|
[Image: CBS Local]
Going beyond “Users First”: adding values as well as value
Technology often helps bring exciting new things into the world, but sometimes they have unintended consequences. The combination of mobile phones and electric motors meant that dockless scooters companies became possible. The scooters meet a user need very clearly - quick, cheap, convenient urban travel - but discarded scooters soon littered cities, resulting in discomfort for residents. Eventually they were banned in some cities. Perhaps this happens because, out of financial necessity, startups tend to have a laser-like focus solely on the problem right in front of them, and the wider effects may be blind spots. So this from Ben Terrett (ex-Co-op Digital) is very good: “We need to spend more time thinking about the values we can add, on top of the value we’re already adding”.
Previously: Users Society first:
Putting users first is not the answer to everything. This is a communication challenge for designers - how to accurately articulate the concerns and needs of wider groups like “society”, particularly when these groups are harder to define, measure and talk to accurately and fairly.
Funerals
This report on the UK funeral home sector is interesting. It’s quite informative, though written in 2017 so some detail may have dated. It was written by funeral comparison startup Beyond.Life, and they believed enough in their analysis that they shorted Dignity’s stock (shorting is when you bet that a company’s shares will go down, a risky trading strategy because if the market doesn’t do what you predicted, your losses can be big. (So don’t.) Here, the bet presumably worked because Dignity’s share price is down since 2017). Question: is it harder to run a comparison service fairly if you are betting on one of the services doing badly?
Beyond.Life are also in a piece called Designing for death which on first read is about rebranding modern funeral care organisations. Underneath that are good questions: how to help people plan arrangements for death, a subject that many of them find very difficult? How do you have a good death?
Related; Being and dying is a consultancy whose aim is “new ways of experiencing death and dying, and work with organisations to help everyone live their life to the fullest”.
Weird ecommerce
A long piece about a very weird corner of ecommerce: a vast array of unrelated products from many overlapping brands, presented on many similarly-named websites at wildly varying prices (and on Amazon and Alibaba too), all of whose ownership is vague. It feels like a gigantic dada art performance piece, and an elaborate metaphor for the internet itself. This newsletter’s summary cannot do the piece justice: it’s worth reading for the weirdness.
“The problem is… Facebook”
The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee hosted an international group of parliamentary questioners last week - they gave Facebook’s representative Lord Richard Allan a difficult day. Allan said the company needed to make its own controls stronger but also needed better controls from lawmakers: “Frankly you and your colleagues standing over us.” Is it worrying or reassuring that a big tech firm admits to needing regulatory supervision? (The committee later offered a declaration that seemed a bit, well, thin.)
The negative news stories will probably keep coming until the industry acts more ethically or is regulated more forcefully. But defensiveness is probably not the answer: if your legal argument is something like "Oh, you can't prove the affected people were UK citizens so you have no standing, ha!", you are missing an opportunity to rebuild some trust and goodwill.
(Topical political aside: UKGov is said to be running social media ads asking voters to tell their MP to shape up and support Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement. It might have been easier to target the individual MPs?)
Amazon Web Services event
There was an AWS event, which announced many new things. Outposts is AWS running in private data centres. It is tempting to imagine Outposts being just boxes with blinkenlights and an internet connection to the *real* AWS in the cloud, but no, this is Amazon expanding its addressable market to what the industry calls “on premises”. For various reasons some computing jobs aren’t going to move to the cloud. Also: new Machine Learning things, new storage and compute things, a “managed blockchain” service. The general AWS approach is to tick as many potential jobs to be done boxes as quickly as possible, get customers, eventually the weight of the social proof means that no-one gets fired for buying AWS.
In brief
Alibaba founder Jack Ma was confirmed as being a senior member of the Communist Party. It is not immediately clear if this means anything for the tech industry, but it is an opportunity to make a joke about centralised techno-capitalism looking quite a lot like communism: a massive shopping machine that derives the correct products and prices for its citizens.
Hackers took the personal data of 500 million customers at Marriott hotels. Since 2014. Personal data affected, perhaps and credit card data too.
People’s Vote activists created a “Costupper” inconvenience store, featuring expensive food and household products.
Tom Loosemore was on good form on the history and potential of GDS at the Science and Technology Select Committee.
It is International Day of Persons with Disabilities.
.
Events
- Funeralcare show & tell - Tue 4 Dec 2pm at Angel Square 12th floor.
- Food ecommerce show & tell - Tue 4 Dec 3pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- VueJS Manchester community - Tue 4 Dec 6pm at Federation House.
- Web team show & tell - Wed 5 Dec 2.30pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- Line management drop-in clinic - Thu 6 Dec 1pm at Federation House.
- Federation House committee - Thu 6 Dec 1.30pm at Federation House.
- Heads of practice community of practice meetup - Thu 6 Dec 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- From territorial to functional sovereignty with Frank Pasquale - Thu 6 Dec 2018 6pm at Federation House.
More events at Federation House. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.
.
Thanks for reading. If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog.
|
