Front to back

Organised, industrial society creates left-over time for its citizens -- and that time has to be used up somehow. At first it was with gin. Then TV. Now it's just beginning to be with mass creation and collaboration.

Thanks to Anne Sophie Leens for the pointer. And "wow" to Clay Shirky for such a great post. I hope the book is just as good.

I have to say - it really shifted my mindset.

...if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

See? Read the whole thing...

If if the 1st Gen iPhone was so "bad" - what was Apple thinking when they launched it?

Lots of people are excited about the new iPhone because they think it will address many of the annoyances present in the first one. (Well - not all of those issues are getting addressed, in fact. But some are.)

There was much complaining about the iPhone 1.0. And vocal user complaints are not usually a great recipe for a popular product and strong sales. In fact often, companies that rush products out to be "first to market" end up having their lunch eaten by products that arrive a little later, but offer a better UX. Apple themselves demonstrated with the ipod that late-comers can steal the the show by being "best-to-market."

Here are 5 reasons I can think of why Apple launched a "bad" product, braved all that negative publicity, and gave companies like Samsung and HTC a chance to take a shot at them.

1. Launch simple products first.

Apple like everyone else had to launch a version 1.0. Business reality and human psychology demand it. At some point you have to get something out the door becfore you run out of cash or go insane. iPhone 1.0 was a product of controlled project scope.

2. Get feedback from beta testers

Getting live market feedback works well - but mostly with early adopters. So perhaps Apple didn't want go mainstream yet. Did they elect to keep sales constrained and stay with the iPhone *BETA crowd until they had perfected the product?

3. Move the focus to UX

The iPhone caused a stir because it moved the focus to a different aspect of the mobile UX. Were Apple deliberately saying "it's not about hardware. Stop competing on hardware. This new phone is all about the user experience." So in a way, the hardware shortcomings drew attention to the UX. People complaining about missing hardware could be accused of "missing the point/having no vision" - and frequently were.

4. No competitors stand a chance anyway

Apple decided it didn't matter if their prodcut wasn't perfect, because they were confident that none of the existing mobile manufacturers could get their act together to compete on Apple's UX turf nearly fast enough. Efforts from HTC and Samsung were hardly mind-blowing. Nokia's device is still in development.

And realistically, that wasn't hard to predict. For traditional electronics companies try to squeeze into the Apple mold seems to be all but impossible. So Apple put their money where their mouth was and went first to market with an incomplete product. They knew they would get a way with it.

5. And now they can generate more buzz by launching version 2.

All publicity is good publicity.

Are people going to buy iPhone2? Some more will. That I suspect that question doesn't matter to Apple too much. We're still, arguably, in beta 2. One more release and it's going to get interesting.

Tower Bridge has joined the ranks of an increasing number of intelligent objects that can tell us things about themselves.

My colleague David Whittle uncovered this beautiful little story: Tower Bridge is now on Twitter. Effecitvely the bridge is keeping its own micro blog of its activitiy and notifying anyone who cares to subscribe about what it is doing.

This makes Tower Bridge into a spime - an object that is in some why aware of its's own position in space and time, and able to report it to interested parties.

You've found your keys

Spimes offer a lovely way to connect the world of physical objects to the information flow of the Internet.

Lost your keys? If they were spime keys, you could Google for them.

Lent a book to someone but can't remember who? If it were a spime you could Google for who had it. And maybe even if they had read it.

Bruce Sterling describes a vision of the future where product designers can iteratively enhance spime-products using spime data about when and where the products were used. Kind of like Web analytics but for physical products too. (Fascinating and useful for the designers, but no replacement for experience labs and other ethno techniques. Why? Because a spime will still not be able to capture and relay its users intentions, motivations and desires.)

Spimes and spime kludges

You can't yet google your keys or get analytics about how someone used their new shoes. But there is already a lot of spime-like stuff out there, beyond Tower Bridge.

Track packages: Express parcels are spimes. They have barcodes and RFID tags, so that you can track where they have got to. There was furore a few years back over the idea of RFID tags embedded in clothes to help with inventory tracking. If you forgot to remove the tags, then conceivably, people could track you!

