Metaskills- Five Talents for the Robotic Age

by Marty Neumeier

  In The Elements of Style, E.B. White discusses the difficulty of dealing with aesthetics: “Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind? Who knows why certain notes in music are capable of stirring the listener deeply, though the same notes slightly rearranged are impotent? There is no satisfactory explanation of style—no inflexible rule by which the young writer may shape his course. He will often find himself steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.”

  Yet the fact that aesthetics is approximate doesn’t mean that artistic knowing is less important than scientific knowing. The insights and ideas discovered through art can be every bit as profound as those discovered through science. As Ken Robinson says, “To assume that artistic judgments are simply personal opinion is as mistaken as assuming that all scientific opinion is undisputed fact. Meaning and interpretation are at the heart of all creative processes.”

  When ordinary people make aesthetics-based judgments, they tend to satisfice—they choose the good-enough answer over the best answer. Yet, if given the ability to see their alternatives side-by-side, they’ll choose in favor of the one with the best aesthetic cues. They do exactly what designers, artists, scientists, and critics do—they decide through comparison. The process of knowing by comparing is called analogical intelligence. The difference is that, for professionals, the basis for comparison is locked into their intuition through experience. They don’t need multiple choice to recognize quality.

  Lately it’s been fashionable to suggest that aesthetic judgment comes preloaded into the human nervous system through genetics. Experiments have shown that newborn babies seem to prefer complex patterns over simple ones, and three-dimensional spheres over flat circles. After a few months, they begin to respond better to patterns that look like faces over patterns that are more random. Later, as adults, people seem to prefer faces that are regular rather than those that are asymmetrical or unusual. They also seem to prefer scenes of nature to abstract art. (My dentist would be happy to hear it.)

  Yet this may be another example of science underreaching itself, bringing a complex phenomenon down to a level where it can be easily measured. What science should question instead is why so many adults can’t see aesthetic differences and don’t have an adequate framework for critiquing beauty.

  My wife and I got hooked on a TV series called House Hunters International. Maybe you’ve seen it. In each half-hour program, would-be expats choose among three properties based on a wish list they’ve given to their agents (which is always bigger than their budget). The wishes themselves are always couched in terms of functional benefits—a certain number of bedrooms, access to the beach, proximity to town, or other concrete parameters. There are no parameters concerning the quality of the light, the authenticity of the materials, or the relationship of the house to its surroundings. More often than not, the highest praise during a walk-through is “This a nice size room.” The same sentence is uttered up to a dozen times in each show. (Check it out—it’s a running joke in our household.)

  Yet in the end, it’s obvious that the buyers base their decisions mostly on their feelings. If all that mattered was the size of the rooms, they could just bring a measuring tape. What actually matters, beyond basics such as price, is the beauty that they believe will give meaning to their lives. It’s just that they don’t have the vocabulary to express it.

  Question: If average people aren’t conversant with beauty or the qualities that determine it, why should designers and other professionals bother with aesthetics?

  Answer: Because average people are deeply affected by beauty, whether of not they’re conscious of it. The average person would choose—and has chosen—Cirque du Soleil over Circus Vargas, Google over Lycos, and the iPhone over the BlackBerry. The average person wants, deserves, and will pay for, the most beauty he or she can afford.

  It’s not business—it’s personal

  In the movie You’ve Got Mail, bookshop owner Kathleen Kelly complains about larger rivals who excuse cutthroat practices with the “godfather” mantra: It’s not personal—it’s business. “What is that supposed to mean?” she says. “I am so sick of that. Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.” At the end of the movie, the chain bookstore wipes out little shop around the corner.

  Warm-touch transactions increasingly seem like a thing of the past, replaced by cold-touch transactions such as self-service online stores, self-service checkout in real stores, and the tedious automated voices of call centers. Technology companies have gone crazy with CRM—Customer Relationship Management software—spawning myriad variations such as VRM, PRM, EEM, and SFA (don’t ask). Despite the technological focus on customers—or maybe because of it—market research has discovered the “80/80 rule”: 80 percent of the economy consists of service, and 80 percent of customers report bad service. It seems that many businesses will do anything to avoid direct contact with customers.

  The service problem is actually part of a bigger issue, which has to do with branding. As competition for customers increases, companies offer customers more choices. Customers, faced with a wider array of choices, have begun to make their purchase decisions more on emotional benefits—such as delight, trust, or tribal identity (“If I buy that product, what will that make me?”). The way a customer “feels” about a product or company is, by definition, its brand. A brand is akin to a commercial reputation. And while it’s built by the company, it’s defined by the feelings of customers.

  This transfer of power from companies to customers has had an enormous impact on the value structure of the S&P 500 and other companies. Over the last thirty years, brand values have shot up from five percent of market capitalization to over thirty percent. That means that more than one-third of a company’s worth now comes from intangible assets. Some companies, such as Coca-Cola and Apple, figure their brands account for two-thirds or more of their market caps.

