user experience – Ambility Perspectives

The Third, Fourth, Fifth Screen Experience?

Anyone who has visited the Ambility blog or scanned our post topics knows that our team is fairly obsessed with mobile screens and how we interact with them. But recently we’ve become obsessed with another kind of screen.

Digital out of home (DOOH) installations are undergoing a period of tremendous growth – from under 1.5MM screens in the US in 2009 to an estimated 7MM+ in 2015 according to Wirespring, a hardware connection platform provider. Hardware advances have increased both the quality of display and the durability of the devices, while increasing scale of development continues to decrease the
cost. Add to those factors the increase in media value that such placements enable above static media assets for owners of the physical spaces and we should expect to see dramatic increases in the number of screens we experience outside the home.

Beyond public spaces, expect to see more DOOH screens in office parks, schools, hospital complexes, and retail stores as well. Those spaces, too, are seeing dramatic increases in the number of digital screen installations driven by intense competition to enhance consumer/brand experiences.

Most out of home digital screens currently in use are broadcast experiences only that have immense media value but are limited in their ability to message individuals. Even the few direct response, large format screens in Times Square that allow you to post your selfie for all of midtown Manhattan to see are leveraging a pretty limited set of consumer needs; namely the need to broadcast your selfie to midtown Manhattan. Instead it’s a different kind of out of home digital screen that is getting the attention of the Ambility team: those screens that provide the potential for one-to-one or one-to-a-few interactions and can lead to highly personalized, high-value consumer experiences.

Location Based Connectivity

New York has undertaken a huge effort to replace its largely defunct collection of phone booths with a network of installations that offer WIFI connectivity, two large-scale display screens, and a third interactive screen. The interactive screen (an iPad) is housed just above waist level and includes a dedicated user interface providing access to city services (think 311 and 911) and free nationwide video calls. It’s this type of digital out of home screen that got us thinking.

Internet connectivity links us to billions of nodes of content and services at all times. But for now, at least, we are creatures capable of occupying only one physical space and one physical time. Data and design experts spend countless hours working to anticipate what we will want at any given time based on our demographic profile, browsing and purchase history, and our cohorts. But there is growing recognition that where we are when we’re outside the home or office is as much a determinant of what we are looking for as all of that profile information combined.

The things I’m looking for when I’m browsing the internet from my couch have almost no resemblance to what my wife and daughter are seeking, but when each of us is wandering around town at 1pm on a Sunday we’re probably looking for largely similar things: something to see, a place to eat, or a shop. If we each walk into a train station, hospital, or retail store the options are more limited still. In other words, the potential for digital out of home experiences to provide relevant, valuable messaging and services for even anonymous users is pretty high.

Interactive Digital OOH?

Large format digital displays that media planners covet have some inherent limitations in providing interactivity, but that could change. No one will look to book a restaurant reservation through a Times Square billboard but installations like the LinkNYC assets, transport information displays, or executions that leverage a small portion of a large display screen for interactivity could deliver broad access to more personalized location-based content. These in themselves would increase the media value of such installations (“Local Specials for You!!”), be great sources of insight for urban planners and marketers, and provide real value for consumers.

But I Already Have a Screen

To be sure, personal mobile devices are getting better and better at offering location-based custom content, but there are a multitude of reasons that location specific interactions offer advantages. Even ubiquitous platforms like Facebook and Google struggle to offer a consistent level of quality and detail, and well-designed displays that provide way-finding or other valuable content and services enhance a customer’s experience of a neighborhood, campus, or store.

Publicly accessible digital assets offer immediacy, all categories of local offerings at once (no switching between Open Table, Groupon, and local tourism board offerings), and local attractions that tend to be featured on purely local online offerings. Municipal installations immediately become tourist information centers, educational campus installations become more comprehensive than any volunteer undergraduate guide, and hospital installations can tell you where radiology is and get you directions to the nearest pharmacy without taxing busy health professionals.

