Serendipity and Learning

 Many of us receive unwanted notifications from the apps on our phone. And some of them take the cake.  Until recently, it was limited to mail and gmails spam filter neatly took care of it.  But now every app has 5 classifications (or more of notifications). Each of them wants you to see their app - probably some metric on the lines of "times app opened" is being tracked. So, obviously the geniuses who design the app have come up with downright stupid and irritating ways to make the user open the app.  Sample a few - most are real - a few are parody Connect with your latest corporate connect. (Why?) A year of being in touch with X (again, corporate networking site, god why?) Happy hours on spectacles (huh?) Three days since you purchased coriander (cringe) Credit card rewards app wants me to login everyday and has gamified it to a Pavlovian level.  Flight booking app of airline wants me to fly to random locations Travel site wants me to travel here and there Th...

 Yes, digitization has made our life easier (refer to the previous post), but we are facing a few issue. Filling digital application forms.  1. For one, it is not intuitive. It takes a lot of user effort to get it right. Mostly they are digital replicas of physical artefacts, so it is painful. 2. Scanning every document and uploading (there is no standard size, dimension, format) - so it is a circus getting it right for every form. In the physical world, it was simple, photocopy, staple and boom.  3. The servers aren't always available, so you have keep on trying.  Thoughts as we fill out form after form for college application! How to make the user journey easy? The forms aren't made on any user journey - they are made purely from a bureaucractic lens and user is an afterthought. 

 I happened to pass by a railway booking counter - the likes of which were abundant some years ago. Indian railway ticket booking is a good example of how technology changes how work gets done.  In the olden days (before 90s) one would have to go overnight, 90 days before journey, be perfect with the train number, fill out a form and present it at the counter. My father would go sleep in front the counter the previous night (like many others), rush when the gates opened at 7, only to find the first 4-5 places on each counter occupied every single time (touts/agents), some how get a ticket and ensure our travel tickets are "booked". And there were limited counters.  Post 90s, this became a little better as more and more counters opened - at one point erstwhile VT station had 100 counters for booking tickets. The forms were the same, but the process was faster. Agents still got tickets faster than ordinary people. But the overnight waiting was eliminated. And counters were ...

 Recently, I have faced this phenomenon of top rated cab aggregator drivers requesting a switch to cash after getting to the point of pick up. Ostensibly, because of high commissions and because of delayed payments.  And it left me thinking - imagine a situation where your best employees dont like you. And as an org, you seem to be either unwilling or callous to do anything about it.  Now, isnt that a market gap waiting to be filled?