Balkan Witch

I was chatting away with SavageSays the other day. He had made a (fairly rare) foray to Waitrose to do some grocery shopping. “I didn’t know which Flora to buy” – he said – “I used to buy just plain Flora because I thought it was healthy but now they have loads of them. What’s omega anyway?”

As one of my participants once said, “Choice is a terrible thing!” That remains one of my favourite user quotes and many more, before and since, have relayed a similar sentiment. We all want choice, we have been convinced it is a good thing and so we demand it. Being presented with it is a whole different kettle of fish. Savage Says had already pre-chosen the brand, and the fact that he wanted a tub of marge, and he still ended up having to do some choosing without being aware of the benefits each option would produce.

Your customers all want choice but all need help making a decision. Why is that model better than the other? No, not what the feature is called but what the benefit is. What will I get if I chose that one? What will I lose if I don’t? This one seems more expensive and yet the features list is the same length as the cheaper one. Do I really need that much broadband? Are you saying that this tub of margarine is bad for me now?

SavageSays, in case you are curious, “went for the original Flora”.

Personally, I prefer butter.

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I watched Dragon’s Den the other day.

If you don’t know the format, it is like Pop Idol for inventors/wannabe entrepreneurs etc. In between the moments when I have to leave the room out of sheer embarrassment for the ‘pitchers’, I quite like all the crazy and brilliant ideas and the different approaches people have.

Anyway.

True to form a chap steps out and pitches his idea for a safety gadget for seatbelts. Its aim, to stop children putting their arms out of the belt, which is apparently very bad as it increases their chances of being badly hurt in an accident.

All the Dragons loved the idea.

For some reason, known only to them, they proceeded to tear strips off him for not knowing the size of his market, how to get a distributor and whatever else it was they seemed to think a train engineer should know about bringing a new product to market.

Ahem…May I suggest that had he known the answers to those questions he may not have been on Dragon’s Den? I appreciate that even to some of us who aren’t successful business people he seemed to have some basic gaps in his thinking but, he did manage to invent a gadget to save children’s lives so, in the grand scheme of things I think we can forgive him.

Of course I was shouting at the telly.

What’s my point?

1) People aren’t all the same.

2) We should be respectful of people who are not the same as us, have different skills to us, etc.

3) Manners are never surplus to requirement.

I’ll try to keep away from the telly.

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As an update to one of my very early blog posts on this poor neglected blog I can proudly announce that I am now a fully paid up member of The Fawcett Society.

Historically I have struggled with the word feminism. Studying electronic engineering with a large majority of male students I always felt that somehow the women’s organisations around the university weren’t so much helping but rather highlighting the idea that perhaps I shouldn’t be there. Also, they always seemed to gather around courses that were predominantly attended by women and I was left sceptical that they truly understood what impact gender had on my day to day. There was that one lecturer who, during a talk on friction: “friction is the force generated when 2 bodies rub against each other…why are you all looking at Ivanka?”. I will always be grateful to my class mates for not laughing at what this man obviously thought was wit.

At the same time, on the same course, there was the mathematics lecturer who stopped a lecture to tell ‘the boys’ they should be ashamed of themselves for letting me answer all the questions. (This I liked, obviously!) He quickly scuttled over to apologise “I hope I didn’t offend, please don’t report me to the equal opportunities board, I’ve already been there once this month!” Both these men were of a particular generation and good educators and I decided that causing a ‘fuss’ would do neither me nor them any good at all. I just got on with being a student.

Fast forward 12 years. I was discussing Fawcett with a woman I would consider to be a mentor. She is older and more experienced and I have a huge amount of respect for her. We were discussing gender differences and women in work:

Me: “A friend introduced me to Fawcett; it’s a feminist charity…not sure… I’ve always classed myself as something of an anti-feminist.”

My friend: “You are just being sucked in by the shallow media on feminism.”

Me (blushing): “Hmm…”

So I have done some reading and checked out their research. To highlight only one report seems a little remiss of me but this blog post is long enough as it is:

Dispelling myths on Women’s voting patterns, Fawcett and Ipsos MORI

“Just like men, women hold widely differing views which are greatly affected by their age and class.” I love the way this finding ties back into my day job of persuading my clients that thinking about ‘the customer’ as a lump is perhaps not the best way to approach things.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I invite you to check out The Fawcett Society, I encourage you to read what they have to say and I hope you decide to sign up.

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I commute. The price I pay for living where I want to and working where I want to is approximately 4 hours a day travelling; about 2 hours 10 minutes of which are spent sitting on a train. I undertake a whole range of activities while I travel: sometimes I sit and think, sometimes I catch up with friends (the Stella express we like to call it), I read, I listen to music, listen to books, work, sleep, catch up on emails - so many choices.

Two items that I always have with me are my mobile phone and my Blackberry and I use them for a variety of things including accessing Facebook. I have downloaded the Facebook app for my Blackberry which, on inspection, seems to be missing something.

This is not a post about Facebook and its relative merits (another time).

The Blackberry Facebook app provides easy functions to check friends’ recent status updates, update you status, should you choose to you can ‘poke’ people, send them messages, write on their wall, upload a photo (though my Blackberry doesn’t take them) and I think that is it. Oh yes, it gives you a link to go to the Facebook Mobile site (again, another time).

What it doesn’t do is allow you to see responses. I can send a message but not receive one. I can ‘poke’ someone but not be notified of ‘pokes’ (oh dear) received. Without going into the lots of communication theory I think we can agree that feedback is an important part of it; communication quite important to socialising and therefore to a social network. No?

