It could have been worse. I could’ve been stranded on the runway for eight hours. Instead, I was stuck at the JetBlue terminal for 12 hours last Thursday before finding out my flight was cancelled. [1]

Here are some communication lessons learned from the fiasco:

Put all your soldiers on the front lines. Jet Blue’s corporate offices are located near JFK so they brought in a bunch of people who normally work there to help out at the terminal. They wore Jet Blue vests and/or badges and wandered around the terminal answering questions, directing customers, and listening to complaints. Granted, a lot of these people didn’t know much more than the passengers but, hey, at least they were there. A lot of customers just wanted to vent and know someone was listening. You need boots on the ground to do the little things. I saw one rep ask an irate customer for a business card so he could follow up with him later. A small step, but it just might save a customer.

Be the guy with the megaphone. The PA system by the gates was pitiful. The volume was feeble and you could barely make out the thin announcements (which were similar to the unintelligible conductor announcements on the NYC subways). People were desperate to know what was going on. Enter megaphone man. Rumor was that he actually worked as legal counsel to JetBlue. He went to each gate with a megaphone and updated all the passengers with the latest info. Then he’d walk toward the rear of that gate and repeat the info again for those who hadn’t heard the first time. It wasn’t always good news. But at least an actual person was there, communicating something clearly.

Have an operator reserve force. A lot of the JetBlue reps on the scene encouraged passengers to call (800) Jet-Blue for more info. The problem was the phone lines were so jampacked there was no way to get through. This forced already irate customers to wait in lines for hours in order to find out information that easily could have been shared over the phone. The result: Anger builds and the people onsite had to deal with it.

Take it personally. When people are stuck on board a plane for eight hours with no clean toilets, they take it personally. And when your company promise is to “bring humanity back to air travel,” you better take it personally too.

The founder and chief executive of JetBlue says he’s “humiliated and mortified” by what happened. He’s taking responsibility and promising real changes. That’s what customers want to hear.

Mr. Neeleman said he would enact what he called a customer bill of rights that would financially penalize JetBlue — and reward passengers — for any repeat of the current upheaval. He said he would propose a plan to pay customers, after some amount of time, by the hour for being stranded on a plane…He says knows he has to deliver. “I can flap my lips all I want,” he said. “Talk is cheap. Watch us.”

Your site is a PR weapon. Neeleman’s emotional response was nowhere to be found at JetBlue.com though. The latest JetBlue news at the site is the addition of 3 blind moose Merlot and Chardonnay to flights. Hmm, is that really the big JetBlue news right now? And the last entry at the CEO’s blog at the site has the title “2007 Takes Off in the Right Direction.”

Granted, there’s a link that says “Operational Interruptions” in the site’s header but it only takes you to a bunch of sterile, boilerplate text (e.g, “JetBlue continues to experience cancellations and delays as a result of Wednesday’s ice storm in the Northeast. Please check the status of your flight online before proceeding to the airport.”)

The site needs to become the online version of the guy with the megaphone. There should be a letter from the CEO. There should be an apology. There should be details about changes that are going to happen to prevent this from occurring again. If they can’t easily make changes to the current site, they should set up a special crisis site to deal specifically with this debacle. As it is now, the company’s online presence seems disconnected from reality.

Erik K. Antonsson, a prof at Caltech, has a page of quotations related to design and engineering. Some samples:

“If a major project is truly innovative, you cannot possibly know its exact cost and its exact schedule at the beginning. And if in fact you do know the exact cost and the exact schedule, chances are that the technology is obsolete.”
-Joseph G. Gavin, Jr., discussing the design of the lunar module that landed NASA astronauts on the moon.

