Andrew Ferrier

I’ve just come back from the Good Experience Live (euroGel) conference in Copenhagen (more on the city and Denmark in a later post). It was a superb and surprisingly moving experience, and as a conference that I paid for myself, I would say it was worth every penny for personal development reasons alone. I would recommend it to anyone with a wide range of interests.

The theme of the conference is hard to pin down; it is defined as ‘good experience in all its forms’. I’m still struggling to ‘get it’, but it didn’t seem to matter that I didn’t. In practice, this seems to mean a variety of speakers from across the arts and technology, some of them specialising in user experience or customer experience, coming together to share their stories.

This is the first time the conference has been run in Europe (it has been run in New York City since 2003), and current indications are that it will return to both places. The creator of the conference is Mark Hurst, who also leads the sessions at the conference, and who I unfortunately didn’t get to meet. A large number of the speakers are obviously personal friends of his and there is accordingly a sense of community, which is also explored online (see the Gel blog category on goodexperience.com)

The presentations were almost all entertaining, and most informative and passionate. Some of the highlights were:

• Han Bennink – I’m ashamed to admit I’d never heard of Han before. It turns out that he is one of the top Jazz drummers in the world, and his natural exuberance for his work was obvious for all to see – a man who managed to enter the stage, drop a bunch of metal pipes haphazardly on the stage, and make it part of his performance, he obviously has more talent than just a natural sense of rhythm.
• Stephen Bauman – Stephen is a Methodist minister in New York, and in true ministerly style, he told stories. These helped to illustrate what he called ‘Basic Truths’ (on which he has also written a book). I was lucky enough to discuss these and others things with him later on, and he struck me as an extremely perceptive and open-minded religious man: an inspirational American preacher who didn’t hector about Jesus.
• Alison Young – Possessed of a beautiful voice, Alison Young is a supremely talented singer with Southern influences. Why she isn’t more famous is a mystery to me.

I also met some interesting folks:

• Kareem Mayan – Kareem is a returning Gel participant (and volunteer), and obviously enjoys it greatly. His blog has some interesting discussions about emerging technology, including plenty of media and YouTube links (including this ‘How to drive a stick shift’ video – sadly, this doesn’t impress chicks here in the UK, where manual cars are the norm).
• Alexander Kjerulf - Alexander is an irrepressibly bubbly fellow, and describes himself as ‘The Chief Happiness Officer’. He writes and consults on happiness in the workplace, and his passion for his work is obvious. What he says is not rocket science, but it bears repeating. His blog is well worth a read.

I was also lucky enough to win one of the prize draws – for a set of books written by some current and previous Gel speakers, so I now have the following to work my way through:

• Bing Get Dressed by Ted Dewan
• To the Desert and Back by Phil Mirvis and others
• Net.art Per Me by Vuk Cosic
• Bosch & Fjord by Bosch & Fjord
• Simple Truths by Stephen Bauman
• All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin
• Life Between Buildings by Jan Gehl
• The Power to Heal by Rick Smolan
• From Alice to Outback by Robyn Davidson

Thanks to all the folks who donated books for this – and to Mark Hurst and his team for organising euroGel. I will go again.

Update 2006-09-12: Alison Young’s website can be found here.

Purely by accident, I discovered this little bug on Google: go to google.com/wibble (or any other invalid URL). The 404 page that appears has an ancient logo. Judging from Google’s logo history, it’s pre-1999.

Is this really a mistake, or is it a feature? I can’t believe I’m the first to notice this. It’s cute, anyway…

It appears that Orange, in their infinite wisdom, decided that they were better than Nokia at creating a usable phone, and are in the habit of replacing the standby (home) screen on their some of their smartphones with a custom Orange one. It’s actually pretty awful, as it’s unreadable, doesn’t always update correctly, and doesn’t show some useful information such as the current profile. Orange were too arrogant to admit this at first, although in their defence it looks like there will be a way to disable it on future models. I have a Nokia 6630 and this has annoyed me for some time – I also have a suspicion it has contributed to many of the crashes I seem to encounter with the phone. Fortunately someone has written a small application called HSKiller to kill this homescreen and bring back the default (the page is in French – the download link is right at the top). It has a few minor niggles, but seems to be working relatively well so far for me.

Incidentally, JJLKeyLock is also a pretty handy application for the 6630 and other Symbian S60-based phones, as it provides a timeout-based keylock, as provided on some earlier Nokia phones, but not these.

Why oh why can’t someone make a wallet that:

• Can hold at least ten plastic cards, some cash, and some receipts so they are easily accessible?
• Isn’t so huge that it looks like I’m carrying a copy of War and Peace in my pocket?
• Looks fairly smart, preferably made from leather, but not like I just bought it from Armani or some other o-so-faishonable label?
• Lasts more than 2 weeks?
• And most importantly, has a zip all the way round so your stuff doesn’t fall out?

Is this so hard? (grumble, grumble).

Wallet manufacturers: I will pay you £200 for a wallet that fulfills the above criteria. I realise this won’t cover your R&D costs if it’s just for me, but I’m sure you could sell more of them. Please feel free to design the wallet before manufacturing it if that helps.

