Ends. A Critical Difference- Transcript

Transcript

1. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 JOE MACLEOD: Give me a minute while I up. And while I am setting up I would like to introduce a few people who will come up onto the stage as part of the upfront global initiative that Lauren Currie started a few years ago. She is from the UK, and this helps people who are interested in doing this job where you stand here in front of you lot… This is Alex, Tom, Belle, and Tina. First of all, you have to do this kind of stuff which is boring. Clicking things in stuff. While I am doing this, I will tell you a bit about my history of why I got into this, and why I started thinking about this. I had a couple of experiences really early on, like 2004, one of them with a voice recognition service on your mobile phone, and it would pick up messages and say, "Handle voice messages." You remember when people use to use answer phone messages? I thought it was great and I signed up and I had this conversation with Wildfire and when like this, "Hey, tell me who this is." And they said, "Hey, I don't understand it." And that was how it worked. I was so angry about it. I wanted to throttle Wildfire and have its horrible avatar eyes fade to black. And I didn't have a vocabulary to express what I felt about it, my emotional feelings about it. So hopefully that should be working now. That was way back in 2004. I have done a couple of little projects. Mostly shallow. Thinking back on it, it was pretty shallow. So then I had a career that went through those of telecom companies. I was head of design at Us2 for a couple of years which was great, it was a great company. I was intrigued and I want to learn more about ends and why we have designed them. I believe it's a critical thing we have to improve on. And I will talk about ends. Right, we are all going to die. I am just going to put that out there. Historically, we were a lot more comfortable with that. We were historically more comfortable with witnessing death, talking about death, and the idea of dying and being comfortable with that. We have distanced that over centuries and we have also started doing that with our consumer experience over centuries. And this removal of distancing and endings has sacrificed consumer involvement, belief, I guess, in some sense. We have distance ourselves from responsibility. The consequences of that, I think, are climate change, mis-selling of climate services, and hideous things like revenge porn in digital. I have done a couple of decades of digital product development, digital products, I have had lots of conversations about design and going into big companies, small companies – hundreds of products I have been involved with. And we all go through the same mechanism, the same team, the same conversations, and be really excited about the onboarding. How was a consumer going to discover this? How will they use it? Let's test it and really understand what
2. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 2 of 12 they want out of this thing. And then next walk away from it. You know who deals with that last, lonely journey between usage and the end? The consumer. They are ridiculed, threatened, exposed, uninstructed, and that is down to us. We built a culture around creation – that isn't the right thing to do. But before you start blaming yourself, and I like blaming myself for all sorts of things, blame history. Because we can go way back in history. Imagine yourself in, let's say, the 14th century. You are in a dirty old field, digging up turnpis or something. Everyone is dying, you're comfortable with that, and you kind of want to because you want to get to heaven. Most religions have a component of heaven and they have a similar offering in heaven. They're pretty much offering abundance, warmth and nice people. Unless it is Valhalla, and we can come to that later. But that's different. But to get to heaven, and you desperately do want to, you have to go through explicit rule systems and follow practices over your life, and one of them is how you die – your funeral. And making that a good funeral which is very special, etc. But then, 1347, the plague arrives in Europe and decimate Europe. Within three years that killed a third of Europe's population. To give you an idea of how many people that is, there is an anecdote from a friar in France. He used to bury 28-30 people annually in his village in France. In the first September of the plague he buried over 600 people. So when your life is hard and you are really into heaven, that messes up when people start dying in big amounts. Death becomes meaningless. The dominant