In May I was lucky enough to attend UX London. I thought I’d share some of the notes I took from four of the sessions I attended. (More speaker slides are available.)

Design for Engagement (keynote) - Jesse James Garrett

• The difference between UX and other forms of design is that our work doesn’t take shape until the thing that we designed is used by someone. Use is what makes our work have meaning
• It used to be that as a designer you used to have to really know your field, your medium. UX is about moving beyond the medium and thinking about the broader experience. The experience IS the medium
• But experience is subjective, ephemeral, and intangible
• Great experiences are about engagement, and engagement starts with the senses
• Engagement of sight - the field of cinematography has a lot to teach us here
• Engagement of hearing - this can take lots of different forms e.g. ‘Music for airports’ by Brian Eno engages without demanding the listeners attention, unlike Beethoven’s music
• Engagement of touch - this is a bit alien for web designers
• Engagement of smell - there is interesting potential here, especially for creating engagement in physical spaces
• Engagement of taste - taste is subjective and ephemeral too
• We also need to engage our sense of balance and motion. For example, the designers of Halo 3 made the decision to have very fluid player motion, compared with Mirror’s Edge which was designed to be have natural, jerky motion. But even hardcore gamers became violently ill playing Mirror’s Edge because it was so jerky
• Engagement of the mind, through cognition, is well understood by most UX designers
• Engagement of the heart - theme park designers have long understood how to engage the heart
• We need to take into account the capabilities of the user within four realms - perception, action, cognition and emotion
• We need to take into account the users’ constraints
• We need to take into account the context
• To understand what makes up experiences we need to do meaningful analysis
• But we should also focus on synthesis and orchestration
• "Music is the spaces between the notes" - Claude Debussy

 

Search Patterns - Peter Morville (slides, 67 MB)

• These days, browsing simply doesn’t scale
• Search is one of the most disruptive innovations of our time
•  When searching for something important, it’s almost always a back-and-forth process
• Search should evolve over time, it should be adaptive
• Auto-complete is a good example of helping users before they get to their results
• Real time search of Twitter lets users know when new results have appeared since they started
• The results interface needs to be better designed
• To create good quality content the creators need to have the right tools, processes and incentives
• Cross-media integration (where one channel acts as the controller, like the iPod/iTunes combo) is going mainstream
• We are seeing a collision between user experience & service design. For example, Zipcar turns cars into services
• Service blueprints are necessary but not sufficient
• Search is a "wicked problem", it’s never done

The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions - Stephen Anderson (Slideshare)

Seduction is the process of deliberately enticing a person to engage in some sort of behaviour, like using the stairs instead of the escalator. Why does this video work?    

• Sensory integration appeals to all senses
• Social proof
• Novelty

"I’m a great application, if only people get to know me". What if you have a great product, but

• there is a high bounce rate
• low adoption
• no difference to the competition
• not enough registered users

 
HOW DO YOU GET USERS TO FIRST BASE?

iLike is a great example of a seductive sign-up process

• It has a nice, usable registration form
• But instead of asking you to name your favourite bands in a comma separated list, they show you a sample of artists you might like
• At the bottom of the page, they say "show me more artists"
• Stephen clicked on the "show me more artists" button 10 more times
• iLike got lots of valuable data as a result

Why did this work?  

• Feedback loop - our actions modify subsequent results
• Curiosity - what bands will show up next?
• Visual imagery - big iLike button
• Pictures of artists - this is important because we think visually (quick, how many appliances on your kitchen bench? Did you picture where they were?)
• Pattern recognition
• Recognition over recall

They also have the iLike challenge, a "Name this song" game where you have 30 seconds to identify the artist or the song title

• The more quickly you answer the more points you get
• They track your stats like "points to next rank", average answer time and "best streak" and your rank ranges from "music intern" to "musical deity"
• Stephen showed his to his wife - she was addicted

Why did this work?  

• Sensory experience
• Status - how am I doing compared to others, compared to me?
• Feedback loops
• Appropriate challenges
• Need for achievement

Try this exercise - in 60 seconds write down things you know about people. For example:

• We’re curious
• We don’t like to make choices, but we like choice
• We’re lazy
• We perceive people who are more attractive as more credible
• We all have different capabilities
• We’re intensely self-centred
• Etc

ARE YOU USING THESE OBSERVATIONS WHEN YOU DESIGN?

