Category Archives: work

Oct 06 2010
links, work

smörgåsbord choice cuts (iv)

The usual selection of things I have seen and absorbed in the last few days around the internets.

Innovation
The laundrette that emails you when your clothes are done. Rather obvious idea that makes you wonder 1. why hasn’t someone done it before? 2. who still uses laundrettes?

Social Commentary
Daniel Pink questions what it means for (American) society now that the data shows for the first time that more people aged 25-34 have never been married than are married. He looks at Economics, Culture, Politics and new business opportunities.

Apple
According to Apple Insider (and probably two minutes earlier/later by Mac Rumors), the new Sharp phone has a display that matches the Retina display on the iPhone 4.

UX
One from the ‘No shit, Sherlock‘ school of UX insight. UX Movement alerts us to the news that right-aligned buttons on web forms work best. It suggests that you might use left-aligned buttons on single-page forms because: “it creates a clear and direct path to the button that users can’t miss” but doesn’t sufficiently explain why having it on the right in this instance wouldn’t be just as good. Because right-aligned buttons work best on multiple page/section forms, users have got used to them being on the right – such is the way conventions work. Why swap it around for the single page forms? This sort of article is potentially useful for a real newbie in UX design but it isn’t really telling me anything a lot of comparitive research and common sense wouldn’t. Not to mention the complete ignorance of languages that aren’t read left-to-right.

However, redeeming themselves, there is also a cute post from UX Movement about New York City reverting to Title Case on their signage to improve readability from the previous capitalised approach.

Moleskine
I am generally quite critical of hipster trends but I concede to loving my Moleskine and my Apple portables. This has made a bit of noise this week on the web, but in case (ahem) you missed it: Moleskine case covers for iPad and iPhone incorporating notepads.

Health & Fitness
As someone who has dabbled in dietary supplements (Chrondoitin, Gingko Biloba, Glucosamine, Omega 3) and who lives on a meat-light diet, I am struck by a conflict between believing marketing hype about supplements and knowing the evidence is light. David McCandless & Andy Perkins’ active infographic on Information Is Beautiful “Snake Oil?” helps sort the supplements by evidence. Multiple bubbles exist for supplements depending on the number of health benefits associated. Very compelling visual and (amongst an awful lot of info-graphic noise recently) one with a genuine enlightening purpose. I don’t think the concept is new, it was a static graphic before no? but i believe the interactive element is.

Design
37 Signals admit on their blog that their site is much-imitated and that this may be a part of why they attempt a redesign every 6 months. The new look is a bit of a “back to basics” for them. There is a real emphasis on copywriting and on using colour sparingly for highlighting. It was interesting that their summary didn’t mention IA or structure as such – perhaps that is because it is a given in their processes.

A bit of a lightweight piece on Six Revisions about single-page websites. The accompanying text is a little frothy but it is notable for the showcase of attractive examples.

Finally,
As if to underline the point above about frothy analysis, 90 Percent of Everything had a great post earlier this week about why we should return to a little more academic rigour in our sharing of knowledge and testing of hypotheses. It suggests a few approaches including:

:: Returning to primary sources, not relying on second-hand re-telling of material
:: Ensure enough detail is included to allow the test or experience to be reproduced and re-evaluated. This includes sharing all the data.
:: Be honest about shortcomings. There aren’t enough examples of failure shared in the Information Architecture and User Experience community.

The author acknowledges the difficulty in achieving this in commercial and sensitive situations (client confidentiality for example) but it is a welcome piece of advice for us to avoid issuing sanitised soundbites for instant sharing. Very much worth a read and I wholeheartedly concur (even if I am guilty of just this fast food ux snacking on this very blog).

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Oct 04 2010
cycling, links, work

smörgåsbord choice cuts (iii)

Cycling
I have flirted with the idea of stripping-back my old Orange P7 ever since seeing the beautiful work at the Orange P7 project site . Back in 1995-6 I saved everything I earned at Sainsbury’s as a checkout assistant to buy my beloved bike. Back then it cost £1,200. It astonishes me that I could afford that when I couldn’t even justifiably cobble that together today for a MacBook Pro. Every so often the idea of bringing it back from the dead is freshened up and the post of the GT Bravado I saw on Cycle EXIF just serves to remind me what beautiful single-speeds 90s MTBs can make when treated with design dignity.

