In Gladwell’s book, he highlights the effect of Giuliani’s zero tolerance policy on minor crime in New York City had in reversing a years’ long reputation for being dirty and dangerous.

I think the same kind of effect of the magnified effect of small issues applies just as well to another kind of Windows.

When Microsoft launched Windows Phone in 2010, they achieved something similar in a change of attitude. Screw the number of total features, apps or whatever, the Windows Phone team reversed a decade-long (Pocket PC first came out in 1990, Windows Mobile in 2003) trend of releasing software with lots of little bugs in it. And in doing that, they gave many of us hope that Microsoft could really rival Android and iOS in the mobile phone OS market.

Anyone who lived with a Windows Mobile devices (Windows Mobile 2003, Windows Mobile 5, 6, 6.5) will remember these little bastards the overwhelming feeling when one thing or another just failed to work wasn’t anger, it was resignation.

I’m not talking about UI failures – although there were certainly plenty of those. My favourite bit of non-user-centred thinking must be the snooze menu for the built in alarm clock which required the navigation of a pop-up submenu – this for a user that you can guarantee is half asleep. In later versions, SMS messages were threaded but with new messages appearing at the bottom of the list which would open at the top – often taking several minutes to scroll down to.

No, I’m talking about full-on bugs. In our office at the time, where these phones were standard issue, we gave up asking why people had failed to return calls, had hung up mid-sentence (I still believe the phone would drop the call if it received an email with attachment), or sent garbled and incoherent emails and texts.

I remember a conversation with the ‘mobile expert’ from our firm back in 2008 when he told me that the way to keep your WinMo phone working well was to completely wipe it and re-install everything each month.

You just learned that every so often, the phone would let you down and the only thing to do would be to suck it up.

It was a disaster. Ballmer even admitted as much in public.

Despite all this, the platform was pretty successful, commanding up to 20% of the marketplace. Because it was only competing with Blackberry (which was a bit more expensive and required a server for enterprise customers to get their mail) and Symbian which was late to make any kind of leap to the enterprise.

I’m sure Microsoft would kill to have the same share with Windows Phone today that they once had with Windows Mobile. And the fact is that Windows Phone – a completely re-designed mobile platform – deserves to be a serious competitor in the marketplace. It’s really good.

But the best thing about WP7 when it came out was that it wasn’t buggy. It didn’t have multi-taking (WM did), it didn’t have copy and paste (ditto) or all sorts of other features. But at least it didn’t have any bugs. Things would straight-forwardly work. Calls could be made. The screen wouldn’t stop responding or go all laggy. The UI was consistent. In fact, the UI was excellent and intuitive. So good in fact that it’s ended up on Windows 8, but that’s another story.

For once, it felt the Microsoft team behind the product really understood the need for quality in the product released. Better quality not more features. When Microsoft updated the OS to 7.5 (codenamed Mango) they brought a host of new features and capabilities to the platform and once again, maintained the capability. Of course it was and is an uphill struggle for the OS. Clearly it’s been slow to grow. But the people that have it like it, and that’s a great starting point.

So now it’s two years later, And Microsoft has recently launched WP8 for new WP hardware and a final update for WP7.8 for older hardware.

Whilst it brings a couple of new features and a new start screen, WP8 is really an engineering-led change for Microsoft, building on a long-story which dates back to before the somewhat calamitous release of Windows Vista.

Vista had been intended to improve the overall user experience of Windows, making a big step forward from Windows 2000. As it happens, the user-experience of the Windows Vista interface was very compelling. Unfortunately the performance – the most important element of any user experience – was not up to scratch. Frustrating many with the new OS.

By contrast, Windows 7 went on to be Microsoft’s best and most successful OS and it did this by making the heart of the operating system as small and efficient as possible and therefore dramatically improving the actual user experience. Project lead, Sinofsky did this by taking advantage of the ‘winmin‘ project which had been running at Redmond for many years to cut down core Windows NT.

With Windows Phone 8, Microsoft has replatformed – almost invisibly – their phones from Windows CE (a somewhat dated and clunky core) to a version of Windows NT (a long-standing but highly efficient system), just like Windows 7 and Windows 8.

There is no doubt that this is an amazing engineering achievement. Even though it has come of the cost of WP8 moving along very little from WP7 in terms of what the user sees. But it also seems to have come at the cost of quality in delivery, and not just the delivery of WP8, but WP7.8 too.