HOW TO BE MYSTERIOUS AND INTRIGUING

• Hot Wheels offer a blacked-out mysterious version (kind of like Wotif’s Wot Hotel)
• California Pizza Kitchen have a "don’t open it" thank you card (which has a voucher for anything from a free drink to $1000). If you open it, it is void - you need to bring it in the next time you dine
• LinkedIn teases you with "who’s looked at your profile"
• Netflix have a ‘Rate your recent return’ before they reveal two new picks for you

PLAY HARD TO GET

• Gmail launched with a private beta (and combined it with "social proof" which created something very powerful)
• Scarcity is evident in Twitter, with only 140 characters to post a message
• Sabre Town
• Sabre employees earn karma points for being a good citizen and participating in their knowledge sharing tool, but the tool doesn’t reveal how much karma you get for each action
• Some parts of the system are locked until you have enough karma e.g. "earn 80 Karma points to unlock this photo spot"
• Unlocking things is very powerful
• 60-70% of employees use the system each month
• 60% of questions are answered within an hour
• 30 page views / employee / visit

Why this works:

• Limited duration
• Rewards
• Reputation
• Foodspotting - allows you to take photos of food, but the limit they number of nominations

There is an Outlook plug-in uses up points whenever you send outgoing email
 

ON FRISKINESS, GIFTS & UNEXPECTED SURPRISES

Delighters are fun things that aren’t crucial to the experience. e.g. Mail Chimp, Dopplr

 
Making Movies is Hard Fun - Michael Johnson

Michael Johnson has been at Pixar for 17 years. When he first started, he asked around about what Pixar meant and got told that it was a moon near Yoda’s home planet. (It’s actually two words mushed together, PIXel ARtists). That seems to be a good summary of the Pixar Way.

Pixar was spun out of Lucas Film [40 people] in 1986, and it merged with Disney [800 people] in 2006. Today they have 1,100 staff.

Pixar philosophies:

• Casting, casting, casting. Because they are doing "Art as team sport" they are very careful about who they hire. "We’re all artists, we’re all film makers"
• There is a peer relationship between creative and technical people. They like and inspire each other
• They are a director-driven studio. The producers are there to be the adult
• They have a culture of constructive criticism, but try to ensure that they "give a good note" (point out the problem but also propose a solution, and give the criticism when the person can still use it)
• "Quality is the best business plan" - John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer
• "Pain is temporary, ’suck’ is forever" - Jason Deamer
• "Well, do something, so we can change it!" - Gower Champion, famous director

Making a movie in 3 steps:

1. Design a rich, believable world
2. Create engaging characters
3. Tell a compelling story

 
It takes about 4 years and between 50,000 - 100,000 storyboards to make a Pixar movie. Pixar actually make the entire movie twice - once as a storyboard, once as an actual movie

• The voices are done first, then they animate the storyboard
• The animated storyboards (with sound effects and voices) can take years
• But animating the storyboards is important, in order to fail faster

What makes a great story artist?

• Draws fast
• Draws well (poses, composition, pacing)
• Always has another idea
• 51%  is "plays well with others"

(Incidentally, what makes a great developer?

• Codes fast
• Codes well
• Always has another idea
• 51% is "plays well with others")

Someone has done a much better job of summarising another one of Michael’s talks

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This time last year we ran a series of talks on How to Create Government Websites That Don’t Suck. We hit a nerve, and the slides have subsequently been viewed over 6,000 times.

This year we have decided to take a different angle. We want to talk about government websites that inspire and delight us, in other words, government websites that rock. The breakfast briefing is happening on the 23rd of June in Wellington, but in the meantime, I thought it would be fun to share a half-dozen of the websites that we’ve researched.

Pay Car Tax (online service, UK)

In the UK, it used to be that you would go down to the post office to pay your car tax, bringing with you a wad of papers, including your insurance certificate and road worthiness test results. This tedious task has been replaced by a simple online service that validates in real time whether the insurance is up-to-date and that there are no outstanding issues with the car.

This site doesn’t look pretty, isn’t new, and has nothing to do with social media. But it is a terrific example of how to make life easier, and users love it.

