to use all the features that were in WordPerfect. At the time there were 1,700 features at its peak, 1,700 features in a word processor that you could use to word process. Then another company came along, a little startup in the Northwest came along with this product, it was called Word for DOS and eventually it turned into Word for Windows. It didn't have 1,700 features. When the first version of Word for DOS came out it just had 70 features. They just happened to be 70 of the right features. What the folks at Microsoft had done, which is what Microsoft is very good at doing, is they had studied the market and studied what people were using and built a word processor that just did that. It had this neat idea that you didn't need all these field codes and special control keys. Instead you would just put the cursor some place and you would start typing and wherever you typed, that's where the text would show up on the page. That was remarkable and it changed everything. I bring all this history up because there's a cycle here that keeps repeating itself. It starts with the introduction of new technology. It then moves to focusing on features and building feature, feature, feature, feature, and then it moves to experience and thinking about things in terms of the experience that is there. And we see this process over and over and over again, and it's somewhat cyclical, because after the folks who master the experience sort of take over the market they have to make more money so the easiest way to do that is to go back and focus on features. [laughter] Jared: Isn't it [laughs] ? This is how you word process in hell. [laughter] Jared: Just with every menu open. Just try it someday. Try and actually create it. Open every possible menu in Word and then see what happens. It's stunning. But we see this cycle over and over and over again. When the first cell phones came out they were very much technology-based. Then we got into what we called feature phones where everything was about what new features could we add to the device? And then the market shifted with something that focused on experience. And keep in mind, the iPhone when it came out it was missing critical features. It did not have the capability to do text messages with photos. It did not have MMS capability, something that everybody said was a non-starter, right? The kids would never buy one. Well, the kids weren't buying them because they were 600 bucks. It was the grownups who didn't need to send pictures to each other unless they were running for Congress. [laughter] Jared: Just saying. So that's how it works. At its heyday AltaVista was barely about search. It was about all these different features that it had, whereas Google when it first came out was just about search. They focused on purely the experience. If you go to AccuWeather.com the list of things that you can do at AccuWeather.com is intense. It seems to never end, and they're always adding new things. They've put in bloopers. [laughter] Jared: I don't know what weather bloopers are. [laughter] Jared: "Oh, mom, look. That guy got hit by lightning. It was supposed to go over there." [laughter] Jared: I don't know what a weather blooper is, but that's what it is. What do you need from a site that tells you the weather? Do you need all this stuff? There's a site out there now. It's called "Umbrella Today?" You type in the name of the city that you want and it says, "Yes." [laughter] Jared: It's focused on just experience. We go to the Air Canada site, and the Air Canada site, it has all of this stuff that you can do on it, right? All of this stuff. This is an airline that flies to seven cities. [laughter] Jared: Yet it does all of these things. It just goes on and on and on. If you go to it on the mobile phone of course you have this desktop interface to deal with, but it turns out that there's a secret code. If you know not to go to www.aircanada.com but instead go to Aircanada.com, you get a special secret mobile-only screen that has just the things you need for mobile only, right? So everybody else gets features. You get experience. And they're not the only one with a secret screen. You land in San Francisco you want to figure out how you're going to take the BART from the airport to downtown. Well, if you just look up the BART schedule you get this completely unreadable thing on a phone, but if you know the secret password, which happens to be bart.gov/wireless...I'm telling you. Next time you go to San Francisco now you know. It's like in and out. You get the secret menu. And the thing is is that it's these two website ideas, and this is not the way to do it. Amazon has a much better idea. You go to www.amazon.com on a phone, and you get something that looks sort of like the desktop experience except that it's been optimized for a screen. Everything is readable. All the essential functions are there. So going and looking up a book by an author, and getting that book, and seeing the ratings, and being able to read the reviews, it's not exactly the same experience you have on the desktop, but it's the experience you need to have on a small screen, and it works really great. If you go to Bestbuy.com and you look at the Best Buy website on the phone you get functionality there that you actually can't find on their desktop system like the TV finder, which lets you go in and lets you pick certain attributes about the type of TV you want even with slider and cool little choice check boxes and then it recommends TVs that are there and even helps you find a store nearby that has those TVs based on the location services of the phone. So here they're focused on the experience of building that out. And that's what this whole idea of market maturity is about. It's understanding that things go from this pattern of just focusing about technology, then focusing on features, then focusing on experience, and that we