Podcast Ep. 20 – Science-backed principles for human-centric experience design w/ Dana Rock – part 2

In this episode, we hear from Dana Rock, Director of Experience at Pickle Jar Communications. 

Our experience is the sum total of all the bits. It’s made up of our interactions and touchpoints, but also our 

• expectations, 
• feelings, and 
• our memories. 

These things might sound kinda squishy and abstract.

But, as Dana will explain, it’s these squishy-sounding bits that are key to designing the ‘right’ experience for your customers. And it’s these bits which we can easily forget, particularly when we are focused on delivering within our specialist areas. 

In this two-part episode, we will explore four experience design principles, informed by scientific research, which you can use to rethink your approach and connect the bits together.

In this session, part 2, we will cover our next two principles:

• Make it memorable (or intentionally forgettable)

• Make it personal

Design with purpose, empathy, and simplicity. Create experiences that inspire, empower, and delight. Click To Tweet

Dana is passionate about enabling others to create compelling and inclusive content and experiences. A professionally trained and experienced content design, Dana draws on research across behavioural economics, neuroscience, and linguistics to inform their approach.

They are a former Director of Marketing and Communications with a strong track record in developing award-winning campaigns, nurturing high-performing content teams, and delivering omnichannel strategies to meet business goals.

FUN FACT: Dana is one of the best elite kayakers in the UK. Having previously paddled the Grand Canyon and kayaked over a 20ft waterfall all on top of having a name that utterly kicks butt.

ment needs and developing practical roadmaps to achieve their KM vision.

Full session transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

Noz Urbina  

Okay, so we’re going to tackle making it memorable and making it personal. And part two of this two part episode. We’re back with Dana rock, I’d like to thank everybody for, for listening, and I will help you see on the next episode. Remember, get in touch with us with other questions. If you if you already heard this one, you still have time to ping us, share us, share us subscribe, etc. All that good stuff on your channel of choice. And we’ll see you in the next episode. Hello, everybody, and welcome back. This is part two of our episode with Donna rock, who is talking to us about four principles for making better designs. Our four principles are making it make sense making it emotional, making it memorable or intentionally forgettable, making it personal. In the last episode, we talked about making things make sense and making them emotional. And that was very emotional for me, I the big two big two items, I have two big items that I’m a really big proponent of and lots of great research coming in from Donna. And today we’re gonna be tackling making it memorable and making it personal. So how do we use emotions to drive better memory? How do we use everything that we’ve talked about in the previous episode to inform making things memorable? And then top on many of my customers list is personalization. How do we actually make the individual feel that they’re having a an experience, which is for them? So I’ve already introduced a data on the first episodes, you can go check that out, she is designer for pickle jar communications. Sorry, I forgot her title there, Director of experience design at Pickle, Pickle Jar communications, and a very cool person overall. So without much further ado, Dennis, I want to say hello to the group. Hello. Welcome. Okay, so data today we’re looking at making it memorable. We’ve been looking at this from a cognitive science perspective, which is just huge, hugely enjoyable thing for me. We’ve mentioned on a previous episode that we had Anil Seth, open our last real time conference, big fan of the cognitive science community and what they can teach us as designers as content people as content modelers, content engineers, information architects, everything that has to do with making an omni channel experience. I think if you know a bit of cognitive science and know a little bit about about this area, you you empathize better and you understand this field better. So we’re talking about memory first in this episode than a Why do you feel that? There’s there’s room for improvement here and why and why is it so important?

