TLF Gems Newsletter February 2025

Your monthly CX and insight newsletter from TLF Research

You never learn more about a process than when you directly observe how data are actually measured.

Cuthbert Daniel

Everything is a tradeoff:

- If you increase efficiency, you decrease resilience.

- If you introduce flexibility, you reduce consistency.

- If you make it harder to shoplift, you make it harder to shop.

Good design isn’t about finding a perfect solution—it’s about making conscious choices, understanding the tradeoffs, and mitigating the consequences.

Too often, we design customer experience on paper, based on what suits our systems and processes, rather than by looking at how these tradeoffs work in the real world with real people.

Thanks for reading,

Stephen

Here are 6 things we think are worth your time this month

Anti-Shopping Strategy

This is a long, and mostly quite boring earnings call with the US pharmacy chain (and ultimate owner of Boots) Walgreens, but there's one really interesting nugget in there. Struggling, like many retailers, with losing inventory to theft, they had implemented tougher security measures, but these ended up backfiring because they put off legitimate customers too. This a really good example, I think, of the importance of demonstrating that you trust customers. "When you lock things up…you don’t sell as many of them. We’ve kind of proven that pretty conclusively."

Read: Anti-Shopping Strategy

Halfway Projects

Great post from Seth Godin about the fact that some projects are only of value when they are complete, while others are valuable as soon as you start. One place people go wrong with improving CX is going halfway with all-or-nothing projects or never starting more-is-better projects. "Half a canoe is worth less than no canoe at all."

Read: Halfway Projects

Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science

Search is broken and AI-generated nonsense is polluting the web. More than ever we need reliable sources of information, and one of the best is the MIT Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. "From large language models to political polarization, cultural diversity to animal cognition, our intellectual lives are permeated by questions about the nature of minds: what they are, how they grow, how they interact, and how they differ from one another."

Read: Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science

Wheel Running

Nice story in Mike Sowden's newsletter about researchers in the Netherlands who put hamster wheels outside to see what would happen, and found that wild animals including mice. frogs, and even slugs "ran" on the wheel. Why? "...fun! They were just enjoying doing it for the sheer ridiculous fun of it - just like us, when we remember to resist the tyranny of usefulness."

Read: Wheel Running

Dataviz Accessibility

I've been thinking recently about the challenge of making data storytelling more accessible. Sarah Fossheim specialises in accessible and inclusive design, and their website is a great source to explore for ideas and inspiration. This article looks at a how a selection of election graphics perform from an accessibility point of view. "While we as developers and designers do carry a responsibility to make the products we work on as accessible as possible, accessibility is a group effort and when accessibility issues make it into production, it's typically an indicator of issues with the processes, planning, and culture within a company. "

Read: Dataviz Accessibility

Zenko Mapping

I love a template, as you probably know by now. John Willshire's Zenko mapping is a really useful way to think about design projects while recognising the messy reality of how decisions are made as the project evolves. "It’s a mapping tool which helps you to ‘do the next right thing’, whether when collaborating with others inside and outside of your organisation, or making decisions on where to go next. It makes your strategy and tactics visible."

Read: Zenko Mapping

What I'm Reading: Info We Trust

This is the "remastered" version of Info We Trust, and it's not only absolutely brilliant but beautiful in its own right. If you're at all interested in data storytelling, this book is a must. Don't expect simple tips and tricks, though, this is a book that encourages you to build your data storytelling choices from the fundamentals. "Data is like water; it can nourish or it can drown."

What I'm Reading: Info We Trust

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