“What appears at first to be well-articulated, firmly established architecture often consists of a broad (perhaps even vague) product concept; a set of evolving, sometimes loosely formulated specifications; and multiple, often conflicting targets that may be difficult to meet. The product is invariably complex and the planning process, its attention to detail notwithstanding, is unlikely to uncover all the relevant conflicts and problems in advance. To meet an objective such as `the door on the new luxury sedan should create a feeling of solidity and security when it closes’ may be difficult, involving the application of technical expertise and a great deal of negotiation with engineers working on the body, electrical system, stamping, and assembly. Though planning establishes overall direction and architecture, product engineering must still confront numerous conflicts and trade-offs in local components and subsystems.”
-Kim B. Clark and Takahiro Fujimoto, “Product Development Performance: Strategy, Organization and Management in the World Auto Industry”

“And let it be noted that there is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than to set up as the leader in the introduction of changes. For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new.”
-Niccolò Machiavelli, “The Prince”

Have a heavy load that needs lifting? Have the kids do it.

This picture was taken from a big heavy box delivered to our office today. We get the point of the illustration, but we couldn’t help but chuckle about how the people look like 9 year olds. Thanks for the photo, BB.

Every once in a while we get an email from a customer asking about how permissions work with our products. They’re almost always asking how to prevent someone from doing something. “How do we prevent someone from posting a message or adding a to-do or downloading a file? How can we make our project site read only except for a select few?”

When we set out to build Basecamp we decided that it was going to be about communication, not control. It is our belief that when you collaborate with trusted parties it’s important for people to be able to communicate any way they see fit. Preventing someone from saying or doing something often breaks these free flowing communication channels and introduces miscommunication or silence—two cancers of collaboration.

We do have some permissions in Basecamp. There are some basic controls over who can do what, but as far as products like Basecamp go, Basecamp would be considered among the least controlling. If we started all over today we’d probably have even less permissions and less controls. Some of the controls we’ve put in place have turned out to make collaboration harder, not easier.

Back to the customers… When they ask how to prevent people from doing this or that I usually reply with something like “Have you tried asking them not to do this or that? If you don’t want them to upload files just ask them not to. If you don’t want them to create to-do lists just ask them not to. Communicate with them as you would if you weren’t using software.”

And to my delight, their replies are usually “Great idea! I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll try that and see how it works.” Follow-up emails usually come back as success stories.

Simply communicating with people about your expectations of their behavior is often the simplest and most effective solution. It’s respectful, it’s kind, it’s fair. And if someone does something you didn’t want them to do just remind them politely that they weren’t supposed to do that. They’ll almost always get it the second time.

So next time you are looking for more control, consider more communication. It may surprise you.

Ex-Gizmodo guru Joel Johnson returns to the site to rant about why he hates gadgets and early adopters.

Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. You don’t need it. Wait a year until the reviews come out and the other suckers too addicted to having the very latest and greatest buy it, put up a review, and have moved on to something else. Stop buying broken products and then shrugging your shoulders when it doesn’t do what it is supposed to. Stop buying products that serve any other master than you. Use older stuff that works. Make it yourself. Only buy new stuff from companies that have proven themselves good servants of their customers in the past. Complaining online about this stuff helps, but really, just stop buying it.

You want to know the punchline? The average Joe that makes up the market is smarter than you saps. The market-at-large waits until a clear leader emerges, then takes a modest plunge. You may think you’re making up the “bleeding edge” of “gadget pimpatude” but you’re really just a loose confederation of marks the consumer electronics industry uses as free market research and easy money.

Some quotes from an interview Stanley Kubrick gave about the film Barry Lyndon [via CP]...

There is an aspect of film-making which can be compared to a sporting contest. You can start with a game plan but depending on where the ball bounces and where the other side happens to be, opportunities and problems arise which can only be effectively dealt with at that very moment.

[On the topic of period costuming] What is very important is to get some actual clothes of the period to learn how they were originally made. To get them to look right, you really have to make them the same way.

(That’s a Christopher Alexander theme too…you can’t make “the same thing” with a different process.)

I think Nabokov may have had the right approach to interviews. He would only agree to write down the answers and then send them on to the interviewer who would then write the questions.

...and here’s a couple more interesting quotes from thinkexist.com’s Kubrick quotes page.

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

Perhaps it sounds ridiculous but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.