Nokia was kind enough to send me a Lumia 820 device early on. Aside from using the highlight colour for the button actions as well as the tiles, the devices can only really be told apart from the Lumia 800 by the removable back cover and the size (for my money, a bit too big). The screen’s actually the same resolution (but bigger so it drains the battery faster). It’s got NFC and wireless charging, both of which are cool. But it crashes. About every six hours, meaning I’ve got pretty good at taking the removable cover off. And the music player hangs the system. And you know what I thought straight-away? This is like having Windows Mobile back. Broken windows.

Because it’s careless. As I said earlier, I’m sure it’s a major engineering triumph but from a user’s point of view it’s taken a year to make a phone that’s bigger, has worse battery life, crashes (often at night, making it’s use as an alarm clock somewhat questionable), hangs, doesn’t have Gorilla Glass (the 800 does), has a much worse desktop sync client and doesn’t look as nice.

And the 7.8 update, a sort of parting shot to keep a Microsoft promise about upgrade cycles, is full of bugs. So now my 800 is broken too. The live tiles don’t work, mine at least is crashing regularly and there are small careless errors dotted here and there. Take for example my Music tile which has recently renamed itself (somewhat accurately) ‘Crowded House’!

Forgive me for saying that it doesn’t feel like a year well spent. A year in an industry which (Android at least) is moving ahead very quickly. Yes, we want new features but what I personally want more than anything is quality. Each new product should have fewer bugs than its predecessor, not more. And every time I find a ‘little bug’, it shakes the faith I have in Microsoft to win in phones.

Surely a successful phone is the most important key to Microsoft’s long-term consumer strategy. So why isn’t it their top priority to get it right?

Why is this image so powerful?

Even before the caption is read and the context explained, it has a very strong visual resonance.

Obama is obviously an historical figure, a phenomenal orator, a symbol of humanity and intellect. With his image comes a huge amount of that recollection and meaning: the victory speech after the Iowa primary in January 2008 (“They said this day would never come”), the victory speeches after the two elections (2012: “The role of citizens in our democracy does not end with your vote”), the basket ball, the humor of the correspondent’s diner, the battle with Donald Trump and so on.

The pose is somewhat humble and inquiring and Obama is alone, looking confident but curious.

But that is only the start of the meaning. That Obama is sitting on the bus where Rosa Parks once made her historic protest changes the picture altogether. Park’s refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger became a powerful weapon in the civil rights movement’s campaign which would eventually change laws and end segregation; her act is a landmark on the continuing struggle for racial equality in the US.

The bus is in a museum now, of course, and Rosa Parks herself died in 2005. But the act lives on a strong symbol. Fifty-two years and a few months after Park’s original ‘disobedience’ led to her arrest, Obama was sworn in as US president, the ultimate proof that – whatever racism remains in America – it is not ingrained in the institutions through which the country is run.

Race at times seems to be the least part of the Obama presidency. I’m sure that’s how it should be. However, this image reminds us that it is no small achievement for a country that – within living memory – built racism into its laws, to elect a president who might have been the victim of such segregation.

‘Needs’ is a brilliant word. Five letters long and yet it means so many different things to so many different people; can encompass a huge range of planning challenges and can, perhaps, lead us to some interesting thinking about how to make things people really love, and to communicate things in a way which will really captivate.

The starting point for this discussion must surely be Maslow. In creating a classification of the natural order of human needs, he helped the expansion of the concept of need beyond the purely physical and into a somewhat grey area between needs and wants. Of course, he is also responsible for the concept of a hierarchy among needs with some being of a higher order than others, whether that has pejorative implications or not.

Humans are physical, but also emotional, social, ambitious and so on. And if ‘needs’ are to include all of these factors (which surely it must), then they will encompass every aspect that could be important to us in creating a product or communications which has some resonance with our customer. And of course, needs must be personal, so we will necessarily have to try and understand what needs are commonly shared.

In user experience, we may use ‘needs’ to codify user requirements. But this can be layered. If we’re designing an interface, we need to know which tasks or functions a user needs to be able to carry out – e.g. I need to be able to update my address details. All users also face straight-forward usability needs. However, in thinking about the broader concept of the product, we need to consider emotional needs in addition to the functional needs of the user. How can the product resonate on an emotional level, as well as a functional one.