Retail digital installations have the potential to broaden (or replace) shelf space and answer common consumer questions. No need to explain the difference between boot-cut, straight-leg, and skinny jeans when a digital screen can display it clearly. Paired with sensor technology, interactive screens can limit time in the changing room by showing how different items would look on the buyer.
If these same out of home interactive assets could somehow know our interests, our likes, our shoe size, without asking for someone to enter that detail then it could get really interesting.

Your Phone, Your Passport

It’s no secret that less than ten years after the release of the first iPhone the digital age has become fully mobile. Mobile now captures two out of every three digital minutes according to Comscore, and DMR reports that the Facebook mobile app has over 1.4 billion active monthly users. Through our likes, check-ins, and searches our smartphone has become one of the most intimate expressions of what we are interested in. And whatever our real passion points are, as the saying goes “there’s an app for that.”

The data that our phones collect have the potential to turn anonymous DOOH interactions into very targeted ones, and that need not be creepy. Explicit share requests that precede a near field communication interaction have the potential to be enormously valuable to visitors to a new city or a loyal shopper. My check-ins exhibit a pretty clear appreciation for water-front restaurants and cozy, old dive-bars. A customized itinerary for a new city based on those check-ins would be very welcome. And I know more than a few people who revel in discovering hidden specialty shops that match their interests. If they’re pushing a sale then all the better.

As the economics of DOOH continues to decrease the cost of installation, and targeting technologies provide additional media value to the dynamic screens expect to see more of these experiences. And don’t be surprised on your next trip to Paris if those famous old billboard kiosks can also direct you to that out of the way restaurant your friends told you about.

Your next screen?

Voice Controlled Computing – New Opportunities and a Big Challenge

Several times in the past this blog has discussed the work being done by large and small companies with deep pockets to usher in the age of voice-controlled computing. For the most part we have focused on the advantages consumers would realize from being able to leverage computing power with simple voice commands and the additional use cases connected devices would help satisfy as a result. As we continue to experience voice controlled devices weaving into our lives, two areas we haven’t discussed have started to come into focus – one an opportunity for insights and the other a challenge for product developers and barrier to widespread adoption.

Lessons from the Echo

We have written several times about the advantages tablet devices offer over voice controlled computers like the Amazon Echo, that offer no display, as the richness of the response is multiplied by a screen where information, imagery, and videos can be offered in addition to audio responses. The Ambility team still believes this to be a significant advantage, but we have learned a great lesson from the Echo that we didn’t fully anticipate – that a wealth of use cases can be addressed very well through audio-only responses, and that these audio-based interactions offer brand new areas of insight for service and marketing providers to learn about their audiences.

Another lesson we learned from interacting with Echo is that Siri and ‘OK Google’ are not really voice controlled computing platforms. They offer great doorways into web content end experiences, but once you get there you have to rely on tapping and swiping to get what you want.

New Use Cases, New Opportunities for Data

Over the course of a long weekend the Ambility leadership team found themselves turning to the Echo, by summoning ‘Alexa,’ more and more to satisfy simple queries and to help with tasks around the house. Our computers and mobile devices have long helped us settle debates by getting that easy answer, but how many of us turn to those devices to set a timer for the bread we’re baking or to dim the lights before dinner. With the Echo these were tasks easily completed, so by the end of the weekend we had forgotten where the light switches were and never cared to check for a timer in the kitchen.

Beyond those tasks we also turned to the Echo to play music, create a shopping list, and check traffic, but it was the mundane uses of the device to help with dinner and manage the room’s heat and lighting that stood out (Tom’s Guide also identified tuning your guitar and having Alexa act as your exercise coach as good uses of the product). These are tasks that for most people are not completed using connected devices, and therefore have been unobserved by marketers and analysts. As voice controlled devices increase in their application and penetration into modern households, the opportunity (and burden) of harnessing this new data for insights will be vast.

So overall the Ambility team liked the Echo and adopted its use for certain needs around the house quickly – to a degree that we don’t do with Siri or OK Google. Why is that?

