Category Archives: work

Jun 23 2011
work

I don’t Like numbers

There’s a not-unreasonable perception that agencies are staffed with people who are preoccupied with the new and trendy. At Dare it’s fair to say there are gentlemen that don’t wear socks. There are girls who were in maxi-dresses last year and preposterous jumpsuits this year. There are even people that wear hats and scarves in June. But that’s just textiles. When it comes to digital I’d challenge you to find a more cynical bunch. Propose an idea in an internal meeting to make use of the latest in social networkery and you’d better have some solid evidence to prove it works because you are going to face a barrage of critical analysis from 24 year old juniors to 45 year old seen-it-alls.

With this in mind it’s been a matter of debate this week that perhaps the sheer volume of requests we get from clients asking us to take them (for example) from 10,000 to a million fans on Facebook, is getting to be a bit of a problem. I mean, how important to a brand is a Facebook fan?

Consider an example from Taco Bell in the states. During a spell of bad news for the Mexican fast-food chain where they were challenged on the volume of beef in their Tacos, the Yum! brand reached out to their fans as part of a $4m ad campaign. Presumably these people – who let’s remind ourselves had actively said they were fans of the brand on Facebook, would be up for some positive activity? Over the period in question they’d swollen their fanbase from 500k to 6 million.  Jonathan Blum explains that they offered these fans free food … hey friend, come get some free tacos, on-the-house.

What happened was that just 200k people did. That’s 3%.

97% decided not to take-up the offer of free food from a brand they liked.

When you can’t even give away free food to people who like you, how can you possibly expect people to pay for it? But we’re being asked to generate bigger fan numbers with the assumption that this equates to more sales somewhere down the line.

So, what’s at work here? Why did so many people look the gift horse in the mouth and walk away? What are the implications?

Friction
I don’t know how the mechanic was resolved logistically. It would have to be easy to redeem the offer. If you’re on Facebook it’s not that likely you’re in Taco Bell right then or perhaps even in the frame of mind for a taco. You might see the offer but unless it’s promoted in-store and can be obtained and redeemed at the point of transaction then there’s sufficient friction that customers (fans) are less likely to follow through with the process. It doesn’t take an expert in ethnography or service design to see that printing a voucher at home and remembering to take it next time you get a taco is a bit clunky.

Mixed messages
On the one hand there’s a lawsuit alleging your food is only 50% beef and at the same time you’re offering it up for free. What does that say about the quality and the value you place on your product? Does it display confidence in your taco or does it smack of desperation?

Like ≠ like
Perhaps we don’t actually care that much about the brands we like. Like has become a substitute for ‘join in’ on Facebook. In order to see or interact with content we have to Like it. We might not actually like the nrand but are just intruiged to see what the fuss is about – Like has become nothing more than a threshold. The freedom with which likes are handed out has devalued them; it was presumed that the peer pressure of being seen to like something you clearly wouldn’t would act as a moderator. For example, I might want to see what all the fuss is about Justin Bieber’s page but to like him would be to broadcast that to much derision amongst my friends. The reality is that I can hide this like instantly to spare my blushes but still it counts as another positive vote for the precocious little twerp. Many of those 6m Taco Bell fans aren’t real fans then, they’re just people who had a passing interest or were perhaps mindlessly clicking away on anything they recognised. What would scarcity do to modify this behaviour? Perhaps if we could only issue three likes per week we might think more careful about where we used them.

They just didn’t see it
Data at AllFacebook.com suggests that the magic of EdgeRank (Facebook‘s ostensibly-intelligent method of prioritising content for you) means that  only 3%-7.5% of fans actually see business page posts in their feed. The reasons for this are not entirely understood (Edgerank isn’t transparent) but brands that are posting infrequently or with low-engagement content for example aren’t going to be helping themselves.

But but but…
What about those people that did take up the offer and do see the posts? Their numbers may be small but are these the mavens and connectors, the influencers? Before we entirely dismiss the idea of the fan we should at least acknowledge the benefits of the engaged superfan.

Part of the problem is that Facebook’s irritatingly quantifiable. Chief Marketing Officers and their subordinates can hang their targets on tangible numbers – more fans, beat our competitors, more likes than last year etc. etc. This is data they can see daily, it’s not something they need to commission research for or wait until the next quarter. He or she can log-in at home or in the office and beat their agency with a stick as the numbers rise and fall in real-time. Trouble is, the acquisition of these fans costs money (c. £10 per fan in marketing spend some say), even more when you’re honest and realise that something like 1/10 fans is likely to be a truly engaged one.