Here there are two concept which may well be very useful. The first is the idea that emotional response can be classified and codified. Here the work of Plutchick seems very relevant. In classifying the emotions, exhaustively, Plutchick raises and interesting question. What is the emotional reaction that we are looking to achieve and how does the product foster that emotion or suppress its opposite. Does the product in question look to surprise or reassure, to reduce frustration or drive trust?

However, it seems reasonable to suggest that such an emotional resonance can only be properly described in context: What is surprising or fear-inducing in the light-snack market is presumably different from the mobile phone market.

And can we extend this to include the ability of a product (or communication) to offset an emotional reaction that already exists to some other object – i.e. where the emotional response is in the problem the product or communication looks to resolve?

The second framework which is quite powerful here is the concept of the derivation of emotional response. So, in choosing the right shirt for a night out, this is related to the need to impress the opposite sex, from the need to continue the species and ultimately (perhaps in all cases!) the fear of death.  I’ve tried to discuss this briefly before. I’m still convinced there is value in this. If we can understand how an emotional response is driven, we can better understand how to respond to it. After, all, if your product can’t be traced back to a real underlying human need (or multiple needs) of this sort (and here perhaps we’d be less keen on a Maslow style hierachy), then what use is it?

In this post, Northern Planner discusses his fundamental planning beliefs. One of them  is that:

Behind every business problem is a very human behavioural problem you need to change. The art of strategy is making people care enough to behave differently

When they don’t want to be sold to anymore, if they ever did, we need to start with what they’re interested in and work back from there. Real problems and tensions in real lives

Good quote, (and the reason I started writing this post). I agree entirely, apart perhaps from describing the behaviour in question as a behavioural ‘problem’. It seems to me, it’s only  a ‘problem’ from the point of view of the business being discussed. From the user’s point of view, it’s just a behavior.

Perhaps there’s little new in directing our strategies to meeting needs, but I suspect we can all benefit from being more curious in how we dissect that need in the first place.

UPDATE. I had originally meant to kick off this post with the following video. Genius, speaks for itself etc. etc.

“Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.”

The quote above from the great American Novelist, Kurt Vonnegut is made more compelling by Vonnegut being, at times, humanist, atheist and agnostic. The idea seems broadly accessible to all that – in its various forms – we can make deep, almost spiritual, connections with music.

But of course, taste in music varies considerably. Why is that, and how does your preference get defined?

For my own part, two things appear to be true.

1. If I listen to any music for long enough, I can learn to like it and then find it enjoyable.
2. I don’t typically fancy doing (1)

So perhaps if I’d been brought up in a house and school full or Iron Maiden and AC/DC, I’d be a metal fan now; or perhaps in different circumstances, I’d be a classical music boff, or devotee of rap?

What I tend to find, in fact, is that what I’m listening today is either:

1. The music I learned to like in my teens
2. Music that I’ve got to from the music I listen to in my teens (from The Smiths to Johnny Marr to The The)
3. Music which has been pumped out of the radio, or TV so often I’ve come to like it.

A good example how tastes can develop is Martin Stephenson. Growing up in Newcastle, Stephenson and his group the Daintees were like local heroes, signed to local label, Kitchenware alongside other local favourites PrefabSprout. At the time, the band were destined for the charts, groomed and PR-ed for it.

I fell in love with the band, bought all their albums, saw them live and kept on listening to them for years, even though they quietly disappeared.

Then a few years ago, he started playing concerts again. At first I went along to see the old songs. But there had been a lot of water under this particular bridge. Still a fantastic showman, Stephenson had transformed into a much more eclectic performer, mixing many musical influences, mysticism, the wisdom of therapy, addiction and religion. Songs would blend, narratives would drift off. It is hypnotic. The Stephenson of  2012 is – of course a totally different performer to the Stephenson signed to Kitchenware in 1982. Like the philosopher’s axe, all the parts have been replaced, only the name and the memories remain.

I wonder if I’d never heard the old Stephenson, would I love the new one? I doubt it. Liking the original gave me enough licence and patience, I suppose to learn to love the descendant. And for that, I’m very lucky.

What about the catchy, manufactured pop that floats out of youth radio (to which I still, erroneously, listen)? This fantastic New Yorker article takes a peek behind the scenes at how much of this music is made. Certainly ‘manufactured’ doesn’t feel like a stretch. But then again, have you ever actually tried to write a song? It’s not easy, and part of the reason it can feel so difficult is that the result can appear flat and unseductive. These techniques pull those levers deliberated and simply adds in meaning later. The idea that the singer must write the songs, and write them from the heart, is a relatively recent one.