Information Architecture
Regular readers will know I curate (word of the moment for these days) thisisIA. The site showcases everyday examples of information design and organisation. I added a wonderful example today from Iain Tait’s crackunit blog that resonates with my autistic desire for order in cabling (Dare people should take a look at my zip-tied desk cables..).

Service
A quick look at a wonderful idea from the Hotel Exerda (found on PSFK) whereby hotel diners can see the recipes for the dishes they eat. Very much along the lines of those hotels where you can buy the fixtures and fittings.

Social
A very cute and simple idea seen in this Vimeo demo from Studio Sophisti [in het Nederlands] to use two lamps connected by the net (Ping) to sense when the other is on and consequently burn brighter. In so-doing the lights create a non-verbal communication link between the two users. I love the subtlety and intimacy of this idea that could be a very sweet way of connecting with loved ones. Away from your wife or girlfriend, both of you have connected lamps and you are working away when the lamp begins to burn brighter … touching.

Miscellaneous
A great find last week from my friend @Ppparkaboy was John Crace’s review in The Guardian of Roland Huntford’s new book “Race for the South Pole: The Expedition Diaries of Scott and Amundsen“. This review draws our attention to the fact we seem to laud Scott of the Antarctic despite of his catastrophic failure, yet Shackleton – “who didn’t lose a man .. remains a footnote in the national psyche”. I suspect, when we think about this, we can find similar examples amongst many of the modern era’s heroes – athletes, talent-show contestents and so-on. Huntford continues:

“Only in Britain do we revere the man who died in failure above the survivor. Elsewhere in the world, Scott is seen as rather second-rate – an incompetent loser who battled nature rather than tried to understand it.”

It is definitely worth absorbing the remainder of this review.

Nota: I have added a few more sources to my collection of regularly-monitored feeds to mix things up a bit. I get a little bit of a PSFK and FlowingData overload so would like to share a little more UX. I will also try and keep to the subheaded structure to allow scanners to skip past content they’re not interested

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Oct 04 2010
work

When tinkering with charges might not be enough

Take a look at the video explaining about SF Park, a federally-funded initiative in San Francisco to imrpove the efficiency of finding and using parking.

I like the objective, I like the easy-peasy visualisation and the fact that it is so impressive in its scale. What worries me is the logic behind it. Whilst the cost of parking is important – and could nudge behaviour – the proximity of spaces to your planned destination is so significant (particularly to such a perambulatory-challenged nation) as to put the kybosh on the scheme?

Even if parking is significantly cheaper three blocks away, is that sufficient to offset the extra walk? What if that area is one where the lighting and security is poor?

What about the execution: Parking places are spotted and taken so quickly in urban areas that checking availability online (even on a mobile device) is not particularly helpful to the driver. It might have relevance if your passenger is on a smart phone screaming, “two blocks north there’s a space … hit it!”, how about feeding this information into your TomTom or broadcasting on local radio?

Aside: When you go to a multi-storey car park and it says ‘spaces’, what sort of tolerance do they run? Is it a literal count in must <  out + spaces? Do they allow a 5-10 car tolerance to account for people frenetically driving around looking for space? In Kingston-Upon-Thames at least one parking facility has clever little marker lights at the end of vacant bays and incorporates a live count of space per floor to inform drivers and speed up the locate-and-park situation.

Nevertheless, what a nice federally-funded project. It’s about time basic tech was applied to this sort of problem. I would encourage you to add your thoughts to the comments.

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Oct 02 2010
links, work

TomTom directing drivers to shorter travel times

Nota: This post was originally published on our client-facing blog at Dare in edited form. I love the editors deeply but I wanted to share with you, dear reader, the full vestal version.


It doesn’t seem that long ago that the sight of a GPS in a car had the same reaction of someone using an iPad on the train does today. A sort of curious mix of jealousy and cynicism about their efficacy.