religion at the time was the Catholic religion. They were mismanaging that situation, let's say. They were doing things called indulgences. That was a new product on the market, an indulgence. It was signed by the Pope, it was for rich people, to get you out of purgatory. And that hasn't changed much, has it? It also saw these new challenge of a legend which came along – start-up religions which are more dynamic, they are future-facing. And the Protestants at this different idea about how we should live our lives. There are three things, they did lots of stuff, but three things I think are key to this issue. The first one is fasting. Martin Luther very quickly removed the idea of fasting from the Protestant religious calendar. Most religions have a period of fasting where everybody removes themselves from the abundance of life and will reflect and give thanks and appreciate how lucky they are. So we removed that from the Protestant calendar in northern Europe. We also changed the relationship with jobs. In the Catholic religion there were three good jobs – Pope, priest and nun. All the other jobs were rubbish. They were the God-given jobs stop in the Protestant world, they decided that everyone, if you're doing a good job, thoughtfully, not
3. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 3 of 12 hurting anyone, and that was a good job in the eyes of God. If you think your education or LinkedIn has anything to do with your career path, that is the Protestants. You should talk about that in your next job interview, how the Protestants helped you 300 years ago. The first thing in the eyes of God, which was considered a bit dodgy, they considered investment in the eyes of God is a good thing, that you invest in your business in the eyes of God and your business starts to do well and you put in more growth and invest more and have growth and more investment... These started to lay the groundwork for when we are today. A couple of hundred years later, we started to have the Industrial Revolution. Because up until then, as consumers, the consumption we were doing was consuming on the kitchen table of the food, and the waste from that would be given to the animals and the waste from the animals would go on the land and the abundance from the land would come back on the kitchen table. The consumer could see and observe that as it goes around. The Industrial Revolution changed that circle to a linear experience, and then we started to split it from beginning to end. This was basically initially factories making much better product so we could make much more products, start the experiences at the beginning of the customer life- cycle. And we could start to tell stories, so we could fill the factory that needed more orders and we would tell people stories about how great this product was that they were going to use. We also started to attach people's identity to the consumption they were doing, initially through banking and debt, and more recently emotionally through a like on Facebook or follow on Twitter. At the same time we started to distance the relationship with the end. If you think of Jon Snow, not the game of thrones gyu, the guy who observed germs distributing in Soho. Can you imagine telling someone from that period about germs. "Have you had about germs? They get inside you and kill you." Everyone is like what? It blows their mind. Only this specialist person can see germs, it is not for ordinary consumers to understand germs. But through telling this story to the centuries, things like radiation and the atom bomb can only be seen by the specialists, and we tell ourselves the same story about climate change, only a specialist can see it and the consumer has no relationship with it. This is split up in a sort of psychosis from me over here who loves buying stuff. But in all of us, we also got a civil self. So me jumping on an aeroplane and pumping loads of carbon into the atmosphere, loving buying a ticket and getting on at the airport, buying loads of stuff, eating all of that, at the other end unlike, "Isn't it awful, climate change?" That's the same person. I've got this psychosis around consumption. Let me put this into modern context with printer ink cartridges. I've got a printer that runs out of ink every five minutes so I go out and buy a new cartridge, put the new one in, then I'm holding the old one thing, what should I do with that? It is really poisonous, I can't shut that in the bin. There are two other marketing messages on the back of the printer cartridge. Go online, look around, find out this company has been doing a really good recycling and reclaiming program for 20 years.
4. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 4 of 12 So I feel in 2500 words of T&Cs, I have committed my personal data of where I live and they send me an envelope which takes two days to arrive. I put that in the envelope, then I have to go to the post office, another two days for it to get back to them, properly five days, the whole cycle is hidden and I've had to do loads of work to find it, I've given personal details, made legal commitments. That is the off-boarding experience that someone hasn't really thought through. But we're doing that everywhere, we do it in services, products, and that is sort of killing us. Why do emotional endings? Because humans love stories. We have communicated in stories for thousands of years, it was the primary way of educating people through different generations, long before we had books. And the endings of those stories are vital. Endings of narratives preserve the natural social order which would be threatened by endlessly erring narratives. I think about that in the context of people who have lost their homes and there have endless problems with their credit. ... Moral authority, a purposeful interpretation of life and genuine stability. Isn't that politically close to what we're dealing with with climate change? Throughout history, we've been pretty good at giving reflection and giving thanks. All sorts of cultures have had a harvest festival. Whether you were the ancient Egyptians respecting the many gods, the harvest out of that, the made in China, or you were in the UK and the last cart was celebrated as it entered the village, the bounty that people had invested in and celebrated for the whole year. A celebratory giving thanks. We have also done that with people moving to America, in the first Thanksgiving. They even invited the natives as a gesture of goodwill. They have since turned things giving into a massive consumer boom as well, although that is a bit of a different story but very much attached. Imagine the big things that you do that you have no thanks for. This is the biggest commitment all your life – your mortgage, every month I'm going to pay the mortgage, buy that massive house. And at the end of that after 25-30 years, you get a letter from the bank that says you've paid the debt off. A letter, a call later. Don't you think there should be a lot more around that? We do it with credit cards as well. Do you ever get thanks for paying your debt down on a credit card? Very rarely. That is not where the gain is. Teaching us to borrow more money, thanks given, none. Some companies have been doing it. This man who developed a bank in Bangladesh, read the book called 'Banker to the Poor', crying, laughing, crying, it is an emotional rollercoaster reading that book. Part of that, micro payments and lending to people in small groups, individuals in small groups would be encouraging each other to pay back and celebrating paying back, not borrowing more. I'm sure many of you have heard of Marie Kondo, who has been doing the Netflix thing, which I think is a great bastardisation of a thing. Looking at people's houses in a grotesque way. She is a de-clutterer from Japan, and she gets all the stuff
5. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 5 of 12 Out into categories and you had to pick up each thing and say, does it bring me joy? And if it doesn't, you put it into the pile to be disposed of, then you pick up things to be disposed of and you say, "Thanks, comfortable shoes, for allowing me to work up a mountain and see these amazing views. We say goodbye now." Then you put it into the appropriate mechanism. That sounds insane, doesn't? Saying goodbye to things. If you do that in the west, you think it's mental, but it is actually really important, saying thanks to things will make you appreciate them a lot more. Some companies get into grappling with endings, by making lifetime promises. And they are hysterical. Has anyone heard of the Dominoes Forever campaign? It is in Russia. Domino's Russia said to their followers, if you get a tattoo on a prominent area of your body of the Domino's logo, we're going to give you pizza for life. And it kicked off. People are getting tatoos everywhere. Then something happened, and I reckon it was that global Domino's rang them up and said, "What the fuck are you up to? That is not our brand." They pulled the campaign within five days. What I think is genius about this, there is a company which is all about speed, disposability, fast food. They really don't care about longevity. They have made promises forever to ask you to do something permanent, and then they said it's over in five days. Genius. But they're not the only ones who do it. American Airlines in the 1980s were running out of money and they thought, let's get some crazy ideas, they probably got their marketing team together to whip up some wacky ideas to make more money. So they decided to make a golden ticket, lifetime and endless flights, quarter of a million quid, put it down, for 25 grand you can get another one. In old 1980s money. There is this Wall Street broker guy who has added up the numbers in his head, thinking it's a really good deal and he is all in. They sold 63 of these tickets. They actually had to pull one of them which ended up being this guy's. He went at it after he got a ticket. 10,000 flights, he'd done, 10 million miles. Individually, he cost the company $21 million. The CEO of the company at the time, the biggest deficit that company had in terms of an idea. You've really got to think through endings. This is another example, a bit more digital, on brand for the audience, we are all working in digital. This company come along and said, I bet a lot of people want to put their digital stuff away forever, really secure it down or stop as it's not like a drawer – someone might come in and steal your digital stuff. This is the forever, guaranteed, pay them some money to store up some digital assets for you forever. Obviously it is targeted at baby boomers who don't know much about the service. I like the idea that they have this fund which allows you to migrate from one platform to another as the future beautifully blossoms in front of us. This company is seven years old and they are promising you lifetime +100 years. I don't think we're going to make it to 20, actually. I can probably guarantee, I could make a company that guarantees death in 20 years and I bet we will beat them to it.
6. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 6 of 12 And you couldn't do this without cybernetics, the promise of being frozen and re-birthed into a future world where you are cured of your time-limiting life. Damn that time-limiting life. Don't just imagine the world of the future – personally experience based travel, virtual reality and other incredible things, including the gangrene because they couldn't quite unfreeze your leg. Probably. That wasn't in the detail. I read a book 2 years ago about ends, and I've been trying to place awareness about how we design better endings, try to become more aware of them and respect our environment and respect and reflect on the benefits we get out of them. More recently I have been doing more about the business of that and developing tools and techniques. I will go into a few of those now for the next bit. I will talk about the intent of what we're trying to achieve, some of the strategies around what we can change in businesses, the sequence of events, because if you start dealing with end a lot more, some of the sequences around the life style change happen, and then about consumers. Probably won't do tools today, haven't got the time. Could waffle on for hours. Let's look at intent. Take responsibility, intend, take change, dealing with it within the consumer life-cycle, not at the outside. But that is just some flippant tagline. Who hasn't made up one of those before? So I thought, let's get some more practical examples. A big part of it is business culture. Lots of businesses around growth and sales and not around the long-term benefits. And also, there is also a bit about consumer experience. Let's look at the business culture. Businesses have to change to having open conversations about endings. I bet if you told someone on Monday that there was an interesting conversation about ends, see how many people will ask you what the hell you are on about. You will be kicked out and downgraded, and they will come up with crazy ideas. We have to open ended conversations. Lots of our experiences linger too long, so we have to have an end-of-life plan. Let's go into those in more detail. This is Reid Hoffman, he started LinkedIn. He has different ideas about how we should work. He says, "Acknowledging that employees might leave is how you build the relationship that convinces great people to stay." And that is very much around what that consumer experience should be. We're going to start discussing that with the consumer and not denying them the ability to talk about endings. And is also about expiring collaborative efforts. Lots of our devices, like my phone and this laptop, a couple of generations ago I could update my laptop and put in a new battery. Not anymore, they are full up with glue. My eyes are so bad I can't look at the tiny screws on the phone. I can't even change the screen on it when it cracks any more. Totally impenetrable to a consumer. But Fairphone have changed that. A phone is being offered up where you can upgrade the camera, they are inviting you in. They're doing this collaboratively with you. Extending the life of
7. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 7 of 12 that product. And also we have to actively conclude the end of that lie. Not let things linger forever. When you get your new phone, you have your old phone and you are like, "what shall I do with that?" And then you open up the drawer of your desk and you put it in there with the other five generations of mobile phones you don't know what to do with. Patagonia has actively gone out and are starting to talk to people about the end of life of those products right there with the consumer. They are upgrading or improving or taking back those products. Think about business strategy. Our businesses are in this mindset of single engagement. And it comes from going out manually selling to people, like a good few decades ago, so what businesses like to think is that there is a consumer out there who will become my customer in one single permanent relationship forever. But that doesn't happen, my marriage ends in two ways – death or divorce, no other way out. If you think ends don't happen to your business, you are insane. Because they do, they smash in and blow your consumer experience to smithereens. And you get shards of broken experiences littering the digital, physical and service ecosystem. And that is the type of things which ends with waste plastic in the sea, revenge porn and lost pensions. We have to move to multiple engagement options which says, there is a consumer over there he will become a customer, until they might choose to leave of their own free will, and I have designed this off boarding process which helps them, collaboratively, through a relationship, honestly with me, the provider, and we gain back some trust and they are free to look at other places. But of course, when you go to work, someone will mention the word retention. And they will say, "Yes, but we need to do some retention to stop people leaving. You can't leave, no way." That is what consumers get told. There are two reasons consumers leave – either the product doesn't fit their needs, or external factors. Is the answer to either of those questions, "Stop them leaving"? It isn't, is it? There are two answers to that, it is either to improve the product or, empathy. When retention goes on, a consumer buys product, consumer likes product, consumer decides there is a new product somewhere else that might want to go for, or external factors. And then the 'you can't leave' retention sign comes in which talks them out of it and then they are in the post-retention regret world. You will erode your brand ending. How many of you have been forced to stay with the company and then hated them and told everyone how much you hate them? It happens all the time. We have to move to a multiple engagement model and you have to start strategically looking at brand equity over decades and multiple engagements where the consumer might not be with you that long. They designed then.
8. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 8 of 12 There are some quirks as well with ends which are pretty weird. This is Kia cars. They brought out a seven-year warranty a few years ago. Most products were based on product material warranties. Do you remember those Volkswagen ads when people would radically shut a car door and say, "That sounds like a Volkswagen?" Anyway, Kia Cars comes along and says a seven year warranty, and every one is surprised. The thing about seven years, though, is that humans find it hard to think beyond five years, to get those job interview questions of financial services questions, where they ask you what you are going to be doing in five years time, and you think, maybe at this job still, or maybe a millionaire or something. But when you go beyond five years, it gets difficult to imagine. It's like a void, a darkness. Like death. Like product death. And Kia Cars are saying that just over there is a funeral and you are going to go there and then come back and we will sort you out with another car. Since they introduced a seven-year warranty, their market share is doubled. Consumers value the warranty over every other part of the car. And the consumers are very loyal. And then Snapchat. Years ago, I was wondering if I should go with Snapchat or Facebook. You are thinking that through. I thought that Snapchat is for intimate couples to send things to one another. So I thought I would go with Facebook. A much safer option. They will probably fuck up the world's democracy, but hey. So I thought I would go with Facebook. So, Snapchat, 'delete is our default'. Can you imagine a company having delete as a default. People love the company because it'll delete stuff. That's insane. Gyms have a terrible turnover rate. The churn rate is terrible. What tends to happen with gyms is that you have Christmas and then you put on a lot of weight, and the new go to a gym and you signup in January and then you are really into it, at least in northern Europe it starts to get lighter, and then come March someone asks if you want to come out for a beer and you do, so you don't go to the gym, and in March 20 April and June. By June, you are out every night. No more gym for you because you are drinking lagers in the park. And then you are thinking that you are wasting lots of money at the gym, so you will unsign up to the gym. Then you go to the gym and they tell you that you can't cancel the contract. So you go off and decide you will go to the doctor's, because a friend says you got out of the gym because you had an aching knee. So you go back to the gym with your note and they tell you, no, there's a clause on X, Y and Z. And they tell you can't leave the gym. That's the gym market. TV market is similar. They say you have to stay with us, in fact, Sky up until recently, said you could only leave during a one-hour sales interview with a professional salesperson. And then after that, if you have gone through that challenge, with your shield held high, battled with the best salesperson we have, then you can leave. Someone came up to me a couple of months ago and said they had gotten rid of that six weeks ago. Six weeks ago? That is 2019, isn't it? Both of these markets have been totally disrupted by endings. The gym industry, at the top, we have things like spas with cucumber on your eyes, and personal trainers, that is still intact. And
9. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 9 of 12 then the whole of the middle has fallen away, and then there is super-quick come and go as you please gyms with no contract. That is a great ending. Comfortable, quick ending. Netflix does the same – they are proud of their come and go, no hassle online cancellation. The consumer satisfaction of Netflix is 78%. Traditional pay-TV, essentially what we experience when we watch TV, and not caring where it comes from, through a cable or whatever, has gone down 11 years consistently. It is now at 62%. Because you can't get out of those contracts. I will give you a quick example. Apple. Life is easier on the iPhone but death is in. The end of an iPhone isn't easy. You know we have these onboarding experiences that have to be incredibly well polished. We have all done one of these, for a printer or a phone or whatever. These are complicated things. To pull all that stuff together and make a great consumer experience is a complicated thing. And once you've done that, you are into a stable, comfortable usage within minutes. Brilliant. But that doesn't happen at the end. That usage to the end is that lonely journey of every consumer. So, Apple does do endings, they think, but basically that is these type of endings. These are after the event. This laptop on the left has been a loyal member of our family for 12 years. My wife had it, she worked on it, and