Awesome concept, but failure on execution and experience.

I bought a beer sampler today from Southern Tier Brewing Company. I’ve had their IPA before and enjoyed it, so I thought I would try the sampler. When I opened the box I found a flyer asking me to vote for my “Favorite Pale Ale.” My first thought was “oh, cool” but I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on. I didn’t know if they were competing against other breweries (and were pandering for votes) or if it was an internal initiative to connect with their customers.

The url on the flyer pointed me to the Southern Tier Brewing Company website, so I figured it was an internal initiative, which got me excited. I think its great when companies reach out to their consumers for their opinion even if its just for a taste test. I looked up the website to see what was going on. Long story short: great idea with poor execution.

Let’s take a deeper look.

It looks like they introducing a new Pale Ale and looking for feedback on their recipe variations. Here’s an excerpt from their website:

If you’ve opened a 12 bottle Pack of Pales, you have noticed we’re running a special promotion: VOTE for your FAVORITE PALE ALE. We’re testing a few different recipies of our new Pale Ale, and we want your opinion. As an incentive, once you’ve cast your vote, you’ll be granted 10% off your next purchse from our online store!

Very cool idea. Instead of spinning their wheels internally about the recipe. The have their initial ideas and are putting it out in the world with an established vehicle to collect data and iterate on the product design (recipe). I commend them for their concept, and putting something out in the world that may not yet be optimal. However, it all comes down to execution of the concept and the manifest user experience.

Have you figured out what happens next? They have created and distributed 6 batches (or variations) on their Pale Ale recipe and are looking for feedback from their customers about which batch is preferred. Awesome. Right?! Not so fast.

There are several problems with how this concept was executed, which definitely impacted my overall “experience.”

Limited Access

First, I assumed they would have packed several of the batches into the sampler pack I purchased. When I checked the batch numbers on the back labels it turns out they are all from batch 212. What?! How am I supposed to vote for my favorite, if I only get to sample the same batch 3 times. If they intentionally include only one batch per 12 bottle sampler pack, then I would at minimum have to purchase six 12 pack to be able to try all of the batches (and I don’t feel comfortable voting for my favorite if I haven’t sampled them all). I say at minimum, because it seems this offer is only available on the variety packs, which are sealed. So there is no way to know, prior to purchase, which batches (or batch) will be included in the pack. I think its pretty unlikely that I am going to buy enough of their sampler packs to be able to make a fair evaluation of all of the batches.

If Southern Tier Brewing Co. wants to send me a sample of each of the batches, I would be more than happy to do a tasting and report the findings here.

A few other issues as well as opportunities to change the current experience with this campaign.

Website Design

Okay, here is a really minor issue with the submission form. The instructions say “press the corresponding check box in the form below.” but they are using radio buttons and not check boxes. Regardless, the instructions should say something like “Select your favorite batch number” or “select the winning batch number” or something like this that doesn’t reference the specific form mechanism.

Missing the Why’s

As Dan Formosa points out in his recent article Why Marketing Research Makes Us Cringe in Interactions Magazine, they should be asking consumers to do more than just indicate their preferences. Southern Tier is missing out on a huge opportunity to query their customers about why they likes the beer they selected. What is it about the beer that they like, what makes it compelling, what attributes are significant and which are meaningless. This is a missed opportunity to connect more deeply with their customers than just having them fill out a form indicator preference.

Creating a Dialog with Customers

Maybe even more important than the missed opportunity to collect richer data (and based on how they have structured access to all the batches, I would be surprised if anyone who submits a form on their website really tasted all the beers), they are missing an opportunity to connect with their consumers and create a dialog. They have brought people (me for example) to their website through this promotion, but they are only collected information. They aren’t opening up and talking to people. They aren’t connecting. They aren’t really listening (they’re harvesting).

