We’re back from 10 days in Hawaii; trip was excellent, relaxing, and entirely offline. I’ll be posting more photos and stories, and here’s a quickie starter:
Reminiscent of old-people walkers with tennis balls to help the legs slide, these barricade/signs at the Honolulu airport do the same thing – in bulk.
Models stalked the runway in designer clothes made from fermented corn sugar Thursday in a fashion show held at an international biotech conference in Toronto in an attempt to “make green sexy.”
The one-of-a-kind outfits created by big name designers Oscar de la Renta, Stephen Burrows, Elisa Jimenez and others included a strapless beige ball gown, a cream baby-doll dress with ribbon and sheer overlay, and a pink and yellow taffeta skirt with a silver recycled polyester bustier.
Okay, it’s really about Tribe 8 and the documentary film ‘Rise Above’ but I like the FreshMeat t-shirt. I guess I could go to cafepress if I was really interested in merch, but still, it’s cool.
(__) (oo) Fresh \\/ Meat
I love the automatic checkouts at Home Depot. There’s usually no line for them, so I can start my transaction right away. Even if it’s slow and inefficient, I’m actually doing something, rather than waiting behind another customer. I like being in control!
There’s a balance of design goals at work in these monsters – standalone/simplicity (and by that I do not mean ease-of-use), theft prevention, staff reduction. Those goals are not all met very well, and they are sometimes at odds with each other.
After using this for a couple of years, I’ve figured out that to start to check out, you must place all your items on a tray to the left of the screen (this isn’t so obvious). You pick your items, one at a time, pass them over the scanner, and then place them in a bag on the tray to the right of the screen.
The trays on either side contain scales. Your items are being weighed, with the left and right being compared. You can only have one in the air (i.e., not in the bag and not on the to-be-bought tray) at a time. And you must stow it in the bag before picking up the next one. This is not beep-beep-beep rapid scanning. It feels very silly and slow, but that’s what the system wants you to do.
If you try to go too fast, the system warms you. “Please re-place item in bagging area.” It’s far from foolproof (not that the users are fools, but the users can fool it!); it often goes out of sync. The item it wants to be put in the bagging area is already in the bagging area. Often we have to flag down the cashier at the master station who is “supervising” the four self-check devices (usually trying to help poor first-timers, or calling out instructions from her station).
Anyway, I was plodding away with my purchase of 4 $0.69 switchplates the other day, and of course, we got out of sync. Everything was either in a bag or waiting to be scanned and I was being given instructions about what to return to where, even though there was nothing that could be returned. In my attempt to mollify the system, I picked up one of my to-be-rung-up items and put it in the bag. That seemed to satisfy it. That left one remaining. I picked it up, scanned it, and put it in the bag. All four of the items were now in the bag. But I had only scanned three.
Screw this. I clicked “finish and pay” and ran through the payment swipe interaction (this takes place on another interface, about 5 feet from the first interface).
The machine, which represents Home Depot and its interests, didn’t want my $0.69 for my fourth item. It insisted that I put it in the bag without swiping it. Did I alert the supervising cashier so she could come over and rejigger the whatsit and charge me the right amount? I did not.
I was able to somehow justify this because it was the will of the machine; the error was not like an ATM that gives you two $20.00 bills stuck together; it was a richly interactive error – “put this in the bag, Steve” it told me… (but I never…) NO – PUT IT IN THE BAG NOW PLEASE. (okay, sir). The machine is the boss, but I’m responsible for knowing more than it about what is right and what is accurate?
Please don’t read this as some sort of attempt to rationalize something that is obviously wrong. We can get the Ethicist in here if we need to, but we all know what he’d say. I guess I’m more interest in the attributes of the exchange and how it influenced my own decision.
Of course, the fact that was $0.69 also is a factor. Do we want to call this stealing? If so, then the dollar amount shouldn’t matter? Although we’ve got a recent story where Wal-Mart is ignoring some sub-$25 shoplifting, so maybe there’s a sense that the amount does matter.
Presumably, I was doing a calculation of time, cost of goods, aggravation, and wrapping that up in a bit of self-justification and walking out with my extra (free!) switchplate because of that. These decisions are complex, with a lot of factors mixed in, in an organic (rather than linear) fashion.
