 So, hi. I'm Dan Hon. I'm going to have to bear with me for a second because I forgot to turn on my presenter notes. So, I live here in Portland, Oregon, and it's been a while since I've spoken at a tech conference. It's been probably around four years or so because for the last four years of my life, I have been hiding in the ad industry. I've been working as a creative director at Wyden and Kennedy. Some of you may have heard of it. It's one of the biggest independent ad agency networks in the world. And until May this year, I was working there as a creative director. And before that, just to make sure that I'm well on my way to getting the trifecta, I qualified as a lawyer. So, advertising, law. I'm trying to work out what the third most reviled industry in the world would be. Okay, yeah. QA. Yeah. I work on filing incomprehensible bug reports. Or politics, as someone else suggested. So, I trained as a lawyer at Cambridge University. I got a master's in software engineering at Liverpool University and then moved out over to Portland, Oregon about three years ago. And it's been really interesting because I have a background in... I've always been a geek, so I have a background in software. I went and I got my master's because there was a whole bunch of stuff that I knew, but I didn't have the piece of paper that proved that I knew it. And after I qualified as a lawyer, one of the things that I did was I went and joined a start-up in London that made online games. And then when that went predictably tits up, I left and we started our own start-up. And today I want to talk about an idea that I have that I've been developing for the last few years, mainly based on what I've seen coming out of the advertising industry and also other kind of service and product-centered start-ups and products about something called the empathy gap. But first I'll give you some background about what I've seen over the last 10 years or so that has kind of led me to this conclusion. There's always been a geek who's been interested in the space of games, storytelling and what's interesting about them and what can be learned from those particular media. Now, we all know that this is what your stereotypical gamer looks like these days. But the interesting thing here, of course, has been that thanks to Moore's Law, something that had been in one particular part of our culture and by culture I'm going to shorthand and just say Western culture but something that had been in one particular part of Western culture and that hadn't necessarily been particularly well-accepted and even to this day probably is seen as the pursuit in spite of evidence otherwise as being something that 14-year-old teenage boys do in their parents' basement playing Call of Duty, shooting each other in the face and calling them wonderful homophobic slurs, gaming does actually start to look a little bit more like this thanks to the fact that we've taken those wonderful computing devices that we have and we're able to stick them in our pockets now because it was one thing when you could imagine a world where Tetris could be on the front cover of Time Magazine being the gaming craze that took over the world and that the thing that all of these kids and teenagers were spending their time on but when you get that computing power in a phone or a smartphone and the thing about a phone being that because it satisfies your need down Maslow's hierarchy of needs much further down in terms of communication and wanting to get in touch with other people you have an excuse for getting that $600 smartphone you have an excuse for getting all of this superfluous computing power that can be used for games and then we started to see that with stuff like Angry Birds we started to see that with stuff like when you have all of this extraneous computing power in your pocket for one ostensibly respectable adult use which is talking to people or texting people it's finally more socially acceptable for you to start playing games on that thing because you don't need to buy a custom device for it you don't need to buy a single purpose device for it anymore so we've seen that just because of the inexorable process of Maslow in terms of increasing the computing power and just making sure that it's cheap enough to put everywhere and that screens are cheap enough for us to put everywhere the types of things that we can do with those devices start changing and the cultural attitudes to the things that we can do on those devices start changing as well they become more accessible they become so accessible to the point of a few years back we had the success of Zynga with games like Farmville which another way of looking at Farmville as people slowly start to read what someone has very creatively written in the gameplay area the thing about Farmville one way of looking at it is that it happened at roughly the same time when internet access became so much more prevalent and that Farmville is expressly designed to be an attention suck and an attention sink it's designed to keep you coming back to it possibly in a way that's way more effective I wasn't going to say better but effective something like Daytime TV for example so we start to see in correlation obviously doesn't imply causation but we do start to see things like people spending less time on Daytime TV and spending more time on things like Farmville so that's gaming I think gaming just because it has moved from being something that has been a niche interest to something that you can legitimately say is a medium now as opposed to a genre is really interesting in terms of what it teaches us in terms of interaction mechanics that's not to say anything about all the crap that's gamification and all that kind of stuff and at the same time you've got a massive increase in the quality of storytelling that we've got so I've just come out of spending the last four years in advertising at Widen and Kennedy they're an independent ad agency their office here in Portland is over 30 years old and they've done some of the best and most effective and emotional short form storytelling and one of the reasons why I was interested in joining them was because they're a traditional