London Cycle Hire Seats – Better experience?

The London Cycle Hire is a service where you rent a bike pay-as-you-go. If you keep the bike less than 30 minutes you don’t pay a charge so saving 30 seconds might make all of the difference. Those 30 seconds might be lost setting up the seat as you’ve got to set this to your height to ride well.

The seat post has numbers showing you a scale.

Great. If you know your ‘number’ you are set. But a lot of people don’t actually know they need to set the seat correctly or can even remember their ‘number’.

So here is an idea to make the seat post more useful.

Simple. Everyone knows their height (The number i’ve used above are very made up btw). It could have the height in cm on the other side of the post.

I wonder if it is useful though? Thoughts?

Advertising UX Fail

When you’ve only got a few seconds to deliver a message it has got to have bags of clarity. This is something that advertising agencies do very very well. Deliver brand truths, clear messaging and a call to action in the blink of an eye.

So it still surprises me when I see media placements of messages that make absolutely no sense. We all know that creative has to be delivered with context.

Here are a couple of examples.

The Economist

I really like this work. Lovely illustration, great use of the double ad space to deliver the dual message. But look at the call to action.

For a free copy text IRAN to 60300.

Fantastic I can get a free copy. But…Hang on a minute. I’m underground. Waiting  for the tube. Unless the TFL has secretly installed a way to use my phone underground (which they haven’t) then it isn’t going to work. It would have taken no time or money to have dropped / switched the CTA and run new creative for these placements. They’ve even put a custom keyword on the ad to track it…so close…yet so far.

Cherly Cole

This again is really really good in theory. You check into a poster via Facebook places to win a prize. Brilliant you all say. But look at the poster below.

This looks a little fake so I’m not sure it is real…But taking it as real…it looks like a very very busy and fast moving road. Am I really going to get my phone while driving (and thus breaking the law) to check into a poster. Are the passengers in the going to do this? I would actually say it is impossible for someone to see that poster, register I have to do something, open Facebook, get a GPS lock and check in all within about 5 seconds. Why bother putting a message on a poster that is useless. They could either changed the messaging or just dropped the placement and saved some money.

You could argue that the Facebook messaging is so obscure it doesn’t affect the main message but I would disagree.

The advertising industry has to grow up. Clear communication of creative is the core of the industry. New advances in technology are rapidly changing how the public choose to interact with those brand messages. It is getting incredibly complex to manage and if you can’t deliver a clear message on a poster then I fear the worst when you tackle the hard stuff.