Simon on: Predictions for 2013

It is a great tradition to offer predictions at this time of year. 

Given the exaggeration about some aspects of technology, could it be that we’ll be told that the iPad mini will revolutionise the meetings world so desktops and laptops will be burned? Or that “The cloud” will mean that everybody can have all of their documents safely stored in a mystical place run by someone else? 

Somebody is bound to claim that NFC will mean that nobody needs to carry cash, credit cards, business cards or a name badge. And no doubt, by the end of the year the whole planet will be signed up to Facebook so there won’t be any need for any other communications channels.

Why stop there? Surely within 20 years, your smartphone will be wired directly into your brain and will know more than you do so you’ll no longer need to go to conferences or exhibitions.

Perhaps this is a slight exaggeration but I have a horrible suspicion that it isn’t much more ridiculous than some of the stuff we’ll actually read.

Originally published in Conference News

Simon on: Interactive presentations

Over recent years there has been a marked growth in the number of people claiming that presentations need more interaction. The latest voice in the clamour is Meeting Professionals International (MPI) which has published a series of papers looking at the future of meetings. One deals with content. Among other things it says ‘Shorten content and add lots of interaction…’.

A few days before reading this, I sat through several presentations. Some were good but some were delivered by incompetent presenters with appallingly bad PowerPoint material. The idea that those sessions could be made compelling by adding ‘lots of interaction’ is obviously misguided. All we would have would be sessions delivered by incompetent presenters with appallingly bad PowerPoint material and badly executed interaction.

No technology in the world will make a poor presenter look good and their sessions won’t suddenly become riveting by the inclusion of interaction. They have to be shown how to do the job properly. Only when they have become competent presenters should anybody even think about teaching them how to incorporate interaction.

Originally published in Conference News

Will paper brochures ever disappear?

I saw in the news recently that Argos is planning to scrap their catalogue and go entirely online. I can’t help thinking that this is either a totally inspired or incredibly stupid idea and I’m really not sure which yet! Either way it’s brave and I commend them for that.

That situation made me think about a number of meetings we’ve had over the years with people that plan to “make brochures obsolete for exhibitions”. None of them have been particularly credible in my opinion but it’s not their solutions that are faulty as such – it’s the fundamental idea which is broken. 

We had a guy come to see us who had quite literally bet his house on his idea of a kiosk where the user would select the brochures they wanted and behind the scenes they would burn a CD with that information on. I told this guy it was a terrible idea and his only hope was to look at the conference market but I didn’t rate his chances. 

We’ve had people who plan that every visitor to an exhibition should carry a USB stick which will be provided by the exhibition. They would then insert the USB stick into a device on each stand and would be able to download the brochures they wanted to take away. 

We’ve seen other solutions too but the thing that they all fail to recognize is that brochures often convey a lot more than the words and pictures that are printed in them. 

For example, if you are a luxury hotel then you may have a brochure on beautiful quality paper with spot varnish (where certain parts of the pages are varnished to make them shiny) and the quality of the paper and printing effects as well as the photography and writing all contribute to make the brochure feel amazingly luxurious. 

If you head over to the Rolls-Royce or Bentley websites right now – I guarantee they will look lovely but will they look and feel as fantastic and special as the hard-backed brochure you would probably be given if you go into a showroom? Not even close! 

Another part of the problem is that electronic information – whether it is a PDF brochure or an email – is too easily lost under the deluge of everything else. A paper brochure is a reminder of something. It will sit on your desk or somewhere and every so often you’ll find it and think “oh yes, I must do something about that”. You may never get around to it but it still acts as a reminder until you bring yourself to throw it away – which is basically admitting defeat so you won’t do it for a while. 

Equally, a brochure can be flicked through very quickly and something may catch your eye. At the very least you can get the general idea of the contents without having to wait for pages to load from a website or render on screen from a document. 

Despite the exhibition organisers desperation to minimize the waste – it won’t happen in the foreseeable future in my opinion, because brochures can do things that websites or electronic documents simply can’t. 

All things considered, I believe paper brochures are here to stay for a good while to come because although technology is amazing but can’t replicate a lot of what can be achieved with paper and print.

Why do I have to learn how to use a company’s business model?

Sometimes dealing with a company who are selling a fairly simple commodity isn’t as straight forward as it should be which tends to annoy me. This has happened to me personally a few times now, then a colleague mentioned it to me again a couple of days ago and I thought it’d make a good topic for an article.

To explain what I mean I’ll use a couple of examples. The first example is that a number of years ago I was in the process of upgrading our company mobile phones. It turned out that if you upgraded the “leader” phone (the main phone on the account) without upgrading all of the rest at the same time meant that the level of phones you could get for the other users on the account was suddenly reduced. This seems ridiculous to me. If we are entitled to upgrades then we should continue to be entitled to those upgrades regardless of which phone gets upgraded first.

Basically this meant I had to learn enough about their business model to use it in order to not get screwed by them! In this example I ended up writing to the head of customer retention complaining about their stupid practices and got what I wanted. It shouldn’t have taken so much time and effort for me to continue to be a customer for them. 

Another example is internet service providers (ISPs). I’ve heard plenty of stories about the ISPs improving the packages that they offer to their customers over time. That’s perfectly normal, the market is very competitive and they have to move things forwards to keep up with their competitors. 

What isn’t right is when they don’t pass on those lower prices or better features on to long standing, loyal customers. We had an ISP who dramatically lowered the prices they charged for the exact same service that we were on. We were not in any long term contract with them as the charges ran from month to month yet they didn’t give us the savings until we spotted it and asked for them.

