September 24, 2008
I set this website up in 2001 to record the overland trip Lindsey and I took to India. I wrote my diary entries (I’d not heard of the word “blog” at the time) onto my palm pilot and uploaded my notes in internet cafes when we found them. I called the site “dancingmago” for reasons that are not so clear to me now, (in the early nineties I’d spent a year living, working and studying in Calcutta and had grown rather partial to mangoes and the name stuck with me). With social networking sites popping up all over the place, it only seemed right to register myself as Dancingmango. So I’ve got a pretty good claim to the username “dancingmango”.
However. On the web it doesn’t quite work like that. There’s only so many sites I can claim my username as my own. On the web it is first come, first served. It seems that I am not the only dancingmango. Nor am I the only Marc McNeill (the guy who supports Rangers on Bebo is definitely not me!)
The point of this is that in the social web of the web, are you who say you are? Which dancingmango is me? Which Marc McNeill is me? This wouldn’t really matter, but I read that one in five employers use social networks in the hiring process. This is inevitable (I’m hiring in Hong Kong and will Google prospective candidates), but I’d be concerned if it was used as part of the screening process. Excluding someone because they have the same real name or the same user name is clearly wrong. It is hard to see a solution; but if you are looking for a job, make sure that you have photographs associated with your social presence, and if there are multiple ‘you’s out there, ensure that you are distinctively you to prevent mistaken identity.
Posted in Social networks, Web 2.0 
No Comments »
September 22, 2008
Imagine the Vodaphone shop on the high-street is open for business, the phones are on display but there are no sales staff around. You wait a few minutes, call out (thinking there might be someone “out back”) but nothing. Nobody there. It’s the same thing everyday, the shop is open for business but no-one to help you buy. Or maybe there is a sales person, but anytime you ask them about the hot product you want, the iPhone, they respond to you with nonsensical gibberish. It’s hard to imagine the high-street outlet doing this, but on the web this kind of thing is still sadly common place. Take a look at Donna M’s recent rant. Because it is a website (probably within the constraints of some dated CMS), a shoddy experience is permissible.
Posted in Customer Experience, Information Architecture, Mobile phones No Comments »
September 18, 2008
This is rather sad, I was thinking about this post in the shower this morning. The past few weeks I’ve been going into the same Starbucks on the way to work. After a few days the barista saw that I am a creature of habit and no sooner had I walked in was she preparing a small black coffee. The first time that happened was a real magic moment (via Experience Zen). After a while though, that magic moment becomes the norm. What delighted me at first I now expect when I walk in. So in the shower this morning I was thinking about this and wondering how do you keep magic moments magic. But before I come to that, as I went into Starbucks today the barista asked me my name and introduced herself (this isn’t the US, a Cantonese local asking a stuffy Brit their name breaks social conventions I think!) So now we are on first name terms. That’s a magic moment of sorts. But after a while that too will become the norm. The real lasting magic moments are going to be those that randomly delight me. What if one day she says “don’t worry Marc, it’s on the house today”. That would be unexpected, random and special. Like being offered an upgrade on a flight without asking for it. What can you do today to randomly delight your customer?
Posted in Customer Experience, Hong Kong, emotional design No Comments »
September 15, 2008
Credit card companies talk about “front of wallet”. With customers having a number of cards at their disposal, how does a credit card issuer ensure that their card is the customer’s card of choice; the card they will pull out first because it is at the front of the customer’s wallet?
How do you make sure that your website is “front of wallet”? One solution is to become the wallet. In Web 1.0 many organisations tried this, branding themselves as “portals” trying to be a one stop shop to do everything. The reality was that people liked to “jam jar” their experiences. They didn’t trust one one provider who did one thing well to sell them unrelated products; that just didn’t fit in their mental jam jar. They buy insurance from an insurance site, cars from a car site. So if they wanted to buy a car they would go to Autotrader. It was not a banks place to offer car sales in their portal offering. (The value proposition to the bank of course looked good on PowerPoint, sell people cars on the banks portal web and there was a ripe market for cross selling finance and insurance at the same time).
Web 2.0 brings a new “portal” to the playground. A concept rather than a product. Thus we have iGoogle and netvibes and mash-ups. No company can become the wallet, they must resign themselves to being the cards inside. They can do this by offering rss feeds and widgets. Making their content and functionality promiscuous, divorcing it from their site and allowing the customer to consume it how and when they want it. Sadly the banks have yet to grasp this concept. Their technically savvy customers would love to have their balances and recent transactions displayed on a widget or as a feed. Sadly they listen to the masses and their inherent conservatism prevents them from such offerings, killing it with what-ifs and unfounded security concerns (”what if a husband and wife shared the home computer and the wife saw suspicious transactions…” yawn).