But if we think about it slightly differently, manufacturing music through chord sequences and hooks, is all about designing tracks which can be very quickly taken on board. It’s about giving your audience a sprinkling of good reasons for putting in the work to get, literally, hooked. And there are as many hooks in ‘A rush and a push’ as there are in ‘Diamonds’. The story about how and where the song was created and the conviction of the lyrics, are merely extensions of the meaning that can be attributed to it. Noel Gallagher claims to have written most of Definitely Maybe while manning an NCP car park. Is this preferable to a studio in LA? And of course (witness the X-Factor final last night), much of this can be manufactured too.

So music, and our preference for it, is fascinating. I’m sure similar parallels could be drawn for film, theater, books and the like.

At different stages of our lives, we may also care more or less how the music we listen to, the books we read and the films we watch define us or support our self-image. Like the character Marcus in ‘About a boy’, the choice of rap music reflects a desire to fit in to a group, as well as just a joy of the experience. Like the boys behind the bike sheds coughing their way into a an addiction to Embassy No 1, how many young music fans have to invest time to learn to love the ‘right’ acts? Is this pretense? I don’t believe so, as the effort required is to build the initial relationship which then builds through familiarity.

Perhaps an interesting spin-off question is how closely this method of liking, exploring and becoming tuned in, is reflect in brands (or rather, non-media brands). How do we learn to love, and how far will we explore beyond our preferred repertoire.

Presumably some of the same principles are true:

1. We can embrace or reject the brands our parent’s loved
2. Once we’ve become used to a brand, we stick with it as it develops, as Apple has
3. We could perhaps define genres of brands and observe tendencies to favour one brand type over another
4. We need an incentive to try new brands, a chance to sample
5. We can use brands to define ourselves
6. The back story of the brand can be just as important as the qualities it manifests

This wonderful clip from Mad Men on Amelia’s blog started me thinking again about Kodak, both a case study of success and failure in product innovation, and – now – a cautionary tale for businesses facing change. But what, if anything, can we actually learn from it?

One of the best studies of the primacy of experience in product design is that of George Eastman, Kodak and ‘You push the button and we’ll do the rest’. The company grew hugely successful on the back of that thought, successfully navigating several technology changes in its early years and developing a massively dominant position in the film marketplace.

As recently as 1976, Kodak held 90% of film sales and 85% of camera sales in the US. This level of market leadership is interpreted as causing complacency from management, and equipping Kodak badly for battle with Japanese rival Fujifilm.

In fact, it was Kodak themselves who invented the digital camera in 1975 and the first megapixel sensor in 1986, the innovations which would prove a major component of their downfall.

The engineer who made the invention is quoted by the New York Times as describing the management reaction, “That’s cute—but don’t tell anyone about it.’” (because of the threat it posed to the core film business).

Whilst it is tempting to think of a beleaguered Kodak being overrun by digital innovation, the company was among the first movers in this new product space. Ranking #1 in the US for digital camera sales in 2005 and manufacturing the first Apple offering in digital photography, the ill fated Apple QuickTake. From that year onward  the company’s position fell by a position or two annually as new entrants, eventually including mobile phones (now the most popular cameras), took hold of the marketplace – making better and lower-priced products whilst generating better profits through lower costs and better efficiency.

Whatever the future of Kodak now, it seems certain it will not be in the consumer imaging market where it once dominated so thoroughly, even though other brands (such as Canon and Nikon) did manage to make the leap from film to digital successfully. Why is that?

It would be easy to assume that it was management incompetence or poor decision making. Indeed, there are some examples of magnificent own goals.

In 1996, Kodak introduced Advantix, a hybrid film and digital product that allowed images to previewed at a cost of around $1/2bn. This was later written off.

In 1998, Kodak commenced an expensive ($5.8bn) experiment, acquiring Sterling Drug in an attempt to diversify beyond the chemicals in its products to the chemicals in pharmaceuticals. This marriage proved mismatched leading to a disposal of Sterling Drug in pieces at a large write-down.

Perhaps these several billion dollars would have provided enough of a reserve to keep Kodak in the game a little longer.

Of course, the prolonged death of the business was down to many thousands to decisions. But at the heart appears to be a lack of enthusiasm for the digital products, even when the company was successful with them, and a business which was simply geared up to do a different thing and had too much invested (financially and emotionally) in seeing film prosper and digital fail.