On the one hand, you might think that’s good business practice because they are keeping the money in their accounts until the customer is observant enough to notice. I say it’s terrible business practice because pretty much without exception – the customer will feel cheated and aggrieved by their suppliers behaviour – put simply, it’s not fair. I think that will lead to customers looking for alternate suppliers. 

We had a similar situation a few years ago but with us as the supplier. We had a client who was renting a piece of software from us and had been doing so for a couple of years and were making a reasonable profit from the deal. 

We started off renting the software because it meant we had more control over things and the software wasn’t really at the stage where it was ready to be sold. After a couple of years, we decided we were ready to start selling the software. 

At the time we took the decision to sell the software, I felt very strongly that the only course of action was to inform our existing customer that they could now buy the software for much less than they had been renting it for. There weren’t any downsides to the customer and they are a large corporate with far more money than us but I still felt it was the right thing to do. 

I guess the point for me is that it’s important to treat people as you would want to be treated. If you know that if you were in the same situation you would feel upset or annoyed by the actions of a supplier then don’t do those things to other people. 

I’ve always said that it would be really easy to be rich if you have no morals but having a clear conscience is probably more important to me. You can still be rich but it might take a little longer! 

Simon on: Smartphones

There is an assumption, frequently repeated, that ‘everybody these days has a smartphone’. It’s a claim that’s used to support the idea assertion that organisers need to provide services for attendees to use on their smartphones. The trouble is that the claim is wrong.

Recent analysis by research company ComScore shows that 51.3 per cent of mobile phones in Britain were smartphones in Q4 2011. Obviously the proportion will vary from one age group to another and between market sectors but ComScore shows that almost half of phones in this country are not smartphones. That said, it is true that smartphone sales are increasing but it will be a while before they become the standard.

That is a serious issue for any organiser but even that overstates the case for smartphones. It ignores the fact that some smartphone owners won’t use technology developed for the phones. They may have a smartphone only because their company provides it and they may not be allowed to use software not provided by the company.

Clearly this means that systems that rely on smartphones will be immensely useful for reaching around half of any market but organisers need to remember the other half.

 Originally published in Conference News

Coming up next….IMEX America 2012

Well it’s that time of year again and I find myself sitting at the airport waiting to fly to Las Vegas for IMEX America 2012 next week.

I'm privileged to have been there at the beginning of both IMEX Frankfurt and IMEX America and while I've sort of got used to IMEX Frankfurt being a normal part of my May schedule, IMEX America still feels new and a little more unknown. 

There are certainly cultural differences between doing business in the US versus Europe but that’s to be expected and should be celebrated. Who wants to live in a world where everyone is the same - that would be very dull! 

Although I don’t directly communicate with the users of the IMEX America website, it’s definitely been an interesting learning experience to understand how we've had to change terms and functionality from the Frankfurt website to suit the US market. 

I'm very proud of the fact that we've made some amazing progress on the website this time around. We've completely redesigned the Exhibitor Directory to improve usability and the Hosted Buyer’s Diary system has had a huge amount of work on it too which I believe has improved the end user’s experience massively and I think the results speak for themselves. 

When I look back at all of the changes that have happened to IMEX Frankfurt over the years it makes me wonder what changes and evolutions we can look forward to with IMEX America as it progresses as I'm absolutely certain that it will be around for a long time to come and I hope to continue to be a part of it all.

Simon on: Event apps

Every meeting planner needs apps – right? Well, not necessarily. It depends on how useful the app is to the attendees, how painful it is to set up and how reliable it is at the event.

This is the balancing act that a planner needs to understand. For example, if you’ve got a significant number of breakout sessions at your event, an app might be useful to remind attendees that a session is starting.  That said, the app is still not going to be popular if it is too fiddly to set up. This is the pain threshold: some attendees will be happy to grapple with a tricky set up operation but the majority will probably give up before getting to the end of it.

Even if it’s useful to users and easy to install, if it doesn’t deliver consistently onsite, it will still fail. How many event apps rely on having an Internet connection? The best download and store their information on the phone itself so the app will work even if the wi-fi or the mobile network is groaning under the load from other attendees.

So before diving in and having an app developed think: is it useful to the attendees, pain-free, reliable? If the answer is no to any of these, then think again.

Originally published in Conference News

Do you give your customers what they really want?

Twice recently I’ve been out for meals to pubs that I’ve not visited before. In both cases, the pubs were in lovely surroundings with nice décor inside and the food was good. However, there was the same problem with both of them. The portion size of the food in these pubs was far too large!

I do like my food and I can easily eat too much sometimes (ok, too often!) but in both visits there was no way I could finish my meal. In the first pub, I was out with family having a meal as a treat and so we decided to order starters because some of the starters sounded lovely.

The starters that arrived were easily big enough to be main course in their own right! Then the main course arrived and that was also enormous. In the second pub the main meal was so large it had to come on multiple plates with the main meal and salad filling one large dinner plate and another sizeable plate for chips.

This got me thinking about several things. Firstly, I think that World War II had a big effect on British eating habits. That seems to be a strange thing to say in 2012 but let me explain. In 1939 rationing was introduced and meant that food was very scarce. This carried on until 1954 and I think the British culture of having to clear your plate of food was either created or reinforced during that time.

This meant that at least several generations have been taught that “you can’t have any pudding unless you eat all of your dinner”. Basically this means we are teaching our children to carry on eating after they’re full in order to get the treat of a desert!