And then the prices fell and the world and his wife were getting them for Christmas. From the executive saloon to the student runabout, almost every car sports some sort of touch-screen map these days. It is this progress to ubiquity that has led TomTom to assume a critical mass is being reached such that their latest initiative has a chance of succeeding.

Boldy termed a Traffic Manifesto, the Dutch navigation giant has published its objective of making “better use of [the] existing road capacity” in Europe to “reduce journey times for everyone by up to 5%”. Quite some lofty objective given that this is predicated on the take-up of its HD Traffic service reaching 10% of the driving community in Europe. Soak that up. 10% penetration in Europe. Add to this aspiration the cold hard fact that just 2.2% of TomTom’s 45million drivers connect to such a service and one wonders quite what they’re putting in the tea over in Amsterdam.

Leaving that aside, the technology and the ethics behind it are quite pleasing. In TomTom’s own words, this is how it works:

“TomTom HD Traffic uses a revolutionary new source of traffic information: the traffic flow of up to 80 million anonymous mobile phone users on the road. From this anonymous data, TomTom knows exactly where, in which direction and at what speed all these mobile phone users are traveling throughout the road network. This real-time data is combined with other existing quality traffic information sources, resulting in the most complete and reliable traffic information.” [Source: TomTom website]

The campaign activity to support this includes offering this data up to local broadcast networks across the continent for free. The cynic in me assumes this is to offset the simple truth that an in-car device capable of real-time traffic data and re-routing rather makes the hyper-local radio bulletin (ergo much of  the stations’ raison d’être) redundant.

We seem rather obsessed at the moment with geographic social networking. Whether it is initiatives such as this or more frivolous pursuits such as Places,Foursquare, Nike+, History Pin and even the BBC’s Dimensions project, it seems a rather curious paradox that the more our lives are being tracked and traced in the digital world, the more we seek relevance from the physical environment around us: to seek out new routes, new places and new people in the vicinity. So, while the TomTom traffic data is helpful in the now, imagine  aggregating this data  over a longitudinal study to identify new places to commute from? Well, social graphs such as Harry Kao’s commuter map and Mapumental are doing just that sort of thing.

After all, isn’t it nice to find examples where crowd-sourced information is genuinely useful, even if CEO’s like TomTom’s Harold Goddijn can’t resist making somewhat grandiose claims.

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Oct 01 2010
cycling, links, work

smörgåsbord choice cuts (ii)

With a pile of Tabbloids bulging in my tote bag, it is time once again to roll out a few selected links, observations and all-round ephemera from the web. I have decided this is going to to be a recurring but infrequent feature of the ‘bord. I have appended a scalable lowercase numeral thus (ii) as this marks the second of the smörgåsbord choice cuts.

First up is the bystander effect. The Nudge blog reminded me of this well-known social psychology observation whereby passive peer pressure leads to inaction. Most famously observed in experiments where subjects made no attempt to save themselves or other victims when other (acting) persons remained apparently unconcerned. In an observation on the communal fridge (viz.”how long would you ignore [an item that had gone off]”), I would posit that a stronger observation of this could be a packed train carriage. A passenger may stand in acres of space whilst the carriage fills up tightly by the doorway but because no-one has yet asked the person in space to move down, neither will they. No-one wants to be the first, no-one wants to be the outspoken one – even when the group would benefit.

Once again, Nudge blog alerts us to a nice bit of persuasive design. Sweden’s Speed Lottery rewarded the obedient motorist by entering all law-abiding, non-speeding cars in a given zone into a lottery to win 20,000 SEK. It remains to be seen whether such a carrot approach produces the long-term reduction in speeding that a fine-based stick approach has attempted in the past. (på Svenska)

A quick find on Twitter now, apparently the design of the new web-based Twitter user interface is based, at least in-part, on the golden ratio. The extent to which the golden ratio matters is debatable, as is the success of the Twitter redesign. That said, it’s always nice to see someone using principles in design layouts.

