When in-store technology fails at the first hurdle

By Chris Evans on January 18, 2012

At the new Westfield Stratford last week, I was excited to see an iPad discovery zone within the new Topman store.  It consisted of four iPads, two on each side of a wooden table, with the words “Touch Screen to Start”.

I touched the first iPad, ready to be amazed, and after a short delay was greeted with the following message:

“Destination host unreachable. Please check your server and network settings and try again”

This is not the brand image you were looking for

There was no one around to help me, as there never seems to be in these certain clothing stores.  So I moved onto the next iPad and touched the screen.  This time I got the message:

“Welcome to wi-fi.  Please choose your service provider.”

And that was the end of my experience.  Not really the captivating experience I was expecting, and definitely not much of an advertisement for Topshop.

This type of broken experience happens all the time, particularly when technology is involved, and planning to recover from these types of errors is the difference between being loved by your customers and being labeled as “rubbish”.

When designing experiences or looking at existing processes, it is good to do a disaster recovery workshop where problematic scenarios are thrown at the process, and a recovery manual is built around around the process. 

Failure is an option

For the above, it could be as simple as a backup system: when there is no wireless access, have some parts of the experience stored locally so the user still gets a limited experience.  Also, as part of the process, there should be a notification to staff that the wireless is down so that it can be repaired or the iPads turned off.

Planning for failure is key to creating seamless experiences, and it can be a really useful learning process as a team to try and find all the possible failure points, and plan to blow customers away by how you deal with it.  A seamless recovery is always more impressive than getting it right in the first place.

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Could smartphones enable “Black Box” Ethnography?

By Tom Weaver on January 11, 2012

Black boxes are actually orange, you see.

Popular Mechanics recently published their harrowing account of the cockpit events of Air France 447, which mysteriously disappeared mid Atlantic in June 2009.  When the black box was recovered, the real story of the events during a critical 25 minutes emerged that highlighted the real reasons the flight crashed.

Crucially, it can be seen that the co-pilots fail to cooperate, and the most junior pilot erroneously pulls back on the controls during a stall right up to the moment of the crash, something the other pilot is unaware of (the controls should be going forward to allow the aircraft to pick up speed).  The aircraft has been designed in such a way that the two controls are completely independent, with no feedback mechanism between them, and at one point the two pilots are even pulling in different directions – one up, and the other down – without ever realizing it until the final seconds before the crash.

None of this information was available until the black box was found in April 2011.  Every commercial airliner has a black box, which contain both a Cockpit Voice Recorder and a Flight Data Recorder.

The Cockpit Voice Recorder records all interactions between the pilots.  Flight Data Recorders capture data from all sensors during the flight.  Putting these two things together against a timeline builds a picture of events that can then be interpreted to tell the ‘story’ of events.  This allows airlines to train other pilots to avoid the same mistakes, to simulate the same events, or, possibly, even to change the way the aircraft is designed, all in the hope of avoiding the same mistakes to be made again.

Over 100,000 flights are made every day around the world, and only an average of 150 crash a year (and of those, very few result in significant tragedies).  As terrible as a crash is, the vast majority of journeys take place without significant problem, a remarkable achievement.

The Service Experience

Contrast this, if you will, with a typical service experience in a department store, a customer contact centre, or a supermarket.  Every individual experience is a new journey that takes off, and lands.  Though many of them land successfully, there is often a significant amount of service failure that goes unrecorded and undetected at any level in the organization capable of deciphering and learning from the experience.

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