So, in Britain (and probably many other cultures) we feel bad for leaving food. People routinely feel the need to apologise for not eating everything on their plate. In some other cultures, eating everything on the plate is a sign to your host that there wasn’t enough and the host feels obliged to give you more to eat.

It would be much better if we could get our heads around the fact that we should let kids eat what they want and still have a treat. If they leave half of their dinner then that’s actually good. It means they know when they’ve had enough. Should they be denied the treat of a desert because they stopped eating when they’d had enough? Probably not but I would guess that feels completely alien to most parents in Britain even though it might help the kids stay thinner in later life.

So, all of that means that a pub serving larger meals is likely to leave their customers feeling less happy when they leave. They’ve had a good meal but they wasted half of it which means they may subconsciously feel less happy because they didn’t clear their plate. They also paid for ½ a meal that was wasted.

If the two pubs I’ve encountered that prompted this story scaled down their portion size then they would probably be able to reduce the cost of the meals (neither of them were particularly cheap) and have happier customers.

I personally believe that families eating out in the evening are probably mainly after a nice meal that is sensibly priced. It’s expensive going out to eat with two adults and a couple of kids and if the meals feel like value for money then the customers would probably come back more often.

In one of the two pubs, it was expensive and the food wasn’t good enough to justify the cost. We won’t be going back there. In the other pub, it wasn’t actually too bad on price but I don’t like meals that are too large and even if I do go back, I’ll certainly only order a main meal which means the pub loses out on the revenue of a starter and the chance of more drinks that we would have during the extra time a starter takes.

The point is that if these establishments stopped to actually notice things then they could improve their business. Plates consistently coming back with a lot of food remaining on them or even asking their customers what they think might help develop an understanding that there’s something wrong. If they listened and adjusted their behaviour they could actually make their businesses much more profitable and successful.

Simon on: Social media

Recent articles about social media and the events industry seem to suggest that any organiser not using Facebook, Twitter and the rest is either incompetent or an idiot. It’s a classic tactic used to sell unproven products.

If social media was half as effective as it’s claimed to be, its promoters would have powerful case studies to show. Nobody has any yet so they point to statistics showing Facebook as 845 million users worldwide. That’s as relevant to an organiser in the UK as the fact that 3 billion people watch TV across the world.

SM might yet prove to be an invaluable communications tool for trade shows and conferences. The problem is that nobody has yet figured out how to use it effectively. Until they do, we’ll continue to see vacuous comments on FB event pages from people who are ‘so excited’ to be en route to this conference or ‘delighted to be on stand XX’ at that exhibition.

For now it’s best to wait until somebody else figures out how to use it and learn from their mistakes.

Originally published in Conference News

Smoking Kills: when did we lose the ability to communicate?

Communication between human beings has always been an interesting topic. I heard someone saying “the spoken word is not the received word” – basically meaning that what someone means to say isn’t necessarily what the other person hears.

That’s because of filters that people listen through. What I mean by that is that we all have experiences and preconceptions about situations or people which means we actually hear something different to what the person speaking think they’ve said.

However, that aside – recently there was an incident on a Megabus on the M6 Toll road in the UK Midlands which made me question whether we have lost the ability to communicate completely.

The incident in question was that “something” happened on the bus which caused a full scale terror alert. The bus was halted on the hard shoulder, armed police and ambulances galore turned up and everyone was escorted off the bus one by one by the armed police and made to sit in a cordoned off area of the now closed motorway. The motorway remained shut for 5 hours while “investigations” continued.

Obviously this was paraded endlessly on the parasitic rolling news channels with speculation about what might or might not have happened and what you could clearly see with your own eyes on the TV screen but presenters trying to “fill” have to keep stating the bloody obvious! Worse than that they also referred to the M6 Toll as “one of the busiest motorways in the country” – which means they’ve never actually been on it!

In the end it turns out that the “something” that happened on board this bus was an electronic cigarette that someone had which was creating artificial “smoke” (which I believe is just water vapour).

I have to ask why the hell didn’t someone on the bus just ask the person with the “smoking device” what it was? Surely this whole vastly expensive and time consuming operation could have been avoided with that simple question? Perhaps the Megabus and rural Staffordshire are known priority targets?

I would say you couldn’t make it up but someone already did. A few years ago the BBC had a fantastic comedy series called “Broken News” which was a complete lampooning of the rolling news channels and the pathetic coverage of anything and everything that they give.

That show had the story of “Union Air Flight 216 from Chicago to Amsterdam” which was the subject of intense media speculation about a possible hijack. When it landed in Amsterdam it emerged that the “situation” was that someone on board had a wooden spoon.

There are some ridiculous parallels here although the bus situation response was arguably much worse. If the authorities in the spoof comedy program had responded to the situation in the same way that the UK emergency services responded to the bus incident, the entire airport would have been closed for ½ a day while they examined the spoon. That wouldn’t have been believable – well, until now!

Unfortunately, too often people don’t communicate with each other openly and honestly. If they did then all sorts of things would be far easier but I think we’re too scared of what might happen if we tell people the truth. Sadly it seems to be getting worse!

The broken news BBC page for the hijack is here http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/brokennews/indepth/hijack.shtml

The Pina Colada Song

I was driving home the other night and a song came on the radio. It’s called “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” by a guy called Rupert Holmes. It’s a classic (depending on your point of view) 70s song which tells the story of a couple who are bored with each other.

I have been aware of this song for a good while but it’s been some time since I heard it and this time I was paying particular attention to the words.

