ITP Inspired Journal

My wife and I have been using Zipcar for several months now and are satisfied with the value it presents in the city for “wheels when we need them”. I spent a sizable amount of time thinking about parking in the city and the problems that cars present for a thesis project and I am not going to talk about the benefits of Zipcar today. A car sharing service is highly commendable and more things should be shared if possible, especially in the urban environment.

My gripe with Zipcar comes from the way that their web materials present the working agreement and distort the actual rules in the name of cuteness and psuedo-simplicity. Web writers, marketing professionals and managers want to tell us how simple their service is and that is fine, until the actual understanding of an agreement is clouded or misrepresented by a flip graphic with a short paragraph.

Look at the picture above of the Zipcar graphic extolling the ease at which you can reserve a car. In the beginning the paragraph states “Your Zipcard will only open the car you’ve reserved during the time you’ve reserved it…” Actually that is NOT true. In another section of the agreement Zipcar states that you may open the car as much as 15 - 30 minutes ahead of time and pay for that additional time on top of your reserved time.

The original graphic gives the impression that your card is smart enough to know best, if you happen to approach your car at 15 minutes before the time it is happy to unlock and bill you for a full half an hour! I contacted a Zipcar representative about this discrepancy any they didn’t seem to understand the problem as the wording remains the same. At the very least, why not put in a asterisk to allude to the other details of the agreement.

The use of an asterisk is probably a dirty word to flip/hip marketing types as it is often associated with extended legal mumbo jumbo. Zipcar seems to be comfortable with vagueness in its terms. Understanding of the full terms can be born out by customer cost, it’s OK to let the customer be charged for the extra time as long as their initial impression was that Zipcar is so easy. Often in our experiences with products and services we blame ourselves for not getting the details right, after all we should read all fine print completely before using anything. The mark of a thoughtful company is to examine the feedback of their products and services to look for any vagaries in the consumers understanding.

I’m not sure that Zipcar is open to examining themselves… after all, it all is so simple right?

So Apple anounces it’s latest offering of the shuffle… now mind you I had the last shuffle and really resented not knowing what song was on, I’m not sure if I want to wait and have someone speak it to me.  I really don’t want one of those wonky apple voices from the “speak it” feature of the OS.

What really is a design tipping point is the light weight of the shuffle, I would bet that the weight ratio of the ear buds with cord is almost equal to the weight of the player.  So what?  Well I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve slapped my headphone cord while running only to real them in with the player still safely in my pocket. Now with the weight ratio the same I am willing to bet that the player will be flying out of pockets everwhere.

I personally like a bit of weight to objects in my pocket, substantiality is a quality that is overlooked these days in a race to… well I guess embedding things in our body.  I had a really beautiful phone in 2001 made by sony - small for it’s time, light and really wet when I walked into a salt water pool in Monte Carlo because I forgot it was there.

I like bullet proof too… a solid knock around quality in personal objects.  I recently found a nice design object in a thrift store uptown for 10 bucks, it was a folding Sony AM/FM/PB radio with dual antennas and even an analogue signal meter… it’s a solid brick like steel object that looks like it could survive a trip through the jungle.
So you can keep the stick of gum concept, I didn’t like it the first time and I doubly hate it now. I don’t want to scroll through verbal descriptions either, I can scan and read faster than I can listen. I hate to say it, but this is the first post Steve product that may be a bust. Just my 2 cents**