Paul Rouke and PRWD on User Centered Design

Yesterday I attended the very engaging Forethought by Four event, part of the Future Culture series of events by Manchester Digital, the trade association for Manchester based digital and ICT companies.

This event was the kick-off for Futuresonic 2008, which is described on their site as:
“5 days and nights of live music, art premieres, exhibitions, club nights and events featuring a world-class programme of over 300 artists in 30 venues and spaces across the city centre. Futuresonic is an international festival of Art, Music and Ideas now in its 12th year occupying the orbits of both digital culture and music.”

Introducing Forethought by Four was Shaun Fensom, chairman of Manchester Digital, and he duly introduced the following 4 speakers:

• Justin Hall - CEO, Gamelayers, and a founder of PMOG
• Aleks Krotoski - blogger, columnist, podcaster, The Guardian
• Matt Jones - Founder, Dopplr
• Chris Heathcote - head of service & UI Portfolio for Nokia / anti-mega.com

Although all 4 speakers provided stimulating talks, with not a single bullet point in sight on each of their visually rich presentation slides, I was most engaged with the talks from Justin Hall and Matt Jones. Justin is a Founder of PMOG (Passive Multiplayer Online Game) which is, arguably, a model for the next stage in the evolution of web 2.0, and Matt the founder of Dopplr.

Timing is most definitely everything! - just a few seconds ago I received the beta invite for PMOG from Justin, who I chatted with at the end of the event (PMOG is currently in closed Beta with invite and queuing only). Thanks Justin!

Matt talked about the continual need for applications and services to allow people to upload personal information to the web, as a way of allowing us to share information with our friends and members of online communities. This he says makes information about us much more interesting when the data can be compared to other people around the globe or with similar characteristics and consumer habits.

Monitoring and Sharing Energy Consumption Data

Examples from Matt of uploading and sharing personal information and preferences were Last.fm and Muxtape, although Matt also talked about a new invention which sits in your home and monitors usage of all of a homes utilities (gas consumption, electricity usage, carbon emissions etc) with the ability then to upload this information to the web to allow you to see how you compare to other people and families in similar size houses as you. In turn this may identify ways in which you can adjust your day-to-day usage of utilities to be reduce carbon footprints and reduce energy bills.

What Now, Even More Social Networks?

Justin also talked about the vast amount of social media experiments being developed, pointing to the speed in which new prototypes can be pulled together and released for public consumption. An interesting idea to encourage usage of social networking sites is to offer rewards for people using networks, such as how Linked In provide you with a ‘Profile Completeness’ indicator, which just likes games provides encouragement to continually interact and add information onto the network in order to complete your online profile/persona.

With the amount of social media experiments and new social networks, Justin touched on user fatigue, with the classic case of having to input, yet again, your name, email, DOB, friends, contacts etc - the list goes on.. OpenId, although not directly mentioned in the talk, certainly is one great way to begin tackling some of this fatigue, and as expected PMOG provides this log-in facility.

New social networks will always have some users trying the service initially, but once that initial ‘buzz’ has gone its getting even more difficult to build sustainable, user rich social networks.

Information Overload - will any real work get done!?

Finally Justin mentioned Attent with Seriosity, an application which plans to address the information overload experienced particularly by corporate organisations - see how they describe the application:

Attentâ„¢ with Seriosâ„¢ tackles the increasing problem of information overload in corporate email using psychological and economic principles from successful multiplayer online games and market economics. Attent creates an economy with a scarce new currency (Serios) that enables users to signal the importance of their outgoing email by attaching value. Recipients can use the Serios received to prioritize their attention to messages, and in return use their Serios to assign appropriate weight to their responses. Attent also provides tools to analyze and manage communication patterns and information networks in the enterprise.

Finally, a quick mention to Aleks Krotoski talk, where she emphasised the importance of trust and customer engagement, in particular for e-commerce stores. This really struck a cord with me especially with the recent launch of our e-commerce platform, where trust and engagement have been two of the key areas addressed for launch and more importantly will be integral areas of focus as part of the continual evolution of the platform.

All being said this was a really interesting event put on by Manchester Digital - its just a shame the attendance wasn’t as strong as the panel and talks merited.

Another day, another highly rewarding and insightful conference!

1st off I must list the exceptional speaker lineup for Media Forum 2020, both from their status and levels of responsibilities within the media industry and also with the panache and comfort at which they delivered their talks:

• Jim Chisholm - joint principal of iMedia, the world’s leading newspaper consulting practice
• Alex Marks - head of marketing at Microsoft
• Jeremy Tester - Director of Insight at Sky Media, giving him responsibility for the development and execution of the marketing strategy in the division of Sky responsible for generating advertising revenue
• Simon Daglish - national sales and trade marketing director at GCap, with key objectives to drive revenue growth through innovation and collaboration with media and creative agencies
• Nigel Dean - senior manager with responsibilities for the development and sales of O2’s interactive portfolio (based mainly around sms, mms and lbs)
• Robert Steven - director and co-founder of Bunnyfoot, a company (and with my ambitions of my own user experience agency being a competitor in the future) focussed on user experience
• Mathew Watkins - group sales director for The Telegraph, responsible for all advertising revenue

So on to the various talks…

Jim Chrisholm talked about how he expects the number of free daily papers to increase, along with a continued influence of user generated news portals, one example being an pan-asian individual whose personal news site expanded to such a degree that it actually influenced the countries political election.

