Westminster council are sadly the kind of client who wants you to parade your arse in front of them for 6 months in order to have a chance of making a meeting. And then it goes down hill from there as this kind of organisation goes through round after round of tedious “prove your nob is bigger than the guys who are presenting after you” beauty parades. And of course the inevtiable “do you know what an honour it is to work for us? Please give us everything you’ve spoken to us about over the past 12 months for free”. And because everything is designed by committee the service ends up being a botch job of 20 different cool ideas; on their own great, but together become a mish mash of useless rubbish.

Oh but what am I on about “Virgin think simple”!! How silly of me! I booked a train last week with Virgin Rail. “yes we’d like users to be able to speak to a robot to book their train”, “no sorry we don’t care if it is unuseable and the most frustrating thing in the history of the universe, we just want people to think we are using cool technology”.

Over the past 6 years I have seen thousands of clients setup to use SMS and MMS. The most successful and those that are still running after several years are the simple ones. The ones that normobs find useful and geeks sadly find boring. But I am afraid boring works.

Clearly SMS delivery alerts could be brilliant if they can alert you to go home and wait for the package, rather than waiting in all day. SMS being more appropriate than email in a ‘do this now’ way.

Katie’s last blog post..SMS Stickies: Why people like annotating their SMS