It’s because of these superfans that I’m reluctant to call bullshit on the whole Facebook thing. It’s still important to (ahem) fish where the fish are. There are plenty of us swimming about in the big blue sea, but just trying to get loads of us into your net and assuming we’ll all eat your taco… (this isn’t working is it?)

Let’s just teach some of this to our clients and make sure that proposals aren’t about numbers but are about genuine engagement, conversations that are acted upon and activities like voucher redemption are as free from friction as possible. Let’s not go around issuing desperate calls for people to share, let’s think instead about strong scarce engagement ideas for some brands and tactical offers in volume for others. I’m glad I’m surrounded by so many cynics, I just wish they’d wear better clothes.

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May 09 2011
work

Carrots and Sticks Wielded at the RSA

In doing a little research for some behavioural change theory as part of my day-job I came across this wonderfully brief talk that Ian Ayres did at the RSA back in April. I’ve been toying with carrots and sticks (I think both approaches can be wonderfully split-tested online) in my own work particularly around financial services. However, Ian introduces the idea of the anti-incentive and it’s a bit of a head-scratcher that I’m going to spend some time exploring for my clients. I think it’s got some potential but it’s perilous in terms of setting oneself up for quite the outlay should it be implemented incorrectly. So, without further ado, take a moment:

> More on anti-incentives found by Liz Danzico

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May 04 2011
work

Press Here to Play

 For some reason this new bit of work from my colleagues here at Dare has me clicking the video ‘play’ call-to-action a lot. Still not got to the bottom of whether it was intentional or not…

Apr 26 2011
work

Wood Preservation Society: Participation Marketing At Its Worst

It’s been a great and sunny weekend in this Sceptered Isle. Britain has come out (well, at least in this rather Royalist corner of Surrey) in red, white and blue.  There’s a frisson of wedding buzz and I even saw several amorous middle-aged couples dry-humping in the evening sun on the grassy banks of the Thames as I enjoyed my first post-marathon run last night. A weekend of BBQs, Zinfandel Rose and wall-to-wall sunshine will do that to our repressed Northern Hemisphere blood.

Imagine how sad it was therefore to find it all come crashing down last night during the ad-break to the Suspicions of Mr. Whicher on ITV.  To the unmistakably British melody of ‘The Self Preservation Society’ tune written for the Italian Job, the British TV view was subjected to the latest ‘wood preservation society’ advert for either Cuprinol/Ronseal (so clear I couldn’t remember which one it was), it encouraged people to sign-up to their (turns out it’s Cuprinol) Facebook page and to presumably tell lots of stories about painting and preserving external wood.

This is Britain at its worst. A mind-bogglingly stupid consequence of a creative idea that spun out of that song from The Italian Job. The incentive (there HAS to be an incentive because clearly nobody in their right mind cares that much about external wood preservation) is to win a shed or something. But of course you do benefit it other ways: ergo … tips … (there’s always a market for tips isn’t there? “Try using a brush!” “Consider sealing your wood when it isn’t raining!”) and inspiration (“Why not use green, instead of brown, or brown instead of green if you prefer!”) and the worryingly vague ‘other updates’ can also be found lurking behind this terrible stock shot of yummy mummy in pink gloves watering her pansies. Presumably they have people hanging on the line for the latest in ICI’s wood-preservation solvent technology.

I hate Facebook participation campaigns so very much now.

EDIT: I have since discovered this ‘idea’ has been around since 2009, and as this post explains even more acerbically, it was pretty lame first time around…

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Mar 25 2011
work

I promise this is the last time I’ll mention it

Just a little note to readers new and old that we* won our first award for myFry last night at the Media Guardian Innovation awards. It was nominated in the Mobile App category alongside the well-known iHobo work (which won two other awards last night).

You’ll probably already have seen my thoughts on my time developing the app at Dare, and they still ring true today. Even though I still read the odd critical comment (and then assume it’s naive criticism) the truth is, as the awards recognised and Stephen himself states here – it fundamentally challenges the notion of linear reading for certain texts and it – more than many other alternative digital readers – understood the culture and physical environmental context in which this book would be read.

And that, said Pooh, is that.

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* – Dare, Stefanie Posavec & Penguin

Mar 23 2011
3 Comments
work

The Waitrose Redesign: Perspective Required

This week eConsultancy’s report on the apparent usability calamity of the new Waitrose site has been widely shared: “New Waitrose website panned by users“. People queued up to take pot shots at this aspirational brand, criticising a range of issues from taxonomy, speed and the apparent non-disclosure of prices.

Several cried-out “why wasn’t this tested?” “didn’t listen to users” and so-on and so forth. Compounding the issue was the revelation that the design ‘cost £10 million’.