Alex Marks posed a question with regards how, if a media firm today was trying to sell tv advertising as a new marketing channels, would it actually seem like worthwhile investment.

Imagine the conversation:

Media seller (M) - I have a fantastic new channel to market your product. In between tv programmes every break
Client (C) - How do you know whether the consumer watches our advert?
M - er, we won’t know
C - How will we know if our advert has led to a new sale?
M - mm, we won’t be able to tell you this
C - What kind of cost is this form of advertising?
M - It’s very expensive especially compared to your other forms of marketing.

– you get the point! Not very much accountability!

With regards media consumption in the future, Alex fully expects the mobile phone device to become intergral to how individuals digest content. For instance in a morning going on the tube, rather than picking up a daily metro on your way into the station, you ca choose what news tyes you want bluetoothing to your mobile device.

Ultimately Alex doesn’t see much future for the printed newspaper, a view which Mathew Watkins from The Telegraph later disagreed with strongly (as you would expect of course!).

Jeremy from Sky Media provided a great insight into the areas which Sky are looking at from both advertising opportunities for businesses on sky’s anytime tv channel (a medium which he fully expects to replace traditional standard scheduled channels by 2020) but also looking at a totally unique tv channel named Current TV (sky channel 193) from the US which uses its users to not only create the content but also the advertising! In case you think this can surely only apply to small brands Jeremy showed 3 user created ads for Honda, Yamaha and 1 other household brand which I can’t just remember.

Current TV has just arrived in the uk on sky channel 193, so I’ll be taking a look for sure. In the US they receive over 30,000 submissions for user generated ads and content per day for consideration in airing.

With regards the tv advertising opportunities for the anytime TV channel, Jeremey explained how they offer advertisers the chance to feature a small ad prior to the start of a show/programme, which would promote to viewers that they can see the full advertisement or perhaps an extended version after the programme has finished. He showed examples of when brand haven’t been too sensitive about having a strong message featured throughout their initial advert has much more positive results in viewers watching the extended version at the end of the show. This is in comparison to brands which don’t want to effect their advert visually so simply feature this message in the final frame of their initial advert.

Simon Daglish took us through how one of his radio stations Xfm is harnessing the possibilities of both cross platform personalisation and brand experience with user generated content and community creation. I addition Xu is also providing users the ability to control what music gets played during the day. All interesting stuff, which brought a few parallels to Last FM, the “social music revolution” which I use personally.

Robert Steven took us back over 35 years to help explain in his eyes how over this period we have passed between periods of individualism and collectivism, with collectivismnow becoming (once again) an intergral part of society (read Facebook, MySpace and Bebo to name just 3).

Rob’s talk used images such as 400,000 people gathering at Woodstock in 69 through to the Time’s Person of the Year 2006 front cover.

I understand all the presenters slides will be made available in the next week or so, which means I won’t provide more references from this presentation at this stage.

Finally on to Mathew Watkins views on The Newspaper in the Digital Age. Again providing another stimulating talk, one of the key points Mathew made on this was that in the future there will be a clear distinction between basic, free news resources and premium news resources which will be paid. Naturally he expects The Telegraph to operate in the latter space.

Mathew touched on the ways in which The Telegraph have made the digital channel an integral part of the strategy, which included completely redesigning what was a business operating on 5 levels with disparation between the different marketing channels, to a new open plan office space which encourages collaboration on all levels. He actively encouraged us attendees to contact him to make arrangements to be shown round these offices, an offer which I intend to take up for sure the next time I am visiting clients in London.

In addition Mathew explained how a long time ago The Telegraph began promoting readers of their broadsheet to go online for further information on a particular story, or for other relevant stories etc. This has ultimately led to more and more of their readers going online, and the business aims to encourage readers to use both the offline and online channels to read their news, rather than looking to channels the readers down a particular channel.

There are other areas to discuss but on reflection this is already a very extensive post so I will wrap it up here…

As a final comment, across all speakers the main focus for media in the future is the importance of the online channel, both at home and when out using more and more advanced mobile devices. Personalisation and user generated content will also play a key role within the media industry and the advertising world.

Whilst on my train back from this future of usability event tonight, hosted by Bunnyfoot and E-consultancy, I wanted to share some of the key messages and findings that came out of both the questionnaire and from the speakers.

Ashley Friedlein, CEO of E-consultancy, opened the event - he started by talking about the change in terminology over his 10 years within the online user experience and usability field…

…going something along the lines of HCI - usability - user experience - customer experience - UCD (User centred design)

Ultimately its about putting users at the heart of your online marketing decisions, a statement which can’t be emphasised enough.

