An experiment in light expression

Yesterday on my way home I got a call from a certain car dealership company in Bangalore from where I’d purchased my first car. After some small talk on how the car was doing and such, the lady rep on the phone got to the point. Here is how the conversation went:

Rep: Sir, did you receive a customer feedback form from our Delhi office

me: Umm, No

Rep: Sir, when you do could you make sure you rate us 8 out of 10

me: What?

Rep: Sir, the ratings of the Delhi office are really important for us. If you rate us less than 8 it will reflect bad customer service

Me: Umm, O…K, but what if i got bad customer service (which i havent, but what if)

Rep: No problem Sir, you rate us over 8 and come to the showroom - we will fix whatever problem you’ve had with us

Me: Right…ok

At that point the rep hung the phone leaving me puzzled if i were living in some strange Orwellian fantasy world for those 2 minutes!

While listening to Barry Vandevier of Travelocity, i noted that very few companies have actually walked the talk in terms of ‘open innovation‘. Most companies pay lip service to building an innovation culture across their global workforce (from the mailroom boy to the documentation guy to the UI designer) but end up building ‘innovation’ silos which, when they interact with the rest of the ‘normal’ organization do so very little, very late.
In this regard, Yahoo and Travelocity’s Hackday initiatives are inspiring. Both companies have held Hackdays regularly in their US and international locations, and Yahoo has even gone one step ahead and hosted a ‘public’ Hackday. The notion of bringing in select groups and individuals from outside the company to seed new knowledge networks within the company is an old one but doing so in a Hackday format is pretty innovative. There is a difference between a 1 hour staid lecture and a 24 hour marathon design and technology creation session.
There is something exciting about the Hackday format - throw in a lot of smart and hands on people in a large room with lots of coffee, pump up the challenge by having multiple groups competing, and then select winners based on audience polls and expert reviews - i would argue that this format is suitable for any sort of post-brainstorming work and especially so for ’suits’ - there is nothing more heartening than seeing people create new concepts and ideas without the bureaucracy of top down organizational structures.

Jared Spool’s article “Surviving our success: 3 radical recommendations” in last month’s Journal of Usability Studies is a nice quick read.

He proposes 3 recommendations to deal with a common problem (backed by studies such as by Rolf Molich) that CEOs point to — UE findings by supposed experts can be very variable depending on who conducts the evaluations.

Among usability studies conducted by dozens of ‘credible’ teams across the world, Molich found that usability studies on everyday products such as Hotmail and the Flash based Hotel Penn website (which is a favorite hiring ‘test’ for some firms) had a lot of variation in what experts thought of as ‘catastrophic’ issues. Very few of the teams that conducted the usability studies had similarities on what they thought were P1 issues.

Here are Spool’s 3 radical recommendations – perhaps worth a thought:

1.    Stop Making Recommendations
2.    Stop conducting evaluations
3.    Seek out new techniques

Read the paper to see the details on these recommendations – they’re not as controversial as they appear!

A few days back I finally finished the Black Swan - a rigorous and empirically skeptical (and darkly humorous) take on randomness, stock markets, experts, and life. I enjoyed the contents of the book as much as trying to read into the genius mind of Nassim Nicholas Taleb - a practitioner with sound footing in theory. Mr. Taleb is a genius no less and also bold and relentless with little tolerance for fools and financial ‘experts’.