UX Culture

Blockbuster and its franchisees are struggling to overcome the confusion created by the company’s recent PR and advertising blitz promising “the end of late fees.”

In practice, it seems that customers who keep a movie or game out longer than eight days suddenly own the rental, and Blockbuster bills their credit card for the purchase price. Customers can then reverse this charge by returning the item in person for a refund, minus a restocking charge. Hmmm; is this situation really fee-free?

Blockbuster is working hard to survive the Netflix challenge. With its DVD-only, online ordering, mail-delivery-and-return model, Netflix needs no physical showroom or in-store staff. It’s a lean, clean, just-in-time approach. Netflix is effectively leveraging opportunities tied to the Web and digital film storage that weren’t around when Blockbuster began. In fact, Blockbuster Online is now matching the Netflix model, positioning itself as “The Movies Store At Your Door.”

A Blockbuster store franchisee, by contrast, cannot afford to have his or her entire inventory out indefinitely—a real risk if customers are free to “borrow” an item permanently, with no incentive to return it. To address this concern, Blockbuster stores are now giving customers a “Frequently Asked Questions,” brochure which includes the following unusual discussion:

Q. Aren’t you worried that you won’t have enough movies and games if everyone keeps rentals longer?

A. Yes, we are very worried. We will be carefully monitoring the movie and game selection to make sure we maintain our current levels of product availability for you. However, it’s in everyone’s best interest to return their rentals by the due date, even with the end of late fees, to ensure that we have the movies and games you want to rent, available when you want them.

The no-late fees gambit makes sense when customers select “inventory” online and the business can control the flow and routing based on availability and user preferences. For a physical storefront, though, customers won’t be as understanding if they schlep to the store only to find that all of their desired selections are unavailable.

The issue facing Blockbuster stores is similar to that facing record stores and book stores. When a global online outlet can beat you on availability, price, convenience, and information (reviews, sound or movie clips, recommendations), how do you keep your local storefront business alive? What ground is left for you to stand on and compete? The only answer I know of is to innovate through the in-store customer experience.

Today, many people feel technology-rich and conversation-poor. As phenomena such as Meetups demonstrate, people are delighted with any excuse to come out from behind their computer screens and rub shoulders with other human beings. Bricks and mortar stores can benefit greatly from tapping into this cultural dynamic.

Blockbuster franchisees, for example, would be better served finding ways to import more of the movie-buff culture into their stores. Take a back room and show locally made documentaries there. Provide in-store computer kiosks linking to movie reviews and databases. Host a weekly movie discussion group.

In short, create an atmosphere that’s richer, more informed, more interactive, and more social than simply ordering a DVD or video-on-demand from your living room. Instead of the end of late fees, how about the beginning of an exciting new community where movie buffs can browse, shop, share, and explore?

The development and use of wearable, stickerable, and injectable microchip identification technology holds far reaching consequences for our future. The technology, also known as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tagging and scanning, provides the ability to identify and track anything and anyone, and furnish digitally encoded information about that object or being to a RFID-enabled scanner/reader.

In other words, RFID technology connects the physical world to the digital world. The possibilities extend far beyond pet recovery, inventory management, and point-of-sale strategies. By seeding the physical landscape with microchips, we encode it in a machine-readable format that can be integrated into interfaces, databases, and a global, networked user experience.

Two examples, fresh from the headlines:

• A grade school principal in California requires all students to wear RFID tags around their necks while in school;
• A Canadian RFID company called Advanced ID Corporation receives an order from the government of Newfoundland to use RFIDS for fish identification.

Clearly, the grade school mandate implies just the kind of “big brother” image that RFID critics fear. On the more optimistic side, we see RFIDs already being used electively to embed critical medical information for those with life-threatening conditions. And on the less-controversial side of RFID product tagging, we can envision a consumer landscape where products are smart enough to tell you about themselves. Nokia has already created a cell-phone with RFID scanning/reading capabilities for business use.

Since both the positive and negative potential for human-RFID tagging is virtually limitless, it’s important for conversations about legal and ethical use of this technology to start today before it becomes pervasive.

In the post-desktop world of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) and ubiquitous networking (ubinet), microchipped devices talk persistently to each other and occasionally to us. As designers and users of the present and the future ubicomp-ubinet reality, let’s make sure we’re part of the dialog.