George Fisher (CEO 1993-2000) described the company he had found, on leaving the CEO Role:

“It was mired in debt. It had haphazardly diversified into pharmaceuticals and other areas it knew little about. Its growth, save the revenues it added on with ill-starred acquisitions, was flat. It was a high-cost manufacturer, with a bloated staff and a sleepy culture that was slow to make decisions. And it regarded digital photography as the enemy, an evil juggernaut that would kill the chemical-based film and paper business that had fuelled Kodak’s sales and profits for decades.”

At this remove, Kodak’s demise seems inevitable. How would you avoid it in your own business:

• Avoid entrenched conservatism
• Allow entrepreneurial voices to speak out
• Read the tea leaves a little better
• and so on

All nice sentiments, but how many are really practical? The systems put in place in all large corporations are to keep the super-tanker on course, to move people to adherence with a common belief set. Every incentive in business is designed for more sales next year and greater cost efficiency. In fact, Kodak, in continuing to research at all, despite it’s apparently unassailable position, almost seems like proof that macro-economics not company structures are what can continue to deliver innovation, especially after the departure of the visionary founder.

Anyone for the iPhone 6?

Now, I’m not the biggest fan of Apple in the world. And it’s certainly easy to see their business practices as aggressive at times. But how can anyone keep a straight face and defend Samsung as having not copied the iPhone, either in principle or by debating the intention to copy.

Just after the Apple IPhone 3, Samsung released the Galaxy Ace Plus:

And then, when the IPhone 4 came out, they released the Galaxy S2

Incidentally, here are the USB plug adapters in the US:

Perhaps it is a cultural thing. Perhaps all property is theft. Perhaps it was a homage. These may be valid points but to claim that there was not  a causal effect between one and the other is to treat your audience as plain daft.

Rarely is it inexplicable why something hasn’t worked.

The things that succeed are the few, are the exceptions. Most technology projects aren’t huge successes.

But the odds are stacked so heavily in favour of Google Plus that it’s almost hard to believe it isn’t the world’s best and most popular site already. And it’s clearly not. I don’t need to analyse huge volumes of data to know this. I can just do what everyone else does, which is to log into the service and see absolutely nothing of interest everyday. I only know a couple of people who work at Google, but they are the main contributors I see in G+, along with a number of social media ‘gurus’. This is despite:

1. It being promoted on the front page of Google, one of the world’s most visited pages

2. Being an almost exact rip off of what is *actually* the world’s most popular website

3. Full integration with Picasaweb, YouTube, and even the chatty text in gmail:

4. Great social matching and a huge volume of people signed up.

5. Every Google employee has been tasked with making this a success

6. Quickly baked in Android and good apps on several mobile platforms

So, what on earth isn’t working about it? Why is there so much less to it than meets the eye?

I was in China a while back and was amazed by the story of the Chinese ‘Facebook equivalents’. Those sites (Renren, QZone, Kaixinn001) have grown very quickly. To say they’re similar to Facebook is something of an understatement – often they’re fairly shameless rip offs, even taking some of the graphics directly, or implementing copycat features within weeks – but they’re very successful, not least because Facebook itself is blocked.

But not Google.

The really worrying time for Google, I would have thought, is not having noone signed up. It’s having huge volumes of people ‘signed up’ to the service and still no one is using it.

Why don’t people engage?

My suspicion is that whilst G+ may functionally work  very similarly to Facebook, users are failing to see it as more than a pale imitation of the market leading service. If we’d never seen Facebook (or it was closed down by the government) then perhaps we’d all be flocking to G+. As it it, aside from a little initial interest, users seem to not see the point of the new service. And that perhaps is at the heart of why Google + feels so flat.

They might be capitalist monsters now but its not hard to believe that Facebook is genuinely driven to connect people on line, to become the social fabric of the web. Perhaps it was always purely to inflate Zuckerberg’s ego but it doesn’t matter. He had an objective in mind and he went for it. And Facebook has always felt like a site that is about enabling the user to build and communicate with a network.

G +…. Meh. If it has an identifiable purpose, it doesn’t feel like it relates to the user. Even the casual user must be thinking – Google’s doing this to gather data on me. Facebook has always been remarkably canny at the psychology of sharing: just enough subtlety about what you share, which of your  friends you see updates for (without needing to explicitly state it), clever language to encourage interaction. Google’s version seems less human (surprise!), less useful. By trying to be a broadcast platform and an intimate platform at the same time, it’s perhaps trying to do too much, or it’s become too difficult to understand.

