Bye 2019 Boots on the ground 2020

Audio Version above

Welcome 2020, the slate is clean and the race to define you has begun.

With 2019 closed, it is time for me to declare my progress and assess where I have moved forward and what got sacrificed in the process. Yearly reviews do not write neatly into short rants and therefore, I am calling the thought chunks touchpoints, as I touched on these topics during the year and find them to be important.

3D Touchpoint

Unfortunately, the 3D modeling that I got so much personal enjoyment from in 2018 has been on the ice this year. 3D doesn't have an ROI in terms of paying the bills for me but it is such a big piece of evolving technology which I believe will help to rejuvenate retail. Configuring avatars to your body shape so that you can visualize how the cloth hangs on your shape is pushing forward and is starting to get really immersive. I will be paying particular attention to this type of technology at the NRF 2020 Conference in New York later this month. 

I adapted this approach to visualize what it would be like to spend time in the UK in 2018 by creating a 3D representation of my apartment in New Jersey USA whilst nesting it in a panoramic 360 image of the Yorkshire Dales. I found this to be a very powerful tool to help combine ideas with my current state.

I believe it is important to have some hands-on understanding of the technologies that will help retailers bring a more entertaining experience to the high street. I know that I respond much better when talking to somebody that has taken the time to adopt new technology and can speak with authenticity about how it has improved their quality of life. This then makes it easier for ideas to be adapted and tested in other contexts. 

Augmented Reality Touchpoint

We were early adopters in 2019 of the Facebook Portal TV, this is a home video conference solution that enables the use of your TV. For an international family, this has been a significant leap forward in our communications. We were using our cell phones which we held awkwardly in front of ourselves, the pressure to communicate constantly and fluidly made the calls short and often forced. The introduction of a device that enables us to sit on the couch looking at a widescreen view of our family on their couch, whilst allowing family members to walk in and out making the communication experience more natural, has been a real joy. In addition to this value, they took the time to include augmented reality in the form of funny hats, voices and weather effects that are applied as filters over the top of everybody sat in front of the camera when requested. The younger members of the family really cannot get enough of this feature.

I am always surprised how soon after you lurch forward with a technology that you cannot imagine being without it and how your mind automatically starts to try to place the new improved experience into other areas of your world. I can now imagine standing in front of a retail mirror in a suit and having it augment Johnny Depp's tash and goatee whilst filtering my voice to resemble Don the Jewler but maybe I would say, "this ain't no fugazi". If it allowed me to record a video clip that could be posted directly to social media with the price and location of the suit labeled for anybody that viewed it, there might be a value there. I understand that this may not be for everybody but it could make buying clothes for the girls on holidays a possibility at least.

End of Year Scrum Touchpoint

As a certified scrum master, I feel that I must include in my year in review a paragraph of agile coaching, I think one of the topics that would benefit from more airtime is the importance of failing fast.

Fail fast, inspect and adapt, failure is one of those branded words that hangs out in all the same places that you find success. Failure gets great airtime in conversations where challenge is being introduced and there is always an expectation that failure is a building block for success.  

You would think that with failure being such a requirement for success, it would be scheduled with high importance. If we are not failing enough we must be frightened to move forward. Instead, failure is often seen as a byproduct of standing up to a task you are poorly prepared for, or badly equipped to manage in the time frame being presented. Experience is having the opportunity to get involved in a process that leaves you with a nuanced understanding of the gap between positive affirmation and the grit of getting to done. A good experience can appear to be the opportunity to be part of a process that is well funded, allowing you to fail at somebody else's expense, whilst understanding that the expectation is that, you will get it over the line eventually but without the glory of hitting the first target.

In the waterfall world failure usually looks like a catastrophic wipeout attached to significant disappointment and usually a bill that makes everybody draw breath. In the Agile world, the experience is usually just a matter of a minor meltdown, whilst the acceptance that the vision is not getting completely realized this sprint and that there is going to be another. Of course, there is always another when continuous improvement is expected but with the maximum length of a sprint less than a month or 30 days, you are never far away from managing expectations.

Facial Recognition Touchpoint

Facial recognition has been a technology hot in the press this year, there is a belief that it might be a little more effective than we are comfortable with. I have been quietly obsessed with facial recognition, I started the year getting to grips with the acronyms used with the technology, the key seems to reside in the Hog (Histogram of Gradients) of a person, which is used to calculate the measurements between key features. The clever part is how it calculates the angle of the face to the camera at the point it is Hog'd.

Whilst thinking about this I found myself sketching faces. It blows my mind how we can all look so different and yet all have the same key features, I discovered that I am often mesmerized by eyes that do not have a strong upper eyelid crease with an almond shape. A facial recognition solution that can provide this type of analysis could benefit retailers looking to advise customers, how to benefit from these differences, by giving more junior sales associates a quick print out of the features from a face scan.

It amazes me even more that I can spend a year drawing faces and still not have one look like a person.

React Touchpoint

As expected I have channeled another 360 personal hours into my coding skills specifically React, React Native and Outsystems this year. If there is anything that stands out as a major cause of delays in my progress, it is the almost continuous refactoring that goes on in programming tuition courses. It's great that there are almost endless opportunities to cut corners but when you are trying to understand how to build a toolkit that can be relied on, having to work backward through the endless refactoring is extremely labor-intensive. Especially when you are working at it as a muse to improve your visibility and quality of communication, to help with converting merchant use case stories into actionable internal dialogue. I apologize for the granularity here but I feel the need to highlight the most frustrating realization of the year. When passing props from your App component, following a request from your real-time database to a child component, you need to wrap that prop on arrival in an If statement, to ensure that the prop data has arrived with the child component before you try to destructure it and render the data in your JSX. Thanks for listening I really needed to let that go.

React Native Touchpoint

React Native will be my focus going into the New Year, I am having a blast with Stephen Griders, The Complete React Native + Hooks Course. Being able to watch your App render almost immediately on both Android and IOS devices whilst you code is a real breath of fresh air, although, this comes with quirks and the need to stop and start the service from time to time. 

I am hoping to find time to combine this new knowledge with the idea described on the Stack Overflow post "Sending simple data to other apps using React Native" as deep linking has really got my attention just now.

Happy New Year to you all, I hope to meet as many of you as possible at NRF 2020 NYC in a couple of weeks, I will be in town the Sunday before and staying an extra day after the conference if anybody has time for a trip to Virgils or Dallas BBQ. I am particularly partial to Hot wings, no breading and the sauce has to be Franks anything else would be a fugazi.

Final Words

Problems are just a precursor to solutions if you need a solution message a solution consultant. If you want to be better prepared for problems message your solution consultants more often. I drink coffee black with sugar, sadly I am off the donuts this year.

"Posts are my own opinions and not necessarily my company's"