Making digital human

One complacent Apple can spoil the whole bunch

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 09:39:08 -0700

It’s no question that Apple is an outstanding company that takes pride in building beautiful, desirable, usable products that consumers want to own, touch, interact with, and adore.

However, in creating a product line that generates obsessive fan boys and fan girls worldwide, comes a deep responsibility: never stop pushing the envelope, and keep innovation at the forefront of your business model. We’ve seen it before where the wildly successful company begins to become complacent, especially when they’re no longer being pushed by competitors or consumers.

We challenge Apple to keep “Thinking Different”, by improving the craft of their digital design to meet the innovative level of their product design. And as a community – both of designers and consumers – we need to keep from getting caught in a cyclical pattern of blind positivity toward Apple, and be willing to point out the flaws and to push for better products.

As part of the digital product strategy work we do for our clients, we spend hundreds of hours observing and interviewing people around the world as they use – and struggle with – technology. And it’s not all roses in Cupertino: there remain some clear challenges for Apple.

Nine fix-its for Apple (or opportunities for competitors!)

1. Shopping and experiencing don’t go hand in hand

While Apple.com is a visually pleasing website that clearly showcases the design, functionality, and even the environmental friendliness of each product, there’s a definite distinction between shopping and experiencing: After you’re done being mesmerized, there is no obvious, inline call to action to buy that iPad you’ve been saving up for - rather, you have to hunt for a tiny ‘buy now’ button at the top of the page.

Instead, their IA is designed to completely separate the two actions, both within each page and within the top navigation, with an obvious distinction between “Store” and “Mac”. As consumers, we do want to learn about a product, investigate the specs, and marvel at the design, but it should be automatic and seamless to move from experiencing a product to purchasing a product.

Inexplicably, Apple breaks some of the basic standards of ecommerce design, visually disconnecting the Call to Action from the related product, and making it more difficult to buy an item when you’re ready to. When I have my credit card in hand, that button had better be there.

2. Who Moved My Media?: A call for complete integration

People want to get their hands on great entertainment in an integrated, streamlined, and refined marketplace. And when using iTunes on our laptops and desktops, it’s all right there in front of us, familiar and fully integrated into one app.

However, when using the iPad this model breaks down: our music is in one place, movies in another, shopping for media in a third, and shopping for apps in yet another. There is a distinction between purchasing and consumption, and users are unable to simply listen, watch, browse and buy simultaneously. We need a one-stop-shop for all of our media engagement.

3. Applicable Apps: The lack of organization in the App Store

There is an entire industry devoted to IA, yet it’s as though the App Store has been built without a blueprint. The overall experience reads like it was developed piecemeal, and not as a comprehensive, well-integrated whole. There are well over 300,000 apps in the App Store, but it’s incredibly difficult to actually locate genre-specific apps within this variety and choose your own personal experience. Instead, the push is toward “New and Noteworthy” apps, “Hot” apps, or a random smattering of front-page-profiled apps that seemingly have no reason to be headliners over the thousands of other apps available in the section you’re browsing.

There is no clear method for discovery or conceptual search, and no indication of the possibilities within each app section; what’s hot for a teenager doesn’t always mesh with my personal interests – go figure – and the appropriate app for me may be buried among the thousands of others under “See All”.

For example, if you’re looking for shopping apps, you’d have to browse tens of thousands of unorganized titles in the “Lifestyle” category. And, if you search for “shopping”, there isn’t one retailer listed in the first pages of results.

4. Sync Stinks: It’s difficult to sync media on multiple devices

If I have an iPad, iPhone, and a MacBook, I want to be able to download a movie or song on one device and seamlessly play it on another. While there is a way to do this, it’s not obvious, clearly defined, or better yet, done automatically. We live in a cloud computing, mobile society, which changes our expectations to assume a simple, instantaneous merging of my data across all platforms. Media should flow seamlessly across my devices and be independent of the device that happened to be in my hands when I acquired it.

5. 2+1=1: Solve the problem of having multiple users on one account

There’s a good chance, if you live in a household, that there are multiple users on your iPad or iMac, and each person has different media interests. In developing iTunes and propagating downloadable media, Apple has truly altered our media-sharing experience: where we used to be able to buy a CD or DVD and play it throughout the household on a variety of machines, now we’re relegated to downloading the same song or show on each account we want to play it on, should we want to maintain separate accounts.

As a result, we have seen that many households have had to resort to sharing a single iTunes account to avoid duplicitous charges for downloading the same songs and shows. Why not simply have the ability to create multiple profiles under this master account? Each person’s iTunes should feel personalized and proprietary to their own tastes, not like a giant stew of media spanning generations. And when you do want to share music within your home, it should be easy to see what others have been downloading and grab it for your own profile, or vice versa, across accounts. Though there is always the inevitable possibility of account abuse, we challenge Apple to develop a shared account system that is defined by personalized profiles. We shouldn’t feel trapped with our media.

