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.

Knowing where you are in a space that doesn't exist

A fascinating TED talk from Neil Burgess about how our brain lets us know where we are in a space by firing particular bits of our brian at different locations.

Researchers measured the brain waves of mice in a physical space, and of humans in a virtual reality space, and found that both animals' brains were sending elecrical pulses when they reached certain points. In fact, the mice's brains were creating pulses that mapped out a triangular grid of the whole space.

But when researchers added new walls in the space, or changed the size or shape of the space, the same pulses became less accurate, leading to the conclusion that the brain was having trouble adjusting to the change in the parameters of the space, perhaps causing the subject to become disoriented.

This is lovely, but so what? Well, as technology and people become more and more comfortable, we rightly challenge conventions established at the birth of time the world wide web. And now as we embrace post-PC thinking, it's going to be even more tempting to reinvent wheels and re-frame entire experiences to let our content shine through. I'm talking about navigation structures that change, whole sections of content that hide themselves away once you've moved through them, and things like sub-categories and product ranges being presented alongside un-related content & links.

But watching Neil Burgess's talk I guess I was reminded not to take things too far - we are still animals with brians that like to know where we are. And even though we're moving through two dimensional representations of interfaces, not real spaces, we still need to establish the boundaries of our environment so that we can find our way back to the content we came here for.

 

Here's another link to the Neil Burgess TED talk.

Holcroft Court, W1

There's something awesome about Holcroft Court, the big residential block that backs onto Dare towers. It's like for one block we're transported out of central London and into some pristine housing estate on the outskirts of Amsterdam.

Whilst it looks blandly singular in function from the outside, there's a huge central courtyard, a nursery, and an underground car park underpinning the bulky austerity. I imagine the whole building crouching down to be more inconspicuous; despite the bright grey and white it's completely in scale with the buildings and trees around it.

There's all kinds of random buildings in the area and there are more being built, dating from all over the last few centuries. I assume that this one sprang up not long after the war but it feels like a slightly younger utopian inner-city new town attempt, with all its integrated services and standardised panels.

For me it's this beauty and simplicity of function contrasted with its awkwardness in its surroundings that catch my imagination.

Every pin counts

Pinterest have been rolling out a few changes today. There's a little blog about it on their site.

I like it - they seem to be moving past that 'slightly less shadow, slightly squarer, slightly more white boxes on grey' thing that's happening a lot right now. Even the barry horns are getting involved.

Anyway - one of their changes is to how boards are displayed. 

I wonder if this will change pinning behaviour - now that your latest pin will be your board's thumbnail - will each pin need to have more meaning?

 

Lauren Moffatt Fall 2012

I've been really inspired by this Lauren Moffatt press event recently. 

If you're a follower of my Pinterest you may have seen some of these shots already, which were taken by the awesome and highly followable Calivintage. But I wanted to comment here too.

From the little I know and have seen from the fashion world, catwalk/runway shows seem to be the standard way of showing your clothes every season. My impression has always been thatthe shows are about showing how the clothes move and fit, in a way that works for magazine editorials and buyers alike.

But then why are they over so quickly? It always seemed strange to me that more time is spent getting people in and out, doing the mingling and blagging than actually looking at the clothes that the designers have spent months on.

I've seen the likes of Acne do a more static display before, just asking models to walk into tableaus in a room, but what struck me about Lauren Moffatt's show was that the whole set and situation is tied into the look and spirit of the clothes. It must have happened before but it really inspired me to think about other presentation standards: Why is the accepted wisdom on performance or demonstration so accepted? Is there a way to give more value to your audience by doing things differently?

In Lauren Moffatt's case, the show cleverly speaks to the way designers of her level are talked about and shared around the web these days. These images, whilst still highly aspirational, have their qualities displayed in a much more tangible way than the often abstract catwalk would allow. It's meant that mere mortals like me can easily pick up the images, find something to say about them and share them with my own networks.

By redefining the audience and their interaction right from the start, Lauren Moffatt has been able to reach a far wider and more engaged audience than more traditional channels might have allowed.

The show must go on an app

This is interesting - the Royal Opera House have commissioned Hide&Seek studio to create a new app thing which has turned out to be a fun iPhone game.

It acts as a new digital revenue stream and potential audience-grower for the institution, which is doubtless dealing with all kinds of cuts and strains like the rest of the UK public culture sector.

