Category Archives: work

Nov 04 2015
work

The Experience Gap

Thoroughly enjoyed this Harvard Business Review post about something we call at Dare, ‘The Experience Gap’. That is the huge gulf that often exists between a company’s perception of its customer experience and the reality of it. [The article isn’t entirely about this topic but is hugely valuable to consider the difference listening to customers and understanding]

Of course, much of what we consider marketing is about pushing the aspirational or intended experience from a product or service and caring less about the reality of it (which is generally something controlled by operations or product development teams).

A nice articulation of this gap can be seen in these two videos for Les Mills Grit Strength gym class. I shall leave them both here for direct comparison.

What you think you’ll experience

… and what you will almost certainly experience

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Oct 14 2015
2 Comments
work

Drawing Fire: How transparency in User Centred Design brings out the worst in our users.

There are certain roles in digital user-experience design that are coveted. Coveted for the opportunity they present to have your work seen and interacted with by a huge number of people, coveted because they represent Britain at its best, most accessible and world leading.

Jobs like the Government Digital Service and the British Broadcasting Corporation.

The new BBC.co.uk homepage across three screen sizes.

In that context, I’m a keen reader of the blogs both these organisations put out that explain and add authenticity to their work; the rigour and integrity of which is inspirational. [GDS & BBC]

Imagine then, having spent weeks and months developing user-centred solutions, using all the best thinking you can bear to the project. Deploying some of the brightest UX, Information Architecture and interaction design minds, commissioning (extensive) user testing and getting the buy-in and agreement of savvy and critical stakeholders. Imagine the end result being pushed to the expected audience and, in the spirit of transparency, sharing that journey online.

And then you read this response:

So another blog by another name showing all the hard work that has gone on the background, trying to justify the latest reason for the ‘responsive’ redesign. Just like the news app, just like the news page, you may have spent weeks shuffling you coloured bits of paper round on the wall and getting each other so excited that the toilets have never seen such use before, but the fact remains, you work has been pointless. The home page is crap, the news site is still crap and the news app still remains so crap, that those of us who still have access to version 2 now refuse to update.

And what will we see as a response to comments in this blog? Dismissal of those telling you that you have got the change wrong and continued insistence that this is the way forward. At least it’s something you can proudly tell you grandchildren in years to come, “I used to work for a Great British institution called the BBC and was involved in its downfall.”

Granted there is just a group of detractors and critics who are so full of hatred for a ‘biased’ BBC that one will never convince them, but even so, does this not make your heart sink? Sink at the ignorance, the stupidity at a group of people that cannot see how a truly incredible digital public service is designed entirely around the users. The undermining of the craft of the people that work on sites like this is deplorable. Patronisingly assuming that it’s just a self-congratulatory exercise involving coloured paper makes my blood boil.

When I read Hugh Gummett‘s original post I read about competitor analysis, stakeholder reviews, detailed requirements capture and interrogation of data. I can see there was more than cursory user testing, namely:

32 in-depth qualitative sessions and collecting quantitative feedback from around 400 people through surveys. Those recruited to provide feedback covered a wide range of demographics, had varied interests around areas such as news, sport, entertainment, lifestyle and learning..

Furthermore, the testing included a BETA site (opt-in) and multivariant testing of the implementations for the homepage. To give the team credit one really has to acknowledge that this was not a design done in a sealed room and foisted on a gullible public. But they can’t even win there, other commenters assert that 400 users aren’t sufficient as the BBC has 8 million users – not understanding how representative sampling works at all. Design a site for each one of those 8 million users? How does that work then? Sigh.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have looked at the comments, perhaps the UX team doesn’t either, nothing good ever comes from comment threads after all but my goodness me, as a way to demotivate this afternoon’s reading takes some beating.

Of course, if your head is as far above the parapet as it is at the BBC this kind of attack is inevitable. In our industry, we do have to stay strong and continue to work with confidence that we’re going about user-centred design in the right way. I take comfort from the fact that as practitioners we have raised the bar and are getting some many things right now that it takes a bit of pedantry and comment flaming to stir us and increase our resolve to ensure each implementation gets better and better for those that care about what we do.

