Public Strategist

This blog has not had a substantive post for quite a while. There’s no particular reason for that, other than that I find that the longer I haven’t written something here, the harder it feels to write anything, so the longer the gap keeps growing. So this is to break the cycle and blow the dust off, with some substance to follow soon. There’s a post coming up which was 95% written two months ago, after that I will discover if I can remember how to string two sentences together.

It’s not iterative if you only do it once.

Paul Hammond

We are not the customers of our own services. And even if we think we are, we are still not: we know too much, we cannot stop thinking as provider or designer.

Sometimes we are the customers of other people’s services and that holds up a mirror – sometimes a very distorting mirror – to our own. Even then, of course, the perspective of someone who is then tempted to blog about the experience is not wholly to be relied on.

A couple of days ago, I went to buy some parking permits from my local council. I am not going to give a blow by blow account of the experience. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. There were lots of small ways in which it could have been better: here are three where service design could be improved.

The first is a point of measurement. There is a ticket based queuing system – take a ticket and wait for your number to be called. Screens show average waiting time (with the average while I was there going up by about a minute for every minute of elapsed time, but that’s another story). But there is also a queue to talk to a receptionist to get a ticket in the first place. So the queuing time being measured is a process management view, not a customer experience view.

Having got a ticket, the next thing is to wait. That turned out to be very confusing – numbers were called apparently randomly, so both giving no indication of progress up the virtual queue and making it impossible to know whether your number had been called or not. I assume that there was a process going on of assigning cases to appropriately skilled staff members, and so in practice several queues running not just one. That’s perfectly sensible, but would be a lot less confusing for customers if the queues had distinct number ranges. To make matters worse, one of the display screens showed ticket numbers in the queue – but only some of them. If the number one higher than mine has been called, and if my number doesn’t appear on the screen, should I start worrying that I have missed my turn? As it turns out, no, I didn’t need to have worried, but it was hard to be sanguine at the time.

The final point is that ineffective innovation can be a long term burden. The time came to pay for my parking permits. There was nothing so obvious and straightforward as a normal card reader. Instead, I had to be led to a payment machine, the like of which I had never seen before and which had clearly been intended to operate on a self-service basis.

attempted self service which fails is more complicated and expensive than not attempting the self service in the first place

In theory you put in a reference number, a postcode and, of course the card details, and got in exchange a receipt to be exchanged for whatever it was you had paid for. In practice that had clearly proved to be too difficult, so members of staff now walk the length of the building and enter everything except the card details, then stand around waiting for the payment to go through. The net effect is the worst of both worlds, with more staff time used than necessary to deliver a more disjointed service. That neatly illustrates two important points: attempted self service which fails is more complicated and expensive than not attempting the self service in the first place; and, to adapt Jakob Nielsen, users spend most of their time making other payments, so prefer your payments to work the same way as all the others they already know.

I got what I went for, I didn’t have to wait inordinately long, the service was friendly and effective. But it could – and I think should – have been just a bit better still.