then she gave it to these kids. And then now it is swollen, looks like it might blow up in your son's face as he goes on roadblocks on the weekend. And you start to think you might take it back. So we went back to Apple, son in hand, his laptop in his hand about to blow up, and we say that we will bring it back, I think you should dismantle it under safe procedure. He says he will get a form. A form?! Am I in the 18th century? I don't want a form at this stage, isn't there an off- boarding thing where you tell my son that he is a valued customer and given a voucher? They also do a buyback scheme, but that is the end of the product experience. And I have offboarded emotionally by that time. I have left emotionally as a consumer. But they do know a lot about the degrading of that product as you have that experience. They have brought out this physical performance thing recently, a patient from last year. They know hairline cracks in your product, your screen, which you can't even see, a patient filed last year by Apple. They also have the capability of your software and the battery life and some of the features you are probably not using any more. There is loads of bits of information and data on your device that could be assembled. And at the moment, it is just distributed and no one is pulling them together in any meaningful experience. So corralling this information into a meaningful bit of information that we can engage with in the collaborative sense between me and Apple, would be great. And they would get more engagement. You can imagine a situation where amongst the fitness apps, is the fitness of my iPhone as well. So I could understand the performance of my device as it starts to lower in quality. Then I can
10. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 10 of 12 make predictions about when to upgrade, and then we've got a conversation about what is happening, reclaiming, and not giving me a form at the end of my experience. Also, endings are obviously going to change the sequence of events as a consumer goes through those events. There are roughly about seven consumer endings. You can map them over services, products, digital. And you can imagine the timeout, in terms of services, you go two weeks, holiday, off for two weeks, that is ended, isn't it? You have a warranty period that also sell-by dates so there is an ending in that. And in digital a one-year licence agreement. You can imagine somebody turning up at your house to fix the boiler, it is completed. We have experienced a lot of broken withdrawal endings when we have signed up to start-up apps, where they go, "That's a cool feature, I love it, comment, commit, download, engage, make friends in app. They are doing well. They have sold out? Yahoo has bought them?" We also end up having lingering relationships with products, like your phone in a drawer. It might be in your house, you don't use it, it is out of date, lingering around, you haven't concluded that relationship. There is also aspects of proximity in our endings. For example, in services, in the UK open get the service of the BBC, and what a proud service it is. Then I moved to Sweden so I had to go on VPN so I was out of proximity unless I became illegal. But when you move from Apple to Android, you move out of the jurisdiction of that thing. Let me give you an example of how to analyse that in terms of some of your products. Which I think is a really messed up. Freemium comes in off in three flavours. You have time out when after three months of usage, that is the end of your freemium experience, you get credit out, after five events and that is the end of freemium. Or you will get only a certain feature set and outside of that you can sign up to get the full, bountiful feature set. What is funny about how polished the endings are in freemium models, the same companies that do really good freemium do really bad endings, when actually they've got endings down in some of these aspects. What I suggest they should do in freemium is make them more disruptive and make the people who pay for the real service make a much better ending there, and it would be way better. People often ask about how we can get this into projects, because no-one will think about endings on Monday. So you will have to do sneaky things and engage in a long philosophical debate about the meaningfulness of endings and then have to go back to the Protestants to justify it, which I'm sure you don't want to do. No-one has time for that, so 5/5/5, nobody cares about 5% of your project I'm. So you say it is just 5% of your time. Because no-one can think five years out, then you think, 5% of project time, no-one cares about. But you will have to deal with endings, because probably nothing in your product pool will last five years if you are building digital.
11. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 11 of 12 Let's come down to the consumer experience. There is loads of endings in the consumer experience, and I'm not to go through all of them, specially last thing on a Friday when you all want to get to the pub and I haven't drank in hours, so I'm keen too. I want to get to the nuts and bolts of developing a consumer experience. When we build consumer endings, we need to make them consciously connected so they are beginning to end their conscious connection. They have emotional triggers – the same stuff you have in advertising that tells a story. They need to be actionable so the consumer can get involved, and to be done in a timely manner. I will give you some examples. I love drinking really cool, cold, sugary watery things, like Coca- Cola or something like that. I feel like the dream, you know. And over here, "Look at all that plastic in the sea!" Without connecting these two, at the moment, we're talking about great stuff inside the consumer experience and we talk about plastic outside the consumer experience. I never go, "I'm just popping down the road to get some plastic. It might have to be wrapped in some stuff and there might be some sugary water in it, I don't know." Nobody ever does that in the consumer experience. We need to get out of the habit of attaching the waste in the off- boarding. IKEA is starting to do that because they realised, they filled up all their houses with IKEA stuff and unless we take that away they will not buy any more stuff. They used to say, "We are recycling, but not taking it away." Now they say, "It's like Marie Kondo has been in there." They are taking it away as well. It moves it from being someone else's issue to you being accountable for that, and making you connected to those things, if we keep it inside the user experience. Keep it emotional. I remember when I was a kid, the first packet of cigarettes, 1972, that was the year I was born, I remember watching my dad smoke, so cool, drinking, smoking, he had a pretty good body because they were starved in the '70s, all they did was drink and smoke. And you look at the packs, and they were beautiful, really nicely foiled, real bits of craft. Tiny little text that only a child could really read – 'don't smoke, it's not good for you'. Then a few years later someone said a lot of people are dying of smoking, so we should put in capital letters on black and white, that will stop it. We are going to make it emotional and put some really fucked up imagery on the packs. And everyone will look at that, "I will stop smoking immediately now I've seen that horrible eye." We are selling that into the user experience, and now we are coming to plain packaging coming into a lot of countries. We are stopping any of the onboarding experience in the packaging, with the conclusion of where you might end up if you smoke. So it takes it from this indifference about everything, that emotion takes it to being engaged. Is it actionable? Does anyone know what this symbol means? Don't throw it in the bin. Does anyone here do 'don't'? "You can't go around doing don't all the time, Joe." You really can't, it is
12. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 12 of 12 it's not actionable. The consumer is not going to go, "Don't throw it in the bin. So what do I do with it?" It is not actionable. I have asked this at every conference I do for the last couple of years. Probably 5000-7000 people, I have met 15 who know what this symbol means. The directive symbol. There you go. That 16. Well done. Consumer electronics needs to be recaptured, so any reseller or importer needs to offer up to the consumer an opportunity for anyone to bring back consumer electronics. Into the manufactureing ecosystem, which means I try this out, I get a 10-year-old Epson printer and I took it to PC World in the UK, in Canterbury, a small city there. I go up to the desk, thinking I'm going to get kicked out, "I'm ringing this back under the directive," and he says cool and put it on the shelf with a load of other stuff. I'm like, "This is like a life hack!" You can't go around doing don't. If things are actionable, there is a circle of influence. Is it timely? There is a girl called Emma who had a terrible cancer in the UK, and she had to go to the US to get some special treatment. And whilst she was in the US she was in the children's ward, lying there, and kids were getting up and ringing the bell at the end of the ward. And she enquired as to what they were doing. Once the kids have had all finished their treatment, they can get up and bring the bell. And Emma thought this was a great idea and she came back to the UK, and gave the idea to the doctors and nurses at her local hospital. And they put a bell in for the end of treatment. The trouble with a lot of health treatments, not just for children, but there is no conclusion. You traverse through this post-treatment world where you don't really read bring an end or conclusion. If you want to have a little cry at work sometime, you should go onto this Facebook thing. So many kids getting up, ringing this bell. It is incredible saying in having this experience that brings a powerful event to the end of their treatment. Thanks very much.