This excellent post about uncanny UI design, from Berg

Which led me to this weird footage of a robotic dog – get to 44 seconds and wince as they kick the robotic dog -

An excellent video by Rory Hamilton that looks into the uncanny valley of services

All this reminded me of a paper I wrote about the uncanny in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. How the lead character ends up on the wrong side of town, getting freaked by how it’s still the same city, but obviously isn’t. Hadn’t thought about it much, but it suddenly occurred to me this could sit at the heart of my hatred of:

- Automated “we apologise for the inconvenience this causes to your journey / delay in handling your call” messages

- Interactive Voice Response systems that try to be too smart – ie you speak to it and it tries to respond

- Some of the ‘smart’ online services that try and surprise and delight you

- Avatar FAQ / web chat things – where you type in a message and this odd looking lady speaks back an answer

All these things are aimed at making an automated service more human – the organisation takes out the cost of staff, and replaces it with tech – but all too often it just ends up making us more uncomfortable. On paper it makes sense, but that’s the funny thing about the uncanny – you don’t anticipate it. It tends to creep up on you – like deja vu. It just suddenly doesn’t work – something jars and everyone knows it. I’ve had a personal reaction to these sorts of services, and I’ve had a chat to others as well – seems it’s pretty common.

But in this time of financial cuts, most service providers are looking to cut costs, usually replacing people with technology. Bridging the uncanny valley in services means using that technology sensitively at the right moment and for the right intervention. It’s probably safe to say that transactional services are ok, but those that involve empathetic exchange – apologies, welcomes, thank-you’s – should be handled with care.

Question though – if you really can’t afford to have a human say sorry for you, which is worse: to have a machine do it, or have no apology at all?

Added: spotted this latest advance – The Geminoid. Serving you in a store soon! Yikes. http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?bmb=1&v=uzwK02OYrTk

I’m guessing that, like everyone else, they’re struggling with logistical delays due to the #uksnow – parts are coming in late, maybe they’re short of staff, or backed up deliveries are waiting to go out. Anyone reading the press would know this and I think most are sympathetic of this sort of “act of god” scenario. I certainly am. But if this is the cause of the delay, what I find odd is that they’re not telling me?

Is it ever a good thing to keep a customer in the dark?

Personally I’d be very happy if they moved my iphone status to “delayed” with a new estimated delivery date. It’s the ‘not being kept informed’ bit that I find annoying. It’s costing me time and effort to call in and chase them, and it’s all wasted if no-one responds. Result: I grow increasingly dissatisfied with a service that is probably (and I am guessing here as I’ve not been able to speak to them) in a situation for which I am actually sympathetic.

I’ve spoken to others in similar situations recently, many of whom are waiting on christmas gifts and fearing the same. It’s that word “fearing”. Why would any service provider allow their customers to feel fearful about their purchases? Surely it’s better to have them confident that a problem is being dealt with?

The truth that the service is experiencing delays is a negative, but a known negative is better than an unknown. It’s the same principle with queuing. People tend to be much happier to queue if they know why they’re queuing. I’ve read a study (still trying to retrieve it) that demonstrated how showing a queue of people video footage of the front end of that queue, helped them to stay patient. They knew what to expect.

Ignorance is not a good thing in a service situation.

People don’t like not knowing. They like to be treated as adults. But I suspect many service providers in the current situation turn into fearful pessimists – they worry too much about the delay’s impact on branded commitments like 24 hour turnaround etc and opt to hide away from what they can see – growing numbers of increasingly angry customers.

My guess is the people repairing my iphone are in that difficult vicious circle where you hold off announcing problems to customers whilst you race to resolve them. But you run the risk of problems accumulating faster than you can resolve them, leading to ever more problems.

My vote – service providers need to think and act like optimists. Nip problems in the bud, be honest, admit to delays and demonstrate you’re taking steps to resolve it. Have faith in honesty. It’s probably the best brand value for long term customer retention.  Like I say to my son “if you do something bad, tell me. It’ll be better than me finding out another way.”

Have a great Christmas everyone. Hope all your gifts arrive safely!

UPDATE: Another example of this point - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12033813 – when a service provider keeps people hanging on again and again whilst they faff about, leading to an outcome that is bad for the customer, and inevitably bad for the airline. Would be interested to know what airline this was, if anyone knows.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jul/05/society-daily-elderly-care

When I was 16 I made my first film. It was an overly arty VHS affair, with lots of pretty dire strobing, but with an excellent Tangerine Dream soundtrack. (Small aside: while I was editing it, Ridley Scott came in for a chat. He was scouting for locations). What captured my imagination about film was the opportunity to control a narrative – to take disparate parts and completely manage an experience. Feels like that was maybe an early stepping stone. It’s about that time that I decided I wanted to work in TV/Film.

