Elegant ideas are so powerful that to know them is to fully understand them. To understand them is to forget what life was like beforehand - their designed simplicity belies their value.
Here's a simple idea that I appreciate every week - shopping trolley?wheels that are self-arresting on an inclined moving walkway:
Here's how they work - on normal flooring, the metal wheels roll normally. On the moving walkway, however, the metal wheels fall into the tread, resting the trolley on its rubber stops and allowing me to let go of my heavy shopping trolley. It's effortless, automatic and the arresting function has no moving parts.
It's so simple it's obvious. Anyone could have thought of it, right? Wrong. As a sober reminder, here is?a moving walkway travesty from Melbourne domestic airport:
As you enter the walkway you see this sign, telling you to release your handle. Then a smaller warning sign with the same info. Then an emergency stop button to arrest boths walkways if needed. When you reach the other end, there's yet another sign &?emergency stop. Finally - just moments from?disaster -?you hear a looped recording telling you to now ignore all the signs and depress the handle before?exiting the walkway. I can see it now?- crowds piled up at both ends of the walkway for failing to release and depress their handles at the critical moment.
Why? They fixed the wrong problem. They satisficed on their trolley design, burdening users with?the?responsibility of protecting life and limb by performing?a counter-intuitive task. They didn't push through the complexity to find the simple solution.
Never underestimate the value of elegant ideas, nor those who generate them.
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How do you pitch a product that's buried on a web server and noticed only when it fails? By creating a campaign that's different+good - being different gets you attention, being good sells your product.
IMO this campaign largely fails by being only kinda different and kinda good - apart from taking 2 minutes to say 1 minutes' worth of info, it adds nothing but Sophos knowledge to the viewer. That's what we call an advertisement - just another interruption. Instead, Sophos needed to understand their audience to create something they want to see, and then fully commit to delivering it.
Here's two videos that demonstrate this well. Firstly, here's a Virgin America safety video that 200,000 people have voluntarily watched on YouTube, when they're nowhere near a plane. Its designers clearly understand travelers, creating appropriate humor to capture their interest:
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Secondly, here's a video demonstrating the benefits of committing fully to pretty much anything, with almost 8 million views to date:
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Having said all that, being kinda different + kinda good is better than not being different or good at all - I am, after all, one person bothering to blog about Sophos' video. So take risks, try, fail & learn - in world full of noise, the biggest risk of all is to play it safe.
Today Seth points us to senseless precision that muddies the distinction between what's important and what's not. Don Norman points out overstating precision can also be lethal in his lecture on the perils of intelligent devices. The entire 90 minute lecture is fascinating, but his comments on precision start at 33 minutes:
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Really? Are prospective Telefunken factory workers screened against their childhood attitudes toward perfection?
Marty Neumeier, author of Zag, describes?a tagline as the outward expression of your brand's most compelling differentiator. Surely it would help for your tagline to be believable.
Here's a poster I came across in the city this week:
I love it. Imagine the fun of sharing these tic tacs with your friends - you have the disco ball, I'll have the Kombi van.
There might be many ways to bring attention to a low-interest product - ask an artist like John Maeda to do something crazy with it, invite passionate customers to show why they love?your product - who knows. I doubt, however, that creating and advertising a?fake product that's more interesting than your real product is the optimal method.
As we transmit & sense fear, so we transmit & sense passion - it cannot be faked.
You may not care for dancing, nor for reality TV, but the dancers on So You Think You Can Dance would convince you otherwise. One cannot achieve their expertise nor maintain their level of commitment without their passion for dance.
Choreographers Napoleon and Tabitha take this one step further, by telling passionate stories in their routines. Not only do they give us a visual feast, they transmit emotion - we feel something.
Few routines epitomised this more than Joshua and Katee telling (dancing) the story of a young man drafted for war and his girlfriend's reaction:
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How is your passion transmitted in what you do, so that others can sense it, feel it and respond?
Yesterday a friend told me of a life-changing experience as a 12 year old kid. He was playing rugby and defending the try line as a very large player bore down on him, intent on scoring a try. For the uninitiated to rugby, the effects of big rugby hits look like this:
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Deciding that a) his very large opponent was likely to score a try anyway and b) a trip to the hospital or morgue was likely, my friend stepped aside. At that moment a smaller teammate stepped up and comprehensively took this very large player out, preventing the try and saving the day.
My friend learned two valuable lessons:
He was capable of more than he realized, and
If he doesn't defend the line, who will?
In turn he told me his story so that I'd realize I was the last line of defense for one aspect of a client's business. It stuck in my head and changed my mind.
Chip Heath and Dan Heath tell us about idea that are made to stick - they say that memorable ideas are:
Simple
Unexpected
Concrete
Credentialed
Emotional
Stories
These map to 'SUCCESs' for easy recall.
If my friend had merely told me some facts I might not have paid close attention or responded. Instead he changed my mind with a SUCCESsful story that I may never forget.
