A recent survey of 1,200 people conducted by strategic brand consulting firm Siegel+Gale shows that trust in financial-services companies has dropped nearly 40 percent in the past year. Nearly two-thirds of those respondents also believe that businesses complicate their processes and communications in an attempt to mask real risks. This is a stunning indictment of the financial establishment. Click here to read the full story
Archive for the ‘uncategorized’ Category
Feb 5th, 2007 by Irene Etzkorn
Grocery Shopping the Old-fashioned Way—Online.
While my mother was very ill and I was her caretaker, leaving the house to grocery shop was a dilemma until I discovered Stop and Shop’s Peapod home delivery service. Those of you who live in the city probably can’t relate to the rarity of delivery services in the suburbs. Finding a service where I could order online, choose a delivery time and have the items carried into my kitchen was a godsend. Since I’m usually complaining about the complexity of goods and services, I thought I should give praise where it is due.
What impressed me most was the simplicity of the process. I could browse the “aisles” online, select from lists of my past orders or search directly for an item. Although I’m not particularly thrifty, I was also delighted that I could compare price much more easily than in the real store. On store shelves, prices are scattered beneath the items and you have to move along the aisle to compare them. Online, similar items are aligned in rows and columns so that you can quickly scan the unit price and pick out the cheapest. Had I clipped coupons, I could have given them to the driver when he delivered my order and had their value deducted from the total. They also advertised their weekly specials but didn’t do so in an intrusive way.
What’s more, when they delivered the groceries, they seemed to have selected the plumpest, freshest produce and carefully separated items when bagging them so that fastidious people like me didn’t have to worry about the bleach touching the bananas. Peapod is a good example of a service that fills a need and is designed with the customer in mind.
Feb 2nd, 2007 by Irene Etzkorn
What’s the Daily Recommended Dose of Arsenic?
Am I the only person on Long Island who was motivated to read and understand the 16-page 2006 Annual Drinking Water Quality Report sent to my home? Unfortunately, I still can’t tell you what it said.
The frightening words, “arsenic,” “radon,” “molybdenum,” and “strontium 88,” certainly caught my attention, but I can’t tell you if my water has them and whether I should be worried about them. That’s because I would have to find my location within 35 Distribution Areas, and translate the low, high and average values for dozens of possible contaminants. This is a classic example of inundating people with data that yields no actual information. It’s presented on 16 pages of newsprint and literally looks like a sea of gray type. The only way to make this useful would be to customize the content so that it focused on the water supply for the location of my home and then wrote the conclusion in plain English.
Feb 2nd, 2007 by Irene Etzkorn
Ask To See The Instruction Manual Before You Buy
If Best Buy or Circuit City were forced to display the instruction manuals next to their products in the stores, no one would ever buy another digital camera, plasma television or home theater. A classic example is the 147-page instruction manual that came with my newly purchased surround sound receiver. Once my eyes saw the manual, my ears no longer wanted surround sound.
Had I thumbed through the manual in the store, I would have seen the warning signs:
- 36 part names on the front panel; 14 more on the display and 19 more on the rear panel;
- dozens of illustrations that looked like plates of spaghetti (a preview of the many wires I would find shortly); and
- the coup de grace—a chapter titled, “Easy Set-up and Operation.”
Why is it that the words “easy” and “simple” are only present when the task at hand will be anything but?
Of course, the electronics retailers are not to blame. The manufacturers, specifically their engineers, are the ones who dream up the hundreds of features. Then the writers of the manuals make it worse. The manual I was reading seemed to be written for either a moron or a rocket scientist. One page had cartoon drawings of the receiver crying, melting and otherwise exhibiting human traits while the next talked about “connecting the pre-out terminals, the trigger-out terminals and the multi-zone terminals.” I can’t even say that this manual seemed to have been translated into English from another language. I think someone actually wrote it this way.
Since I had 146 pages to wade through, I didn’t appreciate the writer’s inability to get to the point. You tell me whether it was necessary to have these as three distinct steps, “Read instructions…,” “Retain instructions…,” and “Follow instructions…” At that point, the only one I wanted was “Burn instructions…”
Will I ever buy another piece of electronics—yes, but not from this company.