Anyway, so there’s Twitter. I’ve signed up to it and for a long time it just sat there I had a subscription, but out of sight and out of mind. It wasn’t at the front of my wallet. It wasn’t even in my wallet. Until I got round to putting it on iGoogle. Suddenly it is visible to me. I see it every time I log in. I get bothered by the inane, uninteresting tweets that most of the people I follow burble, but I also update my status on it (and it updates my facebook status as well). Twitter is now part of my on-line experience. It is now front of my wallet.
Unlike the banks who I visit periodically to check my balance and pay bills (in-out, no lingering). Now if my bank balance was a feed on iGoogle I’d have more of an interest to drill down into more detail. I could manage my money better. I could establish a better on-line relationship with my bank. If they gave a little away, I’d give them so much more. But for now, they are back of my wallet.
Posted in Banking, Customer Experience, Social networks, Web 2.0, Web design, interaction design 1 Comment »
September 10, 2008
Experience suggests that a project without a vision is like a rudderless ship. A clear vision from the start is essential to the success of a project. It is like the corporate mission statement. It is not the project objectives (objectives are generally SMART - you shouldn’t be looking to measure the vision), rather an articulation of how the end goal of the project will touch the lives of it’s ultimate recipients; the customer or the user. What the project will do for them (not the business, not for IT, but the customer, consumer or user).
The first step then is to get the vision agreed on. Luke Hohmann’s innovation games such as product in a box are a good way of distilling the vision. Next step is to keep it live and visible. Don’t just have it buried away in the project Wiki, but have it stuck on the walls where the team work. And then use it as a frame of reference when those difficult questions arise around scope and priorities.
Why is this important? (Via Leisa Reichelt), Peter Merholz shows how Google started out with a vision for their calendar.
The vision…
And what it meant for the product when it went to market…
Google didn’t start with a bunch of features of functionality (”Drop dead simple to get information into the calendar” - that’s hardly a requirement any BA would be proud of), but by having this vision, a statement of what the product would mean to the end user, and referrring back to it when scope or design decisions had to be made, they ensured that the end product delivered real quantifiable value.
Posted in Customer Experience, Methodology, Work, project management 1 Comment »
September 8, 2008
On Saturday I attended the Hong Kong BarCamp. This was the first Barcamp I have attended and it blew me away. Here were 200-odd people, brought together on their own volition to share and learn.
On-line communities are easy to subscribe to, requiring minimal effort to participate. Being physically present requires more commitment and effort. The content, as typical of Barcamps, was generally technical. It asks the question, is there something inherently social and altruistic about being a geek? Do other industry horizontals have such a rich picking of community events? Could there be an accountancy barcamp, or a marketing barcamp? And what about the verticals? Could there be a banking barcamp? And what about collaboration on projects for the common good? Geeks get together to opensource. When will the (to pick on a vertical) accountants get together to build an opensource offering?
Posted in Social networks, Work, innovation 1 Comment »
September 4, 2008
The <enter time period> ends and a retrospective is held. The team writes on Post-It notes things that are important to them and they get stuck up on the wall. And maybe they get grouped into similar topics or themes. And then the team vote on them; the topic that has the most votes is the one the group talks about first…. and they talk about that topic at length. (If you were to analyse the signal to noise ratio of the first topic discussed compared with the last topic discussed, you’d find significantly more noise when you start). Actions to resolve the issues are finally addressed and identified. The team then move on to the next topic and so on until all the topics that had votes against them are done. And it’s been a marathon session and we are done.
But what about the topics that no-one voted on? What about the post-it that sits alone? It was important enough for someone to have written it. No votes, no priority, no discussion, no action. Yet mining it might have delivered a diamond action.
I don’t care much for voting in retrospectives. It’s not a particularly efficient way of doing things. For one because the actual process of voting takes up valuable time. Then by the time the issue with the fewest votes comes up, the energy in the room is drained and the discussion is rushed. So why not do away with the voting, and introduce strict time management to the retrospective discussion. Allow five minutes to each topic. Use a stop watch to enforce this. This will allow all the issues that were of importance to someone to be aired. When the five minutes is up, if there is still heat in the discussion, park it and return to it later in the retrospective. Such an approach is more incremental, and dare I say it, Lean.