Dana Rock  

Thanks, I think make it memorable, which is also make it memorable or intentionally forgettable, but be think about what is the lasting impact that you want to have for your customers? Do you want them to remember this experience? And I think sometimes brands tend to think like we want people to remember us. But what do you want them to remember? At what point in the journey? What kind of element do you want to create? And actually, very, very infrequently, are there examples of people really consciously creating and designing for this is the bit that I really want you to remember. And this is the bit that’s forgettable and really thinking about that. So a couple of places to go with this is, you know, what is memory memory is this kind of newly encoded experience where and again, it’s kind of going to get filtered down into you know, the the emotional relevance of something we don’t necessarily like if you’ve read War and Peace. I don’t know why I picked that book, but I guess there’s a lot in it. You might not necessarily remember everything There’s a lot going on in that book. But you might remember that kind of feeling of like, it was good, it was bad. And we know what and maybe some key, some key bits of the book. So like the Battle of Borodino has a very specific example. But like a really memorable part of that book. Anyway, so we remember certain things, and it often gets distilled in a certain way. And, you know, research shows that the patents in what we tend to remember so we know from Daniel Kahneman, who I mentioned in the previous podcast, that we tend to remember the peak and the end of an experience. And if it’s something that really engages our senses, so you know, very emotional, particularly positive emotion, we tend to actually remember positive experiences better than negative one. And there’s, there’s absolutely, absolutely brilliant books, if anyone’s interested in the topic of, of memory. There’s a wonderful, wonderful book, which I can’t recommend highly enough by Veronica Okene, which is called the rag and bone shop. And it’s about this is written by somebody who’s a psychiatrist, actually. And it talks about how memories make us and we make memories. And it’s it’s really amazing, a book, and it’s in that book that the author suggests that there’s this kind of kind of bias towards remembering the positives is why perhaps for some people, when they think of their childhood, it was always sunny. And when I read that, I was like, oh, yeah, I thought that the weather was just different in the 90s. Because all of my memories of childhood, where it’s like Saturday morning, walking to the shop, device, sweet. It was sunny. But clearly, it wasn’t like I could look up the weather, you’re

Noz Urbina  

from the UK, you do know that?

Dana Rock  

I am from the UK as well. So no way is that true. But it’s a nice example of the kind of the bias of our memories of, you know, my positive memories of childhood of going to buy sweets on a Saturday morning was my dad would be there was blue sky. And clearly there wasn’t blue sky, because as you say, I’ve grew up in the UK predominantly. So I think it’s interesting when we’re thinking about, you know, as, as designers, how do we intentionally designed for the kind of experiences that we want people to have? Do we want people to have a particular kind of peak and end. And I think people who work in the kind of the business of experiences, so things like hospitality actually probably have got this, right, because I think they kind of intuitively understand that the end is really important. Like, even if a customer has a bad experience on Route, if you you know, give them 20% of the bill, if you give them you know, the chocolate mints at the end, if you have kind of a fond farewell at the end of the trip, then people will think positively about it, even if overall there were actually some real troughs in that experience. And just to kind of back that up with a bit of research as well. So this is something that Daniel Kahneman describes as a piece of research that looks at people’s experiences of pain. And you’re nodding, so perhaps you’re familiar with this one of, of, you know, you’ve got two people who are undergoing a surgical procedure. And either they have a kind of a great amount of pain, like a 10 out of 10, and then it kind of eases off gradually, or they just have moderate pain, and it’s the people, you’d think it’s that moderate pain would be more preferable than excruciating pain, and it is not. But by kind of smoothing off the the end of that experience, people overall are kind of more positive about that experience for those people that had the mildot. So influencing the end of how people kind of finish that the level of pain that they are, as they come out of that experience has a greater impact than the full duration. You know, it’s it’s not a complete narrative, in terms of how we experiencing things. And so I think that’s gonna be

Noz Urbina  

everybody’s, I think it’s such, it’s such a clear, simple example, that we would rather have more pain for longer. But the narrative that we take away, our memory of it is oh, yeah, it got better at the end. You’ll see he also uses the simple little record scratch story, which is one of my favorites from that book, where he says, how someone was talking to him about how they were listening this beautiful piece of music. And then at the end, there was a scratch on the record, and it ruined the whole thing. Yes. And that’s we all empathize with that. We can all go Oh, yeah, it ruined the whole thing. That doesn’t make any sense. Really. You know, why? Why would 40 minutes of wonderful music be destroyed by one bad second at the end, but that is how we retain stories.