State of Utah (local government portal, US)

In complete contrast to the Pay Car Tax site, the state of Utah’s website is highly visual, integrates with Twitter and other social media, and has been described by Fast Company as "instantly user-friendly". In 2009 it won a Digital Government Achievement Award and it goes to show that government websites can be functional and look great.
 
GovHK (central government portal, Hong Kong)

Most governments around the world have some kind of portal that brings together public sector services into one place. It’s far from perfect, but Hong Kong’s recently re-launched GovHK has a very citizen-focussed feel, probably because of the way the site has been structured to support the users’ goals. From the site people can find information on everything from booking a tennis court to filing their taxes.

The Norwegian government portal deserves a mention too - their home page is similarly goal-focussed and their government departments are hardly mentioned.

Data.gov (open data, US)

I have to include at least one example of the democratization of data, a growing trend across the world. While the Data.gov site is not particularly useful on its own, it functions as a clearing house for US government data that third-party developers can use to build interesting mash-ups like This We Know and the National Obesity Comparison Tool.

Act on CO2 - Carbon Calculator (social change, UK)

Many governments try to affect social change. For example, the New Zealand government tries to get kiwis to quit smoking, eat healthy, stay out of the sun and regularly exercise.

What’s different about the Act on CO2 carbon calculator is that it’s actually persuasive. It’s simple to use and visually attractive, but the thing that got me was the specificity of the questions. I didn’t feel at all like I was being lumped into a general profile, and the plan it gave me was detailed and actionable.

NHS Choices (citizen participation, UK)

There is a lot to like about NHS Choices. The site offers a great deal of health advice and information, and even helps people to partially diagnose themsleves. But what’s super cool is the ability to be able to rate hospitals and GPs, Amazon-style. For example, nine patients have commented on the service at Great Ormond Street Hospital. The comments about what patients liked and disliked are painfully real and incredibly helpful when choosing a healthcare provider. I’d love to see this kind of thing rolled out at universities and other state-funded institutions.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

At Optimal Usability our vision is to help transform our clients into providers of world-class customer experiences. But it turns out that it’s really hard to transform organisations. So lately I’ve been reading up on ‘big D’ Design, how organisations can build design into their DNA, and I thought I’d share a few ideas that have stood out.

1. Allow space for exploration and risk taking

"Financial planning and reward systems form the hidden infrastructure of the organisation, an all-but-invisible force that can promote or stifle design thinking." - Roger Martin, Design of Business.

It’s a tiny example, but we’ve recently bought two iPads for our Wellington and Auckland offices. They weren’t in the budget, and I couldn’t justify the spending from any logical part of my brain. We bought them because part of our job is to explore and play with technology, to try and figure out how it might help our clients.

Exploration is crucial to creating a design-led organisation. The structures, processes and culture of an organisation need to be open to risk taking. 

Unfortunately as organisations grow they are less open to risks. They tend to prefer the safety and predictability of efficiency over innovation. 

The thing is that a good design process is not very predictable or safe. It’s messy, difficult to explain and sell, and its results are not certain from the beginning. That’s why so many new ideas come from small companies. Small companies don’t have to consider what they might lose - market share, revenue, reputation - just what they stand to gain. 

So, if you want to be design-led, you have to be open to exploration. According to Roger Martin, this means that financial planning for innovative activities should only consist of setting goals and spending limits: "Goals define the breakthroughs the company is seeking. Spending limits reflect the reality that the company can only afford so much innovation spending in total, and each knowledge advance is worth only so much to the company."

2. Create a project-centred organisation

"Hot project teams start with a clear goal and a serious deadline. The hot group knows that it might disband after the goal is reached and reform the next week to slay another dragon." - Tom Kelly, The Art of Innovation.

As a consultancy, our work is based around projects and teams, often from very different organisations. Working with different people all the time, on challenging, time-bound projects is one of the most fun parts of the job.

It’s interesting to contrast our workday with those of some of the clients we work with, whose roles are more tightly defined. They don’t necessarily experience the energy and creativity that comes from being part of a "hot project team" focussed on achieving an important goal in a fixed timeframe. 

