Chris Turitzin

Lost Conversations

I have been thinking recently of the changing ways that we communicate due to new technologies. What we talk about may be a newly developing generation divide.

Here are a couple of examples of quickly dissapearing conversations.

How do you get there? (replaced by Google Maps/GPS)

What is a good restaurant in town? (replaced by Yelp)

What is a (random object)? (replaced by Wikipedia)

What is your phone number? (replaced by Facebook)

Where are you? (replaced by Loopt/Google Latitude)

Any other ideas? What else is being/will be replaced?

Nurturing Decision: Wine, a case study

Inspired by a recent prompt from my beloved design group, El Corazon de la Design, to redesign a shopping experience, I’m going to explore the paradox of choice.

One of the classic interaction design problems is allowing people to narrow down a huge number of possibilities to a couple that are of most interest to them.

Matching a user with something that makes them happy is the goal. This is the purpose of every collaborative filtering engine, music recommendation service, and online store.

The need for help in decision making occurs in situations where:

1. People cannot test before they choose.
2. Products look similar.
3. There are a huge number of products available.
4. People often come in uneducated about what they want.
5. The difference between a “Good” product and a “Bad” product requires education to realize.

I decided to study a prime example of disambiguation of products to find how a store can help customers choose what will make them happy. I spent an afternoon at K&L Wine Merchants in SOMA of San Francisco. Wine is a great example of an ambiguous product. All bottles LOOK the same, but there is a rich culture surrounding wine that purports huge differences in flavor and quality between bottles.

With the wine store as inspiration, I will go through the forms of decision help that I observed:

Matchmaking

Read Stuart Skorman’s book, Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur, and he talks about how to build a video store to help customers find the perfect movie. He calls this “movie matchmaking.”

The way this works at K&L is that employees ask customers “What are you going to be eating with the wine?” or “What other wines do you like?” These are two classic tools of recommendation: through pairing, and through similar tastes. With a bit of education an employee can make good recommendations.

Exaggerated Opinions

At K&L, employees spend time tasting all of the wines they sell (this is A LOT). In my time at K&L, I overheard one customer yell “What do you think of this Pinot from Oregon?” an employee replied “That one… It’s OK. It’s not European, but is full of ripe fruit.”

Employees need to be able to show they are competent, but with something like wine, where taste is so subjective, it doesn’t really matter what they say. Most customers will see them as experts as long as they appear confident in their opinions.

Editorial Recommendation

The wine world is rich with reviews, and also plagued by them. The most famous are the Wine Spectator point rankings. Wineries live and die by a simple 0-100 point score.

Universally known point scores give customers a simple way of scanning many products and pulling the few best that match their price point.

At K&L, they label some of their wines with editorial reviews and often mention the wine scores. They do not show the scores often and obviously. It is clear that they want to sell wines by more than just numbers. Offering such a simple decision making tool, doesn’t allow K&L to form a closer relationship with their customers through personalized recommendation and community education.

Community Building

To develop loyal and educated customers, K&L offers two forms of community education, a newsletter and wine tastings.

The newsletter is nothing special, but it gives customers something to take with them and read on the couch, dinner table or toilet. It educates about new wine trends, and informs about deals.

Tastings teach people to speak the language of wine, form relationship with employees, and have fun. It is a way to let people join the exclusive cult of educated wine consumers. Tastings of course, also sell a lot of wine.

Wrapping up

With a product like wine, where quality is very subjective and taste varies from person to person, what it all comes down to is building a story around a wine. Any of the techniques I spoke about will do this. All a customer needs is a one-liner to tell at the party they are hosting. This could be “This is a 92-pointer” or “This wine goes perfectly with lamb” or “I tasted this at K&L and loved it.”

When selling products we all need to realize, education can only go so far. People don’t need to know everything about the history or specs of products, but they DO need to feel good about WHY they made the decision they did. All we are doing in helping a customer make a decision is to arm them with something to think about while they sip or something to tell their friends as they uncork.

Music is Changing

As a followup to my User Centered vs Self-Centered Design post, I’ve been working pretty intensely on a Next Gen Music Player over the last month. This player is inspired by needs I have observed in myself and in friends music listening patterns

I realized two core needs for music listening:

#1 For a continuous streaming experience.

#2 To listen to any song I want, whenever.

My personal problem statement:

I couldn’t find any music player that catered to BOTH of these needs. I would always find myself switching between Pandora and Mixturtle/Songza to fill these two needs.

Pandora is frustrating because of license restrictions. I can’t make specific song requests, and my stations always seem to corner me in specific genre. I ended up listening to very unrisky music.

Online music services (Mixturtle, Songza…) are really nice, but my behavior was to sign on looking forward to playing one or two songs, playing those, and then feeling lost about what I should listen to next.

I set out to create a music player that would offer ad-hoc “stations” set up by listening to a couple good songs. It plays the requests and continues playing similar music until you tell it to stop. You can set up bizarre mixes like Britney/Metallica Mix Radio. You can also ‘favorite’ songs to add to a personal, everyone-growing, online music library. That is the idea, simple, but I believe powerful.

And, yes, it is all free.

I’m releasing in private alpha to gather feedback. If you would like to test out the current product, post a comment, and I’ll send you the link.

User centered vs. Self centered design

After working now in the design industry for 3 years and having studied it for 4 years, I’m going to start publishing some of my findings.

Here is one:

In the Stanford Product design program, user centered design is key. This involved deeply understanding who you are designing for, finding their quirks, needs, and then making prototypes and getting feedback. It was all about express, test, cycle. You express your idea in physical or virtual prototype, test with users, get feedback, and reiterate until you have something pretty damn good. This process is very useful if you are designing for a market far from your own life or a user different from yourself.

But what if you are one of your users? This is where the fallacy of user centered design emerges. The user-centered design process implies that “I don’t know what my users would like.” It implies a fuzzy unknown between what you would design without research and what you would design with it. In my personal experience this has allowed me to create products with the assumption that “users would like it” while I, myself, would not use the product.

So, luckily many people know nothing about user centered design. The second, and more common, type of design is self-centered design. You can recognize this process with problem statements like “I want a better _____” or “I wish I could do ____”.

Self-centered design is simple. I see something that I want, and I make it. Along the way, I can continually pass my product through my own bullshit filter which is simple: Am I using it yet!? Unless you can’t wait to start using your product, you are running down the wrong path. I am currently designing a web based music player, and as an avid Pandora listener, I will only be pleased  once I use mine instead of Pandora.

Paul Buchheit told a story at Startup School in 2008 of how he created Gmail. He basically created Gmail by thinking of all the problems he had with current email clients. He then found 100 people at Google and asked them “What are your problems with your email app?” This gave him a big list of features, and he began to make an application. Every so often, he would poll these 100 if they would use his current version of the Gmail. Once a majority said yes, he was done. Gmail is one of the best examples where good design is the main product differentiator.

Gmail is a good example of mixing self-centered and user-centered design. Paul was basically designing for himself, but using “users” to supply him with more problems to fix and giving him final thumbs up or thumbs down feedback.

The third type of design is nobody-centered design, and this is a dead end where many people find themselves. Technologist fall in love with a new technology and “do something cool with it”, big corporations create applications because “everyone else is doing it”, or designers or artists make something that is “intellectually interesting.” This is why so many hours and projects go to waste. The creators of a product are so impressed by the coolness or interestingness of their product, they forget to check if anyone actually wants to use it. Don’t get stuck in this pit.


Takeaways

1. For mass audience products, you are most likely a user, design for yourself.

2. Designing for yourself is much easier and quicker. But make sure to pass your product through the bullshit test every week to make sure you are heading down the right path.

3. User centered design can do two things:

4.You must design for someone.

Back in SF

Hey Dudes,

I just flew back into SF today from modesto.

I had a very nice week in modesto: visiting Brandon in La Grange, going to Yosemite with the family, playing with Tara (not be confused with Terra), and going to the Queenbean AMAP (as much as possible).

For the incrowd:

You should tot YOT go to Modesto!

Food Bank

I spent today working at the San Francisco Food Bank.

My team of about 30 people packaged 7000 lbs of carrots and bagged 2000 1lb bags of frozen pasta.

It was nice to do some ‘non-brain’ work. It also got me thinking more about how I can apply my skills to volunteering/social good.

The simplest thing to do would be to set up a little group that makes pro-bono websites for non-profits helping them communicate what they do for raising funds and helping clients.

More to think about this.

Move from wordpress

I personally, really dislike wordpress.

I feel like it takes too much setup, making a post takes too many clicks, and the visuals are really quite boring without customization.

So, I’m switching over to tumblr. I’m hoping this allows me to get past the activation energy of writing posts.