Apart from being fiendishly hard, it's a really fun and surprisingly engaging way to explore behind the scenes of an opera production, and the payoffs from working through the levels can be quite funny, especially if you're as bad as me.

I'll be really interested to see if this does help ROH financially - the app is reasonably pricey, but I imagine their brake-even point will still require quite a few sales - but I'm even more interested to see what its effect on audiences and young career starters is.

Many years ago in biology class I almost decided I wanted to be an ecologist when I grew up, because of a fun worksheet we had to do where we had to find the best place to re-house some newts. We had to think about water flow, tree cover, sewage, other predators, all kinds of things. As a 13 year-old that was just about the level of encouragement I needed to plan my future. I wonder if moving sets around and working lighting rigs in The Show Must Go On will inspire more young people to get involved behind and in front of the stage, even if it is only 3.5 inches wide for the time being.

Download it!

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?

Mindless?

So the dust seems to have settled a bit around the UK, after the 'riots' of a few weeks ago.

I think most people have thought a lot about the reasoning behind the violence we saw here, and I've been at a few parties and with different groups of friends where the subject has come up. It largely seems to have followed the Conservative line of "this was mindless violence, the people should be punished, they deserve harsher and quicker sentencing than usual because the actions were so severe"

Well, I've found this rationale a bit problematic, and while I waited for alternative opinions to spread past the blog pages of national newspapers (like this great piece in The Independent and another in The Telegraph) and start influencing real public debate, national attention has seemed to move on to more justifed conflicts further afield.

So I wanted to get my thoughts down and see what responses were, because I'm worried that for the young people who were involved in these acts, not much has changed. And if nothing has changed, this could happen again.

Still from the Keep Aaron Cutting campaign site.

The thing that really struck me wasn't necessarily the 'mindlessness' of the actions, but of the targets. For me it raised some questions.

• What could lead someone to think there is no difference between a lone local hairdresser and a global electronics brand?
• How could someone not differentiate between members of their community and state police? And going further, why are the Police/state seen as the enemy at all?

I believe it's true that many of these acts were not pre-meditated, and many people now in custody probably did just get caught up in the moment. But I also agree that that's not always an excuse. But the idea that kids 'should have known better' doesn't wash for me either.

It seems like the answers to the questions above lead to some pretty long-term conditioning that these kids and their peers have gone through.

If everyone is against you, what difference does it make if you burn Oxfam or Foot Locker? If as soon as you do something, people distance themselves from you and persecute you, why would you ever attempt to reach out and empathise? If at least 1 in five of your friends are out of work and being forced to jump through hoops to receive £2.14 per hour while they look for jobs that don't exist, what faith do you have that polititians are on your side, even before they start calling you 'scum' and 'thugs'?

Just lots of questions really, but I hope that as a country we're able to think about answering them. There's a lacklustre speech from Ed Milliband that touches on some of the issues, but in that very middle-class way that doesn't even come close to the kinds of reform that's needed.

I leave you with this video shot before any of this kicked off:

What do you think?

A Fifties mentality

This.

via WWD 

Is there a difference between mobile internet access versus fixed line access? If so what is it?

I wrote a little thing for a thing yesterday and I thought I'd share it here...

At the moment yes, sometimes, there is a difference – mobile 'out and about' use still concentrates around information/news, location services and social media, leaving the more immersive entertainment and Software as Service stuff to fixed line 'desktop' situations. There are big peaks in times of use as well - mobile is traditionally very early in morning and late at night: Leaving the house and quick check in before bed.

BUT the biggest link clicked on mobile internet pages is 'go to full site' - so consumers often don't think there is a difference.

ALSO access is often happening simultaneously, so in this case there is no difference - we've seen a rise in people using a 'second screen' alongside other media sources to enrich their experiences. For example - watching something like x-factor on TV, having a laptop to hand to follow the twitter #xfactor

FURTHERMORE we can't predict how users will access content and plan different activities to cater to these 'differences', without being super clever. Mobile is great for keeping up with email and social media, for example - so if you're doing any direct offers or your content is being shared, it needs to work when people click through on it.

As we see more integration of real-time ugc into our daily lives and the 'offline world' it will be interesting to see how organisations can leverage platforms like the ones described by Berg to grow their audiences and deliver more value to them.