I went on to study film at UCLA (via a circuitous and, importantly, free route of American Studies). I spent the best part of 16 hours a week watching films. The  most memorable part was the Hitchcock course. Over one term I watched his entire collection. It’s only when you realise that he rebuilt entire stages for single scenes in The Birds, to capture a particular scene in a particular way, that you realise the power of design in experience. I don’t think I really understood the potential of that realisation, but it did strike me as pretty powerful. Hitchcock’s answer to the question “what makes a good film?” remains a mantra of mine to this day – “three things: scrip, script and script”. All good experiences are designed. Nothing is left to chance. (Further aside: Mike Leigh was later to prove for me that there’s balance even in this rule. Naked remains one of of my top 10 films.)

So I dawdled around in TV, with a bit in radio, eventually reaching the heady heights of Assistant Editor for the BBC. The same principle applied. I’d work to piece together moments into a narrative.

Alongside many people, I was lured into new dot.com world – colonised as it was in the early days by TV people. I was a Producer at Virginbiz.net (a Virgin subsidiary devoted to small businesses), which meant my job was to literally produce online experiences. It was a great cutting of teeth – I was information architect, web writer and graphic designer. It was like editing in three dimensions – but you couldn’t control the user this time – you had to coax them. You had to suggest a desired route, whilst also satisfying infinite varieties of routes. I was pretty transfixed. This is what I wanted to do, and – by and large – this is what I went on to do for the next 10 years, except then the bubble burst.

Being made redundant was all part of the fallout. And looking back it seems so temporary. And it feels ridiculous now when I remember how I actually thought this was the end of the internet. Jobs were few and I am not good at doing nothing. I took my healthy redundancy package (thanks mr branson) and signed on for an MA in… European Real Estate.

Bear with me now. I’m a rational kind of guy, and sometimes overly so. I looked at my options in the downturn and sought out something sustainable. Something safe as houses on paper. I opted for commercial real estate. The course itself isn’t so memorable, but when I had the choice of what to write 12,000 words on, I started gravitating back to those designed structures.

Another quick aside: I’m also partial to designing written experiences. I wrote my BA thesis on Detroit Techno. It was all about threading together a history from something that was going on right there and then – the way electronic music travelled from black America, to Europe and back to white America. It was 1998 – the days of the rock/punk/electronic sound of Chemical Brothers and Prodigy. I was in Los Angeles and it was happening around me – plain as day – the black electronic sound I love, exported and reimported, dressed up with white rock. I put everything into that dissertation. I loved finding the sources and I loved weaving it all together into something which delivered an experience as well as an argument (I even included a mix tape that began  with Yellow Magic Orchestra, and ended with up to date stuff by The Surgeon). Anyway – this is an aside. You can go too far on this service design stuff – but I still trace something in this.

Anyway – back on the path. That was my BA thesis. I wrote my MA thesis on UK planning. Fun eh? But planning for me is the essence of structural design. You’re restricting design on some pretty formidable assumptions. And for me, there’s some crude assumptions in our planning laws, which means that we are unable to effectively plan in this country – and it’s largely down to our cultural perception of what is urban and rural.  I’m proud to say it caused a bit of a stir and it even got published. Now for me this is definitely in the same vein. Planning is about three dimensional service planning. How unconscious principles dictate how physical ecologies evolve – just as they do within service ecologies. I found it utterly fascinating.

But alas, I was to have an out of body experience in an interview with a large corporate property firm (I kid you not – I was watching myself being interviewed) and I left that industry behind. There starts my “true” service design career. Businesslink.gov.uk was all about designing a better deal for businesses, based on the principle that the less time businesses spent on dealing with government, the more time they could spend generating profit, which led to more tax income. I worked on that principle for 8 years, arguing not for less red tape (this wasn’t a political venture) but for a better way of dealing with the red tape – simpler touchpoints – better communications, easier interfaces, reliable experiences, and single gateways. I had some silly job titles – Senior Category Manager, Head of Transformational Government and… Service Design Leader.

The rest is history really. It’s tracing the roots that interest me today. And I think the golden thread that I can trace right through to service design is a fascination for designed narrative and structure. Creating something that is fully artificial (an argument, a film, a website) which to the reader/viewer/user feels totally organic. A great essay, film, website or service should speak for itself – it doesn’t need description or instruction. I like the idea of doing all the hard work so someone gets something intuitive, polished and seamless. That’s what I try to do for services – take that artificial thing and make it feel natural.

And when I think about it, it’s been a pretty twisty and windy journey (I didn’t even cover the various library jobs – those structured systems again?) with all sorts of detours. But that’s also a pretty valuable thing in this industry. As service designers we’re called on to compose experiences across increasingly diverse terrain. The broader the experience the better. Still loads to learn, but happily, still got an appetite to learn it.

But recently the problem has begun to accelerate. My friend pointed me toward this article from the New York Review of Books. http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/437005501/britain-the-disgrace-of-the-universities

In it the author connects the slashing of budgets with an expensive and misguided new management layer. Misguided because it is driven as ever by short term gain – courses that return on investment in a financial year, courses that attract maximum numbers of applicants. All at the expense of those disciplines that struggle to demonstrate impact – humanities – the exact one that gave the educational foundations I’ve relied on all my career. But managers need results, and those results have to be measurable. And the other thing – management’s tendency to breed and expand. The business of management and fund raising needs people – an managers not lecturers.

This is all pretty upsetting, not just because my friend is at worst, at risk of losig his job, and at best of losing the sovereignty of his department, but because it massively misjudged the importance of true university education to our position as a knowledge economy. Managers hate risks. It is something to be mitigated. Educators recognise that their world is risky – the chap taking six years to write a book could be the next leading european philosopher, opening up lines of thought an opportunity no-one had ever thought of. Isn’t that how it worked with Wittgenstein? Of course he might not. That’s the risk and it’s worth taking in mind. Worth protecting.

The lady opposite me on the train is reading the Evening Standard: “BA strikes to cause Easter chaos”. Well I think it’s time for one that reads “University strikes to cause applications chaos”. We’ve already sold out the next generation financially and environmentally, it’s time to fight for their education and the future foundation of our shared prosperity.

I’m less certain. My reading habits have suffered as I seek bitesize chunks of info – sacrificing depth for breadth. I’m a great believer on “sleeping on things”, but that doesn’t work when the things are on machines. Others argue that you outsource the small stuff, making room for your brain to work on the big stuff, but my efforts to segment like this have been difficult, hampered by an overall erosion of deeper thinking. I just have less time to deep think. Emails, podcasts, music – there’s always more to take in, to fill the gap made by the stuff youve outsourced, and the “in between moments” dissapear as a result. These are the day dream moments when the subconscious gets to work on the deep and broad problems. Without it things feel a whole lot more erratic.

But this is the model for technology. It’s sold on how it makes life easier, freeing up leisure time (where’s the 3 day week Tomorrow’s World promised us with the advent of the PC?!) – but it just makes space for more. My blackberry doesn’t free me from the office, it let’s the office flood into my life (though I’m strict about not letting it).

Am I comfortable outsourcing my life to such a ravenous beast? What’s the advantage if it’s just more information? The answer seems to me to be filters. I need better filters so small stuff is dealt with systematically, so I see only what’s really relevant, so outsourcing means deeper time on the stuff that matters. Intelligent filters. That or ludditism, or stupidity, or whatever.

Nesta’s recent document on The Challenge of Co-production is an energetic manifesto for re-engaging society in public service provision. This goes beyond participation politics, with its consultations and surveys, as well as co-design, which involves users in developing the service. It proposes that shared responsibility for full service delivery is both more effective and more efficient. This is nothing short of a sea change of conventional wisdom. It’ll be very interesting to see how far the ripples ride on this one. Politicians from both sides are dropping already hackneyed words like “choice” in favour of “co-production”. But one wonders whether they have the legs to implement something so radical.

When Thatcher announced the end of society, what she marked was the division of public service from the public being served. Society no longer affected change. It was the individual, her dynamo of wealth creation, that did all the work. Well, as we can all now see, this provided a financial boon, but now things have gone awry  it turns out we might need society after all.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/01/ford_recently_wrapped_the_firs.html

“So the message out in public sector land is; we have to do things very differently if we are meet growing needs with shrinking budgets, and that crucial to the capacity to reform and innovate is a much higher level of collaboration, focussed around a shared strategy and a strong sense of place. I don’t see this changing whoever wins the next election.”

It does seem to be that both sides are relying on us, the citizens, to design better services for ourselves. I can’t agree whether this shows a distinct lack of leadership, reflects paraylsis in the face of major demographic and financial upheaval or ingenuous insight into bottom up innovation. The proof will be in the pudding…