Posted in Agile, Methodology, Work 3 Comments »
September 2, 2008
This appeared as a headline in my iGoogle world news tab today.
A series of disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s choice as running mate, called into question on Monday how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket.
Now I care little about American politics and even less for the Republicans, but it strikes me that vetting politicians for anything and everything they have ever done (or indeed anyone close to them has done) is a path to ensuring politicians of the future will have to be closeted and avoid living “real” lives.
To be young in e-enabled socieites means to be connected. Myspace, Facebook, Bebo… If you do not have a page yourself, chances are one of your friends will. And if they have a Facebook page they’ll probably upload photographs to it. And if you happen to be in a photograph…
Pictured: The mayor who got drunk and climbed up a pole to celebrate friend’s birthday
In the photo published on the social networking website he stands on two metal bollards for support while clutching the lamp-post as his two friends pose underneath him (Deputy leader of the council and a Tory county councillor.)
In a connected world the “vetting” process becomes scary. The message it sends out is that if you want to be a politician of the future, stay away from social networking sites, stay away from anyone who inhabits them… in other words stay away from “normal people” (who as a politician you will one day stand up and claim to represent).
We crave politicians who are human yet in a world where any indiscretion becomes instant public knowledge, and becomes acceptable to everyone but politicians, what of our people of power in the future?
Can you imagine the following dialoge on a social networking site and the impact it would have on the politicians career:
B: Sir, you are drunk.
C: And you, madam, are ugly. But in the morning, I shall be sober.
How times change.
Posted in Social networks, Web 2.0 2 Comments »
August 27, 2008
Recently I was told of a Blue Chip company whose IT organisation, in the guise of cost cutting, has recently disbanded its QA function. From now on, testing will be conducted by the developers themselves. Since when have developers relished the role of testing? It is inevitable that this cost cutting solution will end up costing the organisation more than it saves.
At the end of last summer I was working with a bank on their on-line retail banking strategy. During a workshop with representatives from their mortgage business they made it clear that they saw the biggest sector for growth in 2008 was the buy-to-let market. I left the workshop shaking my head, were they not reading the same newspapers I was? Even then I didn’t need a crystal ball to tell them that they were putting their eggs into the wrong basket.
Clearing out old paperwork, I came across a document describing the technology strategy for a blue chip organisation that I’d worked with in the past.
There is a guiding principle that is being applied to product technology selection that says we do not follow a ‘best-of-breed’ approach, but rather select a major technology leader (IBM) and ride their product development cycle. This means we explicitly seek and accept the “80% solution” rather than trying to optimise for each and every possible requirement. [We are] emphatic on this point. What this means in practice is that, following the selection of IBM WebSphere Application Server… add-on functionality should be sought from the IBM WebSphere family of products first. Shortcomings will be made explicit in order that we can escalate with IBM, and influence their product strategy.
No rationale was given for their preference for going with a single vendor rather than a best of breed solution, but talk to developers who have used best of breed products and the above mentioned vendor product and they will almost certainly come down on the side of the “best of breed” (that is why they are best).
During the dot-com boom I worked with bank who were developing a WAP mobile banking platform. Trouble was it could only be accessed via a Nokia 7110 (the first mobile phone with a WAP browser), the experience sucked - “Worthless Application Protocol” and the market penetration was never going to reach beyond the most hard-core (and GUI-patient) of early adopters.
At the time the same bank was intent on closing as many branches as possible - branch banking was considered unprofitable; on-line was the way forward… yet several years later I was back in the same bank helping them with their in-branch customer experience.
We all must have examples of times when we have shaken our heads and asked of others do they really know what do are doing? Whose interests are their decisions in aid of? You may not be able to do anything proactive about it at the time, but the question is, what can you learn from these encounters and how can you use them to teach others in the future.
Posted in Banking, Customer Experience, Work, innovation No Comments »
August 18, 2008
In the current market conditions the easy and obvious thing to do when turning to cost cutting is to wield the knife heavily on IT. New projects get culled, recruitment freezes and contractors get laid off as IT spend shrinks. This is a knee-jerk reaction and rarely in the long term interests of the oganisation. Surely the current market downturn should be seen as an opportunity to invest in IT, use the slack period to improve processes when they are not stressed, and get ready for the upswing when the economy turns.
Posted in Work, innovation 2 Comments »
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