  This would seem to put the rise of branding and the rise of technology on a collision course. Customers demand the warm touch of service in return for their loyalty, while companies require the cold touch of technology to make them more competitive. What’s the solution: reduce technology, or give up brand share? Neither. The solution is to use empathy—the ability to recognize how other people feel—to design technologies, processes, and interactions that increase delight, engender trust, and reinforce tribal identity. In other words, place brand first and revenues second. Brand momentum is the leading indicator of sustained profitability.

  Take Zappos, for example. The online shoe retailer has managed to combine technology and humanity to build the world’s largest online shoe store. You’d think that offering to pay shipping on all returned products, plus their replacements, would kill profitability, as people sent back every pair of shoes that didn’t fit or flatter. Yet somehow the company worked around these costs. They started with the premise that customers and employees should be treated well, then worked back from there to build the rest of the business model. They built a thriving brand around customer emotions.

  Starbucks impressed the world by building a huge business on expensive coffee drinks. But coffee drinks are not really what they sell. What they sell is an aesthetic experience that combines surprise (a fresh idea about the meaning of coffee), with the emotional warmth of community (a “third place” to hang out with friends), tribal identity (the feeling of belonging to European-style culture), and company sincerity (the demonstrated belief in a mission). However, as Starbucks has grown, growth itself has become its raison d’être, and customers have begun to doubt its sincerity. This is what founder Howard Schultz had always worried about—the loss of the company’s “soul.” Its only long-term salvation will be to place empathy ahead of operations. We’ll see how they do.

  A stark contrast in empathy can be found in the stories of two low-cost airlines, Southwest and Ryanair. Both airlines have adopted a “point-to-point” strategy of selling one-wa
y rather than round-trip tickets, often routing planes through secondary airports. And they both have the goal of pushing prices so low that it’s often cheaper to fly than to drive. But how they go about achieving this goal shows a shocking difference in their regard for customer delight.

  Europe-based Ryanair has defined its competitive advantage solely in terms of low price (or at least the illusion of low price). Every decision the company makes is aimed at reducing costs while keeping as much of the profit as possible. The prices of their flights are low—sometimes as low as one penny for a return ticket—but there are hidden costs, including fairly high emotional costs.

  The price of a ticket doesn’t cover taxes, administration fee, or baggage fees. Any bags larger than a gym tote must be checked, and will cost you up to 150 euros. Your first bag is limited to 20 kilos, and your second bag to 15. If you go over these limits, you can still check your bags, but only for an additional fee of 20 euros per kilo. Of course, you’re bound to go over these limits. And when you do (your bags will be weighed at the airport) you’ll have to get out of one line and wait in another to pay your penalty fee. If you try to regain your old place in line, you’ll suffer the wrath of other passengers as well as the Ryanair check-in agent who sent you away.

  Additional fees may apply. Let’s say, for example, in your rush to get to the airport, you’ve forgotten to print your boarding pass, thereby depriving Ryanair of a few pennies of profit. That’ll be 40 euros, please. Forty euros, really? A Ryanair representative was asked if this penalty seemed a bit harsh. “They’ll only forget to do it once,” he said. When you add up these extra fees, you may find that your one-penny flight now costs at least 100 euros, a 10,000-fold increase. Suddenly you’re not feeling very good about Ryanair. And your experience is just beginning.

  Once on the plane, you may feel a bit cramped. The seats are closer together than the usual “pitch” of other airline seating, and they don’t recline, so your knees are pushing into the hard plastic back of the seat in front of you. Maybe it simply feels more cramped, because the tops of all the seat backs are shiny yellow plastic, creating a visual foreshortening as if the seatbacks were a garish deck of cards standing on edge. You might begin to worry that, in an emergency, your chances of reaching an exit would be slim. In any case, the plastic safety card is right in front of you, glued to the back of the seat (to save on cleaning and replacement costs).

  After your ordeal in the airport, you’re no doubt looking forward to closing your eyes for a few blissful moments during takeoff. This is not to be. Ryanair regards you as a captive audience for an aggressive menu of overpriced food, drink, and duty-free trinkets. So an announcer keeps up a steady monolog over the PA system, putting special emphasis on raffle tickets that you can purchase in order to win—guess what—more trips on Ryanair! The staccato blare of special deals in the blue-and-yellow plastic cabin is the perfect complement to the company website, which features the same garish colors along with flashing euro symbols and bikini-clad spokesgirls.

  And never content to rest on its laurels, the airline has been busy inventing new ways to cut costs (and improve profit margins). President Michael O’Leary has suggested getting rid of two toilets to make room for six more seats; redesigning the planes so passengers can fly standing up; charging extra for overweight passengers; and asking passengers to carry their checked-in bags to the plane themselves. “Just kidding,” he said. But he would like to charge admission for the toilets. It’s part of Ryanair’s commitment to low prices.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, Southwest has been equally committed to low prices. When the airline began operations, passengers were surprised to be herded onto the planes like cattle instead of getting seat assignments. You could hear the sarcastic sounds of “moooo” as people crowded into the jetway. Yet the employees, especially the flight attendants, were able to defuse the situation with large dollops of humor. Their in-flight announcements were so funny, in fact, that passengers began recording them for friends. Eventually the company solved the cattle problem by designing a first-come-first-serve system for boarding lines at the gate.