The obvious answer is that Alexa was always available. We didn’t need to grab a phone or tablet, hold a button and then ask for what we wanted, we only had to hail ‘Alexa’ and then make a request. The not-so-obvious answer is that the Echo “interface” is built for an audio only interaction and does not default to older, tactile mechanisms of interactive experience.

Voice-Screen Interactions Require New UX Standards

Building “always on” capabilities is straight-forward enough (Siri allows it when your iPad is plugged in), but enabling audio only commands that interact with screen display is a far trickier change. Touch screen technology, historians tend to agree, was first developed in 1965 by E.A. Johnson at the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern, UK, but it would be over forty years before mass audiences would have the chance to adopt them for anything other than highly specific interactions. Apple’s release of the iPhone in 2007 introduced intuitive standards of interaction that developers could then apply to web and application design.

Siri, OK Google, and Soundhound’s new Hound product continue to enhance the ability for our devices to recognize voice commands and provide base level responses. And now there’s even a program for making your laptop respond with J.A.R.V.I.S.-type displays like those Iron Man relies on, but for now all of these offerings assume some level of touch or mouse based interaction. For example, Siri and OK Google respond to most queries with a standard search results page (SRP) with no way to select a result by voice command. Siri’s voice controlled messaging functionality works well but correcting or editing a message can be frustrating unless you resort to tapping and typing.

Big Challenge, Big Opportunity

The Amazon Echo so far has at least demonstrated that voice controlled interactions have some real usefulness and appeal. Even without a display screen the provision of always on audio computing is valuable. But the Echo hasn’t provided a way of navigating the rich and varied offerings the internet is so good at delivering. And a display screen would be a good start.

Tackling that interactive challenge is far more complicated than programming a voice-controlled timer, but the Echo showed us that intuitive, voice-controlled computing solutions will be a welcome addition to consumers’ connected worlds. And the payoff for the company that establishes those standards, the solutions designers who leverage them, and the analysts looking for more insights into their target audiences will be massive.

Content Marketing and Persuasion Architecture

This blog has included several postings dealing with the skills and team design needed to deliver “digital” well for brands. From the implications of immersive content platforms (Return of the Product Manager) and the different perspectives of millennial staff (The Native Advantage), we’ve thought a lot about what evolving digital platform and ad tech capabilities require from strategy and delivery teams. These organizational design considerations are essential to evolving marketing teams as our channels and customer behavior continue to evolve at a pace never before seen in history.

One thing that won’t ever change is the fundamental objective of marketing and communications teams across channels: to be persuasive about the products or services they are promoting. After we succeed in “interrupting” audience’s attention and attracting eyeballs (and/or ears), and have established the first hints of interest our messaging and experiences must aim to persuade that a service, product, or, yes, brand is worth creating a relationship with.

Persuasion Architecture

Years ago the concept of looking at brand/customer interactions as conversations intended to persuade was cleverly applied to online user experience design challenges as “persuasion architecture.” This took the form of developing website experiences in a non-hierarchical way, so instead of building a site from the top down, which too often mirrored the structure of an organization (company>brands>products & services>product) rather than the way customers explored their needs (search>search results>product) and the questions they were seeking to answer.

Practitioners of this approach, notably industry heavyweights Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, designed experiences to provide answers to questions they would anticipate from customers and prospects exploring a product or service need. So if someone searched Google for “accounting software” and landed on a product page, the designers of that page would consider what questions a shopper would have when viewing the page and provide content or clear pathways to answer those questions. What operating systems does it work on? Is this for personal or business accounting needs? Can I handle invoicing, payments and receivables with the software? These are all examples of questions shoppers of accounting software would likely seek to answer.

Persuasion architecture thinking was and is a great way of delivering a site experience and identifying content needs in a user-centric way that leads a prospect along a clear pathway toward a transaction. In part the content marketing revolution reflects a broad recognition that brands have not done a great job historically of providing answers to questions through case studies, articles, and videos that show the benefits of products and services rather than just showing a picture or list of features and then offering an order button.