An unmitigated disaster eh? Well no, not in my opinion. Firstly I think that the £10m issue is swaying a lot of bad publicity. The general public, and this is not to patronise, simply do not understand the price of design (c.f. Olympics 2012 logo). I don’t understand the price of building a new bridge, or anti-retroviral drugs and I don’t presume to tell the people in those industries that the cost of such things is too much. For some reason, the great British public assume that design work is just a 17 year old with photoshop tinkering about. It completely misses the point that work like this involves high levels of expertise in visual design, logistics, accountancy, information systems, security, project management and so-on. It’s massive, it’s expensive stuff. You might re-design a local dentist’s website for £1000 but really this isn’t even vaguely comparable.

Secondly, it does actually work. To claim it’s “not fit for purpose … beyond fixing” is bonkers. Show me the evidence that no-one is shopping on the site, that the usage is down that average basket sizes are down etc. etc. I suspect you would find the opposite [EDIT 25.March: Orders are in-fact up by 34% on the previous site, according to The Guardian]. Yes, there are problems. Some of the nomenclature and taxonomy is a little unconventional. Sally pointed out that browsing freezer products was done by brand and not by type, that seems peculiarly specific. Most users would at least like a choice to filter by meal, by category (fish, poultry, ready-meal, dessert) and so on. Other glaring errors include the (now fixed) inability to identify sizes or quantities of items like milk and meat.

And then there’s the speed. The speed it’s rendering is not great. I’m no developer so can only speculate that it could be either an interface layer issue or one related to pulling items out of the eCommerce catalogue (the back-end). To the consumer this distinction is irrelevant, it just takes time and time-precious consumers get understandably narky. Fixing the speed is critical to the perception of performance.

It infuriates me to suggest that this wasn’t thought about or tested. In our industry with so much money at stake it is inconceivable to think it wasn’t tested in some way at several points throughout the process. It was designed in part by some very talented user-centred people and the fact that certain elements have been included (drop-down category breadcrumbs) suggest a user-experience designer’s hand. The key is whether the user-testing was sufficiently rigorous, sufficiently real-world and sufficiently analysed to feed back into the design process.

Interactions which are causing the most concern include long-lists – the heavy duty users at home doing > £100 shops with many items. In these scenarios they are likely to be juggling multiple threads of activity: searching for goods, ticking them off a paper list, popping to and from the kitchen, considering recipes and so on. Keeping as much of the action (‘add to basket’) transparent at the same time as the browse activity is a tricky ask. Often user-testing is done in a lab with a user isolated from the context in which they normally perform their activity. It’s not a real shop, it’s a simulated list and the observations you will make will subsequently be quite false.

Work like this is so dependant on context that it needs to be stress-tested in real-world situations. It means sample shoppers using a staging-version of the site or a high-fidelity prototype to do their normal shopping routine. It might have happened here, I speculate that it probably didn’t.

I rememeber Catriona Campbell of Foviance telling me once of some ethnography work done for Tesco where they observed online shoppers ordering in bulk from their value range. Actually observing the users in their homes showed that these were consolidated orders for their community where one person acted as a distributor from a single paid-for delivery. Insight like this rarely comes from a two-way mirror, eyetracking and a moderator.

Returning to the Waitrose site, i’d urge you not to get caught in the hype but to actually use the site. The majority of  problems cited on the forum seem to be resolvable coding/performance issues, not fundamental interface design issues. By which I mean buttons not working as intended, technical errors and so-on.  The remaining issues surround a nostalgia for old site features like the jotter. I’ve seen this sort of thing before when a quirky feature barely anyone used gets removed the one or two people who did use it take to the web to complain.

I’m not saying it’s brilliant, it clearly needs work but I just personally feel the need to call for some calm and reflection in light of the fact that passionately user-centred people would have been involved in this and working with the very best of intentions albeit perhaps without the backup to see it through to final development or the support of adequate contextual user-tests.

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Mar 07 2011
work

Experience Planning

I decided to have a bit of a break from Twitter (and Facebook) and to revert to the long-copy pleasures of full-fat blogs. To this end I have downloaded Reeder for my iPhone, fired-up my Instapaper archives and am eschewing the free papers on the commute home with the intention to read more about the things I used to read about.

A corollary to this will hopefully be a refreshed attention to my own blog and to the joy of writing again. Though I’ve read too many blogs in the past that have a post that reads: “Am blogging again, hope to blog more, watch this space!” … and that’s the last or penultimate dusty entry. So, no promises, none at all.

