A few weeks ago, I flew from the London Luton airport and was surprised to see this low-cost airport equipped with a few automated customer service assistants. The airport is trying to reduce costs everywhere and so replacing real humans with automated assistants that work nearly for free comes as no surprise.

Upon reaching the departures hall, a male assistant (picture below) reminded me that certain items are not allowed on board aircraft. Later in the security check hall, another female assistant informed me that liquids should have been placed in transparent plastic bags and laptops were to be taken out of bags.

I was queuing for the security check for just a few minutes but the messages became very repetitive. What had been a useful reminder, quickly became rather annoying noise. I noticed there was a human operator standing not far from one of the automated assistants, telling passengers which queue to join. After observing this guy for a while, I asked him whether he found the automated assistants a little bit irritating. (A leading question, I know!) Almost instantly, as if he had uttered it for a hundredth time that day, he replied, "You tune it out mate. You just tune it out!" He also told he had been working there with the new ‘colleagues’ for two weeks then.

The way he replied instantly made me realise that work shifts with the non-human colleagues are probably not very popular with the airport staff. No wonder, imagine a colleague of yours repeating the same line for the whole day. For the whole week.

Automated Virtual Assistants are an interesting invention. They surely get much more attention than a boring notice board on the wall. However when designing a customer journey within a service, it is essential that all stakeholders are taken into account. In this case, while virtual assistants might be fulfilling the short-term business needs by reducing costs and speeding up the queue, their implementation means that neither the customer’s nor the staff’s experience is improved. On contrary, they might be potentially causing friction. In the long term this may damage the brand, affect traveller’s choice of airport, and would make staff more likely to quit their jobs.

Service design needs to address the customer experience holistically, and any potential knock-on effects need to be considered. Subtle changes could make all the difference. All airport customers follow the same route which makes careful positioning and Directional Sound a possible solution. This would ensure the message gets heard in context without becoming just annoying noise.

Great team effort from our colleagues over at Foolproof who produced this extensive expert review on the 2012 London Olympic ticketing system as it went live. Read the full report on the Foolproof website: ‘London 2012 ticketing opens for applications’.

No not that sort... the sort that makes my experience of the internet personal and efficient.
The European law makers aren’t so keen, or to be more accurate, they want to websites to get “explicit consent” from their users before they place a cookie on their computer or other device.  (See the story on the BBC website).

What is a cookie?

Very simply, a cookie is a text file which your browser can store to your computer when instructed by a website. It stores information about you, or what you are doing, which the website can access in the future.

Used properly, cookies can greatly enrich a user’s experience of a website.

• Recognition:: Cookies provide a great middle ground between anonymous and authenticated. They enable a site to say “Hi Meriel, here’s your stuff” without forcing an annoying login for a task which simply doesn’t require a full identify check.
• Preferences: Cookies can be used to store user preferences, such as accessibility settings, or preferred formatting.
• Processes: Although shopping baskets are going to be excluded from the legislation, there are many other types of process such as form filling. Cookies enable users to return to a process part way through, thereby providing convenience and removing a lot of frustration.

Most web browsers receive cookies by default, but have options to let people choose individually or refuse all.

What problem are they trying to solve?

This legislation seems be a rather blunt instrument. It is intended to stop websites collecting user data, and using it for behavioural advertising.

• Is behavioural advertising so bad? If you reframe it as personal recommendations then it’s a feature many value. We must remember that all advertising is carefully placed to get maximum exposure to the right market.
• If they are trying to let consumers control whether they receive behavioural advertising then focus on that – don’t put in place blanket legislation which will cause far more damage to online experiences. They should be legislating to control the use of the data rather than the mechanism for collecting it.

What’s the problem with asking for permission?

In normal life, I don’t expect people I meet to get my consent before remembering details about me. On the contrary, I am flattered when I discover that they have remembered me and are willing to tailor future conversations. I would, however, be upset if they had slipped something into my bag without my knowledge. Asking for permission for cookies is effectively likening cookie placement to putting something in my bag rather than remembering something. Physically, that may be more accurate, but the metaphor causes problems because we’re dealing with technology, not people. Technology can only ‘remember’ by storing data – and it needs to store it where it can get to it.

The legislation requires explicit consent before a cookie is placed. With a willing user in the right context, this can be as simple as ticking a checkbox during registration, like the “remember me” ones on many sites. Things are not always so simple.