Find children: Mobile phones and cool sneakers with GPS are being used to help worried parents keep track of their children. (No need to implant the chip in the child, just give them a kid-friendly phone or trendy sneakers and they'll take their treasure with them everywhere).

And this low tech but ingenious approach is helping people find lost digital cameras. If you find a lost camera, just mail four pictures from it to the Found Cameras and Orphan Pictures blog, and maybe the owner will find them and claim it.

Spime your stuff now

If you own something that you feel need to be searchable by others, Google can help. Google Base lets you store any information about anything online now, so that others can search for it. But unless you can find a way to update the information in real time, then your object won't yet be a spime.

Know any other good spimes? Do tell.

As remote controls and mobile phones become increasingly baroque in their complexity, more and more of us find ourselves pressing the wrong buttons at the wrong times. I press the wrong button three times a day on my K800i.

But Grandma has an extra problem: she worries that by pressing the wrong button she will break things or hurt herself.

Big picture here at Book of Joe. And you can buy the cartoon from the New Yorker.

Designing to overcome that is a major challenge. But if you can do it, the magic part is that millions of other people who thought they were more sophisticated than grandma will suddenly love your product too. Because it's simple and supportive.

Thanks, Debre, for pointing out the strategy that Starbucks have been following: cutting costs and downgrading service in a bid to stave off competition from MacDonalds.

From the Guardian...

The troubled coffee chain Starbucks, renowned for its elaborate frappuccinos and mochas, is going back to basics by testing a cut-price brew costing only $1 (51p). Fighting slowing growth at its US stores, the firm is offering an eight-ounce "short" measure of ready-made coffee for a price undercutting fast-food rivals such as McDonald's in a trial at branches in its home city of Seattle.

This looks like an appalling strategy. For the simple reason that it focuses on coffee.

Experience vs Commodity

Starbucks didn't build a business on selling coffee. Coffee is cheap. They built a business on selling a customer experience.

The term they used was a "third place" a restful, aromatic, aesthetically pleasing, sociable space that is neither work nor home. Coffee was the hub of it, but without the surrounding experience, would any of us really consent to pay two pounds a cup?

Apparently, the experience is now all but gone. And hence it's becoming rather difficult to justify the price tag for coffee alone. More from the Guardian...

Schultz recently warned in a leaked internal memo that the brand's charm was in danger of diminishing as it became a mainstream "commodity". He said the sense of theatre had evaporated, thanks to automatic espresso machines, and he complained some stores even no longer had an aroma of fresh ground coffee due to vacuum-sealed packaging.

Innovation pundit Bruce Nussbaum relates his recent experience of walking into a Starbucks in New York City…

I thought […] I’m going to feel like a sausage on an assembly line, waiting, talking to people not paying attention, then waiting again. And for what? A cup of coffee? It was all so transactional. I don’t need Starbucks for that.

CEOs who get it

Apple has been down this road. During their darkest hour, they were producing a bewildering array of uninspiring machines and an ageing, unreliable operating system. They wanted to compete with the frequently drab IBM PC clones, and in so doing seemed to forget their "think different" mantra. It was Steve Jobs, much to everyone's surprise, who put Apple back on track by helping it deliver a unique user experience again - starting with the brightly coloured iMac.

It seems that Starbucks has also smelled the coffee. Howard Schultz, the newly appointed chief executive is the guy who built Starbucks up in the first place. He does seem to know what he's doing - note that he talks about the "sense of theatre".

So why the $1 cup of coffee? No matter home much pressure Starbucks is under, competing on price to "lure" customers back in doesn't make sense for an experience-based company. Better to refurbish the stores, refocus the staff and refresh the coffee. Then let word of mouth bring customer back for what they were always buying anyway: the experience.

The strategies, as mentioned in the previous post:

1. Innovate your way out
2. Optimise, to squeeze more from what you have
3. Cut costs by improving the customer experience

Let's take a look at strategy 3.

Cut costs by improving the customer experience

Customer experience got a mention in the previous post. It's the idea that every interaction that a customer has with your organisation, via whatever channel, contributes to the impression they form of your brand. Your branding and advertising makes a promise. Customer experience is about delivering on it.

