aspire to enquire

Mis-interpreting Pinterest facts

There's a nice article on Mashable today featuring a little infographic about the rise of Pinterest, made by a company called Tamba.

Whilst some people are starting to question the continuing rise of the platform, my real issue with the infographic was the potential mis-interpretation of some of the stats, especially this one:

I would hazard a guess that a pin's likelyhood of being shared is nothing to do with whether it has a visible price tag or not. My experience of using Pinterest has been that pictures are shared much more because of their overall lifestyle connotations than because of the specific product they represent. For example:

It's more about this:	Than this:

Which one is more likely to have a price tag, and which are you more likely to add to your own board?

My own advice would be that Pinterest could still be a highly useful way of generating new fans and traffic, but it will be way more effective if you place your brand within the context of your target audience. Like, how does what you do fit into the rest of their lives, how do you add to it?

It's a bit like when you see my dad just mooching round B&Q looking at drill bits and wood. It takes someone like my dad to dream about what the components could one day be, but most people would rather look at the picture of the shed. Maybe.

Fool-proofing delight

Those of us working in and around the internet are generally in agreement that it's a good idea to reduce the number of clicks/taps it takes a user to complete a task. By reducing frustration in an experience it's likely that someone will return and use your product again.

But sometimes it is good to introduce some friction. If you just give users exactly what they expected to find, what is there to set you apart from other sources?

Picture credit 

Google earned our trust early on because they were able to give us relevant results quickly and with zero fuss. Their competitors at the time were bloated portal sites like lycos, aol, yahoo, and Google's simplicity won the day. Compared to MySpace, Facebook 'just worked' (I can think of another example there). But those sites haven't stopped there.

Having my mind switched on to this in my current role has made me realise that this is going to be a continuing trend as the world truly becomes digital native and the internet of things surrounds us in our 'offline' lives - it will not be enough that your product works the best, or is the most popular right now, it will need to surprise and delight people, connect emotionally, and seamlessly enhance the user's own self-projection in a meaningful way.

I guess branding people have understood this for a while, but it totally applies to user experience design as well. That's why we see Google adding circles, +1, places, and updating the look and feel of their entire suite of products. Their core business is still search, but they compete on a much broader plane because of the extended value they can offer to that search.

I just the other day learned from John Gibbard that there's a well-establised term for this concept; it's called 'poka yoke'. It was traditionally used in manufacturing, as a fool-proofing method. By adding steps or barriers to factory processes, companies are able to reduce production errors. Essentially, if you put an unavoidable thing in the way, you will make sure that it's always done. On the internet, it's sometimes been little things like suggesting purchase add-ons as part of a payment funnel.

And we've always been doing our own little poka-yokes in our own lives as well. There are some great examples on Dan Lockton's blog.

So I guess what I'm realising is this: you can deliver the best user journey with the most rewarding end points, but what is there to stop a competitor popping up and 'building' on your 'best practice'?

As well as being best-in-class we need to start thinking about the opportunities to delight people. What steps will users be ok with us adding to processes so that we can make sure that they're getting the most from their time with us, and that they're taking away a memorable experience they can share, and a brand they can return to?

Why we should move towards location services

There is buzz all over the place at the moment about location services. The initial excitement that came from early adopters with foursquare, gowalla etc has died down, but there's still a bubbling anticipation that campaigning or service provision based on user location is going to tip into the mainstream any day now. I wanted to take a minute to have a think about how this might play out and how one might get involved if one worked with a campaigning organisation.

Even with facebook joining in, I think it's fair to say there hasn't been mass take-up of any location based apps or services (ok, maybe maps). It's probably because many phone owners either don't have gps/apps yet, but I'd be interested to compare the penetration level of smart phones to the take up of location services. I'm guessing, but they probably don't correlate.

I think we're at the start of something similar to the transition that 'photos' made between MySpace and Facebook. If you remember, in the old days, us young people were busy creating our myspace poses and being individuals. Here's a tame example of what I mean, one of my own attempts from 2004:

Becuase of the storage limitations of the myspace service at the time, and the cultural 'emo' thing (which wasn't really emo) that internet music marketing encouraged, users were very careful about the kind of picture they posted. Each shot was carefully constructed and posed to communicate some sort of expressively nonchalant transitional moment - you can see I'm failing at it here by looking at the camera. 