Before I dismiss the microblog for the aforementioned hiatus I did just want to highlight a link I found via Anne Czerniak’s stream: David Friedman’s Twitter Thesaurus. The function of David’s thesaurus is to provide alternative, succinct variants of the words you would write if you didn’t have a 140 character limit. It seems like just the sort of thing that verbose writers like myself would like to see added as a contextual add-in to desktop and mobile twitter clients, a bit like bit.ly does for url shortening.

Experience Planning (aka. Experience Design)
My ‘new’ job title is Experience Lead. This is in part due to Dare‘s merger with MCBD and the fact that not only do I now have sight of digital work, I have an occasional role to play in designing and consulting in offline experiences and service design. Whilst we have an adorable presentation deck that covers-off what Experience Planning is (in the context of Dare), much like my This is IA tumblr, I find it helpful to describe what we do with examples of what it is to design experiences (and not just websites).

Virgin Atlantic
Ever noticed that the lighting spectrum on airplanes leaves you looking rather palid, almost green and nauseous? The chaps at Virgin America have and consequentially installed a scheme with a varying light spectrum that reflects the prevailing destination timezone and external light conditions – even the mood of the passengers at key ‘touchpoints’ in the journey, viz :  “[the lighting is] in a ‘theatrical mood’ prior to departure. When you walk down the jet bridge, you see the purple glow of the mood lighting, and it hopefully excites you…” “…people have an emotional and physiological response to lighting. So we decided to shift the colour of our cabin lights during the course of flight. They’re associated with time of day outside or ambient light outside. If you’re flying by day and heading in to dusk, it will reflect the light level outside. It’s less jarring” – Adam Wells, Virgin America [Source: Budget Travel “Travel Innovators“]

Disney
As experiences go, Disney have mastered many at their attractions around the world but queueing provides a constant target for designers with a remit to increase enjoyment at any cost. Innovations here are increasingly rare but often involve psychology (see David Maister’s article from many years ago). In this article from the New York Times late last year, Brooks Barnes details some of the cute operational armoury the experts at Disney can deploy:

  • A nerve centre with wait-time monitoring in real-time.
  • The ability to ramp up ride throughput by, for example, deploying more boats on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
  • The authority to re-deploy their character talent to the queues so that Goofy can take kids’ minds off the interminable wait.
  • Induce significant crowd shifts by initiating a pop-up parade: “Move it! Shake It! Shift It!” which nudges people to the less populated area.
  • Attention to operational detail to open more kiosks or cash registers, hand out menus and so-on.

Such interventions pervade in a culture of exceptional customer experience. Leaving room for staff to innovate and react in this way ensures that, collectively, the impression and memories users are left with are both positive and lasting. And memories are what all decent experience designers are after.

I got asked recently to write a piece on what might be considered a good opportunity for marketeers tired of the existing promotion calendar. I took an opportunity to assert that I think the marketing communications industry has for too long focussed on the acquisition part of the courtship of consumers. I think we have a great opportunity to work harder to continue to persuade throughout the life cycle – to promote retention with some ‘wow experiences. Working with tools like memory, serendipity, ephemera, transience and humanised language and interaction. All of which are just fancy words which are my attempts to intellectualise the stuff that Disney (v. supra) do so intuitively.

Perhaps I haven’t wrapped this post up quite the way I would normally like to, but these, dear reader, are my thoughts in flux about how I currently think about Experience Planning and the directions which interest me.

—

Footnote: This post was composed a few weeks ago during a spell when I wasn’t on Facebook or posting regularly on Twitter. I have returned to both sites since then but am significantly less active. I hope.

 

 

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Mar 04 2011
links, work

smörgåsbord choice cuts (vi)

Today was a watershed. I visited Scandinavian Kitchen for fikka for the first time since Anna left us. It was lonely. I got asked if I spoke Norweigan, I don’t, but takk som spør. Here are the things I’ve been thinking and reading about recently:

Persuasive Design
Almost everyone in the advertising and marketing world reads PSFK so perhaps this isn’t new to anybody reading this blog but occasionally we all miss stuff. In Finland at less-busy intersections, a little proximity sensor detects the presence of pedestrians and alerts other road-users with a little light. It’s a great nudge to help with nighttime road safety.

Again, from PSFK, this little chart from Leo Burnett is worth a look as they attempt to represent behavioural archetypes in simplified form.

Human Computer Interaction
Saneel Radia writing on BBH Labs‘ blog dug up a great little piece from David Bryant at Google where tells a compelling tale about the rise of the Human Operating System. It’s an often over-looked element of the success of some of the most lauded devices and innovations in recent years, that by using humanised nuances that trigger limbic responses, the designers have made products that simply feel more human and instinctive. Thinking about what might be dismissed as interaction frivolity, behaviours like inertia, resistance, sliding, bumping, flying and so on are of profound importance.