in the user experience world have to be ready when the organization and the customers are like, "You know what? We don't care about features anymore. We care about having a great experience." We have to be right there having those designs ready so that we can put them out there and make them work. So it turns out that understanding that transition is key, and the executives, what they're seeing is that companies that don't understand the transition are getting caught and stuck, and because they're getting stuck their competitors are coming out with something with a better experience. Motorola used to own the phone market. WordPerfect owned the word processing market. Microsoft used to own it. Now Google is giving them a run for their money. So they're seeing that there's these things that are changing, and if they don't understand the patterns...the patterns are clear as day if you know to look for them. If you don't understand them you get caught in them and you're stuck. So that's definitely one of the storms that's coming in and creating this effect but there's something else that just happened at the same time, an awareness that we got, and the name we call it is, "activities versus experience." This is the map of Six Flags Magic Mountain. It's a theme park in the San Diego area, and like many Six Flags parks when you walk in you are handed this map, and this map is your tour guide for the day. It helps you do everything that you need to do. And the idea is that you come in the front gates, and you sort of go to the left, and you go through this cyclical process of enjoying Six Flags Magic Mountain. And the cyclical process involves first getting into a really long line for a ride. You sit there for a very long time. Then you get on the ride for what turns out to be a really short time. Then you throw up for what's hopefully a really short time, and then you get in another line, and you get on another ride, and you just keep repeating that process. And then way the map is constructed every ride is detailed here. They don't want you to miss a single thing. You paid a lot of money to get into this park. You came a long way. You're going to stand in a lot of lines. They want to make sure you haven't missed a single thing. So they designed it so you can actually check off everything you can do in the park. And the map very much reflects the mentality that Six Flags brings to the design of their parks. Now contrast that, this map, with the map of Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom. The Magic Kingdom map is very different. There are no rides. Sure, if you are familiar with some of the architecture that's behind the rides you can pick it out of the map you can pick it out of the map. If you know what Space Mountain looks like you can find Space Mountain, but if you don't know anything about Space Mountain you don't find that out from the map. There's nothing on the map that tells you where Space Mountain is or even what it is, right? And it's not that Disney doesn't have rides. They lots of rides. They have incredibly cool rides, but it's not how Disney...it's not the mentality that Disney brings to their park. That's not what they want you to do. They want you to go on adventures. It's all about adventures. If you go to Walt Disney World with a six-year-old there's a very good chance that one of those days your adventure will start with something known as the, "character breakfast." The character breakfast is a chance for your six-year-old to get up close and personal with a creepy dude in an animal suit. [laughter] Jared: And the two of them together will make what will become the most expensive breakfast you will have ever paid for. [laughter] Jared: And the thing is everybody loves this. Your kid loves it. You love it because your kid is having so much fun. The guy in the animal suit seems to really love it. [laughter] Jared: Everybody's enjoying this. It's awesome. And that just starts the day, and then you start wandering through the park, and you go from one place to another in the park, and you're just having this grand old time, and it's a fabulous experience. You go, and you go on rides and see things and just move from place to place to place, and it's just great. It's just wonderful. And then your day just erupts at the end with this amazing fireworks show that's completely synchronized with music, which you can clearly hear no matter where you're standing in the park because they've carefully designed the speaker system so that everybody can clearly hear the soundtrack to the perfectly synchronized fireworks, and it's even timed so that if you're farther away from the fireworks the music is slightly delayed to match up with the light and the sound and everything that's happening. So it's just brilliant the way they think about the whole thing, and the fireworks goes on for practically ever. And then you take your child, and you put them on your shoulder because they're exhausted by this day of adventures, and you bring them not back to your hotel room, because Disney does not have hotel rooms. Disney has resorts. And you go back to the resort, and you find that while you were gone someone had taken your towels and created little origami animals out of all of them. [laughter] Jared: And if your kid had left their toys, the toys are no longer where the kid left them, but instead have been organized around the animals as if all of them were playing together up until the very moment that the humans walk in just like in the movies. And this is how Disney thinks. Disney thinks about paying their housekeepers to learn how to make 10 to 12 separate origami animals. You can't have an average housekeeper do this so you have to hire special housekeepers and then train them with origami animal school... [laughter] Jared: ...to do this. And it's worth it just for the sheer joy of walking in the room