Dana Rock  

Yeah, exactly. And so I mean, people could just adjust and the good old would just need to make the end really good thing but actually, I think it’s also thinking about where we create moments to enable memory to happen. And the experience that the best example that I can think of is pretty amazing experience because last year, as I think you alluded to in the intro of the last podcast, I cracked down the Grand Canyon, which is in itself an awesome in the in the true meaning of the word and awesome experience paddling down. You know in my little Clacton On the Grand Canyon for two weeks now, objectively, I do remember, the sand was horrendous the sand really fine sand trying to put contact lenses in in a desert, not great 40 degree heat, bugs and baits, definitely some of that stuff existed. But my overwhelming feeling for our American

Noz Urbina  

listeners 40 degree heat is really really hot.

Dana Rock  

Oh, yes, sorry. Thanks. Thank you for the translation. Yeah, and so for sure, I do recall that there were negative things, but my feeling of that trip was just like, oh, wow, that was awesome. And I think one of the reasons why is because on the last day of the trip, and this is my example of how you designed from memory, was the on the last day of the trip, the guide said, like, we’ve had an amazing trip, this is a trip that you’ll remember, for the rest of your life. We’ve had two weeks down this flooding down this canyon, and we’re going to come out soon, we’re going to come out soon. And what I want to do is just from the campsite, to the top of the first rapid, let’s paddle in silence, let’s just kind of float along and absorb it all and feel what it’s like to be in the Grand Canyon and to experience what we’ve experienced. And it was just like, a little cut out to say, now’s your moment to be right. Be here. Feel this. Remember this moment. Guess what knows. Remember, did I remember Yeah.

Noz Urbina  

That’s what I want to put in a metaphor here, you make a good point about this does not mean you can skimp on the on the on the quality and rescue it up yet. Because if you if you try to put a bow on a turd, it’s gonna be a bone, a turd. And it can actually be worse in the sense that I’ve had that where you’ve had terrible experiences, it’s been a disaster, the application isn’t work, the service isn’t bad, the service is bad, the people are not helpful. And then at the end, they go, tada, and they just kind of like this expectation that they’re there, they’re still have an automatic kind of assumption that everything went great. And that actually makes it worse. So if you try to kind of like pick it all up at the end, and it’s been a disaster, the it’s the opposite of that. You’re, you’re instead of having this wonderful closure, and memorable piece that really makes you kind of forget some of the bad experiences. If it’s been too bad. You have to acknowledge that and and try to correct that in an appropriate way. Or else you’re really trying to you’re not getting a cherry on top. You’re Yeah, yeah. Insulting the person.

Dana Rock  

Yes. And I think that it would be airiness to for the takeaway to be make sure the ending is good. The piece really is to understand that what we remember tends to be the peak the trough, for particularly strong senses, the positive emotions. And now that you know that, how is that going to inform your design practice? Because I’m going to assume that people listening to this are, you know, interested people engaging with OmnichannelX? I think and how do I create a good experience for my customers, right? They’re not out to create a bad experience. But now that you know that, if you want them to remember and think positively about your brand and recommend it, and what the moments that you want to have in mind, that they might use to kind of trigger talking about, you know, their experience of your brand or organization. And is there a point in the journey that people typically have in which you want to create that space to make it to make something memorable to make something have, you know, a particular resonance? Where is that? And how do you use what we know about the kind of cognitive bias of how we remember things to inform how you want to create your experience,

Noz Urbina 

I can put a some some something concrete on that as well. I really like that, because we’re, it’s I see smart companies putting in sensible dividing points in a journey. So let’s say it’s onboarding, I’m, I’m getting familiar with with product X be that a service or piece of software or physical device, and it can do lots of things or there’s onboarding process is going to be could be weeks, who knows, could be all day or several hours. And then all along that they’ve kind of put breakpoints and said, Okay, well, you’ve now you know how to do the first thing, first important thing. Yay. Let’s move on to the second thing, as opposed to they don’t have to stop there. You know, they could just feed things at you non stop. But they’ve taken a pause to say, okay, x is complete. Now we’re going to start y and that’s your opportunity to to let people orient themselves and that’s all your also your opportunity to kind of like your your guide there in the Grand Canyon. There. By doing that. You’re creating that space to go, you’ve accomplished something. Great. Let’s go Move on. And just by doing that you’re chopping the up and you’re giving yourself these people to get that little endorphin hit of positivity, which helps them write better memories.