There are two ways to use customer experience design to save money:

1. Encourage your customers to migrate to lower cost channels
2. Reduce the overall service load by building a customer experience that works

Encourage your customers to migrate to lower cost channels

Many businesses have found that the web is now channel to market. That's great, customers love the flexibility and business love the cost savings. So, to reduce costs in a downturn, make sure that your customers migrate to the channels that cost you less. Hardly rocket science.

But actually getting customers to migrate can pose a challenge. How do you persuade them to move?

Some businesses have been known to deliberately increase call queuing times to encourage customers to try online self service. This is a good way to annoy customers. Others have tried customer education campaigns - generally a good way to bore customers. In reality you can't force people to use a channel they don’t want to. You can only entice them with a great website customer experience.

A great example: British Airways. Their strategy is to reduce the number of staff on check-in desks. To do that, they need to reduce the duration of each customer check-in. And to do that, they need to get customers to adopt online check-in. The BA.com website has been steadily optimised over the years. It has reached the point now where I actively choose to fly BA, just so that I can use their online check-in. It's easy and clear, you can select your seat easily, and you get to zip through check-in quickly. They've enticed me to use their online channel and everyone wins.

Reduce the overall service load by building a continuous customer experience

When things go wrong, customers want to talk to a human being quickly and set things straight. Enabling human contact is a reality of delivering a good overall customer experience. But a typical call centre call can cost between 7 and 20 pounds to handle, when you factor in facilities, training, salary and benefits. So avoiding the events that generate call customer service calls is very important for controlling costs.

Customers call when they encounter a breakdown in the continuity of a customer experience. A breakdown can occur at different levels:

• Within channel: Eg. One member of staff has no information about a previous conversation with a customer. This kind of stuff is quite rare, mercifully.
• Between channels: In one project, Flow found that customers referred to the online channel found registration so difficult and confusing, they had to call the call centre back to get help.
• Between organisations: In one Flow project, we discovered that customers could not top up their mobile phone accounts because the 3rd party retailer they had bought from had not correctly registered the sim card and provided the customer with a PIN. Another example: incorrect payment details on an airline website generated calls to a the airline, but also to the customers banks.

How to build a continuous customer experience:

• Hunt down the discontinuities. Look at call centre logs. Look at website logs. Interview retail staff. Run a research project to get "mystery shoppers" or real consumers to try the process out for you.
• Work out the cost of the discontinuities. How many calls does it take to address the problem? What opportunity is missed if the customer fails to resolve the issue? How many customers are encountering the problem? Multiplying the numbers up will give you a rationale and a business case for choosing particular problems to address.
• Fix the discontinuity. Often, a small fix makes a big difference. Making sure a piece of information is made available in the right place at the right time often does wonders. But sometimes the fix will require major system alterations. If those changes can't be justified or undertaken in the short term, look for a way to patch the service: a work-around. (I blogged an amusing example of this a while back: Microsoft's new software boxes are hard to open, so Microsoft patched the issue and published instructions online).
• Measure the results. To prove the project made a difference, look for reductions in the relevant call types. Look for increases in usage of the problem channel. And the most powerful evidence of all: look for improvements in your bottom line.

Organisations that work to improve the customer experience benefit from reduced costs. They can entice customers to the most cost-effective channels and they generate fewer negative customer experiences and fewer expensive service calls.

The strategies, as mentioned in the previous post:

1. Innovate your way out
2. Optimise, to squeeze more from what you have
3. Cut costs by improving the customer experience

Let's take a look at strategy 2.

Strategy 2: Optimise to squeeze more from what you have

This is primarily a marketing strategy. The idea: find out why your customers buy, and what stops them from buying. Then do more of the good stuff, and fix the bad stuff.

Digital marketers make a lot of noise about acquiring new customers. That's certainly an essential element of a successful business. But keeping your customers happy when they get to you is worthy of at least as much attention. There's a rule of thumb: acquiring a new customer is 6-10 times more expensive than retaining an existing customer. So a solid strategy when times are hard is to plug the holes in your "leaky bucket," and stop website visitors from pouring out as fast as you can pour them in.