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Sep 18 2015
work

Waitrose, don’t make me think. The illusion of choice in the myWaitrose offers programme.

We have to begin by making the assumption that Waitrose made the decision to ‘force’ their loyal customers to choose their own offers on the basis that it would engender those customers to the brand and this would benefit the business. That is to say that someone at Waitrose ran the numbers and built a business case that said “This will be good for our business”. Now, there’s also a complication (that I freely admit I don’t fully understand) that getting more people to convert on these offers presumably means they lose margin on the specific sale but there is a general uplift on the basket of goods. One estimate put the cost of the scheme at a potential £5m to Waitrose.

From The Guardian, this is how it works:

To use the scheme shoppers must have a myWaitrose card. They can then create an online account, log in, and view the full list of almost 1,000 products from which to select the 10 items they want. They will then get 20% off the cost of these goods, however many times they buy them.

Discounts last for a fixed period, […]. After that shoppers get the chance to choose from a new list. The discount is applied automatically at the checkout, and is on top of other promotions. For example, chickens are currently £10 for three, with the 20% off on top of this.

I’m not a retail analyst. I am merely musing on a set of behavioural biases. A lot of the articles about the scheme are rich with chat about whether it’s a good deal or not for the customer. These article presuppose that the customer has done the work and selected the most pertinent 10 offers for them.

And that, dear reader, is quite the presupposition. More on that in a minute.

Talking of suppositions, Waitrose themselves make one by assuming that customer choice in this sphere is a good thing. Now, they may have done research that told them ‘customers want to choose their offers’. We know, however, that customers – human beings – are not that good at making unbiased decisions. That’s what behavioural theory tells us. Unless the research was rigorously executed with absolutely no bias then I have little faith in the leap Mark Price makes in this BBC News article from June:

The boss of Waitrose, Mark Price, says it’s a ground-breaking move giving customers the power to choose the offers they want.

“Different forms of personalised marketing have been around since the 1990s, but we’re introducing mass customisation in grocery. Customers can choose what’s valuable to them when they shop for groceries. We really are giving power to the consumer,” he said.

Ground-breaking it might be. Doesn’t make it right though.

A host of paradox of choice experiments have been run which demonstrate we are confounded by choice; too much choice, particularly where there is considerable cognitive effort involved in the eventual decision, makes that choice harder to make. We know that increasing choice (often) results in:

  • Regret that we made an incorrect choice. We have no-one but ourselves to blame.
  • Loss of presence; effectively question why we’re doing this task in the first place.
  • Elevated expectation, we’ve been given this choice, we have to make the most of it.
  • Peer pressure, other people would make better choices.

With the possible exception of the last item, the myWaitrose scheme falls, in my opinion, into this trap. The illusion of control and freedom it presents, coupled with the possible cost savings is insufficient motivation for me to get over the hump of the effort required to actually do it. As a customer and myWaitrose member, I must have received 20+ emails and direct mails encouraging me to take up my offers, I have never done this beyond a cursory look online. The reason is plain and simple: I cannot be bothered. Even before I’d seen the summaries in the aforementioned articles that showed around a 10% saving on a basket of goods (vs. Tesco) and that the hyped 20% on offer isn’t really against staples but more high-value infrequent goods.

Stopping to think about the customer touchpoints and the interface here might help illustrate. It’s right out of the mantra of Don’t Make Me Think, perhaps that’s idealistic in this day and age, some things are inherently complicated, but saving money at a supermarket shouldn’t be difficult (as pointed out in this fantastic work by Lidl).

myWaitrose try and make things easier by pulling in the favourites from your recent in-store, online and Ocado shops, using these to guide you toward things you’re likely to want offers on. Aside from a couple of high-frequency items like baby wipes, I found myself getting stuck as the task of completing the 10 slots (actually a good, persuasive interaction pattern) became tricky. The value of these slots is such that you want to make the most of them, you don’t want to waste the 10 scarce slots with bad choices. So the decision gets harder.