ad agency they are 30 years old and they're really really good at that TV stuff they're really really good if you want to come to them and you're saying right we've accidentally sponsored the Olympics which is effectively what P&G told them and we need to work out how we as P&G can possibly be relevant to an Olympics watching audience and can you please craft a story for us that's going to be relevant, that's going to be interesting and capture the attention of all of these people who are watching all of these athletes that they actually don't know anything about so it was as much about learning about what makes a company like that tick how they learn to tell the stories that they learn to tell and also bizarrely one of the things that they don't get that much credit for are things like user research and strategy and insight so how they decide to work out and how they figure out what audience they want to talk to what makes that audience tick and what the best way to reach that audience is and then they may go about that reaching that audience in different ways because when they get their advertising right and sometimes they get it really really right it's because they can understand the client's problem and they can understand how the people they're trying to reach fit into that problem so storytelling is definitely getting better it feels like it's enjoying a renaissance it feels like the internet is definitely one of those things which just because of its change in nature as a distribution platform whether or not you think broadcast media is a good thing it's definitely widened or changed the playing field so that there are different and more interesting ways of getting in touch with you so one of the accounts that I worked on over the last couple of years was Facebook which normally people feel a bit weird about because A, it's Facebook B, because people normally don't think that Facebook needs to advertise because have you heard they have over one billion monthly active users they seem to have this thing pretty well locked up but Facebook at least have the self-awareness to know that they have a perception problem would be one way of putting it so one of the things that we looked at doing for them was how do we get people to start to give credit for despite all of the other stuff that they may or may not do the fact that they do provide a free communications network for one billion people so every so often I got to do fun stuff like this and this is the bit where I get to show you some of the work that I've done on for the last couple of years or at least maybe for about 30 seconds it makes you like Facebook there was a lot of internal debate about the kind of stuff that the team started coming back with scripts like this we were a bit worried about the kind of fake out that you see there because you're going yeah okay this is pretty good and then you kind of hit them at the end with the thumb but there was something very nice about that we got to go and I'm an interactive I was an interactive creative director which meant that I didn't really get to go out on film productions or anything like that very often I got to go out on things like website productions which as we know are very very different things there isn't a catering truck when we build websites most of the time you don't get to go to New Zealand to create a website on location although actually a team did get to go to New Zealand to create a website on location and that was a very different thing but one of the nice things about that particular piece was that you would have expected that a lot of the people that you saw in that spot were actors but we went out and we casted actual cosplayers who had spent the last three years making each particular costume we went to a proper con and everything and that was I think part of I think that type of honesty and that type of accuracy and reflecting that reality was part of what made that work but anyway what I promised you all was this idea of an empathy gap and I think what we're seeing is it's really really easy for us to make complex systems now like stupendously easy for us to create complex systems I talked before about Moore's Law I talked before about the fact of that without even trying with just you know waiting and then just waiting for Transist account to double every 18 months we've been able to deploy almost without effort stupendous communication networks around the world you know we have an almost unimaginable amount of computing power in our pockets that most of us just buy new versions of every two years because we can not necessarily because we need it and we're talking about taking that embedded computing power and just because we're able to reduce the power requirements we're able to increase the complexity of the data and then we're able to get the data to a level of 3 to 8 months or so we're running out of places to put it which is why we're starting to talk about things like the Internet of Things which is why we're starting to talk about okay well you know it's relatively trivial now for over 30 million homes to have a pretty good 3D depth sensing camera that also does skeleton tracking that's just in 30 million homes now and that's one of a billion monthly active users and Google is kind of using all the data from every single one of those phones to produce traffic information around the world and those are just there it's kind of easy for us to create all of those complex systems it's easy for us to deploy them and I say easy I mean easier than it was before it's still obviously hard but it's definitely easier than it was before and at the same time we can do them at scale so you can get to stupendous numbers of users numbers of users that you know just 10 years ago you would have thought unimaginable in an incredibly short amount of time and yet you know there's still the VCs down in Silicon Valley who are saying well that's not fast enough I need to see an even steeper hockey stick curve on your growth chart and all of this is because of Moore's law but the thing is is that a side effect of this when it's really easy to build all of this stuff is that it's also really easy to lose sight