The first part of the song has these lyrics :-

I was tired of my lady, we'd been together too long,

like a worn-out recording, of a favourite song,

so while she lay there sleeping, I read the paper in bed,

and in the personal columns, there was this letter I read:

"If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain,

if you're not into yoga, if you have half-a-brain,

if you’d like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape,

I'm the love that you've looked for, write to me and escape."

This got me thinking. There are relationships everywhere in life but in a business context, they might be with colleagues, suppliers or customers. Perhaps there is something we can learn from the song in a business context?

The song continues with :-

I didn't think about my lady, I know that sounds kind of mean,

but me and my old lady, had fallen into the same old dull routine,

so I wrote to the paper, took out a personal ad,

and though I'm nobody's poet, I thought it wasn't half-bad.

"Yes, I like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain,

I'm not much into health food, I am into champagne,

I've got to meet you by tomorrow noon, and cut through all this red tape,

at a bar called O'Malley's, where we'll plan our escape."

Well, fair enough. Personally I don’t like where the song is going now. It’s not right to cheat on someone and everyone knows this, but it’s a nice tune so we’ll let it slide and use it to focus on the relationships between a customer and supplier in a business sense.

There are some interesting parallels here to the world of business where the whole situation is not morally questionable.

So in that situation, let’s imagine that we’re finding the relationship we have with an existing supplier isn’t going as well as it should. Things are looking up though because we’ve just seen an advert for a new supplier that we like the sound of. So we’ve arranged to meet them.

This is where the song starts going having some problems. It continues with :-

So I waited with high hopes, then she walked in the place.

I knew her smile in an instant, I knew the curve of her face.

It was my own lovely lady, and she said, "Oh, it's you."

And we laughed for a moment

Whoa there horsey! This is a HUGE problem! We’re in a bar for an illicit meeting with a new “supplier” and our existing “supplier” walks in. I can imagine blind panic would set in. What if the existing “supplier” sees me with the new “supplier” – we better hide quickly. We might even leave by the back door and try to reschedule our “supplier” meeting.

Ok, if we were really talking about business suppliers then there would be a bit less of a problem although,, it is conceivable that the existing supplier knows the new supplier you’re meeting with and this might cause the existing relationship to become more difficult.

In a business scenario you can imagine that this meeting would be a little awkward, but personal relationships are a lot more volatile than business relationships. So, if we go back to the original meaning of the song – I can’t really see either him or his wife reacting with “oh, it’s you” and then laughing for a moment. I think that world war 3 would instantly break out followed by a divorce!

However, the song ends nicely like this :-

"and I said, I never knew,

that you liked Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain,

and the feel of the ocean, and the taste of champagne,

if you like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape,

you're the lady I've looked for, come with me, and escape."

Luckily for them they are both much more enlightened than anyone else on the planet. They decide that actually, they just hadn’t worked hard enough at their relationship and they didn’t know all sorts of things about each other that could have helped things along.

That is where our tale ends but what can we learn from this song? Well, going back to my supplier analogy for a last time. Any relationship has ups and downs and there are always things we can do better and different. With a customer – supplier relationship it’s perhaps too easy to think “I’m fed up with that supplier, I’ll get a different one”.

This is often easy for something like printer paper or toilet rolls but there are lots of other relationships where changing supplier is much more of an upheaval. Perhaps before jumping ship completely – it would be worth talking to the supplier in more detail about what could be different and if the relationship can be improved. Remember, you will have to learn all of the foibles of a new supplier and they might be worse than the supplier you had before!

Sometimes a lack of change is disappointing

In a recent blog post I talked about how people don’t like change. Now find myself writing about the exact opposite!

I’d also like to clarify my last blog post. There are times when change is welcomed by a lot of people and in the software world that’s where the change is that something that was clearly not good enough before is improved and made to work either properly or much better. I think it’s when people are “satisfied” with the status quo that the change causes consternation.

Personally I think I’m much more open to change than most people – certainly in software and websites that I use. However, there are times when I find a lack of change disappointing. One instance of this is with smartphones.

Not very many years ago, getting a new phone was an exciting experience. For the first few weeks I would be discovering how it worked and how things were different to the last phone. Every few days I’d find a new feature or something and would think “wow, this is fantastic” but that all changed with the advent of the iPhone and Android phones.

I got my first Android phone about 3 years ago and was amazed by it. I loved installing new apps and playing about with settings to get it setup just the way I wanted (I am a techie after all!) and I’m now onto my second Android phone.

About a month ago I was excited to receive a notification on the phone to tell me that there was a system update available for me. I knew this was the latest version of the Android operating system for my phone. This was big news indeed (I did mention I’m a sad techie didn’t I?).

The problem was that I did the update and rebooted the phone and was…………. erm…………. well…………. pretty unimpressed really. It turns out that Android 4.0 looks very much like Android 2.3 that I had before. It’s a bit slicker and there are some new bits but nothing much.

This made me think about when I got my second shiny new Android phone. When I think back I remember I felt distinctly underwhelmed that time too because apart from a bigger screen and it being a bit faster, there wasn’t a fat lot of difference between that and my first Android phone.

The same can be said of a lot of devices these days. The latest iPhone or iPad might have a better display, a nicer camera or be a bit faster but apart from that, it looks and works exactly the same.

The trade off to this of course is familiarity and that means that as soon as you do get the shiny new device you can work it and know where everything is. Overall that’s probably a good thing but it has taken some of the fun out of it for me!

Usability problems – “Don’t ask me again”

Note: This is post is one in a series of usability posts. To read my explanation about what usability is click here.