Related: All of Coudal’s posts on Stanley Kubrick (“A look back through our archives reveals an obsession with the work of Stanley Kubrick…”)

Speaking of weather, Yahoo weather says “Unknown Precipitation” is falling from the sky in NYC.

WeatherDock opts for the phrase “Wintry Mix,” which makes the precip sound more like a cocktail or lounge music compilation.

And then there’s the icon that accompanies it: every crappy weather icon you can think of layered on top of each other. I think if you look really close at it, you can see locusts.

How come when I search for Chicago or Tucson or any other US city on Weather.com I don’t get a single pixel of weather data on the results screen?

I get links for ski forcasts. Links if I’m getting married. Links to traffic information. Links to city parks. Links to lawn & garden resources. But no temperature, no precipitation, no forecast.

If I search for a specific zip code I do get weather, but searching for a city name gives me just a list of matches (the first one is the one I want 99% of the time). Just show me the weather and give me the other links and matches as secondary options, not primary suggestions.

Who’s making decisions over there?

Scorcese uses X to mark the spot in The Departed

“As an homage to Howard Hawks’ classic 1932 Scarface, Scorsese scattered Xs throughout the movie (some more subtle than others), using them as a symbol of impending doom.” [via GF]

Eliot Noyes: “The Forgotten Pioneer of Corporate Design”

“It is harder still to explain why the designer and architect, who died in 1977 at age 67, isn’t better known today, when the principles he championed—the notion that good design is good business, for instance, and the belief in interdisciplinary design teams—are now accepted wisdom. Every designer working in or for Corporate America today owes Noyes a debt of gratitude.”

WSJ analyzes social bookmarking sites and says it’s a few power users that dominate links

“The Journal’s analysis found that a substantial number of submissions originated with a handful of users. At Digg, which has 900,000 registered users, 30 people were responsible for submitting one-third of postings on the home page. At Netscape.com, a single user named ‘STONERS’ — in real life, computer programmer Ed Southwood of Dayton, Ohio — was behind fully 217 stories over the two-week period, or 13% of all stories that reached the most popular list. (Netscape, which gained fame with its namesake browser, is now owned by Time Warner’s AOL unit and operates a news site.) On Reddit, one of the most influential users is 12-year-old Adam Fuhrer.”

Mingling with restaurant customers

“My dad never seemed to be working at all. I’d look on as he mingled with diners, mostly making idle chit chat. With strangers he’d walk up to their tables as they ate and ask them how their meals were. At the tables of regulars he might sit down and share a drink, maybe even roll some dice. It was a fantastic excuse for a job. Or so I thought. It turned out that my dad had the most important job in the place. His endless conversations with patrons clued him into changes he needed to make on the menu. He was quickly able to comp a round of drinks if customers received slow service, nipping their frustration in the bud. They would often tell him how they’d heard about the restaurant, and possibly mention an upcoming party they were planning and did the restaurant do banquets? (answer: of course!)”

Suggestions for improving the Complete New Yorker UI

“Nearly 33% of the vertical space is consumed by tool chrome, those thick gray bars segmenting the screen. Combined with the often bizzare and mostly useless ‘Abstract’ below, this leaves 11 rows for search results, the place where users make decisions on what to launch in the viewer. Unforgiveable.”

I hadn’t been in a Blockbuster for years so I found a recent trip there amusing. See, Blockbuster offers 2-day movie rentals. But the company gives you a one-week grace period too. So, in reality, you get 2 days + 1 week to return that movie at no additional cost. And if you get a 7-day rental, you actually get 14 days. The poor clerk who had to explain this setup sounded like he was trapped in an Abbott and Costello routine.

Similarly, I recently received an Amazon Reward Certificates valid for 18 months. But the certificates says it’s “valid for 18 months, followed by a 6-month grace period, after which it will expire.”

So 2 days is actually 9 days. 7 days is 14 days. And 18 months is actually 24 months. The extra time is nice, but it’s too bad people don’t just say what they mean anymore.