Questioning time — Part 3

Scott Liddell, Head of Enterprise Solutions at Standard Life, talks about engaging with the real you in the third part of our series on learning lessons from one of history’s great problem solvers.

An aversion to verbs

The question we set out to answer was simple — how do you build a product for the Experiential Self (who we really are) rather than the Narrative Self (who we want to be)?

Today’s standard method for defining a product would be to build up a catalogue of User Stories that serve as the definition of what the product needs to do. It is no coincidence that the ‘story’ concept is likely to be more aligned to a narrative view of our world given that these are the stories we tell ourselves.

A standard User Story goes something like:

“As a customer, I need to be able to…”

Bzzzzz. Thanks for playing. This is the Experiential Self. It only has one User Story:

“I’ve just got back from a long day at work and I quite fancy watching Eastenders then Bake Off.”

There they are. There are our requirements. We can’t fall into the trap of expecting the Experiential Self to want to do anything.

How do you do that when you are building a product? It’s actually quite simple. You avoid verbs wherever you can.

As we build out the product, we need to keep the number of times we require the user to do anything to an absolute minimum so whenever we see any verbs, we challenge them.

Even something as simple as logging in. Why would you log in when you’re watching Eastenders? This is the embodiment of what I call the negative-effort proposition. We deal with the verbs so you don’t have to.

Clearly we can’t remove all interactions, but they should be limited to, simply, making choices. All the heavy lifting should be done in advance and all we will ask the user to do is decide what they want to do.

Contrast this with the majority of financial planning experiences today. They simply aim to surface data to the customer and let them do the rest. But the visualisations they produce are hard work and don’t sit neatly within the rules of the Experiential Self.

Everyone loves a good visualisation. They’re cool. You feel smart by association.

It’s like that bit in Jurassic Park when Richard Attenborough’s granddaughter says, “It’s a Unix System, I know this!” and we are treated to flight over a 3D file system that has never been seen and, even if it had, would have been entirely unusable. It’s simply meant to look clever so that, by association, the audience considers the young girl to be clever.

For a brief moment these visualisations of your data might appeal to your Narrative Self too — “Check me out with all my cool numbers and stuff.”

Before your Experiential Self shuts the laptop lid with a triumphant “It’s my finances, I know this!” after having done precisely nothing to improve things. Aside from the indolent nature of the Experiential Self, there are fundamental issues at the heart of any human readable visualisation.

1. The particular form of the visualisation is based on what the person building it thought was important i.e. it has been filtered, with emphases determined by the creator. It is skewed.

2. The information that is gleaned from this particular presentation of the data is a victim of the perception and understanding of the viewer. It is skewed again. At this point a perfectly good Rubik’s cube of data is garbled into who knows what.

3. Assuming — and it is a big assumption — the viewer has gleaned enough information to take action, there is the problem of self-efficacy. Do you trust your understanding enough to get on and make a change? Or do you start by saying: “If I’m reading this right…”.

The Experiential Self looms large over user self-efficacy. It tells you that you are rubbish at this kind of thing. It probably let out a shriek when it saw the graphs. It’s more like the guy in Jurassic Park who got eaten on the toilet.

This is what lies at the heart of Choices, the distillation of data to information, the assessment of information into actions, the description of the outcome of those actions as a set of easily understood options. Choices is simplification. “It’s a simple choice, I know this!”

You can follow Choices and Scott here on Medium for more, or drop us a line if you know someone we should speak to about building the future of life savings. Email simon_lyle@standardlife.com