New.
3 letters that can inspire all manner of emotions in people.
When it is associated with something you already like, you tend to be happy … excited even.
However, when it is associated with a fundamental change to what you already know and/or do … then the general response is skepticism or outright distain.
I recently did a presentation to a client of ours about the need to do 3 fundamental things when looking to push into new territories.
1. Remember society knows what they want, they just don’t know how to articulate it.*
2. Make your UX as intuitive as possible so people can move from the present day to modernity without feeling insecure.
3. Prepare to ride waves of criticism.
There were two big reasons I wanted to remind my client of this.
One is that I recently read an interview with a tech journalist who said his biggest challenge was not to review brand new technology as if it was fully developed technology. He has to remember his view should be about potential, not realisation.
The second was this …
Interesting eh?
I don’t know when that article was written.
To be honest, I’m not even sure that article is real … but given the name of the ‘journalist’, the visual design and sarcastic ‘riddle of email’ that is placed at the bottom of the piece, it does seem the sort of shit The Sun newspaper would have peddled.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate how mad ‘the internet’ and ’email’ must have sounded back then – mainly because I was living through it – however, instead of having the distain of The Sun, I distinctly remember how excited I was about what I was hearing.
Maybe that was because of my age.
Maybe that was because of my love of gadget tech.
Maybe that was because I was seeing science-fiction becoming reality.
Whatever the reason, it served as an important reminder to me to listen before I dismiss.
Of course, there’s lots of new things that turn out to be a pile of shite … and sometimes that is because they are literally, a pile of shite … however societies skepticism to ‘new’ plays a huge role in whether things take off or not [acknowledging there’s a whole host of other elements] which is why the next time someone offers up something that challenges your tradition, think about what they’re trying to solve before you judge how they’re doing it … and who knows, maybe adland can be part of something new rather than packaging up someone else’s new.
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* I say this because people constantly quote Henry Ford’s “If I asked people what they wanted, they’d say a faster horse” … and yet, if they had said that, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what they’re saying is they want to get from point A to point B faster than the current modes of transport available to them. In other words, they were giving big clues to what they wanted without even realising it.