The one thing you can do better than Apple

Apple store genius bar

You’ve probably been to an Apple store. They’re a very different proposition to what computer retail stores looked like in the first 30 years of the PC revolution. They are super busy, it’s no surprise it’s the most profitable retail outlet in the world per square meter. But the thing that impressed me the most isn’t the slick architectural design and visual brilliance, it wasn’t even the knowledge of the genius, it was this one thing:

I went in to get my macbook fixed after I made an appointment on line. When I arrived a staff member checked me in for my appointment, and then I stood in a line with other people waiting for help. I didn’t have to wait long. But when it was my turn a different guy turned up and said, “Hey Steve, come take a seat and lets get your sorted out.” The thing that threw me was that I was in a bunch of 10 people, I’d never seen this guy before, and yet he knew my name, and come right up to me. He didn’t yell “Steve?, is Steve here? you’re next..”

So I asked him how he knew who I was among all the other random people. And he told me what they do. When you check in on the iPad they write a description of what you look like. Clothes, colour hair, tall, short, red back pack and so on. So there can be no mistaking who is who. There could always be more than one Steve…. there could be two people wearing black t-shirts. This detail ensures they always get it right. He told me that they are told to come up to the customer and great them personally and intimately. And it really works, I felt good.

Now, I know you think that this is not so innovative. It’s hardly a new idea, and anyone could do it. And that is exactly the point. Anyone company could, but not many do. If the worlds biggest company can make a single customer feel like they are getting personal service, what could your startup or small business do?

You should totally read my book – The Great Fragmentation.

 

Why aliens have never made contact with humans

Aliens

The reason that aliens have never made contact with humans is that they don’t think we’re in charge.

I go jogging every other day, and I always see humans walking behind dogs. The dogs are leading the humans along a path, with a rope attached to the human. The humans are following the dog with a plastic bag. If the dog happens to do a poo, then the human stops, picks it up, and keeps on walking behind the dog while carrying the poo. If aliens ever happened to drop into our fair planet, I’m pretty sure they’ll think the dogs are running the show. Any conversation aliens have with a life form on earth would be directed at the dogs, not us.

So what would the aliens think of your startup based on what they see? Would the product tell the story you want? Our customers might as well be aliens, as they can only judge us based on what they see.

What we do, and others observe, is where reality lives. While we might talk a good game, the way we actually play it is far more important.

You should totally read my book – The Great Fragmentation.

Motivation & Administration

A part of life ‘on-line’ is that it requires a certain amount of administration. Stuff needs to be set up, logged in and authorised. It’s also a big part of getting people into a start up. So we most often ensure that the barriers to entry are reduced…. we let our new users do the admin later. Maybe, on their next visit. The only problem with this is that administration should always be undertaken when motivation is the highest, and that’s usually at the start of a process or project.

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The end of manuals

Up until very recently – maybe 10 years ago – the people who made the stuff we use, didn’t really care if we could use it. Which is why anyone who have ever owned a VCR can remember the time flashing at 12am for most of its shelf life.

People who made stuff didn’t care, because they didn’t have to. Our options were limited. There were only so many brands to choose from, and only so many retailers to buy from. It was buy from them, or miss out. But they were nice enough to a write manuals for us. If you’ve ever had struggled to read or understand a user manual of some sort. I’ve got good news for you… I have the translation below.

“Hi there, we’ve written this manual in order to avoid have to give you any real or human feedback. You see, we are too busy selling this thing in so many countries, that caring would impact our short term profitability too much. So instead we just got some of our engineers to write this thing, and then we hired a translation company to put it into your language….. so if this is all reading a bit back to front, or just too technical to understand, then that is why. The reason our product needs a manual is that we are pretty much trying to be everything to everyone. We couldn’t really decide which features to include or exclude, so we just put all of them in. We believe we can charge a higher price if it has more features, we are not 100% sure, but why risk it? We know having this many features makes it harder to user, but it really makes it easier for our sales and marketing team to tell customers and retailers our ‘thing’ does everything. Our policy is to do the bare minimum when it comes to anything related to our product after we already have your money. And we know that all our competitors do much the same stuff so we reckon we can roll like this. Good luck!”

Lucky for us manuals are a thing of the past and smart brands know this. In this day and age the thing itself should be the manual. If it isn’t we can be pretty sure that someone will replace our stuff with a better user experience that’s intuitive and actually cares about the people using it.

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More evidence of screen culture

Screens are beginning to permeate our entire existence. This latest effort from Samsung is seriously a step into the future. A fully connected web enabled window. It’s not hard to imagine this appearing in architectural designed houses and offices in the next 12 months a la minority report. Again it seems that UI is what really matters.

Startups need to be thinking about how they design around next generation screen UI beyond Apple.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5rlTrdF5Cs]

 

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Screen Culture

TV was the first entertainment screen in our lives and belonged in the living room. And it stayed there for the best part of 30 years before it multiplied. Slowly, it made it’s way into the other rooms of the house. It was linear and unidirectional, but it was also the start of a new culture. A culture that would shape more than entertainment.

In less than 20 years since the birth of the graphical web, screens in all shapes and sizes have started to pop up all around us. They’ve made things simpler, easy to understand, and just made life better. So much so, that screens now permeate virtually every aspect of our lives.

I call it screen culture.

And it’s much more than TV, web browsers and smart phones. It’s every screen we see. All web enabled, all around us and consumers expect the screens to serve them without a hitch.

They’re in our pockets, they’re on our desk, the car dashboard is now a screen, on the back of airline seats, the airline check in counters, supermarket checkouts, shopping centre directories, in all retail spaces, in the back seat of taxi’s, bus shelters, community spaces. They exist where ever communication and commerce does. Every machine now has a screen. Every time we interact with technology, the interface is increasingly screen enabled. And we often attend to multiple screens concurrently.

The more we learn about the screen, the more it learns about us. The best screens can be manipulated, touched, caressed, controlled and even spoken to. It’s our job to humanize the screens so that they are culturally sensitive. They need to intuitively know what we want… and lead us to that solution. The interface has to be the instruction manual. Screen culture demands that we teach people “how”, while they interface. That the learning, and the solving, happen simultaneously. The screens need to serve us. We must be able to navigate the tight spaces of the small screen, if we can do this, then conversion to the big is easy.

This can only happen when we design as humans, not technologists.

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