My name is Josh, and this is my corner of the internet.
Branding and marketing ideas based on things that I see that are opportunities and things that I think are broken and stupid.
I can never remember the keyboard shortcut for “é.”
I used to have it down pat back in high school when I was churning out papers for Spanish class. Lately I’ve just been using it for the word “résumé.”
Lazy solution: type the word “resuma” into Word, right click when the red squiggly line appears, choose the correct iteration.
(Actual solution: Hit CTL+’ then the letter you want an accent over. This would have made life WAY easier if it were implemented in Word 2003.)
Every single online checkout page—ever—asks you to input your credit card information in more or less the following way:
“What’s this?” leads to a page like this:
The CV2 / CSC / CVD / CVC / CCV / CV2 / Card Security Code / (…Seriously???) / CVV2 / Verification Code was implemented as a security measure for when you do transactions and the card isn’t physically present at the register (like when you’re buying menial crap on the internet).
But that doesn’t answer the question: Why does this page still exist? We’ve been doing this internet thing for well over a decade. People have pretty readily figured out what the Credit Card Number and Expiration Date. Why are we still struggling here? Isn’t this silly?
Two thoughts:
1) Label your crappy credit cards better. “Credit Card Number” is pretty intuitive because those numbers are big and imprinted. Every card I’ve ever had has said something like “Valid Until” or “Good Thru” or “Expiration Date” next to the expiration date, so that’s handled. Why the secrecy surrounding the CV2?
On this credit card, there’s no indication at all that the number 7379 has any significance whatsoever. With about fifteen seconds’ labor…
Any question now? This sample card wasn’t really designed too well; I added the white box to make it clear that “CV2:” was referring to 7379 and not 01001. With a little more thought and care, the two number series might be distanced and the white box rendered superfluous.
2) Pick a name. There’s obviously some serious confusion in this department—The Wikipedia page for “Card Security Code” lists seven different names with ten corresponding acronyms. Pick one! I’d lean towards “Verification Code” since I guess it’s a bit more intuitive (consider how much trickier it’d be to remember what an “EXD Code” was instead of an “Expiration Date”). I used “CV2” above for the sake of size. The face of a credit card has a pretty limited amount of real estate. And also I didn’t really feel like reorganizing and squeezing things around.
Through a discussion with a friend about the NBA’s nascent interest in promoting basketball across the globe, I uncovered the following insights:
I say the NBA should develop an outreach program along the following lines:
I guess follow me on twitter or something in the meanwhile.
I’ve decided to branch my thinking out into a slightly new direction: Design.
I don’t necessarily mean the sort of creative work that my friends Matt and Logan are capable of. Maybe someday. For now, I’m referring more to business design. Way more human interactive experience, way less Adobe Illustrator (theoretically).
So I thought I’d kick things off by talking about toilets.
In case you haven’t pooped any time in the last decade or so, there’s been a fairly significant innovation in the world of public toilets. That little black square on the left side of the pipe is a motion sensor: It can tell when you’ve stood up, and will automatically flush the toilet for you so that you won’t have to physically touch a handle (how outdated!).
Here’s the thing, though: These sensors kind of suck. Most of them can apparently detect the movement of anything bigger than an oxygen particle, and will flush repeatedly throughout the course of one, *ahem*, sitting. I’d guess this is also a waste of water, but as far as I’m really concerned, it’s just a broken experience. And I think it can be easily fixed.
See Figure 2, below:
Here’s the thing with the toilet flush sensor: Its success doesn’t hinge on the fact that it activates the second you stand up from the seat. All we want to do is alleviate the need for you to touch a handle and spread germs. It’s not necessary for the monitor to be fixated on your back while you’re reading a particularly funny Calvin & Hobbes strip or after you’ve consumed more than your fair share of late night Taco Bell. This contrasts starkly with the motion sensor on the sink (which, I believe, was first to market), where the design completely fails unless your hands are directly under the sink when the sensor activates.
All I did above was make two excruciatingly simple changes to the design. First, I rotated the sensor 90 degrees. No more excessive flushes from seat shuffles. All you have to do is hover your hand over the sensor when you’re done. If we were to get really fancy, you might even move the sensor over to the other side of the stall so that patrons don’t have to reach over the toilet. (I don’t know; they’re the germophobes, not me!).
Second, I added a thin red light. Figuring out the three-dimensional depth of where I need to place my hands to line up with the bathroom sink sensors usually works after a few seconds of trial & error. It’s not a terribly big inconvenience, but heck, we’re fixing things anyway. We solve this modern day crisis with the red light, which is much easier to line your hand up with spatially. My guess is that common sinks don’t employ this because they’re usually pointed horizontally and might get in childrens’ eyes. No such problem here.