of who's using it why they're using it and what they're using it for you know one of the things that I saw over the last four years you know when I was embedded as kind of like a I felt a bit like a sleeper cell inside of the ad industry there was all this talk about companies being social you know you saw it even with things like doc cells as clue train manifesto you saw it with all of these ideas about companies being conversational about how the intent was really really great because it ushered in this period of two-way conversation companies could listen and they could talk back for the first time but you see what's really interesting at the same time is unless we look at what you're talking about something or someone that is a sociopath is the fact that they're really good at listening and telling you what you want to hear and never actually doing anything about it and that's one of the dangers I think of being able to deploy all of these systems that do things but don't necessarily quite do the right things and that's what I really mean when I'm talking about the empathy gap that's what I really mean when I'm talking about there's all of this technology that is easier than ever before for us to put out there in the real world and the fact that we're able to do it at such large scale, the fact that we're able to do it by just looking at dashboards the fact that user research is as hard as it has ever been and hasn't necessarily gotten much easier whereas it has gotten so much easier to deploy to large numbers of people means that it's somewhat easy for us to forget what the impact of that technology is when it does get out there in the real world and that's where we get to things like Google in a way being surprised as to the reaction to Google Glass because obviously one of the arguments there is well you know you can do the same thing with a phone you can just take a phone out and take a picture of someone but it turns out that there is a qualitative emotional difference between someone having cameras on their glasses that may or may not be recording you all the time and something like a more visible way to collect where I take out my phone and I take a photo of you and we see this in other areas as well so one of the clients that I worked on at Wyden was Nike and I worked on the launch of this the Nike Fuel Band how many people here have activity monitors or fitness monitors or use apps that do those things on their phone these days which I imagine is most people I was taking a look at the front page of the iTunes store the other day and at least I could find at least five different apps that did step counting now you know I wouldn't be surprised if the iTunes music player comes with a step counter bundle I'm like the fact that it is in the SDK of the major operating systems for mobile devices just means that if I want to get a step count I can just get it and again that's one of these things when I'm talking about the ease of creating complex systems is now available and the question is what are you going to use it for and how are you going to let a user interact with it or how does a user want to interact with it so the main paradigm the main way that people interact with devices like this is either physically through something like this where I can press a button and it will tell me exactly how sedentary I have been so far today or through something like a dashboard and in fact it feels like most of these devices allow you to access them through a dashboard and a dashboard doesn't necessarily feel like it's the right way or the only way to access information like this so for example when people talk about making information more ambient when they talk about taking all of this data around you and then liberating it from just a screen and then making it part of your environment it feels a bit weird when they say that they say ambient and then what we actually see in a lot of the concept pieces are more screens in more places displaying the same information to you in the same kind of dashboard the number of times that I saw is a reference piece I don't know if you've seen it but there's a movie called Stranger Than Fiction which is a very very typical go-to piece for this type of information visualization it's the pop-up numbers that appear in a translucent display situated in 3D space around you that annotate the number of times you're brushing your teeth to make sure that you hit the optimal number of times that you brush your teeth so I don't necessarily think that stuff like this is right it certainly looks cool but you don't necessarily know if 26 runs is a good number you don't know if 50 climbs is a good number if 847 thousand steps is good you know there's a spark line in there because hey spark lines you know you may as well put one in there it's blue and it's got circles in it and then you look at the page for the designer who put this together who is an incredibly good designer this is all front-end this isn't a terrible piece of a terrible flash monstrosity that you might have seen a few years ago this is all nicely put together using open source open standards works wonderfully in any kind of browser but from my point of view you look at stuff like this and then you ask your doctor do you want me to be taking my blood pressure every single day and knowing what it is every single day to which I suspect for the vast majority of people the answer is no I would not want you looking at your blood pressure every single day because it's probably going to do bad things to your blood pressure right you don't necessarily need to see all of this stuff one of the ways of looking at how to make the information that's gathered in these types of devices and how to make it usable and actionable when it is actionable is when is the right time to be notified about it so for example something like this might not need to be brought to my attention ever until there's an event that requires it to be brought to my attention so for example you could be looking at my three month moving average of activity and then you could wait for say two weeks of below average activity and then you could push a notification to me and say look