and finding an elephant made out of a washcloth or a monkey hanging in the closet made out of a bath towel. It's crazy, but they do these things. And this is how Disney approaches it. If we were to compare Six Flags to Disney, we could say that Six Flags is about the discrete activities about the rides. Everything is about making sure you get on every ride. It's about the activities. But Disney is about the experience. They take the rides, and the create something in all the gaps, and it's the design work that's done in the gaps that makes the difference. The difference between designing for activities and designing for experience is filling in the gaps. You're in a big city in the rain, and you're trying to hail a cab. It is crazy. It's a miserable experience, right? Cabs are already filled with passengers, and you're standing in the pouring rain, and you're trying to hail one down, and it's really hard to do. And so it's horrible. Company comes along called Uber. They create a service. The service works very simply. You have an iPhone app for which when you got the iPhone app you set it up with a credit card so you're all authorized and authenticated. So you fire up the app. It uses location services to figure out where you are. You press a button that says, "Pick me up." And then what happens with the button that says, "Pick me up," is that the phone sends a message to their servers which then sends a message to a bunch of drivers who have a different app in their car that says, "Hey, there's a passenger near you." Using their GPS it goes in order of closest, and, "Do you want to accept this fare?" And the driver then decides if they want to accept the fare, and they press the button, and then the phone tells you, "Hey, a guy names Tony who's five blocks away says he'll take you where you want to go. Are you cool with that?" You say, "OK," and now you get a little map, and it shows Tony's capabilities, and as Tony gets closer you are updated as to where Tony is. And there's a button that that says, "Call Tony," on your phone so that if it's raining too hard you can step into the Walgreen's and you can say, "Hey, I'm in the Walgreen's." He says, "No problem. I'll call you back when I'm pulling up." And all of this happens, and then you get into the car and you could have even told Tony where you wanted to go when you put it in, or you tell Tony where you want to go. And then at the end, instead of having a meter that has surcharges, and you have that issue where you're fishing through the wallet and you're trying to deal with paying it, and someone's trying to get into the cab themselves because it's pouring rain out, and there's all this sort of confusion at that sort of end of game cycle, on the Uber app the way it works is that it just says, "Your fare is 15 bucks. We've billed it to your card, and we've sent you a receipt and email. You're done." There's no tip, so it's already included in there. And then you rate the driver, which is great, because he's rating you. That's how he knew he wanted to pick you up. And so that's how the system works. They filled in the gaps. They designed for the experience, and they've made it a better system. Groupon's done something similar, right? The early days of Groupon you always had these sheets of paper that had your Groupon discounts on them, and you had to remember, and you would buy this great discount for the coffee shop down the street, but you completely forget to bring the paper with you every time. You're like, "Damn it, I wish I had the paper." Well, now, using the mobile website or using the app you can just get the barcode and then they can scan it or enter the code at the store, and then you no longer have the little pieces of paper, right? Again, filling in the gaps of the experience. And we can try and do this with technology. This is QR codes. Here this QR code, it's pretty cool. I was walking through the streets of Melbourne, and there was this giant black wall on one street, and it said, "Live here," and it had this giant QR code. It was two feet wide, or four feet wide. And took a picture of it, and sure enough, it brings you to a website for a real estate company that apparently they've put a hole behind the giant black wall, and they're going to fill the hole with an apartment building. And so you can see the apartments there. It even has a very easy to fill out form. This was a real estate company that figured out how to do this. And it turns out that real estate companies in the United States are just one step above restaurant menus online, right? [laughter] Jared: They're horrible things. But here, this was really easy to use. It was brilliant. But QR codes aren't the solution to everything. I feel bad for First Bank who bought these QR codes and put them on these giant banners in the basement of the Denver International Airport where there's no WiFi signal. [laughter] Jared: Wasn't thinking. QR codes are sort of a stopgap between...we have real technology that can tell where you're standing close enough that you can give you contact sensitive stuff without having to pull out a reader and go to a link and possibly get spam, or porn, or wherever this random QR code brings you to. And so it turns out what we're looking at here is the difference between activities and experience, and this is a key piece of this, and so that's definitely a factor. The executive folks, they are saying, "Why can't we do more in the area of experiences?" It turns out that for most businesses being competitive in just the activities is completely saturated. There's very little you can do other than reducing price in the activity side. But in experience there's so much room to create better experiences. This is why the Apple Store sells twice as much product per square foot as Tiffany's who sells seven times as much as the average retail store in a mall. It's because the