Simon Lamb once again finds a sweet cycling link to share and in light of (Le Tour 2010 winner) Contador’s peculiar suspension (a tiny, ineffectual amount, on a rest day … are the regulations just a little excessive?) I thought I would share to build a picture of the Landis allegations against Lance Armstrong. Of course, Landis remains the only other Le Tour winner to be identified as being a doper. Bill Gifford, “The Case Against Lance“.

I will, at some point, write a post about my beloved Rapha and why I am torn in two about their recent (last two years?) brand growth. For the meantime, draw your own conclusions about how I feel about their move into skincare. I cannot deny that the image and product quality are outstanding. The attention to detail that Bianchista outlines in her ‘unboxing’ post “Rapha Skincare – First Look” is typically high and redolent of the tifosi tone they have woven throughout their kit. But soaps? Really, is there anything more to this than simply chasing the indulgent gift market? Does it devalue the brand they established in exceptional race and training garments? That said, if you go to Rapha and use the promo code ventoux5 you get free shipping.

I bought the first edition of Communicating Design sometime around 2006 when Dan Brown came to a NN/g conference in London. I loved it and it changed the way I did user experience documentation and the way I thought about explaining to people what we were doing. So I am delighted to have pre-ordered the updated and revised version. I could get books on expenses through Dare but I choose not to for things like this, I want to own it. It is very much my book for me to consume. In a post last week, Dan talks about his work on the revised Flow Charts section. The little peep-show of the typesetting and diagrams are wonderfully intriguing. I can only hope that this busy family-man can find some time in his schedule to run a workshop or two in the UK in the near future.

Of all the presenters at UX London in 2010, Stephen P. Anderson stood out as offering up the most inspirational – and instantly usable – content delivered in the most friendly and measured style. I was much pleased to see his post “Playing Hard to Get: Using scarcity to influence behaviour“, carries on this clear and measured theme. Stephen’s work is not a dusty academic study and nor is it a soaring aspirational call-to-arms for the Ux community. His observations are genuine, vivid and transferable. If you read one Ux post today, make it that one.

And finally, D&AD curate a section in British newspaper Metro each week which examines and critiques the output of the creative industries. myFry was featured this week and consequently my face was printed on 1.4m pages along with some of my observations given to the charming Seb Royce (Creative Director at Glue Isobar). You can read the article online in Metro (use a made up email address to access it) or on the D&AD site: “I can’t say no to this truly tasty Fry app“.

Sep 22 2010
work

Protect your creativity with a barcode

Although it has been spun out of a non-profit organisation, this great idea for copy protection of creative concepts still seems incredibly expensive.

The principle of Creative Barcode is that one generates a unique barcode for items of creative work. These are appended to the documentation in digital and printed forms and effectively watermark the ownership and credentials of the work prior to distribution. Were this to be the end of the story it might seem that the costs (£195 setup with 5 barcodes, thereafter £6 per code/piece of work) was excessive. However, throw in a few additional elements like standalone software, file lookup/transfer services and so on and the price is softened a little.

Without looking into it in detail I do wonder whether the £6 charge works across a project or whether you would have to generate a new barcode for every deliverable?

In any event, is there something a little more Creative Commons that could supply similar protection, or would something ‘free’ lack protective rigour?

Sep 22 2010
links, work

More choice cuts on the smörgåsbord

I don’t propose that one or even now two swallows can make a summer or that this frisson of activity on the blog will not fade incredibly quickly and my writings will dry up as quickly as they appeared. Like a chalk stream, perhaps.

So, to continue from yesterday, a few more things I have seen, and ting:

1. Flowing Data drew my attention today to a few pertinent images posted on the excellent Historypin site. Historypin simply takes archive photographs and overlays them (sadly without the option to place with the opacity) on Google Street View images from today to place history in context. The selection identified in today’s post draws attention to The Blitz.

2. Something I shared with a client of our who recently rejected the idea of using accordion interaction on forms, Luke Wroblewski’s work with Etre to test the pattern and make some observations. Conclusion, not significant +ve effect on conversion, but equally no significant –ve effect for an identifiable +ve change in the perception of simplicity. Well, that’s how I interpreted it.

