How Should Your Dyson Talk to You?

It’s a normal work day and you’re sitting at your desk, focusing to finish an important report due at 9am tomorrow. It’s been consuming all of your thoughts and you’ve pushed all other responsibilities out of your head. Just then, your phone screen lights up with a reminder: “Meeting in 10 minutes.”

To put it lightly, you are not pleased.

You need to focus on this report, but you also need to attend this meeting. You’re annoyed, and while you know it’s not right to “shoot the messenger,” you also wish the reminder could have been delivered in a less jarring manner.

How would you have preferred it?

Polite/Friendly:

Just a friendly reminder - you have a meeting in 10min

Passive/Aggressive:

Please be reminded you have a meeting in 10min

Apologetic:

I am sorry but I think you have a meeting in 10min

Excited/Humour:

Hurray - at last you have a meeting. It’s in 10min..

I would venture to guess that each one of you reading this might choose a different option. As you should! We are all individuals, and we all want to be addressed differently. Regardless of the clichéd marketing segments like “white, female, urban, 30s” or “Asian, male, rural, 60s” different unique messages resonate with each one of us in a different way. The difference between “Just a friendly reminder - you have a meeting in 10min” and “I am sorry but I think you have a meeting in 10min” could determine whether you attend the meeting happily or hurl your phone against the wall.

This is just one example of the ways communication (and in its most basic form, word choice) through connected devices are slowly but surely taking over our lives. In this connected society increasingly automated through artificial intelligence, brands, products, and devices will succeed based on a new frontier of user experience: the ability to individualise language for outbound communications.

It seems you can’t go more than a few minutes without receiving some sort of information, notification, lock screen message, automated email or chat announcement on one or more of your devices. The more messages we receive, the more important it becomes that they’re delivered in a way that truly resonates with the individual user. Amidst the flurry of these various messages, how many times do you get an alert on your phone only to ignore it or get distracted by something else just moments later? (Maybe we’re just so used to it from all those mornings of automatically hitting the snooze button on our alarms…)

The more generic the alert, the more willing you probably are to dismiss it. But as we allow ourselves to depend more and more on our connected devices, be it the Keurig telling you your coffee is ready, or the Dyson that warns you to empty the vacuum cannister, we increasingly rely on these alerts. By now, you can see the problem. Unless these messages — whether they’re from your friend, a brand, your calendar, or something else — connect with us and truly resonate with us, they won’t be effective.

Having said that, please don’t mistake my comments for a forecast of doom and gloom. I am a natural optimist and excited for what lies ahead. In front of us lies a blue ocean of personalisation potential. The number of alerts we are getting — however generic they might currently be — are all opportunities for communication that feels personal and better resonates with the human on the receiving end, making life more pleasant or inspiring.

Meanwhile, the spread of communications to a variety of outlets (i.e. marketing channels and devices with screens) has led to the disintermediation of companies and products from the end user. In the next few years, products and companies will depend as much on the product as on the personalized communication capabilities of the UX (user experience design) to drive meaningful, long-lasting relationships. Sure, it’s cool for your OS to update you about a meeting, but that feature isn’t nearly as good if it’s more annoying than useful.

Furthermore, this disintermediation is accelerating due to the proliferation of smart devices which, along with AI, are already automating simpler tasks right now but will eventually automate important parts of our society like education curriculum or mortgage qualification. Without strong, personalised communication, no matter how well those connected products and services are built or designed, they will struggle to foster the deeper engagement that can lead to device--and hopefully brand--love.

As brands begin to talk to us more and more directly, the classic approach to one-size-fits-all copywriting will not hold up. In fact, brands will be differentiated by their ability to communicate with consumers in personalised, natural ways. Brands will succeed if they’re able to form personal, long lasting relationships with consumers. Why? Because other options are only a swipe away (think Tinder…). The question will be less about how you can talk to Siri or Cortana, and more about how Apple or Windows will talk to you.

You’d all agree that a personal conversation with a good friend is almost always more enjoyable and rewarding than generic small-talk with a stranger — shouldn’t the same hold for communications from devices and brands, especially as brands take on more and more of a direct approach to communicating with consumers?

If your answer is no, maybe I should have asked you in a more personalised way...