Jan 31st, 2007 by Irene Etzkorn
The secret weapon of the 2008 presidential campaign: information design
It’s popular to say that the next President of the US will be chosen based on sex or skin color or experience, but I know the real answer. The candidate who unleashes the power of information design will steal the show. Remember Ross Perot—the man’s looks and voice were certainly not his charm—but he engaged people with charts and graphics that conveyed complicated topics in terms that they could relate to.
The power of good information design is its ability to show relationships between events, numbers and items. Good information design is achieved when the display of the information enhances its meaning. Topics that are hard to grasp, such as amounts and probability, are prime candidates for graphic depiction. That’s why I was so delighted to see The New York Times create a graphic to put the annual cost of war in perspective in its January 17, 2007 edition. The graphic showed the $200 billion being spent annually on the Iraq war and then showed what $100 billion could buy instead (universal health care for all people in the US without it), what $10 billion could buy (carrying out the 9/11 Commission recommendations), etc. At least now I know what the monetary trade-offs are.
When Charles Gibson, television anchorman of ABC World News Tonight, wanted to convey the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans one year after the storm, he sought a graphic representation. On air, he contrasted the hefty telephone book of 2005 to the much slimmer book of 2006, and it was immediately obvious how many people and businesses had not returned after the storm. Television is a medium of images, and in addition to its ubiquity, imagery is the source of its power. In the instance of the phone book demonstration, Charlie Gibson was using an image (the phone books) within an image (the television broadcast), doubling the impact.
I’m well aware how easily images and graphics can be manipulated to distort meaning. What I’m hoping for is a candidate who will unleash the power of graphics for good, not evil.
So, in 2008, “It’s the picture, stupid.”
Jan 31st, 2007 by Irene Etzkorn
Why Do Old People Need a Special Search Engine?
I hear that there is a new search engine with my name on it: Cranky. Actually, although I might be attitudinally suited, it’s really aimed at people age 50+ and I’m younger than that. It’s the brainchild of Jeff Taylor, who left his previous big hit–Monster.com–to create Eons for the boomer generation and now this search engine. The home page for cranky.com actually talks about “cranking up an engine” as the inspiration for the name but I think cantankerous connotations couldn’t have been far behind.
Cranky is based on the premise that serving up search results based on what other people of a similar age wanted to see is useful. I question this premise. How much of anyone’s curiosity is based on age? Yes, before the age of 10, it is, but after that, I think other factors overtake age. Since Cranky likes to point out the virtues of living to be 100 years old, how similar are people from ages 50 to 100? It strikes me that such a broad demographic is a marketing ploy, not really a community of interest.
By the way, when I used the Cranky search yesterday, it listed the most popular search topic as Sex. I think that proves my point. Is that so different than the results for 30 and 40 year olds?
Jan 26th, 2007 by Irene Etzkorn
IRS Has Money it Wants to Give Each One of Us
Have you heard that the IRS has money it wants to give each one of us—at least those of us who use a phone? Since these days every man, woman and child has a phone, that really does mean everyone. It’s a refund of the federal excise tax we paid between 2003 and 2006 on long distance telephone service.
That’s the good news; the bad news is that they’ve made calculating the refund ridiculously convoluted.
The instructions for IRS Form 8913 include this gem:
“You will need your phone bills for the 41-month refund period.”
Well that stopped me right in my tracks. I’m a very organized person—reputedly, one of the most organized in the nation if friends and relatives are accurate character witnesses. But even I don’t save every phone bill. Recognizing that reconstructing one’s telephone calls for three years is near impossible, the IRS offers an alternative. Just take a standard $30 refund. So that’s what I will do along with everyone else. I won’t feel that I necessarily received restitution but I’ll have no choice because of the complexity of proving otherwise.
As a simplification expert, it is always injurious to my health for me to read the IRS instructions. Another gem in the same instruction booklet includes a description of how people who used prepaid telephone cards should get their refunds (thank goodness I’ve never used one). Here’s the actual example they provide to CLARIFY the process: “Example 2. S purchased the PTC from O. O is a transferee that purchased the card from R. R is a carrier. O is eligible to request a credit or refund. S cannot request a credit or refund because S did not purchase the PRC from the carrier.” I certainly hope that S, O and R graduated summa cum laude.
Aren’t we all complicit in a charade here? We spend millions of dollars to get professionals to help us pay money to the government and then more money to get the money back. Simplifying the tax code cannot come soon enough for me.