Flash forward to to 2006 and all of a sudden a very different kind of picture is being enthusiastically pasted all over facebook. There's much less posing, no storage limitation, and no quality control. Pictures on nights out are taken and uploaded without any real thought, and albums of 60-100 very similar shots started filling people's feeds. It seemed that everyone was at it. Privacy is an underlying concern, but it's controlled by choosing who you are friends with, and who you allow to access your different data.

So I think this is going to happen with location. Right now, we're at a stage where we're carefully choosing where to check in, based on our small networks of fellow users, the 'coolness' of the location or event, and whether we're going for the whole game thing. Before not too long, I predict many people will be closer to the "let's take hundreds and post every picture from tonight" model, with much less regard for quality or in interesting peers. Of course, the bell curve will mellow out a bit once it has peaked, and we'll start to see more useful applications throughout our everyday lives. But we're not anywhere near there yet.

Why do I think that's coming soon? Well the way apps like foursquare have spread seems to be generally at the point of use; the "what's that" moment that is sparked when someone opens up their phone in a pub to check in. It's then down to users to sum up the plus points of the app to their peers. In my case this has usually been along the lines of "you get to be mayor", to which many people have responded "I'm not that bothered about being mayor" and so they haven't bothered signing up themselves. It's not fun, as TechCrunch say, and not ideal.

The much more persuasive promise, for me at least, was always that "You'll be able to see if any of your friends are nearby to meet up". But the network of users was so small that this was never really possible. Facebook getting in on the game means that all of a sudden my entire list of friends is potentially a part of this network. That's quite exciting for me, and it's obviously quite exciting for brands, who are starting to make use of the 'deals' functionality.

If the deals and the networks available start to appear fulfilling enough, I anticipate we'll see a much closer correlation between take-up of services and smartphone use.

It should be really exciting for charities. As Rob Dyson writes, the opportunity to communicate with people based on their physical location is perfect for some organisations. Action for Children, Red Cross, and Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research have already got started and are doing some great work, and things like CauseWorld have had huge success. If future, imagine a homeless charity able to appeal to people near problem areas, or a road safety campaign asking people to be aware of dangers of certain roads nearby. An outdoors organisation like YHA or the Ramblers could start offering tips on great locations and walks.

American Red Cross's foursquare badge, earned by checking in when giving blood.

And organisations shouldn't just think in terms of new activities for new audiences. We're presented with an opportunity here to enrich services we already offer, to re-package our existing communications in ways that may be more effective or more what we had in mind in the first place - If you're the sort of group that relies on distributing pamphlets in key places, or getting flyers to key audiences, perhaps there are ways you can add to that, using what you know about those spaces and people. 

It's going to be a long time before there are enough people plugged into location aware devices for them to be the only medium we can use, but that also offers an opportunity to create more advocates in the meantime. Giving existing supporters a new way to connect should bring them closer to you, and surprising non-supporters with innovative messages will catch their attention in a much more lasting way than perhaps might have been if you were using more conventional media.

My encouragement would be to think about your target audiences - where are they, what are they doing, and how can you position your organisation and work to be relevant at those points. There may be things you're already doing that aren't as effective as you'd like, or there might be new possibilities you're thinking of - either way it might be time to start thinking about location-aware media as a new tool in your arsenal of communication methods.

See you when we get there!

 

 

Authenticity in service design

Federation Coffee is brilliant. It's a great place to go on a Saturday, have a sit, have a beautiful americano or two, take a notepad and scribble out whatever it is that's on your mind at the time.

It's a young and very genuine addition to these almost gourmet coffee houses that one isn't really prepared for coming from Cardiff. Last week I spent a bit of time thinking about the new coffee shop look; a sort of 'railway sleeper chic'.

I love how these places look. It seems to tie in with a fascination with fixed-gear bikes, beards and chrome that I picked up a few weeks ago on the Convoy blog. Musically, the aesthetic stretches to Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes and Seattle: a rainy, authentic tartan-shirted affair where you 'just know' what quality is, without really needing to be told. The standard and style of service and product are implicit in their presentation.