You, the customer has to do some tricky things. Workout how best to ‘spend’ your ten offer slots. You’re effectively making 10 assessments on whether the offers are for items you’re likely to actually buy (wants vs. needs), taking a view on when you might buy them, and, of course, establishing whether the saving is considerable (accounting for multipacks, alternative places you might get them from etc.). The ‘when’ assessment here matters quite considerably; it’s not made particularly clear when these offers expire and the customer has to predict their own behaviour: “Am I likely to buy this in my next shop?”. They are highly unlikely to be making a prediction based on the likelihood to need an item in 2 month’s time, much of this will be based on the availability heuristic, meaning that they will be thinking about their most recent purchase of that item.

Waitrose offers

In short, it ain’t easy.

Time and data will tell Waitrose whether the process works for them. Whether the small % of their customers who have a loyalty card (and note, loyalty schemes tend to reward the already loyal, not magically create new loyalists) go through the process and buy more of the stuff they were already buying (one little-promoted benefit is that the offers are repeatable within the period so you can keep saving). My hunch is that the number of engaged and active myWaitrose offers is not the point. This is a brand exercise, encouraging people to think that Waitrose are all customer-focussed and that maybe having one of their free loyalty cards is a good thing. The important thing to Waitrose is knowing which customers spend on what products. I just wonder how long it will be before customers figure out the scheme just isn’t for them and that data mine ceases to be profitable.

EDIT: Update 08.FEB.2018 …. Waitrose close their PYO Offers scheme saying: “We’re always listening to our customers’ feedback on how we can make your shopping experience with us even better. Customers have increasingly told us they have difficulty remembering what their Pick Your Own choices were and how to update them, so we will be stopping ‘Pick Your Own Offers’ after 28 February. We will now be providing tailored vouchers and personalised offers through the post or at the checkout to make it easier for you to make savings on your favourite products.” It only took 3 years to come to that conclusion….

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Sep 17 2015
work

British Gas one-off kitchen appliance repairs is a clunky broken service

It’s always a risk when I rant discuss customer service issues, more than once in the past I have anxiety that a brand I’ve lambasted has been in the building to ask us to pitch or that we’ve been wooing. In this case, I’ve already spent some time in front of this brand, way back in 2008 (maybe 2009). One day it might come back on my plate but here’s the thing, I speak as I find, as an end user, the point is today was just another example of an ostensibly straightforward request being idiotically laborious to change.

Our dishwasher’s broken. It’s not that old, it’s showing an error code. I decided to use British Gas to fix it because their Channel 4 idents and suchlike make it look so easy. Cheerful engineers wielding spanners can repair anything.

I phoned up a couple of weeks ago, had a bit of a crap call-centre experience with shouty voices (I think they were trying to make themselves heard amongst the din) repetition of script after script, hand-offs and I think I had to tell them at least three times it was a one-off booking, not a sign up to a monthly repair plan. Eventually an appointment was booked.

I couldn’t make the appointment tomorrow, I wanted to cancel.

No obvious route back to cancel, had to tweet to get a phone number, eventually @BritishGasHelp (Jamie-Lee) did call me back.

Then, to move an appointment two weeks ahead took three hand-offs to different people, 23+ minutes of time (90% of which on hold) and involved full diaries “Nothing available until mid November” [It’s early September] and lots of tapping around on screens presumably.

How is it, in 2015, that something as logistically straightforward as this, results in a terrible process? Frustration, irritation, time-wasting for them and me. It’s insane.

Eventually an appointment was found. It’s an all day appointment, I’ll get about ten minutes warning before the engineer arrives but I’ll have to be at home from 8am to 6pm.

British Gas’ own website states “Technology and Innovation is key to the ethos of British Gas”, anecdotally at least there is much work to be done.

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Jul 31 2015
work

Protected: Opt-in uniform, or wardrobe minimalism? A simpler me.

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Mar 12 2015
work

It’s really easy to make stuff persuasive: A story of linguistics, prototypes and Dare.

Picture from Fine Country Lifestyle – Devon Farm Shop

I’ve done the same presentation about psychology, seduction and persuasion several times. It changes a bit here and there depending on the audience. I include a few more contemporary examples, add a few gags and throw in the odd bit of data to back things up.

At one part of the presentation I talk about how adding largely meaningless adjectives to products makes them more appealing – so pepper becomes hand-cracked pepper or we add a provenance like Suffolk honey. I’d always think of these off the top of my head during the presentation and, for the sake of a little humour, would try and invent outlandish examples to make the point (an in so-doing probably dilute it). Then last year I was watching the inestimable Stewart Lee when he amusingly parodied the craft-beer industry with some ludicrous names: Gandalf’s Memory Stick, Hogwarts Bukkake and it inspired me to keep doing the same gag.

I must have been holding on to this idea for a while and I got chatting to Dare’s technical director, Charlie, in a cab. Charlie’s got an academic background in English and a similar sense of humour so we naturally came round to the idea that this generation of novel food labels could be done in a random fashion. It seemed so simple to concoct the recipe: take a foodstuff, add a method and a provenance and the result takes an ordinary staple and turns it into a farm shop or artisan product that can be sold with a healthy mark-up.

Persuasive marketing nomenclature, automated with a tinge of comedy.

So we (well he) started building it. A simple JavaScript took items from three arrays (lists of data) and combined them at random in the order: Provenance, Method, Foodstuff. It worked quite well. But, thinking about the old adage of garbage-in, garbage-out, we noticed that some of the combinations didn’t work.

Does it feel right?
At this point we should stop and consider what we mean by work. It’s quite subjective, but you have to think about it a bit. The comedy is about the combinations appearing almost right but a bit outlandish. If you go too far toward the outlandish then it just feels wrong. In some cases this is obvious – the pairing of methods with foods that don’t make sense hand-reared houmous, pulled brioche, grass-fed asparagus. So we started to think about what it was about these pairings that made them wrong and how we could eliminate them. Do you, for example, identify a matrix where methods applicable to foods are deemed ok/wrong? So hand-reared is relevant to all animal products? line-caught is relevant to seafood only? Or do you simply manually edit the list to exclude methods that are too niche? The trouble with doing that is that you reduce the serendipitous moments that make this work. Trying to avoid creating a behemoth that relies on learning or crowd-sourcing inappropriate pairings I set about building an Excel sheet with a series of lookup tables that allowed me to fettle with the source lists and try out combinations without relying on a very busy Charlie to repopulate his script.

Syntax is important
Creating the spreadsheet opened up even more questions. Taking a leap from an unconnected musing I had on Twitter last week, it occurred to me that order – syntax – is an important part of the output. Food will always come at the end but does changing the position of provenance affect the humour or the apparent luxury of the item? To use an example, is Newlyn fried corn a different product to fried Newlyn corn? So the method seems more artisan and niche if it’s Newlyn fried (presumably only a handful of people know how to fry the Newlyn way) as opposed to the corn being from Newlyn and then simply fried? It’s almost the difference between an item being at the bottom of the prestige retail hierarchy and the top.

Aside: Could you put the following retailers in hierarchy of perceived prestige? Tesco Finest, Waitrose Seriously, Marks & Spencer, Whole Foods, Borough Market, Artisan Farm Shop, Selfridges …

Provenance and terroir
Looking at the list we’d made for provenance it was clear there were two things going on. Once was about the association a place had with the growing or raising of food and the other was about what this meant by association. So the concept of terroir is that the geography, geology and climate of a place affects a foodstuff. It’s hugely important in wine and coffee to know the place it’s come from, but also in items like meats or vegetables (Hereford beef, Norfolk turkey). It gets more complicated when you add in the method of preparation or the regional significance of a recipe (A Bakewell tart, a Cornish pasty) or get super-niche and choose a specific producer Blacker Hall quiche. Consequently, the list we compiled is composed of places that have strong associations with food – largely agricultural counties, coastal locations and regional recipes. I then scoured a list of Britain’s top 50 farm shops and delicatessens for examples of artisan-sounding producers

What’s a method, what’s a foodstuff?
Related to our thinking about ordering and the awkwardness of pairings it became apparent that the foodstuff could be the array that includes a variety of methods specific to that food. So, instead of simply putting pork we could add pulled pork to the list. We could have scallops and hand-dived scallops. This would mean that we wouldn’t need to worry about hand-dived pork coming up but we could keep the fancy-pants descriptor of hand-dived to make the scallops seem more interesting. It’s fair to say it had stepped away a little from the original plan to have a simple 1+1+1 = 3 pattern (but that was about to have another twist anyway). We started to think a bit more about what constitutes a food and that complicated dishes don’t work so well as items that are atomic or simple but this wasn’t clear cut. Bakewell vanilla-infused cupcakes works but Jersey broiled yoghurt doesn’t. For every decent example involving brioche, sourdough, quiche, pasties there were far more decent examples involving single ingredients – asparagus, quinoa, lentils, beans, chicken. Once again, order plays a part here and having categories might help solve this. Hold that thought.

Something extra
Finally, after about two days fiddling about in Excel and chatting to Charlie we decided to throw in another part to the concatenated string, a garnish perhaps. We had a randomly-appearing descriptor that affected the overall product. It could be vegan or gluten-free or giant. So, not so-much a method or a provenance but in the spirit of the type of thing that gets added to nomenclature to change the perception Clearly the taxonomic importance of vegan/gluten-free over micro/giant is worth bearing in mind. It many cases it works wonderfully: Giant sugared Herefordshire pudding in others not so well Salt-Baked Pommery Vegan Steak Pies, so it’s fair to say that becomes a matter of user preference. Which leads us neatly on…

Getting it out there
After a while you realise there’s loads more you can do and several of these things made great sense. I always loved the Urban Spoon app that helped you find a restaurant matching a series of criteria at random, the trick was that you could lock down the most important part of your criteria – for example price, and then leave the random bit to choose the genre, location or both. It strikes me that this might be a nice add-on to our generator. You might lock-down the foodstuff and just play around with random combinations of qualifiers – the most fancy chicken product you can find for example. Then there was the consideration that this could have a crowd-sourced element; users could work in volume to rate the best combinations or highlight ones that don’t work. Clearly this would mean a lot more coding effort than we could afford to spend. What about supporting unique URLs for each combination so they could be shared or copied straight into a tweet link. And finally, what about categorisation? would this be better if you could focus-in on drinks, ingredients or prepared products like quiche, cakes, pastas.

Everything’s a remix
Back to reality and I realised fairly early on that this wasn’t that new. There are about ten thousand ‘generator’ sites that compose sitcom and film character names, craft beers and, perhaps channelling a little of the Bill Bryson observation on British place names, a village name generator. What I rather like about all this is that it seems to be most effective with our wonderful language here in Britain. I hastily trimmed out provenances that weren’t British and have tried to keep the foodstuffs a little native, scattering a bit of brioche or salami here and there does work but one must be parsimonious. when the strings get a bit long and they pick up quite specific methods like -infused or cold-pressed it can definitely feel a bit Heston Bloodyhell (sic)

To what end?
So, where does this leave us? Perhaps one day Charlie and I will get a public facing version up, designed hopefully around a style that befits the point-of-sale references we see in hipster marketplaces. A tool that uses some of the functionality we’ve mused about and ultimately becomes a playful little twitter stream. I like the idea that you could run this for 6 months with a voting mechanic, gather the data and establish a shop somewhere in a quaint Cotswold market town (Greater Drowsisle?) that sells products derived entirely from this output.