• Interruption: In a lot of situations, users are in a state of concentration (or flow) and will be interrupted by the request for consent. This damages the experience and therefore the brand.
• Comprehension of benefit vs. risk: Cookies are simple text files which can do no harm to your computer and they are usually used to great benefit, much of which will not be visible (nor should be) to most users. The less technical are likely to get upset about a file being placed on their computer and will say “no” without realising the impact on their experience.

What can website owners do?

The details of the legislation are not yet available even though the restrictions are officially coming into effect in May 2011. Here are a few initial thoughts:

• Placement of consent: It is important to identify the susceptible moments when consent can be easily framed in terms of benefit and with least impact to user flow.
• Consent wording: The wording on the permission is critical. It may be that the “explicit consent” will need to be specific words. I hope that these are focused on the benefits to the user rather than the technology or ‘dangers’.
• Authentication: Consider piggy backing off a single sign-on service. A client of ours has been implementing Facebook registration. This works well because users are often already signed in to Facebook, meaning that our client can identify them and provide a personal experience without requiring their own cookie.
• Page design: You will need to design for the no-sayers as well as those who accept cookies. This will mean really understanding all the different scenarios of use for each page and providing relevant opportunities for login.
• Consider other channels: If it becomes harder to tailor your site to an arriving user, then you might consider using other channels to personalise their experience, e.g. email.

Although the legislation is concerned with a technological restriction, the knock-on effects are all about experience. It shifts the goalposts a little for the design of websites.  We’ll be watching this space closely and we’re happy to share our thoughts with you.

The advent of Video on Demand (VoD) services such as iPlayer and 4oD has revolutionised TV. Traditionally TV has been a passive consumption experience, where content is pushed out via schedules carefully tailored by broadcasters to the tastes and mood of the audience watching at a particular time.

More change is yet to come with the advent of connected TV (CTV) such as the high profile YouView. CTV is essentially the next generation of freeview; the merging of Digital TV, VoD, PVR and Web Apps.

Some describe YouView as “genuinely market leading”, others claim that despite the opportunity the current fragmented experience presents, by 2012 the market will be very saturated (NMA, 2011).

As the diagram below shows YouView is not the only contender, CTV can come in many forms; a set top box, similar to those used by IPTV companies such as Sky, directly into the TV or via a games console.

The current and connected TV landscape - Connected TV as the “Pay TV platform without the Pay”

The rise of online viewing: Suggested discovery and disintermediation and the affect on audience, broadcaster and advertising power

As TV becomes more interactive, the challenge is now to ensure that what is great about TV is not lost. The flexibility of viewing and sheer volume content available has already proven hugely popular, allowing a more personalised experience, where views can watch what they want when they want to.

So I went to hear what Bill Scott (Easel TV) and Marc Goodchild (BBC IPTV) had to say at the recent Bristol Media Innovation Academy event; IPTV & YouView – What’s in it for us?

“The most important consideration is to retain the serendipity and simplicity of the TV. Consumer habits are slow to change and whilst, over time, people may get more used to interacting with their TV, the default viewing mode is to sit back and watch. The user experience is very different to the web on a PC.” Bill Scott.

Bill proposed a solution of “suggested discovery”, replacing the linear broadcast schedule with a personalised suggested playlist generated using a combination of viewer and social trending data. Rather than relying on search boxes and keyboards.

He also explained how the rise of online viewing may result in ‘disintermediation’ of the broadcasters as advertisers pay content producers directly or third party aggregation services which enable users to bypass channels. This reduction in the position of power of broadcasters could negatively impact on advertising revenue disrupting the whole commissioning model.

However, Bill believes that the knowledge of their audience that Broadcasters possess and the resultant trust users place in the Brands (channels) to meet their entertainment needs will remain an important factor. CTV will also mean that for the first time brands will be able to uniquely identify viewers. When this is combined with the potential of CTV to provide a more personalised and engaging TV and advertising experience, by drawing on valuable unique viewer data, brands could potentially demand more for advertising slots.

So in line with what YouView bosses and partners claim in the recently published NMA Cover story: Delays risk making YouView 'irrelevant' (Feb, 2011), it seems clear that the key to it’s success is to turn a complex technology product into a simple, transformational and opportunistic user experience, to consumers and advertisers alike.

Nevertheless, “Interactive TV” has actually been around for a while, as Marc reminded us with his insightful overview of the lessons learnt from developing BBC red button experiences. The great challenge now for the UX industry is to start to define what a great user experience is when TV finally becomes truly interactive.