Lost in telecommunication
News just in from the department of the extremely obvious – iPhone users can be a little obsessional and, even, delusional.
It seems a consultancy has invested a serious amount of time to diagnose what they call the ‘iPhone syndrome’. Strand Consulting tells us that the iPhone isn’t that great a phone but that users will sometimes overlook its faults or even come to defend its shortcomings as features. They liken the behaviour of both users and mobile phone networks to the delusional relationship which can sometimes develop between kidnappers and their victims.
Well I’ve certainly witnessed the behaviour. All one need to do typically is wait a couple of hours for the iPhone battery to die (normally a critical failure for a mobile phone’s performance) and the addict will claim that it’s not the iPhone’s fault – they shouldn’t have left the 3G switched on, they’ve been using the screen too much, or perhaps they’ve made too many calls. Indeed this is such an obvious design flaw that there are now several products, advice and articles (‘turn off bluetooth, vibrate and the music equaliser’) out there to try and remedy it. Or, you’ll receive an SMS resembling hate mail, only to find out it the result of a (practically unusable) iPhone keyboard, which the sender is yet to ‘master’.
But I think it is unfair to blame the technology press and general media for misleading the public about the qualities of the iPhone. The point isn’t that iPhone customers are duped into buying a product which is in some ways flawed. The amazing thing is that iPhone customers quickly accept these issues as facts and plough on being evangelical. Media couldn’t do this. It is the product of a piece of absolutely superb bit of software and hardware design, focusing not on the ostensible functions required of a phone (making calls, sending messages etc) – all of which the iPhone is at best medium at – but rather at looking at what the joys are of having a computer in your pocket (the iPhone has the same computing power as the first generation of iMacs).
Apple (under Jobs) has always been good at this, although it’s not original thinking (Theodore Levitt put it very nicely: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”).
It doesn’t matter if the Sony Vaio has better specs that the Apple Macbook. Why? Because the Macbook lets the guys with the funny glasses and the expensive jeans feel like they, not Microsoft or Sony, is in charge of the computing experience. With a Macbook or an iPhone, they are masters of their little computing universe (admittedly only for an hour or two at a time with the iPhone). Apple has given geek pleasure (of technology mastery) to the next wrung down the ladder – to the people without screwdrivers in their pockets, and they will forgive them a lot because of it.
The search is over
Any regular reader of this blog will know that I’m a huge fan of the Register and Andrew Orlowski in particular for telling it the way it is. Perhaps with a little added sneering cynicism thrown in for good measure. Orlowski’s retrospective on the good old days of Google ‘Google abandons Search‘ is very much in this vein, marking the decision of Google to move away from authority-ranking (dubbed ‘Page Rank’ in El Reg) and start including extensive ‘live’ social media content.
Of course, there are some catches in that last sentence. SEO experts will give you very different views on what relationship, if any, Page Rank had to actual page rankings (the term ‘Page’ refers to Larry Page not to web pages). And the ‘live’ social media in question may not be very alive at all, it’s probably turgid junk. But it is current and was generated by someone who likes to spend their time creating 140 character message so what the hell…
I’m sure Google’s still doing loads of fancy things to filter search results, but perhaps the leap that both Google and Bing have made to surface the latest, weakest content to the very top of their search results pages misses a point about why that content is generated in the first place. Which is that it was generated in a social context, not in the context of the whole web.
Whilst the content on Twitter is often unfiltered garbage, and an alarmingly high proportion of SPAM, it seems unlikely that many people are going to want to see it sitting at the top of their search results pages. And bear in mind, these results will not be filtered by being in my network. As it is, I mostly follow people on Twitter I actually know in real life and many of them still seem incapable of ever posting anything I’d like to read. But, listening to garbage is certainly easier to take when it’s generated by your friends and acquaintances.
And what is the equivalent of Page Rank (or any supposed Google technology to place a value on a piece of content)? It can’t be followers, follows, re-tweets. All of these things are thoroughly open to SPAM, and the formation of very narrow online groups.
Rather than venture further into the unindexed content which is on the web (some estimates put Google indexed content at 1% of total web content – see ‘Deep Web‘), as Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo) turn up the volume control on this often-vacuous content (ultimately from just a handful of sites), the effective change is much larger than has been reported – from a search-result world where quality and authority was valued to one where brevity, simplicity and speed are what matters.
Perhaps Google is trying to put us off vacuous micro-blogging content through overfeeding. Or perhaps it has – as Orlowski suggests – finally thrown its hands up in the air and given up. Both seem unlikely. What’s the really evil possible answer? Perhaps they’ve realised that by filling the top left of the SERP with user-generated gibberish, user will have no choice but to click on the paid-result on the right.
Eulogies
Most people got to know the inimitable Anthony H Wilson, who died two years ago, by seeing him on Granada TV, or one of the Granada shows that was broadcast outside the Manchester region, like “Other Side of Midnight” or “After Hours”. And, a whole generation got know him from the Hacienda or other Factory experiments.
I first became aware of him because we shared my favourite band. I bought their records. He released them.
Wilson’s relationship with the Durutti Column has been described as tumultuous. They were the first Factory band, unpredictable because their main member, Vini Reilly was often ill, and if not temperamental. They were never going to be stars like New Order or Happy Mondays. But Factory kept them on board until the record label itself fell to pieces. Not least because Wilson himself was a huge fan.
