I’ve been thinking a bit about this lately and I’d love to workshop it with you…

For people born in 2008 (and probably a few years before) - ambient intimacy will just be a normal state. It won’t have the novelty that it has had for us. The ability to stay in touch with people that we have stronger or weaker ties with in this light weight way will be something available to them from a very young age and - in all probability - throughout their entire lives.

What do you imagine the repercussions will be?

For example, assuming that within the next few years, more and more people will have a social presence online, my little guy will have no real excuse to ‘lost contact’ with anyone he makes contact with. Can you imagine a kindergarten equivalent of Facebook? I can. Extrapolate from there.

What does that mean? Being able to ‘lose touch’ is, when you think about it, a pretty valuable luxury. How will we negotiate this I wonder.

What about ‘contact’ scalability. How many contacts could you accumulate over the course of a lifetime if you start really young? How will we manage that? If we get stressed about our mum’s friending us on FaceBook now, what do our kids have coming? We think Twitter gets distracting now - how will we manage all the noise that such a huge number of contacts will generate? Or will we all just shut up? (I doubt it).

How will we manage our identity online as our identity changes? Will this pressure that seems to be about to have an ‘integrated’ online persona (work, social, family, all in together) continue? If not, how will different personas evolve and how will the be related? Will we be able to re-invent ourselves? Will it be as fun? Will our kids ever forgive their parents for putting so many photos of them on Flickr when they were babies?

On the brighter side though, imagine how powerful and extensive these networks will be - the ability to motivate, research, refer, inspire, inquire. How distributed and trusted information sources will be.

Put on your future goggles and imagine what it would be like… what do you see?

Here is a new phone we got the other day. It’s our landline phone. Pretty cute huh? It’s called the Aqua by BT. Don’t buy it. I paid about £100 for a set of these phones. They are going to cost me a lot more than that in no time.

Here’s the thing. How do you end a call on a slide phone (which is what these are)? Simple - you close the slide, right? Well - yes, on every other slide phone that I’ve ever encountered, but not on this phone. Closing the slide does nothing… except closing the slide. So, when I went to make a call last night I discovered that, in fact, a call was still in progress. A call to a mobile phone, that had been connected for 8 hours. Ouch. I am *dreading* seeing this months phone bill because this isn’t the first time we’ve made this mistake. Although, this is probably the worst example.

We keep making this mistake because the slide-to-end-call convention is such a strong part of our model of how a slide phone works. We will keep making this mistake - despite the fact that we will be punished, seriously, by our telco.

As cute as these phones are, they’re going to be returned very soon because the experience of using them is so broken.

Moral to the story - if you’re designing something that has existing conventions associated with it - ignore them at your peril. Otherwise you’ll end up designing something that sucks as badly as this phone. And we don’t want that, do we.

End of rant.

I just don’t work that way anymore, it seems. Sure, I still do wireframes every now and then, but never a ‘complete set’ and often with no where near the detail I used to include. Why? I think there are three reasons. Firstly, I tend to work on more of a strategic level than a detail ‘exactly where does that button go’ level these days. Secondly, I tend to work on projects where there is no time for that level of detail. And finally - and most interesting I think - I tend to work closer to the production team these days - more often are graphic designers designing and/or developers developing the very same stuff I’m wireframing at the same time. Investing too much in the documentation is a waste of everyones time - much better to do just enough to get them going and then work collaboratively with the team to do the fine tuning.

Personally, I think I should have been working more like this since forever.

Does any of this sound familiar?

I haven’t quite been able to watch this myself yet, but here is a video that someone took at the Interesting08 conference last weekend. I spoke about the development of the human brain and the importance of social interaction for babies. It was an excellent day - makes me feel only slightly better about missing Reboot10 this week.

Not sure what the quality is like, hopefully you can makes something of it - it’s about 10mins long.

One of the first challenges for guerrilla design research is recruitment - the particular objective being to avoid using recruitment companies in order to reduce the cost of the project and also avoid the delay (often up to 2 weeks!) that is typically associated with recruitment.

A common approach to guerrilla recruitment is simply to rock up at a venue where your target audience is likely to congregate and to try to recruit on the spot. Typical venues might be a local Starbucks or a conference.

This is not an approach that I tend to use, for a couple of reasons - primarily because I really have to relinquish a lot of control over who I involve in my research… more than I feel comfortable with, given the responsibility that I have to my clients to provide them with useful insight. Also, sometimes the recruit briefs I need to meet are quite complex and require me to be quite selective when identifying participants. This is quite difficult to do on the fly and face to face… it can lead to either some awkward moments or spending time doing research with people who aren’t really quite right.

The approach that I have been using (and many of you are probably very aware of this!) is to use my online social network using tools such as my blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, and FaceBook. I have been pleasantly surprised by how successful this has been - on a number of levels.

Essentially how it works is that I work with my client to define a ‘call for participation’ that will be posted - the objective here is to get people interested in the research, to get more rather than less people to contact us, but hopefully mostly people who are at least close to right for the profile. I have to say, I am quite happy not to have to put together screeners any more (or review screeners received from recruitment companies). In fact… if I never saw another screener again I’d be perfectly happy

I do, up to a point, think about what ‘channels’ to use. As a gross generalisation, somewhere like Facebook is better for a less technical participant, where as Twitter is better for a more technically savvy participant… this is a gross generalisation though because more often than not, the people who I end up meeting are not directly in my network, but friends, family, colleagues of people in my network. This is the real power of ‘guerrilla’ recruiting, and a big reason why the ‘channels’ matter much less than having great people in your networks (Preferably great people with lots of friends, family and colleagues!)