Dana Rock  

Yes, yes. And you’re thinking about that as the kind of the different stages, right? You’re kind of having little, little points and thinking about that,

Noz Urbina  

or creating pages, creating sub stages. Yeah, where you previously only saw stage. Yeah.

Dana Rock  

And, you know, just just to add to that as another thing, which I don’t know, if the people who organized my Grand Canyon trip were, were like, really well researched neuroscience experts, or whether they just intuitively knew how to create a brilliant experience. But another thing that they did after the floating down the river kind of memorable moment was weeks and weeks after my trip, like a good month after my trip, I got a postcard i in the UK, got a real postcard in the post, you know, snail mail, from Arizona, to say, Wow, do you remember your trip to the Grand Canyon, which ironically, only arrived sort of two weeks after the postcards I’d attempted to send from Arizona, such as international mail ballots. But it was also like long enough. And of course, on that postcard, it kind of said, Hey, do you remember your trip? So it’s trying to, you know, prompt me to kind of go back to that experience that kind of neurally encoded experience that particular memory of the Grand Canyon to go, Hey, do you remember that? But of course, then they use that moment to say, Hey, why didn’t you rate us on TripAdvisor, which is also brilliant, because by that point, I’ve gone home, and I’ve refused about how amazing the Grand Canyon is, I forgotten about the horrendous ant bites that I suffered. And I’m really just focused on this, like really kind of trippy or inspiring moment floating down at the end. So again, that’s a moment where you are creating memory, because creating a moment where you say, Hey, do you remember that? And I think again, there are examples of people who are intuitively doing that, creating those moments to go, Hey, do you remember this and how good it was. But really understanding perhaps, like the timing of that, and how you link that to the previous experience, I think is something that it’s worth designers kind of probing around and testing and experimenting with, because I think there’s something I think there’s something useful there.

Noz Urbina 

There’s, you can even take that as deep or as granular saying, you know, putting more headings in your content, or creating several smaller pages out of out of one page. Where because it gives people a chance to break the flow and go, Okay, I’ve completed this, I’ve read this whole thing, I can move on to the next one. And even if you don’t say anything, simply by not having one big, massive flowing page or just paragraph after paragraph of unbroken text, you give it you give them no chance to stop a no chance, even implicitly or unconsciously to go. I’ve done something now. Yes, yes, yes, I think it applies to every part of design information design, pagination, layout, everything.

Dana Rock 

Yeah. And I think the way that we now kind of understand how, you know, friction can be useful. Slowing down on purpose, the journey, I think people kind of getting to understand how that can be useful, even though perhaps we might think we want it to be completely smooth and seamless. What you’ve just described there of how do we break it down? How do we create space, and, and seeing space and time as ingredients in the experiences that we’re trying to orchestrate?

Noz Urbina 

All you made me smile there, because I’ve been talking about for the content content, which we consider not just the length and width of our particular information space, but the depth that we and how we want to expose depth, and where we are in space time. I’ve been talking about that for the past 12 years. So I’m delighted to hear you’re using that language. Okay, so I am really struggling to keep this into too tight episodes, because I’m having such a good time. So but we have to move on to making it personal. I just want to pause there for a second because I mentioned the previous episodes, some some research, we were talking about making memorable and the idea. And the tie ins between emotion are our subject and previous one and memory or kickoff for this one. And I mentioned some research about people who have lost their emotions and become disoriented and unable to wayfind or do anything effectively. And that research was by George Lake off. He’s a American cognitive linguist and philosopher. And he does some great stuff on the universal metaphors, which we also kind of talked about in the previous podcast, he talks about these kind of metaphors like rising prices, or hot and cold emotions or hot and cold people, warm people, chilly people, these metaphors, which and how they they those kinds of metaphors that are rooted in our, in our ergonomic beings are universal across all languages. So it gives you kind of a safe set of metaphors you will use in any culture around the world. So George Lakoff is very cool, so check him out. But our last principle to tackle is personalization. Big time back. What I asked kind of clients cold what’s like, what are your number one priorities? They’re talking about personalization. It’s got to and it’s controversial in the in our community, the UX and content communities. It is controversial topic. So Donna, what’s your what’s your take?