Related to that thought, but worthy of more exploration at a later point, is a piece by Joshua Allen on “Transience” (UX Magazine) and another one by Suzanne Ginsburg (also at UX Magazine) on “The Evolution of Discoverability“.

Design Pattern
Jason over at Signal vs. Noise has piqued my interest with this charming transfer of inspiration. I’ll let him tell you the story of how a notice on a rest-stop booth on a recent journey challenged 37 Signals to re imagine the FAQ. As someone with a love-hate relationship with the FAQ (though mainly hate) it might just be a new pattern to appropriate from the marvellously fresh-feeling 37 Signals showcase.

Restaurant Websites
Mark Hurst found a nice piece on the Boston Globe site which popped-up in my Good Experience feed yesterday. I often cite menu-design as an example that choice architecture is nothing new and better-understood by restaurateurs the world over than many people paid to be in the persuasion industry. It concerns the fact the restaurant websites are often atrociously designed pieces of design-wank, portfolio pieces for one-man-band flash designers. (The BG article doesn’t use the term wank though, more’s the pity).

The Oatmeal gloriously lampoons the practise but please do read the post at Good Experience as Mark’s appropriately gutted (ahem) the Boston piece for us.

Crowd Mapping
It’s not a new thing to do but I was new to me. Anne Czernek drew my flighty attention to a Google-sponsored “ladies mapping party” in Kenya. Here 70 educated and not-so educated community members lent their hands to populating, correcting and otherwise improving the state of their local community’s map at Nairobi’s iHub last month.  It’s easy to think sometimes that with enough people and enough time that crowd-sourced knowledge like this just happens but occasionally you just need to get a lot of people in a room and give it a bit of a kick in the proverbials. These Kenyan ladies did just that.

Have a great weekend.

Feb 25 2011
work

A very special persuasion brief

Screengrab of the OpenIDEO brief

As an advocate of the trendy field of behavioural economics & persuasive psychology, it’s rather humbling to read a brief that plays in this space but is a little more worthy than trying to get people to spend a little more. Open IDEO have posted their latest brief:

“How might we increase the number of registered bone marrow donors to help save more lives?”

For all the right reasons anyone with a creative interest in the field of persuasion should take a look and start sketching. The basics are explained eloquently in this YouTube clip. For my part, this is the reason I haven’t joined the the register is pathetically:

1. I once heard/read that the donation process is incredibly painful
2. I one heard/read that the donation process leaves you immuno-supressed for some time.
3. The small number of registered donors means it’s much more likely your marrow will be called upon

But I know, without out ever having been in the position, that if I or close family needed marrow I would be out campaigning hard to get people to sign up and I would of course submit my own marrow.  It’s a big challenge, a worthy one and one where the answers elude me right now. I shall follow this with keen interest.

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Feb 25 2011
work

Apple Stores: Experience Design = Great. Reality = Aaagh!

Rory Cellan-Jones writes over at the BBC dot.Rory blog today about the emergence of the Microsoft facsimile of the Apple retail store experience. I contend that we shouldn’t fawn too much over the Cupertino firm’s success here.

I am an Apple fan, albeit one without the disposable cash to have actually bought one of their computers. I have bought several iPods and my iPhone at the Apple retail store. My local store is Kingston [photo: a typical Saturday] and I suspect this store is representative of their mall units in the UK. It’s wonderfully designed inside with clear experience design – the analysis of which is covered well here. The reality is that the store is incredibly popular and consequentially the experience takes a pounding. I’d love to spend time browsing the Apple TV interface and discovering if the paucity of content has improved to the point that I might buy one. But I can’t because on a Saturday I’m lucky if after 5 minutes of trying I have actually managed to get near it. There are lots of teenagers who have absolutely no intention of purchasing nor the money to do so but they’re in the store in their hundreds. They stand two-three deep around £1500 machines taking photos of their faces and warping them, updating their Facebook status’ “in the Apl str, LOL” and generally cooling my enthusiasm for the brand.

Of course I can see that these teenage browsers are prospects themselves in a few years’ time or – through their parents’ wallets – in the near future. I’m not really attempting to make an assessment of the financial success of the Apple store (for which a selection of financials need to be considered). What I am really trying to draw attention to is that we are often a little too quick to wax on about such experiences without actually thinking them through by actually experiencing it. This means ethnographic reporting following a field trip out to the store with a given sequence of tasks to perform/observe. A report under these conditions would surely reveal more about the service experience than the  blind hyperbole of jumping on that jolly popular bandwagon.

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