I bitched about Spin magazine and questioned the notion of relaunch vs. loyalty vs. targeting in a previous post
, only to read in Wired (in a piece by Chris Anderson excerpted from the just-released The Long Tail”) that “money-losing Spin magazine was just, well, spun off for a fire-sale sum.” Wikipedia sez
[Under the direction of new editor-in-chief Andy Pemberton] The [May 2006] issue’s format took a dramatic turn to many readers’ disgust. The new style has been compared to celebrity gossip magazines such as Us Weekly, even going as far as to have a cover story and picture on Kevin Federline. Prior to the issue’s release, much of the staff quit or were fired.
and
As of June 26, 2006, Andy Pemberton resigned from Spin as editor-in-chief amid much criticism of his handling of the magazine.
and
Vibe’s recent sale of the magazine for only $5 million, given the fact that VIBE paid over $45 million for the publication in 1997.
I left my last issue at the post office, didn’t even take it home to flip through. I didn’t even open the magazine before discarding it. Sad, really.
Meanwhile, Chuck Klosterman has created a big stir in the blogosphere with his Esquire article about the lack of criticism in the gaming scene.
I was at Staples recently and saw an interesting display; a standalone kiosk that dispensed a variety of shopping lists suggesting what school supplies would be needed for diferent grades Let’s forget for a moment that it’s July and they’re selling back-to-school, this was an interesting idea.
I know grocery stores, for example, have toyed with getting shopping lists into customer’s hands in order to presumably help them buy more, but this occasional purchase seems more appropriate. The bottom of the sheets offer handy suggestions on parenting, which Staples frames as “Organizational Tip” – example: “You can’t make the bus come later or stop them from “forgetting” their homework. What you can help with is getting, and keeping, them organized. Binders, notebooks with pockets, folders, and accordion files are all great organizational tools.”
Of course, that’s the solution!
Yeah, I’m a bit cynical, but I think the idea is basically a good one. They have a long way to go if they want to be your kids-management partner (or your workflow management partner, or any other sort of partner based on the types of tools they are selling); they are no Steelcase/Herman-Miller, but the little signs are intriguing.
Also, I saw a funny binder comparison widget that Sara should blog about. On the wall of binders, there is a small device that is intended to help you decide between the Durable binders and the Heavy Duty binders. It’s a small card with the binder rings on either side, with a comparison chart highlighting the different features. But the humor comes from their inability to be direct and point to one version as better than the other. Instead of the Good-Better-Best cliche, they’ve gone for an even more confusing Pretty Darn Great and Really Great. I don’t remember the exact verbage, but one binder might feature Stay-Tite lock rings and the other would feature Sup-R-Secure D-rings. You had to go back to the price point on the individual binders and infer which was actually “better” than the other. Their little display (unlke Sara, I don’t shop with a camera on hand and wasn’t prepared to capture it) is cleanly designed and suggests transparency and helpfulness but it’s really an awful piece of propaganda.
In the The Wired 40 I was intrigued to see
23. FLEXTRONICS
2005 Rank: 22
Singapore-based Flex-tronics pioneered outsourced electronics manufacturing for blue-chip customers like Motorola and Nortel. Now the sprawling company wants to own another link in the value chain: product design.
Pardon? Flextronics already bought and then sold frogdesign.
Seems like Wired is playing kinda loose (if not completely off the mark) with their glib faux-analysis.
The SF Chron writes
about those little extras costs on various services that add up pretty dramatically, with some economics research on how we perceive and make decisions around fees.
“In the end, you don’t fool the customers with the hidden price,” he says. “They know they’ve paid it even if they didn’t know they were going to pay it.” And if they feel ripped off, they won’t come back. In the cell phone industry, he says, carriers lose 40 percent of their customers each year, a tremendous “churn” rate that industry players are starting to take note of. Sprint, Nalebuff points out, recently began pushing what it calls its “Fair and Flexible” plan, which adjusts customers’ calling plans to minimize overage charges. Sprint is betting, in other words, that customer loyalty is worth more, in the long run, than sneaky fees.
They consider the cost of ink in owning a printer, and hotel costs. The quote takes a customer-centric view of what will most effective, but consider the switching costs (in terms of time, aggravation, and sometimes money) for banks, credit card companies, telephone service providers, and internet service providers. Not to mention that some hidden-fee situations such as utilities or cable TV may be monopoly situations. Frankly, we get shafted by these firms because they can. Because it’s too hard to make the switch or there is no one to switch to. It’s not loyalty on our part, or tolerance for this sort of crap, indeed there may not be any place to go. Do you see CitiBank or Wells Fargo or Bank of America as having dramatically different fee policies (we could investigate and see, for our specific needs, what the advantage is, of course, but my point is that these companies are all playing these games, and if you start factoring in the research required, it’s just silly)? Of course not.