Shopping is not a Site Experience

But of course online audiences rarely feel constrained by the boundaries of an individual site domain and rather seek to interact with multiple online sources and platforms to continue their investigation and gather affirmation that a particular product is the right one for them, so persuasion architecture purely in the context of site development is an incomplete answer. This is where implications for how marketing teams may need to (again) evolve and organize themselves in order to be effective should be acknowledged.

Media as Part of the Journey, Not Just the Start

It can appear expedient to separate the thinking and people focused on online platform development from those focused on media messaging and distribution considering that the tools leveraged within those disciplines are very different. I know plenty of UX leads who neither know nor care to know what goes into an insertion order and plenty of media planners who lose consciousness when asked to review wireframes, but for the purposes of building a modern persuasion architecture the skills of both teams are required.

Improving cross-platform identification technology provides the landscape where the principles of persuasion architecture are going mobile… And social… And just about anywhere customers interact with the internet. Customer behavior has always been multi-channel and multi-platform. New tracking and data solutions capabilities are now allowing experience design (very broadly speaking) to be as well.

Facebook and Google do an effective job of tying together your cross-platform journeys, which is why that pair of pink pants you once looked at keep appearing in your feed, and data solutions providers like Neustar, Nielsen, and Merkle proclaim the ability to map customers to a broad database of online interactions with a high degree of accuracy. Retargeting shoppers with images and logos of the products they recently reviewed is just step one of applying that technology.

Content Sequencing

Emerging content marketing platforms like OneSpot (who list the aforementioned Eisenberg brothers as advisors) are starting to gain traction in demonstrating the value of looking at media as an extension of the consideration journey that good web platforms have always labored to deliver. Marketers now have the opportunity to continue answering questions they expect prospective customers have beyond their owned platforms. OneSpot calls this content sequencing, which is the notion of anticipating content browsers want to see based on online behavioral and demographic patterns, and serving that content up on different platforms and channels – wherever a browsers’ online journey takes them.

Right now Adam Weinroth, CMO of OneSpot, sees its platform as being most effective when their algorithm serves content to web browsers based on engagement patterns rather than how a brand would like to see customers explore their offerings. But the Ambililty team wonders if a potential source of revenue for OneSpot and companies like it could be brands looking expansively at persuasion architecture and where customers explore their options online. That, again, would require brands to unify (or, at least, align) their platform and media teams around the fundamentals of persuasion architecture.

In the News – The Rise of Voice Controlled Computing

The Unblinking Eye

We all – at least those of us of a certain age or proclivity for Stanley Kubrick movies – remember Hal. The Hal 9000 was the on-board computer in the 1968 Kubrick classic 2001: A Space Odyssey that the hero interacted with by voice alone. For display, Hal only offered one red eye that glowed with unvarying consistency. A toggle switch that indicated only that “I’m on,” even when Dave very much wanted it off.

Ignoring the sinister nature of that particular example, how close are we to having a Hal-like assistant that we can turn to for the complex or mundane challenges of our home and work lives? If development and investment activity are any measure then very soon we should indeed be surrounded by devices that will respond to our voice commands more quickly and more helpfully than those voice command systems companies use to provide “customer service” when we call them.

These new voice controlled systems promise to provide interactions that not only recognize what we’re saying, but can serve up articles, images, and video from any source connected to the internet and feed them back to us immediately – and in high-def. And they recognize what we want without prompting us to “say or press 1” first. They proclaim to understand what we want based on how we’d ask for it as if we were asking a friend or colleague – but promise a more informed response.

At the moment of writing companies as varied as Soundhound (a music search and recognition apps company), Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Conversant Labs (a company focused on providing solutions for the visually impaired) all have releases planned to deliver on-demand, voice controlled computing solutions. If you doubt that voice-controlled interactions will soon be widely available consider this from Wired magazine’s We’re on the Brink of a Revolution in Crazy-Smart Digital Assistants; Francesco Muzzi; 09/2015 – “It’s a classic story of technological convergence: Advances in processing power, speech recognition, mobile connectivity, cloud computing, and neural networks have all surged to a critical mass at roughly the same time. These tools are finally good enough, cheap enough, and accessible enough to make the conversational interface real – and ubiquitous.”

