“be used as lighthouses to guide you through stormy seas, that can be used as flags on the battlefield of your challenges, words that will bolster you and give you a direction that goes beyond the goals you might attach as a result of these words”.

He also cites another post that suggests using the twitter hashtag #12in12 to mark the execution of your three words every month.  I’m going to try to remember to do this.

My Lighthouse Words for 2012

Decisive

I can just hear my college friends laughing and nodding their heads!  To my defense however, I’m not talking about what I’m wearing or what I’m doing on Friday night.

Decisive is defined as having the power to decide or determine an outcome.  It describes behavior that is resolute, determined, and unquestionable.  For some time now, especially in the later half of 2011, I have spent ample time in wait-and-see mode doing far too much introspection leaving me in some sort of personal analysis paralysis.   This word also connects with one of my words from last year – fearless – because the inability to make a decision for me has often stemmed from fear of failure.  I don’t think I’m failing often enough.

In my work, I’ll start by clearly defining my goals, deciding if I am going back to school and exactly what for, and being more purposeful in what I will be spending my time learning.  I’m pondering the value of becoming less of a generalist and more of a specialist.

With my children, I will be more consistent in how and when they are disciplined.  I want them to have zero doubt about how they are expected to behave in various situations and what our house rules are.

Growth

With a handful of side projects already lined up, I’m excited about the new things I will be learning and doing. I am also eager to grow my monthly income.  I’m hopeful that my 9-5 will provide some opportunities for growth as well.

2011 brought many new wonderful people into my life, and I hope to continue growing those friendships.  Over time and miles, I have also neglected some of my dearest friendships.  I am excited about tending better to those relationships.

My kids are amazing and gifted, and as a parent, there is nothing more gratifying than to see their pride grow in their work and abilities.  I will provide opportunities for growth for them especially in the arts, experience, health, and charity, being more purposeful and setting aside time and funding.  Rather than pushing my interests on them, I will seek activities for them which appeal to their natural strengths and interests.

Regarding my health, I will stop the growth of my waistline!  I would be lying if I omitted this one.  It’s only 10 pounds, but I hope to lose it in three months.

Disciplined

I almost chose “purposeful” for my third word, but I chose “disciplined” instead because purposefulness is implied yet there is the inclusion of training – mind, will, body – and self-control.  Without discipline, I don’t feel I can attain growth in any area of my life.  This is especially true for growth in my work and education.  Free time is not something I have an abundance of, and I need to be self-disciplined in how I use that time, especially at night when I have the time and ability work on side-projects and learn new things.  I’ve always considered myself self-disciplined.  I remember as a kid even creating tests for myself just to see if I could do it.  It was very gratifying for me when I did and still is.  I stopped smoking, became a runner, gave up soft drinks, and became a vegetarian because I had the self-discipline to see it through and not give up easily.  Recently, I think I’ve been less self-disciplined than I should be – thus the 10 pound weight gain and increase in personal debt.  I hope to reduce both.  I’ll be adding weight training to my workouts again and re-establishing a family budget in January.

As I’m wrapping up this post, I’m struck by the clarity on how each word builds upon the other.  I’m also once again feeling introspective about my failure to apply my three words from last year more thoroughly throughout my life.  Forward, focused and fearless became diluted over the months by a sense of that same “wait-and-see” mindset which now makes my stomach literally churn.  I’m done with that and moving on, approaching this year hands-on with intention and courage.

CHEERS!

We all know that the way we share personal digital data is going to change, but how?  I like where the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) is going, but I’m not convinced that it is as user-centered as it needs to be.  Given the confluence of our digital and physical lives, individuals and businesses need our identities to merge as well.  As with payments, we’re moving from cash, plastic, and paper to digital.  With plastic, it was all or nothing – does the bouncer at the bar really need to know where I live?   Don’t get me started on paper checks… With digital, we should have more control.  We should have the ability as businesses to ask only what is required and as consumers to give only as much as we feel is appropriate.