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

• Betagov blues.. « Digital by Default Outside of Hercules House ‘digital by default’ seems a long, long way away and requires making compromises in order just to get some momentum. Small wins are achievable (and you can bet we celebrate each one!) but getting anything larger out of the door requires considerable patience and fortitude.
• How to be good at work | Stephen Hale Personally, I am much better at my job because of social tools. I’m better informed, often helped by others, better connected, more grateful, and more ready to share my own thoughts than I would be without tools like Yammer, Twitter and blogs.
• It’s the end of the web as we know it « Adrian Short The promise of the open web looks increasingly uncertain. The technology will continue to exist and improve. It looks like you’ll be able to run your own web server on your own domain for the foreseeable future. But all the things that matter will be controlled and owned by a very small number of Big Web companies. Your identity will be your accounts at Facebook, Google and Twitter, not the domain name you own. You don’t pay Big Web a single penny so it can take away your identity and all your data at any time. The things you can say and do that are likely to be seen and used by any significant number of people will be the things that Facebook, Google and Twitter are happy for you to say and do. You can do what you like on your own website but you’ll probably be shouting into the void.
• Nik Cubrilovic Blog – Logging out of Facebook is not enough Privacy today feels like what security did 10-15 years ago – there is an awareness of the issues steadily building and blog posts from prominent technologists is helping to steamroll public consciousness. The risks around privacy today are just as serious as security leaks were then – except that there is an order of magnitude more users online and a lot more private data being shared on the web.
• Prototyping as an ethos | Brian Hoadley So if we take our responsibility seriously, why don’t our clients? Why do they so often try to cut corners, cut out research and prototyping, shudder at the idea of iteration (which will equal cost now but provide potential benefit later), and railroad us down an agile path that promises iteration, but so often delivers linear, scaled-back development with no opportunity to evolve already built functionality?Prototyping and testing gives you a real opportunity to test, iterate and re-test. It allows teams to incorporate learnings (other than their own) so that the end results more closely resemble the type of result that users might actually find useful.
• Schneier on Security: Complex Electronic Banking Fraud in Malaysia The criminals use a fake card to get a new cell phone SIM, which they then use to authenticate a fraudulent bank transfer made with stolen credentials.
• Schneier on Security: Complex Electronic Banking Fraud in Malaysia [comment] One problem with multi-channel authentication is that the owners/maintainers of the individual channels may be unaware of the consequences to the end-user of their security weaknesses.
• Should you launch at a conference? – Joel on Software We probably could have brought it to market after three months. That would have been ever so lean. There was a strong temptation just to dump it on the world super-early and spend the next year iterating and improving.We didn’t do that. We worked for nine months, and then launched. I couldn’t stop thinking that you never have a second chance to make a first impression. We got 131,000 eyeballs on 9-month-old Trello when we launched, and it was AWESOME, so 22% of them signed up. If we had launched 3-month-old Trello, it would have been NOT SO AWESOME. Maybe even MEH. I don’t want 131,000 eyeballs on MEH.
• A Cohesive & Unified Identity for British Government — Paul Robert Lloyd If we want to talk about reducing bureaucracy, and simplifying government, then surely we need to think abouthow it can be representedwithone singlecommon identity rather than a multitude of different logos.
• Older freemium app users fork over cash, younger users spend time — Tech News and Analysis Younger users spend more time in freemium apps but don’t plunk down as much money while older users are the opposite, less free with their time but more likely to open up their wallets.

I herby declare, “arguments not aphorisms” to be my new aphorism (not argument).

Tom Coates

In the continuing fight for the greater availability of public information, it may seem churlish to observe that sometimes what’s wanted is not more information, but less.

The picture above shows a typical display on a Countdown sign at a London bus stop. This particular stop has buses from two routes. At a quick glance, you might be forgiven for thinking that it’s going to be a long wait for a 2, while three 88s roll past ahead of it. Actually, the sign shows no such thing: the bottom three lines cycle through all the buses known to the system, so the second, third and fourth aren’t showing. Nor indeed are the eighth and ninth, which at that moment were 20 and 23 minutes away respectively. But if you want to know when the next 2 is due, you will have to wait  for the sign to cycle round.

I would be prepared to lay considerable odds that there is not a single person standing at that bus stop who has the slightest interest in the fact that a 2 will be along in 16 minutes, still less (if that were possible) that there will be another one in 20 minutes. What they care about is that the next one is three minutes away, and right now the sign isn’t telling them that. In extreme cases, there are so many buses stacked up in the queue that they come and go faster than the display can keep up with them – the screenshot on the right (from James Darling’s minimalist site) is from the bus stop with the most extreme case of that problem I have come across.

There are no imaginable circumstances when it would be useful to know that that the sixth bus to Marylebone is coming in 26 minutes, when you are already standing at the bus stop. But there is potentially much greater value in that information when you are not at the bus stop at all. So for Countdown at bus stops, perhaps the solution is simply to show less. The first and second bus due for each route served by the stop might do it (though capping by either time or an arbitrary number of buses shown wouldn’t).

But the moment you are not at a bus stop, the ideal solution changes radically, for two reasons. The first is that the information is now informing a different decision: whether now is a good time to be going to the bus stop in the first place, with opportunities for trade offs which exist only because the information has been liberated from the bus stop. The second is that the small screen in my pocket can comfortably show me the next twenty buses; the much bigger screen attached to the bus stop struggles as soon as there are more than four.

