If the people who read this blog are the sort of people I think read this blog, few will have paused over the title of this post. For better or worse, people who read this are people who are comfortable in an online world. They will shop online, bank online, talk to their friends online, [...]
In the opening days of 2010, I am reading a collection of essays proclaiming itself to be The Best Technology Writing 2009, every single one of which was written and published in 2008.
It’s a curious book, for several reasons.
The first and most obvious is how very strange it now seems to be reading some of [...]
The glamour of New York high fashion is a long way from the grit of government service delivery. But if you half close your eyes, imagine away the fur coats and unwearable frocks, and photoshop human variety and frailty in rather than out, some surprising similarities emerge.
I walk in, slightly tentatively. It’s not altogether clear quite where I should be. I stand in what looks like the right area. Nobody takes any notice of me. There are one or two members of staff talking to other customers. There is a woman whose job seems to consist of walking around importantly with [...]
A couple of days before Christmas, I went to buy some cheese. So did a lot of other people. The queue was out of the door and well down the street. Inside, the initial impression was of utter chaos: there were twelve people serving in a space which could comfortably accommodate about four. Lindsey Schechter [...]
I suspect that the airline congratulates itself on its customer insight and, for all I know, acts on it to improve the service. But while they clearly have a lot of customer research, they have deprived themselves of the opportunity to get insight.
For many government services, the rules and regulations are horribly complicated. Working out which conditions need to be applied to which people in which circumstances is hard enough. Explaining that in a way in which normal people can understand can be harder still.
There has been years of sustained effort to make explanations more comprehensible by [...]
We are all familiar with the ‘nine out of ten cats prefer fresh mice’ school of advertising, so much so that it is a parody of itself. Here’s an interesting variant from BA:
I am pleased to let you know that Terminal 5 continues to perform well. In May, 80% of our customers told us they [...]
Banks don’t even bother verifying signatures on checks less than $30,000; it’s cheaper to deal with fraud after the fact than prevent it.
Notes Bruce Scheneier in passing, in an essay which starts from the oddity of fax signatures and goes on from there.
That approach presumably relies on counter-parties to detect and report that they have [...]
The Innovator’s Dilemma is a book, published just over ten years ago, the central argument of which is that it is very hard for dominant firms in a market to innovate radically, because by doing so they risk destroying their existing business. If they don’t, though, they make themselves vulnerable to some upstart which doesn’t [...]