3. I read about this visual technique a while ago in the national press but it has been picked up by the curators of the Nudge blog. Norfolk City Council are using funnel planting patterns for trees to create the illusion that drivers are approaching junctions at speed. This technique has been used for years with line-painting on roads but to use the built/grown environment is new. This is a great example of what Dan Lockton calls Design With Intent.

4. In related news, Konigi had a short piece on ‘Dark Patterns’ which is perhaps on the Machiavellian side of behavioural design. These are interaction patterns which intentionally coerce/seduce users into performing actions they would not ‘normally’ have performed. This is work by the enigmatic Harry Brignull which was presented at UX Brighton (2010) and you can follow the entire 30 minute slideshare by visiting his excellent blog.

5. This is worth of a full post at some point, based on some thoughts shared with me by a member of my team, Richard Blair. In the meantime, take a look at PSFKs piece about the effect of the Times paywall on their RSS content. This tears me up. As a Times reader in the offline world I quite like the new online exclusivity a paywall has created and the ad-free experience but I desperately lament the loss of the ability to pour my favourite columnists into my Tabbloid by subscribing to their RSS. I now am forced to the site.

That’s it for today, similar but newer things tomorrow. And possibly a proper ‘comment’ piece later today.

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Sep 21 2010
cycling, links, work

A few things I need to tell you about

A couple of years ago, maybe 18 months ago, I started using Tabbloid. Tabbloid is an HP-originated project that takes-in RSS feeds of blogs and other news-like content that interests you and, each day, outputs a PDF of that day’s posts. This PDF becomes your daily personal newspaper (an example of a Tabbloid PDF).

It isn’t that novel an idea now, a host of other sites do a similar thing. I make no assertion that this is the best, only that it suits me down to the ground. I am a frenetic gobbler of content. I save tens of articles a day into my Instapaper iPhone app and rarely read them (partly because I forget to synch before I find myself offline). I read and equally large number of posts daily when I stumble across them, follow a tweeted link or email. But what suits me best is the slow absorbption of content when I am offline. On the Tube. No connection, just a PDF in my hand with lots of stories about tech, cycling, gardening, architecture, behavioural psychology, satire…

So, what I tend to do is take a sharpie and mark-up articles I am going to explore further when I get back online. What actually happens is that I end up with bundles of 15-page duplex-prionted PDFs in my laptop bag and only a  handful get further exploration and even less get broadcast to my friends and colleagues.

Today I thought I might have a quick blitz and share some things I read last week in my Tabbloids:

1. A bit about how Wal-Mart’s CEO clears his inbox every day. This post from Good Experience resonnated with me as I recall the days of long commutes from Chelmsford to Norwich with a work laptop, clearing correspondence religiously at the start and end of each day.

2. The (harsh) reality of Nokia’s acquisition of Dopplr was explored by The Guardian and Signal vs. Noise took up the story and opined about the consequences of similar acquisitions. As a long-term Dopplr fan (a consequence of their tone of voice and functionality), it made for honest and sober reflection on the commercial realities of such deals.

3. PSFK‘s machine gun of inspiration regularly lands a direct hit and last week myself and a colleague both picked up on the behavioural psychology at work in the role of using kindness to punish Danish bike owners violating cycle parking arrangements in Copenhagen. The authorities treat each violator to a full bike service before leaving a message about their violation. Max from Dare suggested that the violators’ subsequent good behaviour might be due to a sense of reciprocity in his post to our clients. I wonder whether the lack of repeat offense (given that such a positive punishment would seem to reward bad behaviour) may be due to an implied belief that the first action was a warning and future violations would actually incur a genuine negative action from the authorities.

4. Late to the party as I don’t track his blog that intently, but as a fan of “Everything Bad Is Good For You“, I was struck by Steven B. Johnson’s forthcoming book when I heard about it this week. His blog post describes the content of the book, called “Where Good Ideas Come From” which is due out (hardcover) in early October.