While there are many pieces missing (and by pieces I mean aggregated data), we have the opportunity as we pick up momentum in digital payments and healthcare to build the digital identity infrastructure in a way that is secure, user-centered, and easily integrated into a variety of systems.  Facebook is a social network and using my Facebook identity as a social identity is appropriate in some cases but not all.  LinkedIn provides an adequate professional identity.  Movenbank is establishing a financial identity.  I’m not aware of a healthcare identity, but given the increase in digital healthcare records, it’s only a matter of time.  The need for this is easily seen when you have a child with a chronic health condition.  If you know of a digital healthcare identity provider, please share in the comments.

Our digital identity should be more like an onion with layers of information that we can trade appropriately.  As in life, it is a combination of things we can easily control and things we cannot – connections, circumstances, opinions, education, decisions, location, physical attributes, habits, attitudes, etc.  It is inherently open and dynamic.  Plastic, paper, and governments could never support this type of identity.  Technology can.

Brian Solis recently wrote a fantastic post titled “How to Make Customer Service Matter Again” where he asserts the opinion that lately “customer service is a contradiction of words and intentions”.  He uses a horseshoe to illustrate the “lack of confluence” between social media and customer service.

…with social networks becoming the preferred channel of communication among connected consumers, businesses are losing ground and faith. The reality is that customers will share their experiences whether positive or negative and they will influence the decisions of others. The question is, how are you changing your service model to shape and steer experiences that deliver value to customers and also back to your business?

Improving customer service and delivering an integrated experience will not only help customers feel valued, but also establish a competitive advantage. In the end, businesses that invest in customer retention and acquisition to deliver positive experiences, regardless of platform, will strengthen relationships and loyalty and additionally contribute to organic advocacy.

In financial services, what does it mean to deliver an “integrated experience”? How can service models and financial products be improved to better support such an experience?  Brett King’s book, “Bank 2.0: How Customer Behavior and Technology Will Change the Future of Financial Services“, presents an ideal case for this in the call center of a bank, calling out the disparity in systems used to perform seemingly simple tasks like obtaining an account balance.  In some banks, the customer service representative (CSR) must use multiple systems to attain basic account information.  King asks, “Why isn’t anyone building a single view of the customer dashboard for call centers?”.

Recently, King launched Movenbank - a bank offering a more personalized customer experience.  Having signed up for the Alpha launch, I had the pleasure of experiencing the sign up process.  It starts by connecting your (gasp!) Facebook account to the bank during the login process.  Movenbank explains some of the benefits in doing so in a blog post titled “To Facebook Or Not To Facebook“, and Jim Marous cites in a recent post marketing research that supports the simplification of the login and account creation process.  He also makes the very important point that the benefits of a social login must outweigh the perceived privacy concerns.  While I currently use social logins for many sites, I honestly still felt slightly unnerved doing so with a bank.  It will certainly be interesting to see if Movenbank will continue to use Facebook as a form of authentication and what the public response will be.  The next phase of the sign up process was a series of thoughtful interview questions regarding my financial habits and attitudes culminating in a “Financial Personality”.  Once I completed it, I was quite honestly blown away by the fact that my current bank never asked me these questions!  It seems so simple, yet so revolutionary at the same time.

Back to the call center and CSRs.  Imagine a dashboard that not only integrates all of the disparate systems required to satisfy a customer request but also includes this personality profile and alerts the CSR if the customer has recently tweeted or posted in any other public social media forum about the company or any of its products and services. Maybe even a life changing event has occurred recently that the customer has shared.  Am I comfortable with an informed CSR knowing my financial personality and knowing some basic personal information about me obtained through Facebook?  Am I comfortable with a CSR accessing my public Twitter stream? Absolutely! Yes, please display my picture when I am speaking with a CSR because I’d like to be more than just another anonymous voice on the other end of the line. Yes, I’d also like you to know that I’m not saving as much as I’d like to, that I use other financial products (just not with you), and I’d rather not make a trip to the branch.  Oh, and I abhor checks and am an avid fan of mobile payments.  Maybe then you could tell me about a product or service that better fits my lifestyle and enables me to meet my financial goals.  For me, this knowledge establishes the beginning of a business relationship that already exceeds that which I have with my current bank of four years, and as someone who keeps an “ear to the ground” in financial services, I see this opening the door to multiple new products and services banks could offer while presenting many more sales opportunities of existing products.  An integrated, personalized call center dashboard is just the beginning.