The good news is that, more and more organisations are moving from the old notion of "jobs" to the more expansive concept of work as "projects". As Kouzes and Pusner point out in their book, The Leadership Challenge, project-centred organisations allow people more freedom. Freedom is essential in a design-led organisation (see point 1).

3. Lead from the front

"I like to taste the food. If it tastes bad, I don’t serve it. I’m constantly monitoring what we do, and I’m looking for better ways we can provide financial services, ways that would make me happy if I were a client." - Charles Schwab, founder of the US-based discount brokerage schwab.com.

It’s hard to be design-led when the boss doesn’t care. If insanely great design is your goal, then senior management need to take a role in the design process. There is no substitute for senior management actively promoting the power of design, and ensuring that innovative, design-led projects are properly funded. If you are serious about being design-led then it takes real money. For example, Apple throw away 90% of their work in their desire to reach perfection. And they pay their designers 50% above market. (Source: Why you can’t innovate like Apple).

4. Be research-led.

"We’re spending far more time living with consumers in their homes, shopping with them in stores and being part of their lives. This leads to much richer insights." - A.G. Lafley, CEO of Proctor & Gamble.

To be a design-led organisation, you need deep empathy with your customers. You have to spend time with them and be a "first-class noticer". You have to ask consumer-oriented questions.

When you have taken the time to truly understand your customers, then it becomes easier to trust your gut. For example, the team at Air New Zealand always did what they felt was right when designing the Skycouch, even if that meant ignoring feedback from senior executives. That’s because the design team could rely on the insights they had gained from real passengers, rather than the individual preferences of execs who didn’t represent the target audience.

5. Don’t centralise the design function.

"Designers hold on to their craft as if only people with magic skills can do it. They need to let non-traditional designers into the effort, give them a role, empower them." - Adam Werbach, chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi S

I’ve read several arguments for having a small team responsible for the core design. Personally, I’m torn. I can see how that’s important when designing products, but I’m not so sure that’s true when designing services (which make up 70% of New Zealand’s GDP). 

For example, Proctor & Gamble’s transformation into a design-led organisation only happened precisely because they made design everyone’s job, rather than centralising the design function. 

I believe that today’s designers need to rely more and more on collaborative methods to co-create, particularly as our world gets more and more connected and complex. Just because you can’t work Photoshop doesn’t mean you don’t have a role to play in designing.

In conclusion

I remember four years ago we did a research project for a bank that was interested in improving their phone banking experience. When it came time to present our findings and recommendations to a room full of senior managers, we decided to try an experiment. Rather than jump straight into our conclusions, we got them to call into the test system and try a simple task, checking the balance of a credit card. We saw people having to hang up and start again multiple times, people swearing at the system, and a general grumbling about how "it shouldn’t be this hard". In getting senior managers to experience how painful it was to use phone banking, we made a much stronger case for change.

So, if you are trying to sell design thinking at your organisation, here’s one final tip: the importance of design can’t be explained, only experienced. 

By Blake Lough
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After two years of work we can finally talk about one of the most exciting projects we have had the privilege to work on. As many of you will have seen, in January Air New Zealand released details of its new long haul travel product. Although most of the focus has been on its new Economy Skycouch seating, this actually only represents one piece of a very large puzzle in offering a new long haul experience that Air New Zealand hopes will put it at least two years ahead of its competition.

In mid 2007 global design innovators IDEO were selected by Air New Zealand to help them develop a new long haul experience strategy (check out http://www.futuretakingflight.com/). The insights from the IDEO work lay the foundation for the next stage of conceptual seat design in which Kiwi design companies helped create 19 separate concepts. The Air New Zealand team managed to whittle these 19 concepts down to five that it thought offered the most promise. It was at this stage in February 2008 that Air New Zealand approached Optimal Usability to help test the concepts to identify which one or two to actually build and place on its new long haul aircraft. The brief was simple: "we know you’ve never done anything like this before, but we back you guys to help us understand how customers will react."

Developing personas

Optimal Usability worked with Air New Zealand to establish personas that communicated how key market demographics behaved when travelling and what was important to them. This helped focus a diverse group of designers to a single view of the key customer groups.
 