> Super interested readers can explore my thoughts on “Everything Bad Is Good For You” in a post from June 2005

5. Cycling afficionados may like this post from Cycle EXIF showcasing Pedro Jeronimo’s Slütter. Featuring a belt-drive and some of the most refined titanium metalwork I have ever seen, it is wonderfully different to the derivative hipster fixie in the urban bike category.

6. Hopping about a bit now, this one is an information graphics one. For fans of old-school information design, take a look at Harold Fisk’s hand-drawn map of the Mississippi River in 1944 which illustrated the history of the channel the river took. Beautiful and intricate, if not altogether immediately accessible as an illustrative device.  My thanks to Flowing Data for the spot.

7. Having read Matt Rendell’s wonderful “The Death of Marco Pantani” last year, I was familiar with a few of the pictures posted over at Simon Lamb’s passionately-written La Gazzetta Della Bici. The other pictures he posted were a captivating exploration of the numerous highs and the ultimate low of the tragic death of Il Pirata.

8. Another quick flip over to Flowing Data where their short piece on Harry Kao’s commuter map left me thinking that Mapumental had done a much better job of this data by combining it with house prices in the UK.

I think I will save up a few more of these and share from time to time. If only to identify a few of the great writers and destinations I visit daily on the web that inspire me in work and play.

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Sep 17 2010
work

When a 25 minute form is considered a customer-centred success

It is somewhat inevitable that having spent time working at a major financial services company, my best-fit moving agency-side would be on financial services accounts.

I started at Dare with responsibility for creating delightful and innovative digital experiences with Barclays before a small side-step into Barclaycard and thence, last year, to Standard Life. Throughout this time I have had exposure to countless transactional forms, most of which are understandably onerous to the customers, advisors and others that have to use them.

Often the request is to sex-up such interactions. Crudely, our clients want more Apple and less application. Fundamentally though it doesn’t matter how good a student of Wroblewski you are or how much Tumblr you have channelled, it’s still a mortgage/car insurance/SIPP and not an iPad. It may not be entirely the correct analogy, but it is a touch of ‘lipstick on a pig’.

So it is heartening to see ING direct have a crack at reflecting this in their ad campaign running (at least where I have seen it) on The Tube. Broadly, the message reads that they tried to make the application fun but that wasn’t possible so they made it easy. Easy is then reinforced by the assertion that it only takes 25 minutes to complete.

That’s right, twenty five minutes. And that is deemed to be a promotable statement. I would not be happy if I were the CEO of WordPress if we were going to our customers and saying that blogs could be setup in 25 minutes, and blogs can be complex, configurable things. Who in their right mind thinks a 25 minute transactional experience is great?

I don’t blame the IA here, I blame the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and organisational structures that fail to sufficiently-challenge the arcane rules and regulations around such customer-facing forms.

Time and time again work is stymied by regulations on type size, concealment of information and the mindless mantra of ‘clear, fair and not misleading’.

If behavioural theory has taught us anything it is that showing customers all the information they could possibly need to make the decision can never be unequivocally fair and unbiased. In the real world, such an approach leads only to bafflement, confusion and a sense of being overwhelmed. It’s drinking from a firehose. Experience designers have known about this for decades and use progressive disclosure and choice architecture as a strategies for helping and nudging people down a path. Show this to a compliance bod and instantly the fear of an FSA slap for non-disclosure or assumptive selling makes the red ink pour forth.

The IA (who ultimately represents the customer) has no right of reply. Such decisions are largely non-negotiable. Even, dear reader, in the event that we use video footage from user testing where customers bumble and stumble over needlessly complex choices or exasperatedly slump at the sight of swathes of small-print, none of this melts the ice. Rules supposedly there to protect the consumer are, invariably, confounding them.

In such a rigid culture of blind compliance, forms will continue to take 30 minutes to complete. Forms will continue to demonstrate a paralysing paradox of choice. Forms will continue to lead consumers into completing incorrect or inappropriate responses leading them poorly served and out-of-pocket.