  In 2008, when airlines in the United States and elsewhere began to feel the pinch of rising operational costs, most followed the lead of Ryanair and began charging extra for luggage. Southwest’s chief executive, Gary Kelly, refused. He took the opportunity to increase the difference between his airline and the others, effectively lumping them into a single category called “pickpockets,” while claiming for Southwest the category of “good Samaritan.” It was a brilliant PR move, which the company underscored with a “Bags Fly Free” ad campaign.

  Why does one low-cost carrier lavish love on customers, while another antagonizes them? The difference, of course, is empathy. Without a developed sense of empathy for customers you’re more likely to misjudge the prevailing mood of the market. You’re prone to mistake money for meaning and low prices for loyalty. While Ryanair may survive its lack of feeling for a short time, its brand is unlikely to make a full contribution to the bottom line, and its customers will almost certainly jump ship the minute a real competitor comes along.

  Elsewhere in Europe, a coffee brand has outmaneuvered Starbucks by bringing the barista experience home. Swiss food giant Nestlé has tapped into a different kind of emotion with its sleek Nespresso coffee-brewing system. The idea is simple: a home appliance that brews espresso from single-serving “pods” of ground coffee. Nestlé uses a razor-and-blades pricing strategy, in which most of the profit comes from continuous purchases of the pods rather than the machines themselves. The pods are only available to “members” of the Nespresso Club through its website or its 200 boutiques.

  A few years ago my wife and I inherited a Nespresso machine as part of a house purchase in France. It sat in the kitchen unused for months. When we finally fired it up, we were pleased to find the coffee pas mal, and quickly drank our way through the capsules.

  Weeks later, as we walked along a street in Bordeaux, we came to a store that was buzzing with excitement. “Nespresso,” said the sign. As a line of customers waited to get in, others were walking out with bags full of coffee. In the “showroom,” the architecture, surface materials, lighting, product displays, and packaging had more in common with Tiffany’s than Starbucks. Multihued coffee capsules glowed like jewels against dark wood paneling. Catalogs with the production values of coffee table books were positioned in soft pools of light. Clearly, this was a company that had a vision for its brand.

  Even so, why would people pay Nestlé up to three times what it would normally cost to brew a cup of coffee at home? Why wouldn’t they simply buy one of the competing offerings from Sara Lee, Kraft, or Mars? The secret, once again, is empathy. The Nespresso designers were able to “feel” what it might be like join an exclusive Nespresso tribe. Instead of putting costs first, they put customer delight first, then engineered the pricing model to fit customer expectations. Everything about the Nespresso business model makes customers feel coddled, cared for, and special. True, the capsules are costly. But customers are buying much more than coffee. They’re buying something that can’t be measured, counted, or even described.

  Thanks to a well-crafted experience and a slew of patents to keep competitors out, the Nespresso brand has logged sales increases of 30% per year over a ten-year period. Those patents, however, are expiring, and customers are free to buy cut-rate capsules from a number of other sources. Will some of them defect? Sure, because money matters. But the most valuable segment of customers, the Nespresso loyalists, will continue to support the company because of the emotional benefits that come with membership in the original tribe. Its less innovative competitors will have to settle for the dregs.

  In The Myths of Innovation, author Scott Berkun has correctly noted that innovative ideas are rarely rejected on their technical specs. Instead, they’re rejected because of how they make people feel. “If you forget people’s concerns and feelings when you present an innovation, or neg
lect to understand their perspectives in your design, you’re setting yourself up to fail.” This applies equally to coffee brands, airlines, and online shoe stores. It also applies to residential architecture.

  One of the last century’s leading architects, Le Corbusier, made a colossal error of judgment when he set out to design a new approach to public housing. Instead of using his emotional brain to focus on the feelings of inhabitants, he used his rational brain to focus on the possibilities of the buildings. He envisioned people as interchangeable parts in a system, inputs to a “machine for living.” Informed by a rigid Modernist ideology, the theories were bracing but the results appalling: geometric clusters of identical stacked cells, devoid of emotional benefits such as individuality, historical reference, or a connection to nature. Most of these projects ended up as “dirty towers on windswept lots,” as critic Tom Lacayo put it, “the kinds of places we have been critiquing in recent years with dynamite.”

  Contrast this with the Katrina Cottages designed by Marianne Cusato. In response to the emergency housing needs of Hurricane Katrina victims, she developed plans for small traditional-style houses that can be built quickly for the cost of an emergency trailer. The 300-square-foot interiors feel surprisingly spacious (this is a nice size room), thanks to their nine-foot ceilings and thoughtful floor plans. Their front porches encourage interaction with neighbors, and the original structures can be expanded when the owners’ insurance money comes in. There’s no emotional sacrifice to be made with these houses, since they tap into deep associations with family, community, and tradition. And on a strictly formal level, their proportions are sensible and satisfying. As a result, some people who could afford custom architecture are using the Katrina plans to build their vacation homes and guest houses.