If you’re new, she’d be certain you had what you needed to get your job done well.

If your work is too easy, she’d tell you to challenge yourself because you’ll get better.

If you are cheating yourself, she’d call you out on it.

She’d remind you of why you are here in the first place.

There would be many thoughtfully placed milestones throughout the life of the project, and the team would feel a bit more motivated and proud of their work after hitting each one.

When the going gets really tough, she’d remind you of how close you are to hitting that next milestone.

Ultimately, it’s up to you. She’d tell you that what you put into is what you’ll get out of it.

“there are millions of contactless cards in circulation today that no one uses, because there’s no inherent benefit in tapping versus swiping.  The potential for NFC is having a really smart computer chip interacting with my really smart phone and a really smart merchant point-of-sale device that provides a better experience for me before, during and after my shopping experience.”

She is absolutely right – it is the customer experience that will drive the mainstream adoption of mobile payments.  But how and what does that mean?

Being a regular reader and fan of Scott Berkun’s blog , I recently finished reading in his book “The Myths of Innovation” how innovations gain adoption.  He cites the author Everett M. Rogers in “Diffusion of Innovations” as writing this:

“Many technologists think that advantageous innovations will sell themselves, that the obvious benefits of a new idea will be widely realized by potential adopters, and that the innovations will therefore diffuse rapidly.  Unfortunately, this is very seldom the case.  Most innovations in fact diffuse at a surprisingly slow rate.”

I think the point Scott is trying to drive home and the one in which I strongly agree, is that there is so much more to the mainstream adoption of something new and disruptive like mobile payments than “technical prowess”.  I’d like to point out that “diffuse” in the above quote is equivalent to widespread adoption.  In his book, Scott describes five factors that define how quickly innovations spread as first defined by Everett M. Rogers.  I hope you’ll bear with me (and Scott will forgive me) if I go just a little bit looser with these and try to apply them to mobile payments with an NFC enabled device.

The first one is Relative Advantage.  This is basically what the consumer perceives as the value of the new innovation and not what its makers perceive as the value.  It is “built on factors that include economics, prestige, convenience, fashion, and satisfaction”.  Simply put, how are mobile payments better than payments made with cash or plastic?  Going back to the Starbucks app, the ability to instantly check your Starbucks Rewards Stars and the other self-service capabilities of adding to your account via a linked credit account or a PayPal account makes mobile the clear winner.  We could also add fraud detection via location awareness using the GPS capabilities of a mobile device and mobile coupons to that list.  If the powers at play (Google, Apple, ISIS) can nail some usability, standardization, and security issues surrounding identity then we won’t be comparing plastic to mobile but rather leather to digital as our mobile devices aim to replace our wallets.

The second is Compatibility.  What does it cost the consumer to transition to using the new innovation, and is it compatible with the consumer’s culture (habits, beliefs, values, etc.)?  This seems to be one of the major hurdles facing the mainstream adoption of mobile payments in any form as it may require costly improvements to or replacement of point-of-sale terminals.  In addition to this added cost to the merchant, the consumer is required to have a smart phone.  However, all signs like this study from Nielsen point to smartphones overtaking feature phones (aka dumb phones) by the end of 2011.

The third is Complexity.  How much learning is required for someone to start using a smart phone to make a payment?  It would be very interesting to see research data from the Starbucks pilot launch.  While the Starbucks video advertisement of their new mobile payments app seems very simple to me, we still have to consider that over half of Americans don’t even own a smartphone yet, so there is not just one learning curve here in the quest for widespread adoption – there are at least two.  There is also training for merchants that must be considered.  I wish I could remember the author, but someone made the point of how the first snafu in this regard may be the unfortunate, overly technical naming of NFC / Near Field Communication.