Shown here is one of the dialog boxes that Microsoft Outlook presented me with today. I have setup AutoArchive on my machine so that my mail items older than 3 months get copied into an archive file where I can still get them if I need to but they won’t clog up my inbox.

The problem I have with this is with the checkbox that sits there with the legend “Don’t prompt me about this again”. This bothers me because I don’t think it’s at all clear what that means.

Does it mean :-

• Based on whichever button I click on next (Yes or No), do that every time in future without asking me. 
• Don’t ask me again but just do it anyway regardless of whether I click Yes or No. 
• Don’t ask me again and don’t auto archive anything again. 

I have found myself in exactly the same position with “Read Receipts”. Outlook will pop up a dialog box saying “Don’t ask me again” but it doesn’t say which option will be the default action.

Personally I don’t like read receipts because I might want to read the email late at night and if a read receipt was sent then I know the person knows I saw it and then I feel an obligation to reply.

That said, these days, seeing an email and reading it are two entirely different things so “Read Receipt” should perhaps been “Viewed Receipt” to be more accurate but that’s an entirely different article!

I saw the read receipt dialog box lots and lots of times and always clicked "No" without checking the "Don't ask me again" option because I was concerned that if it didn't ask me again it might automatically send a receipt to anyone that requested it. I had to Google to find out how to set the default and stop the question properly before it went away.

Microsoft has many millions of users of Outlook yet I find myself having to Google to figure out what this little dialog box actually means and what will happen if I tick the option. If I'm having this problem - how many millions of other users are having the same problem? A brief round of questions to a limited panel of users would reveal to Microsoft that this option isn’t clear and is horribly ambiguous and needs changing. 

My point in this surprisingly short rant is that software developers need to be extremely careful about ambiguous terms in their systems. If something can’t be clearly and concisely understood by your users then you might need to rethink it.

People don't like change!

This is something I encounter quite a lot in my professional life but lately I've found it in my personal life too.

In my work life I see a new feature being introduced in software and people immediately hate it. This isn't just in software I'm involved with. A classic example is Facebook. Almost as soon as Facebook announces a new feature there is a message going around about how you can protest or keep the old way of doing it.

The problem for me is that there generally isn't anything wrong with the improvement that's been implemented - it's purely that people don't like change and prefer things "as they were". I tend to find that a few weeks later, people are used to the feature, have stopped complaining about it and probably now quite like it.

It's for this reason that I think it's really important that people involved with software development don't automatically react to the public outcry of disgust about a new feature or an improvement to the user interface.

Most of the time, the changes have been debated at length and every aspect of the changes scrutinised to ensure that the change is for the better. It isn't possible for a casual user without access to all of the feedback from the different users of the system to perform this sort of analysis.

In my personal life, I have just moved house to a small village. A few days after we moved it there was a meeting of the Parish Council. We were invited to the meeting by a neighbour and we thought it would be a good way to meet the other neighbours.

When we got to the meeting we discovered that the main issue and the reason that the Parish Council was having its first meeting in more than a year was that there is a proposed wind farm within a few miles of the village.

The farmer who's land the wind farm would be on was at the meeting and seemed very well informed about the whole plan and had been to see other wind farms to understand the full implications of the proposed project.

Anyone who has travelled a lot around Europe in the past few years will have seen wind farms absolutely everywhere. Personally, I really like them. I think the turbines are graceful and interesting and the fact that they are generating clean energy is a bonus.

Unfortunately, the local residents are totally opposed to the idea. This is despite the fact that there is a large wooded area between the houses and the proposed wind farm so they won't be able to see it at all. On top of that, there is a constant background noise from a nearby main road so they won't be able to hear anything. That doesn't stop them wanting to prevent the scheme.

Sadly, these days, nobody wants coal fired or nuclear power stations but it seems they don't want wind power either - well, they probably do as long as it's not near their house!

I really think that it's a shame that more people aren't open to change. Change is inevitable in virtually every area of life one way or another and resisting it will probably just make those people much less happy than they could otherwise be. I just guess it's a good job we're not all the same!

Usability problems: thetrainline.com

Note: This is post is one in a series of usability posts. To read my explanation about what usability is click here.

Thetrainline.com website allows you to search for train times for the UK rail network. On the surface of it, the site is quite well designed and simple to use. There is one major issue that really annoys me. It won’t allow me to search for train times “in the past”.

At this point I can imagine some puzzled faces as people read this and think “why would you want to search for a train in the past”. Well, there are a few times when that would be useful. However, the problem is compounded by the fact that the website only allows searching in 15 minute time intervals.

Let’s suppose it’s 16:31 and I’m 2 minutes away from the train station on my way home. I don't know what time the next train is and want to search to find out. At 16:31 I can only search from 16:45 onwards because 16:30 is “in the past”. That means that there may be a train at 16:39 (8 minutes from now) but I’m not allowed to see that!

Given that most of us carry a web enabled device in our pocket now, it can sometimes easier to look at train times on your mobile. This is especially true when you are at a big train station like London Victoria.

The other problem this presents is that when I’m using a tablet device (like an iPad) to search for trains, I often will leave the search results page open on the tablet. This means I can easily see when and where I have to change trains and what time the next train departs. Unfortunately, iPads sometimes aren’t very clever either so when you turn an iPad on after a period of inactivity it often doesn’t just show you the copy of the page that was already on screen – it goes to get a new copy. At this point, website will tell me that I can’t perform that search as it’s in the past!