From the first album (‘The Return of the Durutti Column”) in 1980 (that’s Fact 14 for the Factory geeks), it was obvious that Vini Reilly could express more with his guitar (and, in that case, synths and production from the great Martin Hannett) than most bands ever would with vocals added on top. Listening to the incredibly evocative “Requiem for a Father”, or the complex “Sketch for Summer”, you are presented with whole textures and emotions that seem much deeper than the tracks themselves.
But then from the second album, LC (Fact 44, 1981), Reilly started adding vocal tracks. More and more came on successive albums, with the exception of Without Mercy (Fact 84, 1984) – a quasi-classical album Wilson had twisted Vini’s arm to make. Wilson, you see, didn’t like Vini’s singing. And they used to row about it. Throughout the years the singing waxed and waned, almost entirely absent on some albums, replaced by extensive (and at the time, novel) use of samples, on others such as (eponymous) “Vini Reilly” (Fact 242, 1989) and numerous guest vocalists. Perhaps this was Wilson’s influence, perhaps just part of Vini’s evident desire to keep on experimenting.
Although some of the best Durutti Column tracks have vocals (“Missing Boy” – a tribute to Ian Curtis, “Requiem for Mother” on the Mercury Nominated “Someone Else’s Party”), it is easy to understand Wilson’s viewpoint. Often Vini’s singing is not great (he’s said himself in interviews, “I can’t sing for toffee”), often vocal tracks become a bit of a dirge. But more to the point, when you can make music like he can, why not leave it as it is.
Well now Wilson has his wish, and much much more.
While he was dying in hospital, Reilly visited Wilson often and created instrumental snippets to take to him in hospital, responding, I guess to Wilson’s long held request to take the music in a certain direction.
The result has now been turned into a fully fledged album, A Paean to Wilson (review and details) which will be released early next year and which has been previewed already at a number of concerts in Manchester and London.
The album is an extended reflection on Reilly’s loss of a long-time friend and manager; the guy that gave him his career; his number 1 fan, perhaps. The friendship of these two – one a man often portrayed as an egotist and cad, the other a reclusive musician seems strange. But it is celebrated throughout this incredible album, which is also Reilly’s best for years.
The album starts with a loop of Wilson asking ‘Are you an artist or just a technician?’ before the intense opening beats of ‘Chant’ which drives from a broody and insistent bass line, through an aria-like melancholy to the almost club-style repetition of one sampled phrase modulating up and down, with Reilly’s guitar filling the gaps delicately. The song is like an exercise in how much space can be left in the piece of music as it drifts seemlessly between moods.
Throughout the album, Vini plays alongside long-time (and more recent) collaborators such as John Metcalf, Tim Kellet (“Without Mercy”) Poppy Morgan, and – of course – Bruce Mitchell, generating new tracks, and reprises of old tunes which jump from classical through to hypermodern; from almost over-polished form to deeply discordant and suprising.
The final track ‘How Unbelievable’, captures the outrage that Wilson felt about the inability of the (current) Labour Government to narrow the poverty gap (a sample of Wilson is used towards the end of the song). The track powers through with trade mark guitar riffs and looping vocal track repeating over an over ‘most of all, we miss you’.
As with so many Durutti Column tracks (and again, without lyrics aside from the odd sample and loop), Reilly somehow summons powerful emotion from the tracks. And this isn’t maudlin funeral music. What comes across is a deep respect for Wilson and a deep feeling of loss.
The Independent rolled their review into a broader look at albums and tracks which carry the theme of loss and bereavement. So much of the Durutti Column catalogue has been about relating feelings of loss, of sadness, and, at other times, of exquisite happiness and awakening. It is not, perhaps a surprise then that Reilly’s response to such a major loss would be so powerful.
Wilson has got so many of his wishes. Another great Durutti Column album, Reilly back on top form, and not a vocal insight. Perhaps he’ll get his other wish too, a little more recognition for the other Factory legend.
Here comes the Sun
What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?
Well, we find out that either the force wasn’t really unstoppable or the object wasn’t really unmovable.
And so, the News International empire is about to collide with the self-appointed monarchy of the internet, Google. It’s tempting to paint this as a battle of good vs evil, and more than a few Star Wars analogies have been thrown around already. But really it’s not that simple, of course. More like the battle of the presumed innocent and the presumed guilty.
The delicate subtext to much of this discussion isn’t easy to miss. Protest as they may that Murdoch is a crazy out-of-touch Luddite, there’s an unmistakable absence amongst his detractors of either certainty that he will fail, or explanation of why he should. As per usual, Andrew Orlowski provides one of the most insightful takes on the whole subject and an explanation for the sudden desire for aggressive action:
Really it’s a cultural divide. The web divisions at media companies – who can speak fluent “clayshirky”, quote from Freakonomics and are invariably Twittering at a New Media conference – haven’t brought home the goods; media company boards and shareholders now see them more as part of the problem than as the solution.
The reality is that no one really knows what on earth will happen in this showdown, and not many media companies are ready to come out and say that they won’t jump on the band wagon if Murdoch does somehow manage to get it rolling.