Dana Rock  

Yeah. Yeah, so I’m super interested in personalization has been quite a bit in my life, I think because of where I started in my career, which was trying to engage people in getting them to participate in fundraising events. And lo and behold, those that were a personal approach or appear to be a first approach, because I was so good at Mail Merge had a greater impact than the more generic communications and well, that’s price. But so personalization has been a bit of a theme for me. And the thing I would actually start with is to say that all content is personalized content, because, and this is me, quoting for a kid who I mentioned, who wrote the rag and bone short book, which I highly recommend is that personal experience is the only filter through which a person can understand the present world. So people are bringing personal experience personal expectations, memories, biases, etc, to what they experience with the things that you create. And that goes back to what you said, beginning of episode one of people have experiences, not things, right, people have experiences based on the things that we create, and we want to kind of understand that. So all all experiences are personal experiences, because that’s, you know, the nature of it in and of itself. So, stop that, for me is the starting point for understanding. Okay, how do we use personalization? How do we use it as a foundation to add value to our customer experience? How do we better meet our strategic goals? By doing things like, you know, there’s me back in the day trying to get to fundraise and finding personalization more impactful than generic communications. And then when I think we kind of dig into the research to understand like, what works and what doesn’t work in personalization.

Noz Urbina  

I find personalization, that witnessed things come up often. The creepy factor people are scared of, of, of making a personalizing, because they don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable. So what is the you know, what’s the right side? How do we keep on the right side of the creepy factor? The other thing is, they’re there. Constantly pleading, data, poverty, oh, I can’t do any kind of personalization. Because we don’t have this amazing integrated all singing, all dancing database that lets us get a 360 view across organization of all our people. So I have my responses to both of those. But I’m interested in yours.

Dana Rock  

Yeah, so the two things, the creepy factor, and the we can’t do it, which I call the dark area of impossible for reasons I’ll come on to later, I think. And so for me to, to understand personalization, and to first of all to make sense of the creepy factor is what is the basis of our interactions? What is the basis of our interactions, dialogue, like, before we do anything else, before we kind of get, you know, personalized interactions with brands, we just have conversations with people one on one, me and you’re talking to each other. And if I suddenly knew the name of, you know, all your family members, what school you went to what your shoe size was, instead of bringing these things up in conversation, I’m going to be freaking you out was, I’m not going to do this, by the way, I haven’t done the research. But um, if I started doing that, that would be pretty freaky, because you’ve not told me that information. And, you know, even even if I was sort of trained myself to hear human CRM, and write down every single fact that you’d ever told me, now, you might think of me as you know, a really kind of, you know, conscientious friend who always remembers your birthday, but also you might go Blimey, why have you got my shoe size? And you know, you know, yeah, it’s a bit it’s a bit odd, because I think our basis of understanding is, you know, interaction, full stop. And most of that interaction is human interaction, the basis of that is just dialogue with another human being. So when we start having dialogues with brands, that’s where things get interesting, because that’s where things can easily misfire, either, because I haven’t given you this information. So why are you trying to do something? So for example, if a brand starts trying to sell me products that totally I’m not going to buy, they’ve assumed something so for example, if it’s assumed on the basis of like age or gender or something like that, and they’re selling you, you know, particular products and you’re just going blindly, this is just so not relevant to my personal life path. And then equally, the frustration of I’ve told you what my address is, so why haven’t you remembered my dress from my last order? This is really frustrating. So I think if we are in a human interaction, you’re talking to a friend Do you would expect them to remember certain things maybe hope that they remember it was your birthday, you might assume that they remember where you live or what your name is, and they’ve got your, your phone number saved and those sorts of things. But there’s a level to which we expect. And I think if we understand it is, what would be acceptable if we were human human, and then trying to scale that to something that is a brand. And that, of course, you are turning the human into the CRM, and you’re looking at your technical capabilities. But I think there’s also two ways to think about this. So I have, obviously, it’s podcasts, we can’t demonstrate it. But I will describe, I have a little chart that I that I show of the scale of personalization, when you’ve got one axis, which is about the essentially the kind of the processes of what is possible, and you’ve got another one, and it gets more and more difficult, right? And then on the other process, sorry, the other axis, you have a kind of a level of knowledge and a level of personalization. So if I was to get you something like a gift, then if I knew nothing about you if

