matt.me63.com - Matt Edgar

Ah hello, may we come in madam, it’s the police. I’m PC Smith and he’s PC Jones. Yes, you can take the chain off. Oh, and the other one, my that’s a big bolt. Thank you, cosy in here! Tea, don’t mind if I do. Don’t worry about the batons and body armour - standard issue. Anything wrong? Ha ha no no, quite the opposite in fact. But as it happens you may be able to help us with something…

You may have seen the news about the latest crime statistics. Yes, terrible those stabbings you read about in the paper, but the thing is that, overall, crime’s actually been going down. That’s right going down. Only we don’t seem to be getting credit where it’s due. Crime levels reduced 18% in the last four years, but satisfaction with the police is only up by 6%. That’s right Jones, hurtful isn’t it, ungrateful…

The thing is, the Home Secretary says that from now on we won’t be measured with top-down targets, and that’s a good thing - too much paperwork, not enough time out on the beat. Except for one target, from now on, she says, we’ll be measured on public confidence in the police. “Outcome-based metrics”, that’s the buzz word. And that’s where you come in madam…

Yes, you see our computer has identified your postcode area as one where the fear or crime is out of all proportion to the actual chances of being a victim. Yes Jones, it’s hard to believe. I mean it’s not exactly the Bronx round here is it, all these net curtains and privet hedges. Myself, I blame “A Touch of Frost”. But if we don’t do something our Chief Constable will have some explaining to do, madam, and that’s why we’ve come to ask you a little favour…

Well it’s like this. If a nice lady with a clipboard happens to stop you in the street, maybe she’ll say something about the British Crime Survey and ask you lots of questions. Well if that were to happen, my Chief would be ever so much obliged if you could say nice things about us. Like how quiet the neighbourhood is, and how safe it feels, what a great job your local boys and girls in blue are doing…

Oh no Madam we’re not asking you to fib, but let’s put it another way. That’s a lovely collection of porcelain you’ve got there. My colleague, PC Smith, he gets emotional sometimes. And then he can be clumsy with that big funny old side-handled baton. Be a shame if anything were to happen…

In the 21^st century, few consumer services follow a neat linear model of awareness, consideration, purchase and use. Instead we see a web of customer expectations and perceptions where little things can make a big difference.

It’s the job of service designers to cut through the mass of insight to find the decisive moments where you can make or break a customer relationship. And sometimes you can find those moments in unexpected places.

David Armano recounts a story from Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture” that sums up one of these moments perfectly. You can read “Disney’s $100,000 Salt + Pepper Shaker” here.

I loved this post pointing out that “You can’t move in London without someone giving you the news“.

It struck a chord with me - first because of my own interest in how the way we get the news has changed, yet stayed the same, but also because this seems to be a particularly London phenomenon.

While the big screens do exist up North, they don’t yet feel quite as ubiquitous or oppressive as in the Capital.

Is this because we’re behind the times? Is an army of telescreen installers waiting for the next clear day to descend on some unsuspecting provincial town?

Or is it that Northerners just don’t feel the same need to be frenetically in the know, up to the minute, every moment of the day?

We can have slow food, how about slow news?

Maybe it’s just me, but as we enter the latest phase of convergence with more and more big web properties moving onto mobile, I’ve noticed a trend for work in progress to be developed and presented mainly on PC screens.

In my (possibly mythical) golden age, presentations and design reviews were stacked full of phones in all shapes and sizes. Now stuff seems to come to me in neatly zipped PDFs and Powerpoint docs, which immediately place the work into the wrong context. They introduce implicit assumptions that were set in stone in the old days of the deskbound internet. The web’s moving on - but sadly many of the ways we design it are not.

So I started wondering: could we have a mobile design process which deliberately avoided deliverables on the PC screen? You can, if you must, use a desktop or laptop as a tool (Mitchell or Webb is up to you, it’s so irrelevant :-) What matters is that the design is presented in more appropriate media. It goes like this…

Paper wraps phone: The big visual canvas of a web page can hide a multitude of sins in site strategy and structure, but on mobile they’ll be painfully laid bare. So spend some time getting straight the objectives of the mobile interface, underpinned by the things you know about your users, their relevant needs, and their existing use of mobile. Write it down in complete sentences, you know, the things they taught you at school with a subject, a verb and an object. Banish any preconceptions about the context of use - for example, 27% of mobile internet-enabled phone users in a Pew Survey had used it in the home. Sketch out the information architecture and user flows on big sheets of paper. Then get out the scissors…

Scissors cut paper. Chop up the sitemap, give the resulting scraps a shuffle and see how a user will experience your work. Yes, mobile really lends itself to paper prototyping. As the small, handheld interface takes shape, how about mocking it up on small, handheld pieces of paper? Take a stack of index cards or PostIt notes and use one per scene on the mobile screen. Or to simulate the act of scrolling, cut a card with a hole in the middle to mask off all but a screenful of content at a time. I saw this trick used really effectively in early stages usability testing on our mobile portal a few years ago. It makes for a more realistic low fi test, and gives the designers an insight into the tunnel view that users have of their mobile interface. Then it’s time to hit the handset…

Phone blunts scissors. As soon as possible, get it mocked up on a mobile device. With XHTML and Flash Lite it’s much easier than it used to be, and immediately helps you get a feel for certain issues: Which buttons will be the main controls? How will the user enter text? How quickly can they scroll up and down the screen. Critically, get the design up and running on a few different kinds of phone that represent the spread of devices your users will have. This is not something that comes naturally to web designers for whom these things come down to narrow choices of screensize and IE/Firefox version, but it’s worth the hassle. If you don’t have all the phones yourself, beg or borrow them from friends, family or colleagues. If you’re doing the work for a big corporate or telco, ask them about access to the target devices. And if it’s a consumer application, make sure you don’t inadvertently introduce a bias towards business devices, which may well have bigger screens and more capabilities than those of your target users.

Now step outside. Stand in broad daylight on a busy street corner, preferably in a slightly dodgy area of town, and most likely realise that the fontsize needs to be even bigger than you thought. And if the fonts are bigger, than means fewer lines of text, which means revisiting those flows. Paper wraps phone once again in our iterative process :)

What do you think? Who is doing mobile design like this already? Who is doing it even better?

Matt

A football agent being interviewed about the negative impact of his profession on the game was asked, shouldn’t negotiating be left to the players’ union, the PFA? Well, he replied, the PFA are nice people, but they’re mostly former players, not businesspeople. If I was buying a house, I wouldn’t trust a bricklayer to do the conveyancing.

Neither would I trust and estate agent to do the wiring.

A friend of a friend bought a house which had been modernised as a speculative investment by an estate agent. All the rooms were generously supplied with power sockets, but after moving in she found that only about half of these seemed to work. When she called in an electrician to check the wiring, the truth was revealed: there was no wiring. The sockets were stuck on for show but not powered up for use.

The moral of this story? In every domain there are sellers and there are doers. Whether you’re buying a house, signing a new player or launching a high-tech product, make sure you know which of those you’re dealing with.

Unlike some people, I’m partial to a spot of anthropomorphism, which is why I was delighted to receive this email after ordering some cards from Moo…

Hello Matt

I’m Little MOO - the bit of software that will be managing your order with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will print it for you in the next few days. I’ll let you know when it’s done and on its way to you.

Please do not remove the photos you have chosen from your account until the cards have been printed, or some of your cards may come out blank.

You can track and manage your order at: http://www.moo.com/account
Please note, as your order will be shipped via Royal Mail First Class/Airmail, it should be with you in around 10 working days, but it won’t have a tracking number.

Remember, I’m just a bit of software. So, if you have any questions regarding your order please first read our Frequently Asked Questions at: http://www.moo.com/faqs/ and if you’re still not sure, contact customer services (who are real people) at: http://www.moo.com/service/

Thanks,

Little MOO, Print Robot

It’s a simple positioning seen through with total conviction. I love it. And so does my email client, Fluffy.

It’s been a while since my trusty work-issue Compaq Tablet PC gave up the ghost, and I’m finally getting around to writing about it. We’d been together more than three years, the TC1000 and I, and the day the man from IT pronounced it dead (a motherboard issue, apparently) it felt like a bereavement. A pet bereavement, admittedly. Well more a small pet, say a goldfish or a gerbil, rather than a cat or dog kind of pet. But a loss all the same.

The Compaq Tablet PC was possibly the world’s slowest laptop. Even after the Service Pack 2 update fixed some of the obvious user interface problems with XP Tablet Edition, windows still opened and closed and switched from landscape to portrait and back again in slow-motion, like the flight of the bumblebee reduced to one frame per second to expose every tiny flap of its wings.

But it had an organic quality that made these things so easy to forgive. Let me count the ways.

1. The smooth rounded edges made it a joy to handle
2. The whole unit was warm to the touch, about a warm as my newborn baby sons, but without the nappies
3. It breathed. The internal fan pushed out warm air - essential for long meetings in my director ’s office, where the ice-cold aircon posed a risk of frostbite
4. It was polite. In meetings, it lay flat on the table, not raised between me and the rest of the room like the Berlin Wall of regular laptops.
5. It could read my writing, a feat beyond most humans. Reeves and Nass should study this feature as a driver of their “media equation”
6. The gratuitous swivel action to reveal the keyboard - more reminiscent of quirky French design - an old Citroen car, Terminal 1 at Charles De Gaulle Airport, a font by Porchez

Fortunately, my Tablet PC’s twin is still going strong - I bought another for my personal use and am typing this post on it right now. But for work use, it seems the Tablet PC just hasn’t got the traction to be worth the trouble for cookie cutter corporate IT. That’s a shame, because I really believe Tablets can improve productivity and make the workplace move human. No one ever got fired for buying a Dell, but no matter how much more practical I can’t imagine holding a wake for a D420.

Is this door with the sign that says other door the other door or is the other door that doesn’t say other door the other door?

Originally uploaded by mattedgar.

News that GNER, my financially-challenged intercity train operator, has just achieved a Charter Mark for excellence in customer service, has prompted me to reflect on a peculiar scene that’s played out nearly every time I travel with them. There are many things I love about travelling GNER compared to other UK rail operators [if anyone from the company is reading this, rest assured, I only write it because I care :) ] but the exchange I hate to hear goes like this:

Guard to customer: That ticket’s not valid on this train, you’ll have to pay to upgrade it.

Customer: But no one told me that when I bought the ticket at the station/on the internet/wherever.

Guard: I don’t know what you were told then, but I did make an announcement before the train left the station that these tickets were not valid. That’ll be [insert amount between £30 and £70] .

Customer: How much? That’s ridiculous. I was told this ticket would be valid.

…and so on in variations depending on the respective cantankerousness-es of guard and customer.

Now I know there are people who will always try it on, hoping to get away with travelling at peak times with a saver and so on. And sometimes my schadenfreude gets the better of me and I quite enjoy listening to a good argument from the comfort of my wifi-enabled seat. But I can’t help feeling that the train company is doing itself no favours.

The process seems to be broken in a number of ways:

1. Aside from being expensive, the fares themselves are bizarre and highly complex. There are 189 different ticket types offered when buying online. I Am Not Making This Up.
2. The problem often seems to stem from restrictions on the use of a Saver, which do not apply to another ticket-type, called a “Business Saver” - many of the people caught out are not businesspeople and would have no reason to think a Business Saver was the right ticket for them.
3. When making announcements, GNER guards speak a quaint language of yesteryear in which the refreshment trolley “makes its way through Standard Class” and mobile phone conversations “must be confined to the vestibules” (that’s the bit between the carriages, apparently). Deciphering these announcements is a special skill only acquired over countless journeys north and south.
4. In any case, it’s a bit much to tell people which of the 189 ticket types are valid when they’ve just struggled aboard with their luggage and the train is about to depart. Returning to the booking office to change a ticket at this stage would certainly mean missing the train.
5. If your ticket is not valid, the Guard can only upgrade you to a full-priced standard ticket. (And you won’t get much change from £100 to travel less than a quarter of the way up our small island. Double that for a return.)

This is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night. Sometimes I do the maths in my head to get back to sleep. Disclaimer - all the numbers are my rough guesses, at round numbers to make for simpler sums, though I reckon I could be a factor of 10 out on any of them and still have a valid case.

Let’s assume they catch one customer with the wrong ticket in each of the five second (sorry, standard) class carriages on 10 peak-time trains a day, charging an average of £50 per miscreant. That’s £2500 a day, $12,500 a week, £625,000 a year. Every penny counts when you have to pay the Government £1.3 billion for the right to run trains while your new competitor gets a free ride.

But now look at the customer experience impact. That’s 12,500 customers made to feel like criminals in front of a carriage-load of passengers. Let’s imagine each of them retells their story to three friends or relatives - adding in that word of mouth effect gives us a total of 50,000 people with a negative perception of this company.

And then there are all the people on the train who witness the scene, some of them, like me, repeatedlty. Roughly 50 people per carriage, so for every extra pound raised, there’s a customer whose journey is disrupted by an uncomfortable exchange of words and a brutal reminder of the fragmented and chaotic nature of our railway system.

Depending on our assumption about repeat use of the rail route that could be 625,000 people who witness my vignette once in a year or 62,500 who hear it 10 times each on average. You decide which scenario is worse from an image point of view.

Taken together we have at least 100,000 people who have either been stung by this ticketing confusion, or know someone who has been, or have sat on a train and listened to GNER staff enforcing the policy. Maybe it seems the right thing to do on paper but from where I’m sitting I wonder what could it be worth to the bottom line if those people had a good experience instead?

Remember the old story about the plan to sell ads on vinyl records in the gaps between the tracks? It never happened because the crackly silence turned out to be an essential part of the LP experience. I’m on a train with the world’s information sliced and diced into 500 pixels in my hand. But looking out of the window is still the most rewarding option.