it looks like something has happened over the last couple of weeks I can show you what that is and I can show you how that's changed and then maybe here are some things that you might want to do about it or if you want we can just set up an appointment with your doctor if there's something that we need to talk about but it doesn't necessarily mean that there's an expectation that as a user I go into my dashboard every day and I see every single one of these numbers I feel like if the quantified self brigade started designing cars when I got into my car in the morning I would see detailed readouts of the historical performance of every single cylinder in my car and how every single wheel had been doing and the up to the minute PSI reading for each single tire when actually I just want to start my car and I just want to get somewhere so all of this stuff just feels like it's not necessarily taking account of what people's actual daily lives are like this stuff feels like it is information for the sake of information it doesn't necessarily help in the understanding it might at best give you an idea of the kind of rhythm that you have but I would argue that a lot of the decisions here in terms of the design of dashboards like this aren't necessarily around actionable information and at the same time we see it that's one person in this audience who watches Little Britain this is from a sketch from a BBC comedy show called Little Britain there is a character in it you can see her here and her main line in it is computer says no so someone comes in with this story this customer service story and then she taps away at her computer for a bit and she turns back to them and she says computer says no and again I think the thing that's going on here is that it's very very easy for us to design these systems and it's very very easy for us to hide behind them when they're designed it's very easy for example for someone to say I'm sorry there's nothing I can do about this because of the system that's been designed and we should be able to step back from that and say well someone had to design that system someone wrote that algorithm whether it was someone on the development side who was involved in the decision making or someone on the business side who was made on the decision making but the technology reflects the decisions that we've made along the way we can't excuse all of this on saying well you know it's just it's just technology it's just the computer the computer did it well we designed it that way we have a responsibility and we shouldn't hide behind that I think there's a really really good example in something that Dropbox did recently it was a very bad thing that Dropbox did but they did a bad thing well you like lawyers here in America so I was reading that there was a supreme court decision AT&T which is a wonderful company they recently decided I say recently they decided that they wanted to remove the ability for people to take them to court people who use their services to take them to court especially in things like class actions because that stuff can be really expensive and like really annoying if you're a large multinational company you don't really want people taking you to court so what they did was in their terms of services if you use AT&T services unless you explicitly opt out you agree to arbitration arbitration is much easier to deal with than a court case and how do you opt out well obviously this is a telecommunications company one that has extensive fiber optic landline fiber networks around the country it's got an extensive wireless network so the way that you opt out to this is you write a letter to them to a P.O. Box that may or may not be replied to it fails silently which as we all know is a bad thing to do it succeeds silently as well which is Dropbox did the same thing recently they also kind of jumped on this bandwagon I imagine that it's very hard to kind of go against this kind of stuff you've got counsel and you've got your company lawyers saying well you know everyone else has managed to reduce their cost by saying by default we will only allow arbitration and that allows us to reduce our risk and blah blah blah blah and that's presumably said okay fine we'll go do that but they decided that you need to offer an opt out right so you've probably seen this if you use Dropbox if you logged in over the last nine months or so I can't remember exactly when it happened but there would have been a pop up that said that they were changing their terms of services and that if you wanted to opt out of the arbitration clause then you just needed to go to something like Dropbox.com and they had built something that would let you do that you can just put in your first name your last name it's already tied to your Dropbox account because you have to be logged in to do it that's the equivalent of signing and you just hit submit they just decided that they weren't going to be dicks about it and that's what I mean when I talk about this idea of this thing called the empathy gap which is there's this expectation the thing when Dropbox does something like this is they point out how easy it was for them to do this it was easy for them to build this everyone in this room knows how easy it is to build something like an opt out like this so when a company decides to not do this they are deciding to explicitly fuck you over pardon my language now they may well communicate in different ways why they have decided not to do that but this is the thing that technology is starting to show us it's that we are in charge of the things that we build we're in charge of the things that we design Dropbox chose to do this they could have chosen just to have the PO Box AT&T could have well I don't know if anyone here has worked with AT&T they may have been able to build something like this probably would have cost them a lot of money but the choice remains and I think that this idea of a gap illustrates the fact that as things like this start to happen more and more often and I hope that they start to happen more and more often they will illustrate a gap in what looks like intentional lack of provision of service you know we are deliberately