Creating realistic test flights

Utilising a mock Boeing 787 cabin that Air New Zealand had built in a secret location in Auckland (the first outside of Boeing’s facility in Seattle), Optimal Usability worked on creating a realistic shortened flight experience. The realism factor was critical in drawing out true customer behaviours throughout a flight experience. Some key contributors to the realism were:

• Actual aircraft sound
• Lighting that mimicked a real flight
• Real cabin crew to provide safety instructions and service
• Adequate lengths of time for sleep to understand real behaviours
• Adequate number of passengers in a test flight to encourage real social behaviours
• Actors who brought a level of realism to their own flight experience and helped other passengers get into a role-playing frame of mind.

 
Flight Experience (FX) Testing

Optimal Usability co-ordinated groups of passengers from each target demographic through flight sessions and observed the interactions of passengers with all aspects of the design concepts i.e. seats, tray table, in-flight entertainment, access in and out of rows, service options, etc.
 
Observations and photographs focused on parts of the experience that worked well and aspects that caused issues. Following the FX test session, Optimal Usability facilitated focus groups with the passengers and designers to better understand what was observed and to discuss what design changes should be made.
 
Working closely with the designers, quick design iterations were made and then re-tested with the next group of passengers. This style of iterative design helped converge the design efficiently, based on real passenger feedback.
 

Using actors and real customers

Initial seat concepts in the mock aircraft environment were made of polystyrene and the overall environment required some imagination to provide useful feedback. Optimal Usability recruited method actors who were able to take on the role of the personas. The ability for the actors to play the persona characters and then articulate the experience was a very successful technique for the early prototypes.
 
As the fidelity and realism of the seat concepts were developed, real customers were recruited to participate in the FX test sessions.
 
 
Designs that really work for customers

Working with Air New Zealand and their partners in a collaborative environment allowed rapid iterative designs to be tested and refined. With most of the design team being part of FX testing sessions, there was a shared understanding of the issues to be solved and hence focused solutions.
 
Building on the work we did with the seat concepts and FX testing, we also got the opportunity to:

• facilitate conceptual design workshops and user test the new in-flight entertainment system
• test the conceptual design for the online booking experience for the new long haul experience.

It really has been an amazing couple of years and we admire Air New Zealand’s "anything is possible" approach to innovation whilst balancing that with the belief that customer-centred design would realise the full potential of that innovation.

 
Big thanks to Air New Zealand for bringing us along on their journey and trusting us with such an awesome challenge.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Services currently make up 70% of New Zealand’s GDP, and this percentage is growing every year. Given how important services are to our economy, it should be easy to find examples of remarkable customer service. Instead, the front page news in Wellington is all about phone outages and train delays.

I think that the main reason we get bad service is because most organisations leave it up to business analysts, project managers or software engineers to design the customer experience. We don’t get remarkable service because organisations don’t consciously design the end-to-end experience.

This is where Service Design can help. It involves explicitly designing end-to-end customer experiences, across multiple touchpoints (the channels that customers use to interact with you) and across time. 

At a high level, Service Design is pretty simple. You start out by gathering the basic information - who are your customers? What are they trying to do? In what context? How can you help them do it? Then you create multiple concepts, which you test with users and iterate until your design gets more and more concrete. Then you implement. 

For anyone familiar with usability, this process is going to be very familiar. That’s because at a high-level, any human-centred, design-driven process will look pretty much the same.

The main difference with Service Design is the mindset and the methods. With Service Design you think holistically about the end-to-end experience, across touchpoints. Because services are intangible, you need to use a different set of tools.

For example, you might create an experience prototype, to simulate what it’s like to use a service. Steve Jobs from Apple says that one of the best pieces of advice he got about retailing was to "go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn’t work." Apple designed their retail stores as if they were a product. 

You can do the same thing. It doesn’t have to be expensive - you will be surprised with what you can learn by using furniture, cardboard and paper, and asking sales staff and real customers to pretend they are in a real store. Experience prototypes are a superb way to simulate the service experience and cheaply show and test your design concepts with real customers. After all, it helped Apple to reach $1 billion in annual sales faster than any retailer in history.