experience that you can design is where you can find a competitive advantage. Turns out there's one more thing that's sort of contributing to this to make it sort of a perfect storm, and that is what we call the Kano model. Now the Kano model is created by a guy named Noriaki Kano, a Japanese economist, and he was trying to figure out the relationship between investing in building products and services and the results that you get in terms of customer satisfaction. So he started to study what was going on, and he built a model that explained what he found in his initial research. And the way the model works is that there are two axes. So the result we're shooting for is what we call, "user satisfaction," and user satisfaction we can measure from extreme frustration to extreme delight. On the other axis is what we put into the product, the investment that we're going to make, going from low investment to high investment. And when he started looking at this he realized that there were basically three ways that you would get an output based on the input of making more investment. The first is called the, "performance payoff," and the performance payoff has to do with just keep investing, just keep adding features, keep putting in money, just keep trying to build out the product, and eventually if you put enough in, you will delight customers for a while. But it turns out that that's not the only one. There's another one that comes around the idea of basic expectations, and basic expectations has to do with what we expect to happen, what we expect to be there. Any of you who've traveled any time in the last year picked a hotel, went to the hotel, opened the door of your room, and I will guarantee that somewhere near the front door of your room was another door, and behind that door were these magical things. There was a sink, and a bathtub, and a toilet. And I'm going to bet you were completely surprised by this, because nowhere on the hotel website did it mention that your room had a bathroom, right? I probably just...it's like, "Wow! Look." [laughter] Jared: No. You expect a bathroom in your hotel room. I hate to break it to you, but this hasn't always been the case. Your parents' grandparents, if they went to a hotel they would probably not have found a hotel room that had its own bathroom unless you come from railroad money. It would not have happened, because only the very wealthy had bathrooms in their own hotel rooms. Everybody else shared a common bathroom down the hall if you were lucky. In the places that weren't that awesome the common bathroom was outside. That was it, right? In all of the course of human history, having bathrooms in your own hotel room are new. When Mary and Joseph checked into the manger... [laughter] Jared: ...this was not an expectation they had. So having that bathroom there is a basic expectation. There's a third outcome, which Kano called, "excitement generators," and it's about creating delight with small investments. And so what you do here is you make some investment, and you make things delightful. That investment can be everything from having a delightful tone and voice to your copy to providing some cool feature that people hadn't thought about. Some of the those take more investments than others. And the idea is that you invest in things, and you make people happy that way. There's a crazy little application called, "Shazam." If you've never used it, it's wacky. You hear music playing somewhere. You press that big button in the middle, and it listens to the music for a second, and then it tells you what the song is. And it's pretty awesome. It works most of the time, and it's delightful to people when it works, because it's new and novel, and it's this thing that you can't do any other way. It's like, "Oh, damn, what is this song? I wish I knew," and you can find out. You can get the soundtracks from commercials this way if you're fast enough on your phone you can capture the soundtrack, and now Shazam has actually moved into actually letting you expand the commercial experience and get more information about the product. It's an interesting little function, and it's really neat, and it's delightful. It's little things that delight people. The other day I landed at Dulles Airport, and as soon as I was able to use my phone again - probably actually a moment or so before, because I'm that sort of guy - I tweeted that, "Hey, I just landed at IAD. I'm going to head into Washington, D.C. as soon as I figure out how." And I immediately got a tweet back from a company called, "LimoRes ," that gave me a discount coupon for getting a ride into Washington, D.C. I thought, "OK, I'll check this out." And sure enough, there was a website. It wasn't the best website, but it was good enough, because I was able to find the phone number right away and give them a call and find out that they actually had a reasonable priced service to get into the city and it was going to take me half the time that it would have taken than if I'd taken the Metro in. You have to take a bus to the Metro, and then the Metro in, and then it stops 100 places. It's a miserable thing to go the Metro route so it's neat, and it was delightful to get that little thing. It's sort of expanding into the experience and helping. When Google Docs first came out the thing that made Google Docs really neat was that you could share documents. That was the thing that made it better than Microsoft products was how easy it was to just collaborate in a document. You could both see each other typing and all that stuff. And sharing documents turns out to be really simple in Google Docs. We were very excited when the iPhone app for Google Docs first came out because you could see all the document there. But it didn't do something that you wanted it to do, which was share those documents, right? You had to go to a desktop machine and login and share it. So you couldn't be out in a hall before a meeting and say, "Hey, I didn't see the agenda." Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't share it with you. Let me go share it to you." You couldn't do it from your phone. You had to go, "Oh, I've got to go back to my desk to share it with you," right? It sort of defeated the purpose. And it was amazing at how quickly sharing documents became a basic expectation of this product. And that's the way basic expectations work is that they are something that you miss. The thing about basic expectations, what's really key about basic expectations, is that you can only screw them up, right? This line here, this is neutral satisfaction. Being satisfied, by the way, saying that your software is satisfying is like saying that meal you had for dinner last night was edible. [laughter] Jared: Nobody is saying, "Oh, my god. You've got to go to this restaurant. We just ate at this wonderful place. The food was so incredibly edible." [laughter] Jared: There isn't a single Yelp review here that says, "Five stars. Edible, edible, edible." [laughter] Jared: "A plus, plus, plus. Would edible again," right? No. Nobody says that. Why? Because it's not the best you can do, and when we do satisfaction surveys we're stopping ourselves at a mediocre score. Satisfaction surveys, net promoter score, all these things are neutral. The best we can do is neutral, not delightful. And so what happens with basic expectations is you can just match them. Now, if you're missing basic expectations all over the boat, if you go into the bathroom at the hotel and there's no hot water, or the toilet doesn't flush, that sucks. That's going to frustrate your people, and they're going to talk about that all the time. "Oh, my god. Don't stay there. The bathrooms don't work." But if you make that toilet flush perfectly, you make that hot water come out instantly...the investment it takes to get the hot water to come out of the 25-floor of the Marriott is really expensive, and when they do it really well nobody talks about it, right, because basic expectations can never get above neutral satisfaction. Only delighters get you above neutral satisfaction. But you have to have all those basic expectations there, and a lot of companies fail because they don't meet basic expectations. So let's go back to Coca-Cola, where we need to sign in, we need to register in order to put in our code on the bottom of our cap, and we're trying to do that here. So how do we register? Well, it's easy as one, two, three we're told, and we have to put in our birthdate to make sure that we're eligible to do things. And then we put in our name, and our physical address, and then we create an email address, and we confirm our email address, and we put in our password, and we type it in again, and then we find out if we want to sign up for emails from Coca-Cola about Coca-Cola products, and do we want to sign up for emails about mobile things that Coca-Cola is doing? And then we get to prove that we're not a robot. And this is a miserable experience, and when you screw this up people just go away. Look at Groupon. Groupon asks you for only your full name, because computer's can figure out which one of those is your first name and which is your last name. So they take your full name, your email address, put our password in twice, and then you just, "Y," that you've read the terms of use like everybody does, and you're done. And that's a better experience. And the thing about all of this is that the way the Kano model works is that things are delighters today become basic expectations. That simplified sign-up form is going to be a basic expectation if it's not already. And suddenly what happens is this trend where you have to be constantly aware of the basic expectations. And right now people have so many basic expectations about their online experiences that it's catching organizations up, because we're just not aware. And oftentimes we have nothing to do with those expectations. A competitor set the expectation, and now we have to match it even though we may not even like it, because that's how it works. So it turns out that all of these forces are coming together to create this thing we call experience design, and in order to build teams that can do experience design, we have to make sure that those teams have the right skills. For example, we need to have skills to handle all those form interactions and all the different flows and transitions so we have to understand how to do interaction design. And, of course, the copy we produce is incredibly important, because if we have the wrong copy people won't figure out what is there. And we have to understand how to insure that we organize everything on the site - the navigation, the content - in a way that people can find it easily. And to do all of these things we need to have a process where we can take an idea and try it out and figure out what's going on and bring it back. And that means we have to really up our game when it comes to doing user research and going out and understanding how to collect feedback and understand what our users are trying to tell us. And, of course, we've got these huge tables of data, and we have to organize that data in ways that people can interact and glean insights and get the information they need from them, and that's often confused with visual design which people think of as this aesthetic thing, but it's not about aesthetics. It's about prioritization. It's about making sure the most important information jumps off the screen and the less important information just whispers at the time that it's necessary. And all of this culminates with this idea that at some point somebody has to say, "No," because the best experiences are ones that carefully curated, carefully pruned, so that only the most essential things are there, and everything else is