6. No Time for Popcorn: Unreasonable limitations on movie downloading

While we realize that Apple has to deal with rules and regulations rife within the film and TV industries, they are leaders in their own industry and drivers of innovation and should continue to drive change when it comes to digital rights management. Steve Jobs did it with music – now it’s time for film and TV. Oddly, the bricks-and-mortar Blockbuster model was more lenient than the current model, where we simply lose our video just 24 hours after renting it through iTunes (if we’ve started watching it), and reach our expiration 30 days after rental if we’ve never watched it at all.

Why must there be a countdown? Of course there needs to be some sort of limitation on a rental, and the ability to pause, stop, and rewind are critical. However, the 24 hour limitation requires us to consume media on Apple’s schedule, not our own. In addition, many users like to download a slew of videos in one fell swoop, but need more time than 30 days to actually view them all. Let us watch at our leisure, within reason, and then remove the video from our library, unless we then choose to purchase it.

7. Locked in the Filing Cabinet: We’re still filing and foldering like it’s 1980

Sure, there are updates and changes to the general façade of making files and folders, but has much innovation occurred outside of the R&D labs in the past couple of decades? We have a need to store and categorize increasingly large amounts of information, and then easily access and share it with others. Push the boundaries and create a better file-making experience that reflects our personal context and individual item-finding thought-process.

On the iPad, Apple is moving to app-specific document storage. Especially apparent in their iWork suite, each application (such as Keynote, their version of PowerPoint) has its own storehouse for documents that you’re working on. There’s no alternate way of organizing documents, and no way to collect multiple document types into a single conceptual location. Moving to app-specific storage, like what’s being done with the iWork suite on the iPad, is simply a step in the wrong direction.

8. Tip of My Tongue…er, Fingers: Quickly and easily inputting information on iPads and iPhones

There’s no question we’re in a social networking renaissance, with endless opportunities to post, comment, like, share, and save information online. However, both the iPad and iPhone are still better as consumption devices far more than they beckon to be input devices. If you want to share information or comment on a post, the process for inputting data is cumbersome and slow, to the extent that you lose interest (or patience) in being social altogether.

Apple is especially disconnected from the market for business users, who are still turning to RIM and Android devices with keyboards in order to quickly read and respond. We realize that Apple created the iPhone and iPad with the intention of keeping the design clean, simple, and beautiful - but in the process, they have lost a good portion of functionality by not offering an integrated physical keyboard. These devices need to inspire quick and efficient sharing and creating, matching the beauty of the physical device to the potential beauty of interaction and engagement they beg for.

9. Oversimplified: Great form, but function has fallen by the wayside

To create a streamlined design aesthetic, Apple has simplified many functions within their operating systems. However, streamlined doesn’t always equal simple - and frequently it creates new usability issues. One example of oversimplification is in the removal of scrollbars on the iPad. We respect Apple’s objective to remove all that’s unnecessary and cluttered within a device or interface, but scrollbars aren’t an eyesore. Users need visual cues when watching a video or reading a document, in order to reference where they are in the media, and the overall length or number of pages of that item. While perhaps we don’t need an entire bar to tell us how far along we are, a simple indication to show us – without dragging on the screen to make something appear – wouldn’t be hard to provide. But removing it altogether in order to place the focus on the media simply means we’re lost in our own content.

In closing…

Apple has done a lot for digital design community, from raising awareness of great design to emphasizing the importance of desirability. As a community, we need to continue to push for innovation, or else we’ll support complacency.

The rise of the curator

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 13:56:25 -0700

Conventional wisdom holds that the influence of the retailer is on an inexorable decline, as the flatness of the web allows every consumer goods company to put out its own shingle, spin up a solid social media presence, and sell direct to consumer.

However, we’ve been seeing an interesting trend that started about 10 years ago. In working with our ecommerce clients and spending quality shopping time with their consumers, we’ve noticed that there’s something new happening: the rise of the ‘curator’, both offline and online.

Curators are retailers that bring their customers a hand-picked, tailored selection of products within a category or group of categories. Rather than trying to sell anything and everything, they provide a limited set of products, selected based upon specific attributes such as lifestyle, product quality, or compatible corporate ethos.

Many times, these curators become name brands in and of themselves - such as Anthropologie or Sephora in the United States - and begin to carry substantial weight in the mind of the consumer. Sephora, for example, carries both name-brand and lesser-known products under one roof. While the underlying brand of the products themselves may not be well-known or advertised, the fact that the retailer has chosen the brand instantly confers upon it a level of credibility - and can drive significant sales volume in a short period of time.

Given the increasing noise on the web and the ever-expanding circus of products available at a whim and a click - combined with consumers’ lack of desire to take the time to sift through the long tail - we foresee strong growth in the business of curation as the gateway to products, both on the web and in the physical world.

The home page is dead. Long live the home page.

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:31:39 -0700

Ever since the dawn of the Internet, the homepage has been the point of focus for website design, a front door of sorts through which visitors unlock all of the goodness within that we’ve built for them. And quite a bit of web design is done accordingly: get the homepage design right, the theory goes, and the rest of the site will follow.

