Ged Carroll

Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

 

  • Function and form

    Form and function of Black Flag

    You can see the nature of function and form everywhere you look I took it out of this great interview with Henry Rollins with BBC Hard Talk from January 2016. The interesting bit after 6:00 is how Rollins talks about his stage image that evolved from the rudimentary circumstances of being on the road with American punk band Black Flag.

    The origin of this function and form derived look of gym shorts and torso look was to cut down on the washing he needed to do in restaurant sinks post-concert. Rollins continues a variant of this form and function approach to his wardrobe, which focuses on limited basics, even now after his sustained success as musician, spoken word artist, poet, comedian, podcaster and actor.

    Dieter Rams

    Dieter Rams was one of the most important industrial designers of our modern world. His view was around form following function. He is also a big proponent of less and more in terms of product design.

    This approach is exemplified by Braun’s product design over the years, from hi-fis to shavers and and kitchen equipment. This look remained timeless with half century designs still being followed today. Rams extended this philosophy to furniture design company Vistoe.

    Whiskas

    Function and form doesn’t end with stage outfits. While doing my weekly shop I noticed that Whiskas had upped its packaging game. When I was a child Whiskas came in a tin that was indistinguishable from other tins. If the paper wrapper fell off, you wouldn’t know what was in the tin. It was also inconvenient to use and required a can opener. They like other pet food manufacturers moved to a plastic container with a foil lid that was lighter, an important consideration for supply chains. Now they have added a bit of personality to the container design with ears. It cut through the tins, oval plastic trays and aluminium trays usual in cat food packaging. It acts as great brand signage and also helps the human to open foil lid in order to feed their canine overlords.

    Whiskas packaging

    More related content to function and form can be found on my blog here.

  • Christina Xu on Chinese UX

    About Christina Xu

    I’ve been a big fan of work by Christina Xu for a while now and this presentation is a great example of her research. She has worked as an ethnographer for a range of clients including Daimler Benz, VF Corporation (the people who who own Timberland, North Face and Supreme) and Spotify. This presentation on Chinese UX in action is well worth bookmarking to watch it if you don’t have time now. Save it and watch it during your lunch break.

    Key takeouts

    • Etiquette about the order of proffering versus scanning a QRcode to exchange (WeChat) contact information
    • Digitisation of red envelopes drove take up in mobile payments
    • Great examples of online to offline (O2O) interaction in processes and services that are continually expanding.  
    • Driven by ubiquity of mobile phones 95.5 phones per 100 people with a number of people using two phones
    • Users across ages and demographics
    • Mobile adoption is coming on top of a rapid industrialisation. People are getting used to a whole much of stuff at once. Interesting points about the lack of social norms or boundaries on the usage of online / mobile service in the real world. I’ve seen people live their online life in the cinema there are NO boundaries as Christina says.
    • Mobile payments came up the same time as credit card payments
    • Population density on the eastern seaboard of China. Density has helped delivery services and high speed public transport
    • DidiChuxing allows for tailored surge benefits for drivers rather than search-and-forget version on Uber
    • WeChat commerce doesn’t facilitate international shipping
    • Westerners build messenger experiences for scale with automation, Chinese look for bespoke customisable ‘squishy’ experiences down to western interpretation of convenience. Chinese convenience is an absence of ‘nuisance experiences’ – real world interactions help prevent friction. Or is it culturally sanctioned ‘nuisance experiences’ that deals with differing experiences

    More related content here.

  • Vic Gundotra + more things

    Vic Gundotra – The end of the DSLR for most people has already… – ex Googler Vic Gundotra endorses the iPhone as a camera phone for structural reasons in the Android community, of course you could always use a third party camera software instead. What’s more interesting is the implications around system-level innovation and hardware support

    Summer of Samsung: A Corruption Scandal, a Political Firestorm—and a Record Profit – Bloomberg – interesting profile of Samsung. Interesting that they don’t realise Huawei is the big bad wolf yet

    The myths of the digital native and the multitasker – ScienceDirect – fits in with what I’ve seen in terms of empirical evidence, millennials are just as bad at technology as the rest of us (paywall)

    Russia Bans’Uncensored’ VPNs, Proxies and TOR | Torrent Freak – interesting implications for China. I wonder how they would achieve all this?

    Announcing Ghost 1.0 – possible WordPress replacement or niche player?

    The ‘real’ reasons manufacturing returning to US – Yahoo! Finance – it depends how you measure costs. Automation requires more capital, upfront costs and benefits big production runs in certain industries. Automation more limited in batch contract manufacturing. Still barriers: ecosystems of suppliers, expertise, skills and access to critical raw materials (rare earth metals, cobalt and coltran). A crisis in shipping (such as the collapse of Hanjin Shipping) will hit both international long supply chains and Chinese finished products equally hard

    Chinese Fintechs Use Big Data To Give Credit Scores To The ‘Unscorable’ – I wonder how this intersects with the PRC govt social scores?

    Turn Off, Drop Out: Why Young Chinese Are Abandoning Ambition – interesting for the subtle differences between this and gen-x style slackers

    Google Adds Autoplay Video to Search Results Page | The SEM Post – this will be terribly annoying

    eBay Powers Searching and Shopping with Images on Mobile Devices – eBay Inc – interesting move turning every shop into a potential showroom for the eBay marketplace

    P&G cuts more than $100 million in largely ineffective digital advertising | WSJ – (paywall)

    Trending posts — Steemit – paid social network. Apparently digital payments of some sort are given per post. They are held in a blockchain database. I won’t lie, I’m sceptical to say the least

    Hong Kong’s Lee Kum Kee Group to buy London’s ‘Walkie Talkie’ building in historic £1.3b deal | South China Morning Post – interesting that Hong Kong investors think that central London office property is cheap enough to make big deals like this. I think they might be disappointed at least from the short to medium term. It could be a play to gain a UK foothold well in advance of Hong Kong’s final assimilation by the motherland

    Inside LeEco’s spectacular fall from grace | Engadget – I was reminded of an old client Enron, when I started reading about LeEco. Like Enron, LeEco started off in one business (video streaming) and then exploded into several other sectors at once before collapsing under the weight of its ambition. Like Enron, I was left feeling that LeEco just didn’t make sense, except in the mind of a megalomaniac with wicked Excel skills

  • Living with the Apple Watch

    I got the first iteration of the Apple Watch and managed to put up with it for about 48 hours before giving up on it. I have managed to persevere with the the Apple Watch 2.

    Apple managed to speed up the performance of glanceable content, but it still doesn’t have the use case nailed. Watch 2 tries to go hard into fitness, which is a mixed bag in terms of data and accuracy. I am not convinced that it is any better than Fitbit and similar devices.

    They did improve the product in two design areas. The Nike straps make the watch less sweaty to wear on your wrist. It is now comparable to wearing a G-Shock. They also managed to life-proof the Watch. You can now wear it swimming (but I wouldn’t advise snorkelling or scuba diving) and in the shower.  The battery life is still meh.

    I upgraded the OS to watchOS 4 public beta but haven’t managed to use the Siri powered contextual face yet. As a concept it promises to be a step in the right direction to provide the kind of transformation wearables needed.

    watchOS 4 made me realise something that had been nagging me for a while.

    The Apple Watch doesn’t have any personality, or at least traits of a personality that I’d care about. It’s a detail that disappoints me. Mostly it’s invisible as a device, with the occasional glances. It gives me the occasional messages that sound like a vaguely resistant teen or like bursts of micro-aggression.

    1

    It wouldn’t take that much effort to have a bit more manners or personality in the copywriting. How about some icons?

    Susan Kare was the icon designer for original Apple Mac, back in 1984. She came up with icons that were useful and gave the machine a personality. You got a sense of the personality behind the developers who created the machine. This was the kind of detail that Apple was known to obsess over.

    dogcow

    Some of the icons like the dogcow, the bomb and the sad mac became iconic shorthand amongst Mac users. The dogcow was used in printer utility to show page orientation.

    Like the early Mac, the Apple Watch doesn’t have a clear killer app and defined use case. It would benefit from manners, humour or even a bit of Siri wit. What’s more using well designed icons would reduce the effort in terms of product localisation.

    You could argue that limited device resources don’t allow it. But I don’t buy that theory, an Apple Watch has more memory and computing power than the original Mac. I think its about that legendary attention to detail that Steve Jobs had (and drove everyone else made with. Apple has tried to codify this in their process, but you can’t bake in quirky obsession.

    I guess I am old school Apple. I use an iPhone because it works well with my Mac, rather than the other way around. I still come across things where I see ‘Ahh, Apple’s thought about…’ in my Mac. My iPhone is a portable extension of my data, and doubles as a mobile modem for the Mac as needed; it gets in as the Mac’s plus 1.

    By comparison the Apple Watch has less of a connection to the Mac and leeches off the iPhone. For a product that has little use case, it needs to work harder at building loyalty through my relationship with it as a device.

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  • Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

    I took the opportunity in June to re-read Daniel Kahneman’s work Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman uses storytelling from key points in his career to take the audience on a journey through biases and better decision-making. From a book that is obviously aimed at a consumer audience it has an outsized impact on marketers.

    After Thinking Fast and Slow presentations now talk about behavioural economics. What this meant in practice was revisiting the interface of psychological cues and marketing communications to encourage a desired behavioural change – like a purchase. It brought a renewed focus on A/B testing of call to action copy and images based around known consumer biases. The concept of system 1 and system 2 thinking is a useful way of understanding our own decision-making processes.

    It also forces us to think about how we market to consumers. Political campaigns often deliberately look to short-circuit deliberative system 2 thinking and tap straight into the raw emotion in system 1 thinking. It is automatic and can be ugly.

    Thinking Fast & Slow

    This isn’t necessarily a marketing handbook however, it is designed to make the average person more aware of their decision making process. It reminded me of Dan Ariel’s Predictably Irrational.

    The key difference is that Kahneman’s work provides more of a learning structure in the book. Ariel is closer to the ‘ain’t it cool’ style of Malcolm Gladwell (though more rigorously researched).

    I’d recommend that marketers start on Thinking Fast and Slow at the back. There is  summary of the book and then some supporting white papers. Once you have them read then go to the front and work your way through. The reason why I suggest this approach is that marketers use case is different to that of the man in the street (who buys his books from the non-fiction section of the New York Times bestseller list). More book reviews here.

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