The point of this is one which at one level should be trivially self-evident: what counts as good information depends on the question you want to answer or the problem you want to solve, and more information may not be better information. But since there are many different questions and problems, it would be folly to think that there is a single best way of selecting and presenting the information. Part of the power of open data is that it creates the possibility for highly specialised solutions – as Adrian Short has both elegantly argued and practically demonstrated. James Darling’s account of why he built his version and what he and others have done with it is also well worth reading.

One of the comments to that post links to a more radical approach still: stop making it about the buses (tubes, trains…) at all, and turn it round to be about the passenger, in a form of extreme hyperlocalism:

As the about page says, if you live exactly 6 minutes from Sunset Tunnel East Portal, 8 minutes from Duboce and Church, and 10 minutes from Church Station you may find it useful too.

But enough. I have a bus to catch.

I had hesitated to write this post at all – there is only so much bus stop nerdery any self-respecting blog should contain, and I am already well over quota for this year.  But I took heart from Paul Annett’s meticulous deconstruction of a bus stop indicator at Heathrow, so here it is.

When the data seem to point to an unexpected finding, always consider the possibility that the problem is a feature of the data, rather than a feature of the world …

When I discover something surprising in data, the most common explanation is that I made a mistake.

John Kay

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

• My speech to the IAAC | Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent In the time of revolution, and believe me this is a revolution – easily on a par with the renaissance, or the Enlightenment – the translator has a very important role to play. The communicator, the person who makes the facts palatable to all sides, is the only conduit through which real change can be made.
• Nick Bradbury: Privacy is Important Today’s software developers need to look at privacy the same way they’ve learned to look at security: it’s not an add-on or a feature that customers have to turn on, it’s something built-in that shouldn’t be turned off.
• Seth’s Blog: The obligation of the adjustable displayThe Catch 22 of engineering feedback: “The only person smart enough to understand this warning doesn’t need it.” That’s over, I’m afraid. You have unlimited paper and a pen with plenty of ink. Be clear, enunciate and tell us what to do, please.
• FixMyTransport emphasises flaws of government IT | Guardian Government Computing | Guardian Professional What makes FixMyTransport different to some of government’s sizeable IT failures is that it focuses on the user and what they want from a site, rather than what it can give them.
• UX and the Art of Digital Appropriation | Brian Hoadley User experience is pervasive. It is ubiquitous. Companies and agencies need to step back and realise that the concept of user experience will mean change in the way their businesses operate. It’s too big to be owned by any one team, shoved down any one silo. It is too fundamentally important to leave to any one concept, methodology or team. To understand user experience is to create a fundamentally open and collaborative environment with a healthy exchange between and amongst users, businesses, agencies.
• Data Won’t Solve Your Problems Fewer and fewer problems these days are technical. We have the data, and we even have the power to slice-and-dice it a million different ways. Never before have we been able to accumulate, manage, and analyze data to a greater depth than we can today. Here’s the problem: we don’t know what questions to ask of our data, nor what to do when he get an answer.
• Financing efficiency | Blog Government needs to realise that more risk transfer doesn’t lead to better risk management. There are a variety of types of risk involved in each project. Government’s aim should be to transfer only those risks that it is within contractors’ powers to mitigate through innovation and efficient delivery.
• Why I’m not on Google Plus – Charlie’s Diary Google are wrong about the root cause of online trolling and other forms of sociopathic behaviour. It’s nothing to do with anonymity. Rather, it’s to do with the evanescence of online identity. People who have long term online identities (regardless of whether they’re pseudonymous or not) tend to protect their reputations. Trolls, in contrast, use throw-away identities because it’s not a real identity to them: it’s a sock puppet they wave in the face of their victim to torment them. Forcing people to use their real name online won’t magically induce civility: the trolls don’t care. Identity, to them, is something that exists in the room with the big blue ceiling, away from the keyboard. Stuff in the glowing screen is imaginary and of no consequence.
• The Difference Between UI and UX | Design Shack At the end of the day, that is all we get to leave the user with: a memory. As we all know, human memory is astounding but it’s imperfect. Every detail contributes to the ingredients of a good user experience, but when it all comes down to it, the user will remember products in somewhat skewed way. UX contains a much bigger picture than UI does but it still relies on the smallest details to drive it. This understanding is the most powerful asset anyone can have in product development.
• Why It’s Good that the Internet Is Changing Our Brains – Technology – GOOD We all want to believe that as humans, we control our tools, not the other way around. Clark would argue the exact opposite is true, and for the better. After all, how can we say our brains are all we need to be our “real selves” when we have so much stored and invested in our outside technologies? Maybe we’re not losing our “selfhood” at all, but creating mega-selves. Perhaps we should be thinking of our presence on the internet, our phones, and our hard drives as equally important parts of us—really clever parts who can tell jokes in 140 characters or less.

