Let’s take the frustration expressed my last post about cash registers and change to the
e x t r e m e !

Why do Sydney’s bartenders give me beer change on an dented old aluminium tray?

Every time I go to accept my change in the ’standard’ way,with my hand, a wafer thin silver disk carrying my money is carefully manoeuvred around and under my cupped hand, to rest on the sopping wet bar mat.  As I struggle to pick up the dripping wet coins and notes I think,
‘Who was the ‘tool’ that came up with this idea?’

Does this inane practice generate more tips for staff because poor customers can’t be bothered picking up their coins from the champagne and vodka soaked plate? I’m glad our bank notes are plastic now! Could you image the mess with paper?

This pisses people off and often hear people say, ‘I’d tip them if I really wanted to anyway, but I’m not going to now!’

This morning I was at the bakery. A woman being served asked the assistant if the pile of change in her was the right amount. ‘Yes’,  the assistant said looking at the register, ‘you gave me a 50 and your change is $35.30.’

This reminded me that every time I go into a shop and buy something for cash I get a little irritated with the customer service in these technological times.

I remember the very first time I served a customer in the fruit shop where I had my first job. I did exactly what the shop assistant I just described did this morning.

However, in my case, an old grey-haired customer saw me do this and gave me my first lesson in customer service. He said, ‘Don’t do it like that! Do this:

1) Take the customer’s money

2) Put it in the drawer

3) To work out the change start with the total of the bill and put coins into your hand smallest to largest each time bringing the amount in your hand closer to the Total.

4) When you get to a round 5 dollar amount do the same with the notes.

5) Hand the money back to the customer in the same order - coins then notes. You can count them or not, it doesn’t matter because the customer will know how much you’ve given them.

Since the invent of cash registers that do the sums for you, people have forgotten how to do the simple arithmetic and clearly show you the amount of change you have in your hand. And, as a bonus, if the coins are given back first then they don’t slip off the notes onto the ground!

This a good example of how a technology that should be more reliable and consistent in calculating the correct change, may not be in practice, because it removes an important error checking process. 

Maybe when I have [more] grey hairs I’ll give assistants, like the one this morning, a little lesson.

Have you heard this kinda of rhetoric?

1. ‘Sorry I’m not doing Facebook yet, I am focussing on LinkedIn‘
2. ‘Oh, Facebook is so bad, relationships become so superficial’
3. ‘I don’t have time for Facebook’

From my perspective:
#1 people, ‘You are missing out’
#2 people, ‘Your relationships are probably superficial anyway’
#3 People, ‘It’s worth it’

I was talking with a psychologist friend the other day about how great Facebook is, and she really ‘got it’. I recounted my experiences of about 6 months ago.

Catching up with a friend I haven’t seen for a while at a party:
F: ‘ How ya goin?’
J: ‘Good how are you’
F: ‘Fine thanks’
J: ‘I’m about to have a baby’
F: ‘I know, it’s on your Facebook’
J: ‘Doh!’

Then today, I met a friend I haven’t seen for a while:
F: ‘Hey, How was your presentation last night, did you get good feedback?
J: Great thanks! (I think to myself - ‘ah, he read it on my Facebook’). The group was really interested and loved the eye tracker. How was your lunch yesterday?
F: Awesome, at such and such and we ate…’

What happens now is that a lot of the small talk is done away with and is relegated to the realm of Facebook or other social networks. Technology is helping us to have richer and more focused catch ups with friends and colleagues who we know well.  Not to mention keeping up to date with what they are doing whilst we are busy with work and family.

Then on the other hand, it means that we can be lazy! We don’t have to catch up with our friends to find out what they are doing! Plus small talk is fun!

I’m an advocate of the former, what do you think?

Seth Godin has a new book out about Meatball Sundaes - those businesses who try to adopt New Marketing approached in Web 2+ land and fail because they don’t change their business processes.

You know, they don’t have enough people in their call centres to respond to comments on social networks they have spawned or staff to chat online with customers who need help.

Well, something else that his book has made be consider are those ‘People’ who are Meatball Sundae’s in themselves.

You know, they want to adopt the New Marketing but are still stuck in last year and just don’t get it, yet.

In a new software design project that I’m working on, I’m simply not allowed to observe the current human interactions as they occur offline.

The context we are working in is a bit foreign to me and actual observation would be invaluable. My client had a brilliant idea – role play!

So today we got into it! I felt like I was back at Lifeline learning how to do phone counselling - role play, after role play after role play before I was allowed near the phones!

