How important is maintaining product newness? And what are the strategies that consumers adopt to keep the product feeling fresh?

Some Chinese iPhone users are refraining from using the phone’s button – the single, most obviously mechanical aspect of the device because they feel that it will hasten the speed at which it will break. It’s a practice that I’ve increasingly seen in play with Chinese iPhone consumers is the use of the Assistive Touch, the accessibility feature that supports users with limited motor mobility, providing a software, on-screen alternative for the button.

On the one hand this is a wonderfully graceful degradation, when for whatever reason the physical button doesn’t work there is a software backup, assuming consumers know how to access it. But for a company that is looking to China as its largest market it is worrying that the primary interface feature on their flagship product induces a workaround behaviour for perceived risk of breaking. If you strive to be the most-loved brand this is a problem.

Not that the risk is only perceived: as a mechanical object the iPhone button does sometimes fail without apparent reason. It takes just one frustrated consumer in a social circle for the “crappy iPhone button” story to do the rounds to impact behaviour and for others to switch to the lower impact, alternative. This is also part of a larger story, one where the company has been accused of arrogance and where the perception lingers that consumers get sloppy seconds from other markets. Using a software alternative to the physical button helps people offset what they perceive as inevitable failure.

There are numerous mainstream strategies for delaying the onset of natural wear and tear across product categories and consumer segments: shrink-wrapped living-room sofa or car seats; retaining the screen protector on a display; or unplugging electronics when not in use. For some product categories such as sneakers the importance of newness is heightened with younger males obsessing over box-freshness as a status symbol where newness implies disposable income and being in the know where to find just that brand/model/colour of kicks. But it is in African cities such as Accra, Kampala, Addis Ababa or Lagos that you’ll see extreme behaviours and thinking around newness: pure-white sneakers worn in very dusty environments combined with the daily use of scrubbing and bleaching services.

There are a number of opportunities that arise out of a real/perceived non-working iPhone button: for the street repair services it provides steady income for a relatively easy fix; Apple charging a premium for an accessibility pack that includes Assistive Touch would go counter to some corporate values but is in line with other ways of doing business.

But most intriguingly it suggests that consumers can do without the button.

From that starting point new interfaces are born.

End Notes.

I go through about 2 iPhones/year through unnatural wear and tear and it seems fitting that my iPhone 5 died last week in Singapore – looking to get it fixed the the informal repair guys here in Shanghai this week. What was surprising was managing to successfully complete a week’s worth of business meetings in Singapore without a working mobile phone, all be it with someone else running my schedule and that schedule being mapped out in advance and having proximate team members looking after the details. In a connected environment the non-mobile alternatives make it viable. Looking to spend more time off-grid this coming year – a healthy precursor, intentionally or otherwise.

Beat up Mercedes are to Lebanon what beat up Corollas are to Afghanistan.

That’s stories being written.

Clothes for on the road/skies/trials becoming nicely worn & patched.

The distance between you here (your physical presence) and you there (your public and private online presence) is closing. How might this affect us? And what can you do about it?

Digital payments, cellular tracking, ticketing, what you like/Like, where you check-in, being tagged in a photo: there are umpteen ways to triangulate who you are, where you are, where you are going, and who you are going to be with. Of all of the methods through which you can be recognised (or triangulated) facial recognition is one of the more significant social disruptions, not because it is particularly novel but rather because our sense of who we are is very much tied how we look and how we look is disproportionately tied to our facial features.

Facial recognition will be a growing source of friction because the companies that are building businesses around connecting the physical you to some form of online identity will, over time connect people to the online you that makes them the most revenue, rather than the online you that makes the most sense to you. A lot of this will happen in the background, but there it will have sufficient visibility to be annoying e.g. a picture of your face as a search parameter triggering an advertisement for a particular kind of product.

All of us value a degree of anonymity, and a few will go to great extremes to maintain a high degree of control over their online and offline identity. For people who don’t want to be facially recognised (and acknowledging that facial recognition is but one parameter that can be used to identify you) there are different approaches to maintaining a comfortable distance between the physical and the online you – stealth wear and dazzle camouflage are but two examples, both by Adam Harvey. One approach that I’ve been mulling for a while is the subtle subversion the recognition process by seeding alternate versions of oneself – with just enough system recognisable data points there for the system to make a match, but with enough of a difference that to the human eye/mind it looks like a different person. Once that alternative photo-realistic identity is formed, it can then diverge from the real you over time.

And for other social disruptors consider for a moment this project on DNA profiling.