Noz Urbina  

so one axis is how personal and the other axis is,

Dana Rock 

yeah, how difficult it is to deliver, like the right so, so but I can plot in a line. So that’s kind of right in the right in the bottom, left hand corner, kind of 00 as it were, if we were to give something a score, and I had to buy you a gift, and I knew nothing about you, you know, I buy a vanilla flavored sponge cake. If it was Christmas, it might be like a candy cane. And you know, if if anyone’s taken, you know, a kid to, you know, sees like Santa Claus or equivalents, you know, there’s some really generic gift that’s maybe just like, for a boy or for a girl. And it’s just terrible. Yeah. And then we get right to the extreme end, where so for me, the best gift I’ve ever had in my life, was a hand carved canoe paddle created by my dad, that had the Canadian flag kind of Maple Leaf kind of carved on one side, and a dinosaur carved on the other side, because I was born in Canada. And my nickname is Dino, like Dino the dinosaur. So this is like a super personalized gift that took months to create. And it also incorporates, like so much that my dad knows about me, right? So it’s super high in terms of process. You you spent months in the garage, making the battle, but also super high in terms of like, what are the different things that I know. And I should add, he’s my dad. So it’s okay, that he knows this stuff, like, you know what I mean. And, of course, it’s super memorable, it’s something that I’ll cherish for the rest of my life. Now, if we’re an organization, we don’t have, first of all, necessarily the knowledge about our customers to know, you know, what is meaningful to them in terms of their personal identity, like their nickname, their country, etc, etc. But also, we don’t have the workshop space to be creating these hand carved things. So we do need to think about our technical processes, what we’ve got available. And we need to be thinking about what’s the customer data that we have, what’s the customer data as well, crucially, that’s going to add value, because there’s lots of information that my dad has about me, like, you know, what grades I got at school, the fact that I came third of the beanbag race, aged eight, not relevant, not relevant information, like not fundamental to me, in a sense of my identity, not relevant to this particular to this particular gift. So selecting the information that adds value. Needless to say, the paddle was the perfect size for me, right as well. And selecting that information, and then also having a scalable, scalable process that you can deliver on mass. So for me, the dark era of the impossible is the stuff that you can’t do either because you lack insights about your customers. So that’s blocking off the top of the chart, or you don’t have processes that allow you to scale effectively, where the kind of the value that you’re adding through personalization is worth the effort that you’re going to, because theoretically, theoretically, you could, you know, hire a bunch of interns to all write handwritten letters or emails to people. But the ROI on that is disastrous, right. Like, that’s not going to work. We’re only doing those one to one interactions on things like, you know, I mean, I worked in fundraising, as I mentioned, so like really high value donors, you know, you’ve got to be given me 1000s of 1000s of pounds before I start writing you personal messages. Otherwise, I’m just getting snazzy with mail merge. So it’s understanding where are you as an organization and if you want to decrease the the impossible, the dark era, if you’re possible, you either want to have more insights, which might mean more data, but also might be more insight about what are the things that we know about our customers that actually add value? Come on to that in a moment and the other bit is making processes better make it possible to deliver at scale something so you’re not doing kind of handwritten stuff. shouldn’t listen to this is doing that. But you know what I mean? Like, rather than it being a kind of what would the next look around? Yeah, well

