I had the pleasure in January of briefly visiting Seattle to see my old friend and mentor, David Anderson. On the Saturday I went with him and his elder daughter for a toddle around the canal locks in Ballard, followed by a coffee (what else?) at a local cafe. As David pointed out, this cafe specialises in cupcakes, thus differentiating itself from the ubiquitous Starbucks and Tullys — a “plus one” marketing concept.
Being January, and Seattle, it wasn’t exactly tropical outdoors. When we got in to the cafe there was quite a long queue, and all the seats were taken or reserved. (This latter practise of bagging a seat which stays empty whilst those ahead in the queue are then forced to stand and drink is not my idea of good manners.)
Anyhow, it occurred to me that the queue itself was part of the experience. You get to longingly gaze into the cabinet of cupcakes, discuss with your friends which type you want to guzzle. You’re in the warm, out of the chilly wind. You can smell the aroma of the drinks being prepared; there’s a sense of anticipation in the palate. You watch groovy Ballardites doing their Saturday thing. You aren’t too hurried and flustered in selecting a drink and encoding your order in the local coffee dialect — “A ventissimo ne plus ultra grande sucrified milky-milky cocoa beverage, please.” (Handy hint: theobromine is a better mood-altering drug than caffeine.)
I believe I once read of studies of how much people’s enjoyment of Disneyland rides varied with how long they queued. The result? Zero queue was not the best! Even the newer fast ticket bypass system still makes you wait in anticipation for your allotted time on the big ride, just without the pain of standing in line.
The lesson from all this is that value in the eyes of the customer is not some simple end-product of an industrial process. Indeed, it can be hidden and subtle. The activity is not the same as the user’s goal. At the extreme, what appears to detract value may be an intrinsic part of the experience; and adding more features and capabilities in fact decreases value.
With various consulting clients, I’ve been unpicking the value proposition of messaging and telephony. You can read about some of the results in my ETel ketnote. But here’s an example that doesn’t appear in any of my client reports of how value is created and destroyed. (Disclosure: I think I got the insipration for this one from an article I read once, but I’ve lost all references.)
When you send an SMS to someone, you have almost total certainty that it will be consumed on a mobile handset. Furthermore, that handset is a personal device used by one person alone; and there is a social taboo of messing with other people’s handsets and checking their messages. So there is a strong privacy value element to SMS, because the sender can make assumptions about how the message will be received and consumed.
Now, imagine for some moment that an overexcited telco doing some triple/quadrouple/whatever play bundle decides it would be a great idea to integrate messaging and telephony. Now, if your TV is on then your text messages also are displayed there in a little scrolly box at the bottom of the screen.
Does this new feature create or destroy user value? My belief is that it destroys more privacy value than it creates in distribution value. No longer can senders be sure that messages will be consumed on a small, personal, private 1.5-inch screen; rather, they may be broadcast to the whole household or visitors. The “feature” has net-negative value. But the only way you’ll work this out is by going through the intellectual exercise of decomposing the activities involved in the product and reverse-engineering out the underlying value to the user.
Sadly, my experience in telcoland tells me you’re liable to be labelled a freak for even trying.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 09:54 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Ssssh! Don't let my wife read this. It's our little secret. Kids today don't get to eat cupcakes. ;-)
Posted by: at March 8, 2006 01:48 PMShort note - I happen to agree with you fully on this one. Reminds me when I was working testing MMS and even as a "blind" engineer could see it was going to be of low value - we found it hard to configure, we had terrible handset interop., and you could not know in advance if the receiver had a compatiable terminal and to put the cherry on the cake, it cost 2-3 times as much as txt.
Posted by: at March 10, 2006 12:49 AM