Anyway. I hope there will be more crap like this to come.
Getting stuck in a trend is tough. A rut, worse yet.
Routines, even (perhaps especially!) bad ones, are hard to break. “It was no big deal last time,” and “what’s one more week?” are compelling arguments.
The trick to getting unstuck: Just start doing anything. Flailing around. Whatever. Something, anything to break the regime.
This post is pretty useless. But it’s a kick start in the right direction.
We’ve got a lot of good ground to cover soon.
Just write.
Gosh, this stuff is so easy. A cancelled flight home yesterday offered hours of further opportunity to ponder and investigate the airport and airline conundrum.
Looking around the whole airport experience, there are a plethora of problems that we business school folk like to call “bottlenecks”: situations where the performance of the entire system is limited by the productivity of a specific area.
Most readily complain about the difficulties and delays in check-in and security—but I don’t think expedition here would really make the process go any faster. A quicker check-in process would simply reallocate waiting time elsewhere.
There’s another wait-heavy area about which far fewer complaints are heard: the plane boarding process.
It’s freaking difficult for passengers to embark and disembark the plane in rapid fashion. And the wait time is sneaky because it’s broken down into four parts:
Plane embarking efficiency is more important than check-in or security because advances here might actually lead to an efficiency improvement in the overall process. If we can turn the planes around faster, we can either increase the number of flights or decrease the time sensitivity (a likely cause of delays and other problems) of each.
The “progressive” airlines like Southwest have implemented a “group” system: If you’re in Group A, you get to board first and can take whichever spot you like—there are no assigned seats. Speed is rewarded, rather than precision.
Seat upgrades are a fake solution: Customers in a hurry can spend an extra $40 or so to board the plane first…and…uh…sit around in the plane for 20 minutes while everyone is doing the same thing, but in the terminal.
How can we get people on and off the plane faster? The true root of the problem is the plane aisle: the aisle is wide enough to accommodate someone walking down the length of the plane, or wide enough for someone to reach up to their overhead bag, but not wide enough to allow two passengers to do both at the same time.
I propose three possible solutions:
1. Eliminate the overhead compartments. I really don’t think these are necessary anymore, if they ever were. It seems obvious that a large portion of boarding delays are due to people like Grandma, who’s packed her son’s Christmas gift (probably an olympic weightlifting set) into her carry-on and can’t quite reach the storage above her frame. She means well, but the negative externalities of her thoughtfulness are adversely affecting everyone else on the flight.
If you’ve been flying recently, you’ll notice that the overhead often reaches capacity, thanks in large part to increased fees for checked luggage. So, remarkably, you’ll have also already noticed that the airlines have a solution for this problem—you can leave your excess overhead on the bridge for some terminal workers to check under the plane, and you can pick it up in the same spot on your way out. This isn’t a perfectly efficient process—surely there are better places to build up crowds of people than in the middle of the highly-trafficked bridge—but the building blocks of the process are already in place.
In fact: the whole, entire checked bags process is already in place! Airports already have entire areas for baggage claim and plenty of complicated luggage trolley systems. By adding baggage fees, the airlines have moved much of the baggage process from the airport, where there’s plenty of excess time capacity (as far as the airlines are concerned), onto the airplane itself, where time is very much of the essence (in spite of how much the airlines try to convey that they just don’t give a damn).
If we (the airline) removed the overhead space and allowed only one carry-on, could we move to smaller, cheaper planes? Could we make the beneath-the-seat spaces bigger? We could surely revoke the policy on charges for the first checked bag. And we could definitely make plane turnaround process time faster (…perhaps while making customer process time longer, which seems like a perfect fit for the airline industry jerks).
2. Also board seats in the chronological order of window-middle-aisle. By far the weakest of my three solutions, but also, the option that might get implemented most quickly and cheaply. Every time an aisle-seat passenger is seated, and has to stand up and get back into the aisle to make room for a window-seat passenger, seconds or minutes are lost for everyone on the plane.
3. Invent a second bridge that runs along the side of the plane on the outside. You couldn’t successfully argue for making the original aisle wider—this would either necessitate wider planes (and more fuel) or fewer passenger seats. All planes are required to have both a front and a rear exit (at least, so I’m told by every single plane welcome video EVER)…but the passage in the back is seldom if ever used. Why?
The airport’s bridge is wide enough to accommodate two streams of traffic. Why doesn’t an airline invent a proprietary, temporary/move-able second bridge that might allow passengers to go directly to the back entryway from the main bridge? You should then be able to board through both doors at once, starting with passengers seated in the middle—the emergency exit rows, which are typically regarded as the luxury seats with bonus legroom, anyway.
