Virtual Floorspace

Older people (30 and above, which includes me) grew up with TV and radio advertising. They understand the game. They get “free” TV and radio broadcasts in exchange for watching idealized vignettes promoting the wonders of a product. Skinny, healthy-looking people drinking lots of beer. A soft drink uniting the world in harmonious song. Deodorants that make the opposite sex flock to you regardless of your looks. My generation understands it for what it is, and responds or doesn’t respond according to deeply ingrained habits and preconceptions. They don’t as easily get social media. It’s foreign to their filters. Many would find it very difficult to sift through 100 comments online and pull out meaningful information for decision-making.

Millennials (people born 1982 – 2000) do get it. They have lived with digital media and the deluge of information for much of their lives, and have developed senses that are different from their parents when it comes to sifting the wheat from the chaff. They are different in other significant ways as well.

• Millennials were the first generation in which the majority of kids spent their early years in daycare rather than at home with Mom and siblings. This required early development of social skills to get a fair share.

• Millennials have grown up working in teams. Everybody gets a trophy, the kid who shot 97% of the goals that season, and the kid who usually kicked the ball in the wrong direction, if they made contact at all.

• Millennials share with one another. They share opinions, ideas, values and even their entertainment “possessions” with peers they’ve never met in the real world.

• Millennials smell an inauthentic rat quickly. I’ve heard older people comment, “Who knows if any of this is true or not? It could just be the company trying to fool you.” Millennials have revealed a starkly different attitude to me during in-home interviews. One said, “You can tell what’s valid and what’s not. I trust people to give me the right answer. Especially people my age.”

So the first key to reaching the coming tidal wave of customers (Millennials are 20% more numerous than Baby Boomers) is Authenticity. Unfortunately, you can’t fake authenticity. The companies who are excelling at developing communities around their products and services are those who understand their own DNA and their place in the social media scene, understand their customers, and understand the difference between what their customers want to hear about (the pull), and the idealized, one-sided expounding of product highlights and promos (the push). These early winners have developed a voice that younger consumers perceive as Authentic.

It’s not too late. Millennials will be talking about you one way or the other, so it’s better that you frame the conversation in terms that emphasize your core value adds. For larger companies who don’t understand the new game, I recommend you take a deep look at what role your products and services play in the lives of your customers, particularly Millennials. Not just the utility aspects, but the full life context. The best way to do that is through an ethnographic research study, conducted ideally in the homes or primary usage context of customers. And yes, I would be delighted to help you with that.

Uncategorized design strategy, discourse analysis, e-commerce, e-commerce design strategy, e-commerce strategy, e-retail, ethnography, millennials, social media

I submitted a proposal today to SXSW 2011 to present the topic: “Digital Ethnography for Design Innovation.” Please vote for my panel at the URL: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/8232

If my panel is selected, I will present methods Usography has developed over the past couple of years for structured analysis of social media using principles from ethnography as a theoretical foundation.

The presentation will focus on identifying needs, gaps and opportunities through virtual participant observation, discourse analysis, identification and operationalization of key dimensions, audience segmentation, formulation of design concepts, and reporting results. There is a significant time element to overlay on the process, because one major benefit of social media as a data collection method is that it is real time. Emerging trends appear in social contexts long before they are surfaced to broader attention through traditional media. This has implications for designers, because there is a latent period between idea and realization, so understanding the trends in a particular product domain is an important aspect of successful innovation (unless you are designing in a market-agnostic vacuum – possible, but not widespread).

My experience with this topic stems from structured review of social media on e-commerce sites. Customers’ passion really strikes you as they express their pain and frustration to peers. But just reading through a mountain of remarks, with no benchmark as to honesty or authenticity or relevance, is not necessarily going to be a fruitful exercise. This is where ethnographic methods come in. They are especially suited to extracting key dimensions from massive amounts of discourse, leading to a deep understanding of the underlying scaffolding that drives behavior.

The trick will be finding a happy medium between tediously theoretical and plebeian pap.

