Usable Interfaces

It’s not really going to be a good DM idea of course. I can’t stand the stuff. Instead it’s really an anti-junk mail idea. And it is also – entirely coincidentally – an idea that might help solve some of the problems of The Royal Mail, all those sweet little rural post office and red post boxes etc. So, two birds with one stone.

The idea is simple and I think The Economist would be proud as it’s based on putting a price on things we don’t like.

The idea is that any corporately sent mail (not just what companies themselves deem to be marketing), would have to include a return address and code for that company (issued by RM).

Now, If a customer currently recieves a piece of mail currently for someone not living at that address (a ‘gone away’ in DM parlance), they simply write ‘no longer at this address’ on the envelope and stick it back into a post box.

My suggestion is that we introduce a new convention. On recieving anything we believe to be ‘junk mail’, customers are encourage to mark it with the word ‘spam’ and pop it in the post box.

Royal Mail would then return it  to the sender, at the sender’s expense. The sender might also be under some form of legal obligation to act on the feedback, but ultimately, this wouldn’t really matter, as it would become uneconomical for companies to send bulk mail without considering the cost of returns. Plus it’s a bit more cash in the pocket of Royal Mail.

Imagine how satisfying it would be to know that 5 minutes with a pen and walk to the post box and you could be charging companies for misusing your data and trust. We could even give the money to charity, making the whole venture a bit of a feel-good exercise.

It’s good for the customer, good for the environment and, actually, good for the DM people who would be forced to raise their game. Who’s in? And could we do something similar for junk emails?

Adaptive Path may be brillaint at most things but they can’t write books well.

There. I’ve said it.

‘Subject to Change’ is the new AP book. And it’s an absolute whirlwind tour of ideas surround design, design strategy, the future of organisations and consumer marketing and how to build software systems to deliver great experiences with agile development methodologies. It’s virtually an instruction manual for what I do for a living, and I agree with the sentiment of virtually every sentence in it. The problem is that the sentences themselves leave a lot to be desired.

Part of the issue is that the authors attempt to summarise enormous tracts of thinking in just a few words. Authorities like Seth Godin are reduced to just a few sentences. The Cluetrain manifesto is barely more than a footnote. And these references aren’t passing points of interest, they’re proof points in the build up to very unstable argument about what will in the future make successful companies.

The arguments aren’t just unconvincing because of the speed at which they suck in other people’s ideas, but also that they do not seem to be subject to any potential falsification. For example, the authors talk about the great revolution which TiVo brought about, but brush under the carpet the lack of corresponding commercial success.

AP Case studies are also a part of proping up this wobbly edifice, although they are all of the kind described witheringly by Stephen King…

in which our immaculate heroes proceed, without hesitation, from brilliant analysis to startling conclusion and in the final frames stride into the sunset pursued by pathetic bleats of gratitude from their half-witted clients.

And of course, Apple and the iPod are used incessantly – although I’ve started to notice that you can use the iPod to justify virtually any point of view. Even here, AP falls into the falsificationist trap. The key to iPod’s strategy, we hear, is a strong underlying design principle ‘all your music with you all the time’, but we are have to pretend not to notice that this simply doesn’t work for the shuffle, mini or nano range. Similarly, an idea is floated that the iPod’s great design approach was not having all the features, relying instead on a PC to do the ‘heavylifting’ of downloads etc. The fact that the iPod Touch and iPhone now have these and a million other features is quietly ignored.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m immensely impressed with many of the ideas in the book, and much of the work AP carries out, and I agree with many of their conclusions, however they may have been reached. Its just a bit of a shame that the experience of reading the book couldn’t have been improved somewhat but practicing a little bit of what is being preached.

Seth Godin here, picks up on a subject which Russell Davies discussed in Campaign last year. The Uncanny Valley. That topic is actually about when robotics (and the like) become too believable, and people begin to respond less well to them. How does this work in marketing?

For me, it’s a bit like when you meet someone at a conference, or when they come for a job interview, and you suddenly realise they’ve been reading your blog. But Godin and Davies are talking about when companies do this to consumers using just a few data points. Using just a couple of snippets of information, companies can start getting all ‘aren’t we good friends’ and ‘first-name-terms’. It’s particularly freeky when the company in question is somewhere you’ve only shopped once, or someone who makes some crappy facebook app you installed years ago.

Godin says, “The relevant issue here for marketers is what happens when our databases and predictions get too good”. Of course, most companies are still struggling to spell their customers’ names right, so we have a while to go yet before creep factor sets in.

From a direct marketing point of view - as I mentioned here – the fundemental flaw to the reasoning appears to be this assumption that faking it is ever going to really work – not because we haven’t got big enough databases or models, but simply because the cost of doing it well (e.g. all the variations of tone, copy, proposition etc) would become too expensive. There’s always also the issue that many communications are best done in a transparently public setting – people need to know not just that they’ve seen it but that their friends, colleagues and neighbours have seen it too. What’s the point having an iPhone if no-one else knows how cool it is?

And we also run the risk, it seems to me, of displaying to the customer just how much is being written down. Privacy policies can feel very abstract until you start to actually have the bredth of what is stored played back to you (it’s a very interesting experience for example to have a look through your Google history). If the government knew this much about us, we’d never put up with it.

The spirit of privacy laws is actually pretty instructive here. Data should only be kept and used where that use can be justified. Should the people I bought a collander off in 1992 still be mailing me collander deals now? Obviously not, and frankly they’re wasting their time as much as mine.

Counter-intuitive perhaps, but companies should be looking to throw away as much customer information as they can, while maintaining the information which genuinely improves customer service. A little more of this disipline could make the move towards greater customer intimacy, actually feel like a benefit for the customer.