So my Blackberry Facebook app seems to allow me to broadcast without feedback; rather like when my brother and I used to fight when we were small: say something and then close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears and sing loudly so you can’t hear the response.

Thankfully the Blackberry Facebook app doesn’t exist in a vacuum and it very kindly gives me a link to the mobile site.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the change that Facebook message notification email now contains the content of the actual Facebook message, I have yet to hear anyone complain about that (happy to hear though); not including the message in the notification email is rather like (picking on my brother again) walking past the post in the hallway and then coming to tell me some of it is for me: “and why didn’t you bring it?”

So there I am, sitting on the train, with this device that is all about communication, trying to access a site that is all about socialising and yet it is a dreadfully disconnected, cumbersome experience. The Blackberry is so good at treating email, SMS, even Google Chat as part of the same - very effective - interface why is this one so disconnected?

Cue the rumoured arrival of the Facebook Phone.

Is this the right approach? Facebook communication seamlessly integrated with phone functionality? Ring your friends, SMS them, Poke them?

As long as I get to find out if there was a response, without having to walk to the letter box myself then I certainly wouldn’t have any objection!

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My mother is off to travel the world. She has retired from the sometimes rewarding often frustrating world of teaching in a modern world, her children can take care of themselves so she has packed her bag and is leaving us!

As one of the results of her life’s work to date, it is my job to ensure we all get to find out what she is up to. So here goes:

1) The first 6 months of her journey will be to travel overland to Singapore. See here for full details: Odyssey Overland.

2) For pictures of the ‘bus’ she will be travelling in check my flickr set (hers is set up, but thus far empty): Mother’s bus

3) There is a blog http://annmajic.blog.co.uk/ I had no input into the choice of host so, annoyingly, it doesn’t seem to allow Twitter feeds which leads me, rather elegantly, on to my next offering.

4) Twitter. What way to better ensure that for the bargain price of one text message she can let us all know she is ok? For those of us who love and know her alerts to the phone, for anyone who is interested in how such a trip turns out: http://twitter.com/annmajic

5) We did try dopplr but, it doesn’t seem to allow for one, very long, journey so, a public Google Calendar it is: Ann Majic, public Google Calendar

If, like me, you are green with envy at this Baby Boomer’s imminent adventure then please feel free to travel vicariously through this web 2.0 selection. Let me know if any of it doesn’t seem to work and, of course, if there is a trick I have missed.

My mother rocks!

P.S. It won’t stop in Singapore. Australia and South America are on the longer term itinerary so, this little news feed could keep on giving.

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I started a rather undersubscribed group on Facebook to take the discussion about the dreadful travesty that is the changed Marmite recipe out of the kitchen at work and into the wider world.

This is very obviously a personal rant.

If you are not a Marmite lover then please support my right to Marmite the way I know and love it and not this immitation stuff they made for the squeezy (pah! squeezy, what a nonsense!) jars.

If you are a Marmite lover and have had the disappointment of the new weaker, saltier, less tasty, Marmite then join me.

If you are Marmite. Shame on you.

I have been loving Marmite for a very long time. Memories. Comfort. Why on earth would anyone want to mess with that? Is it worth it, this new coke?

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“Her first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, `and in that case I can go back by railway,’ she said to herself. Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the general conclusion, that wherever you go to on the English coast you find a number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and behind them a railway station.” - Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland

There I was, sitting on the train, on my way to work, listening to Alice in Wonderland when this lovely story about mental models popped up. I love a good story.

It has everything, a problem solving situation, a mental model, and importantly the back story to how it came about i.e. from not very much.

We use mental models to help us work things out. Sometimes our previous experience - on which the mental model is based - helps enormously and sometimes it just doesn’t. Alice did get out of the pool of tears but the railway and seaside town thing didn’t really do much to get her out of her general predicament.

When designing any kind of interaction it can pay dividends to be aware of what the audience might be basing there mental models on; sometimes these can even provide inspiration for how the interaction should work, what language should be used etc. Let’s face it, that thing on your favourite stock photo site isn’t really a ‘light box’ and you don’t physically ‘fast forward’ an mp3. The mental model works though and that is what matters.

Tapping into how the audience will approach the ‘problem’ of interacting with your site or device can make transitions from offline to online significantly easier.

The tapping in is easy. Watch people. Ask them. Simple.

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The Balkan Witch is now happily solar powered by the very friendly and helpful people at ecological hosting. Thank you to Jamie for all his help rescuing my blog.

Why solar powered? It dawned on me that I bang on about the environment a lot but had failed to consider how much power was being consumed just keeping my little blog alive. I googled and am happy with the results. Now I can blog from the comfort of my ecologically sound home electricity supplier and know that I am updating to an eco-aware host. Splendid.

Now. Where was I?

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I find it enormously irritating when cash machines offer me a ‘withdrawal’.

When I walk up to the cash point I am thinking about getting some cash. Some money. Moolah. Readies. Wonga. I have never uttered the line “I am just going to the cash machine to get a withdrawal” and I doubt that I ever will. Even if we go American English for a second do people ever go to the ATM for a withdrawal?

It drives me nuts. It makes me pause. It interrupts my journey to my cash. It delays me. It makes me make the people behind me wait too. I can feel the tuts as I get flustered looking through all the options, realise that cash isn’t one of them and then have to read all the options until I find the one that looks like the most likely candidate.

To use this to make a slightly more serious point, not bothering to match the taxonomy to the users’ goals is plain foolish. In my example I am irritated and perhaps a little apprehensive - how big is the queue? who is behind me? - but, if I am coming to your site to buy something and the same scenario occurs, you just lost a sale!

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