Similarly, Southern Tier doesn’t appear to have a twitter account. A quick search reveals that people are in fact tweeting about their company, but there is no indication that they are listening to this free feedback. Dell is a great example of what truly listening to your customers via twitter can do for a company.

There’s also no end date to the promotion. Again, the acquisition structure they have created takes some time to complete, so it would helpful to know how long I have to sample these beers before they decide which recipe they are going to go with.

Bottle Design

On a positive note. I do like their beer (I haven’t tried the batch 212 yet pictured above), and I really like the label for their new Pale Ale.

However, it’s interesting to note that all four of the bottles don’t match each other in terms of graphic style or brand standards. They aren’t, in appearance, a unified suite of products. It would be difficult to tell at-a-glance that these four bottles are from the same company.

Conclusions

So, Southern Tier Brewing Company was able to initially get me excited about the concept and their brand, but the execution of the concept yielded a bad experience that now makes me think less of their brand than I did before I purchased the initial 12 pack of beer. If they are a savvy company, they will have mechanisms in place to discover posts like this and respond positively.

Hello?! Southern Tier Brewing Company. Are you listening? You make some tasty beers, but you could seriously improve your customer relationships through better service design and more thoughtful engagements.

C’mon, really? Who wrote this? Who thought most people think about the sensor for traffic lights as “actuating signals?” Really?! This sign is at the exit of my office building, the Smith Bros. Hardware building in Columbus, OH. The sign is meant to tell drivers where to stop so the sensor is activated and the traffic light changes.

It blows me away every time I see it. It’s a constant reminder that bad design decisions are made all the time with everyday objects like this sign.

I originally thought this was a custom sign (made to look standard/official), but after a little search I found the Standard Sign Design Manual from the Ohio Department of Transportation, Office of Traffic Engineering. The image below is from the black and white regulatory series. Evidently, it is an Ohio specific sign type.

First of all, the sign itself shouldn’t be necessary. The sensor for the signal is in the wrong place based on user behavior at this intersection. The sensor is further back from the intersection than most people stop, because they always creep forward to see if any cars are coming around the corner.

But if the sensor can’t move, let’s at least create a sign that people won’t find odd and maybe even understand. Even if you just changed “actuate” to “activate” it would make more sense. Some may argue that actuate is actually more semantically accurate, meaning “to put into action; start a process; turn on” as opposed to “to make active; cause to function or act,” but I think the semantic accuracy is immaterial. It doesn’t matter how that actual physical thing (the engineering of it, the system design) works; what matters is the user’s mental model and how they think it works.

This a classic example of the system design being directly represented in the user interface. It may be a 1:1 and truthful representation of what is happening, but it’s not how people think about or interact with the system.

How would you change this sign to make it more understandable to the everyday user?

btw, that arrow looks non regulation to me.

UPDATE: (02-02-10):

I came across another sign today that says “stop here to trip detector.”

So, why don’t more people do this?

Sometimes design solutions don’t address the root problem and subsequently cause problems of their own.

I had to use the toilet at the dentist office before my appointment the other day, and came across this obscured sign.

“Please do not flush paper towels”

The sign itself isn’t novel. It’s not like my dentist is the only one encountering this problem. What’s interesting here is the design problem. Not with the sign itself, and ultimately not with the obscuring of the sign. The question is why is the sign necessary in the first place, and secondarily why did the sign get obscured.

I should have taken several more pictures, but let me try to unpack what’s happening here. You’ll just have to imagine some of it.

Its not uncommon to have signs in public bathroom in service establishments. Most of them say something like “Employees must wash hands before returning to work.”

So, why is the sign necessary to begin with?

Because it is a dentist office, they are using a biohazard style step can in place of a simple, open trash bin. Even though it is just paper towels going into this trash bin they have used the bin with a top on it.

