Don’t be the ‘dog's arse of software design’, and most digital products are misunderstood
Plus: The elephant in the European Digital Identity Wallet room, and AI agents are getting pretty powerful… and that’s before we connect them to your real life
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Each week I unpack the disruptive shifts around ‘Empowerment Tech’. Digital wallets, Personal AI and digital customer relationships.
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Hi folks,
Another packed week. Where we take a sideways look at the next wave of digital products coming.
On design. On adoption. And on connecting AI to real digital services.
As ever, it’s an opportunity to unpack what it all means for the future of being a digital customer.
So welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.
In this week’s edition:
Don’t be the ‘dog’s arse of software design’ - you need adoption by default
AI agents are getting pretty powerful… and that’s before we connect them to your real life
Most digital products are misunderstood
Is a ‘Data Union’ the Empowerment Tech model we’ve been looking for?
… and much more
Let’s Go.
Don’t be the ‘dogs arse of software design’, you need adoption by default
The razor-sharp Mark Ritson makes a killer point about Microsoft Teams and CX.
“In a world of optimised online interactions, CX mastery and touchpoint obsession - how do we account for Microsoft Teams? Millions use the platform each week. And yet it is a dogs arse of software design.
“Functional, yes. But ugly and obtuse and painfully presented. It's like the opposite of the iPhone. On really bad drugs."
It’s totally true. And a poster child for the maxim that ‘the best tech never wins’. It’s the tech with distribution that wins.
So what’s your distribution strategy?
Is adoption-by-design a core part of your product? Or are you just hoping you’ll catch a viral adoption wave with clever marketing and a smart referral strategy?
Microsoft have an unfair advantage. They already have a global user base. But more critically, they have thousands of enterprise customers who are already locked in, and who can force employees to do things. Like put up with a crappy UI.
For everyone else building digital products and services, we must be deliberate. We must design for adoption.
Here’s a simple question to ask your product team:
Does our product or service get more valuable to the customer as more and more people use it?
AI agents are getting pretty powerful… and that’s before we connect them to your real life
If you are not already following the very clever developments around the Model Context Protocol (MCP), you need to be.
Because MCP is fast becoming a gateway for AI to be useful in your real life. Not just for researching and writing reports, for brainstorming or producing art.
It’s a new service from Anthropic, and is a ‘standard’ for connecting AI assistants to the systems where the data actually lives. Rather than just pumping prompts and data over to servers in California.
MCP means your AI assistant can now access other digital products and services, including data inside businesses.
And that means customer data too.
But it just got another level more useful. Because Zapier just added MCP support.
“Agents still struggle to take real actions across all the apps we use daily.
“Zapier MCP helps bridge the gap for developers - instantly connecting their AI Agents to 8000+ apps and 30,000+ actions with simple, secure, authentication.
“It lets AI do useful work beyond chat. You can use MCP to have AI schedule meetings in Google Calendar with the right people, or automatically create JIRA tasks from support tickets - all with secure authentication.
This has always been one of the big questions for AI. About how and where agents will show up in our daily lives.
We’ve all seen clever demos of an AI using the browser to get stuff done. But that’s like a driverless vehicle, where I still need to sit in the driver’s seat and hold the steering wheel.
This digital ‘control mode’ is a result of compliance and safety teams making sure the individual is still responsible for the AI’s actions. The user can see the automated actions and intervene when needed.
But MCP and Zapier point to something deeper. More meaningful. More disruptive.
And more seamless.
It’s another inevitable baby step towards real digital transformation on the customer side. Where the best customer experience might just be no customer experience.
And where your Personal AI tool can take away the Bad Friction. The repetitive, wasteful, error-prone and frustrating steps in a customer journey.
Anthropic describes MCP as a ‘standard’. Of course, it’s not an ‘open standard’ like SMTP or HTML, but I can see it opening up a huge wave of new, customer-side innovation for us all.
Exciting stuff. But as always, we must make sure that the data governance, security and privacy rails are in place to make these new data flows trustworthy.
Having Zapier in the mix, and providing some level of system authentication, means we can take another baby step on the journey.
Most digital products are misunderstood
I heard a great story a while ago about how one of the lead engineers at Apple used to throw cold water on the latest trends in software development.
Arguing that they successfully managed to ship the Mac, the iPod and iPhone without ‘Agile’, ‘DevOps’ or ‘Lean’. They just used smart people and the first principles of product design and development to get it done.
So this next piece is not about Empowerment Tech. Nor about AI. It’s about the basics of building a product, with inspiration from Jony Ive.
It was written 12 years ago. And every word matters.
Because ET, like all other digital tools, must be developed with a product mentality. It must be focussed on creating value and solving real problems. To help people with a ‘struggling moment’.
There are too many brilliant things in here to mention, so you should just read it. But my main takeaway is the original point from Ive himself:
“Be concerned with not just the product, but how the product is understood”.
In other words, the best products don’t just create value and meet customer needs. They are also easy to explain to others. They are simple and easy to make sense of.
The piece includes a helpful checklist:
Products have to be ‘shelf demonstrable’, like a toy on a shelf. They can tell their story in 15 seconds, with no interaction beyond looking.