That, of course, is nothing new, it's a basic question of creating a unified brand to deliver meaning and drive take-up. People develop their own affinities based on the visual cues around them. But over the last few decades there's usually been a fair bit of signage or labelling to explicitly point out a product's key selling points. At the turn of the 80s/90s we had 'as seen on TV'; 10 years later we had the importance of a product story. And now it seems we're moving towards objects whose entire heritage is visible in the product themselves, or the environment in which they are served. You don't need to see little pots of coffee beans in various stages of roasting any more, or see extended menus outlining every single variety, ingredient and size. You just know.

I'm quite into this, but I'm worried that it's become the established look du-jour of the niche back street place that middle class twentysomethings show off to their friends about. Not for my own sake, but because I'm worried about what happens when the trend filters out to mass adoption.

Starbucks have already started removing their branding from some of their US neighbourhood stores, in an effort to appear 'more authentic'. In the UK, there was a bit of a humph a few years ago when McDonald's adopted a tasteful green façade on some of their shops. But in McDonald's case the neon counters and chip fryers at the back of the store stayed the same. As we move forward though I can see bigger chains adopting the distressed counters and coffee-crate looks that I love in small, independent outlets right now. What will happen then?

If more people feel comfortable in those environments, will they stay the same? What will happen when people apply their own ideals and heritage stories to things, that are different from those intended by their creators? Is that cool? And how will we differentiate, and will differentiation matter? 

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Mark Hadfield inspired me to use 'authentic photography' for this post, but it's only the ideas here that will degrade over time, not the pictures. 

 
 

Political iPhone apps reviewed

As General Election build-up has been building up, there has been lots of talk about how it will be the UK's first 'digital election'. 

That may or may not be true - there is still tremendous value in everything that's going on on the doorstep - but there are definitely a number of things happening online that weren't available online or otherwise during the last election.

One of those things is the emergence of the app, and their subsequent use by the main political parties for campaigning purposes.

Having just scoped and designed an iPhone app for MPs to use when they're doing 'running the country' stuff instead of campaigning, I thought I'd see how these new apps measure up.

First off, I need to establish what I'll be looking for. Even though the apps are essentially there to do the same thing, they have quite different approaches, visually and functionally. So I'm going to ask more general questions and then see how the apps answer them.

The questions are: 

Does this app excite me about the Party?
Can I engage in their policies?
 Do I feel valued by the Party?
 Is it possible for me to get more involved if I want to?

Does this app excite me about the Party?

Well, there's no denying here that the Conservative home screen is cleaner, more modern looking, and probably a little more on brand generally. The Labour home screen has followed the more traditional iPhone interface guidelines, which to some will seem quite traditional. 

However, in terms of getting a sense of the depth of the apps, I think Labour wins, by implying through the 'slide' interface that there is much more information available at the next stage. The menu options on the Labour app are clearer, too, giving the user a greater sense of what they can expect from the app right at the outset.

What about the Liberal Democrat app?

When I started thinking about this post, there was only a Lib Dem app for the European Elections last year. Now, they have a manifesto app as well. 

It has a nice clean introductory page that allows you to chose what you want to hear about, and then watch a video of Nick Clegg talking about it. Unfortunately, though, that's about it. There's not much else to compare in terms of app features with the other two main parties, so I'm going to leave it here. Friends of mine who have downloaded the app quite like its simplicity, so there you go.

Onwards...

Can I engage in their policies?

Well, aside from the epic accessibility fail on the Conservatives' part (white text over white background), it's fairly easy to quickly get a sense of the policy responses available to explore. The tories have used the Apple picker, and Labour have used the scrolling list. If I was being picky I'd say you could see a lot more of what's available on the Labour app, but I think people quite like playing with those picker things.

Can we engage with the party policies? I quite like that Labour have a little line at the top giving an introduction to the tone of all the policies. If a user is into fairness, fair rules, fair chances and a fair say for everyone, then hopefully they'll be getting the sense that this is the party for them. 

Not much to say about these next screens. I suspect that I'll want to have a go at that ridiculous lens-flare on most screens. In this instance there are more tangible things pledged by the Conservatives than Labour, but that's not the case on all policies.

In the case of news, the Labour app uses pictures, which is nice, more engaging than the blue. It's also way clearer that the Labour headlines are links to stories. But on some Labour screens the text breaks a bit on some special characters (like apostrophes and ampersands, not Ed Balls) and bleeds out of the area that was intended for it. That's not really un-engaging, but it just feels a bit shoddy.