And of course we’ll have fun watching. It’s a good fight. No one in their right mind writes off the man who has somehow convinced almost 10 million people in the UK to give him over £20 a month to watch TV which is (more or less) also available free. And few will write off Google, because they’re the only people who’ve so far managed to make big money from advertising on the web.
The freetards taste victory, but also fear the passing of the utopian summer we’ve all been having. I imagine Chris Andersen is busy trying to work out how he’ll eat all the words in his boring books if the crazy Australian manages to make it fly. Microsoft presumably can’t imagine their luck: there’s a battle going on, and they’re not the villains for once – although they may be crazy if they chose to pay Murdoch to list his content.
But as the debate rages in media offices all over country, there seem a few rather critical truths which are not being discussed:
- Search engine inertia – The thought that consumers will change engine in response to the content that is available gives the impression that most users understand the distinction between search engines and what they do (or even search engines and browsers). This has not been my experience in user testing. This isn’t a point about Google being so easy and fast that people are loyal to it. This is a point about users thinking Google is the web. Long-learned habits will take a long time to break. Clearly if Murdoch got almost all media outlets to follow him (not inconceivable), the absence of such results would drive users on, but as long as ‘Tiger woods crash’ returns hundreds of results, migration is likely to be slow.
- The BBC – In the UK, the BBC – also committed to open, free access – makes any such anti-Google cartel a paper tiger.
- Prisoner’s dilemma – the more media outlets are in the Murdoch alliance, the more tempting it will be to leave it.
- Cover price – The cover price of newspapers do not make them commercially viable. The value for media owners is still the value of advertising, not cover price. So unless we are planning on driving people away from the web, back to newsprint, subscription prices are going to have to be way higher than offline pricing, since internet advertising doesn’t work. Numerous free-paper wars have shown how advertising in print can deliver profits. And, of course, most newspapers operate an at-least partially free model: what percentage, for example, of The Times, are given away for free? Conversely, what would the cover price on the Sun have to be if it carried no advertising? £1? £2? Would it be any more commercially viable than the Sun on the web with a paywall?
- Purchase mechanic – It’s an obvious point but customers pay for newspapers with small change in an ad hoc arrangement. And the decision to purchase is often driven by the front page headline or image. Neither of these techniques exists online.
- The newspaper is not just about news and sport (or opinion) – much of the content of the Sun is already monetized online (Page 3, Bingo); further considerable portions are being monetized very effectively online, just not by News International (classifieds, reader offers etc).
- The print title is a social object – No I don’t mean in the tree-hugging, twitter-will-save-the-world way. Average readership of a national newspaper is 2-3 people. Being social, offline, supports advertising but not cover price revenue. Interestingly, most media owners love secondary reading, not seeing it a cannibalization of readership. Again, Murdoch risks damaging precisely this aspect of newspaper consumption. And, newspapers are social in another way too. Part of the attraction of mass media is that they can form topics for discussion in social groups. Online has actually been very efficient at enabling this. Paywall’s are very bad at encouraging this sort of behavior. Like music licensing, once I’ve paid for online content, I feel I should be able to share it, not with the whole web, but certainly with my immediate networks.
- Subscriptions are not rare – The failure of music subscription services and of registration / pay-walling in general are taken (by the ‘free’ lobby) to mean that consumers won’t pay for things by subscription . In fact consumers sign up to all sorts of licence / subscription deals: for their Sky packages, for their broadband, for their mobile phones, for their travel cards, for football seats. The barrier to subscriptions is not a general resistance but the ability to demonstrate value.
- Online all content is micro-content - At the point at which the consumer is going to be asked to part with cash, they are about to interact not with the entire contents of a newspaper, but with a particular piece of content (whether they’re searching on Bing, on Google, or on the Sun’s own website). Pricing, therefore needs to be proportionate.
So what it adds up to is the need to ask for the customer to pay more, for less, in a less convenient medium, in a way that they probably don’t know how to navigate.
But it’s not a one way lesson. Whilst Murdoch’s move creates uncertainty, the key lesson for the free lobby is that the content producers are being squeezed out of existence. Is this obvious? I think it is but it never seems to be admitted to by those hawking that ‘information wants to be free’. Or does information also ‘want’ to be of a high quality and across a wide variety of topics? An older and more certain cliche comes to mind: ‘you get what you pay for’.
Today newspaper websites are seen as a marketing tool rather than purely a delivery channel. The new marketplace means online papers will have to be commercially viable in their own right. With no indication of an acceptable online advertising model; we are still awaiting the revolution which does in fact come at the end of Shirky’s argument. Will we end up with free content? undoubtedly. Will it be any good? Will Rupert Murdoch own it? We’ll have to wait and see.
Care less Wispa
Does anyone else think the following – one an honest-to-goodness advertising campaign (from Fallon no less) and one a piss-take of the world without computers – look suprisingly similar?
(And yes, that is Rolf Harris).
The entire cracked photoshop contest is a lot of fun, imagining what the world would be like if the internet disappeared tomorrow. Particularly good is the theatre audience watching a cat doing something cute (a la YouTube) and the real life Rick-rolling.
The Wispa campaign basically says: people like sharing this crap on the internet, now let’s take some pap and shove it on a billboard sign. There’s something interesting in the idea from the point of view of creating salient advertising – each poster will be unusual and might make the passerby wonder what on earth it is about? But – of course – it will also be meaningless to most people.