We’ve seen a few projects die. Google especially has spent the last few months spring cleaning the projects they don’t think are viable.

How will G+ pass away? It’s going to be very hard to remove it from so many of the Google services. But I suspect they will eventually need to go back to doing what they do best – monitoring, users, sites and information covertly, rather than explicitly. Deducing what we like rather than asking us to indicate it directly.

Over at AdLiterate, Richard Huntingdon has been doing an infinitely better job, it seems, of my favorite hobby – disecting pointless brand ‘immersion campaigns’.

We now have a very wide selection of examples  of supremely stupid advertising-agency-created ideas encouraging the clearly disinterested reader to put down what they were doing and  get involved in a supreme act of pointlessness instead.

Perhaps there are now enough examples of this sort of nonsense that a rudementary classification system can emerge.

a. Make our advert for us

This is probably the laziest thinking and delivers the most cringeworthy outcomes. Of course, it’s not really brand engagement at all, since no-one in their right mind could possibly put in this much effort just to celebrate the brand. Instead ad agencies offer actual money to anyone who can make a better advert than they can. But the result is almost always horrendous, like a desperately patronizing school project gone wrong, which the brand in question quietly has to run once on TV and then sweep into the shit-heap of YouTube. Since the reward is not guaranteed, such misadventures often go through a particularly embarrassing stage with the brand in question asking friendly production companies to get involved. So really this is just hit-and-miss outsourcing done in a very public and embarassing way.

b. Please be my friend

The desperate brand begs and bribes customers into playing along in even the most minor of ways. One of the most embarassing efforts recently was the huge (media wise) McCain chips campaign which required users to become the  brand’s friend on Facebook to stand a chance of winning a trip to New York. Now, I don’t have 11,000 friends but then I suspect that if I did have that many friends as a result of offering them a holiday-based reward, they probably wouldn’t be very good friends.

c. Answers on a postcard

Before we had the internet, magazines used to run competitions to win things. Typically, you had to complete some kind of tie-breaker, normally where you would complete a sentence like ‘I really love Walkers Crisps because….’. Customers would then have to try and come up with something really corny to make their entry stand out and – in theory at least – the best would win. Now, of course, you don’t need a postcard. And the sales promotion johnnies have elevated this idea of a special answer to front and centre. In order to try and get the ‘real human voice’, customers are ironically asked to engage in the most bizarre and tripy sort of  fabrication like these bread-related confessions. I can’t look at a site like this without wanting to post up ‘I have the Lindbergh baby in my airing cupboard’, although unfortunately I can’t because the answers they display are, in fact, all made up.

d. Act like a twat and we’ll put you on the (small) telly

Shows like Big Brother demonstrate that a small number of  people don’t mind public humiliation as long as it’s extremely public. The advertising johnnies have translated this into ‘upload a picture of yourself looking like a twat, and then you can download the picture of yourself looking like twat, and there’s a small chance it’ll be seen by one of the other miniscule number of twats who’s willing to do this’. Unfortunately, this formulation loses even the minimal charm of reality TV and all of its appeal for the aforementioned twats, leaving the poor advertiser with their product being modelled by a bunch of losers. Now, even those worst advertising agency in the world knows that you want to show attractive people consuming your products. Not these people: http://www.milkybar.co.uk/PhotoAlbum.aspx. Incidentally, if ever see a non-loser on one of these boards, they work for the PR company.

Of course, most of this is just harmless. Wasting FMCG budgets is hardly a humanitarian disaster. I think the reason it feels so unpleasant and tasteless, rather than just irrelevant and silly, is that it seems obvious that the people that think up these horrible campaigns would never, themselves, contemplate taking part. The repulsion comes from the inherent (if shit) attempt to exploit an audience who we can only conclude the agency staff hold in very low regard. Customers may not always be right, but if we’re working in the name of participation, can we not try at least to show a little respect?

It takes a very cold heart indeed to not love a user-experience concept which can be illustrated using a mathematical formula. Look at Fitts’s law:

This set of symbols help us understand that the ability to point at something on a screen (or in real life) is dependent on the size of the thing in question and its distance from where you’re currently point (D is the distance, W the width of the thing and T the time it will take to do it).