The Ambility team has more than a passing interest in this trend as we hold intellectual property in a solution for flexibly positioning tablet computers, and with their mobile connectivity and rich display capabilities tablet users seem destined to be one of the main beneficiaries of voice controlled computing. When smart, digital assistants can be provided hands free, the value of hands-free tablet use will multiply.

Unlike the Hal 9000, tablets don’t provide an unblinking red light in response to your queries. They provide whatever best satisfies your need. After all, a voice can provide words in response to what you want, but a picture speaks… Well, you get the idea.

It seems clear that we are still at the very beginning stages in the world of voice controlled computing and significant barriers stand in the way of widespread adoption – standards of interaction for needs beyond straight searching and integrating voice commands into popular software and applications are just two. But it also seems clear that voice controlled interactions will help to multiply the use cases tablet computers can satisfy at home and in the office. And solutions for positioning tablets for hands-free use across those use cases will become more and more valuable.

The Return of the Product Manager?

Fifteen years ago when I first got into interactive marketing the product manager ruled. Brands thought hard and paid a lot of money for user experience designers to think about the types of interactions to deliver online, and how to create new ways of servicing customers in the virtual space. Content management systems were expensive, enterprise installations that serious online brands invested in out of an appreciation for the value of creating destinations that were fresh, current, and relevant for its audiences. Forrester’s Digital Agency Wave Report was the industry bible that could raise or dash the fortunes of interactive agencies large and small based on their appearance or absence in the ‘magic quadrant.’

But then things changed. Agencies realized that focusing on web builds created on-going challenges for their revenue streams, and advertisers continued to struggle with adapting to an online world that was taking a growing share of consumer attention. The consumer behavioral shifts created new challenges that the broadcast world never encountered but also provided opportunities for targeting messages to specific target segments more effectively, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the media spend.

And somewhere along the way the voices of the media side of the interactive world became dominant, almost obscuring the site/platform experience conversations. The biggest events in the interactive agency calendar are no longer Forrester conferences but (the seemingly constant) Digiday conferences. The most coveted title isn’t Experience Design all-star but Media all-star (congrats, by the way, Jordan Bitterman).

But I wonder if that’s about to change again, and the reason for wondering is the growing appreciation of content as an effective and increasingly essential mechanism for promoting a brand and its products and services. Content marketing agencies like to argue that marketers should stop talking about what customers want and ‘be’ what customers want. Brands across B2B and B2C are increasingly appreciating that delivering high-quality, helpful, entertaining content is one of the best ways of driving customer affinity. What sometimes seems to be less appreciated, however, is that great content is increasingly not a single asset – article, video, or infographic – but an intelligent weaving together of assets around a central theme. In other words, a customer experience.

Too often the impact of great content is diminished by a failure to consider the full experience customers have while interacting with it. It’s shocking to me when I choose to watch a featured video on a publisher’s site only to have a video ad, somewhere deep down on the page, start playing automatically. That, to say the least, is a bad experience.

Immersive content experiences, so far best exhibited by publishers like the New York Times (Snow Fall, The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek is a great example http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek) offer multiple avenues of exploration within a “single” story. Video, infographics, and sub-stories are integrated in seamlessly (and beautifully) to add detail and context.

As leveraging these immersive technologies inevitably becomes easier and cheaper, marketers will not be able to rely on a single writer or video team to develop content that stands out, and the skills normally associated with Product Managers and User Experience leads. Naturally I do not mean to imply that experience design experts and the creative process by which marketers and agencies conceive of and develop high-impact content experiences should outshine the innovative ways in which media planners drive attention to those experiences. Rather, I encourage those marketers and agencies to recognize content development for what it is: a full customer experience that requires planning and thoughtful consideration for how to make those experiences great.

Chris Marquardt, 6.1.15