Salience is important, but… erm… what the hell has it got to do with chocolate bars.
The site explains:
“We’ve decided to give our advertising space to you guys as a thank you for all the love you’ve shown to Wispa.”
“We have bought thousands of billboards all over the UK and Ireland so that you can share your special messages with the world. Yes, that’s right, you let us know your special message and if it gets selected we will post it on a real billboard in the location of your choice.
“So if your mum lives in Birmingham you could post her a special message, say a poem, and we’ll try to give you a site as near to her as possible.”
Here’s one:
(It’s for a dog!)
All of them are up on the site. There’s also the ‘gold panel’ of ‘normal’ (there needs to be about five sets of inverted commas around this freak show) people like Cara Stripp. Does anyone older than Cluster (see above), really think that these profiles aren’t made up?
As you have probably guessed I love Wispa, and was really keen for Cadbury to bring it back. So a few years ago I got involved with the bring back Wispa facebook group, and even though it is now back, I still spend lots of time on the site chatting to other Wispa fans and getting involved wherever I can.
I love Wispa because it’s something that I grew up with and it holds good memories for me. Everyone remembers their favourite sweet as a kid and for me it’s never changed. I like the special texture and just the fact that it tastes so gooooood!
My love of Wispa has become infamous and I often receive Wispas as parts of presents from friends and family. I even have Wispa earrings and a necklace which were specially made for me!
The thought process seems to go along these lines: People are really motivated by social media. People follow recommendations from real people. So if we make up some ‘real people’ and have them recommend us, and then get a sort of weird implied (but not really obvious) recommendation in return for some free poster sites, then everyone will love us.
We’ve said it before but we’ll say it again. The term ‘social media’ is a bit misleading for the advertising types. It is media, but not in the sense of ‘media buying’. You can’t purchase a chunk of it.
It’s certainly a truthful observation that there is a phenomonen around social media that people like it and respond to it, but it does not imply that it can be used for commercial messages. Good commercial messages can be amplified by social media. But that will happen if they’re good, interesting etc; not because they appear to be social in nature. Fallon must know this… it’s the point of the Gorilla.
I find this whole stage of advertising evolution really embarrassing to watch. It’s like a Wispa sponsored X-Factor at Sunderland townhall: “People love X-Factor, let’s get us one of those…. obviously on a smaller scale though, cause we’ve only got a 100k budget”.
Last acts
I’m certainly not claiming to be any sort of advertising pundit.
However, the recent advertising campaign for Dixons strikes me as quite remarkable, and not in a good way. It has already sparked a lively debate. I’m sure that was at least part of the intention. In fact, I can just imagine a bloke from the agency with a La Roux haircut telling the client that this would make it ‘social media’.
First of all, no matter how good the strategy behind it, is it really a great idea to give your client the strapline ‘the last place you want to shop’?Clever wordplay it may be, but it also making a negative statement about the brand, and not a small one. It is acknowledging a commonly held belief that Dixons offers an unpleasant experience. Especially considering that the advert is for the online store rather than than the scrappy Dixons with abusive staff who have now disappeared from our high-streets (or become Currys), which brand would want to say this? Is there no worry that customers will remember it. Imagine it as a store fascia! Unsurprisingly, the strap line hasn’t made it on to the actual site.
Secondly, by reducing their offer to pure lowest price, Dixons is severly limiting any future value proposition it may put before customers. While Selfridges, Harrods and John Lewis (the stores shown in comparison) all have well deserved reputations for service; by lampooning themselves, Dixons can hardly expect any consumer to be left in any doubt about what they are offering now or in the future.
And here’s the other problem with going for a purely price-commoditised proposition. I have absolutely no doubt that consumers do go to stores to find what they want before finding the best price online. And, of course, geeks have already starting using phones to check competitor prices even as they stand in the competitors stores.
Now if you’re in Harrods, and not a total geek, I can imagine that a good sales person will be able to convince you to pay a small premium to have the product there and then, with Harrods’ service promise. This is not, however, a viable strategy for online. The sort of consumer who looks in-store and buys online is not going to stop at just checking the price on Dixons.co.uk. They will check it in Google, Kelkoo and the rest.
So to win in this strategy, Dixons would have to guarantee lowest prices. Of the products I looked at, they were matched or beaten by players like Amazon and Play in most cases, and even more suprisingly they didn’t appear in Google shopping, even for the very flat screen TVs they were talking about in the ad:
(Look over in the cheap seats (PPC slots) for the two DSGi brands).
Is it really possible that they didn’t think of this when planning the campaign?
The main point though is that I think this advertising is smart-arse creative written for smart-arsed creatives and planners. It’s an advert aimed at industry people.
But who is the real target audience? Is it really aimed at customers of Selfridges et al? If so, I think it misjudges the value those customers place on service. And, it’s not exactly an excerpt from ‘how to win friends and influence people’ to mock your customers. If it is aimed at a more standard high-street shopper, isn’t it just a bit too clever.
Indeed Neil O’Keefe, current DSGi marketing director says: “With this campaign we aim to reach an even wider, particularly younger audience.”