What kind of benefits might be reaped by shaving 20 minutes off your turnaround time, every flight? At the cost of what, a few thousand bucks up front to build the thing?
Dear Nike:
Your marketing budget is ginormous. In 2008, Forbes claimed that you dropped around $2 Billion on sponsorships and advertising, combined. And I guess you’ve done some pretty cool stuff.
But things could be SO much better.
Here’s what I propose:
1) Cut the promotional budget relentlessly. Anything that won’t cause an immediate catastrophic disaster, scrap.
2) Call up these guys. Give them all your money. In exchange, you get to change their name from “Royal Jordanian” airlines to “Air Jordan,” you get to wrap the planes with giant MJ photos, and you get to deck the planes out with basketball stuff.
3) ???
4) Profit relentlessly.
Sincerely,
Josh
Here at HBS, we sure do love our Entrepreneurship.
I mean, we really, deeply, unabashedly, lust after it. It’s the dream job. Do whatever you want! No rules! Your own office, your own schedule, everything exactly the way you like it.
There’s all kinds of statistics pointing to our collective interest in the profession (though, rather than actually researching and citing any, just image they exist somewhere in Exhibit 3 towards the end of this newspaper). Harvard has a required course in Entrepreneurship in the Spring semester. The HBS brain trust, in fact, is right now underway inventing new courses under the loose, vague framework of “FIELD” in attempts to pit green RC’s in a real, live entrepreneurship setting (I’m sure you might be able to read more about it, if you dare, in HBS’ intrepid torture system, Learning Hub).
Assuming you didn’t skip the article title like you’re now accustomed to skipping the “Company Background” paragraph in your case studies, I’m going to take the contrarian position here. I think that Entrepreneurship sucks. And as a faithfully sporadic opinion columnist in your weekly newspaper, I felt the burden was on me to clarify some of the many misconceptions about the field.
The sell: You’re your own boss.
The reality: You know what’s great about big, corporate culture? You’ve probably only got one boss. That’s it! Sure, she’s probably an obnoxious bloke who’s invariably more into TPS reports , memos, and cover sheets than concerned about your self-worth. Big deal. I mean, haters are going to hate. Write her behavior off like you know what you’re doing in FRC and go enjoy yourself with the other (x-1) people in your life.
Here’s the weird thing about startup culture: When you’re the company owner, the line starts and ends at you. You’re not your own boss; rather, everyone else you’ve ever met is actually your boss. Supplier got the order wrong? Your problem; you fix it. Sales team can’t get their act together (despite a wonderfully choreographed song and dance routine)? That’s on your shoulders. People fighting, Arthur Moreno’s only working at 103% efficiency, not enough likes and tweets and check-ins? All you. But if Tide suddenly stops selling at Procter & Gamble because somebody’s been brewing three varieties of beer in the vats in the basement? Pfft. I’m just the guy in the Crest toothpaste division.
The sell: Work from wherever you want; work from your desk at home.
The reality: Sorry, I’ve been squatting on Facebook waiting to see if anyone will sell me a last-minute Priscilla ball ticket for cheap because nobody seems to have figured out yet that it’s a horrible idea to buy these things anytime sooner than the last possible minute and there’s bargains to be had. You were saying about getting some work done on an article?
The sell: Make money.
The reality: Hah, seriously?
The sell: Do what you love.
The reality: Half true. To be more precise: “Do the worst part of that thing you love that nobody else is going to peacefully agree to do for you or do even remotely as well as you could do it.
Take, for example, that big idea you’ve got that you want to center your entire life around. Guess what: if it’s not already being done, someone’s already come up with the same exact concept at least a year ago. In fact, the last person who thought of it probably had a way better version than the rather embarrassingly elementary rendering your feeble mind managed to conjure up. The internet is a really, really huge place.
Not to worry, though. There is one thing that may actually separate you from the creepers who breed in the darkest corners of the cloud: You may actually try. You can pound the pavement, make on-the-fly decisions where both options are the wrong answer, sell until your face changes color, invest your own hard-earned money, invest other people’s hard-earned money, ruin someone else’s social life, and even ruin your own.
But honestly, I can’t see why you wouldn’t rather sit back in your ergonomically-designed desk chair, crack a beer you bought on the company’s expense account, and cut your biweekly salary checks that could feed a family of five for three months.
Josh Petersel is an RC in the Class of 2013 at Harvard Business School, and actually was an entrepreneur at one point. This totally makes him a venerable authority on the subject. If you’d like to partner up with him on one of your own stupid business ideas, send him an email at peterselj@gmail.com.
[Note: This article appeared in the Harbus at Harvard Business School the week of October 31st, 2011. You can find the online version here, while it lasts.]
10 Bold Calories! (…and 20 calories per bottle.)
Begs the following questions: