Part of the Process

Slightly delayed post due to going on holiday! My week's reading started with Hofstadter’s Law and Realistic Planning By Jane Collingwood where she outlines how "pessimistic-scenario generation is not an effective de-biasing technique for personal predictions .”  this got me thinking about how much of what we do in our lives is shaped by the people who provide us with the services and products that we use. This article by Monzo is a perfect example of ethical product design should be done. They have thought about what their mission is, who their users are and what issues they might face. Compare and contrast with stories of how Uber use psychology to exploit drivers to see the negative face of "disrupting industries" when that is the sole aim.  Again working conditions can have an impact even in subtle ways. There is a case here for Product Design and OS professionals to   provide more support on reporting usage to users . Computers are much better at this...

The Nike+ running app underwent a drastic transformation to become Nike Run club. Gone is the old r ed and white branding, replaced by black and volt yellow. Impeccable timing as Brighton and Hove Albion switch ed their away strip to the same colours (with Nike as the kit supplier). The whole focus of the app appears to have altered from a useful run tracker in a "quantified self" category. To a more limited - albeit focussed - coaching app. This wasn't the most popular update if my friend leaderboard is anything to go by. Shrinking from 6 regular people every month to me and one other and even then only on some months. I wasn't running regulatory when the change happened but remember some complaints about users losing their training plans . We runners are a funny lot. To illustrate, I had a conversation at the weekend with someone who was upset about running a marathon in 4 hours and 2 minutes rather than just under 4 hours . Our training plans are the ...

Brighton Sea front frosted 2 I didn't anticipate quite so many examples   to my December blog post  on disruption and communication  so soon.  As a follow up I'd like to briefly mention some of these,  ranging from at best inconvenient and stressful experiences  to the frightening and life taking. Taking the first and the seeming inability of the British rail system to cope with our seasons. They suffer with trust and respect as a lot of the people using the system for holiday travel are also regular commuters. Indeed my Facebook feed has a number of people complaining that they have to put up with this all year round.  With the scenes at Finsbury Park and the snow closing  Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport and Leeds Bradford International airport , it's got to have a knock on with passenger trust and with the relatively trivial nature of the impact there isn't much opportunity for the companies involved to show respect. Apart from ma...

Beach Snowman Xmas cards available As the festive season gets into full swing, I am glad that I am not reliant on using mass public transport before I can relax and enjoy myself this year. Especially after reading the news this morning - predicting rail disruption caused by  floods in the mild weather .  For around the past decade my day job has involved helping travel companies in passenger communications; as distilled into these top tips of  The 3 Big Ideas In Managing Passenger Disruption  or in  Managing Travel Disruption  that looks at more crisis orientated passenger communications. [edit: these links are now dead, more up-to-date take on  Disruption management: Your opportunity to impress  or  Travel Disruption Management: Tech Opportunities in the Travel Industry ] But from the small journeys that I have taken in the past week, whether by bus or train, one takeaway has been that small delays can be frustrating when you don't k...

Recently I have been doing some spring cleaning and unsubscribe from various newsletters that I've collected over the past year. One thing that has struck me is the very different user experiences that you get from such a simple task. So I thought I'd quickly run through the good, the bad and the ugly ... London Gatwick airport's page says a simple "your request has been processed", what does this mean? how are my expectations being managed? (they aren't). Which newsletter was this again? Oops, how do I sign back up I didn't mean to click on that! This page looks particularly lazy, possibly not even a web page with any formatting. What makes this worse is that it is from a third party mail list management service ... it doesn't look like the whole user journey is considered equally. Next up was Sweatshop with the confusing "been taken into account" ... 5 days later I was still receiving emails. That is a minor irritation but it cr...