I would love to see the testing results about how this ad influences intention. For those who understand it at all, I’d imagine it’s more likely to drive people to the doors of Dixons’ competitors than to include Dixons in their online repertoire. In part because the younger, smarter audience understands the concept of price comparison, and in part because, in the hustle and bustle of the tube, or wherever you see these ads, people may not even spend long enough to know they’re not for Harrods, Selfridges or John Lewis. An interesting test is whether you’d ever run this creative on the web? When price comparison is one click away, they suddenly seem completely unusable.
Very strange. Slightly desperate. And, I’m guessing, the last thing the ad agency (M&C) will do for DSGi.
Unintended consequences
I’m facinated by unintended consequences.
Tiny, or apparently unrelated acts, can hugely impact people’s lives.
The introduction of rabbits in Austalia is a good example. One expatriate British landowner wanted a little of his home country and so brought out 24 rabbits for hunting to Australia. Within ten years, millions of rabbits plagued Austalia, destroyed the top soil and led to widespread desertification.
Password complexity is another great example of a process which gets so lost in implementation that the original goal is lost. By insisting that passwords are changed monthly, aren’t re-used within 7 months, contain various sorts of characters etc, you are pretty much guaranteeing that users will write them down. They are unlikely, conversely to make them any more secure, chosing instead, a less memorable version of what they were going to have in the first place, i.e. ‘Password1234‘.
Or take the example of Russian car crime quoted in the Register. Concerned by increases in car thefts, Russians took to installing car alarms. The result was that thieves would lie in wait until the owner arrived, shoot them and take the keys.
The last couple of weeks, I’ve been involved in what must surely be an example of ‘unintended consequence’ closer to home. And I think this is something with which probably an increasing number of people can identify.
Having had a pretty sketchy experience with both BT and Paypal, with different levels of unsatisfactory customer service, I mentioned my puzzlement on Twitter.
Now I’d never done this before, so I didn’t know what to expect. To be honest I didn’t really expect very much at all, perhaps a few of my pitifully small band of followers would say ‘yep, I’ve had problems with Paypal too’ or ‘BT are shit’ or whatever. Perhaps they’d even pick up on it themselves and offer to resolve it, but both organisations seemed unlikely to be this switched on.
So, imagine my suprise, when within the hour, both sevices were basically mugging me on Twitter. Ostensibly they were trying to help. Although, of course, help they did not.
Paypal were the calmer of the two, trying to switch almost immediately to a non twitter public channel and find out what had happened. Within a day I was escalated to ‘executive escalations’, who gave me a piece of advice I’d be very suprised to hear on Twitter – that I should charge goods back to Paypal, because their own policy didn’t cover the eventuality of the product I had bought with them not working. Very polite throughout, and frankly wise enough not to battle it out in public, although I continue to believe they mis-sell their buyer protection abilities substantially.
BT on the other hand were like a group of mad relatives. And mad relatives that don’t talk to each other. I’d already had different advice from two different customer service reps about the issue (which was that I failed their credit check, despite being an existing customer and having passed it numerous times – this is something BT can do ‘nothing’ about!). They just kept firing @messages at me, as well as a few directs. They asked me to email them, to phone them (all of these done already) and seemed quite narky about the whole thing. It did nothing to resolve my issue and certainly nothing to make me think more highly of BT customer services.
This raises a couple of questions. Why pay people to sit and watch Twitter unless they stand a chance in hell of helping people. If they’re just there to say ‘phone customer services’ then what, frankly, is the point; except for an unwanted invasion into social media.
Secondly, and more importantly, is it possible that we are teaching customers that the best way to complain about a product or service is loudly and publicly. If I get screwed over again by either of these companies then I know that on Twitter I’ll get a faster response, a generally brighter respondent, and it also feels like – while it remains public – I’ve got a bit more chance of getting a result.
The moral here is – as often – beware oversimple advice from social media gurus. An excellent definition of unintended consequences is the failure of an attempt to model a complex problem with a simple solution.
If your consultants are telling you to be on Twitter to answer customer queries, then remember the prerequisites: am I providing the best possible customer service elsewhere?, and will the poor twits I’m hiring to track the conversation acutally be able to do anything other than produce hot twitter-flavoured air. If not, you’re likely to be part of the problem, not part of the solution. And, what you get for your ‘customer service’ investment may be a lot more flack you couldn’t deal with in the first place, but this time it’s there for ever and out in the open for customers to see your problems.
Got me to thinking
Another excellent Interesting today. Since then my head has been bursting with many of the ideas presented there, particularly the concept of being able to see radio waves, the Indian superheroes, frivolity, and what you might learn about yourself from collecting in depth data describing your thoughts and emotions.
As last year, I’m in awe of the speakers. It’s a difficult and potentially hugely embarrassing thing to do, to stand up and say ‘this is interesting’. What if the audience disagrees?
I’ve been considering for weeks about what I would do if I were speaking at an Interesting.
Most of the ideas get kicked out quickly, would require a huge amount of work, or refused to be put in a coherent shape.
The main (or perhaps remaining) one is an idea (touched on today) about modes of thinking, and how they relate to one another.
I don’t mean the thinking that sort of rattles around your head (or mine at least) all day – the ‘I’ve left the oven on’, ‘isn’t Johnny Marr brilliant’, ‘she’s cute’ type of chatter. Instead I mean, the sort of thinking you’re about to do when you say ‘I’ll have a cup of tea and think about that’.