The fourth is Trialability.  How easy is it to try out?  Well, from a consumer perspective and again using the Starbucks app as an example, it’s as easy as downloading the free app and going to a Starbucks with a scanner.  Looking forward to NFC, I think this may get a little more difficult to do.  However, you could look at PayPal’s Bump-To-Pay for P2P payments as a precursor to NFC P2P payments.  I’m curious if research supports consumers being more comfortable with trialing mobile payments applications for P2P payments over making payments in a retail or other scenario.  I would expect so.  It will be interesting to see how other NFC applications such as Google’s NFC enabled Hotpot sign will help usher in the era of mobile payments.

The fifth is Observability.  How visible are the benefits of the innovation, and how likely are these benefits to spread in social groups?  Given the hype and excitement around mobile computing and social networking, a successfully executed mobile payments application would probably be highly visible.  With the rise of social commerce and the sharing of everything using the very device with which we are paying, the opportunities for making a mobile payments app visible could go up exponentially by every user using the application.  Mobile payments and the mobile wallet have been discussed as well on most of the major news networks and magazines in the U.S.

While I am thrilled about the possibilities surrounding innovation in mobile payments – specifically using NFC – I am in agreement with experts like Karen Webster and Scott Loftesness that mainstream adoption will not happen during 2011, and a successful mobile payments application will have to nail the user experience and provide clear advantages over plastic to merchants and consumers.

This was soon a programming job that included training customers on the application I worked on (with someone else taking the calls – thank you thank you thank you). This was an eye-opening experience, and it made the work I do so much more rewarding. After all, I was able to see first hand how I made the work of other people easier and more enjoyable. I’ll never forget being on an elevator after finishing a training class and hearing a customer described what was once a mundane job as “fun”.

And… of course, the opposite is true. Ever seen a customer use your application in a way you never intended only to bring your app to its knees spewing errors and leaving the customer banging the mouse and going on yet another coffee break? No, that’s never happened to me, but… yeah. It’s painful and again, so enlightening and here’s the point – important.

In both instances, as a developer I was there to witness the joy and the pain of something great and something bad that I had brought into existence. What did I learn? That better apps are built when you understand for whom you are building and even better apps are built when you can see the customer use what you have built. That said, this is definitely better done beforehand with wireframes and prototypes.

I know my experience is somewhat unique – not all programmers like to wear multiple hats and not all companies like to (or see the value of) putting their programmers so close to the customer. So how do we build empathy in those developers who are walled off from their customers? We could build personas that as accurately as possible represent the customers. We could find a willing customer or two to share their experiences in person and/or in writing with the development team. We could host a meeting of the minds where select customers and developers are able to cross pollinate ideas and give feedback in a casual setting.

Any other ideas?