If I want to search for a train journey in the past – would it hurt to let me? I think the website should warn me that this journey is in the past but let me see it anyway. That would seem to be a sensible solution!

Ironically, a good while after I started using this website I discovered that I can search for a time in the future and then use the “Earlier” link on the results page to go back and look at trains that are considerably in the past. This proves that the site is capable of delivering this information – it’s just the front page that prevents me which is stupid!

There is a lesson that needs to be learned from this story. Developers shouldn’t put “road-blocks” in software unless they are absolutely necessary. If someone can get around a particular road-block easily or there is no real downside to letting someone perform that function then the developers should seriously question why they’re trying to prevent it being done.

There are frequently times when it is necessary to limit what websites or software can do but these times need to be carefully considered and only be put in with good reason.

What is usability and why should I care?

In life we are totally surrounded by things designed by humans. Anything from a door handle to the most sophisticated software or website has to be designed. There are good and bad designers which means there are plenty of good and bad designs. Probably more annoyingly, there are also lots of designs that don’t really fit into either the good or bad categories but rather, sit somewhere in the middle!

Usability is the art of good designed so that the end product is easily usable. If you’ve found yourself in a hotel room trying to figure out how to turn the shower on; or pushing the wrong side of a door because it’s not obvious how to open it – you have been a victim of a bad design that has a lack of usability.

As a techie I often find myself looking at things and thinking “that’s stupid” because there are bits that just don’t seem to make sense. Most often it’s simple things that annoy me because they should be easy to fix!

I realise that as a software developer, I’m setting myself up for a fall here. Someone will read this post and then beat me with it over some bit of software that I’ve created but that’s ok – at least it may start a debate.

Of course, not everyone thinks in the same way and so differences of opinion always cause disagreements about how things should work. There are sometimes functionality conflicts which mean that something has to be the way it is because of other elements in the system. Additionally, there will always be budget, resource, legacy code and other constraints that limit what is possible. However, the things I’m going to focus on in coming posts are mainly because too often simple things aren’t good enough.

Designers of anything (especially software) should always be trying their hardest to anticipate the issues users will face and think about what makes sense for someone using the system. This is often hard for a software developer because we use the software constantly during development and so may forget what the system looks like to someone seeing it for the first few times.

This blog post is intended as a primer which I will refer to each time I post a message about a usability issue that I’ve discovered.

When should you stop desperately clinging to a failing business model?

There’s been a lot written in the news recently about Blackberry. Research in Motion (better known as RIM) the makers of Blackberry smartphones have had a torrid time lately. First they had a replacement CEO along with a board “shake up” (which was too much of a gentle stir in my opinion) and now there’s news that RIM has warned of financial losses and significant job cuts.

Before Apple and Google decided to get into mobile devices, Blackberry was the dominant player in smartphones. They had a range of devices that had tiny but surprisingly useable keyboards and allowed business people to send and receive emails while on the move.

RIM was actually Canada’s most profitable company for a while with a share price of $150 a share. Today, their share price is barely $10 (in my opinion it’s likely to slip more in coming weeks).

So where did it all go wrong?

Blackberry was one of the must have devices of the mid 2000’s for a lot of business people. The first Blackberry (the 850) was actually a 2 way pager and was launched around 1999 it allowed email communication but was very basic. It ran on a proprietary data only network so could never be capable of being a phone.

Later, RIM brought out devices that used GSM networks (normal 2G mobile networks) which meant that they could start to offer a device that was a phone as well as being an email platform and these devices were very popular.

Because Blackberry grew from a dedicated data network, they charged differently and as such, they managed the charging for the data connections and provided software at an extra cost to allow you to link your email server into their service. This worked really well for a good while but then Apple and Google arrived to spoil the party.

In 2007, Apple brought along the iPhone which was only 2G (the same as Blackberrys at the time) but crucially had no keyboard and relied on a touch screen for everything. This makes a lot of sense for some applications because for things like web browsing or photo viewing, the keyboard is pointless and just takes up space when it’s not needed. That said, the Blackberry was still firmly aimed at corporate email types so they were different beasts really.

The biggest problem for Blackberry was that the iPhone was also very good at emailing. Being able to view full HTML emails was a really useful feature when a lot of other mobile platforms couldn’t do anything like that.

These days, Apple and Android have pretty much taken over the smartphone world with Android being the best-selling mobile operating system and iPhone being the single most popular phone.

Unfortunately for Blackberry, the World has moved on considerably and they seem to be desperately clinging to an outdated business model in the hope that something will change. The bad news is that it won’t. 

On non-Blackberry smartphones, I can connect the phone to my email account and, when I spend all day in front of my real computer reading my email, those emails will show up as “read” in my mobile inbox. Not on a Blackberry unless I go to the trouble of having special software installed on the server. Sadly for me I’m the sort of person who likes a nice tidy inbox with no messages showing as unread so this is a real problem. All other smartphones can do this without extra software – why can’t Blackberry?

My Android or Apple phone can connect to the internet, download apps, send messages/etc with just a data connection from my mobile provider or Wi-Fi. A Blackberry can’t – I have to have a subscription to the Blackberry service. Recently I was playing with a Blackberry phone on a pay as you go SIM card and even though I had a full Wi-Fi connection I wasn’t allowed to update the phone’s software or connect to the app store without paying for a connection through the phone network.

There have been high profile incidents where Blackberry smartphones couldn’t do anything with web or email for days because of failures in the Blackberry network. In my opinion, the business model of having to subscribe to their service is now outdated and wrong. When you look at the history, it’s easy to see why they did it but things moved on and they should have too.