And, I’ve found there are normally two good ways to solve an intellectual problem of this sort (aside from tea, which is required for both).
If I’ve got a topic that’s going round and round my head, and I want to figure it out, I can either try to forget about it entirely and wait for the answer to pop in to my subconconscious (this can take a while, so it’s not good if you’ve got a deadline), or I can start trying to write a half-arsed blog about it, and the process forces me to a conclusion. Often that conclusion isn’t the end of the whole thing, but it normally moves it forward. (Right now, I’m doing the later!)
Of course, these are solo methods. One of the great advantages of blogging is that someone random from Tennessee can jump in and supply the answer. Or, more accurately, an answer which can push you in the right direction. And a similar thing can happen in brainstorms (although I do remain quite skeptical about this particular activity) or just by going over-and-over it with others until you get somewhere. We could describe this as the ‘Rolling Stones’ method (Richards and Jagger having famously been locked in a room by their manager until they came up with an original song).
But- and here’s my thesis – there are fundamentally different types of thinking. And if they can be managed at all, they need to be managed in different ways.
This probably seems a trivial observation. But I’m not sure it is. Over the years, many perfectly rational philosophers (and some not so rational ones) seem to have driven themselves mad trying to achieve the sort of certainty, for example, which comes from mathematics. Trying to derive the equivalent of Pythagoras’ theorem for meaning or observation is a very short trip to the nut house.
Pythagoras’ theorem and things like it are great. A quick trip over to Wikipedia and you can see just how elegant the whole thing is:
In fact, Wikipedia shows 8 different proofs of the theorem (including one from a future US president). If you understand the symbols used and a couple of concepts of geometry and arithmetic, you can understand the proof. You cannot argue with it. Not just that, it is relatively easy for us to understand that the proof applies to all right angle triangle however extreme, even though we will help ourselves understand the proof with a particular drawing.
And then consider that there are three different (non-scalar) examples of Pythagorean triangles which work with whole numbers under 25 (3,4,5 and 5,12,13, 7,24,25). (Does that seem unsuprising? There are no whole numbers at all that satisfy a3+b3=c3).
This is the sort of thing that people want truth to be like. Absolutely certain, simple and with the sort of ‘elegance’ that makes you feel there is order to the universe and you are just decoding it.
And so much of maths is like this: neat Ikea-style building blocks that continue to yield satisfying results. Pythagoras’ theorem sits on top of some neat geometrical ideas. And it is then used to derive equally satisfying ideas including (elements of differential) calculus. Calculus tells us that the gradient on a curve described by y=x2 is always 2x. And so on.
Not all mathematics is cuddly. You can keep going and prove statements that could hardly be described as intuitive, for example that the size of the natural numbers is the same as the size of the natural numbers squared or to prove that there are statements that are true but that cannot be proved.
But I don’t believe philosophy is like this. Descartes (another mathematician) was famous for ‘I think therefore I am’. A lot of Plato’s writings echo the same desire to believe in perfect objects and reference. These are attempts to put philosophy on as secure a rational footing.
But philosophy is about the meaning of concepts and their inter-relation. It is about the inside of our brains. It does not measure the world itself, and it doesn’t derive from a simple set of axioms, like mathematics. Searching for absolute certainty rather than seeking to understand inter-relations is like trying to find a yellow fantasy or a happy number, it is simply a misclassification of what is going on.
But the two do share something in common: they are both analytic. When thinking in such analytical areas, the thinker must understand the whole question, and must exhaustively run through all of the options that may contribute to the answer.
Science is different again, although many scientists have been drawn to the allure of mathematical (or philosophical analytic thinking). There are a potentially infinite set of sciences that could be brought to bear on explaining any particular set of observations. They are not true or false, rather useful or non-useful.
And then we get to creative thinking. This is not the same thing at all.
With creative thinking, it seems we are often trying to break down meaning, language, or concepts in a way which is deliberately non-sensical. We seek to remove the context of these thoughts, and to look at them through different belief and understanding systems. This is why social media can be creative when it is on a huge scale but less so when it’s focussed on consensus-orientated groups.
Of course, thinking about philosophy or science can be creative, because it can be about re-framing questions or crossing idea paradigms. The most creative thinking however, does not need to be useful – or at least it does not need to be immediately useful. We can play with ideas to our heart’s content, and only need take away what we find interesting or useful. It can be the most powerful skill and it really requires the opposite of philosophical or mathematical thinking, it requires the ability to remove restraint from the thought process.
A type of creative thinking is trying to derive ideas which will motivate others. These are ideas which need to have a particular use. Here we’re trying to use our brains not to examine rational paths but instead treating our own brains like a petri dish for any sort of idea which can inspire a certain emotion.
And then we have creative thinking which is not about utility at all, but about beauty. This is the creative thinking of art and music. Where ideas are generated just because they are ideas, and if other people like them then even better.
We saw a lot of examples of all of these types of thinking at Conway Hall today. One of the speakers said they’d come to the conclusion that creative imagination was a muscle that could be exercised, rather than a well that could be drained. Late in the day, I overheard one attendee saying they were ‘interestinged out’. It certainly was a (very lovely) work out for the brain.
So many conferences seem to train a particular mental muscle. Russell’s ideas fest certainly gave us an all-over full body work out, and reminded us that we need all the bits of our brain (not just the ones that we use to talk about social media) to keep thinking about things in interesting and useful ways.
