Easy is Not Enough — Part 1.
Scott Liddell is Head of Enterprise Solutions at Standard Life. He’s well into clocks but also well into the clever tech that makes finance smarter. Here in a series called ‘Easy is Not Enough’ we take a deep dive into how Scott views certain things that we take for granted in the world of tech. And, because of his aforementioned love of clocks, we will start with the topic of ‘time’.
It is generally accepted that we humans are curious beasts. We explore, we discover and, when the mood takes us, we invent. Although much of this can be seen as innately linked to problem solving and survival it is also directly linked to something very dear to us — time!
As soon as human life had progressed beyond mere subsistence, we set about finding ways to make things ever easier. If you were to apply a very crude categorisation to human endeavour, we spend time largely either discovering, optimising or enjoying and, for a large part, even the discovering takes part in the optimising. Certainly, we have successfully spent a lot of discovery time on ensuring we, on average, live longer which gives us more time for enjoyment, a whole-of-life optimisation.
Most of our optimisation has come in discrete steps. In fact, we even use a nomenclature of progress to plot our path through history; Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age building towards the Industrial Revolution — the beginning of what we recognise as modern optimisation — to the age of the transistor, the computer and, now, the dawn of the Digital Age.
Running in parallel with this progress is its shadow, expectation. With each new leap forward, accepted norms move forward and you expect not to have to do things the way your grandparents did. None of us light a fire in the morning like they did, we expect it just to be warm when we get up. We expect to live longer than they did too and, most important of all, we expect to have time to do the things that we want to do. This is still a fairly new expectation but it is gaining pace perhaps faster than any ever has. In the near past we worked most of the week. A holiday was, at most, a once a year luxury and, when not working, we were recovering from working.
The almost exponential growth in levels of expectation can be seen widely across society. In fact, the epithet ‘millenial’ is almost an encapsulation of this. The new norm is simple. Everything is easy and anything is possible and, above all, effort is the enemy. Time is no longer something to be won back, it is owned, guarded and handed over sparingly. This is the Digital Age. It is the age in which expectation has reached a new height. If you are going to build it hoping they’ll come, best to make sure that you don’t require much in the way of effort.
Psychology of Time
With the quest for time being central to expectation it becomes important to understand how people think about time. Marc Wittman’s book Felt Time explores how human’s perceive time. This includes detailing the relationship between time and value. The phrase “spending time” is commonplace and directly suggests the value relationship to time. At the core of understanding the expectations of Digital is considering time as a currency. People have a finite amount of time available and, therefore, asking or requiring them to use an amount of it on any action is a value exchange, a purchase. Time is spent in return for something of value. Time spent on something that delivers little or no perceived value will be regarded as time wasted and, therefore, the action itself resented. In fact, Wittman says:
“Human beings are able to anticipate temporal duration and integrate into their decision making their assessment of the time they will probably need to wait.”
If you apply this to Digital Finance a conclusion is reached that low value, perhaps high volume, transactions must take little or no time but other actions, such as applying for a loan, can take longer as the ultimate value to the individual is higher. The best example of this, taken from the retail industry, is Amazon’s “Buy Now With 1 Click”. It represents the ideal time/value exchange. One click is perceived as negligible time with the purchase being of high value to the individual. The time/value ratio can be seen as a strong guide to the likely attractiveness of an action to a customer. This is particularly powerful when combined with the concept of self-efficacy.
In the paper linked here, value is identified as Perceived Usefulness (PU) and Perceived Ease of Use (PE) is shown to play a large part in the adoption of online services. Ease of use in the context of the paper is a view of whether or not the customer trusts themselves to complete the action, this drives adoption in the context of whether or not the customer will choose to use online services in preference to other available channels. Expectation is driven by ease of use being seen as the effort required for customers who are already happy to use digital services.
Based on Wittman, we also see that if a customer believes that something will take longer than they are prepared to invest in an action then there is a strong chance they may never attempt it. In the case of, say, a mobile finance application, if the sign up or login journeys are not timely, then the overall perception of the app may result in the customer assuming that other available actions or services will be similarly slow or slower and they will be discouraged from trying anything else. In cases where there is failure to meet this expectation, the resentment driven by the time being stolen by the extra effort can result in complaint and impact on Net Promoter Score.
This is often evident via Social Media. Twitter, in particular, provides a low effort/high value complaint mechanism and much of the feedback companies receive via Twitter relates to dissatisfaction with something that was expected to be quick and easy taking longer than the customer was prepared to invest. Twitter exists and, to some extent, thrives, because enforced brevity is low effort. Unsurprisingly, customers who are digitally active on Twitter have the highest expectations of a Digital Service.
Somewhat ironically, this is seen most fiercely when Twitter itself has an issue. An entirely free service is expected to always be there, always be quick. As the demographic shifts over time, this behaviour will tend towards all consumers.
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