RIP Jeanne-Claude

Jeanne-Claude, wife and collaborator of Christo, died today suddenly of a brain aneurism at age 74.

I met her once, at a talk she and Christo gave at University of Chicago in 1997. I didn’t know that much about them at the time other than a passing familiarity with some of their more well known pieces. I expected a snooty, aloof, artier-than-thou character. Nothing could have been further from the truth. They were two of the most humble, down-to-earth people you could imagine. They financed all their big projects through sale of prepatory drawings and sculptures. They never took donations or corporate funding. Most of their pieces took years and decades to come to fruition, and each only lasted for two weeks.

Leslie and I saw their Gates piece in Central Park and it was a wonderful experience. (Pictures I took at it are in the slideshow above.) We were lucky to score a room overlooking central park on the 23rd floor, so had a birds eye view before and after it was opened, as well as strolling around. Unforgettable.

Good User Experience Starts with Good Employee Experience

A few years ago I was enjoying brunch with some friends at the Tavern at Lark Creek, which is rightfully known for excellent food and attentive and friendly service. Part way through the meal I had to excuse myself to use the bathroom. The bathroom was up some windy stairs, and was very nicely appointed, even more nicely treated than the dining room itself. As restaurant bathrooms go it was very pleasant, but I did not give it much thought.

At the end of the meal before hitting the road for a slightly long drive, I decided to make another pit-stop. This time I saw a downstairs bathroom, which was not as nice as the first one I had used upstairs (thought it was not by any means unpleasant). It became clear that I had taken a wrong turn the first time and had used the employee bathroom.

I could have chosen to be miffed that the restaurant didn’t ensure that the guest bathroom was as good as it could be. Instead, I realized that the quality of the employee bathroom was one sign that the restaurant cared for its staff, and recognized that taking care of the EX - the employee experience - is a prerequisite to a consistently high quality UX - user (customer) experience. They realized that “customer centric” does not mean ignoring employees. In fact it’s just the opposite, if you want to offer truly good service to customers, you need to start with treating your staff right.

As Olive Garden President David Pickens puts it, “It’s very difficult for the experience of the guests to exceed the experience of the staff.”

When you look at the company’s that consistently deliver superior UX - Zappos, Amazon, Google, Southwest, Starbucks back in the old days, Levenger, Niemen Marcus, the one thing they all have in common is that they pay huge amounts of attention to the quality of life of their staff, creating a culture and infrastructure of training that help their staff do the right thing, even when there isn’t an exact rule about what to do in a novel situation.

As an extreme example, read the letter that Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh wrote to employees when the acquisition by Amazon was announced. It is manically focused on the culture of the company and the worklife of the staff, superseding just about every other concern. “Culture” shows up 23 time in it, 7 times in association with “unique”, and 21 times with “brand”. In other words, Hsieh makes an intimate connection between the internal culture of the company and the external brand as it appears to customers - he recognizes that the EX is directly correlated with UX.

New York's Taxis and the Power of the Nudge

An NY Times article illustrates the large effects that can accumulate from small nudges that influence behavior:

[T]he back-of-the-cab swipe has emerged as an unlikely savior for New York’s taxi industry, even as other cities’ fleets struggle to find fares in a deep recession.

Overall ridership and revenue have increased. More and more fares are being paid with credit cards, even for shorter rides. And tips for drivers, usually an early casualty of tough times, are up sharply, double over the pre-plastic days.

…

The increase in tips, however, may have less to do with New Yorkers’ generosity than with the preset amounts suggested to passengers on the taxi’s software systems. In many of the city’s cabs, riders are offered options for their tip depending on the length of the ride. For fares under $15, a screen prompts tips of $2, $3 or $4; the numbers can range from 15 percent to 30 percent for higher fares. The presets are used about 70 percent of the time, according to industry estimates.

This perfectly illustrates the notion of giving people “nudges” - little hints about how to behave - and how influential this can be, even when it’s quite transparent as in this case.

The key was making the credit card experience much easier than the usual pain-in-the-neck that it is in other US cities, where the driver reluctantly drags out an old-school mechanical swipe reader, or rubs your card with a pen on a carbon paper receipt.

Although New York was late to bring credit cards to cabs, it leapfrogged ahead by pioneering a customer-friendly system that required no signed receipts, no minimum payment and an interactive device that let passengers swipe the card and add tips themselves.

This has opened up credit card use for short trips. Like Las Vegas’ use of chips, the detachment from physical cash “lubricates”, shall we say, people’s willingness to part with their money.

Once considered a convenient payment method for longer trips, often to the area’s airports, credit cards are now being used for shorter, cheaper rides, the type of $5 rainy-day indulgences that were once handled exclusively with cash.

Amos Tamam, president of VeriFone Transportation Systems, whose card readers are in 6,700 cabs, or about half of the city’s fleet, said his company’s average credit-card fare is now less than $15, down from $16 a year ago.

“The more usage you get with credit cards, the lower the average ticket is going to go,” Mr. Tamam said.

Read more >

The Psychology of Healthcare Reform

The House has passed the first comprehensive reform package of the health insurance industry in decades, which is now up for debate in the Senate. This is a highly complex issue, but there are some quite basic reasons why it’s so difficult to accomplish significant reform, and these have to do with psychological responses to change and uncertainty. 

A few years ago I was fortunate to work with a couple of organizational consultants, and they introduced me to the concept of NICs and PUFs. These funny sounding acronyms give insight into why healthcare reform is so difficult for many people to support. (And once you have this shorthand for thinking about scenarios, you find ways that they apply in all aspects of life.)

The two acronyms, and their counter parts PICs and NUFs, refer to the likelihood that something will happen, whether the impact with be positive or negative, and how quickly the impact will happen.

PICs: Positive, Immediate and Certain. This is the best case - a good impact will be for sure happening to me soon.

NICs: Negative, Immediate and Certain. This is the worst case - a bad impact that will surely happen, and right away. People instinctively avoid these as much as possible.

PUFs: Positive, Uncertain and Future. Something good may happen, but if it does, it will be in an indeterminate future, and I don’t really know how good it will be if it does happen.

NUFs: Negative, Uncertain and Future. The opposite of course, that something bad may happen at some point in the future, with an uncertain degree of bad-ness.

Applying these to the healthcare debate, they clearly illustrate why there is resistance to reform.

The consequences of reform in terms of money-out-of-pocket, quality of care, and choice of care are all unclear for most people, naturally so since the changes are complex. It’s therefore unclear whether the changes will be positive or negative in nature. Depending on one’s financial situation, job security, and satisfaction with current healthcare service, one may be inclined to see the change going more in the positive or negative direction.

The battle over the public option partly revolves around whether people will get bumped off their existing plans and onto a government plan. This would represent potentially a large scale change, and again may be seen positively or negatively depending on one’s circumstances. But when that switch may happen is unclear. Would the introduction of the public plan cause an immediate sweeping change as employers dropped their private insurance for the public plan, or would the status quo hold? Since this is unclear, people have differing opinions about how it will play out.

People who see PICs in healthcare reform obviously support it - they think it will bring positive changes, quickly. This may be because they stand to gain personally, or see immediate benefits for those who are currently under- or uninsured.

People who see NICs are against reform, believing that it will have immediate negative results, whether for themselves or others.

PICs and NICs are going to be hard for politicians to sway as they are pretty entrenched in their positions (anchored by the Certainty and the perceived near-term consequences). Immediate impacts, whether positive or negative, often have a more powerful influence than ambiguous longer-term ones. That’s why dieting is difficult - immeidate pleasure of a cupcake now vs possible ambiguous connection to expanded waistline later. It’s also why saving is difficult - the benefits in the far of future feel less compelling that buying the latest gadget or trinket today.

It’s the PUFs and NUFs that are the swing votes in the healthcare debate, and here we are tending to see the “devil you know is better than the devil you don’t” dynamic playing out. With something as literally life and death as healthcare and insurance, the glass-half-empty NUFs tend to outweigh optimistic PUFs. If there is a chance of a negative result that you can’t define or predict, then it can seem safer to stick with the status quo rather than hold out hope for an ambiguous improvement at an indeterminate point in the future.

Family Cars

I got into a nostalgic mood the other night and started thinking about all the cars my family had owned when I was growing up in Englad. I can’t quite remember them all, but here’s most of them.

Mum’s cars

Austin 1100

This was the car my mum and dad (and my mum after they separated) had, it’s the earliest car I can remember and still have fond memories of it. Ours was navy blue, and I think a 4 door. No seatbelts, viny seats, huge bus-driver steering wheel. But the visual proportions hold up well to this day. When you see one on the the street it looks tiny (a bit bigger than an original Mini), and makes you wonder why parents with 2 kids need and SUV these days.

Peugeot 104

The car my mum got to replace the Austin 1100 when it finally died, must have been around 1980. (There may have been a car between them, but if so I don’t remember what it was.) It was teal-ish blue, just like this one. Never cared for it much. My first accident (as a passenger) was in this car - a wheel fell of a car going in the opposite direction and spun across the road and hit the side of the Peugeot.

Dad’s cars

Triumph Toledo

My dad had a whole string of shitty second-hand cars, the first of which I remember was this Triumph. Smelled of oil and gasoline inside. Maroon, just like this picture. Didn’t last long.

Austin Princess

Another monumentally crappy car, courtesy of British Leyland. But at least it was spacious. I thought it was cool as it had a feature I’d never seen before in a car, a fold-down armrest in the rear set, where I sat. An interesting wedge shape, but horrible mechanically. Rusted quickly.

Alfa Romeo Alfetta

In one fell swoop my dad redeemed himself in my schoolboy eyes by buying a used Alfetta. I loved, loved, loved this car. Like all Alfa’s of the period, it rusted out in about a week, and a lot of the time it didn’t run at all. But when it did run, its engine was a thing of glory - this was the first time I thought consciously about the sound of the engine. It was wonderful. I have very fond memories of driving down country lanes in Kent with Buddy Holly blasting on the radio.

Ford Sierra

My dad’s first new car was a radical one, a year one Ford Sierra. This was the British equivalent of the Ford Taurus, but with even more radical aerodynamic styling.

Grandpa’s cars

My grandfather on my mum’s side was quite a car nut, and went through them at a good clip. I probably haven’t included them all here. He mostly favored French cars, being a lover of all things French. I don’t remember my grandmother ever driving, so that’s why they are “his” cars.

Land Rover

My grandparents owned a farm, and early on I remember an ancient Land Rover with canvas covers over the back. Very crude but indestructible. After they sold their farm, the family that took it over had a business modifying Land Rovers for expeditions.

Renault 4 Van

The other vehicle he had specifically for farm use was this Renault 4 delivery van. My brother and I learned how to drive in this, me at age 12 and him at age 9. Grandpa took us out to an old World War 2 aerodrome and we lurched around the weed-encrusted runway. Tremendous fun.

Peugeot 504

I always liked this car. It has quirky yet stately styling. Theirs was a cream white. I loved the armrests on the back doors, they had a great curve upward that fit my little hands perfectly. My grandmother didn’t like it because she couldn’t fit her handbag in the glovebox. But she had that same complaint about every car.

Alfa Romeo 33

Grandpa’s only dalliance with an Italian car. He must have been going through a phase, as I also remember brochures for the lovely Lancia Delta on the kitchen table, which I would have much preferred. Alfa was going through an edgy phase, and the 33 wasn’t the prettiest of cars. Quite fun to ride around in, though not as magical as the Alfetta.