But as we continue diving headlong into a connected, social-media-aware, bot-crawled online world, the homepage is fading into irrelevance. No longer do we surf the web by flitting from homepage to homepage, but rather by diving right into the depths of sites thanks to deep links from Google, page recommendations from friends, shopping aggregators … or even apps on our phones.

What’s happening here is an important shift in web design: your homepage is no longer your homepage. Rather, anywhere a user might land on your site - be it from a Facebook link, a bit.ly link embedded in a tweet, or a reference on an obscure blog somewhere - becomes your de-facto homepage. Every page needs to grab the user’s attention, give them a reason to be there, and a reason to stick around for a while.

Looking across our research and design projects, we’ve seen a few key ways to make every page a ‘homepage’:

Location: Every page should give a sense of location: Where am I on the site? What’s similar on the site, like related products or information?
Structure: Every page should expose the structure of the site: How big is it? What major features are there? How do I get around?
Big picture: Every page should quickly give the big picture, answering What is this site? What’s special about it? What can I do here?
What’s new: Every page should include something dynamic, even if it’s just a small widget in the corner, highlighting what’s new or interesting - and for ecommerce sites, what’s a deal, what’s a steal, and what’s on sale.

So what’s your favorite site where every page is a homepage?

Will the iPad save traditional broadcast media?

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:32:41 -0700

For years, technology innovation has been drawing audiences away from broadcast media, siphoning attention off into a land of free and non-monetizable content. But the advent of the iPad holds the promise to redefine how the world produces and consumes media, and may just bring us all back under the wings of the major media houses. Through parallel storytelling, shared experiences, and new social interactions around media, the iPad — and ideally many new devices to follow — can give broadcasters rich new ways to engage us, our friends, and our families in their media events.

Parallel storytelling

Take a look at the media we consume today: nearly all of it is in the form of a single stream of content. Stories told among friends, books, movies, and broadcast media are all constructed from a series of vignettes that combine to tell a story. However, reality is much more messy: multiple things are going on at once; there are subtexts and back stories. Even when movies explore time shifting (Pulp Fiction) or alternate outcomes (Run, Lola, Run), the underlying format is the same: a string of events. However, people have a thirst for multiple streams of information: think record album liner notes, DVD extras and director’s notes, and the 1990s hit “Pop-Up Video” television show on VH-1, which visually overlaid little snippets of information on top of music videos.

With the advent of the iPad, media producers will be able to capture this thirst for additional information and explore new realms in parallel storytelling. Rather than just sitting back and passively watching a TV show, for instance, people will be able to simultaneously explore the back story. Imagine leafing through coffee-stained pages of the CIA dossier on Jason Bourne while he hides in the Caribbean, or training a virtual spycam on Godot to see what the heck he was up to while Vladimir and Estragon were endlessly waiting. And this doesn’t necessarily have to all happen on the iPad itself; we’ll see the rise of simulcast media, watching the main story on satellite or cable on the big screen in the living room and interacting with this sidecar content on our iPad from the comfort of the sofa.

Read the rest of the story on VentureBeat.com

Building trust through experience quality

Tue, 04 May 2010 15:24:31 -0700

While in the field doing in-home research, we recently passed a new house on the market for US $2 million. From the street, it wasn’t possible to see if the structure was sound or the quality of the construction was good - but what we did notice was the house number stickers on the mailbox. They were the cheap stick-on type from a local hardware store, with each digit slightly askew. And that made a big impact: what else did they skimp on?

Websites work the same way: they are a direct and immediate reflection of the company behind them. We’ve seen consistently from our research that no matter how much social media, web 2.0 interactivity, and rich media you build into a site, it’s the little things that quickly add up. Poor website quality affects not only clicks or sales, but can also create a strong and lasting negative impression of a brand. Frequently, each individual issue isn’t that grave - users may not even consciously notice them - but in combination they erode the experience:

Amateur visual design: confusing page layouts and low-quality graphics, especially those with compression artifacts

Lack of alignment: no sense of grid or other visual structure to the page, making it difficult to parse and understand

Inconsistencies: lack of cohesive feel throughout the site, such as a button marked “Buy” in one place and “Purchase” in another

Outdated design: use of antiquated visual design styles or methods of interaction (aa.com comes to mind)

Difficulties finding: issues with finding content or features, whether on a specific page or across the site

Weak Copy: bland, corporate-speak, excessively long or content-free text that does not bring immediate value to the visitor

Lack of content: missing details on products, lack of selling messages (“Why should i buy this? Sell it to me!”), and lack of depth on company

Technical bugs and performance: layout and font issues, dead-end pages, poorly-designed UI widgets, and slow response times

What do you think?

LukeW | Touch Gesture Reference Guide We’ve been watching...

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 19:41:23 -0700

LukeW | Touch Gesture Reference Guide

We’ve been watching the fragmentation of gesture-based interfaces for a while now, since some early work with the iPhone and with Synaptics. Interesting guide by LukeW and team on gestures across popular platforms.

