Editorial

As I write this editorial for the first issue in the 34th year of Behaviour & Information Technology (BIT), we are recovering from the retail extravaganza of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We import many good things into the UK from the USA, from great TV dramas such as Homeland to fast food outlets (well, my grandkids are great fans of McDonald’s). However, thanks to Amazon UK, Black Friday seems to have embedded itself into the British psyche. Having been interested in retail psychology for many years, I am regularly called on by radio and newspaper journalists to explain the kinds of tricks that retailers use to make us buy more. This year, it was a BBC London radio spot, and just before I explained things like creating artificial urgency and apparent shortages to hype sales, people were interviewed shopping in Oxford Street, London’s busiest shopping area. One quote really struck home to me. A reporter asked a man what he had joined a long queue to buy, expecting to be told about some great bargain he had spotted. The answer was ‘I don’t know but I’m sure I’ll get something!’ The man was standing in a real ‘bricks and mortar store’, but the same psychology is at work in online retailing – possibly even more so when retailers and suppliers turn to social media to encourage us to feel part of a buying frenzy. As the papers in this issue remind us, e-business is no longer just part of the business scene, for many companies it is the whole business. And such businesses increasingly turn to social media to keep us engaged and make us feel part of something bigger than just being a bunch of customers. Done well, such digital marketing probably does keep us loyal and encourage us to buy more, or at least to stick to our favourite retailers. But I do think that automated customer relationship management risks alienating us by failing to understand what might really be inferred from our purchasing behaviour. I have no problem with Amazon suggesting crime and mystery books that I might wish to read, as my penchant for such books is pretty obvious and I do indeed succumb to many an offer. However, although I do use Booking.com to buy hotel rooms, I find many of its suggestions irritating. In May 2014, I travelled to Sapporo in Japan from London for an International Standards meeting. Since then, I keep getting offers about ‘great hotels in Sapporo’, which I suppose is plausible. I went there once and might want to go again. The system could not be expected to know that the next meeting of the committee was going to be in Chicago! But being on a very limited budget for such trips, I booked well in advance. From the time of booking in March until the trip in May, I received ‘great offers for hotels in Sapporo’ every couple of weeks. I realise that I may be asking a lot of a recommender algorithm, but I found it very annoying. In fact, I find it sufficiently irritating that I am considering ‘unsubscribing’ from Hotel.com. Which reminds me of another dumb system feature. Almost every time I unsubscribe from a website, I get taken to a page asking me some questions about the reasons why I am leaving so they ‘can improve their customer experience and service’. About five times out of six the first option to tick is ‘I no longer wish to receive these emails’. I guess I am turning into a ‘grumpy old man’ but that is not an answer worth giving. Of course I no longer wish to receive the emails – that is what ticking unsubscribe means! Ask me a real question. As I have said before, even rudimentary usability testing would reveal that such questions are pointless and irritating. Usability testing does not need to be expensive and is certainly a lot cheaper than having unusable systems in a market where your competitors are only a click away. If you think that you really cannot afford proper testing, at least read the questions you are asking users on your system out loud. If that is not enough to make such blunders clear to you, then maybe you should not be in e-business at all!