Thinking inside the box
I don’t very often get to start blog posts with ‘when I was a lad’. Merciful perhaps. But something caught my eye in the flat today that got me thinking just that.
Between the age of maybe 15 and 17, I spent an absolutely indecent amount of time in places like this:
(fantastic Vinyl Exchange pic courtesy of tootdood)
Manchester was going through the whole Stone Roses thing, which was great, but what I was searching for were the hidden gems of another couple of Manchester bands: The Smiths, of course and one of the first Factory bands The Durutti Column. The Smiths may well have been the best British group of a generation, but Durutti Column had other things going for them. First off, amazing music, of course. But they were also prolific, relatively unheard of, and you stood a reasonably good chance of actually bumping in to them (or rather him, the group’s driving force, Vini Reilly) in a record shop, or Dry bar – a particularly stylish Hacienda spin off-, or even, bizarrely, in the lumpen every-town mall of the Arnedale centre (as I once did).
But bumping into the band was by no means the main thing. The obsession was searching through thousands and thousands of albums in places like Vinyl Exchange, hoping to chance on an obscure rarity or dodgy bootleg. You would then take this hidden gem to the counter, full of thoroughly unjustified fear that the staff would spot that it was, in fact, a hugely undervalued collectible.
I vividly remember finding an old, and heavily scratched ‘Amigos in Portugal’, once of the quasi-lost recordings Vini had done with another label; and an original of Factory Quartet, both in the store above. Both fantastic recordings. Both great proof of my devotion to this somewhat esoteric musician. The quest was without end, as no one really seemed to have ever worked out what was in the Durutti Column back catalogue. And even then, there was the next group, that weird dance record Johnny Marr had produced.
It was (like Chirky’s concept of an cognitive heat sink) a thoroughly pointless way to explore Manchester and fill up adolescent afternoons.
And now I work in a company where a big part of what we do, is make this aimless collecting impossible. Go to a modern music download site, type in the name of your favourite band and you will immediately be able to access every last piece of their history and have it delivered, brand new (or ‘mint’ as we sad geeks used to say) to your door the next day. Or, fuck it, don’t worry about all the carefully crafted packaging, just download it to your iPod and stick on random with everything else.
Or perhaps not.
I predicted a while back that artists and labels might try and re-invent packaging. I’d actually thought this would be more radical: Boyzone teddy bears with three free tracks or Girls Aloud Smirnoff Ice with a b-side stapled to the bottom of the bottle. Apple is clearly thinking very hard about electronic packaging alternatives for it’s new tablet and iTunes.
And below are the three amazing box sets that started off this reverie.
If I’d known about all this when I was 16, I could have saved myself an enormous amount of time and legwork. One is from today – a fantastic recording of Elbow playing the entirety of Seldom Seen Kid live at Abbey Road. The other two are a remastered set of the first four Durutti Column albums, with extra notes, postcards, interviews and some very nice packaging (re-released because the original tapes were found after Antony Wilson’s death); and all of those Smiths singles I spent my adolescence trying to track down.
Yes, I know, what would Morrissey say? ‘Reissue, Repackage, Reevaluate…’ But this stuff is great. It’s so much nicer to actually get something beautifully crafted along with the music itself. Even if it goes in a drawer, and the tracks go on the iPod, there is a real pleasure to the tactile elements and content of these packages. The only thing that would have made them better is if I’d found them languishing at the bottom of a bargain bin at Woolworths.
7 reasons
So Windows 7 is now winding its way through to be on the PCs your average users. It’s virtually impossible to know how they’ll like it.
Certainly the development community has been very impressed. A lot of my colleagues have been using it as their primary OS for many months. I’ve had it running since the first public beta. It was very good then, and it’s got better through the releases.
But, as everyone knows. Developers aren’t normal people! Their impressions of the software could prove to be the exception. Developers can see why things are screwy, and their conceptual models are far more developed, enabling them to much more quickly understand how something works functionally.
More importantly, developers are much more rarely out of their comfort zone. And, in my experience of user tests, most consumers are out of their comfort zone most of the time.
I recently spent a couple of hours watching a user who was setting up their (XP) machine. I asked him how he accessed the internet. He showed me that he would log into messenger (because it was set to pop up automatically), click on the ‘unread messages’ icon which would open Hotmail, and then he would enter ‘Google’ into the (Bing) search panel (in IE). He refered to the browser (IE) as ‘Google’. He was very annoyed that he had to keep seeing (optional) Windows Live Today. He was absolutely delighted when I set it so he could launch ‘Google’ directly from a link on the desktop (and a change of homepage). The only ‘advanced’ feature he seemed to be aware of what ‘clear browsing history’ 
These tales are not exceptional. They are the norm.
So it’s remains a big question how Win7 will fare in the ‘my mum’ test.
I think it’s got several things going for it. All of which are testament to a strong focus by Microsoft on what actually matters to consumers, and – as I’ve said before – some very sophisticated research and evaluation techniques to back that focus up. For no reason at all, I’ve picked out 7 of them.