I sent a parcel to Sweden on Friday – some binoculars I’d sold on Ebay. Because I sent them International Signed For, I got a tracking number to use on royalmail.com. Entering this number on Friday resulted in a message saying that the parcel hadn’t yet been entered into the system, and to wait to the next day. Fair enough – this isn’t exactly Fedex or UPS, and I posted them at a rural post office in Hursley.

But after entering the number on Saturday, I got this message: ‘We have received your item, posted on 21/07/06 and it is being processed for delivery abroad.’ Well, duh. This gives me no useful information. I posted it to a foreign country, so what else would I be expecting? And I know when I posted it. How much longer is it going to take? Are there any delays at the moment? That’s what I want to know.

After entering the number on Sunday, I got: ‘Your item, posted on 21/07/06 with reference xxx has been passed to the overseas postal service for delivery in SWEDEN.’ In other words, Royal Mail have no link to a foreign tracking system, so can’t tell me anything more about it.

Is this really the best the Royal Mail can do? Some tracking systems actually provide some useful (or at least reassuring) information – a historical record of which depot a parcel went to, and when. I know this is a cheap-ish service (eight pounds for about 450 grams), and perhaps Royal Mail can’t stretch to that. But my conclusion is: if you actually want to track your parcel closely, don’t bother with the Royal Mail.

Roll on more competition in the UK postal service.

I don’t own a car, and so don’t drive often. This means I usually avoid the passionate debates about speed limits, speed cameras, etc. But I think I’ve come up with a speed limit question that’s less contentious (famous last words). I almost missed a plane the other day when the coach I was on to the airport was held up in a traffic jam on the M25. What made it more frustrating, though, was the temporary speed limit signs (the ones that light up with a speed above the motorway). Either:

• It’s impossible to go that fast anyway, which is the case 90% of the time, or:
• The traffic jam is ending and everyone is so glad to be out of it they don’t honour the speed limit (and arguably the speed limit shouldn’t be there any more anyway).

So what exactly is the intended point of these? To pack more traffic on the same amount of roadway? Possibly, but if it’s impossible to go that speed, what’s the point? Have I missed something obvious? Is there some subtlety of queueing theory that explains this?

I assume these signs must be manually controlled – a person in a control room switches them on or off after observing the amount of traffic on a camera. Would they be more responsive if they were automatic?

Anyway, enough grumbling. I’d love to know how they are supposed to work though.

After getting to Barcelona airport yesterday, I looked in despair at the long lines for the Iberia economy check-in. I thought I’d give the quick check-in machines a go, but I wasn’t seriously expecting them to work. I’d booked both flights for my roundtrip between LHR and BCN with BA but the return hop was operated by Iberia; the BA quick check-in at Heathrow had worked, but hey, this is a different airline, right? They’re not going to have my credit card details or anything, are they? The machine, though, seemed to accept the record locator (booking reference) as an alternative. Maybe this was a faint hope – though I’d had experiences with the BA website being incapable of viewing my reservations with AA, and vice-versa, so I wasn’t confident. But it all just worked – the boarding card was printed, and I was congratulating myself again for my foresight in only packing carry-on.

My worry was, though, that I was impressed by this. I shouldn’t be. This is honest-to-goodness systems integration. The volumes of data are not impressive. Even the transaction rates aren’t that impressive any more, to my understanding. And from an airline customer perspective, this stuff is rapidly becoming essential to stay competitive. Maybe some more regular travellers aren’t impressed: but I wonder how often things like this still don’t work? Are my expectations set too low?

As an experiment in being a cheapskate (I normally spend too much), I travelled on a Megabus from Winchester to London at the weekend. To pass the time, I attempted to assess the usability of the light situated outside the toilet (I’d left all my good CDs at home). My train of thought was as follows:

After seeing the light turn on when someone went inside, I assumed I was correct in my initial guess – it was to indicate it was occupied. So far, so good – although things would have been less certain if you hadn’t been sitting next to it and seen it do this before. However, the light stayed on for 3 minutes after someone left the toilet. After seeing this consistently happen twice, I figured it must be going through some cleaning cycle – thus the light really meant ‘do not enter’ rather than ‘occupied’. I was just congratulating myself on figuring out this rather straightforward pattern when a further complication arose – as we approached London, and the roads got bumpier (or so I theorized), the light seemed to switch on and off fairly randomly, and this time I just couldn’t correlate it with anything meaningful. Perhaps just a faulty connection in a switch somewhere, but it made me question my previous two conclusions to the extent that as I got off the bus, I realized that I hadn’t really learnt anything at all. Perhaps the light had nothing to do with the toilet, apart from being located nearby.

This is a trivial example, and you could argue it didn’t matter. But also, after spending over 2 hours studying the light, and still not being 100% sure what it did, I couldn’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, it could have been designed to be more obvious (or at least have the faulty switch fixed). These little technological irritations don’t normally hurt anyone (although there have been plenty of similar examples that have caused ‘pilot error’ plane crashes, for example), but they are still things that us technologists should aim to understand and defeat, if only for the sanity of ourselves and those around us.

For a lot more discussion on this topic, see Don Norman‘s classic book The Design of Everyday Things.