Another of Ashley’s industry comments was on the continued trend of emphasis placed on the acquisition of potential customers.

To brake this post up I thought now is a good time for a 1 liner from Ashley -

“Driving traffic to your website isn’t hard - you can simply pay for it.”

This is certainly true for businesses spending significant marketing budgets using the like of Google Adwords.

But as Ashley pointed out, the continuing rise of cost in ppc and with affiliates looking to change their charging models, this will only increase the chunk of marketing spend that the acquisition area will take.

In contrast, what smarter businesses (who are looking to better increase ROI and conversions) are realising more and more is that improving the user experience and usability of their websites can provide much greater increases in conversion and retention rates.

People will spend longer on, convert more often and refer on a site with a good user experience which is intuitive and enjoyable to interact with.

Ashley feels that whilst usability is now being considered much more, looking further ahead he is also interested in the next level of user experience studies and online marketing.

This assumes that any usability flaws have been fixed, and now it is time to look at areas such as persuasion architecture and behavioural analysis. Ultimately a better understanding of what triggers online users to interact with an interface and pursue certain journeys, which can therefore allow the website owners to adapt the messaging/tone of voice/allocation of real estate to target different users.

All excellent snippets of views from a businessman whom I have much admiration for, not only for the business he has built in e-consultancy but also for his willingness to assist me in various aspects of establishing both my user experience agency but also me personally in the online arena (part of which is this blog that you are reading).

Next up was Linus Gregoriadis (Head of Research - E-consultancy) who provided a walkthrough of the questionnaire findings and what this means for the Internet now and in the future

Key highlights of the report were as follows:

• Over 700 respondants
• From what I recall this was made up of around 350 client side, 200 agencies/specialist usability consultants and the remaining as other individuals working within the online arena
• Usability is beginning to make a dent in the overall budgets of redesign projects
• Over the next 12 months across all areas of marketing investment, such as seo, ppc, affiliate marketing, mobile and usability, usability was considered the area whuch will see the biggest % increase in marketing spend, followed closely by seo and ppc - (to refer back to Ashley’s views which I share completely, until businesses place more strategy (And budget!) on the actual user experience they are effectively hemoragging money sending vasts numbers of visitors to a site which isn’t founded on UCD (user centred design).
• When asked where the responsibility lies when it comes to the usability and user experience of a project, over 70% confirmed that in-house teams and or/individuals held this responsibility. This left around 15% who use external expert ux agencies and consultants, along with another 10% who work alongside specialist agencies

Finally for this brief overview, the top 3 results for a business embracing the possibilities of having usability and user experience at the core of a project were as follows:

1. Increased brand perception
2. Increased brand loyalty
3. Increased conversion rates

The full report is due to be made available shortly at which stage I will provide a link.

In closing I haven’t touched on the redesigned Visit London website which is due live on the 5th July - this project featured UCD at its core and through the course of the project, using user testing and eye tracking to name but a few methods, the head of user experience at Visit London Jeremy Wilmott and his team have been able to ensure that the relaunched site is well positioned to provide visitors with an exceptional user experience. As with any such large scale redesign project on-going usability evaluations will ensure the website continues to meet its wide variety of visitor needs.

As I make my way back north this evening following this event, taking stock of both this assessment of the future of usability as well as my own knowledge and experiences in this arena, I am relishing the opportunities across all industry sectors which my specialist online user experience agency PRWD will continue to become a key player, both in forward thinking, intuitive web development projects but also in providing businesses with services such as user testing, information architecture analysis and solutions, eye tracking, behavioural pattern defining and persuasion architecture.

All in all an excellent evenings discussion and industry analysis, I hope you’ve enjoyed my summary!

I’m off to London this evening in readiness for what should be a very interesting and productive few days at Internet World 2007 at Earls Court.

I’m looking forward to the break from what is currently a hectic time with both my agency business and my pursuit of focussing more on specific user experience and usability projects, including the establishment of this blog (my target of at least 1 posting per week is already slipping, but I have plenty to write about in the next few weeks which should make for interesting reading).

Internet World Objectives

Along with meeting a few clients who will also be reaping the benefits of the knowledge sharing and fascinating keynote speeches, I’ll be looking in particular to attend some of the sessions on usability and accessibility by the likes of Nomensa, Bunnyfoot and Charlotte Tookey, the Senior Marketing Manager of Tesco.com.

Its always good to find out what other practitioners of user centred design, user testing and usability in the main are both working on and finding out what latest research has been used in support of key decisions made for large blue-chip businesses.

In particular, with being a frequent user of both Asdas and Tesco’s online shopping facility, my opinions on the scope for enhancing the user experience on these kind of shopping sites may in fact co-incide with changes Tesco may be embarking on to further strengthen their position in the retail market.

All in all it should be a very eventful few days and I’ll look forward to providing some of my opinions on the speakers and exhibitors later this week (time permitting).

As a final note if anyone would like to meet me for a coffee over the course of the next 2 days my contact details are within the CV section of this blog.