• Paper books.  I love reading on my iPad – bookmarking and search are awesome.  The Kindle app has a feature to show the most highlighted text in a book.  I expect to see more more social features like this with iBooks and Kindle; possibly integrating with Facebook and Twitter.  I expect to see integration of industry specific dictionaries.  Think text books… My kids will not use the paper variety when they get to college.  Also, cookbooks (think inline instruction videos) and religious texts.
• <nerd alert> My book light.  Yeah, I travel with one.  It stinks when the battery runs out or I forget it.  I can adjust the brightness of the “book” I’m reading.
• My Blackberry calendar.  Ok, so I don’t have an iPhone.  Yet.  I’ve set up my iPad calendar to sync with my Google calendars.  It is color coded, and it is beautiful.  In a sense, it replaced my old Franklin Covey paper planner as well.
• Newspapers.  Being a tree hugger, I always felt bad about the papers I didn’t read, so I haven’t subscribed in years.  I get most of my news online.  An app called Fluent News aggregates news in one beautifully crafted UI with the abilities to turn down sources you don’t like.  There are also apps like Instapaper and Feeddler which allow you to take online content from blogs and websites with you whether you have an internet connection or not.
• Magazines.  From here on out, I’ll take the digital version.  An app called Zinio showcases how awesome magazines becomes when you can integrate such things as video and interactive maps.  Check out the free National Geographic that comes with the download and you’ll understand.  I expect to see a lot of growth and innovation in this area.
• Paper notes.  Still walking around with that unsearchable, unsortable paper notebook at work?  There’s an app (actually a few) for that.  Start with Evernote.
• Leisure use of my laptop.  My IBM Thinkpad lost some sexy points when iPad walked in.  I also watched my husband fall out of love with his netbook.  My kids (ages 7, 5, and 3) all don’t get why the “screen doesn’t work”.  Oh, and boot time.  Lame.  Browsing is faster and email is more fun.  The Apple ads told you that though…
• Simple picture frames and digital picture frames.  I love to see and share pictures of my kids.  I’m not scrapbook-inclined.  I can take all my awesome digital photos with me in a format that looks sleek on my desk and fits in my purse.  I’m looking for a good MOV to MP4 converter so I can take my little videos of my kids with me too.  There’s this really cute one where my 3 year old is watching the sunset at the beach…
• My tv.  Well, mostly.  I have old tvs – not the fancy HD sort.  My iPad HD screen (albeit smaller) is so clear, and I can stream Netflix and ABC shows instantly.  My kids and I have huddled around the screen to watch a show we had ordered via our cable provider’s on demand services but later could not find.  It’s just SO much easier (and we all know how bad the UX is on cable – can we at least get a decent search???).
• Simple clock and radio.  The speaker is decent, and there’s a little app called Night Stand HD that has a sleek UI, and it integrates with the included iPod.  I wake up to my favorite song
• A trip to the bank.  I pay my babysitter every week using the PayPal Bump and Pay app for iPhone.  Simple, fast, and free.

I’ve loved sharing my iPad with my children.   My 7 and 5 year olds love the Alice,  Toy Story, and Cat in the Hat apps.  The Toy Story app by Disney really showcases the possibilities that exist for innovation and tailoring to the young user for books.  My 3 year old loves to go through the letter flashcards in the Letters A to Z app.  She can scroll through, shrink, and zoom the pictures like a pro too with very little instruction.

Is there anything that it doesn’t do?  Out of the box, it doesn’t do multitasking – I can’t have more than one app up at a time except for iPod.  That stinks.  My friend and fellow geek @jsnyng though, has shown me the light and power of jailbreaking, and that will solve that issue.  Make a phone call and take pictures.  Some people really get wound up about this one.  I say, “big deal”.  I don’t need my iPad to do everything.  Word is though, that Webex supports VOIP although I haven’t tried it.

So, I’ve just scratched the surface here on what iPad can do and why I’m fanatic about it.  It’s a whole new canvas for developers and designers, and it’s been quite a ride to watch as new apps surface and gain popularity.  I think we’ve just begun to see the possibilities on this beautiful device.

Shift this experience to the frustrated consumer standing in a long line with three small children in tow, all of which are screaming. Finally, it’s her turn to pay. She pulls out her wallet (which is gigantic because of all the different plastic cards – won’t even close) and those damn cards fall all over the floor. With crying baby on hip, the poor woman bends over and tries to pick up all the cards that just fell out of her over-stuffed wallet. She’s close to tears.

Next scene: With smart phone in hand (most likely an NFC enabled iPhone), the same woman, no longer harried, but patiently comforting her small children, pays for her goods quickly and securely.

The fact is, this technology is awesome and will transform the way we make payments. I could list scene after scene showing how this technology would make my life easier. Unlike the Snuggie, I don’t think it is a fad or a cultural phenomenon, and I don’t think cults will form in opposition.

In a recent article making the business case and strategies for using mobile money to close the gender gap, the author stated that the wide adoption of a mobile payments system must be targeted to women. I couldn’t agree more, both in the U.S. and abroad (however for different reasons).

There seems to be an article or blog post daily questioning whether consumers will adopt a mobile payments model. Going back to the Snuggie analogy… Before the Snuggie was available, most people thought only of improving upon the blanket in style, size, and material.  Snuggie sales have exceeded four million. I’m reminded of a famous quote from Henry Ford:

“If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.”

Then there’s the famous line from Field of Dreams…

“If you build it, they will come.”