This is the futurist’s dilemma: Any believable prediction will be wrong. Any correct prediction will be unbelievable. Either way, a futurist can’t win. He is either dismissed or wrong.

Kevin Kelly

My dishwasher has a bit of whatever the white goods equivalent is of bling. It has a display panel on the front conveying mostly irrelevant information fairly inefficiently. I assume it is intended to communicate whizzy modernity; it certainly doesn’t communicate much useful information.  It cycles through three screens in, only one of which tells me when it will finish, which is the only thing I want to know. But the screen is there, glowing with potential.

The actual controls are tucked away inside the door. They are simple enough and include another display, but one which is much more limited, able to show three crude characters.  At the moment it is showing ‘E-24′. This is clearly not good, since the dishwasher has stopped mid-cycle with a puddle of dirty water at the bottom  But in what way it is not good, I am none the wiser.

Meanwhile, the big screen at the front is showing precisely nothing. It could so easily give me an E-24 related message: the first level translation when I found it took four words, the second level explanation of what to do about it took 75 more to give far more detail than I actually needed. Either would be well within the capabilities of the screen, neither is attempted.

No doubt the deep significance of E-24 is explained in the manual, but that’s just an assumption, since the manual is not there to check. So the obvious answer is to google for a solution. I know the manufacturer, I know the error, but it occurs to me that the model number might be relevant too. There is a helpful sticker giving me a phone number to ring, but no sign of a model number (and what’s the betting on the first question they would ask me if I were to ring the number?).  Too bad, time is running short, I am supposed to be somewhere else. And google comes through without it: a simple tweak, turn  off, turn on, off it happily goes.

The point of all this is the balance between the normal and the abnormal.  Someone has put a lot of thought into the information this machine gives out when it is in a normal state. That’s the state it is in almost all the time, so at first sight, that’s a sensible thing to do. I don’t know how often across the universe of dishwashers E-24 comes up, maybe it’s just once in a month of Sundays. But precisely because it is rare and unexpected, that’s when I need help undertstanding what it means and what I should do.

It’s terribly easy in designing any service to put disproportionate weight on the core process which lead to successful outcomes. Newly fashionable approaches, such as agile, can be understood as encouraging that, with an emphasis on delivering highest value first. The catch, of course, is that value is not necessarily the same as volume, but the two can easily be elided.

Of course it’s right to make sure that the core experience works well: it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Developing the first, second and nth level support processes always seem to lag behind the process which might need supporting, rather than being seen as an intrinsic part of them. So edge conditions can be overlooked, but more subtly to the extent they are developed, they more easily fall into a more technocratic or expert user approach.

In this respect, dishwashers are like staircases:

When specialised users are in a position to specify a service to meet their needs, that is what they will do, even if they are a small minority of the overall user base.

I am sure that dishwasher repair people the length and breadth of the country can recite error codes in their sleep: E-24 is all they need to know. But they are a tiny minority of the people affected. Or as Brian Hoadley has put it in a recent blog post:

No Virginia… you are NOT the user. The user is the user. Someday, you may have the opportunity to be a user on a project – where you are not doing the design. But until that day, please, everyone involved in projects, work harder to get to know who your users are, and please, do involve them in the process. It can be really quite rewarding!

The screen on the front of my dishwasher remained resolutely blank. But if you too need help with E-24, the answer is out there.