(The data that actually supports the rule of thumb is hard to come by. And I think the cost of retention is tricky to calculate because customer retention comes from good customer experience, and that comes from every area of your business. But there is some useful data quoted here at Wikipedia).

The key words: conversion and loyalty

Conversion is about making a prospective customer actually complete a transaction and buy something from you. Loyalty is about bringing them come back to shop with you again.

Ways to improve online conversion

Some good, cheap tactics:

• Take a look at the findings on Marketing Experiments, optimise your product lists [PDF], and generally follow e-commerce guidelines
• Look at data such as search logs, web analytics
• Run A/B testing to get data comparing the success of different site designs.

But there's a problem. None of them ever brings you into direct contact with target customers. And that means that although you when customers drop out, you never know why customers drop out. What was missing from the product descriptions? How did the buying process not match customer needs? What did competitor websites do for them that yours didn't?

The best way to optimise is to mix stats with usability tests. Stats tell you what is going on on your site, and where trouble spots may lie. Usability tests tell you what the causes of the problems are and what customers really want from you.

So. Killer tactics to really improve conversion:

• Run face to face customer tests to understand usability, customer intention and customer workflow
• Use intercept and track tools on your website to mix free-form response with clickstream recording

Ways to boost loyalty

Loyalty comes from an emotional connection. Here are some things that cause positive emotions about websites:

• Human engagement. Two good solutions: an approachable style and an online community. (Firebox.com is a good example of both).
• Polite interaction. As customers we want suggestions and ideas, but we want to stay in control. We don't want hard sell, intrusive questions or spam. If we feel free to walk away, we feel safe to come back.
• Getting what you want. Google has built the world's most powerful brand by giving people the information they want reliably. And Amazon suggest books and CDs you didn't even know you wanted, but invariably find that you do. Both of these sites have gone the extra mile in making it easy for customers to find things. Because if customers can't find things quickly, they won't stick around.
• Customer-first behaviour at all touch points. As a customer, I have to know that you will look after me. If my item is lost during shipping or if I want to return it - give me the facility to sort my problems out quickly and efficiently online. And of course, Amazon is reknown for the high standard of care they offer right through the customer experience. And they're looking good because if it.

Improving conversion rates, and building customer loyalty are really important strategies for surviving and prospering in a downturn. And often, its easy to make improvements in small steps too.

You'll love part 3: Cut costs by improving the customer experience.

The economic prospects for 2008 don't look too promising for the world's most developed economies. We're in for a slowdown, or possibly something worse.

When market conditions change, it stands to reason that a change in strategy can make sense. I've got 3 design related strategies that will prove useful if there are lean times ahead.

1. Innovate your way out
2. Optimise, to squeeze more from what you have
3. Cut costs by improving the customer experience

There's quite a lot to each one of them so I'm going to post them one at a time.

Strategy 1: Innovate your way out

If you're not going to make enough money from what you're already doing, come up with something new for a new source of revenue.

Apple provides an impressive example. Here’s a quote from the San Francisco Chronicle in 2001, when times were hard for the IT industry and the whole US economy:

"Apple has maintained its workforce at about 11,000 throughout the year. In a meeting with analysts last week, Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs said: "Almost every single competitor has been doing massive layoffs and retrenching and restructuring, but we're doing quite the opposite. We're not laying off boatloads of people. We're taking those talented people and saying that if we're going to get out of this, we're going to get out of it by innovating our way out of it."

If you have managed to put some cash put by for a rainy day, Steve Job's approach is a good way to go. But only if you know how to innovate properly. Innovation doesn't mean throwing money at blue sky projects and hoping for miracles. You can cut out masses of risk by using a structured design process:

• Contextual research. This isn't market research with surveys and focus groups. Contextual research is about observing and participating in people's lives to get the dirty truth about what they need, what they want and how they behave. The innovation often seems obvious when you've got the right information.
• Conceptual thinking. Get your team together. Have lots of ideas. Stay out of the details and explore the new and usual stuff - that's where inspiration comes from.
• Evaluation with target users. Make cheap prototypes any which way you can, and watch target customers try it out. Even if the feedback is not what you want to hear, it's better to face harsh reality in the R&D lab than out in the open market.
• Iteration. Your first attempt will be shaky. Keep testing and fixing your product's design until your customers tell you its ready.

