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For our Chinese-speaking friends, you can now watch Sal Khan's Gel video with Chinese subtitles. People I talked to in China recently hadn't heard of Khan Academy (though there are Khan Academy videos posted on RenRen's 56.com, which is not blocked by the great firewall)... I hope this video helps spread Sal's work a bit further there.

And thanks to the good people at Beijing-based Yeeyan.org for creating the subtitled video. Yeeyan is a company that crowdsource-translates English-language media to Chinese. I understand they have over 10,000 translators in their community, and very good editors on staff to keep up quality control.

This is the first Gel video to be subtitled in Chinese - and hosted on RenRen, where all Chinese users can access it - and I hope Yeeyan and I can make more available soon.

From Taking E-Mail Vacations Can Reduce Stress: a UC Irvine study has found that "people who do not look at e-mail on a regular basis at work are less stressed and more productive." (See research PDF.) The suggested solution is to "take a few days away" from email, and rely on coworkers to pass along any "important work events."

Much like inbox bankruptcy, simply running away from email overload doesn't solve the problem. What does work is to engage email as described in Bit Literacy (free Kindle ebook, free iBookstore ebook). To summarize: move your action items to a todo list, and archive or delete everything else. The inbox should be empty at least once a day.

Here's my inbox as I type this. It's really hard to feel overloaded or stressed looking at this:

In a recent NYT article we learn that the taxi-riding experience is being intensely redesigned:

[Taxi commissioner] Yassky and the designer, Francois Farion of Nissan, were in the midst of rethinking every element of New York’s next taxicab, and when a once-in-a-lifetime chance comes along, no detail can be overlooked.

Every single detail, scoured by the agency head and the lead designer. The material of the plastic partition, the color of the meter cover, the sound of the horn. Impressive.

Still, despite the exhaustively detail-oriented process, it feels like something is missing. Or rather someone. Is there anyone else whose input might be important on these decisions? Perhaps a person who might be affected? Can you think of anyone other than the city agency, and the vendor, whose input might be helpful in determining the outcome?

Or perhaps we have all the relevant constituents in the room: which would mean that Nissan is designing a single car for the taxi commissioner to ride, alone, throughout the city. 

I feel silly spelling it out, but it's worth stating: when a decision affects customers, it's helpful to involve customers in the decision. 

We do learn that Nissan conducted a focus group, in which "some New Yorkers said they were unsure about the whole endeavor: 'It’s a 10-minute cab ride anyway, so why bother?'" In other words, a standard focus group – asking a group of people their general opinions – failed to generate specific insights into what customers wanted. Instead, imagine if Nissan had observed the current customer experience and tried to understand people's key unmet needs.

Meanwhile, here's how the team chose a taxi horn:

Three choices were proffered. The first option, more common to Europe, had a screechy, goofy tone; Mr. Yassky grimaced slightly as the honk filled the room. ... Finally, a solution was found. Mr. Yassky tensed for the third horn, only to relax as a mournful trumpet blast resonated through the speakers. It was deep but not jarring, loud but not shrill.

I suppose we'll find out how actual riders react to the new taxi experience once the budget is fully spent and the taxis are fully deployed.

I don't mean to pick on the taxi commission, as they're simply using the process the most common innovation process today: making significant decisions in the customer experience without any meaningful inclusion of the customer in the process. 

For your next customer experience project, make sure to include customers early, and meaningfully, in the process. 

Readers of a certain age may remember the late-80s college-rock hit "Birth, School, Work, Death" – a memorable, if stark, rumination on the stages of life. It's actually helpful in the business world, too: the customer experience a company offers is often related to its life cycle – specifically, where it is in the continuum of birth, growth, maturity, and decline.

Used correctly, it can grant you a kind of superpower: You can often understand a company by its customer experience; and sometimes you can understand why a customer experience is bad, or good, by considering the life cycle of the company. 

Here I'll quote the excellent book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, by Richard Rumelt, describing a hypothetical company that has experienced early success with a customer-oriented product:

Relying on the profits accruing to accumulated resources, they will lose the discipline of tight integration, allowing independent fiefdoms to flourish and adding so many products and projects that integration becomes impossible. Faced with the natural slowing of growth over time, they will try to create an appearance of youthful vigor with bolt-on acquisitions. Then, when their resource base eventually becomes obsolete, they, too, will become pery to another generation of upstarts.