In the meantime it has given me a great chance to revisit ontological thinking, nomenclature and linguistics and logic. Any opportunity to play around in those fields can’t help but contribute to my understanding and enjoyment of the job I do on a daily basis.

A selection of how it works (or doesn’t).

  • Irish air-dried kale
  • Ballymaloe thin-sliced mackrel
  • Hand cut Suffolk micro couscous
  • Fermented Worcestershire buffalo
  • Pressed Derbyshire giant pheasant
  • Castleford dried rye bread

UPDATE: Now showing on Twitter … @shinyplums
UPDATE: A Daily Mail headline generator and a direction to consider the writings of Brian Wansink concerning food psychology , thanks to Juliet Hodges.

UPDATE: Try it out for yourself with our artisinal food generator

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Dec 18 2014
work

False peaks: Understanding what effort feels like

Rushop Edge gives great visibility to the task ahead

Rushop Edge (Derbyshire) gives great visibility to the task ahead (Photo: John Gibbard)

One of my most persistent habits is the use of analogies to describe user experience problems. I don’t always get it right, occasionally this means that I’ve made the concept harder to understand and everyone leaves the conversation a little more befuddled.

Today I think I got one right though, largely because my work and non-work life have been in close proximity this past month. I recently returned from another sojourn to The Lake District and during my fell walks it occurred that arduous ascents draw strong parallels to the most problematic interactions we have online and in-store. Several years ago Stephen P. Anderson showed a graph designed by Joshua Porter that bore an obvious resemblance to a mountain. In a task we have to surmount a peak, we have a certain amount of motivation to perform this task and consequently we can increase success rate by either making this mountain easier to climb or making the motivation to climb it even stronger.

Joshua Porter’s chart as presented by Stephen P. Anderson in 2011.

Tasks are not always (in fact they are rarely) single peaks of effort. When these tasks require multiple deployments of effort it’s really important to help the user understand their position in the overall challenge – how much they’ve completed, how much there is left to do and what the reward (benefit) is of completing it.

One of the jobs I’m engaged with a lot is the design and development of transactional forms – particularly for financial services organisations. Investment modelling, quotes, illustrations, that sort of thing. These are tasks that typically have a large number of requirements for data capture – many of which are regulatory mandatories. This means, simply, that we can’t make the mountain much smaller. What we need to do is help them climb it and make them want to climb it.

A way in which we can do this is through reducing the task to smaller steps, sometimes colloquially referred to as ‘eating the elephant’ but in cognitive psychology it’s part of what is known as ‘chunking’. (Aside: strictly, chunking is part of how our short-term memory behaves but it has become shorthand for the manner in which we reduce tasks to related component parts).

This isn’t easy to do. There are a host of ways in which we might design a chunked or sequential process. We might ask one question at a time, we might ask a cluster of questions. These clusters might be related to concepts you know (e.g. ‘about your savings’, ‘your payment details’) or they might just be related to how the system or business needs the information (e.g. ‘Some assumptions we have made’, ‘Things you need to tell us about’). The manner in which we present information has profound effects on how much effort we perceive the process to be.

A common technique I see is to cluster questions together and hide additional questions (through the very sensible method of progressive disclosure) but giving the user false hope that they will proceed through the task rapidly. So you might, for example, see a 3 step process but after a few questions you realise that step 1 is actually about three different steps and despite completing fields and perhaps even clicking a next or continue button, you’re still on step 1.  These are the false peaks. You think you’ve reached the summit when you reach the next or continue button, only to find that there are another load of questions to complete.

What effect does that have on your perception of the remaining steps? How can you determine how far you are through the process and what you have in store? It has just the same soul-destroying effect on you as climbing a mountain where the eventual summit is hidden behind a series of maddening false peaks that make the task ahead infuriating.

We recently proposed a number of alternatives to a data collection process and one of these was to show everything on one long page. Much like a traditional paper form, customers arrived at it and sized it up (ie. they scrolled all the way to the bottom before inputting anything). They got the measure of it. It might have still intimidated them but at least they knew what they were letting themselves in for. In effect, to hammer the analogy, they got a great view of the path up the whole mountain.

Sometimes of course it’s likely that the majority of users will only need to complete a fraction of those questions – and so we show them a simpler, more likely path and find ways to handle the exceptions/outliers. So, like so many user experience problems, there must be a happy medium. The great thing about digital is that we can find this optimum ‘happy medium’ through multivariant testing. We can put out versions of our forms in full-length, clustered paginated, question-by-question or accordion formats. We can trial progress indicators with major sections, major and minor sections, with labels or with numbers. All of these things can lead us to create data capture that is more successful for user and the client (business/organisation whatever).

Translating what can sometimes feel like fiddly user experience problems into tangible, real-world analogies can therefore actually be quite useful. We all know what it’s like to slog through a form and we might well know the pain of what if feels like to climb a tortuous hill on foot or by bike. Fortunately whilst we might not be furnished with the ability to change the profile of mountains, we can certainly furnish our digital travellers with a much more agreeable route to the summit.

Jun 14 2013
1 Comment
work

Penalising the unsophisticated in financial services

My Dad used to work in the City. He’s always been a great source of information about investing and financial management. He recently sent me a snipped article he found in his weekend papers (there’s an aside story in there about his old-school physical sharing versus digital, for another day). The article [“Tracker funds that could come off the rails” – Emma Wall, Telegraph Money 18-May-2013] was about passive investing and exchange traded-funds (ETFs). He sent it to me as I’ve been looking at different ways of saving that will provide better returns than lazy cash ISAs and ‘high street’ fund packages.

My search for a solution had be prompted by looking at Nutmeg, an up-start provider of ETF investment portfolios that simplify it just enough to make it accessible to the Everyman but with enough scope to receive better returns than you might manage from the big name brands. The article began with the intention of bringing clarity to the complex world of investment options (it started by explaining what bonds were) but ended up doing nothing of the sort, and if anything, making it seem even more complicated and seemed to be suggesting tracker ETFs were bad but I couldn’t work out if there were circumstances where they might be the right solution. Emma Wall, or the ‘experts’ she got comments from, really did make a mess the piece, it became incomprehensible and I’m in no way an idiot with no financial knowledge.

Others have mused that the sheer complexity of the financial markets today was a significant factor behind the world economic crises of recent years. Simply nobody can or could hope to understand the system. In order to make the best of it, of course you’d have to pay for expertise but the industry has made its products so impenetrable that even when it’s simplified is just way too difficult to get a handle on. Naive investors like me end up leaning on the simpler services like Nutmeg or the high street but in doing-so are excluded from the best returns and are penalised with considerable fees and a form of pseudo fund-management that the more complex products don’t. I know there’s no such thing as a free lunch and it pays to become more educated in this sphere but I’m not sure it’s that fair a system right now as it so heavily penalises all but the most educated investor.

Nutmeg’s saving grace is that it is at least transparent in what it’s doing and charging and, because I’m quite the digital magpie, I’m rather attracted to their interaction design. In general though, this is doing little for my ongoing despair of the FSA and the industry that talks a lot about being ‘clear fair and not misleading‘ but each step toward that finds us further and further awayImage

 

Every day when I work with FS brands I try really really hard to challenge this self-serving obsession with elitism and complexity but I do wonder if I’m pushing a boulder uphill when the underlying products and markets their based upon are so ludicrously difficult to unravel.

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Jun 12 2013
links, work Video

Apple focussed on design as their signature

A series of videos, one presumably a TVC, are a clear indication alongside the WWDC keynote this week that Apple is all about design, designing for people and a slavish attention to quality and purpose. It’s hugely encouraging for those of us in the industry of making [digital] stuff better for people. Even if I don’t particularly like the iOS 7 palette…

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Jun 11 2013
work

On being ‘trendy’ for the sake of it

meeker
Planners are nice people. We’re quite in to sharing and helping, finding little bits of information that reveal a little something of the world we live in today and perhaps, hopefully, helping us do out job better by highlighting opportunities in the marketplace for brands.