Photo: back alley graffiti from Little India in Singapore.

The very worst kind of security theatre in operation in this Beirut shopping mall.

Subtle subversion #2: What’s App.

Subtle subversion #1: martyr photo as could-be year book photo.

One of the more interesting/difficult things about planning an extended business trip is handling meetings and events that fall through. This was supposed to be a New York – Munich – Riyadh – Singapore kinda week with all of the jetlag fug that goes with it, but with a trip to the Kingdom shifted to a later date the backup plan kicked in: working out of a friend’s apartment in Beirut. Foreign correspondents, especially those in an interesting geography do litter their home with inspirational artefacts, and the climate (both meteorological and political) creates an ideal space to write half-a-dozen presentations and pitches for a Mondrianesque calendar of meetings in Singapore.

With the last few weekend’s spent travelling to the next destination it seemed logical go off-grid for 24-hours, hire a driver by the name of Hassan (pilot is more accurate given the way he took the corners) and head to the Beqaa Valley to talk with a few folks about what’s happening on this and the other side of the Syrian-Lebanon border, only a few kilometers away. The valley (actually a plateau) is relaxed and the toughest part of the journey was in resisting the tourist knick-knacks including the Hezbollah t-shirt and the lure of fine local wines. But the influx of refugees is and will continue to create challenges to that would challenge any country.

The ride out to Beqaa was uneventful. One too many road-blocks on the ride back.

Highly recommended.

And since you ask, yes that is snow in the distance. Our trip back was supposed to include scenic mountain pass – alas curtailed by 4 meters of snow on the Bcharre road, at least according to the nearest army checkpoint.

A driver’s license in the power-the-hotel room card slot, one that cuts out the electricity the moment the card is removed – not ideal if you want to leave equipment charging when you’re out and about. Two polar opposite strategies for keeping a card in the slot: using a card of significant value triggers memory to pick up the card; or using a no-hassles-if-its-lost card. The middle ground is dangerous with enough value to be missed, but not enough value to recall.

German domestic doors feel like other countries fire-doors. From my favourite Munich hotel – in town for a couple of days to drop by our studio.

Vice is already a BigCorp, all be it one with a decent set of fuck-you values.

As it grows it’s enjoying the pains of figuring out what it wants to be, for example the snarky versus we-care dichotomy is increasingly visible. But it’s real challenge as it scales is two-fold: it’s relentless pursuit of the novel in foreign climes risks turning it into an international version of the National Enquirer; and more significantly that what it focusses on with its international reporting and reporting tone relies on owning the conversation and flow of information from those quirkier reportages. It’s a window that is rapidly closing – the subject of their reportage is increasingly able to talk back, and there’s nothing the kid that talks back hates more than not having the final word.

Of course this trend is also impacting established media and news organisations. An Xiao Mina did a decent write-up on what recently surfaced during the Kenyan elections. Vice has long invested in building out an international network that can supply content. But it will impact its larger investments in video, where their editorial team is more likely to be flying in. Will outing the more boring nature of Vice writers/stringers be the double-reverse-419? What role does Vice play in a hyper-connected world.

In the US the Square-tablet cash register has so rapidly become part of the retail landscape, particularly amongst newer businesses that haven’t yet made the capital investment in their larger brethren. Interested to see how the tablet cash register plays out in South Korea, given the extreme penchant for displays and a tight ecosystem for payments, and the smaller physical footprint of stores.

One downside of processes/ecosystems in transition is the mental model clash. It’s a subtle and subtly annoying thing: at the square register opting for emailed receipt and forgetting to ask for a tangible one; on returning from a business trip having to print out otherwise digital receipts. The next leap forward is on what happens after the purchase.

Context to this post here.

On Friday I was invited into Google Labs New York and given the opportunity to try out Glass.

I declined.

Here’s why.

There are many people who are exploring what Glass could be, evaluating and providing feedback to Google, exposing and conditioning their networks to the idea of Glass as a viable part of the technology landscape. The selection criteria for being a Glass explorer/evaluator/shill* has been as carefully thought out as any part of the bring-Glass-to-market process. Many early adopters are willing to pay to get their hands on Glass. Others will be paid (in kind or in cash) for providing feedback and related services to the Glass team – and I’ll be interested to know how many of those will reveal their consultant relationship when they talk about Glass publicly. While targeting trend and thought leaders and early adopters is not novel few projects or companies have such deep pockets to do so as comprehensively, with such a disruptive product.