In my experience no-one at the major organisations lobbies the FSA for change and no-one at the FSA shows any acknowledgement of the advances in digital interaction and behavioural theory. Both organisations are still heavily influenced by the paper application form and the advised ‘expert ‘ sale via a middleman. Understand this: in a post Retail Distribution Review (RDR) world, the rise of direct to consumer sales will be significant and if financial service companies want to feel more Apple, then they have to think and act with a fundamentally user-centred perspective from product development (including actuarial) and throughout distribution, marketing and customer service.

Perhaps a theoretical example might help. People buy investment products to achieve a certain growth in their wealth. Investment products with higher growth potential tend to be higher risk investments. The safer products (a more guaranteed return) will suit someone with a more cautious attitude to risk. To understand what your attitude to risk is, you can complete a series of straightforward questions. However, try and make a link between the two, such as “you have a cautious approach to savings, you are best suited to investment product A” and that is classed as advice and you cannot do that online. Despite it being helpful to do so. you can only infer, so you might say “Our results suggest you are cautious in your approach to risk. We have products which range from cautious to speculative in terms of risk. Here they are.”

It is laughable. Never mind getting them it to drink it, you can’t even lead this metaphorical horse to water, merely suggest that there might be water in the general vicinity.

I have looked-at and proposed solutions that effectively take a Starbucks coffee at home approach to guiding users toward a suitable financial product. I have considered and suggested that we recommend a product but do not exclude exposure to other nearly-suitable products. I have used FSA-approved approaches to risk questionnaires and terminology but the simple fact remains that a human following a script can advise on the phone or in a face-to-face meeting, but online it is unacceptable.

I would be interested to hear of anyone in the financial services industry, client-side or at the FSA that has heard-of any consultation and user-experience research on the online-advised sales process. Or any kind of dialogue that encourages exploration of consumer psychology to counter the anachronistic approach of this moribund Authority. As the industry comes under the watch of the nascent Consumer Protection and Markets Authority I sincerely hope that the digital post-RDR consumer is given much better consideration.

IMPORTANT NOTE: These views are my own. Neither do they represent Dare‘s opinion nor are they intended as a criticism of any clients past or present. This post must be considered as standalone comment on the financial services industry en masse.

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Sep 14 2010
1 Comment
work

Exposing oneself in public (myFry part 2)

It’s not like I spend my day looking for cures for cancer, I just design and redesign digital experiences. Even so, when something you worked on, however small, gets genuine public attention including (justifiable) criticisms and joyous praise, it feels like a big deal.

So much of the day-to-day work is behind the scenes. Hours of screentime, meetings, sketching and commutes home with ideas buzzing in your head. Then it breaks the surface and with celebrity behind it, it leads to me spending an inordinate (and unbillable) amount of time monitoring the twitter streams fishing for compliments.

So that was myFry and that was yesterday. It occurred to me yesterday that this took place around an app that isn’t even free and, whilst it is undeniably popular, it is never going to be an Angry Birds (Rovio 6m+ sales) or even an ECB Cricket App (the OTHER media). Those apps reach the sort of population that – even ten years ago – would have been considered incredible sales records for the most successful of recording artists. In this day and age, a well-designed and popular app means your creativity is engaged with far beyond the single sales for Xfactor winners (< 0.5m units).

So that got me thinking a bit more (since I was involved on the outskirts of the hugely successful Waterslide and less successful Rollercoaster apps, both of which are free), does it matter more when the app is paid-for? The myFry app is nearly £8, it is hardly throwaway entertainment. Users rightly demand that such experiences work. As far as I can recall this was the first thing I have done which is directly paid-for by end consumers. Of course, sites I  have worked on are indirectly paid for as customers buy the products and services offered but the transaction is nevertheless perceptibly free, they have not just shelled-out cash to use the interface.

That customers have just paid for it means that they more-keenly feel the user-experience niggles (and there are some, both intentional and unavoidable) and feed these back into the AppStore reviews. It is these reviews that I care deeply about, the heartfelt feelings of the people I spent hours and hours designing-for and thinking about in front of my screen and sketchpad.

And there I will leave myFry, until I need to return for alternative versions, updates or any other development that Dare and Penguin see fit. You, dear reader, will only know more when such additional work becomes public.

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