In 2010 you are going to hear us talk a lot more about service design. Optimal Usability’s vision is to help transform New Zealand organisations into providers of world-class customer experiences. To do that, the focus has to be on the holistic end-to-end experience, where each touchpoint is like an instrument in a symphony. Our ambition is to help you to be the conductor of all those instruments, and to create a melodic customer experience masterpiece.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We are often asked by clients for our opinion on the things they should watch out for, what the future holds, and who’s doing the really interesting stuff.
 
These kind of questions have inspired us to reflect and collect our thoughts into four inter-related articles covering:
 

1. Devices
2. Social interactions
3. Services
4. Data

 
In this final part of the series, we are looking at data.
 
The funny thing is that despite complaining about information overload since the Library of Alexandria 2,300 years ago, our appetite for information continues to grow. Thanks to the Internet we have all these great new possibilities to collect data, share it, bring it from one place to another, to remix it, label it and find it.
 
For example:
 

• Sophisticated home weather stations can be purchased for under $200. Who needs Metservice when you can collect the data yourself?
• 23andMe offers an at-home DNA test to help figure out customers’ ancestry and predisposition to 119 diseases. Even your saliva can be a form of data.
• The New York Times has described e-mail as the "the bane of some people’s professional lives" and a $650 billion drag on the economy. The trouble is that many of us are addicted to email, and it’s one area of information overload that we actively contribute to.

 
Of course, the problem is not so much the data itself as finding, filtering and understanding the data. The director of the MIT’s Center for Digital Business makes the point that "we’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured…the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data" (source).
 
World-class companies help customers make sense of their own data. They provide tools which give customers insight into their own behaviour.
 
For example, Mint’s goal is to give people insight into their finances. "We fundamentally believe that the reason you work so hard in life is to enjoy the financial benefits of doing that work…achieving those goals is where Mint wants to help people. The way we do this is by highlighting and focusing on the insights on current behaviour, and then promoting actions that people can take to make change a reality" (source).
 
Unfortunately very few companies have Mint’s attitude. As part of their everyday business most organisations collect data, but it do very little with it. This seems crazy to me. Even if organisations don’t help customers make sense of their own data, surely it’s worthwhile measuring, collecting, analysing and reporting customer data for their own use?
 
Of course, once companies catch on, the demand for statisticians and analysts to help make sense of the data will be huge. In a recent Wired article, Google’s chief economist shared his belief that one of the sexiest jobs in the next 10 years will be as a statistician. "What’s ubiquitous and cheap?" Varian asks. "Data." And what is scarce? The analytic ability to utilize that data.
 
 
Data isn’t going to go away. We are just going to keep collecting and publishing more and more and more information. But as Clay Shirky argues, the problem isn’t really one of information overload, it’s one of filter failure. We need to design filters that let us find our way through the abundance of information. Those filters can be in the form of Mint’s pie charts that show at a glance your financial position, while at the same time allowing you to drill down into details. Or they could be in the form of Xobni, who’s Outlook add-in which allows you to rapidly move through the piles of unsorted email.
 
So I leave you with two final questions: what is your organisation doing to help your customers understand their data? And, What is your organisation doing to help you understand your customers’ data?
 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
We are often asked by clients for our opinion on the things they should watch out for, what the future holds, and who’s doing the really interesting stuff.

These kind of questions have inspired us to reflect, and collect our thoughts into four inter-related articles covering:

1. Devices
2. Social interactions
3. Services
4. Data

In this third part of a four part series, we are looking at services.

I was originally going to build on the last two articles and explore how clever companies are using new devices, and the social interactions they facilitate, to deliver new types of services.

But instead, I’ve decided to focus on one aspect - the large number of services that are given away for free.

Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, has recently written a book about this called Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Essentially, his argument is that the most effective price is no price at all.

The idea seems pretty radical, until you take a look around. Anderson quotes many examples, including Flickr, Google and Yahoo!, and New Zealand has plenty of our own. Our national betting agency, the TAB, give away Internet access for free. To launch their new house tracking service, Quotable Value gave away 220,000 reports for free (and tripled the number of people visiting their site as a result).

Unfortunately, many traditional businesses still don’t get this. In fact, some are going in the opposite direction.

News Corp, who publish many major newspapers around the world, have declared that the "era of a free-for-all in online news is over" and are going to start charging for content. For this to work, they accept that there could be a need for furious litigation to prevent stories and photographs being copied elsewhere. They will literally be taking their own customers to court. As Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News Corp, has said "We’ll be asserting our copyright at every point."

Thankfully, some publishers do get the "free" concept, like Thomson Reuters, whose President said "Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies - they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works."

Free is getting to be normal. As consumers we are starting to expect it. But we are also starting to become resigned to the advertising that goes along with it. Advertising is a crucial part of many online business models. In fact, here in New Zealand we are getting off lightly - according to the IAB, 20% of advertising is "consumed online" but only 8% of the spend is online.

Now, this trend towards free isn’t universally applicable. People will pay if prices are low enough. For example, there were 200 million downloads in the first 102 days of the iTunes Apps Store, mostly of applications that cost a couple of dollars. Business Week predicts the app economy is worth US$1 billion today and will be $4 billion in 2012.

There have also been some criticisms of Anderson’s book. But I believe that businesses who are unwilling to accept the change to their business model, will find they quickly become irrelevant. If you are a bank: Mint.com will offer more insight to your customers than you do, and they won’t ever need to log in to online banking. If you are a sat-nav company: Google will offer sat-nav for free and your stock price will plummet.  If you are a publisher: You’ll charge for content and BBC won’t, and you’ll lose.

So what you can give away for free? As Tom Peters says - change now or risk becoming irrelevant.
 
In the next article we’ll cover Part IV: Data.
 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In this second part of a four part series, we are looking at social interactions.
 
The participatory web
The biggest difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is the change from static content to communities and relationships. Millions of words have already been written about the participatory web from Time naming ‘You’ as its person of the year back in 2006, through to Facebook breaking through the 300 million user mark just last month.

Unfortunately, the message isn’t getting through to many organisations. They say that they want a conversation with their customers, but the kind of conversation they want isn’t very real.

For a start, real conversation isn’t one-way. Blogs shouldn’t be used to push press releases into the world. They should be used to ask questions, engage customers and seek feedback like Nokia does.

Real conversation also feels like you are talking to a real person with personality, opinions, and emotions. Would your organisation write a blog post entitled "Sometimes we suck", like Flickr did?

The courage to publicly engage customers in real conversation has to be driven from the very top, and it doesn’t happen very often. You see it at online shoe retailer Zappos, where their CEO has nearly 1.5 million Twitter followers (the kind of numbers usually reserved for Lance Armstrong or CNN). Locally you see it at RaboPlus, where their General Manager is the one who’s answering all the customer queries. But these examples are pretty rare.

But, to be honest blogs aren’t really where it’s at. The simple fact is that fewer than a third of us read them (and most of those are in the younger age ranges).
 
Social interaction platforms
I think the really interesting stuff is when organisations provide a platform for social interaction.

I’m not talking about social networks so much, although their numbers continue to rise (the 169 social networking websites listed at Wikipedia include a site for knitting and crochet and there are even anti-social networks cropping up).

Providing a social interaction platform is more about helping customers connect with one another and with their own data. For example, on Delicious you can see how many other people bookmarked the same page you did, and see what else these people bookmarked.

One of the simplest ways of providing a platform is to aggregate people’s behaviour as they use your site, and then show the data back to them. Flickr uses the community to figure out how interesting a photo is, based on the number of people who view a photo, bookmark it, comment on it, and a bunch of other (proprietary) things. There are no human editors involved. The community, you and I, indirectly help to decide which of these photos are interesting. We add value to the site just by using it.

Mint takes this a step further by helping users to gather insights about themselves by comparing their finances to a group of other users in a similar life situation. How much are your paying in car insurance compared to others? What about weekly groceries? This makes the site extremely sticky - you want to keep coming back to compare yourself to your peer group.
 
Social psychology
Another trend we are seeing on the rise is the use of social psychology and game theory to persuade us, or to help us learn.

For example, when we publicly share our goals we are more likely to follow through on them. At SmartyPig they’ve taken advantage of this to create a 21st-century version of a piggy bank that allows you to set up a savings account with an automatic monthly contribution. But the trick is that you can share goals online with family and friends, who can also contribute to your account.

Nintendo’s Your Life Rhythm is a pedometer that is designed to get us off our backsides. Their trick is that the pedometer comes as an add-on to their Nintendo DS portable gaming system. Yep, walking around is now a computer game. But when you add in social aspects, and some element of competition, chances are that we will walk around more.