Please go over and vote a thumbs up at: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/8232

Copyright 2010, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (http://www.usography.com)

Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/uxexperts

Uncategorized customer research, design strategy, e-commerce strategy, e-retail, ethnography, methodology

The digital design space has grown exponentially since a CERN research partner first showed me a web site in 1994. At the time I was pretty unimpressed. It was a picture and some text. Big deal. I was already working with multimedia that had 1000x the features and functionality. But then he informed me that the page he was showing me could be viewed simultaneously by anyone, anywhere in the world. That changed my perception from yawn to yipes! within a few seconds.

Since that time, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the leading web agencies in the world, designing web sites for some of the largest and most successful companies in the world. Before e-commerce took off, there were only a handful of people covering all the bases on web site design and development. Now, in larger companies, there may be hundreds of people that have some responsibility for the primary web site. They are all focused on different aspects of the site, from strategy to marketing to merchandising to design to implementation to testing. More important to this blog post, they are focused on different levels of granularity, different types of problems, and different solution sets.

Designers, copywriters, developers, merchandising, and usability professionals tend to work at the component, page, and site levels, depending on their particular responsibilities. Project managers and sales people tend to work at the site level and company level. Architects work at the machine, package and company level. Project sponsors, client partners, design strategists, researchers, and marketing professionals work at the company, market and industry levels. They are looking at macroscopic factors that ultimately will spell financial success or ruin of the endeavor.

I read a lot of discussion groups related to web strategy and design, and it never fails to amaze me how each group looks at the level of granularity at which it operates (component, page, site, machine, company, market, industry), and then judges people working at all of the other levels on the basis of what the judgee knows about the judger’s work. This is nonsensical, since the concerns at each level of granularity are different. One level is not necessarily smarter or dumber than another level, but they see the world through different lenses, they work on different kinds of problems, and at the end of the day, are compensated according to different success criteria.

For example, I have always had a dislike for project salespeople. They seem to blithely oversell scope, which then becomes the team’s problem as they try to meet the client’s expectations. By crunch time, the sales person has moved on to a different account, and is schmoozing new clients, out and about every sunny Friday afternoon. That’s how I saw them until the day I realized that the weakest link in my company is the sales guy, which unfortunately at this point in my company’s evolution is still me. I should have taken some notes…

Before criticizing people in other roles in your family of web professionals, consider for a moment that they may not be focused on the same issues, and may not be prepared on a moment’s notice to consider problems outside of their scope. It doesn’t mean they’re stoopid, it means their job is different. Cut them some slack.

Copyright 2010, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (http://www.usography.com)

Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/uxexperts

Uncategorized e-commerce, e-commerce strategy, e-retail, user experience, user experience strategy, UX design, ux strategy

Asking customers to prioritize features and content that they would like to see offered on a web site is similar to card-sorting, but is different because the emphasis is more on overall user experience than site structure. The researcher creates a set of cards or a table with existing content and features and presents them to the customer to re-sort in prioritized order, based on some criteria. For example, “Place these cards on the table and order them according to the features that are most important to you when shopping for a vacation stay.” Depending on the goals of the research, the research team may create cards with existing content and features, future content and features, or a mixture of the two. These two types of explorations are discussed below.

Current features and content

If the content and features to be offered on the site are relatively closed, without much chance of adding completely different features, then the research team may choose to focus on prioritization of existing site elements. In this case, researchers would ask participants to prioritize potential features according to importance and/or anticipated frequency of use.

Future features and content

When asking participants about preferences for future functionality and content, one approach is to present them with cards, a list, or a table of possible features and content, and ask them to rank them based on their importance or their anticipated frequency of usage. Another method is to ask participants to develop such a list unprompted. If the feature set and content is well understood and somewhat closed, then the first method is most appropriate. If there is some room for invention or the solution set is more open, then the second approach is better. Responses can be compared qualitatively across participants to find trends according to user type.

When asking about future functionality, the researcher should also ask participants how they expect to access it and how they expect it to work. Their expected task path can be used to support the mental model and current or proposed interaction model.

Copyright 2009, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (http://www.usography.com)

Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/uxexperts

Uncategorized content prioritization, design strategy, e-commerce strategy, feature prioritization, interview techniques, user research