Sadly now it’s probably too late for them to change. They must derive huge revenues from this model and despite the fact that their market share is practically in free-fall, changing that business model is a very scary proposition that the board probably aren’t brave enough to do.

I think this is a real shame. My wife has a Blackberry Torch which I actually like. In day to day terms, it is useable and having a touch screen, a keyboard and the little thumb pad is really nice.

I find that there are lots of silly little usability problems with the Blackberry OS but I’m going to cover some of that stuff in a different blog post. For the most part, it’s not a bad device at all. The problem is – it just isn’t good enough compared to the Android and iPhone devices on the market.

RIM is in the process of demonstrating their latest (and long overdue) operating system to the World – BB10. Can they halt the decline? I seriously doubt it.

This isn’t a new story, throughout the business world the same thing has happened over and over again. Markets change, technology evolves and can kill or seriously maim massive companies because they fail to adapt to the changes – either because they don’t see the changes coming or because they hope they will go away!

Polaroid, Kodak, Blockbuster, Motorola, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, Altavista, Borders and Waterstones are some examples. The list of companies that have suffered massive market share losses goes on and on.

Sometimes, we have to take some very tough and brave decisions in order to move with the times. If we don’t, failure will follow.

Another year another fantastic IMEX Frankfurt

Well it’s that time of year again when the great and the good of the events industry descend on Frankfurt to visit IMEX. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been involved in IMEX for a long time and so I know the organising team very well and enjoy an excellent relationship with everyone there – you couldn’t wish to meet a nicer bunch of people and they are all passionate about the show!

This is the 10th anniversary of IMEX Frankfurt and as you’d expect, there have been a number of changes over the years. A couple of the most noticeable changes have been a change of halls (originally Hall 3 and now Hall 8 when the show grew). Also a change of dates as the show was originally in April but having to change hall to expand also meant the show moved into May.

Probably more startling and a lot harder to spot are the tiny incremental changes that happen every year. The IMEX team work relentlessly on their whole offering all year round and a huge amount of work goes into the website making sure that as much as realistically possible, the site moves forwards and incorporates new technologies and ideas.

It is difficult building a website that people from very diverse cultures all around the World can all get on with relatively easily. There are notable differences in terminology and thought patterns between the Frankfurt and America websites for example. It’s also important to remember that most people only use the show websites for a few weeks a year meaning they have probably forgotten most of what they’d learned last year about how to use it!

Over the past 10 years there have also been some big changes in the World that have had an effect on the events industry too. When IMEX launched in April 2003, who would have thought that 4 years later in 2007, Steve Jobs would unveil paradigm shift in mobile phones?

We’re not talking so much about the actual technology in the phone. It wasn’t massively advanced compared to some other devices at the time “what! No 3G?” was a cry that was heard from techies everywhere when the original iPhone launched.

What it did do was start a whole new world that we today know as “Apps”. Of course, computers have always had “applications” which are the programs that run on the computer, but with phones they became known as “Apps”, came from a single “App Store” and have become far more widespread than anything before.

I honestly don’t think that even Steve Jobs himself could have predicted how that would change the World. Now there are apps for almost anything you can think of, from hundreds of categories, with some lucky developers capturing the public’s imagination and earning a large fortune from them.

Then came the iPad – another device that has made a big impact in the meetings industry. I was walking around the show floor during build-up and there were plenty of stand contractors with iPads for email, stand plans, notes, to do lists and many other things – some were probably even flinging birds at pigs in between building stands. After the show opened there were even more of these devices around as people network and stay connected.

The iPhone and iPad weren’t new ideas though – they brought together a number of existing ideas into a single, very elegantly executed package.

When you think about it, there aren’t actually too many genuinely new ideas. Most things are just a refinement of something else, or a merging of other ideas. A significant fact here for me, is that although there are lots of ideas – the good and well thought through ones are few and far between.

One idea that has bothered me for a long time is that of a virtual reality exhibition. Years ago, there were a lot of companies trying to sell such a thing – there may still be. Their idea was that you could have a computer based 3d modelled environment that you could “virtually” walk around. It would look like the exhibition it represented with the stand layouts/etc.

The big problem with those ideas was that they failed to understand a lot of what an exhibition is about. It’s true that at any exhibition, there is an element of walking around looking for interesting products and services but, there is often a much more important element – networking.

It is invaluable to meet up with people you haven’t seen for a while (perhaps since the last show) and getting the chance to grab 10 minutes and update each other on what you’re both doing. Sending a cold email to someone – even if you know them, doesn’t have the same impact as bumping into them and chatting about new opportunities. Let’s be honest, there are plenty of acquaintances that you may see at an exhibition and talk to but wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable emailing out of the blue.

Similarly for many years now, there has been talk of video conferencing eliminating travelling for face to face meetings. Will it ever really happen? I don’t think so. The power of sitting in a room with someone and chatting while being able to observe all of the nuances of expression and body language often outweighs the travelling time for me.

There’s something impersonal about being on a video screen looking at the person you’re meeting and it will never be the same as being there. I know that video conferencing does add something and there are circumstances where it’s better than a phone call. Now that there are free tools (like Skype and Microsoft Instant Messenger) and most new laptops have a webcam built in, it’s never been easier.

That said, it is just another tool that can be used to enhance communication. It should never replace actual meetings in my opinion. The opportunity to chit-chat about life in general between meetings strengthens bonds and builds friendships. I don’t think it works the same way when you’re digitally separated.