not giving you an easy way of doing this because we don't want you to do it or because ultimately we don't like you and we don't really want to treat you that well and all of that kind of goes to this point that technology doesn't have to be dehumanizing unless of course you're Robert Scoble in which case it's just terrifying so it feels like there's got to be a better way Google obviously could have launched or introduce Google Glass to us in a more friendly way but I think all of this shows that technology is a conscious choice you know it depends very very much upon being able to stop and say you know what we can build things a different way or just because we can build a form we can build a form think of all the good things just a simple form can do which is why as much of this isn't just about the fact that yes we can fiddle around the edges and it's easier for us to build all of this stuff than ever before but the thing that hasn't changed is the question as to why we're building it and what we're building it for so there's two good examples one of them is probably one that a lot of you have heard before which is Zappos Zappos is interesting to me because it's not a technologically interesting company you know it is an e-commerce retailer it is not that hard to build an e-commerce retailer the thing that Tony Shea says that distinguishes Zappos from every single other e-commerce retailer especially in the shoe vertical is their relentless and almost terrifying dedication to customer service so if you do a quick google about Zappos and customer service you'll see things like if you call them up and you say I'm looking for this particular brand and size on your site and I can't find it they are trained to tell you where else you can buy it because they recognize that you have a problem which is I want to get these shoes and you just want help in getting that problem fixed Zappos point of view is that if they help you to solve that problem which may or may not involve them it may or may not involve them sending you off to a competitor but their job is to solve that particular problem that shoe related problem for you and that if they do that then you will come back to them because you have shoe problems and Zappos is here in the selling of shoes to help you with your shoe problems I write a daily newsletter and anyone who's read it will know that I'm very very excited about a thing that's happening in the United Kingdom called the Government Digital Service a number of things happened to have happened at the right time at the Government Digital Service in the UK one of them being that a conservative government came to power that wanted to save a lot of money and that a woman Baroness because this is Britain Baroness Martha Lane Fox who is a very distinguished internet entrepreneur and ostensibly and reliably actually one of those who gets it and is trying to do the right thing also got into the right position to provide political cover and what they're trying to do is they're trying to create digital services for everyone in the UK so good that people prefer to use them and it's interesting because they're a government body so they have a remit to be accessible to everyone they are serving everyone in the UK so one of the first things that they did was they got rid of practically every single government domain and they consolidated everything against one government domain gov.uk and they started building services like this so they have a very kind of data and user centered approach one of the pages that they worked on very early on as part of their alpha was the bank holiday alpha which is the public holiday alpha so they would get a lot of google they would get a lot of incoming queries asking kind of when's the next public holiday when's the next back holiday came up with lots of different designs and it turns out that most people just want to know when the next one is so they just built a page that just shows where the next one is and it's this kind of focus on solving user problems so one of the other ones that they did was a voter registration service so you can do all of these things online now and you can do all of these things online in a way that has been structured from user research first and a lot of stuff that's interesting about what these guys have been doing has been because it's not like they were building these services well in essence they did build these services from scratch the services existed before you could find out when the next bank holiday was before but not in a way that necessarily solved your when is the next bank holiday problem you could kind of register or you could kind of renew your car registration online but not in a user friendly way and one of the really interesting things that they have is this thing that I'll end on which is this is a cut out that they have in their main office in Whitehall it's something that someone put up on their window and it's just a piece of A4 paper with a little holes torn out of the middle and the arrow pointing to people in the street and it's a reminder for them that their users are just regular people on the outside it lets them have a remarkable degree of latitude in terms of thinking about what a genuine user need is and that they're able to focus on this delivery of solving user need problems so all of this is to say that what I'm working on now after having seen how the advertising industry deals with communications issues after having seen how game design can affect the systems that we create after seeing all of these things and storytelling working together after seeing all of these things in user research one of the big things that I'm really excited about is the opportunity for technology to be significantly more empathic and more sympathetic to actual people and the problems that they're facing so all of this is everything from internal applications customer facing stuff every single aspect of how we use technology feels like because it's become more accessible now because it's the kind of stuff that's in our pocket now there's a massive opportunity there and the thing that I'm most excited about is closing that empathy gap thanks very much