In most situations I’d jump at the chance. The drive to experience new things is in my DNA: from experimenting with and understanding the impact of new technologies around the globe to deliver rich insights to how things will play out. Clients want to understand everything about the user experience from how consumers discover a service, first impressions out of the box, what will drive consistent use or more likely how it will end up at the back of a drawer gathering dust. It pays (well) to have a natural curiosity about this space and I enjoy being surrounded by many colleagues that like to sketch with code and bits – the drill that knows how deep it goes, or a tape measure that can remember everything it measures are two wonderfully understated and subversive examples of explorations that our Munich studio shared this week.

You’ll find no shortage of people willing to write about their hands-on experience of using Glass and I’m not convinced at this point I have too much to add to the conversation around the Glass experience. I do however have something to add to the impacted-by-glass-experience for people who feel caught in Google’s proxy: the Little Sister data dragnet.

This isn’t a public declaration of never wanting to wear Glass or a philosophical stance against Google or that form factor. I can think of three Glass use-cases that I consider utterly compelling to drive adoption, but for which the social disruption would be significant. Instead it’s an appreciation that when it comes to privacy and un/acceptable behaviour in our public spaces there are stakeholders that go well beyond the community that will read this, with whom for now I prefer to maintain my affinity with.

Stepping out of the Labs meeting and onto the warm friday-night New York street my colleague Robert Fabricant asked the following question: If you could dicate the exact moment of your first perfect Glass experience what would it be?

For me it will be that split-second between a bullet exploding out of a barrel and the moment it penetrates my skull: a lifetime of meaningful experiences flashing before my eye. That techno-utopian assumption of a life exquisitely recapped is of course wishful thinking and as inevitable as the Glass form factor itself. I suspect a far more realistic scenario is that the last thing I would hear is the sound of the gun-shot, and the last thing I would see is an interstitial advert for earplugs.

Go figure.

Thanks to Matt for the invite and the Lab folks for hosting.

And the photo? The augmented reality of a Herat wedding banquent hall hallway. Like many of the internet services we use today, the bride and groom get to use the banquet hall for “free” but then pay a per-head fee for each of the ~500 to ~1,000+ guests that attend. A family will take on a significant debt for the wedding.

If you write sixty thousand words on turning observation and insights into things that make a difference for clients, and your book contains a few paragraphs on the value of buying porn (or more accurately on local norms for obtaining and consuming porn) you can be sure that the media will focus on the porn. Notes from a conversation with fastco, who kindly hosted my book launch. (You’ll have to buy the book to figure out whether I expensed it),

Sometimes you can learn as much from the questions as the answers.

An interview of sorts with the Wall Street Journal this week – in the News Corp building. This reminder of their corporate values greets employees and guests alike.

There’s a point in most journey’s when you finally feel you’re underway, where the motion and dust of travel finally settle into a jet lagged haze. Trying to cue up eight weeks of work in a consultancy is tricky to say the least – rapidly changing schedule based on client pitches, projects and meetings, anchored by a few external facing events.

This trip started last week in Abu Dhabi (pictured) with Chicago (IIT), Boston (MIT, MSR) and NYC (NYU, book launch) this week. So much more to follow: multiple climate zones; continued robustness testing on the D2 baggage prototype; time on an island in the Pacific.

Photo? One of those fuck-it-the-flight-leaves-in-5-hours-why-bother-sleeping-head-into-the-desert kinda mornings from Abu Dhabi. See you on the other side, but don’t expect a smile.

A few upsides from taking the train between Boston and NYC: legroom; one less flight; and having an opportunity to browse and advance copy of Ethan Zuckerman’s pending book: Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection.

In Abu Dhabi for the week – a mixture of new-new and sandstorm-building-site-dust-covered buildings, the textures of fast, expensive cars, marble, kerbs, migrant labour uniforms, road-brushes, palms, agate, agate, agate. A hotel lobbies that you could spend an age talking in the low voices.

When you can create any reality, what do you want to create?

I don’t aspire to this.

But I do need to understand this.

A few references for the You Lookin’ at Me? Reflections on Google Glass article from last week.

Changing consumer expectations with shared-services such as ZipCar; The challenges in signalling discretion when everyone’s online identity is a click, swipe or glance away; how ANA and a few other airlines flipped the anti-social nature of airline seats internalising the knee recline; one of my favourite could-look-at-it-for-hours photos from Delhi airport depicting tethered social dynamics; the dynamics of social contracts; a how to sit poster on the Seoul subway; the use of phone numbers on cars as a social lubrication mechanism in Seoul; about what it means when (my many metrics) the rights to your face is owned by Google or other similar connecting companies in It’s Not Your Face, It’s Ours;

And not least, my talented co-conspirator on the Nokia head mounted display study was Raphael Grignani, currently writing his business plan for Jauntful.