In a world where we have an ever increasing number of ways to communicate through an almost infinite number of channels – sometimes it’s nice to get back to basics and wander around an exhibition hall, recognise people you know and say hi!

I was wrong about the iron in the hotel….or was I?

A couple of days ago I blogged about my experiences in the hotel in Frankfurt. How I had to travel down to reception to get someone to let me up to the 2nd floor where I could use the pressing room to iron my clothes.

It turns out that wasn’t entirely correct but this raises some interesting points which I believe are illustrative of many problems with software and processes in any organisation.

First, let’s look at what happened. In the interests of brevity I omitted a couple of facts about the iron situation in my other blog post. The most relevant of which was that I actually phoned reception and asked how to get to the “Pressing Room” on the 2nd floor. The person at reception answered me accurately with “come down to reception and someone will activate the lift to the 2nd floor for you”.

The problem this illustrates is that human nature is that every question about how to do something is treated as if you were asking for directions. If you ask someone for directions to get to somewhere then they will obviously say “you go down here, turn right/etc”. The point is that you can’t give someone directions to somewhere without knowing where they are to start with.

Unfortunately, with IT and many other things “where you are” is often not the best place to start. As Henry Ford elegantly put it “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, the answer would have been a faster horse”.

This is what we see with people trying to spec software a lot of the time. Frequently they say “can we just have a checkbox for this?” where they should be saying “I need to achieve this, what’s the best solution?”. It’s a subtle change but one that can make a huge difference.

In the iron example, when I rang reception and asked how to get to the pressing room, the best answer would be to say “come to reception and someone will activate the lift to the 2nd floor. However, we can send an iron and ironing board to your room if you prefer”. 

While they answered my specific question accurately, they didn't realise that I knew there was a pressing room and had assumed that meant they couldn’t send an iron to my room. Basically, I was asking the wrong question and if they had thought a bit more about why I was asking the question, they could have given me a better answer.

In life, everything we do is coloured by assumptions. That means we often don’t ask the right questions because we ask the question we want answered based on the assumptions we have made. In the same way, the person hearing the question will have their own assumptions that colour how they hear the question.

The interesting thing is that one of the main skills of a good systems architect is to look beyond the question that’s being asked. It’s not possible to change human nature and get someone to ask better questions all of the time. So the systems architect has to actually work out what is being asked and what the person asking it really wants to achieve, which is often not what they’re asking for.

So yes, I was wrong about the iron – I should have asked a better question!

Hotels need to take a good look at themselves and their competition

Being a fairly regular traveller for both work and pleasure, I find myself staying in a variety of hotels. Right now, I'm staying in a 4* hotel near Messe Frankfurt while I work at IMEX Frankfurt 2012 (www.imex-frankfurt.com).

I'm proud to say that I've a long association with IMEX and the fantastic team that run the show and I've been at every IMEX show since the first one in 2003 so I've stayed at this hotel a number of times over the years.

This hotel has barely changed at all over the years. The only change I’ve noticed at all is that there is now a kettle in the room – impressive progress for 10 years! Don’t get me wrong, this is a very nice hotel with good décor, comfortable beds, nice furniture and a decent bathroom.

There are only really three problems with the hotel for me. The first one is fairly simple and that is that there isn’t an iron in the room. Nor can you have an iron in the room – the only thing you can do is to go to the “Pressing room” on the 2nd floor.

That doesn’t sound too bad but if you’re not in a room on the 2nd floor, this means you have to go down to reception carrying the clothes you need to iron where you can hopefully find a member of staff who will activate the lift for you (there is a clever key card security system on the lifts so that you can’t go to another floor except your own).

Given that the hotel now has reached the dizzy heights of having a kettle in the rooms, it doesn’t seem a big stretch to have an iron and ironing board in the room too. This hotel is primarily a hotel for business travellers so I can’t see this being a problem unique to me!

The next problem is more annoying and is unfortunately common in chain hotels. The guest rooms are advertised as having air-conditioning. The truth is – the rooms are air-conditioned some of the year when the hotel’s management deems that it is warm enough to justify the air-conditioning being switched on.

Despite this, every room has a thermostatic control with different fan settings that optimistically promise a wide variety of temperatures. Alas, all you can have in my room is “hot” or “off”.

There are a growing number of Premier Inn hotels in the UK that have air-conditioning in the room and I’ve yet to find one where I can’t change the temperature to be whatever I want at any time of the year. It’s worth remembering that we’re talking about a budget hotel chain yet they have grasped the fact that people are different and some like it warmer and others like it cooler. It’s no wonder they are the biggest UK hotel chain and my first port of call if I ever need a hotel in the UK.

Yet in “business class” hotels all over the World, business travellers will be well used to hearing that the air-conditioning isn’t switched on until June (or whenever). Even worse, there seems to be almost fanatical adhesion to these rules. I’ve also stayed in hotels where there has been abnormally warm weather earlier in the year but the hotel management still won’t turn the air-conditioning on.

The final problem is again, there is a growing number of hotels that offer free or cheap wifi. Given that I carry 3 devices with me that can consume wifi, free wifi around the hotel would be really useful. Instead, they charge €15 per 24 hour period for wifi – that seems expensive these days – especially when the connection is pretty poor (about 0.5Mbps).

The hotel industry needs to wake up and take notice that the world is changing and people have more choice more easily. Added to that, websites like TripAdvisor are allowing people all over the World to share experiences of the hotels.

How many "poor" or "terrible" reviews does it take to affect whether the hotel gets that big conference contract or not?