So what, right? Well, not so fast. There are a few things at play. The can is covered, so people can’t immediately see what’s inside. They can’t see that there are other used paper towels, which would signify that their used paper towels can go there as well. Secondly, it doesn’t look like a normal trashcan, it even looks like a biohazard bin that I’ve seen in other doctor’s offices. Oh wait, it is a biohazard bin. By appropriating a biohazard bin and repurposing it as a normal trash bin they have also appropriated the meaning of the original form. Just because they have repurposed it doesn’t mean the object has lost its original meaning to the rest of us. So, we are left with a trash can that doesn’t initially look like a trash can, and to determine its “trash can”-ness we need to perform a physical action of opening the lid to determine its intended meaning.

Okay, so that explains why people may have been putting paper towels in the toilet in the first place, because they didn’t see an appropriate place to put dispose of them and the open receptacle of the toilet offered less resistance both physically and semiotically.

Now, why was the sign obscured?

It was an obvious choice to put the sign (about the paper towels) in close proximity to the paper towels. So when someone retrieved the paper towels they would also be confronted by the accompanying signage. However, they forgot one simple rule/fact/trend/behavior. It’s a fairly common social phenomena for flat surfaces to collect objects. I know it happens in our house all too often, and you can see it with trash all the time in public.

There are solutions for wall mounted soap dispensers and paper towel holders, but obviously wall mounted toothbrush holders is too niche a market. The cup of toothbrushes had to go somewhere.

We are left with a design solution (the sign) that is problematic in its own right, and only attempts to address the symptom of the problem (throwing paper towels in the toilet) and not the root of the problem (people didn’t know where to dispose of their paper towels). The fine folks at my dentist office tried to solve the ‘what’ of the problem and didn’t look to solve the ‘why.’

I sent them a reply message thanking them for their photos, and letting them know they sent them to the wrong number in case they wanted to try to send them again to the actual intended recipient. I haven’t heard back yet.

I would assume that wrong numbers and for both voice messages and text messages are in decline, based on the increased use of cell phones and subsequent implied use of address books. This would mean that there is a decreased chance of mis-dialing a regularly dialed number. On the other hand, there could be an increase in wrong numbers if we think about the increase in social communication, and that most wrong numbers or made when dialing non-routine numbers.

Anyone have any idea if dialing the wrong number is increasing or decreasing?

I noticed the other day that the LED lights display a signature light pattern that looks suspiciously close to the Target logo. I can’t believe that the similarity is simply an accident or coincidence.

What do you think?

What’s Pecha Kucha? Basically, each presenter is given 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide. The presentation is set to automatic, so the slides keep moving forward whether you are ready or not. That’s 6:40 to present an interesting idea and tell a compelling story.

It was great fun, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

I presented an update to a side-project I have been working on just for the fun of it: my side view mirror project. Basically, I’ve been taking photographs of drivers through their side view mirrors during my daily commutes.

Check out the video below to experience it for yourself.

Pecha Kucha – Side View Mirrors Project from Erik Dahl on Vimeo.

At the time of writing this, I’m working on putting together an independent site for this project. More details to come.

During my presentation, I mentioned a few kindred projects and inspirations:

Andrew Bush – 66 Drives

Brian Collier – The Highway Expedition

Brian Collier – Very Small Objects

Julian Montague – The Stray Shopping Cart Project

Let me know what you think.

You can download the presentation here: dahl_PKN.pdf

powerlinerflyers from wes johnson on Vimeo.

(Go to Vimeo to watch in HD.)

The question this time is “where would you want to wake up tomorrow.” It’s simple, beautiful, and expansive.

Fifty People, One Question: Brooklyn from Crush + Lovely on Vimeo.

Fifty People, One Question: London from Crush + Lovely on Vimeo.

I’m currently working on a project capturing images of drivers during my commute to and from work. One of the only ways we have of connecting with each other is through our rear view mirrors.

Below is a growing subset of of the images I am collecting. I am still in the process of gathering images and probably will be for a while.

The photos are presented in an interim format, as I haven’t yet decided on the final format of the project.

Check it out and let me know what you think.