When in doubt, tab, tab, and tab again A lot of sites end up...

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 20:00:51 -0700

When in doubt, tab, tab, and tab again

A lot of sites end up using tabs as a visual crutch when they don’t know what else to do with their IA. Take, for instance, earlier iterations of Amazon.com, which had a maddening array of tabs across the top until they finally collapsed them into the left-hand column.

But when you have three (count ‘em - three) sets of tabs across the top of your site, it’s time to take your architecture out back and shoot it.

Our CHI2010 booth in Atlanta We’ve definitely got the...

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 10:49:00 -0700

Our CHI2010 booth in Atlanta

We’ve definitely got the brightest booth at CHI2010, probably due to the massive use of orange and our easy-on-the-feet fake grass. If you’re at the conference, drop by booth 12 and pick up some of our mini cards with findings and tips from our product innovation work!

It’s the subtleties that count Complete the customer...

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 13:09:00 -0700

It’s the subtleties that count

Complete the customer survey online, and get $5 off a family pack - which may inadvertently skew their survey population towards families. If that’s the skew they want, that’s fine - but otherwise, it’s an important reminder to pay close attention to structuring research.

The little things add up: Getting out-of-box right Interesting...

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:57:43 -0700

The little things add up: Getting out-of-box right

Interesting bit on the ‘Flip-ification’ of the Cisco Valet router. According to Pogue, they’ve done a great job of making the router a much more approachable device, but it’s the little things that are getting in the way - like the “Plug in Easy Setup Key to get started” sticker on the back.

We noticed something similar recently when evaluating the Google Nexus One phone. The packaging was very well done, visually appealing with a nice unpacking sequence, but there were three things that really stood out: The box itself was hard to open for people with small hands, the power adapter had a poorly-printed sticker slapped on it at an angle, and the twist ties around all of the cables were the ‘cheap-o’ variety. Little things, sure, but they added up to sully the overall impression.

State of the Art - A Hot Spot Shortcut, Lost in the Weeds - NYTimes.com

"We added a new feature to the Twitter web site that allows you to attach location data to individual..."

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 08:43:59 -0700

“We added a new feature to the Twitter web site that allows you to attach location data to individual tweets. This feature may not appeal to everyone so it requires that you activate it first in your Account Settings.”

- Twitter doing privacy right.

What we’ve learned, for CHI 2010 We’re going to have...

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 12:00:00 -0700

What we’ve learned, for CHI 2010

We’re going to have a booth at CHI in Atlanta this year, and have printed up a batch of little cards with UX-related tips and tricks that we’ve seen recently in our client work. Take a look at our cards, and drop our booth for an orange soda if you’re at CHI next week.

If You Need to Explain It, We Should All Agree, Then the Design Isn’t Doing Its Job

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 10:38:00 -0700

If You Need to Explain It, We Should All Agree, Then the Design Isn’t Doing Its Job:

“Placelessness is a huge problem. With a paper magazine, newspaper, or book, you know where you are and how much remains based on the pages in your hands.” - Daring Fireball

Completely agreed with Gruber on this one. This is something that continues to show up in digital interactions. If the user doesn’t have a mental picture of the dimensions of the thing they’re trying to interact with - the number of products, extent of the feature set, or whatever - then it’s that much harder to engage with the experience.

That’s one of the biggest differences between the philosophies behind the iPhone and Android interfaces: the iPhone typically exposes most of the features available on a particular screen; the Android requires that you long-tap or use the menu.

We’ve been doing a lot of innovation work recently around...

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 15:05:52 -0700

We’ve been doing a lot of innovation work recently around media and devices, and are seeing some interesting trends. Here are four that stand out above the rest:

“Watch TV’ has become ‘Consume media’
The ‘long tail’ is alive and well in the living room. People are no longer content to sit back and watch whatever is on, and are increasingly turning to the DVR, Hulu, iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, and personal media instead. And, importantly, much of this viewing is being done on the small screen, not the 50” plasma.

People still want programmed media
It used to be that we could just turn on the tube and sit back for our nightly dose of the zeitgeist, ready for the water cooler chat the next day. People still want programming - they don’t know what to watch, they want to be entertained, or they just don’t want to put out the effort to assemble the evening’s media - and they’re finding it through Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and friends.

Media anywhere
There’s still a big divide between traditional media (on cable, satellite, and the DVR) and web-based media. We’ve seen lots of people trying to bridge that gap, with all sorts of makeshift solutions to getting their web media onto their big screens, but little success. And manufacturers’ attempts at IPTV give flashbacks to the early days of mobile phone walled gardens. In the end, we’ll see all media share a common platform, and the living room TV will become nothing more than the largest display in the house.

From broadcast to conversations
Corporate branding has gone through a transformation: what used to be a one-way message has been usurped by thousands of conversations, all over the web. Companies are scrambling to catch up and are trying to participate through authentic engagement in social media. The same will happen with the future of TV: people are having conversations all over the web around broadcast media. Media houses need to get involved - not through “AOL keyword ‘housewives”’, but through rich media sidecars - creating real-time and time-delayed community and conversation around their shows. Think “live DVD extras”, real-time Twitter feeds, background information, and real-time chat on Facebook and beyond. Otherwise, third parties will step in and siphon off the chatter - and the revenue

Enter the iPad
And this is where the iPad (or any similar tablet) appears on the scene, making it that much easier to consume sidecar content while watching media. Where the laptop didn’t work - due to a hard-to-handle and hard-to-pass-around form factor - and the netbook fails with a tiny screen, the iPad provides a big-screen, easy interaction with content, and the ability to share the experience with that special someone sitting next to you on the couch without craning your neck over their keyboard.

Photo credit: coolmikeol

"I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: Design research is great when it comes to improving..."

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:31:16 -0700

“I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: Design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories, but essentially useless when it comes to breakthroughs.”

- Don Norman in Interactions Magazine: Technology First, Needs Last: The Research-Product Gulf

SXSW: Zero Waste: The Future of Green

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 11:23:00 -0700

Live from SXSW in Austin, TX, Sunday March 14, 2010

Sol Design Lab

Sol Design Lab has created solar-powered ‘gas pumps’ in the Austin area, which are 50’s gas pumps that have been retrofitted with solar panels on the top, and outlets below.

First electric vehicle 100 years ago got 100 mph, we’re at 30 mph today, there’s a lot of potential here.

One of their key factors is to “make energy visible”, to help people stay within the means of solar energy. They display how much power is coming in from the sun, and how much is being drawn by whatever is plugged into the pump. This helps have consumers demand things that are more efficient.

DOE did a study to look at forward demand for energy. Greatest new energy source that DOE sees - 40% - is to reduce energy consumption.

Rechar creates carbon-negative systems

Build off-grid plants that turn biomass into electricity and biochar (like charcoal in BBQ grills) which can be used for power or buried in soil as a fertilizer and improves crop yield up to 200%. Can sequester 200B tons of CO2 a year this way.

Challenges to scaling Re-Char: collecting biomass from a wide area. There’s a 100MW plant going up in East Texas now, but there’s not enough biomass in the immediate area, so they have to source biomass from 50-100 miles away, which emits carbon in and of itself. To be successful, it needs to be small-scale and distributed.

Feedstock is a major challenge of bioplant creation. Once you get any scale with soybeans or other particular feedstock, the price goes up on those. Rechar creates systems that can take broad variety of biomass: husks, animal waste, etc.

They use a process of oxygen-starved combustion; emissions profile is similar to biodiesel. Best feedstocks for their process are dry.

Moderator: There’s a market for compost - farmers call it ‘black gold’ because it’s very valuable. Composting is a process that you have to manage. Two months to two years for waste to become compost.

Amy - significant other of moderator

‘Dragged into’ the ‘zero waste’ lifestyle by moderator (Steve). Steve said that everything you do is just a bad habit, and she has realized that it’s not all that difficult to make the small changes - switching from paper towels to cloth - hasn’t impacted her in a major way, and has saved them money in the long run. I was caught up in the consumer lifestyle, but only took about 6 months to reengineer and change the lifestyle.

I can eat an apple and cheese, and that’s a meal. Don’t need packaged products, chips, bread, condiments. Eat things that come in containers you can give back to the farmers or recycle.

Conversation

“Supermarkets don’t provide food for you”. “Eat real food” movement is emerging; prior to supermarkets food was three times more potent before supermarkets. We’ve gone into an industrial process for food - they don’t talk about quality, but rather how much you can get for your dollar value.

A 1950s apple would fill you up, today you need three apples to get the same nutrient value. Going to Whole Foods or a farmer’s market is not necessarily more expensive because you are getting more nutrition for the money.

We believe we have to eat three times as much due to advertising.

Q: I want to be able to be in this with other people, so I can see individual or community-level process. Are there any web services or communities that support this?

A: Start up with Slow Food, which has chapters in most major cities. Non-profit group started in Italy. Leading causes of death are all linked to food. Italian food culture was really upset with fast food movement from America. Also localharvest.com, eatwellguide.com. You can cultivate a sense of community by saying on Facebook or Twitter that you’re off to the Farmer’s Market, drives visibility and excitement, draws people out that aren’t sure how to get involved. Cool Austin just launched, they’re building a calculator for community-vs-community challenges (Austin Energy).

Moderator: There was a lot more environmental information last year at the conference, surprised to see less information this year.

Q: Why’s there so much landfill swag in the conference bags?

A: They have guidelines for what they’ll accept. Do not accept single sheets of paper, has to be something interesting or useful. For SXSW materials, made sure to use paper from approved forestry companies. There are some flier consortium companies that use environmentally-responsible inks and paper, they’ll take back unused flyers and shred and recycle them.

SXSW: Banking 2.0: Financial Services Driven by People and Emerging Technologies

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 11:18:00 -0800

Live from SXSW in Austin, TX, Saturday March 13, 2010

Presenters collectively have more followers than the top 10 banks combined. People are coming together to invest better than the pros on Wall Street. Making products that are relevant to what people want. Transparency into what is going on with one’s finances, no more black boxes. Anytime, anywhere.