A good product is explainable in a sentence. This is how ideas spread, but also - especially in big companies - it’s an important component of getting organisational buy-in. You can rally behind a short description.
A product knows its audience. Who is it for? Why? What’s their context? Is the audience a customer… or rather are we persuading the senior management or an investor?
Products are measurable. With physical products you can talk about units shipped, margin, profit, returns, love and so on. But digital products are often more abstract. These metrics need to be decided and built in to give the team direction.
A product is predictable. This is more abstract, but critical. People get really upset if a website or app violates expectations, such as when (say) private information is shared when the tone of the brand is that it’s like a buddy. That’s because our expectation of buddies are that friends aren’t gossipy blabbermouths. Predictability is easy when you have a non-networked, physical product. It obeys mechanical rules and gravity. But this becomes ciritical when we are designing software products.
We must be mindful of these principles as we develop AI. And especially as we develop Personal AI.
Our powerful new platforms that use, and often extract new value from, our personal data.
So here’s a question for you.
Go look at what your employer or team is building right now. If that’s not digital, go look at an app you used in the last hour. Then consider these principles above.
Is it shelf-demonstrable’? Is it explainable in a sentence? Does it know its audience? Is it measurable? And is it predictable?
Digital trust is very often about expectations and predictability. Avoiding the ‘how did you know that about me?’ moment.
We must make sure our digital products, especially our new AI platforms, are designed the right way.
So that they can be understood, not just used.
Is a ‘Data Union’ the Empowerment Tech model we’ve been looking for?
Tony Curzon writes about an AI-powered second brain.
He points to UseFindr as a promising example, but has questions about how it all works, and who is really in control:
“The 2nd-Brain is something I need, but as my mouse hovers over giving UseFindr permissions to all that stuff, I do start worrying that it is all a bit Big Brother.
“The thing is - I want my second brain to be my brain, but in order for it to be “second”, I also have to hand over some control to others.
“I am sure that the guys at UseFindr are thoroughly decent and all that, but what are they going to do with all that info about me apart from providing me with a 2nd-Brain?
“[…] their privacy policy reads to me like they can do more or less what they choose with this data. Do I care? And how much, compared to the clear attractiveness of their product? And what if they get hacked and some seriously nasty people get hold of that treasure-trove … everything you need to impersonate me in my email and my Google Drive, if you care to look…
“If Data Unions can become widespread, this is the cyberspace we can hope for:
Our personal preferences for data use are respected
Our collective efforts have a chance of shaping cyberspace because large numbers of us are exercising our power together
There are large pools of consented data, with the unions holding the consents, for public good uses of data
The platforms face a countervailing power in cyberspace, because without consented data they cannot operate, and we now have a collective means of withholding data - going on data strike; we can use that power to make a better cyberspace (and to get paid for our data work).”
I think there’s something very interesting here with the idea of ‘Data Unions.’
Where citizens and customers can share their personal information with a trusted not-for-profit organisation, tasked with creating new value with their personal data.
Specifically:
For the public good - think national insights to power health and social care innovation
For the community good - think local insights to enable services like volunteering and the sharing economy
For commercial good - think consumer insights, and to connect people to brands
This last point - the commercial opportunity - is where Data Unions get interesting. Because with right business models and consent, they can act on behalf of whole groups of people.
A good example is collective bargaining. The ability to negotiate a lower price of energy for 45,478 people. All verified accounts, and verified as ‘ready to buy’.
Insurance is another example, where a Data Union could negotiate for a collective of motorcyclists or pet owners or a village.
Data Unions can enable some pretty interesting and sustainable commercial models (the plural there is deliberate - I can see at least eight revenue streams). All by making sense of the personal data from, and creating value with and for, those participating.
A collective data economy.
Collective Empowerment Tech.
And examples already exist. Like the UK’s group energy buying service called Cheap Energy Club. Run by the popular consumer empowerment platform MoneySavingExpert.
They collect your energy data and then negotiate with the large UK energy providers to get a better deal for the whole group, which at last count was thousands and thousands of people.
Yet large and more generalised Data Unions can only happen once individuals have some of the ‘Empowerment Tech basics’ in place.
Where customers have their own private and secure data store, with intelligent access and permissions. Plus a digital wallet to hold and share trusted attributes (like proof of identity, entitlements and a digital reputation).
Then we’re off to the races. To smarter and more private data sharing. To next-generation market negotiation. To collective data insights. And to many more ‘data for good’ initiatives.
I’m optimistic about the direction for Data Unions. Because they’ll open the door to what’s possible when we think about new ways to use personal data and to empower the individual.
If that’s not a new and important route for Empowerment Tech, I don’t know what is.
OTHER THINGS
There are far too many interesting and important Customer Futures things to include this week.
So here are some more links to chew on:
Post: Why X509 Certs are Problematic as Evidence of Org Identity READ
Article: “MyTerms” wants to become the new way we dictate our privacy on the web READ
Idea: Your last chance to drive READ
Article: The elephant in the European Digital Identity Wallet room – how can service providers get paid? READ
News: Meta agrees to stop processing personal data for direct marketing purposes (it’s a Big Deal) READ
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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