left off the table. And it was Steve Jobs who said that he's just as proud of all the things that didn't go into the products as all the things that did, and that in his mind innovation was saying no to ten thousand things. But that means that you have to have ten thousand things to say no to so you have to have a process that produces a lot of ideas for which you then cherry pick the best ones. And this makes up all the skills that a team has to have. I wish it could be the total sum of skills that teams have to have now, but it turns out that as we're seeing more and more happening there are more skills out there. For instance, we have to know how to go into the field and figure out what users are doing in their natural context and bring that data in. We have to understand what is happening in our own domains. If we're working in medicine we have to understand medicine. If we work in libraries we have to understand library science. We have to understand how people interact with those things. And, of course, we have to know how the business works and how we generate money. And, of course, our business is now bringing in lots of information. We get so much raw data it's incredible. And we have to be able to figure out how to glean insights from that raw data, and then we have to then figure out well, of all the things we're building, how do we communicate which is valuable to our users? We have to know how to market the stuff that we have and the technology of what we're doing is completely changing. That makes things really complicated. We have to figure out how to take what we're doing and figure out how we're going to get the return from that investment. Because all of this stuff costs more, and we have to explain that to our seniors, so we have to understand how that works. Everything that we do now involves social networks, because everything is social. You're no longer a person interacting with a machine. You're a person interacting with other people and the machine is just a mediator in-between. We have to take that information and translate it into use cases that people understand so the developers can actually build what our intention is, which means we have to understand something about the methods that they use to build those things. This is all the skills that we have to have in order to build something. I wish I could tell you that it just stopped there. But as we've been doing research on what really separates a designer from the best designers, what makes the best designers the best from just an average designer. We found that it's not any of these things, that there are actually traits that go a little further. That storytelling, being able to get up and explain why you're doing what you're doing through stories of what users were doing or what the business needs to do is a key attribute and really essential. That being able to give critique, to actually put together a process where you constructively move the design forward by talking about and critiquing it is a really hard skill. Critique is not criticism. They are not the same thing. Everybody can criticize things but learning how to critique something is really hard. Being able to take ideas and render them and put them out there, that turns out to be essential. Being able to take those ideas, then, and present them in a way that makes sense to folks is key. What we've found is that there is this whole experience that is essential to creating great designs. That we have to have teams that have all these skills. It's no longer about roles. It's no longer about being the information architect, the visual designer. That great teams actually make sure that everybody can do the basics of all of these things because if everybody on the team can do the basics of all these things they can get a lot more done. We're seeing that the most effective teams are now skill based, not role based, and they're focused on getting everybody the right skills. Now where we're at is that all of these things have come together. What we see now, is that the forces out there, are creating this energy inside our organizations. That energy is at the top of the organization, it's at the bottom of the organization. It's making everybody hyper aware of experiences, both on mobile and the desktop just across the organization. That's why user experiences now at the center of this perfect storm. I think that's a great place for us. It's a place where we're going to be able to really do some awesome stuff, but the same time, it's really challenging. All that whining that User Experience Professionals have been doing for the past 20 years saying, "If they'd only listen to us, we could make things better." Their listening to us now. Now we actually have to do what we said we could do. It turns out, it's really hard. What I came to talk to you about today, is that we get to choose between which side we're on. Are we in the 10 percent of great stuff or the 90 percent crap in Sturgeon's Law? We found that by focusing on experience over technology and futures, we can do great work. We need to start looking at the gaps between our activities, and understanding how we design explicitly for that. We have to understand the econo model, and that we need to always be assessing what are now, basic expectations, while looking at those things that can be delighters. That's what I came to talk to you about. If for some reason, you don't know how to get ahold of me. It's fairly easy to do. [laughter] Jared: I have a website. UIE has a website, which has a lot of great resources on it. You can follow me on Twitter, particularly if you want to learn about the experience of flying United. [laughter] Jared: There's other things that I tweet about too. New and wonderful things about the experience of flying. Certainly, please connect up with me on LinkedIn. I love talking to people on LinkedIn. [applause]