I played the role of the end-user and my client the service provider. It was amazing the ideas we came up with in 20 minutes!  By empathising with the end-user I could instantly see things that would improve the interaction online.

The exciting thing was that some of the functionality that we came up with doesn’t even exist now! Completely new tools that are only useful online! Amazing!

A couple of colleagues were watching us and said they couldn’t believe all the ideas they had too! I could see their pens smoking as they wrote notes!

It turns out that the role-play process we fell into today through sheer desperation has been addressed by usability practitioners before.

Jared Spool states,

    ‘Role playing is a time-tested psychological technique to put people into a more conducive context to gain the information you need.’

He used it to get research participants into the right frame of mind.  However, today we found that it was an incredibly useful technique for designers to objectify the online interaction and identify better ways of doing things. It allowed us to interrogate the context of usage and simultaneously envision how the online environment can be leveraged to make the service outcome possibly better than face-to-face! Time will tell on that one!

Spool also suggests in this persona article, that we could have initiated role-playing with Personas. We didn’t formally adopt personas today (they are not ready yet) but my role was discussed before I launched into it.

Gry Seland wrote a great research paper on Role play as a design method. He suggests role-play has the following uses:

   1. making end users active participants in the development process,
   2. creating a focus on user needs,
   3. fast idea creation in early phases of a project, and
   4. enhancing the developers’ understanding of the future context-of-use.

Lots of links to academic articles can be found on a old IxDA Feb 2008 discussion about interaction design and theatre. It suggests that ‘participatory design can involve role playing to understand task flows and the needs of users and also to envision how a future design might affect the overall practices’.

Why don’t you try out this research method in your next project, particularly if you are short on time or money and can’t access your users directly. Hey, I’m sure you did role plays as a kid? You never know, you might have fun!

When my staff or I are reporting findings from website usability testing there is always the challenge of knowing the right ‘tone’ of the document.

In the last month we’ve heard two interesting comments on projects for two different Agencies:

Agency 1 - “Can you be more BRUTAL?”

Agency 2 - “Can you make it all a bit more POSITIVE sounding?”

Both agencies had different needs:

Agency 1 was pitching to a new account and wanted to show the client that things weren’t right with the current site and it required more work.

Agency 2 built the site and wanted to look good so that the client could see all the opportunities to improve the site.

As usability consultants, I believe we need to objectively and accurately report what happened.  However, it can be done in a number of ways to meet the particular agency’s expectations.  For example:

Understanding the impact of your writing style is critical to your project’s success.  It can completely change how the report is received.  Some practitioners would say, ‘just report what you saw with no spin’; however, there is an opportunity to write the report in such a way as to achieve the best outcomes.
A good way to identify the ‘tone’ required is to find out what the agency is doing with the report and then check that they like your language at least twice during the reporting process.  As follows:

1) Conduct the test

2) Find out what the Agency is going to use the report for and plan it with them

4) Debrief the Agency at draft stage, and see if the language is right for their needs

5) Make amendments to the tone of the report if necessary.

I saw Garr Reyonlds talking about his Presentation Zen today! Thanks for the book Garr!

At functions like this I try to take away at least one Nugget. Today, I got a full bag! But it took 90 minutes to start finding them.

About 2/3 of the way through his presentation I thought "Well this guy hasn’t really prepared very well (he just has a massive slide deck) and he’s talked about himself too much. He’s only just started getting into the juicy stuff now but he’s screaming through his slides!" 

A number of times he repeated "It’s a ‘casual’ presentation."  But I thought, "we paid good money and he is trying to flog us his book! There is nothing casual about that!"

However, once the audience questions were launched the nuggets started to appear.

Afterwards, a few people said that they’d learned some good things about how to present; but actually, I learnt more interesting stuff about myself!

Here are my nuggets:                  

Nugget 1: I need to come up with a word(s), like Presentation Zen, that describes my Purple Cow. Then I can own my space!

Nugget 2: What is my Purple Cow?  I might ask you next! 

Nugget 3: I must take more photos of things I’m doing (or eating!)   and use them in my social networking.

Nugget 4: Tell stories, it’s easier to be conversational that way. [I agree, it has to be said though]

Nugget 5: Live in the moment. [I agree, I'm Buddhist.]

Nugget 6: The little things matter! If I’m going to design things for my business make sure they are done well.

Nugget 7:  Mistakes are so stigmatised! If you are not prepared to be wrong then you will never innovate. As a consultant things I deliver should not be perfect first time, instead they must seed discussion and allow us to improve business outcomes together.

