Want Better Communication? Try Connecting Less.
So, I don’t want this to be a product pump, but I found myself purchasing a Smartwatch. I’m not a smartwatch guy, I make fun of smartwatch guys. The thing that got me there was that I could put my gigantic phone in my pocket, and zoom in on what I was focused on, but still stay connected at an appropriate baseline. Let’s face it, digital devices these days aren’t meant to be innocuous or easy to put down, and that’s what I wanted, somewhere between picking up my phone every 3 minutes and the cold sweats that I turned the volume off an hour ago and forgot.
I like to translate experience into a broader palette; it’s a great way to learn about experience from a functional perspective. Most of what I do has to do with crafting customer and user experiences with things. One of the areas most advertising struggles in is that it doesn’t do the whisper so well. In a lot of cases, the small things add up to the big things. Think of how little differentiates one modern smartphone from the next. Advertisers shout over minute differences, when user experience gives them a clear plate of features that draw, and retain, actual users. Reasons people come to them learn to love them, and stick with them. In the immortal words of NOFX “Sometimes the smallest softest voice carries the grand biggest solutions.”
Keeping an attentive ear to the loud voices is important, but basing decisions off that stream of conversations puts you where everyone else is, and is headed. Picking up on those quiet voices, the real key to what makes you awesome and better, is all about finding ways to tune out the noise, not so unlike our audiences do with the thousands of ads they see every day they just don’t give a shit about. How you go about making the connection to your audience is just as important is how you go about maintaining it. In most cases, it’s easier to make the initial relationship, as hard as that is, than to create an ongoing one. Impulses to buy and trends usually help motivate the introduction externally, but it’s your social skills that create the foundation of any future relationship you will have. That’s something to consider, because social skills have to do with overall communication, not social media.
Back to this fantastically dichotomous smartwatch. I don’t know how other people use them, but all it does for me is let me screen my notifications. Separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were. Figuring out ways to do that with your audience isn’t hard; it’s more a matter of figuring out what has significance to your overall goals. You can’t listen to everything, so it’s important to make sure you’re listing to things that are valid. Priorities and situations change so it’s also important to make sure your systems have tons of flexibility, the important thing is where you’re aiming, not what you’re trying to hit it with (i.e. A damn smartwatch…I know.)
So, to sum up, smartwatches still aren’t cool, nor will they be. They are, however, a great tool for people who want real results (Legal Disclaimer: Those people must be exactly like me, or, in fact, me). Maybe, in the near future, there will be a better tool, or one that fits my preference more, but when you find something that works, it pays to stick with it. I tell people all the time, it’s more important how it works than how it looks, and it’s the absolute truth. If the function isn’t solid, designing form is an exercise in creating an object of art. Art isn’t a consumer good, and it’s not likely to become one anytime soon. Smartshoes, on the other hand…