Noz Urbina 

what they are doing is they’re using blocky unstructured content. They’re using Word processing tools like they’re they’re keeping, you know, live data in visual design tools like InDesign. They’re just chucking the data over the wall to the to the design house. And then when there’s an update, they have to update the Word document and email a new copy of the Word document to the team who’s got InDesign they put it in the PDF, copy that so that yeah, there’s there’s inefficient processes all over the place. That that I love your graph, by the way, I’m, I’m still in that, you know, just be warned. That’s getting nicked. That’s awesome. And the dark area that’s impossible. So but there’s the I have to say I’m gonna sidetrack us for a second to say I’m also born in Canada, and was a dinosaur nut when I was little. So I love that story just too much in terms of talking about Churchill. So you’ve been very, very researched back to a lot of this. And so far, in both episodes, I’m interested to know if you have any, any research to share with us on personalization.

Dana Rock 

Yeah, well, the bit about the thing that I just mentioned about in terms of insights, and what actually adds value to your customers. And there’s, I mean, this isn’t neuroscience, this is this is Gartner research. Okay? So we kind of bit more regular wheelhouse, but, you know, a piece of research about, you know, what personalization adds the most value to customers? And the answer is stuff that makes things easier, right? So nothing too complex here. This is the thing where, you know, it’s an E commerce experience. And you remember, my address details, my delivery details, you you remember my my bank card, and so it’s easier to for me to pay or, or whether whatever it is, and, and that is more useful than things like motivational stuff of your you’re trying to understand why I’m particularly motivated to to interact with your brand, and then try to use that to give more personalized content. Now that stuff appears to be less effective. And I think what the Gartner research doesn’t quite go into, but But I kind of ponder is why is that? Why is that and I think there’s possibly two things, one of which is that stuff that we make stuff, making stuff easier, is easier, I think, perhaps to research because we can perhaps see it in our digital analytics, we can see it in our heat maps if users are getting stuck, and we can understand how it can smooth out that process. So we can have a bit more insight into that. And so we’re just better at it. Like we’re good at it. And actually, we experienced examples where a smoother processes is adding value to the experience. Whereas in things like motivational, we’re kind of poking around with quite a lot of assumptions. And, you know, why do I want to buy this particular drink product? Is it because I want to lose weight? While you’re assuming that it’s because I want to lose weight? But do I? Is it for something totally different? am I buying it for someone else? You know, no. And therefore

Noz Urbina  

it was a great example. Mark is a great example. From sorry, she’s She is the author of content everywhere. Sarah, watch her butcher. Yes. Our content everywhere strategy and structure for future ready content. She gave an example of a a menstrual calendar, applicants? Yes, yes. You know, it’s one. And so it starts pinging you about about all this like baby readiness stuff, and fertility and she’s going in said that I was trying to have a baby or like this, because they just kind of went there completely unprompted. And the idea is that they’re getting, you know, giving you a more personal experience and going and getting better at knowing you when they’ve got an utterly the wrong assumptions. And you know, that’s an instant delete. So there’s using these things judiciously and thinking, you know, when is when can when is this an appropriate statistical generalization that is going to allow me to scale my process and when is this an assumption? That that’s an that’s I don’t know if I have a quick or quick pithy way to sum up how to tell the difference between those two. But I think that doing your research carefully. Is is the is the, the no brainer there. And I don’t know it never ceases to amaze me the kind of facepalm mistakes that even the largest organizations can make. So any any kind of disaster avoidance advice there is well yeah,

