Fresh Tilled Ideas

Garages Go Real-Time: An Unlikely Industry Embraces a Simple Web App

As many of us already know, expectation management is everything. That’s why many small businesses are turning to web applications to manage the expectations of their users. One of the coolest examples (and most surprising) I’ve seen recently is an application called AutoWatch from a company called SeeProgress. With this tool, a customer can log in to an Autobody or Garage’s licensed version of this application and view pictures and status updates of the work being performed on their car. This certainly helped my wife understand where the mechanics were in the process of restoring her totaled car after an accident back in November. Aside from the obvious plus of letting customers see the repair process first hand, these shops now benefit by having less call volume regarding the status of their car, as well as customers with expectations that are clearly managed by an easy-to-use system.

Makes you wonder what other industries could benefit from simple technology like this…

Sc@n Th*s!

Last week my wife and I were at a friend’s wedding. Between the ceremony and the reception we stopped off at a Bank of America ATM to quickly deposit some checks and get some cash – in case it wasn’t ‘open bar.’ Turns out our stop was not that quick after all.

While waiting an inordinate amount of time for the two people in front of us, we began to wonder what was taking these folks so long. Just then, one of the customers finished his transaction, backed away from the ATM very cautiously, scowled and drove away. “No sweat,” I thought. His problem had nothing to do with me… But when I went to deposit my checks I encountered the same problem.

Bank of America has just implemented a new system in some of its ATMs that no longer require you to deposit checks in envelopes. Instead, you scan each check and the monitor reads the amount and asks you if it’s correct. After each deposit you get a printed slip with the actual scanned image of the check on it. Cool huh? Only in theory. Of the four checks I had, only two were accepted. The other two had been in my wallet for about 2 weeks and were not ‘just out of the checkbook’ crisp. I felt like a teenager desperately trying to straighten a dollar bill on the side of a vending machine. After about 8 minutes, I walked away in frustration only having completed 50% of my deposit.

The point? I spent about three times as long in front of the ATM to complete roughly half of what I had intended. From a black and white, mathematical perspective that means the new system BOA has pushed on us is six times worse than the previous one. From an emotional perspective – I was fuming. It was abundantly clear that they had not tested this technology in REAL WORLD SCENARIOS. Some engineer signed off on the feature and the head of marketing added it to a bullet list in a brochure somewhere. So where is the customer in all of this? Well… I’m guessing you can find them waiting in line at your nearest ATM.

iTouch and Starbucks: Creating a vitual world

So the iTouch was launched yesterday. I think this is a brilliant example of marketing genius. From the Apple website:

The Starbucks partnership was a good example of how Apple is merging technology and services in an attempt to build an entertainment ecosystem that customers won't want to leave. Apple said an iPhone or iPod Touch user entering one of Starbucks' 5,800 Wi-Fi-enabled coffee shops in the U.S. would see a special icon featuring the company's logo. Clicking on the icon would enable the person to buy the song currently playing in the caf, or a recently played tuned.

If you're thinking on who to partner with, try thinking like Starbucks and Apple. Think lifestyle, think activity. Don't think demographic, don't think psychographic. Think space, think community.

Green is the new cool

This sign is posted at the international arrivals parking lot at Logan International in Boston. Its very encouraging to see how cities are moving towards a reward model for people that make smart environmental decisions.

Ten essentials for designers before they start a project

If you're a designer then you probably have had a bad client or two. By bad client I mean someone who doesn't pay on time, or at all, or maybe they pushed the scope out a little each day until the original spec was completely indistinguishable from the mast revision. After a few trial and error experiences we developed a way to filter the good clients from the bad clients even before a project started. We called this filter "The Lens" and we still use it every time we start a new project or have to develop a proposal for a client:

1. Never start a project until you have received a signed contract and a deposit for at least 25% of the project estimate. In some cases, like projects under $10k or if the client is overseas, a deposit of 50% is acceptable.
2. Make sure you know who the contact person is at the client company responsible for payments. In larger companies admin and A/P (accounts payable) staff may be in a completely different department or even in a different country.
3. Ask your contacts at the company how many vendors they have worked with in the past and if they have had any bad experiences. If there is a trend of vendor issues then it's most likely because the client has some internal issues that no vendor will ever be able to solve, no matter how good they are.
4. Find out if the company's leaders are 'first-timers' or if they have started and built several companies before. Our experience leads us to believe that entrepreneurs with 2 - 3 successes under their belt make better clients.
5. If a client asks you to revise your proposal more than 3 times they are either never planning on working with you or deliberately wearing you down. Walk away.
6. Whenever possible work for a flat fee and not on an hourly basis. Provide a detailed spec at the start of the project, get sign off and get signed change orders every time the scope is changed by the client. If you stick to the spec your projects will be more profitable.
7. Establish if the client values outsourcing to a professional services company like yours. There are some cases where clients are forced to use outsiders but don't value outsider's efforts. They think they can do it all themselves and they won't be proven otherwise no matter how hard you try.
   
8. Don't start work on an existing site or application until you have had the chance to do a full audit. Never ever work on a project if you don't know what's 'under the hood' and don't take the client's word for it that everything is in working order.
9. If a prospect tells you that you are one of several companies that they are considering then either walk away or ask who the other companies are. If the prospect refuses to tell you, then tell them that you cannot provide them with a complete proposal without being able to compare apples to apples. If this doesn't work make the bidding process as short and painless as you can. Long bidding process waste your time and resources.
10. Check your client's references. Ask around your industry about your client and their leadership team. Google them and check out their online profiles. You'll be very surprised with what you sometimes find out.

This is not a flawless system but it's  pretty good at weeding out the bad clients from the good ones.

Why everyone is not a good client for us

Over they last few years we have received hundreds of emails requesting our design and marketing services. Amongst the wonderful and exciting projects have been some less encouraging opportunities. Here are some of those emails and calls:

1. "We want to build a full automated building management system for a 150 unit development. We have $600 to make this happen."
2. "I've already received a quote from India for $12 an hour so you now what you are up against." - Let me save you the disappointment...
3. "What would you be willing to do in exchange for equity?" - Where was this guy in 2001?
4. When we asked for a design spec: "I hate orange!" - What a pity, we like orange.
5. "We've already fired four of our previous guys but we think you might be the one to turn our bad streak around." - Isn't that what Liz Taylor said to her third husband?
6. "If you do this website for free, I can refer you to loads of other clients" - Sure, pay your bill first and then we'll discount your bill with each closed lead you send us.
7. "My cousin said he can do the site for half of what quoted me." - Excellent, then he's going to love doing the work too.
8. "You told me two months ago you had people available to do the work, now you tell me they are committed to another project. How do you run your business like this?" - Like any other successful business, we apply our resources to the paying clients, not to the one's sitting around waiting for better days.
9. "I promise I'll spend at least $5,000 with you if you can discount your rate by half." - Sounds terrific. We work twice as much for half the rate. Awesome, when can we start?
10. "Our idea is sort of like eBay, MySpace and del.icio.us mashed up. We'd like a proposal this week." - Sure, our idea is you send us a bag of cash in non-sequential numbered notes tied to a gold bar and tossed through the office window.

Above all else my favorites are the companies that insist on asking us to sign an NDA before we look at their idea or business plan. Firstly, we are not in the business of stealing our client's ideas, there are just so many reasons why this doesn't make sense. Secondly, businesses succeed because they execute on a good idea not because they have a good idea. If I had a dollar for every new business idea that comes across my desk, I wouldn't need to work. My advice to you is to do exactly the reverse and tell everyone you know. You are going to need all the help you can get.

Brochures are officially dead

Savo Group, a sales enablement technology company, reports that perhaps as much as 50% of all marketing documents go unused by sales organizations. In our ongoing research on sales enablement best practices, we've found that in some organizations the percentage may be as high as 90%.

Seth Godin also points this out in a recent post "If you've ever written a direct mail letter, you've probably agonized. "One more sentence," you wonder, "this might just be the one." After all, direct mail has a job to do... you send the letter and you get the sale (or you don't.) Making it longer and more powerful and more complete are all essential tasks.

Brochures are a bit different. Brochures rarely lead to a sale. They lead to a sales call. So a brochure has to be engaging and hopefully viral. But its only job is to keep you in the running, not end in a transaction."

Unfortunately brochures seldom are worth the money they are written on. We often say around here when asked to design a brochure "would you prefer the money or the box?" Meaning do you want to hang onto your money or do you want a box of brochures that nobody really wants or will probably never see.

Kill the brochure. Spend your marketing money on something that actually gets seen and used.

Wallpaper making a comeback

Wallpaper tends to be something your grandmother would go shopping for, right? Maybe not anymore. There are too many great new designs to pick just one but I think everyone would love to have this somewhere in their lives. I have two boys and it would be a big hit at our house. The frames wallpaper is available from Graham & Brown.

Retail needs to catch up with the web

Designing for shopping is often developed around what's easy for the store clerks and not for the customer (as pointed out so well by Seth Godin in this last post). I'm always amazed that the gardening stuff is outside the grocery store during the summer when both the carriages and the checkouts are inside the store. This is stupid. I'm not going to to grab a 30 lb bag of mulch on my way into the grocery store and drag it 100 yards looking for a big enough carriage. Why not have a register outside or create a system that scans just the tags of the items that are outside. That way you just grab a tag and pay on your way out.

The related thing that bugs be is Home Depot's delivery service and rental trucks. They are time wasting and expensive. If 800-GOT-JUNK? can be at my house in 20mins to haul away a truck load of junk then why doesn't Home Depot have a similar on-demand delivery system. Here's how it could work: Buy your items and pay. Hand your receipt and address to the 'delivery kiosk' located at the exit. The delivery guys are a fleet of small trucks just waiting to pack up your stuff and follow you home. Think about it, you'd buy more, because you'd have the capacity to have more delivered and you'd buy more big ticket items because you'd have the means to get it home.

I'm sure we'd all be willing to pay an extra $25 - $35 to have a new patio set or over sized grill delivered.

My choice for worst UI design: MyCheckFree

I much prefer to post about good design but sometimes you can't help but notice just how poorly things are designed. I use a company called MyCheckFree which allows me to post payments to vendors electronically, like any other bill payment system. I originally signed up for their service because my bank didn't support all the vendors we needed to pay.

My bitch is essentially about the user interface which does a really poor job of showing you what's owed and what's been paid. In the screenshot it looks like we owe all of the amounts listed and you would be forgiven for thinking you have to select them and pay them all. The reality is that the bills have all been paid but how do you know that? After struggling with the system for a few hours and not getting any help from support I'm afraid that I'm going to have to move on and find a service that thinks through these issues before they go live.