How do such formulae exist? They show us that we’re dealing with a fundamentally limited but predictable set of capabilities of a fundamentally mechanical end-user. They have real life results, visible in any good mobile phone interface design, no amount of jiggery pokery will change them.

Well it was in this spirit that I stumbled across Hick’s law.

The law is a formula to help show how humans make a choice from a set of available options. Most famously, I suspect, this has been spun off to show that navigation systems should have about 7 options in them.

The idea here is that humans have certain coping strategies for making decisions. If a long list is presented, for example, they will try to create patterns to help them (roughly) bisect the list (pick half and reject half). It has also been shown that decision speed  is related to IQ.

So – whilst we cling to the nice idea that any navigation system will be OK so long as we’ve got no more than 7 items in it, in fact there are several other dynamics at play

* Stimulus / response capability. It will take a lot longer to click on the right link if we break the intuitive link with layout (e.g. “bottom | top| left” is very hard to scan)

* Elements of mixed sorts shown together require the user to read all the labels and think about them together, placing enormous overhead. (“Carbon neutral products / Contact us / Back / About“)

* Users can ignore well known patterns, significantly reducing the thought process.

But the key thing to take away here – which may be very counter-intuitive for you advertising johnnies – is that it is positively in your interests if you can quickly help your users to ignore options which are not relevant to them. Support your user in ignoring messages

The human genome project started in 1990 and continues today (I guess with ever decreasing marginal return) towards the exhaustive mapping of the core physical cells which make us. Definitions vary on when the project will be ‘complete’ but as Ray Kurzweil points out, we are accelerating towards whichever version of completeness you chose, as the technology to sequence the genome improves. This is a finite task.

This is of course very impressive.

But it will tell us absolutely nothing about why I used to hate my 13+ geography teacher, why Lindsay Lohan chose to throw away a promising acting career, what drove Tony Hancock to take his own life or how to sell a new type of toilet paper to anyone.

What we would need for that is an equivalent map of motivation?

I’m talking about a kind of super-matrix of Maslow needs, helping us to start to understand how the decisions we take are actually part of a broader model of interconnected behaviours and reasons we behave and think in certain ways – whether those motivations are primal, like the physiological elements of the hierarchy of needs, or more sophisticated like much discussed concept of ‘self actualisation’.

Such a model would certainly be useful in looking at tactics we use to address behaviours and behavioural problems, whether serious issues in development or less-serious issues (23 year olds are simply not buying enough cranberry juice), so why hasn’t it been done, or does it simply exist and I’ve been unable to find it? (Wikipedia lists the emotions here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emotions, there is something interesting in this: http://www.scribd.com/doc/3850260/Map-of-the-Emotions).

What sort of cook book would we be writing here? Will we – like chemists – come up with a long list of basic emotions from which all others will be cooked, or will we – like physicists – find a key emotion or two which sits as the basis of the entire system, and from which everything can be made?

I think we’re looking here at a system we can reduce to few components, maybe even one, the fear of death. From this fear we can start to derive many of the decisions  that fill our daily lives. Death drives us to build a physical and mental security and to want to be part of wider, social groups. Death makes us want to reproduce, to extend our legacy beyond our actual lifetimes.

How about belief systems in major external factors, like religion and patriotism. Surely such otherwise peculiar behaviours start to make sense when we can see how they relate to a complex map of beliefs based on more fundemental conditioning we have undergone.

So I propose a first draft of a tree of decision making which is as follows (and many many apologies for doing it in smart art).

The one thing that strikes me absolutely immediately is that so many of the immediate motivations relate so directly to areas provided for my religion. In Connected, Nicholas Christakis argues that belief in a higher-power can support the desire to be part of a network, it also – often – supports the need to think beyond one’s death and many many aspect of family life and social cohesion. Put more broadly, the need to understand moral codes, seems to link directly to the model I have outlined.

The areas shown here seem to be amongst the most primal. Where we can relate the behaviour we are trying to foster to these motivations, we will be far more likely to drive adherence. Magazine editors have long known that money, sex and chocolate sell. Apple have unleashed the powerful allure of group status and immediate clique membership.

Perhaps I’ll not get to the bookshelf of densely packed information shown at the top (in the Wellcome Collection’s physical readout of the human genome) but I’m going to keep exploring this concept, trying to find motivations which just don’t fit. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the idea.