Dana Rock  

disaster avoidance advice. I think it’s a Uh, you know, to me, it goes back to thinking about these as dialogues like the human interactions that we have with people. And so those Clangers is that if you actually like in the example that you’ve just shared with the menstrual app, if that was somebody that you knew you would more likely have said, and why are you doing this? Or actually, they were talking about what they were doing, because because of the why, and the app was kind of incidental to that. And sometimes we need to have that context. But also, if you caught it wrong, you could quickly sort out that conversation quite quite quickly. So in things where we assume so let’s say somebody gets their exam results, right, and they get A’s, and you can Well, congratulations, that’s amazing. They might go, Yeah, I’m over the moon. But they might also go, I really got it, I should have got in this country, we have a stars, which are even higher than A’s. Yeah, and I didn’t get those grades. So I’m not going to the University of my choice, I’m really gutted. And if you were their teacher or their classmate, you would understand the context of whether that’s an A or an A star. Now, if you were like the next door neighbor, maybe you don’t know in quite as much detail. If you hear that they got A’s, you say congratulations. And they go no, actually, I’m really gutted. And they got I’m really sorry for you. And they straightaway change their response. Because they’ve got a little bit more information. They’ve got a context, the problem with brands is that sometimes we’re going to get it wrong, perhaps. But how do we then correct ourselves? And I think there are some good examples. So you know, in the UK, we have Mother’s Day in March, and you know, some card companies obviously, look into cell cards, but you send out an email saying, Hey, do you want to opt out of all that Mother’s Day stuff, because for some people, that’s a very emotional topic, but it’s very unfortunately, it’s, it’s, it’s sad, it’s, it’s about grief, it’s about sadness, it’s about loss, it’s about a whole bunch of things. It’s not about celebrating your gratitude for your mother. And so let’s just give people the opportunity to opt out, let’s not assume the emotion based on the occasion. And, and it provides that that kind of opt out email provides an opportunity for dialogue, right, an opportunity for them to go, no, actually, this isn’t me this, this isn’t a moment of celebration, this I think, sadness,

Noz Urbina  

you’re touching on something, which I think comes up a lot. And I find a lot of my customers are trying to use algorithms and data scientists and et cetera, to be way too clever. It just kind of the assumption is that we should automate and detect our way around these things. And there’s so many times we go, why don’t just ask, you know, pop a question, send an email, put a send a little text message whenever ask is is nothing wrong? Google does it all the time? Yeah, Google is king of the data analytics, triangulation, sniffing up all of our patterns, etc. They pop up questions all the time. Was this result relevant? Did you do we get you there on time? Is this the kind of recommendation you want in your feed? Are you enjoying this whatever, like they constantly just asked the even asked things, which are obviously outsourcing training of their algorithms, they they put up like two different words and go, are these are these synonyms? Or is this is this is this image similar to that image, or they just kind of pop up these things where they’re obviously farming out there, their AI education to me, but they’re utterly unafraid to just ask and I don’t I don’t know why I think there’s a certain anxiety around entering into dialogue, you’re treating the person not as a data point in our analytics, but remembering that they’re human. You can ask them questions they can give you replies,

Dana Rock  1:18:37

Yes, yes. And you know, Was this helpful? Give us some feedback is really important. I think that when we think about personalization, we’re often thinking about how we personalize, automate and scale up, sending stuff out. But what we really need to do because we understand that personalization is about dialogue, is we need to understand how we can scale dialogue, engagement with our customers not just talking at

Noz Urbina  

fantastic, awesome. All right, so this has been a fantastic dialogue. What am I one of my favorites. I’ve really enjoyed this. Diana, thank you so much for joining the podcast. I hope we’re gonna have you back one day.

Dana Rock  

I think Episode Three is Canada and dinosaurs, right?

Noz Urbina  

I think so. And you’re going to teach me how to operate a kayak because that’s an anecdote you want to hear. I went with my partner to do kayaking and there for those of you who don’t know your first trip out, you kind of go around in circles and the little pond right in front of the school. Yeah, we never we never left that pond.

Dana Rock  

But you still that now in fact, that’s where you’re recording as well. You

Noz Urbina  

can only see me from the from the waist up if you’re watching this. Yeah, so I am pathetic in a kayak. But so I am. Yeah, I’m so pleased, aligned on many things. Very good. Thank you for all of your research backed and personal insights into all this incredible use. For our audience, and we hope to see you all next time and where can people get in touch? Danna?

Dana Rock  

I’m, I’m a Twitter person. I’m a LinkedIn person. I’ve done a rock and I work for pickle jar communications. So typing down a rock. There are too many of us. I think I’m doing quite good with SEO for my name, then yeah, and you can find me online.

Noz Urbina  

Fantastic. Thank you so much. And see you all next time.

Dana Rock  

Thanks very much. Awesome. Hey, that was fun. That was really fun. Thanks.