We live in a society of choice, but not ubiquitous simple cross-category choice. If Coke on the shelf is going to charge a hidden fee, and Pepsi on the same shelf isn’t, then after the first time, we might consider Pepsi differently (for those who aren’t powerfully loyal to a beverage). If one gas station has a hidden, and the one across the street doesn’t, sure. On a purchase-by-purchase basis, there can be lots of choice.
But for an ongoing relationship, who the hell can deal with making changes. Would you change your car insurance? Your house insurance? Your health insurance? Your calling plan? Your broadband provider? Not if you could help it, not unless driven to it.
I wish it was easier, and I appreciate the pro-consumer attitude the Chron quotes, but I just don’t think it’s realistic.
is the latest Showtime series. I watched the first episode and I quite liked it. You could describe it (in a fashion reminiscent of Altman’s The Player) as West Wing meets The Sopranos meets The Wire (second season). But that doesn’t mean it was derivative, it just had familiar elements of storytelling, character, less than style.
But 3 minutes before the episode wrapped up, they went to the indie-emo-gritty-yearning-soft-hard-rock-song thing. Ya know, where a white guy-sing shouts slowly over plucky distorted guitar, while there are a bunch of slow shots. A character looks wistfully out at his city. Another turns over in his bed and stares at the wall. Meanwhile, the mother feeds her bouncing children in the kitchen, unaware of ill portent, as life carries on normally for other characters. I don’t know if those were the shots they actually used in Brotherhood, but they are so generic that it doesn’t matter.
I just read something about Michael Mann and his legacy in revolutioning the way we see TV drama, and they cited that very phenomenon. And normally, I don’t mind it. It evokes some great emotions on Rescue Me, on the Shield, the Sopranos. I remember Homicide: Life On The Streets using music (specifically Tom Waits’ Cold Cold Ground) very well. There was just something default about Brotherhood doing it. Oh, it’s a show, it’s dramatic, we better toss ’em the song at the 52 minute mark. Felt perfunctory and actually pulled me out of the show.
We build this language of signs and symbols that we use in drama (and in every form of storytelling, like advertising, and products, and web sites, and interfaces) and they are effective short hand. But we have to be careful to really mean them when we use, else they come off as insincere and cliched.
I’m excited to keep watching Brotherhood, but they’ve got me a bit on the defensive, ready for them to screw up. We shall see.
Edgar’s advice was sound. I sent off a politely worded request this morning and it looks like things have changed over at DanTaylor.com
Before (chock-full of Portigal-icious scam-tastic verbage)
Welcome. My name is Dan Taylor.
I am a consultant that helps businesses and governments. I help our clients understand and recognize opportunities as well as make “things”. The “things” that I help them with cover a wide gamut of “stuff” – public policy, public opinion, strategies and tactics, products, services, software, even advertising. I go beyond the reach of traditional research to discover new insights about how people, businesses and governments; set policy, work, play, shop, entertain, eat, and live their lives around my clients’ products, services, and other “stuff”.
The services that I provide help my keep clients’ costs down, profits up and competitive advantage high.
On their own, these insights are powerful tools to inform the ongoing decisions that clients make. My specialty is recommending specific actions that are responses to these insights, including:
* improvements to existing products and services
* improvements to public policy
* improvements to infrastructure
* ideas for new products and features
* corporate branding and positioning
* new applications for existing technologies
* specific implications for design
* new positioning for existing products
* new strategic directions
After
Dan Taylor + Company is a group of people with strong multidisciplinary backgrounds in public policy, industrial design, technology, business, finance, competitive intelligence and marketing. We know that the use of our services by our clients must demonstrate measurable value to our clients.
We perform industrial design audits and analysis, emergent trend analysis, marketing, integrated product development of new products and categories, competitive intelligence, benchmarking, venture design and of course, integrated product design and redesign.
The confidence we have in our ability to add measurable value to our clients’ businesses is such that we often invite equity participation in the client company as a portion of our remuneration. Contact us to ask how we can help you attract more consumer dollars and add black ink to your bottom line. You’ll be glad you did.
Phew!