Nugget 8:The creation of a simple user experience requires careful planning, which is very complex.  Some people think the exercise of user-centred design is easy but it is one of the hardest things in IT. If it was easy, then I wouldn’t have a job.

Nugget 8: Off the grid. Paper is OK for Getting Things Done (GTD)

Nugget 9: Create sticky ideas with:

• Simplicity
• Unexpectedness
• Concreteness
• Credibility
• Emotion
• Stories

I’ll be buying Made to Stick by the Heath brothers right away!

At the end of presentations ike Zen. I also like have a think about how people like Garr get such broad exposure?

1. He’s smart and carismatic
2. He reads and recommends books
3. He knows the right people (Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki the list goes on!)
4. He use relevant examples from people to add credibility to what he is saying
5. He has a book

I need to write a book.

I am working on a client project with a really tight time frame. We have to spend more time together innovating but I there is none! Plus people are in 3 different offices in two states! What to do?

I immediately launched a free and private Tangler forum so the collaboration can happen online. Over Friday and the weekend we’ve had 6 people contributing and some great ideas are surfacing.

It has helped us to quickly:

• Get thoughts out of our heads
• Comment of existing documents
• Consider our innovative ideas as we write them down
• Think about and discuss solutions without being face-to-face
• Prepare for our next face to face meeting on Monday so it is short and to the point.

Here’s to Web 2.0!

OMG, I just found Get Satisfaction when I was looking for some help with a Twitter idea. Yes, an idea! Not actually a problem, more a feature request.

This service ducks the online customer service NORM and does it really well, in a completely customer focussed way. It even lets everyone voice their emotions!

Many of my customers have been looking for a more customer centric approach to service online and chat seems to be quite prehistoric and needs complete business process redesign. This still needs you to consider your process but looks much simpler as it is not person to person.

Get Satisfaction has a seamless workflow that never confused me. I ‘trust’ that I will get a response (not that I have yet) and it leverages Web 2.0 technology really well.

Step 1
I input my question on one page, with a description, title, tags, flexibility for multiple products and most importantly a myriad of ways to leverage social networks within the company (Twitter in this case) and through my network of friends.

Here’s the automatic output for my question in my Twitter client - Twitterrific

Step 2
The next page I was presented with was a summary of exactly what other people will see with full ability to edit anything.

Oh, most importantly, anyone can use it for their own specific context!

Here’s a quick look. (I went a bit overboard with Skitch)

PG 1

PG 2

I was with Steve @Trib Collins yesterday and heard him explain Twitter to a colleague at work. I finally got it!

Until now I thought it was just about social chit chat and sharing information.  I like that, if I have the time! Who does?

Think about it differently please
At work I actively leverage people everyday. I ask others to do thinking for me, sometimes they even write stuff down. 

However, people may often be thinking about me, or for me, passively. I might have asked them an interesting question as we parted ways, perhaps they disagreed with me and are still thinking about it. If they keep their thoughts about me to themselves, isn’t it just energy wasted?

What if I could guide their thoughts with little effort when we are not together side-by-side? And know that [some of] what they are thinking about will help me?

What if I can I can actively leverage my network to do thinking for me, instantly, online?

Think about it for a second [thanks].

Tapping the collective consciousness
Actively getting the collective consciousness to solve problems for you can occur in four ways when we are not face-to-face:

Synchronous private
I can ask people over the phone and dial/chat with someone from my Skype list, but that is only one-on-one and I choose the person I want to answer my question. They may not be the right one to best help me.

Asynchronous private
Email.

Asynchronous public
I can post my question on Google Answers or LinkedIn Anwsers etc.  But that is slow.  A little while back I did this and asked a question about Government on LinkedIn.  I got lots of quality responses from people who self selected but it took a week or so.

Synchronous public
The best way to get rich, interesting and relevant feedback.
Directive collective thinking happens on talk back radio. An announcer asks a pertinent question and people call in straight away if they’re interested. They put energy into it and generate good conversation.  This is engaging radio.

Twitter is better. It’s also real time and you get answers to your questions on your desktop or phone or browser from people who are online immediately.  But the best bit is that you can CHOOSE to tap into a knowledge base of tens of even thousands of people you’ve SELECTED and can UNSELECT. They probably have similar interests to you and you can ask them whenever you want.  No disk jocks needed!

When I ask questions with Twitter I’m actively tapping my collective online consciousness in the most efficient way to find out the best information from people I choose.

Remember though - this is not free. It takes effort and you have to build your network by talking to them regularly with interesting, polite, relevant, useful stuff.  Right @Trib?

Anyone tried www.fluther.com?

My twitter handle is @jamesbreeze