The paradigm has changed:

Increased awareness of importance of savings
Responsible borrowing/investing
Frugal is the new smart
Financial education starts earlier

New wave of financial products

Stock picking communities
Person-to-person lending, micro finance, crowd funding
Community-based personal finance management: getting out of debt, better interest rates
Credit score management
Social savings

Presenters

Bob Weinschenk, CEO SmartyPig: Set goals, share with others, they can contribute to your goals, and they’ll advocate with vendors on your behalf after you reach your goals. $42M > $353M in last year.
Rob Garcia - LendingClub: Online financial community for people to invest in each other, borrow from each other. Since 2007.
Kenneth Lin, CEO CreditKarma: Access credit score anytime you want, learn how credit scores work, find savings opportunities (Credit cards, auto insurance, …)
Aaron Forth at Mint (part of Intuit)
Jennifer Openshaw, SuperFutures.org, free mobile coaching alerts to teens on their way to college

Do we even need banks today?

Yes, there is still a need for banks, they provide a back end that is very secure and safe. We’re just creating applications on top of this back end.

Difference from banks? Adding value to people’s lives, helping them to know what is going on with their money.

Trends with traditional financial institutions using social media: they see it as a trend, they have to do it because it’s happening. They’re doing it for mitigation purposes, to be aware of and react to storms within social media.

We as consumers are smarter than to talk only to our bank for advice, because they’ll just point us to their own products. By looking at Twitter and Facebook and other communications tools, you can get the intelligence of the community.

Easy to talk about social media, but running a company that is in the middle of social media - it’s a substantial thing to be in the middle of what your customers are saying, and it’s very humbling to see what customers really think.

What’s been the biggest surprise in building these businesses?

Lin: The virality of what we’re doing - 100k+ new members a month, this is very different from where we were 5-10 years ago.

Weinschenk: As forward thinking as we think we are, the last three top product features we did actually came from customers. We embrace the customer, bring them into the product planning process, makes us a better company.

Forth: The transparency that social media brings into the company - you’re either going to be customer-focused or not. Coming out at TechCrunch, it was very important for us to pay attention to customers, react to them. Put people - everyone in the company - into these channels. We use Get Satisfaction for customer support, and we love it. We triage issues from Facebook and Twitter.

Garcia: We knew that transparency was very important for customers. (They made their database available to people to download, and people found it very empowering).

What are the most powerful social media strategies?

Lin: You have to be reactive. If you have a strict gameplan, it doesn’t work in this environment. Place a few bets in a few different areas, be prepared to react to what customers respond to, place your engineering resources towards that. We all have great ideas of what our company will be when we start, but rarely do we get to what our vision was - you usually end up somewhere else.

Garcia: Incorporate the members of our platform into what is happening in the company. For banking, due to regulations, very closed environment - once you put your money into a CD, you don’t know what they’re doing with the money. We’re keeping people engaged with what’s happening in the company - here’s who we’re talking to (lenders) today, here’s what’s happening today.

Weinschenk: Our customer isn’t just GenX and GenY, home improvement is a goal category, and we get 46-year old females. We’ve tried to make it so that however people want to reach us, it’s ok: tweet, email, phone call. You have to open up in your audience’s language. Twitter is wonderful but it’s not for everybody, email is great, but it’s not for everybody.

Forth: Common Tweet is “can’t believe I’ve blown my alcohol budget, and it’s only the 12th of the month”. People are having insights about themselves, want to share that. Personal finance is not an inherently social thing, so it’s an interesting thing, we didn’t build a Facebook app when everyone else was, because we couldn’t figure out how to make finance social. But if you add value, people want to talk about it, they want to share, that’s a great way not to spend marketing dollars. Personal finance is a confusing and frustrating topic for many, and there’s lots of jargon and technology, so we’ve done a blog and it’s purpose is to take complicated subject matter and make it digestible. Our blog has been a great way to help Mint and make people relate to Mint without first signing up for it. Blog has been great for brand-building.

What new trends do you see coming on the horizon?

Lin: Inherently banks are relatively inefficient, we still get direct mail for credit card offergs. Banks don’t proactively call us and say “your rate will be lowered because you’ve done a good job managing your credit”, so there’s no transparency. How do we get over the friction points? We don’t go through the hassle even though we know we’ll save $100 a month.

Weinschenk: When was the last time your bank or credit card company has helped you with your spending? I’ve had the same bank for 20 years, but they give me the same promotion for flowers every month, they know what we do, but don’t target accordingly. We’re releasing a service to offer value on spending from the mobile device - allow you to negotiate through the network to get better pricing That’s the mobile app that really starts to open things up. If you can save 2, 3, 10% on your purchase, that dwarfs the 2% you’re getting at your bank. You get instant negotiation.

Garcia: Disintermediation is the key. Banks have taken money at 2-3% and would lend it out at 20%. We’re disintermediating this.

