Corvus Consulting

A couple weeks ago I was ready to write a short reflection on customer relations gone super-sour, featuring Airbnb. Luckily, I have a black belt in procrastination, which gives these situations time to spin out some more and to make a more interesting story.

The background: a few weeks ago a woman named Emily in San Francisco rented her place through Airbnb and had it thoroughly trashed by a renter in what seems to be a fit of gleeful nihilism by a person bent on bringing as much destruction and pain into a home as possible. The victim had been working things through with Airbnb and decided to blog about her experience, cautioning others and, I think, just venting.

In the days that followed, Airbnb’s actions and lack of actions painted a picture of a company caught in a vortex of legal paranoia and public relations handling from the 6th circle of hell. Fast forward ten days and we find they’ve managed to really turn it around. The missteps as well as the fixes make a fantastic case study in how to do wrong, and then right, by your customers.
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It didn’t take long to do the math as Steve Jobs unveiled Ping, the social music recommendation engine baked into iTunes 10. In one deft move, Apple brought itself into the social networking market with a near-instant enrollment of up to 160 million. And did you catch that they also have credit cards and a history of trusted purchasing with those members?

You could almost hear the gasp in Palo Alto.

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Even when they aren’t part of the deliverables, I write up personas to guide most of my interaction and experience design work. They keep me tuned into motivations and needs that aren’t strictly intuitive to me.

Personas are necessarily artificial; they present a single, fictionalized instance to stand for an entire audience of customers. Despite the assumptions that such abstractions come with, they earn their keep by reminding the development team what’s important to the people they’re building for.

Lately I’ve been wondering about the single-person focus typical to personas, and whether they need to be expanded to capture the real-world social existence of users even when the design doesn’t have socialization as a primary objective.

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A sad episode unfolded last night on the Meetup page for an upcoming Third Tuesday Vancouver event that left me distressed over the health of our aspirations for social media: openness, discussion, plurality; you know, the good stuff about the stuff we’re trying to build and use.

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If you don’t know the story of the Magician’s Apprentice, you should, because it’s a fantastic cautionary tale for the age of the technological commons. When the wizard, who is older and wiser, steps out for a while, the apprentice decides to use one of his spells to naively ‘make life easier’. Enchanted brooms begin to carry in buckets of water, but they don’t stop and multiply at every attempt to stop them, leading to an uncontrollable flood.

With Google’s engineering-first, consequences-later approach, we’re hitting a point where the brooms are getting out of control and the water is starting to rise. With Buzz, we have yet another deployment of their notion of a well-meaning science experiment that ignores our human reality. While it’s never classy to link to TechCrunch, this post by Robin Wauters deserves mention for bringing to light a failure in trust and social savvy on Google’s part. The quotable section is actually pulled from another blog that is now behind a password wall:

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.
There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.

You know who my third most frequent contact is?
My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.

The practice of foisting a new social networking reality onto people who happen to use your product is inexcusable, and Google is not alone in doing so but its mass (like that of Facebook’s) brings along with it the responsibility of treading more carefully.

Given Google’s preference to beg for forgiveness rather than ask for permission, their impulsive changes to the terms of social engagement through their tools have tarnished the trust around their brand, and may have put people in physical danger at the extreme end of things. The problem is, there’s no wise wizard who can come back and right the mess that these well-meaning apprentice’s have made.