Photo: petrol station. What options for electrical charging will exist in any given market place? How will they be dispersed/clustered?

Last week I posted an essay about the adoption and impact on Google Glass that raised more questions that it answered.

Hundreds more questions in fact.

They fell under loose section headings spanning form factor, interaction design, user experience, use cases, business models and anti/social impact. In one section on Google’s corporate culture, were a few items that fell under “creepy”.

This is “creepy” somewhat fleshed out:

You can of course replace “Google” and “Glass” with dozens of other companies and products that are on the market today – a few you know by name, most you don’t. And to be clear some of those companies are past, current and future clients.

They, we, you, I have the resources and smarts to do anything we put our mind to. The trick is understanding the trade-offs and for whom.

#qsforglass is a small step in recalibrating where we want to go.

One of the perceived-compelling use-cases for a future version of Glass (aside from porn) is the ability to mine the cloud in real-time. If, like me, you’re in the business of asking smarter questions – what does it mean when you can see every question you’ve ever publicly asked auto-completing before you?

Photo? Little Sister in Lhasa, a place where the stakes of being recorded and by whom are higher that most.

One of the unexpected benefits of writing a book has been the opportunity to think and learn about the publishing process. In the past month I’ve reached out to a few people for book cover blurbs. Given how horrifying I found the blurb-requesting process I thought I’d purge my soul by sharing a few thoughts.

I came into this unprepared.

I left the house a few years ago dressed in shorts, a scruffy t-shirt and trainers, with keys, a few banknotes and my mobile phone in one hand, called back to Keiko who was sipping earl grey tea at the kitchen table that I was popping out for stroll.

How wrong I was.

I ended up in the New York marathon.

The initial idea for the book came in 2008, a year later I met a compatible writer, signed with a literary agent, we pulled together the outline in 2010, that went to auction with the publishing houses (a wonderfully Kafkaesque experience), signed a book deal, received an advance (zeros never looked so good), and the little matter of writing it in-between. The manuscript was completed in early 2013, and we launch on April 16th. I’m at that stage where the finishing line is in sight and I have just enough left in the tank to sprint, but probably in a oh-so-awkward, are-my-legs-going-to-buckle-beneath-me kinda way.

I now realise I’ve been in a race since I pulled the front door to: the sponsorship deal has paid for new running gear, coach and physio; someone has pinned an official number to my chest; when its all said and one I get to collapse in the team trailer which has Netflix and ice packs and a masseur. Which brings us just a little closer to the horror.

You see, I love people. I love the energy that comes from listening to someone talk about things they are passionate about. And I love giving people that are not usually asked their point of view, the space to reflect and talk, and to turn what is said and done into something that makes a difference. That this is what I do for commercial clients who have woken up to the power of listening, is what gets me out of a warm bed to train on a bitterly cold winter’s morning.

But I detest networking.

Saying that while working for a consultancy is so cathartic, so I’m going to say it again.

I detest networking.

I detest the premeditated process of scaling up social interaction for (apparently) mutual socioeconomic gain. And the challenge with asking for a book blurb feels far too much like hard-sell, socioeconomic-gain networking to be comfortable. It turns professional respect and personal friendships, no matter how established or nascent, deep or distant, into something that feels more like a transaction.

And so in January this year when I find myself at the HarperCollins’s New York office where my literary agent James, my editor Hollis and her team gather around a table with the other writer Simon dialling in from Los Angeles, with various HarperCollins people from their international sales department coming in shaking hands before being whooshed, no-doubt to another writer in another room. At which the only thing left is the pain of hitting the wall.

We draw up a list of people to ask and whom to do the asking.

It should be no surprise that the HarperCollins team knows everyone. They’ve been here before, thousands of times. They’re received requests and they’ve doled them out. They know the value of the ask, and to whom. They’ve experienced rejection, acceptance. They understand that for the person being asked, the risk is that the book is a dud is offset against continued exposure – their name in embossed bold type. Some expect to be asked.

Blurb etiquette dictates that it’s inappropriate to ask current colleagues for an endorsement – otherwise my list of asks would include Mark, Robert and Doreen amongst others. I’m grateful for Warren Ellis, Bruno Giussani, Rob Soderberry, Don Norman and Tim Brown for taking the time to review and then write a few words. Don does a steller job of articulating what the book is not about as much of what it is. I’ve posted their kind blurbs here.