Forth: Transparency and insight is a big part, having visibility into your true financial situation, that’s step 1. The second thing is being a true advocate across financial institutions. It can be difficult to interpret what a bank is telling you, knowing about interest rate changes etc. Third is helping people save money.

Discussion

10 years ago people don’t know what a credit score was, now people know what it is, we want to make it so that people can manipulate their scores for the better.

Q: Are you profitable?

A: Lin: not yet. Garcia: Yes. Forth: if you’re an advertiser, a large bank, you’ re looking for customers - people who are interested in their finances - because they’re a lower credit risk.

Q: Much talk last year about the ROI of social media, but that didn’t come up in this panel. Much investment in social media, videos, etc. How do you measure ROI? Or do you lump all of this into R&D because it’s part of your model?

A: Forth: We’re fairly quantitative internally, so we like to know return. There’s an aspect of brand that this falls into as well. We have a philosophy of carving out a position for the company, we have something to say, and that’s our way to say it.

SXSW: Design for Awareness: Mobile Technologies & Health

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 09:47:00 -0800

Live from SXSW in Austin TX, Saturday March 13, 2010

Presenting: Robert Fabricant, frogdesign

Growing appreciation of the need for awareness of health issues; people don’t work very logically. Mobile technologies can provide awareness around our own understanding of situations and decisions of health considerations.

Four people in frog talking about this: Robert, Fabio (“Design for awareness”), Clay, Josh Musick (“Augmented mindfulness”)

Augmented mindfulness: ‘A growing field of UX design that brings together methods for recording, processing, and feeding back to the individual or group so that they can better understand what they are doing.’

“It would be a great tool for people who have a harder time feeling what’s going on in their body. It gives people a way to ‘see’ the result of an exercise or activity in their body.” - Chiropractor reacting to early product design from Robert

Mindfulness includes:

#1 Feedback

Collection, processing, reporting, and (key) reflecting on the behavior and changing

Levels of effort vary; may end up with a system that focuses on Collection (with Reporting being minimal), or Reporting (with invisible collection). These impact how people interact with the system.

Nike+: ‘Minimal effort to collect, beautiful ways to view data’

Airstrip: iPhone application for doctors, connects to bedside equipment, provides tools to physician to get alerts, check vitals, monitor multiple patients remotely

Design principle 1: Trust in the system is established through athe effective balance of collection and reporting strategies.

LoseIt: most popular health app in the iTunes app store currently

Choice by Choice: iPhone app to log emotional events; but challenging to stay on top of recording

FitBit: good job of being invisible, but there’s some challenge because “there’s not a lot of reason/investment to bring me into the environment to show me the data”

Design principle 2: Data visualization is not as easy as people think; doesn’t necessarily motivate people. ”I’ll take a badge over a graph any day”

Foursquare: Makes the moment of collection fun; gets people into the habit of collecting, give you feedback and tips at the point of collection

Design principle 3: If you can’t automate collection, you’d better make it fun!

#2 Motivation

Three ways to motivate (BJ Fogg):

1. Pleasure and pain

2. Hope and fear

3. Acceptance and rejection

Design principle 4: Designers don’t really understand motivation. We talk about things being intuitive, but we don’t talk about what makes people want to engage

Triggers

1. Signal: ‘Vitality Glow Cap’ pill bottle cap, screw onto normal pill bottle, it can communicate with the network, first alerts with visual and then sound

2. Facilitator: Prius dashboard, people are motivated to understand their fuel consumption

3. Spark: Person has high ability, but low motivation, need a ‘spark’ to get them started doing a particular thing. Example of adding a message into the ‘footer’ of a normal message being sent via SMS.

Design principle 5: People don’t like to set ‘policies’ for themselves. And we’re not very good at it even when we try. Our preferences change over time, so it’s difficult for us to predict how we’re going to want to behave in the future

How to design experiences that bring future selves to us in the present moment?

Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational

Design principle 6: The most effective triggers come from other people (or at least appear to)

getupandmove.com: challenge your friend on Twitter, a trigger comes from within your community, not because you set an alert or the system told you to do something

Game dynamics can be very powerful: how can we match people together, take impulses people have, match with others who are likely to respond at a particular moment

Temptd: app being tested currently within frog, matching signals with others in the community

#3 Ritual

How do you build habit? How do you build ritual?

Set triggers along a timeframe, around exercise, eating, any personal health topic.

BJ Fogg: “My upcoming class is all about using tech to create new routines. There’s a lot to explore here.”

Project Masiululeke in South Africa: building in triggers and events across a cycle

Oprah or local celebrity ‘sending’ you messages to help keep you engaged.

