If we ignore accessibility, we’re a thunderstorm away from living like cavemen (or at least from flushing the toilet)

Fail One:  Waving at Ghosts in the Public Restroom

I am a huge fan of automation and personal hygiene, so the fairly recent adoption of hands free toilets and sinks at just about every public restroom I frequent has raised my quality of life tenfold.  Where the toilets succeed and a majority of the sinks fail is in their ability (or inability) to manually override the automation.  I have found myself waving furiously at the little red sensor on an automated sink more times than I can count while a simple push of a button can override the most insensitive of toilet sensors.  Since accessibility and user experience should be the top priority in any design, how does this get past the prototyping and testing phases and how does it make it to market on such a wide scale?  Maybe the better question is, who is going to fix it?

Fail Two:  A Small Experience in a Big World

What motivated me to dig in to this subject was a similarly bad experience I recently had that could have been avoided if just for some simple real-world usability testing.  I won’t name name’s but as I was attempting to set up an online account for my new in-shoe sensor so that a major athletic brand can track and make available all my running data, I found myself redirected to the mobile version of their website.  Alone, this is completely acceptable; I am running a beta version of Firefox and I’m sure they just haven’t updated their sniffers to catch it yet.   What isn’t acceptable is there is no way for me to manually navigate to the full desktop version of the site; no way for me to manually flush!  With the overwhelming number of mobile devices, browsers and user agents as well as their desktop counterparts, having no way to manually set preferences on your mobile or desktop site can lead to bad user experiences and at worst, an unusable website.

As I sit at my desk like some sort of caveman, manually typing on a full keyboard, using a mouse and navigating through multiple applications on dual monitors, all I ask is for a big, shiny, hypnotizing, robust and image-packed user experience.   When I’m back out in the real world, surfing the web while driving or crossing the street, I’ll take the mobile version.  But in any case, if things don’t work out and your sniffer doesn’t work as it should, give me the option of turning off the autopilot and making the choice myself.   Give me a handle to flush.



The rules of online social interaction have spilled over from our personal lives to define the new economy of trust in marketing and advertising.  To reinforce this point, ABI Research reports that 78% of consumers polled trust peer recommendations as opposed to 14% who trust advertisements.

Knowing this, we have to embrace the social media model of opt-in, trust based interactions and drop the hard-sell. If we don’t, we take the risk of quickly becoming irrelevant.  We can’t follow our old path of email marketing barely within the constraints of the CAN SPAM Act of 2003.  What CAN SPAM was created to enforce is being trumped by the masses who pick and choose what and who they hear, ignoring the rest.  CAN SPAM will be rendered moot when email becomes consumers least relevant tool in their arsenal of communication options.  Social networking and mobile are the present and the future.  We’ve been saying it for years but the coup is coming faster than even the most evangelical of us could have imagined.

ABI Research predicts that, utilizing technology, consumers will be 55 times more mobile in 2014 than they were in 2008.  In one year, overall mobile web visits increased by 34%, Social Media sites overtook porn as the #1 destination on the web and Twitter alone grew 1,382%.

How can your organization move toward trust marketing and trust servicing and away from the push and pull of traditional efforts?  How can your organization evolve to accommodate for the immanent influx of mobile consumers who will expect a mobile experience from you?  Email will not go away any time soon, your website is just as important as ever (even more), and Facebook and Twitter won’t be the last, or the best option, in future years.  Innovate with what is available and get your feet wet if you haven’t already.  Don’t plan away 2010, do it!

First a little background: I decided about a year ago that I was sick of paying the ridiculous amount of money it now costs to park in downtown Cleveland. So, I started taking the Rapid (train) in from my neighborhood of Lakewood. After repeatedly (read: daily for the past 6 months) arriving at the station precisely 30 seconds too late for every train I tried to board, I started using Google Maps to pick up my Rapid Schedule. I know they have such things in printed forms but I have an aversion to paper. If I had the time, I’d tell you about a work colleague who finds it necessary to print out emails and attachments and place them on my desk as opposed to forwarding them in email.

Here’s what you do:

• download Google Maps. Go to http://www.google.com/mobile/ and enter your phone number in the form corresponding with your phone model. You’ll get a text message with a link to download and install the app.
• open Google Maps on your phone, or in my case, my Blackberry
• hit “0″ to pick up your current location.
• hit your menu button. On a BB, the BB symbol to the left of the track ball.
• hit search.
• search for whatever your looking for… ad address, coffee shops, etc.
• Choose from the list they give you.
• Under the address tab,choose “Directions to here”.
• You’ll see two tabs, one for driving (or walking, biking, etc.) and one for Transit.
• Select transit, click show trips, and it will give you a list of all upcoming departures from nearby bus stops, subway train stops, etc.

If you’re feeling especially sadistic, you can click on show earlier trips at the bottom of the screen and see what you just missed and by how much!!

Another great new feature, only available on the Blackberry Pearl, is Voice Searching. With it you can just click a button on the side of the BB and speak your search phrase. Another excellent way to aggravate your neighbor on the bus. If you’re feeling especially feisty, alternate your searches for Gun Shops and Adult Theaters the whole way in to work.

Alright, I’m with you, I didn’t buy half of the stocks that I preached to others to buy and I’m no richer because of it. I suggested to all my co-workers and friends with a smug sense of enlightenment that they should buy both Google and Apple stock when before they made millionaires out of the true believers (those whom acted instead of talked).

Maybe it was because I really didn’t have the money to spare at the time or for some other excuse I’m fooling myself into believing just to keep from crying.

I’ve tried to be ahead of the masses in technology, gadgets and web design since I first had the need for a website back in the mid-90’s, so my advice to everyone is GET YOUR SITE MOBILE!

When the writing is on the wall as clear as it is today, we all have to embrace the idea that you and most everyone else WILL be using your phone to surf the internet at some point in your life (more likely for you since you’re reading this post, within the next three years), if you don’t already.

So, this is more than a post, it’s a warning: If you own a business, your website HAS to be made Mobile friendly in the near future or you will lose out to those whose websites which are.

I’m just getting off the ground with the blog side of Promorock, but I plan to dedicate a large portion of my posting time to the subject of mobile browsing, mobile eCommerce, mobile webdesign, and more. So come back often.

Be sure to subscribe to my feed and bookmark me if you’re interested.

Thanks and I hope to start some great conversations in the future.

Jonathan