Start now, and ride the up-cycle

Depending on your line of business, getting a new product design and launched can take a while. So innovate during the downturn, when talented staff are at their most faithful and affordable, and be in position to ride the up cycle when it comes.

When times are hard, it feels safe to keep a low profile - cut back, don't take risks. But if your current strategy doesn't fit the climate, doing nothing might well be riskier. If you'd like more insight into how innovation can help businesses prosper, Bruce Nussbaum has a list of ten books you should read.

Strategy 2 will be: Optimise, to squeeze more from what you have.

A great quote from an OLPC spokesman about why some governments are not following through on ordering educational laptops from the OLPC initiative.

"It has not been that processor versus that processor or that operating system versus that operating system - it's been small thinking versus big thinking. That's really the issue.

Change equals risk especially for politicians. And we are certainly advocating change because the [education] system is failing these children."

However, a Nigeria's education minister replies,

"What is the sense of introducing One Laptop per Child when they don't have seats to sit down and learn; when they don't have uniforms to go to school in, where they don't have facilities?"

Maybe you don't need a seat or a uniform or a roof to engage productively with a computer. Purveyors of mobile computing in developed countries are trying to convince us of that. But other studies say hyper-mobility is a myth: you need somewhere safe and quiet before you can do any real thinking. Maybe it just depends on the person, and the context they are used to existing in.

See the BBC News article: Politics 'stifling $100 laptop'

There's also some great video and a wonderful slideshow of trials in Nigeria.

I'm excited. I've just registered for Designing Interactive Systems 2008, in Cape Town, South Africa.

It's at least partially about interaction design for less developed countries. Here's a key chunk of blurb:

"At DIS 2008 we want to bring together people from different cultures and understand how designs and techniques employed in affluent high-technology environments can be translated to relatively poor environments to be used by people with relatively low literacy levels. Due to the prevalence of cellular handsets throughout the continent, many Africans are now having their first experience of interactive technology. We believe that DIS 2008 will be an important step in understanding how to design interactive systems for these new users."

It's a huge and wicked topic, and I'm looking forward to learning more about it.

For now, here are a few interesting dimensions:

• Emerging economies are big, so designing for them is terribly important. Mobile phone manufacturers have been exploiting the massive growth in emerging markets for at least a couple of years now. In Q3 of 2007 Nokia sold nearly 112 million devices, and reports that sales of handsets in emerging markets have soared. The number of Chinese Internet users was estimated in June 2007 to be 162 million people.
• Some developing economies have developed further than others. Does interaction design really have any relevance to people living on a dollar a day or less? I can't see it. At the base of Maslow's pyramid, people have more pressing concerns. But there are emerging market economies, newly industrialised economies and less developed countries to consider. So its important not to reject ideas that can work well for one group or environment, just because it won't suit others.
• OLPC is a great case study. Is it the biggest, brashest example of ill-informed western ideals meeting "third world" reality? Or will the kid-powered network triumph over geographical, cultural and political constraints and help a new generation to learn by doing? It's interesting to watch.As discussed above, there are some countries where it won't work. Spending money on digital technology makes no sense when you don't have books, a teacher or a reliable source of clean water.
• Opportunities look different in each place. In South Africa, only 8% of people can get online from home. A lot of the population can't afford the high local price of broadband, or the cost of a computer to plug into it. There are a range of interesting results. 3G is more popular, and mobile operators subsidise laptops, as well as handsets. There's also a community that relies strongly on internet cafes for getting online.In Nigeria, where conditions are different again, you can buy a goat and pay by transferring mobile airtime minutes.

So - designing for developing contexts is complicated. Just like any form of design. And the only sound approach is to do contextual research, to make sure really understand the reality of whatever niche you're designing for.

DIS 2008 is at the end of February. I'll blog about what I learn.