Neither app really allows the user to take ownership of the news or policy at this level, which is sad. It would be great to be able to tell a friend about this particular policy area, or maybe open up some sort of discussion forum. Also, for a new visitor, there's no way to quickly see if you are a policy match to the parties, which the Green Party have done very well.

Do I feel valued by the Party?

I would love to know how many people have used the voter ID system in the Conservative app.

 
I made these screen shots on the way to Bristol last weekend, and the Labour app used my GPS location to give me the contact details of the local organiser. Instant win. There's quite a lot of win in this area on the Labour app actually.

The conservative approach throughout the app is very top-down, only allowing users to contribute funds and contact details, rather than getting involved themselves. It's a real shame to see mobile used in this way, essentially as a mini-website from 2006. You can see here the Labour app getting a bit confused between my postcode (Brixton) and my location at the time (Reading), but this is in principle a massive step in the right direction for how I feel political parties should be using the internet.

The Conservatives do make good use of some of the other technology available in the iPhone though. There's quite a fun 'swing-o-meter' which allows you to wiggle the phone to see how much of a swing to the right is needed to secure a Tory majority (about 7%). It's quite funny that it doesn't allow a tilt to the left, or allow the user to change priorities to Liberal Democrat, or in fact do anything other than dream about a  20% swing, but it's quite a nice toy to play with. It could also be quite a good argument for more proportional representation, but it's not been framed that way.

Is it possible for me to get more involved if I want to?

The Labour app makes it far easier for a prospective supporter to get more directly involved, with twitter links, local campaigners, events and news all shown right from the start, and the Conservative app does link out to facebook twitter and youtube. One of the Lib Dem app's major tab bar functions is to open an email with an itunes store link to forward.

But for me, the major fail is that neither app takes this any further. These apps should literally put supporting your party in the palm of your hands. 

Overall opinions 

If nothing else, these apps seem to me to be quite good indications of how each party thinks. On one hand you have an institutional, top-down approach. On the other, a locally-minded grassroots approach. It's funny and maybe a little bit worrying that the recently published manifestos seem to be completely the other way round at first glance. I don't think any app will particularly sway the election in any meaningful way, and it's sad that many of the features will be a little redundant after the election, especially for the Lib Dems and Tories.

2010 may very well be the first digital election, but I think it will be 2015 before politicians are really able to learn to use mobile in the way it should be used; to empower individuals to shape their own level of interaction with the cause, and give and receive real political value from direct, local engagement.

What does social look like?

I attended IPAsocial last week.

As a recent graduate, and someone who doesn't even work in advertising I should probably have known better than to tweet a suggestion for a break-out talk during the second half of the evening.

But listening to the other subjects that came up, I do think there's some space in the debate for a consideration of the aesthetics of what we're all doing at the moment, whether we're working in straight up advertising or in a more productiony / content kind of place like public zone. The title I suggested was "what does social look like?"

I didn't really manage to talk about this much, but elsewhere there was a discussion on how clients could be convinced, and why they might be sceptical about using social media. There was also a lot of discussion on the more anthropological aspects of behaviour and imitation. You can read a lot more on the IPAsocial page

From my experiences so far, I'm not sure there are many sceptical clients. For me, it's been quite the opposite - nearly every project I've seen recently has had social media and engagement as part of the brief. They're all public service and voluntary projects, which might offer some rationale, but my feeling is that it's probably the same in commercial-land too. At least at the beginning of campaign discussions, people seem to be rushing to 'use' social media right now. I do feel it's widely accepted that it is changing the way brands and organisations need to operate, even though Will has raised some concerns that ultimately I do agree with.

My own concern is the speed that the transition to conversational marketing is taking place. The way that it's occurred within the lifespan of one visual trend; the Web 2.0 world of glossy rounded corners, big search bars and clean lines.

There's nothing wrong with these things, but I think it's going to put half-baked social media campaigns in a precarious position over the coming months and years. 

What I mean by that is that right now it's kind of ok to have a website screaming "share this!"... "add this!"... "tweet this!"... "facebook!", but this won't last for ever — It's always been the case that it's the ideas being conveyed that need to be social themselves to gain momentum and spread. So I'm worried that as clients come to the end of their transitions to adopting these new techniques, or at least thinking they have, their audiences will be on the way to turning off from the generic iconography and aesthetic that's been shouted at them for so long. People get bored.