Remote Home Monitoring: project focused on remote monitoring of cardiology patients, to look at what happens to people after they’ve had an alert that increases their awareness and/or fear around their health. Many components: sensors you can put into bandages people can wear, other sensors in home environment, feed into a smartphone hub, feed into providers, coaches, nurses, guides, and ER. There’s fear after a cardiac event, people are worried about leaving medical care after they are ‘better’ - this concept provides them the reassurance to go back to normal life because they know they have somebody on the other side listening. Sense of relief - both emotional and healing value. Information is surfaced back to the individual in order to make sure they had the sense that the information was flowing to the doctor - not just happening in the background. Also looked at doctors: don’t want to swamp them with data, but also want them to have a good understanding that they have filters and alerts so it’s only getting their attention if they need it.

Design problems: getting feedback right on smartphone; getting bandage right so it’s comfortable and reassuring.

It’s the design of the experience that is important.

Design principle 7: Knowledge is transferable. So try to find the A.M. opportunities in whatever you’re doing.

Mint: Has the advantage of a lot of quantitative data, but doesn’t yet ask you how you feel about that purchase.

Fiat EcoDrive: typical graph-type visualizations but also has a bit of a game, playful functions within the app: enhances the quality of the interaction

Smart Meter Yello Strom: frog worked on the interface, very data heavy,

Technology that augments mindfulness can help us address problems we (humans) are not naturally good at solving.

Tom Igoe: “Understanding is important but it’s only the beginning … how can our work help people not only understand the change needed, but also to begin making it?”

Robert Fabricant on Twitter: @fabtweet

Audience questions:
Q: Someone is talking about making your whole life a game, from getting up on time (+5 points) to picking up the kids on time from school (good parent badge). Does this align with what you’re saying?

A: It’s one more lever we’re playing with, but at some point you hope that the points themselves matter less, and the social cohesion becomes the more valuable thing.

Q: Andrew Donahoe, writes social weight loss software for the iPhone. Most surprising thing: software is very masculine, but should be more feminine. Women are much more interested in the social aspects of weight loss, rather than the data.

A: I’ve had same experience. Hubs and organizers tend to be disproportionately female. Leads to overabundance of graphs and data visualization tools, this leads to a data visualization split. FitBit has flowers in it, EcoDrive has leaves in it, but I’m not so comfortable with that. Badges and achievements need to have the right amount of support, recognition in them.

Q: Humans co-evolve with technology. You can talk about broad aspects of technology, and people evolving with it. If we’re designing so many tools that increase our awareness of things, there’s going to be an information overload problem. How are we going to handle being aware of more?

A: My brain is pretty full most of the time. I tend to be a little optimistic, information overload is already here, not going to get better any time soon, so do you use these layers of info in the most valuable and effective way? So many pieces of data are feeding into our heads, we have a limited amount of data we can manage, but our brains are very evolved towards social dynamics, social navigation, social analysis. We’ve got information overload, the more services take information that is relevant and feed it into that type of social dynamic, our brains are well adapted to handle that. Create moments of reflection no matter what you’re designing, and make it part of normal social conversations.

Q: Are you familiar with socialworkout.com? People who blog their workouts, monthly challenges, you can click a big “feat accompli” which broadcasts to everyone. Seeing an increasing number of men on the site, even Olympic weightlifters. What makes it work for everyone is accountability to your community as the motivation.

A: Best person to boost you and encourage you isn’t necessarily someone who wants to be part of a particular community, but someone who connects to you in general. When they get workout messages, it can be weird, but eventually they can become more habituated to these and start to interact with them. Funky hashtags can become habitual within a group, the trick is to try and make these more broad-based, and draw people’s interest.

Q: Seems like a vast problem dealing with all these elements: motivation, data collection and visualization. Thought about ways that services can interoperate? OpenAPIs to get data into datavis tool or similar?

A: There are two things going on in parallel: lot of effort within the traditional healthcare system, such as the Continua alliance, to get everything speaking the same language. But the challenge is that people doing this are looking at this like infrastructure, automated backend systems. There’s another movement around social technologies enhancing people’s awareness around decisions. These two are not parallel efforts, but different communities with different values. One company working in nursing homes is focused on people’s emotional state and process, approaching first as communication tools and secondarily as health monitoring. Get social engagement and communication to happen, and then get other tools to fit in.

Q: One thing is that technology really can provide better awareness of health. What are thoughts on how mobile technology can help people make the right decisions? Any specific examples?

A: Some of this is almost depressingly simple, like FourSquare and badges - inventor was stunned at how powerful badges were - and smoking cessation programs have seen just one SMS a week can provide major uptick. Simplest feedback shown to be very effective in depression and smoking. For food: point systems, social cohesion. Don’t need to invent something new, but find ways to take existing methods and apply them in this realm.

Happy to have sponsored InfoCamp Berkeley 2010 last weekend....

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:37:51 -0800

Happy to have sponsored InfoCamp Berkeley 2010 last weekend. Lots of great people and ideas! (via InfoCamp - Berkeley)

Books in the Age of the iPad — Craig Mod Interesting take on how...

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:36:19 -0800

Books in the Age of the iPad — Craig Mod

Interesting take on how the traditional page flipping metaphor no longer applies when reading on a device. Why not an infinitely long horizontal scroll? Why not other navigational mechanisms?