It’s in that spirit that a deck got shared today by Hugh. Hugh’s brilliant, lovely chap and in no way is the deck a reflection on him or his ability to parse useful stuff. 

But it was, is, a terrible deck. Produced by the venerable Mary Meeker who is a venture capitalist and analyst with her jolly clever beady eye trained on the Zeitgeist of our digital world, the intention of the deck it seems is to share with the world how everything is changing and it’s really exciting…. But, to what end? I felt I had to respond:

1. [slides 1-12] You’d have to be a moron to deny that life is different today than it was in 1993. Is this news?
2. So there’s lots more video being uploaded on to YouTube. It’s not a massive surprise is it? It’s also not a massive spike, it’s just something that’s been happening progressively as things get better. Like the fact that street lights are brighter than they were 20 years ago.
3. It might be jolly exciting to the owners of DropCam that their software’s popular at the moment but nobody in the real world knows about it or cares. They’ve only just got their head around Skype and maybe Facetime. I’m digitally savvy yet only about 20 people I know use Vine. It’s interesting but it’s not changing the world.
4. What the hell am I supposed to do with the knowledge that 700k hours of sleep are logged on Jawbone per day? Ask around your friends, do you know a single Jawbone user? Has this told us anything about how people sleep now as opposed to how they slept in 1953? Can we make any conclusions from it? No.
5. There’s a chart that shows that the developing new world shares more than the old world. Is that really a surprise given the changes happening there in culture and politics? Crucially, has digital driven these changes or is it a reflection of changes that were happening anyway and digital happens to be their conduit? Basic cause-and-effect paradigm. So this infers we should be focussing on Saudia Arabia’s population sharing on Facebook? great, I’ll bear that in mind for the next Post Office site I work on.
6. This slide (pictured) Take this to a marketing director on £150k a year in a boardroom in their corporate office. Talk them through it, explain what it means for them and their business, how it will help them impress their CEO and deliver on their purpose. I bet you couldn’t.
7. Every single f-ing graph shows an almost linear progression. So stuff’s getting faster, bigger, or changing channel entirely predictably. No big shocks, that’s just change over time.
8.[slides 32-37] Mobile is over-taking desktop. Thanks for that. Have you hear more people drive cars now than horses and carts? True fact.
9. Apparently, stuff we’ve only just seen will be important. Like wearable tech – and if you say it won’t be, remember those idiots that thought there wouldn’t be a computer in every home LOL!!! fancy not being able to predict the future . Idiots, it’s all here, the graphs are telling you it’s going to be mega!
10. Driverless cars, clever crop-spraying drones, better uses of QR codes. It’s all coming. Are you ready? Don’t forget to use this in your next slides for Go Compare.
11. Have you heard about China? They’re going to be really important. Increase in GDP, big population, they have bikes where you can see where your parcel is.
12. [slides 82 onwards] And then a baffling series of slides on immigration and skills shortages in tech industries….

So, anyway….it’s great that we think about how the world’s changing, that we know people using devices and acting in ways in which they might not have done 5, 10, 15 years ago but knowing this stuff doesn’t tell us anything useful about where we’re headed, it’s a Black Swan. I applaud the amount of time and effort that goes into these decks, no doubt justifying the cost of all that thinking, but I wish there was more genuine insight.

For example, I recently got told by someone that their kids wouldn’t be seen dead on Facebook or use an iPhone; there’s a chart that probably shows that somewhere in this deck. Now that’s a good bit of information but I want to know, why don’t they do those things? What can I do to connect with those kids in order to communicate with them about a brand, a story, a product or service?

I wrote this quickly and off the top of my head and thought it was probably a knee-jerk rant and just as unhelpful as the deck itself but it turned out quite a few people here at Dare agreed, and Hugh kindly showed me the post by Tess Alps from 3 years ago where she rants about something quite similar. So I thought i’d dust off WordPress and post it.

As you were.

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