Sound familiar? A company with a previously good customer experience that gradually becomes cluttered with products and projects? I can think of some examples. But it's helpful to see it described as a normal (if unfortunate) pattern shared by many organizations.

Once you are aware of the effect of life cycle on the customer experience, you'll start spotting examples everywhere. Just a few weeks ago Forbes ran a column called Why Best Buy is Going out of Business...Gradually:

First comes the strategic bankruptcy, well in progress at Best Buy, where management’s sole focus is improving some arbitrary metric from last quarter, even when doing so actually interferes with customers trying to buy something else. The financial collapse comes later. But if history is any guide, the second part, once it starts, will be quick.

As with many large retailers unable to cope with new channels and new consumer expectations, the company will continue to sputter on fumes, slowing down bit by bit until one day it just stops moving. Think of Elek-Tek, Virgin Megastores, or KB Toys.

Notice the similarity between the two quotes? An aging company is focused on something other than the customer experience – a short-term metric, or a short-term boost from an acquisition – and will inevitably pay the price.

The obvious question is how companies like this can change their direction before it's too late. 

The first step is to recognize that customer experience is a strategic issue – not primarily a tactical issue of interface elements. If the CEO and other top stakeholders take customer experience seriously, the company has a chance of a turnaround. If not, the smart and well-intentioned employees elsewhere in the firm can make some tactical improvements but the long-term outcome will not measurably change.

I'd argue that customer experience the single most important issue for many companies today. So tweet this, share this, forward this to your favorite top exec!

Here's something you don't often see: more than a half-million views for a user-research video. But it's well deserved. In How Real People Will Use Windows 8, tech blogger Chris Pirillo shows his father (60-or-70-something) using the release version of Microsoft Windows 8. It makes for gripping video. Like any good listening lab, we're seeing a real live user experience: a person honestly try to derive some value from the product. We feel the dad's frustration as he can't figure out how to navigate away from a confusing display of app icons.

The irony is that the father is a longtime Windows user, and at the end of the video, he asks whether Microsoft is trying to get him to switch to Mac. (!) Given the trajectory of the iPad's growth and people's delight with it, versus Microsoft's stagnation in the consumer market due to people's continued frustration with Windows, his joking comment is partially true: Microsoft, despite itself, is launching a new product that will likely drive more consumers to buy a Mac.

Speaking of Microsoft, I have to wonder how (or whether) this video is making any changes there in the mindset of the Windows product managers. Did the company conduct non-directed listening labs on the product, see this utter failure of the UX, and still approve the launch of such an obviously problematic interface? Or did lower-level product managers know about this problem all along but were outvoted by higher-up execs who just needed to ship something, anything, to meet a launch deadline?

Amazing to think it's nine years old already: our whitepaper Joining Strategy and Usability: the Customer Experience Methodology (PDF) is still relevant. The report describes, in four brief pages, the underpinnings of how we go about diagnosing and improving the customer experience - and, by extension, how anyone else can use the method, too.

Sometimes the best way to fly under the radar is to walk. Here at Creative Good we just celebrated our 15th birthday. We'd like to believe some of our longevity is due to sticking with one idea - improving the customer experience - for a long, long time, even at times when the idea is not in fashion.

This came to mind when we read Ben Brown's post about SXSW, the increasingly massive conference that is now attracting literal busloads of would-be startup entrepreneurs:

...the point of these buses is to see how much of your attention they can suck up with tweets about hastily conceived apps that will ultimately go nowhere, burn through a bunch of investor money while adding to the ridiculous spectacle of tech startup culture.

We've seen moments like this before - the summer of 1999 comes to mind - and we've seen what comes next. If you want your team to survive the next year, five, ten years, find an idea and walk with it.

From a reader review of my book Bit Literacy:

I was at a conference where the construction and development team responsible for putting together and constructing the new Minnesota Twins baseball stadium gave a detailed presentation on the project. One of the first things they mentioned is that they required their entire management team to read "Bit Literacy" prior to starting the project so they could come up with a communication system via email and task list tracking system that was fast, efficient, and effective. There was no room for time wasting procedures and methods. The new stadium project was one of the more complicated professional sports stadium constructed in recent history.

Read the whole review.

(Bit Literacy is now a free ebook on the Kindle store and the Apple iBookstore.)