A colleague recently recounted some comments the principal at her son’s high school made before assembled parents, touting the school’s computer-education courses. His comments went something like this:

Students are learning that program… what do you call it? The one with the slides. The slides that move. Scientists use it.

Yes, of course, he was talking about the Microsoft classic, PowerPoint. His confoundment, though, is hardly unique. In today’s digital culture, knowledge and age often move along an inverse axis; young people, native to the digital world, often must pass technology know-how up to their elders.

Many people in their mid-30s and older had their first taste of personal computing in the pre-interface era of the command line. Back in the “green screen” era, if you weren’t a hacker, it seemed you could ruin the computer just by typing in the wrong three-letter command.

By contrast, children immersed in user-friendly digital media today are unencumbered by the cultural legacy of painful personal computing. They integrate the user experience into their everyday relationships with friends and the world. They can move fluidly between and across modes, such as instant messaging, cell phones, text messaging, e-mail, the Web, and video gaming.

While older generations suffer from technology overload, young people can shape and stretch digital tools as easily as sillyputty. And thanks to the great child-to-parent technology transfer, technology today trickles up.

In a fascinating column in MIT Technology Review, Rodney Brooks, director of the AI lab at MIT, makes some startling predictions on the implications of exponentially expanding digital storage. “Any stable system can become unstable when even one component experiences exponential growth,” he writes.

Like Moore’s Law, storage capacities are currently doubling every year. At this rate, 20 years from now, we’ll have 20 petabytes (1 petabyte = 1 million gigabytes) in our pocket. That, Brooks notes, is enough capacity to store every movie ever made in human history.

Among other near and far-term figures Brooks offers:

• Today’s iPod could store the text of 20,000 Books
• An iPod 10 years from now could store the text of 20 million books, exceeding the entire collection of Harvard University’s Library.
• An iPod 17 years from now could store text plus all images for all the books in the Library of Congress.

To make this exponential pocketable data usable—a knowledge of the world in your pocket—we’ll need to refine technologies for viewing (digital displays), searching, sorting, and saving. But more importantly, from my perspective, we’ll need new cognitive technologies.

Once the world of human knowledge is in your pocket, how do you decide what and when to transfer to your brain? And how do you transform information into insight and insight into action?

Recent news reports indicate the FBI may abandon a project central to “Trilogy”—the brand name for the agency’s mission to upgrade its technology in order to more quickly access and share information about terrorism and other domestic threats. The FBI started the $170 million project, called Virtual Case File (VCF) in 2001 after Sept. 11, and intended to deploy it in December 2003.

During project development, four different CIOs and 14 different project managers cycled through the agency.The FBI has acknowledged that “the pace of technological innovation has overtaken our original vision for VCF, and there are now existing products to suit our purposes that did not exist when Trilogy began.”

So in the three plus years between the project launch and today’s looming project scrapheap, related off-the-shelf technology products matured and reached the marketplace at a faster rate, and with a superior quality of user experience, than the FBI’s custom-application building process. VCF would seem to be a case in clockspeed mismatch.

Time Matters

In his book, “Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage,” Charles Fine, a management professor at MIT, coins the concept of “organizational clockspeed” as the pace at which companies and institutions evolve by making decisions about product design, process technology, and supply chain management.

The term clockspeed has long been used in computers to describe the rate at which the central processing unit (CPU) can execute instructions. Each tick of the computer’s internal clock sends a pulse to the CPU, and the CPU components await each pulse to execute a single round of instructions. A 733 MHz CPU chip has a clock which ticks 733 million times each second, each tick representing an “instruction execution cycle.”

Fine extends the clockspeed analogy in two directions, one to biology and the other to business. Fast-clockspeed companies must act like fruit flies, who “go from egghood to parenthood to death in under two weeks,” and therefore must make fast decisions that impact their genetic future. Slow-clockspeed companies, by contrast, are more like the sea turtle, who, with a lifespan of up to a century or more, “has evolved little since its terrestrial cousins, the dinosaurs, roamed the earth.” 

Fast clockspeeds, Fine notes, “shorten the duration of any competitive advantage.” Slow clockspeed institutions, particularly in the public sector, respond slowly to changes in the environment, and are easily overtaken by the fast-clockspeed dynamos of the private sector.

VCF seems to be a case of the FBI trying to regain lost advantage in information technology but operating at a clockspeed mismatched to the situation of extremely accelerated change. Ironically, it seems the extreme internal change within the agency contributed to the slow clockspeed in making critical decisions.