Of course this transition won't be a one off thing, it will need to continually re-invent itself as new platforms and trends emerge. But there will be no point if people have got fed up with listening. And I think that for that to happen, we need to be very careful in the short term not to push 'social' into people's eyes. People know they can share, they have the tools to do it. Let's spend our time worrying about giving them things to talk about rather than whether they should or not.

Which kind of ties quite nicely back into Will's notion of brands just being good at what they do. As well as the 'technology changes, people don't' principle that Amelia wrote about a few weeks ago.

Yes.

Not just laundry

I've had such a wonderful weekend - friends, music and plenty of interesting. I'm sure to bring up some parts of it in posts this week, but I thought I'd just quickly share this little quote from a book I'm reading at the moment:

"If we are in the laundry detergent business, our competition is not the other appalling commercials our competitors deploy for laundry detergents, but the other commercials our target are engaged by, and respond to, across every category: pizza, batteries, cola, beer. A competitive advertising review must be all the competitive advertising the target sees"

Adam Morgan, Eating the Big Fish p23

Seems kind of relevant to how I'm thinking about non-profit communications at the moment, so it's nice to think I may only be 10 years late on it.

The challenge of freeconomics to charities

Whenever societies or sports clubs would try to procure things at USSU they would always try to get a discount under the ‘we’re a charity’ philosophy; a ‘10% off at Topshop’ strategy that works very rarely in the real world, but apparently works often enough to be written down in folklore as the ‘done thing’ when trying to get something for free for your organisation. 

The problem was that offering something straight up for free wasn’t going to bring enough back to the supplying company – an obvious Western paradox, but one that seems to need to be re-explored whenever a new instance of the debate comes up.  

Recently, it’s been the Spotify debate, but I think Spotify is probably just the manifestation of an answer to a question that’s been being posed since the Napster era, essentially the question of how free, low-distribution-overhead, digital music can be monetised (see more here). Yesterday it reached new highs when the internet was a-twitter with complaints about the lack of a ‘free trial’ period on the new apps for iPhone and Android. 

With Mr. Murdoch about to tell us more about how he’s planning to implement pay-walls in front of his many UK news outlets, and with Jonathan from Spotify reaching more and more people, it seems like the real debate about free is starting to enter the public sphere. Namely ‘what are we prepared to offer in return for this ‘free’ service?’ 

I have been beginning to wonder if my ears are worth £120 a year to an advertiser, and whether, actually, £9.99 really represents good monthly value, regardless of how many CD purchases it ‘saves’ me. 

Lots of people have covered that area before, but what I’m waking up to recently is what it could mean for charities. 

Charities are clearly having to work a lot harder for their own money, now that blue chip companies are retreating to their core activity of squeezing as much profit as possible. Those companies are leaving behind their generous sponsorship initiatives that would have kept many charities afloat, putting more pressure on the commercial services (and fundraising) of the able charities to deliver higher margins, in order that they can be reinvested in the charity. For the less able charities, a fairly tight and grim situation has become even worse during the financial crisis. 

If an organisation’s stakeholders consider themselves to be worthy of charitable treatment, as in the case of student discounts, or thrift stores, how is a charity meant to offer meaningful service and deliver its objectives whilst at the same time earning enough revenue to be able to continue to offer that same level of service? 

Hopefully, the charities’ collective lobby (is there one?) will get involved in the imminent public debate about free. It doesn’t just apply to the services that they are offering, but also to the services that they offer each other, to stakeholders, and to specialist commercial operations like those of Public Zone. It’s a crucial debate; one that I hope will focus on outcomes and value, rather than inputs and cost. 

When ‘vintage’ t-shirts can sell for £30 but a second-hand store can charge no more than a nominal £2 or £3 for the same item, it becomes a question of branding, perception, and of management – we don’t just need a public debate on what free means in our everyday lives, we need charities that are really awake to the economic challenges that face them. Furthermore, they need to be in a position to address those challenges through organisational change and re-evaluation. 

Maybe, like it always used to be, there will be a re-ignition of value creation through collective action and volunteering. But I'm worried that charities need to behave like corporations now in order to reach their audiences.

Do any of your favourite shops offer student discount?