Digital Camera + GPS = Awesome.

After reviewing a few pictures in flickr, it occurred to me that the picture properties, i.e. the meta data stored by your digital camera, that tells you the details of the photo including camera type, should also include the coordinates of your picture - latitude and longitude, as discussed on the o'reilly radar almost a year ago (I clearly just got a new camera). These cameras do exist, but clearly aren't that popular [yet].

You can use that information in a million different ways, but my immediate thought would be an A9 type mapping. Google could integrate this as a "micro zoom" on their mapping service. Imagine looking for a location, zooming in as far as it can go using the satellite images, then going one step further and viewing the pictures taken and shared at that exact location?

Flickr has a few groups doing this kind of mapping, you can see one of them here.

Of course there are privacy concerns, and this could possibly be a theif's greatest searching tool, but if everyone was honest, this would be super cool.

Hotspots in Toronto.

 
If you've ever noticed the Hotspot sticker at your local Starbucks, Second Cup, Timothy's or other coffee shop and figured how much they charge, that symbol should make you feel faint, sick or bring up images of paying $5 for a $0.50 coffee. I'll spare you the research - they charge $10/hr for access, or optionally about $40/month.

They should have thought that pricing strategy through, because they have a great opportunity just waiting to be exploited. They are currently partnered (if not owned) by Bell, Fido, Rogers and Telus. To pay for your service, you must actually pay through your providers website. Ya, through their website. Which means they have the opportunity to push advertising, PERSONALIZED ADVERTISING (because they know EXACTLY who you are), to you.

Wouldn't it be worth $5 to get 15-30 seconds of guaranteed facetime with a customer? They could easily push an add about US roaming packages and family plans to me, with a high chance of conversion. At the very least I would click-through to read more about it. I'm at a coffee shop, I've got nothing but time on my hands. Isn't that well worth subsidizing the internet access fee?

Banking in General..

Totally dry subject because the canadian (and american) banking scene is appauling. These guys report record profits every year because I can't store money in a shoe box for fear of my cat eating it. Awesome deal.

Why banking sites don't offer a compelling experience is beyond me. Although everyone doesn't use online banking yet, a good indicator of just how many people are using it is overhearing a PM conversation about this neat new thing he found - "interact email transfers". Nuff said.

If everyone is banking online, why do banks offer such a medeocre experience? I've banked with TD  , Scotia   and ING  , both are decent (TD is better) but neither one is actually very good. Although I can do most everything I need to online, there are so many simple things they can do to change that average experience to a killer one.

Dave, from okaydave.com , took a good stab at reworking the online banking experience by proposing the ability to assign custom colors to each transaction - a way of categorizing transactions. This turns your online statements from reference material found at the back of a library, to a part of your daily budgeting experience. You can assign green to all of your grocery purchases, red to all your nonsense purchases, blue to your utilities, etc. It'll definitely help you figure out your life.

Other than personalization in general, it would be unreal to be able to add custom comments to my banking transactions. You know, the bank seems to auto-generate those things now, then puts them through an information obfuscator before displaying them to you. How am I supposed to know what I that "TRNSF 2098234" transaction was all about. If it said "april mortgage payment", that would be so much more helpful. Such a simple thing, that would openup a whole new world of banking.

Maybe a quick email alert telling me when i've been paid.. or when my car payment has come out.. or an alert when my paycheque amount is different.. There are lots of things that might be useful to different people.

Unfortunately, bank employees are training to save save save, and treat the customer like a small child... bank hours are still appauling, and those ATM machine fees are NUTS. If I'm banking with Scotia, and use my card in a TD machine, maybe they should push a 15 second advertisement telling me why TD is better than Scotiabank instead of charging me $1.50 to take out my money. It's the perfect kind of captive audience - I'm not going anywhere without my ATM card, or my money, so I'm forced to watch and read whatever you're telling me. A 1% conversion rate would more than cover the costs of dropping those $1.50 withdrawl fees. And of course people would start talking about it, and likely use the machines more thus see your ads more, etc. etc.

Some of this stuff might be hitting Quicken territory, but that tool is nonsense. Only the bank knows which debt matches which credit. Quicken seems to guess randomly, and ALWAYS gets it wrong. Maybe quicken should team up with your bank to give you the ultimate customer experience?

Online Banking..

After logging into the ScotiaBank website this morning to make an email payment, I discover the addition of an "Access Code" to help increase security for email transfers. Normally, I don't see this as a problem, but they force it to be a 5-8 digit NUMERIC code. wtf? Are we in the stone ages here? Almost no one can remember a 5-8 digit numeric code for longer than 5 minutes and will OBVIOUSLY write it down. I would love to run a redesign on a banking site, the usability sucks.. there are so many little things they can do to improve services. Simple things like color coding lines in your statement, or adding custom comments to transactions would be AWESOME, and can easily be implemented.

Of course I wrote them an email.. which they won't read, so I wasted 15 minutes of my life.


--- Letter to Scotiabank

While I understand the need for security, asking users to create an ALL NUMERIC access code is a terrible usability mistake. People will not remember it, and will most definitely write it down, thus undermining the purpose of the code. Who can remember a 5-8 digit number off the top of their head?

Why would you force NUMERIC over ALPHANUMERIC? As everyone becomes more used to remembering passwords, why would we step back 10 years and force a numeric password? If this password is also used from an ATM, it would make sense, however if only used online, this is a TERRIBLE usability decision. I work with usability online every day and see how people react to things like this. If you don't believe me, read "The Human Factor".

Other than that, there are many small things that scotiabank can do to greatly improve their service online. Remembering default sorting on the account page would be a huge improvement - who sorts to have their most recent transactions on the bottom?! Allowing user entered comments for transactions, or color coding, would be a HUGE move towards making banking easier for users. Instead of the nonsense comment "transfer to account 84345309583", imagine it said "transfer - mortgage"? Imagine I could color code all my mortgage payments blue, so I can see them at a glance, and know whether it's been taken out?

Don't get me wrong, Scotia has a decent site, but you can attract SO MANY MORE customers if your website actually works FOR the customer, instead of AGAINST them.

Don't take my word for it, ask your users.

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