Sales techniques of Cambodian children

Having recently returned from a holiday in Cambodia, I'm amazed at the advanced selling techniques of the children there.

Over half the Cambodian population are under the age of 16 and many of them spend their days working in the tourist industry - selling bottles of water, books, bracelets etc. Here are some of the techniques they've picked up:

- Artificially inflating prices in the expectation of being bartered down - but still end up selling at extortionate rates (in their eyes). This is an obvious one.

- Giving presents - anecdotal evidence shows that if you give a present or do someone a favour, they will feel compelled to do something in return, often of greater value. One girl trying to sell me water changed tact and attempted to give me a bracelet as a present. I refused but she swiftly balanced the bracelet on my arm and dashed off leaving me to either drop the bracelet or take it. I took it but then knew this meant a commitment to buying a bottle of water from her on my return route.

- Fending off competition and increasing spend per customer - at the start of a trek up a mountain, we bought a bottle of water from a girl. She was competing against another 10 girls selling the same water. Her tactic was to refuse payment for the water, requesting that we paid her on the way back. She knew that we had to return by the same route, would require another bottle of water by then and therefore buy a second from her when paying for the first.

- Showing value for money - many of the younger children sold postcards in packs of 10. They would attempt to convince you by counting out their postcards - 'look what you get for $1, 10 postcards - 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 for $1' - they show you each of the pictures hoping one will grab your attention.

- Offers - younger children also run alongside you, selling bracelets out of baskets - 4 for $1. The longer you held out, the more bracelets they offered you for $1 - it goes something like this: 'you want bracelets? 4 for $1 - you can have this 4. What about this 4? Only $1...Ok 5 for $1. You can have this 5 etc'

- Using persuasive language - they never shouted 'you want water?'. It was always 'you want cold water?'. That instantly evoked positive feelings about the water. Even if you weren't thirsty, you would always want to be cooler in 38 degree heat.

- Creating a rapore / false sense of friendship - some children would ask your name as you passed by. They'd remember and call your name out next time they saw you. It's amazing the effect this has on making you feel like you have committed to purchase something from them.

- Demonstrating knowledge - I never quite understood this one, maybe they were going for cuteness or the friendship thing again but they would recite information they knew about your country - 'where are you from? England? The capital city of England is London. Your prime minister is Gordon Brown etc' (I bet there's American kids that couldn't tell you that much!)

I managed to resist most of these attempts, sometimes with great difficulty, but it was interesting seeing just how many different techniques they'd developed for convincing tourists to buy off them and no one else. Get these kids over here, stick them in a car showroom and there'd be no crisis in the car industry.

My thoughts on the DNA database

I'm dismayed at the short-sightedness of people claiming that 'they have nothing to hide', why wouldn't they want their DNA stored on a database? I've seen posts on the bbc site and this article on the Guardian site.

I can think of several reasons we shouldn't approve of this. Our government's track record at keeping confidential information confidential is pretty poor. Ok, so they probably have information on me anyway but not my genetic makeup.

Let DNA get into the wrong hands and it could be used for any number of unethical purposes. Imagine if your DNA shows you are predisposed towards a serious illness in old age - what if they decide not to provide health care for this illness?

What if your DNA shows you are distantly fromUzbekistan descent and decides to forcibly deport everyone of Uzbekistan descent? Sound ridiculous now, but once the database exists it is available for any subsequent government to make use of. If the BNP ever took over...not so ridiculous!

I admit the database has proved essential in convicting people of serious crimes but I'd rather they were left unpunished and our future human rights are protected.

Horizontal navigation styles

I'm noticing more and more horizontal navigations at the moment - mostly good ones!

My favourites are:
The 15belowproject which works particularly well with the sound on.

Uniqlo is another example, although it hurts my eyes a little!

Adidas have also made use of a similar nav for their new Originals site.

I think these examples work well because there is a reliance on images to navigate around rather than words. Particuarly Uniqlo and Adidas that are promoting a 'look' or style, it's a nice way to achieve it without forcing people to think about what they're looking for. Hovering over the left and right arrows is a simple and easily understood method of scrolling left and right.

I've also come across Simon Hoegsberg's site for a photographic installation. He took photos of people walking across a bridge in Berlin from the same position for 2 weeks and displayed them end to end on a wall. This is a great way to replicate the wall effect online - although unconventional, using the thumbnails across the bottom to instigate the movement above feels intuitive.

Kotsego have a blog post on how to make unconventional navigations work and I've used a couple of their examples.

On the topic of unconventional navigations, I love the Beastie Boys website using a dial to turn content up and down without having to scroll. One day every site will have one :)

New Year, new tv ads

It's the new year and if we are to believe the tv ads, it's time to buy a new sofa and join Weight Watchers.

Standing out among the array of furniture sale ads is the new comparethemarket.com advert. They've come up with a clever campaign involving a meerkat who owns the site comparethemeerkat.com complaining that he's tired of getting people looking for car insurance quotes rather than for meerkat comparisons! Aside from being entertaining, it makes it very clear what their website name is and what they do and stands out from the clutter of other comparison site ads. I love it.

The only charity ad to survive the Christmas charity extravaganza of tv ads is this one for the NSPCC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6TzoQM3ajs
This ad has been going for years on heavy rotation and frankly, I'm sick of it. I wish they'd spend some of their £2's on making a new ad, and one that tells me what they actually do that's different to social services rather than just begging for money.

What happened to Coca Cola at Christmas? I didn't see one tv ad. Christmas isn't quite the same without their festive ads. They seem to have opted for a poster campaign instead. I'd be interested to see how the two formats compare on effectiveness.

The end of books?

I took part in a slightly off-topic discussion about books last night at the Northern User Experience group meeting. It digressed onto the question, will e-readers ever replace books?

It started with the idea of people printing documents from their computers in order to reduce eyestrain caused by reading from a monitor, or to read in a more leisurely manner, slumped on a sofa for example.

So, what's the alternative? Despite Xerox's attempt to produce the digital equivalent to paper (before someone else beats them too it and forces their demise), the closest we have to an alternative are e-books, such as Sony's E-reader or Amazon's Kindle. They have recently launched but I've yet to see a decent review from anyone but those paid to write them.

One of the main arguments against e-books taking over is the idea that people have an emotional connection to printed books. I can understand this argument. I love my books, I proudly display them and am constantly adding to my collection. There's something comforting about the smell, the typeface, the turn of the pages. However, I think to claim this is going to stop future generations taking up e-books and having the same passion for them is naive.

If children in schools each have an e-book, capable of holding every text book they need for the day and are able to download new books online in seconds, I'm sure they will wonder why we ever printed books in their cumbersome format. Would they not develop the same emotional connection to their e-books as we do to our paperbacks?

We may be some time off, but it's certainly not beyond what I can imagine as possible in the near future. I did, however, enjoy this article from the Guardian - 14 features that e-books will need to have in order to match the qualities of a book: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2007/nov/21/thekindledoesntlightmyfir

I don't think they are all unachievable!

The weird and wonderful world of David Lynch online

I stumbled across this site and thought it was worth a blog post. It's David Lynch's website and it's as odd and random as you would expect.

There's a daily video weather report given by Lynch himself - it's the weather outside his window in LA, so completely pointless but intriguing all the same, if only for his hair.

Then there's the literal representation of an item being added to the shopping cart. And the literal representation of the log in page which will have resonance with fans of Twin Peaks :

Like his films, the more I look, the more I notice. The navigation, for example, is a feature of the site rather than just a method of moving from a to b. Take a look at the coffee cup page to see what I mean. The navigation is a map but also a coffee mug, I think.

There's a bizarre mixture of the serious and silly. After a while, you start questioning if the serious parts are actually serious or if the silly parts are quite as silly as you initially thought.

In summary, it's simple on the surface and technically not worth mentioning but scratch the surface and you can't help but stop and look and possibly buy. Plus it screams David Lynch so a successful online experience I would say.

15 Reasons why having a cold and being on holiday isn't so bad.

Ok, so it's the middle of the night, I can't sleep because I have a cold. I've not done any of the things I wanted to do this week. It truly sucks ass and could easily be one of the worst holidays ever. I've been in bed for 2.5 days now and I'm not much better - 4.5 days if you count the weekend but that was because I went out on Friday :).

But, rather than moan and get down about it, I've decided to write a list of all the positive things to having a cold while on holiday.

1) I can lie in my giant, warm bed working my way through every episode of Friends without feeling guilty or like I should be doing something better.

2) I don't have to justify to anyone why I spent my whole week off doing the above.

3) I feel hot and cold at the same time - it's strangely pleasant.

4) I keep hallucinating, which is amusing. I saw an advert for Nationwide whilst watching the England game that said 'proud sponsors of the England Team'. I misread that as 'proud sponsors of the England Netball Team' and laughed at how stupid they were...

5) I have absolutely no desire to venture outside where I would get cold and wet.

6) I don't have to go outside for food / tissues / necessities - people bring them to me :)

7) I don't feel guilty about work paying for me to be off sick.

8) I don't have to go the gym and I can eat whatever I want.

9) I can't smell the fridge anymore.

10) It is acceptable to wear tracksuit bottoms and a giant tshirt with no makeup for the whole week.

11) I've done the majority of my Christmas shopping online and it's not even December yet.

12) I won £7 playing instant win games on the National Lottery site (then lost £5 but I feel good about it).

13) I finished my IPA course - ok, that's naughty while I'm on holiday but so what.

14) I think I'm losing my voice - it's funny trying to talk to people on the phone with no voice and is particularly good if you want extra sympathy, not that I do.

15) I have an extra blog post now. A-woo-hoo to me.


Wow, that has worked. I feel much better. Sleepy time. x

The Content Renaissance

Social media, social networking, online communities, web 2.0 (the list of buzzwords and phrases go on and on) are hailed as the future of the web, moving people to communicate and socialise in new ways and have opened the doors to democratising knowledge and news across the world. But how new is this really?

I remember 10 years ago using a super slow PC on a dial up connection, back when Alta Vista was THE search engine of choice, before the dawn of images and video content. I spent hours reading text based websites - possibly with one image that had just about loaded by the time you'd read the page. Most companies didn't even have websites back then, or if they did, I certainly wasn't aware of them! People who knew and had access to the web had their own websites, stuck together with virtual paper and glue, proud of their text based creations that allowed them to vent to the new online world. I spent hours reading people's opinions, stories, ideas directly from their own sites and taking part in forum discussions with a community of people that was far broader than my circle of real world friends.

What's happened since then? We got fast - fast computers, fast connections. The internet became about making sites as visually beautiful and creative as possible - pushing the boundaries of what we could achieve. The shift was away from text and accessibility and towards making pretty pictures (and of course, without consideration for how easy these creations were to figure out). The more effort the site took to use, the more of an achievement it was for the creator.

Then came the content renaissance - people were bored with pictures and wanted copy again. I'm back to trawling through the web for interesting text, not pretty pictures. The difference now is that you don't need to be able to create your own site to express yourself and the tools available make it much easier and more accessible for millions to take part.

Ironically, the easier it is to communicate with the world, the more people want to limit this to small networks - people they already know, people from school, people from work. I can't remember the last time I chatted to someone from outside this country online.

Maybe we'll have a Creative Renaissance soon - and so a cycle of image vs. copy is realised, much like the unstoppable economic cycle we're experiencing the downturn of now. Or maybe I'm thinking too hard.

I'm an angry Blogger user

I'm shocked at how many basic usability problems there are with Blogger. First, call me naive, but I wasn't aware that Blogger was part of Google. So, on receiving an email from Google Accounts asking me to confirm I had opened a Google Account, I swiftly moved it to my spam folder. On returning to my blog later that day, I noticed an alert telling me I had not verified my account via the email I should now have received. Now I'm confused for two reasons. 1 - why would I verify my account when I am already using it and 2 - where was my email from Blogger? I requested a new email and it all became clear...

Secondly, I'm still unsure as to what I should call my blog, what the URL should be and whether I should write as myself or as an anonymous user. I won't get into my musings around these points (it's boring and the web is littered with plenty of similar thought streams) but I decided that rather than using an anonymous nickname, I want to use my real name. Where do I change how my name appears? What do I click on? Settings? Posting? My Account? No, no..you click on Dashboard of course. Now don't I feel the stupid one.

Having said that, Blogger does automatically save my post before I publish it so when my computer randomly reboots because it hates me, I'm returned to what I was writing. Sweet.

Supermarket shoppers and Muller yoghurts

People become interesting when in supermarkets. What they put in their trolleys is a reflection of who they are (I like to think). While I'm shopping, I'm also weighing up what my trolley says about me - last night I had chillies, ginger, onion, spinach, chapatis, tomatoes, free range eggs and semi skimmed milk and two small cream cakes (well everyone needs a treat and they did have strawberries on top). I imagine other people nosing in thinking 'hmmm...she's going to make a curry' or 'wtf is that weird thing (the ginger)' or 'why doesn't she put her onion in a plastic bag'. Of course they're not thinking any of those things, but I imagine they are.

I'm a supermarket snob and turn my nose up at the fat fucks in there loading up their trolleys with x24 bags of crisps, white bread and litres of coke while dragging round their podgy kids who are mindlessly wobbling round the aisles, narrowly missing hitting their heads on the end of my trolley (I'll get them next time).

The best place to judge other people is at the conveyor belts. There you get a good sweep of the entire contents of their trolley and you can see how they pay. The woman paying when I got there was paying in a stack of twenty pound notes. She was scruffy, grey roots, a bum bag. I often wonder why people like that carry round wads of cash. It's people like that who are secretly sitting on millions.

The next woman on the conveyor belt had basic bread, basic ketchup and some other items I can't recall but I remember thinking she couldn't possibly make a meal out of any of this. She also had 5 muller yoghurts. Not the Crunch Corner kind which are acceptable as a dessert instead of say, a big chocolate cake. Or plain yoghurt for cooking or to go with cereal. No, she had the banana and caramel basic yogurt. Pale, cold, sloppy slop. I'm not saying I don't like yoghurt, but I can't imagine ever spending money on this variety. I can't imagine thinking 'hmm I really want a banana and caramel muller yoghurt now, that's going to satisfy my snacking urge'. Let's face it, if you want a snack, you're still going to want one after eating a tub of muller yoghurt.

After all this going through my mind, I look behind, and the people next in queue after me were loading up the conveyor belt with a whole crate of the same muller yoghurts! Maybe there was some kind of crazy offer going on, but even if they were free I don't think I'd bother!