To date, my experience has been that undertaking recruitment in this way has been cheaper (obviously - I don’t charge myself or my client ‘recruitment’ fees per participant), and faster (rather than weeks, recruits are sometimes filled within hours, definitely days of posting a call for participation). The most pleasant discovery has been that the quality of research participants is significantly higher than I had experienced when using recruitment companies.

In the past 12 months I’ve interviewed dozens of people and only had one ‘no show’ - and that was just a mix up with the dates as opposed to someone who just decided not to show. If you’ve done much research you know that it is not uncommon to have a day of six interviews lined up and only to get four participants to show up.

Some of the recruits I’ve had to fill have been fairly simple, but there have also been some incredibly complex briefs that I have no idea how I would have managed to effectively communicate to a recruitment company.

And the people who do turn up are fabulous - I’ve been amazed at how close to the ‘brief’ almost everyone I’ve met has been. They’ve been interested, enthusiastic, articulate and certainly not ‘professional research participants’ - the bane of any researchers existence!

Of course, you can always just take your design and show it to people in the office, take it home to your own family, show your friends - this can be very valuable. If you’re looking to do some research that is slightly more formalised, then perhaps you could consider using your own online social networks for this purpose.

It has certainly made me value even more the networks that I have in place and thankful for the great people who I interact with in these spaces.

(and, while I’m at it - if you’ve helped me with recruiting in the past year or so - thank you, thank you very much!)

Unsurprisingly, Gizmodo reported it this way: ‘Confirmed: Carrie Bradshaw is too stupid to work a iPhone‘. Very helpful.

Personally, this was my favourite part of the whole movie (which says more about the movie than it does this particular moment). I loved the fierceness of her reaction to the unfamiliar interface.

It reminded me again that those of us who are ‘into’ interface design are really a fairly small group and how important it is for us to remember that the vast majority of people who encounter our interfaces do so on the way to achieving a task - sometimes one that is urgent and very important to them.

The people who encounter our interfaces in that kind of moment are not going to find them interesting, but an obstacle. And that they won’t take the time to ‘explore’ and ‘enjoy’ and ‘learn’ our amazing interface design.

It would be easy to say that SJP’s encounter with the iPhone showed that it lacked ‘usability’, but in fact it is probably more instructive as to the importance of evaluating usability over a longer term than just a one hour session in a usability lab. As I’ve said in the past, if something like the iPod, and no doubt the iPhone had been ‘usability tested’ using the traditional methods, they no doubt would have ‘failed’ and the world would be poorer for it.

All these things I had to think about because the movie was so disappointing… (speaking of bad UX).

Several weeks later, this arrives:

Dear Leisa

I am not a sensitive person by nature, but I have to say that I am feeling a little hurt. We’ve invited you into our Club, but you’ve clearly decided not to.

So, as a one-off attempt at sheer bribery, I‘m offering you your first, trial Club case HALF PRICE at just £47.88 (that‘s a ridiculously low £3.99 a bottle!). Plus, two FREE gifts, worth £30. That‘s an overall saving of nearly £80.

Sound good? Then click here to claim your HALF PRICE case and FREE GIFTS.

But you‘re probably not ready to join yet. You‘re probably thinking…

I can buy the wines anywhere.

Well you can‘t actually. The boutique wines we reserve for our Club Members never appear in the supermarket. And they are always offered to members at a lower price than non-members get them for.

It‘s just like one of those ghastly book clubs.

Er…sorry, not correct on this one either. Quite simply, you have no obligation to take any wine you don‘t want. You don‘t even have to pay us for any wines that don‘t blow your socks right off.

I‘m not the joining type.

If we explained that the reason we have a Club in the first place is because 40,000 people can buy better than 1, perhaps you‘d change your mind? If you join us, 40,001 people will buy better than 40,000.

Or maybe you‘ve just not got around to it. Which is fine. People who buy wine by the case tend to be busy.

So what would be a good reason?

Here‘s one good reason to test us out right now. We‘re keen to recruit new Members. So, for one last time I‘m offering you your first, trial Club case HALF PRICE at just £47.88

Take our HALF PRICE case NOW, and you‘ll receive a complimentary pair of beautiful Dartington Wine Glasses, completely FREE. Plus, a FREE professional lever corkscrew, worth £20.

Still not sure?

What is the worst thing that can happen? If you don‘t like the wines, I promise to refund you instantly, without any fuss whatsoever. If you agree that these wines are a big step better than you can get in the supermarket, you can look forward to a lifetime of feeling superior to non-members.

So why don‘t you join us now and find out what it‘s all about for yourself? Not next week, but right now.

Cheers

Rowan Gormley
Founder, Virgin Wines
www.virginwines.com/reasons3

0870 050 0305

The insight that the tone taken in this email gives me to this brand is profound, and frankly, I don’t want anything to do with a company who has this kind of attitude in their customer communications.

We’ve spoken before about positive ways to handle ‘abandonment’ - well, here is the flipside, a combination of guilt-tripping (‘I am not a sensitive person by nature, but I have to say that I am feeling a little hurt. We’ve invited you into our Club, but you’ve clearly decided not to’), cynicism (‘So, as a one-off attempt at sheer bribery…’) and smart talk (‘Er…sorry, not correct on this one either…’). Yes, consumers today are media literate and this level of ‘openness’ could potentially work well, but be nice about it. I’m supposed to enjoy buying wine, with this email VirginWine have put me right off my drink!

Take care with your tone - and of course, this applies to any kind of copy that you’re writing. And know that only *very* few brands can be anything but nice to their customer.