That local Call that was Free and Normal Service 18 months ago now costs Fifty Thousand Pounds
A few years ago when we arrived from Canada, we went to the bank branch close to where we would live, met with the branch manager and set up various accounts and credit cards. The manager, Simon, kindly gave us his card and said be sure to call anytime. He also told us about places in town for good eats, and places to avoid "Oh yes, that's where i got mugged." Personal service! It was great.
There were very few times we actually had cause to call Simon, but it was lovely to be able to speak with him. We were sad when he moved and wrote the head office a nice letter about how grand he'd been.
That was then. Over the past year or so our branch is no longer a "branch" - it's been re-designated a "service branch" which means it has no manager (if one thinks this downsizing is due to the bank losing money, it's not: they made £11.7BILLION profit last year). If we want to talk with a manager now we cannot call that branch up the road directly; we have to call a call center in India, answer a barrage of security questions ("But i just want a call back; why do you need my date of birth?") and hope that someone local gets back to us.
The main high street banks have now come up with a new Premier Service: they will once again give you a direct local line to your branch manager *if* you have either £50k in savings or make £75k a year AND have a mortgage of 250K or more (see any of the big 4 for their version of same). What was once free, and a default part of banking in England has now become the privilege of the well-heeled few. £50k. For a name and a local phone number.
12 billion in profit and the bank wants 50K for a local phone number. Is that the definition of obscene or have i missed something?
And if you haven't the money reserves to get you into this Premier league of service, count on continuing to be considered suspect each time you pick up the phone and want to ask a question. Your call center will be asking the questions here, bub. And you better be fast with the right answers, or suffer the consequences: getting your call dropped; having your internet access suspended, and/or having a note on your file that you refused to answer security questions.
Don't let anyone tell you there ain't no class system here. As far as UK's big banks are concerned, they've just re-enginered it with a vengeance.
So how long does an apple laptop battery really last?
I've got a brand new battery that apple says is supposed to last 4.5 hours with small print that says of course that depends on use, with a link to preserving battery life which as far as i can tell basically says just don'y use it if you want decent performance - just go plug into the wall.
Right now, while i do have optimal battery use turned on, and the screen turned down low, and wireless off, i'm still not even seeing two hours available. What gives? Is sleep mode suddenly sucking the life out of my laptop, even with the airport /wireless turned off? Apple's note doesn't say.
So in what ideal universe does this battery get 4.5 hours usable time from it? in sleep mode? when the computer is on, but no applications are loaded, no internet activity is taking place and no typing is occurring?
A colleague has just informed me, looking at the spec for the 17" macbook pro (mbp), that while you can order a 7200 drive, the bottleneck of the processor won't let it actually access data at that speed - so its spin is just eating battery life compared to the 5400 which the MBP can actually use.
swell.
What kinda battery life are you getting from your macbook pro?
UPDATES:
Update 1: According to Apple's Discussion Forum, others are having similar problems with mpb battery life (while there's also those precious few who are getting just super duper times).
UPDATE 2: Since taking my macbook pro in to get repaired (it was burning up!) my battery life has somewhat improved, as the image on the left shows.
UPDATE 3: (Early Aug 06). Well shiver me timbers but it appears Apple's actually noticed that there's a REAL discrepancy between performance and spec on its 15" macbook pro batteries, and has initiated a worldwide exchange programme. Writes apple 
The affected batteries have model number A1175 and a 12-digit serial number that ends with U7SA, U7SB or U7SC. To view the model and serial numbers located on the bottom of the battery, you must remove the battery from the computer. The battery serial number is located above the barcode. Only batteries within the noted serial number ranges need to be exchanged.
I've ordered mine. Will be keen to see what the New and Improved performance will be.
In the vein of stating the blindingly obvious:
designing useful and usable tools isn't just about good widgets. There can be great widgets that will let a person carry out a task.
But what if the person doesn't want to carry out that task?
For insance,
In the UK there's a requirement to make publicly funded research publicly available - many places are turning to repositories like Eprints that will enable this process to happen. But right now, getting papers into Eprints is a manual, tedious process: filling in fields and fields in forms.
The "pro bono" argument is that increased access to the data will enable better access to cutting edge research.
A slightly more self- interested benefit is that there is research to show that openly available papers are more than twice as likely to be sited than those that are not.
But that petition to self-interest to leverage future benefit to off-set current pain does not have an immediate, perceivable benefit for the person stuck with uploading papers. We've seen that people just don't do it.
As Alan Dix might put it, the perceived cost is higher than the perceived benefit. The What's in It for Me effect only works, it seems, when that benefit is immediately perceivable. For instance: take these steps now to upload these papers and you'll never have to add them to your cv again: they will automatically update; also, one line in a web page will let you publish all your papers formatted anyway you want.
So either the benefit must outweigh the cost or the cost must be reduced to the point where future benefit is sufficient to cost. Seems obvious, eh? But the idea does suggest that usability is about perceived usefulness as well as usable-ness.
about "what's in it for me - NOW" not just "what can i do with it"
This might also be seen as where affect meets effect. This again is not new in the design community: Dillon's proposed model for assessing applications, Process, Outcome, Affect, formalizes the role of affect - how the user feels about their experience in using a system: do they feel empowered. Ethnography has also always looked at what is the cultural context of the planned artefacts to be developed?
One thing that may be new, however, about using "what's in it for me" as a design query, is that it asks the question of affect before the system is developed - but i won't claim that for certain. What i will suggest is that putting design issues in terms of "what's in it for me" is an easy way to translate the iimportance of effective/affective design to non-hci specialists (ie, software engineers).
If your software cannot pass the test of what's in it for me? of the perceived cost being balanced by the perceived benefit, then it's time to rethink the design.
i was at a talk lately where an interesting tool was presented that all the people in the audience said "wow that looks really complicated to try to set up" - and these were rocket scientist type people. The challenge to the presenter was "would it perhaps not have been better to talk with your stakeholders about how they already do what they do and then design the tool to support that, rather than what seems to be the other way around: designing a tool and asking the community to adapt to it?"
The response was a gob-smacker: that if we had designed for one community, then we would have a custom tool not a general tool.
Perhaps having a tool that was useful and useable by one community would provide a path to a tool that was more generally useable - rather than a tool which now is general but that puts the fear of god into anyone who goes near it - where the what's in it for me - the perceived benefit - is (a) unknown and (b) not even approached because the perceived cost is far too obvious.
So, take away: start with finding a me to whom you can ask "what is in it for me" - and test the answers against the push back of cost. it'll likely end up being pro bono, too.
A colleague of mine, Jeremy Cooperstock, has a rigorous email policy: once a day, and that's it. His emails always include a link to this policy so that folks know where they stand. That's polite (Canadian, eh?). But why have such an explicit policy?
There's an implicit, cultural expectation of immediacy with email: it can be sent and received at near light speed; a response should be just as rapid, so the logic seems to go. If one does not abide by these expectations, an explanation needs to be proffered. Hence an email policy. Based on Jeremy's example, i offer this note as a first draft of an evolving policy.
I'm pulling back from email. It's getting to be too much. Maybe you see this too: email, combined with a laptop and wireless, seems to have become the great distractor: i sit in talks and conferences and watch my colleagues and myself "multitask" - doing email while the speaker attempts to be more engaging than the current virtual exchange. There's nothing inherently wrong with these capacities, but i'm noticing that there does seem to be something problematic with my own practice of them: too much response mode to email rather than to the bigger picture.
So, over the next month at least, i'll be limiting my email reading to one or two set periods in the day, during the week, and likely zero on the weekend. As a result, replies to emails will likely be more like within a day or so, rather than an hour or so.
The reason for setting these limits is to reclaim my day from the reactiveness that is email. I find myself in open response mode - Pavlov's dogs come to mind: the email chimes and i respond. This can't be right.
Indeed, i know from experience that pulling away from email can be a positive, effective thing. My laptop keeled over last year, and had to go to warranty repair land. I remember the look of sympathy and horror that came over my colleagues' faces when i told them my laptop was in the shop - sympathy that this must be a terrible experience; horror at the thought of how awful that would be if it happened to them. I took the time as an opportunity to see what life without constant access to email would be like.
For what ended up being six weeks last year, i reclaimed my space from email and my world became a more relaxed, more effective place. Rather than have email on all the time while at work, i had it on twice a day only. I did other tasks the rest of the time. Things got done; things got finished; i went home at the end of the day and was home, not online. It felt great. Liberating.
And then i got my laptop back, and my resolve began to slide.
I've hung onto not doing email at night: that's family time, not work time. But now i find myself back to checking email first thing in the morning (and throughout the day) - with the idea that i will understand the shape of the day to come if i understand what emails i need to address. This is ridiculous, no? Email in my life is more often than not small things: confirming this thing; forwarding that file; setting up that date. These are not unimportant; indeed, they can be critical building blocks for projects. But here, too, i note that when they get to urgent mode of requiring several iterations back and forth in a day, or in an afternoon, or within the hour, that more often than not it's because i've let them slide, build up, so that they go from a reasonable thing that could have been dealt with calmly in advance to something that must be addressed "right now!" oh no! - i must be online to deal with this now now now - now how did that happen?
To gage days this way is too reminiscent of Prufrock's coffee spoons. It suggests that the big picture may be slipping out of focus, behind a flurry of to do's.
"So what is the big picture?" i ask myself. What are the big things, the mission level things, i want to accomplish? What are the big pieces that support that picture? and what are the things which need doing to support those pieces? Those things first.
In the 7 habits of Highly Effective People, in the section called Habit 3, First things First, Stephen R. Covey writes " 'The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.'
Where does email fit into that? When does email fit into that?
Over the next month, i'm hoping to rediscover this.