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.