1. The number 1 element of user experience is performance
I sat in a Microsoft presentation a few weeks ago. The guy presenting was flipping between a number of decks. I remember thinking, ‘Windows 7′ certainly looks better than it’s predecessors. Then I realised he was using Vista. On the surface of it, Vista looked pretty good and had loads more features. But it was slow at some key things, and it was sort of randomly sluggish.
Everyone knows those pop-stats like ‘the average person spends three years of their life at traffic lights’. How long did we spend watching the blue hoop of maybe-death in Vista? Far too much.
Windows 7 is simply a lot faster than Vista (and even XP) at most common tasks
But this is not just about how long you actually wait.
I think the neatest bit of design I’ve seen in the last two years is the favourites screen (new tab page) on Google Chrome browser. By loading instaneously, it makes you feel like the app is instantly ready to go, even though it could be another 30 seconds till you’ve got your first page loaded.
We know that the Windows 7 team spent a lot of time on this sort of thing, for example making sure the start menu would pop up quickly no matter what. I’m sure it’s faked some of the time. But it works. It makes you feel like you’ve got a snappier computer.
And then they’ve picked out the key performance things – that people actually notice – like sleeping and waking up, and they’ve made sure Windows 7 is way ahead of the pack.
2. Less clutter works towards ‘ feeling of mastery’
For all UI issues, I think rule 1 is that users don’t customize. Remember that over-inflated services bar in XP (the one on the bottom right)? How many people (outside of developers) did you ever meet who had managed to reduce it down to a manageable set?
So quite a lot of the UI in Windows 7 is about reducing clutter. And making things nice, big and clickable when appropriate. Simples!
There is a chance now that an average user might be able to look at their desktop, and scan the start menu, and have some reasonable idea what everything does. Again, this sounds obvious, but it’s been lacking in any other OS I’ve come across.
3. Copy
Windows has always had a fondness for incomprehensible text and excessive dialogue boxes. It’s a small tweak but the UI text in Windows 7 is easier to read and understand, and improved UAC gives you less you have to deal with.
All of these little ‘exceptions’, the times when the user leaves the ‘happy path’, are often paid too little attention in the design process. They are in fact the times of maximum stress for the user, as they stray the furthest from their comfort zone. How on earth do we expect a normal user to deal with ‘host process for windows has terminated unexpectedly’. I don’t even know what to do with that one and I know what it means.
4. A bit of taste
Obviously this one’s subjective, but certainly the backgrounds, themes and login screen in the release candidate are significantly more interesting and creative than anything we’ve seen before from Microsoft. It’s not trying to be too funky, but it feels for the first time in a long time that someone with a bit of taste has been involved in the visual (and interaction) design of the interface.
5. Dealing with third parties
Clearly integration with everyone and their aunt has long been both the key weakness, and key strength of PCs and Windows. The horror show of Vista driver compatibility was arguably its single biggest problem. Win 7 won’t repeat that, since we’ve been through it already (and there’s been a lot of advanced prep with partners). And, a real effort has also been made on the ‘device stage’ functionality to try and make the whole thing feel like one computer experience.
6. Integration of Office apps
I hope the European Commission aren’t listening, but some of the neatest features of Win7 are integration with the UI and features of the apps that run on top of it, and principally the Office suite. The ability to peak into subwindows with Aero Peak is brilliant. Part toy / part useful function, it is very compelling, again building the sense of mastery over everything runnning on the machine. For the first time, the search (from start bar) really works, indexing everything and presenting categorized lists (by source). There are about ten small features like this that add up to real feeling of integration and control. Very neat.
7. Never mind the hype
Arguably the most important distinction between the Vista launch and the Windows 7 launch has been the approach to hype.
What’s worse than suffering at the hands of a dysfunctional operating system? Being told how great it is while you do it.
The defining moments of any OS are not the big numbers, the length of the feature lists or the coolness of the loading animations (whilst important). They are the moments when the user feels ease or disease.
There are lots of parallels in the real world for this. But when a user can’t see how to do something, they feel stressed and they blame themselves. They feel stupid. Not being certain is as bad as not knowing at all. Will what I’m doing really erase all my files? Am I actually in the ladies’ section, because I quite like those trainers? When users are agitated or nervous, they are not building happy memories.
Incidentally, the most misjudged result of this misunderstanding came from a Microsoft marketing campaign, Project Mojave where Microsoft suggested that users were ‘wrong’ about Vista, which is essentially like telling your four-year old that he’s NOT afraid of the dentist.
Instead what we see in Win7 is an absolute acknowledgement that the consumer has the right to misunderstand and make snap and shallow judgements, a fact that many other industries have known for a while.
The story goes that Fiat has a design shop looking at door handles, stearing wheels and ignitions, because these are the only bits most punters will come into contact with in the showroom or on a test drive.
It appears that Win 7 designers and engineers are thinking the same way. They have smoothed the edges, and picked out the occassions when performance matters most, and tuned it up just a bit. Bugger what’s going to make the OS appeal more to devs, what does the consumer care about – a bit less gloss there, a bit more gloss there, a bit faster here, a bit less cluttered there, and the 100 things will make the user feel confident and in control. It may be on an industrial level but it is experience design of the highest order.
Certainly we won’t know until it’s had it’s mass market mauling at the hands of my mum and millions like her who don’t do this for a living. But if I had to bet, I’d say ‘average user’ will like it more than the beta audience. And even better, they won’t know why.
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