~

People always ask me why I don’t tweet. And my answer is that I blurb

I suspect we all have a blurb that we remember from years gone by. For me that would be the negatives writ large on Iain Banks The Wasp Factory – each one slating the depraved mind of the author (spot on for his readership). But with the move to digital it could be that the blurb is a dying form, smothered by tweets and likes and the daily tsunami of digital noise.

I don’t aspire to blurb, but over the past month I’ve come to appreciate its nuances as an art form. In keeping with the spirit of how I like to research, this should be more about you and what you get out of it than it is the feeble mind of an author, send me or point me to your own blurb (or barbs if that’s more your thing) and I’ll publish them here.

It seems fitting to leave you with this quote from Gladwell “People always ask me why I don’t tweet,” he said. “And my answer is that I blurb. They are, after all, conceptually identical: the short, targeted judgment in which the initiator draws attention to himself while seeming to draw attention to something else.”

I’m on Twitter here.

And if books are your thing, you can order mine here.

Where my work schedule supports it, I’m open to giving a talk or two about the research. Ping info@janchipchase.com for more details.

The kind of thread that links people and objects.

Like a number of you I purchased a Twine – the thing that provides new ways to sense and measure and understand the world around us. I’m a happy customer – they’ve done a good job in rallying a community, bring it to market, and although I’ve never met the team there’s I have a greater affinity for who they are (or who I perceive they are) and what they’re trying to do than most of my relationships as a consumer. But I’ve hardly used it.

Today I received an email nudge from them.

”
I just wanted to check in and see how things are going with you and your Twine.

We want you to enjoy owning Twine as much as we enjoyed designing it, so please let us know if you have any questions!
”

I assume this email is in response to how little I’ve been using Twine, the range of things that I tried using it for and how quickly I stopped experimenting with it – when the product is connected it’s easy data to pull up. The email is subtle enough to be read as something more generic and certainly doesn’t come across as big-brotherish. But it did trigger pangs of guilt.

Guilt that the blood, sweat and tears they put into bringing this to market; the environmental impact of manufacturing, shipping it to me; and in spending the time on support to set it up; all were not repaid through sustained use. And I know they know (and if they are reading this, they know I know they know). Hence the guilt. Which, in this slither of a discussion, is a good thing, because a better understanding of use can help me make smarter consumption decisions in the future. Or at least from today’s perspective, because new models of consumption, sale, support, ownership and use emerge – its not a static landscape. (I prefer to consider myself a consumer in the sense of appreciating consumption, use, rather than wanton consumption).

In a world where your new fridge, bicycle, camera lens, drill all inherently share back use, a few thoughts for today:

• » What are your moral/legal obligations for products you buy? Think: use, consumption, disposal.
•  
• » What is the disparity between intended use and actual use?
•  
• » When, and in what ways is it appropriate for companies to share back usage data?
•  
• » And what kind of behavioural change can it affect?
•  
• » What value added service opportunities for coaching use/setting up etc. can companies provide?
•  
• » I’m reminded that the most opportune time to sell insurance is just after a near-miss while the memory is hyper-fresh and the person is still in shock, what are these conducive moments for every kind of product/service?
•  
• » Which companies will trigger near-miss equivalents to trigger additional purchases or sell value added services?
•  
• » Which companies will base their entire business model off the the disparity between intended use at the time of purchase versus actual use? Amazon does this bait and switch with (“free”) Prime Instant Videos to pull customers into buying Prime but then offering a suboptimal experience in finding those films to assumedly reduce royalty fees and encourage paid purchases.
•  
• » How does this feedback loop shift the adoption curve? In particular how does use-transparency impact early adopters whose motivation is driven by experiencing something first?
•  
• » What kinds of secondary markets does this enable? Amazon’s email nudge for you to sell used books that you bought from them a few years ago is a good example: they know what you bought, where you live, what people like you put back onto the market, what that book is now worth and to whom (even better they probably make better margins off used books, since they only act as a broker, and don’t necessarily need to hold stock).

Ultimately I think this changes our sense of ownership and if you want to extrapolate a little, our need to track where the objects we own are. Not in the sense that we will know the discrete location of things (the mythical/bullshit stuff-finder concept/beast that does the rounds every now and then), but rather in the sense that objects will either have built in mechanisms/motivations to find their way back to us, or that someone else’s usage will benefit us.

It’s good to unravel a Twine.

See also: Profiting from Loss, Theft & Other Sustainable Business Models.

Photo: Ford Museum, Detroit.