A more mature version of this idea is the Nike+. It uses a sensor in a running shoe to communicate with an iPod. You can track calories burned, distance, pace and time.

That’s all pretty cool. But where it goes to the next level is when you upload your data to the Nike+ website. I can challenge other Nike+ users to a race, see what kind of times other people in Wellington are running, discuss which Powersong I prefer on the forums (apparently Pump It by the Black Eyed Peas is the number one Powersong).

This is Data (it tells me that I most often run on a Wednesday), this is a Service, this is a Device (a sensor and an iPod), and it is most definitely Social Interaction.  That’s the thing with these megatrends we’ve been discussing - it’s often hard to unpick the threads on some of these things.
 
Organisations who understand how to facilitate conversations online can’t help but be more successful. How can you get your customers to participate more? With you? With each other? What can you do to help facilitate conversations? I’d love to hear your feedback.
 
In the next article we’ll cover Part III: Services.
 

1. Devices
2. Social interactions
3. Services
4. Data

In this first part of a four part series, we are taking a look at some common attributes of the latest devices. By "device" I mean a physical gadget with some kind of electronic wizardry - a cellphone, MP3 player, remote control, camera - something that someone uses for a specific practical purpose.
I want to talk about four trends relating to devices:
 

• Mobile
• Location-aware
• Touch-enabled
• Context-aware

 
Mobile
The mobile phone is the primary connection tool for most people in the world. Already there are more mobile phones than computers.
This shift has some interesting social and cultural implications. For example, the 2002 book Smart Mobs suggests we are becoming looser about time and place. "If you have a phone you can be late…the opportunity to make decisions on the spot has made young people reluctant to divide their lives into time slots."
More and more organisations are creating new ways to connect with customers on-the-go. Kiwibank, ASB, National Bank, and others have iPhone-enabled sites or apps. A bank in the States is even letting customers deposit money by taking a photo of the cheque with their phone.
All of this makes sense - we don’t want to be tethered to our PCs. We want devices that are small, lightweight and portable. That’s why by the end of 2011 there will be more smartphones than PCs.

Q: People are doing more and more things "on the go" - what does this mean for your organisation?
 
Location-aware
Location-based services have been talked about since Y2K, but it has only been recently that we are starting to see devices that know where in the world they are.
For example, you can buy shoes with a built in GPS chip. This chip acts as a location beacon to help people find you (or your sneakers) and can also monitor heart rate, speed and body temperature.
Some new cameras know where you took a photo by automatically adding location data through GPS. You’ll never forget where a photo was taken ever again (especially handy if you are touring Europe and all the gothic buildings start to look the same).
Google Latitude tracks your location using your cellphone. Before you cry ‘Big Brother’, you need to give Google permission to know your whereabouts, and explicitly decide who to share that information with. I can easily imagine situations where this would come in handy: I’m in Sydney, Australia on business and get an alert that a friend is in town and is only three blocks away. I can see that my friend is stuck in traffic and is going to be late for tennis. You get the idea.

Q: Imagine if you knew the location of every one of your customers, in real-time. What could you do with that information? What location-based services could you offer?
 
Touch-enabled
When Pew asked an expert panel about future trends late last year, one of the things they agreed on most was that touch would increase as a common technology interface.
Gesture-based interfaces are definitely becoming more mainstream, thanks in large part to Apple’s family of products. (Although you have to agree with Seinfeld that there is a lack of satisfaction in swiping the iPhone when you’re angry).
Microsoft Surface and Sphere have shown us how large, multi-touch interfaces might actually be used, but we’re unlikely to see any Minority Report-style interactions anytime soon. Humans just weren’t designed to make small gestures in front of us. (Google "gorilla arm" for more on this).
Which brings us to an important point - designing touch-based interfaces isn’t like designing for the desktop. For a start, fingers are much fatter than mouse pointers and require larger buttons. One wonders if we are going to have to suffer though years of clumsy interactions, while designers catch up.

Q: In what way can your interfaces take advantage of gestures?
 
Context-aware
Devices are becoming more and more aware of the context in which they operate. They have sensors to measure all sorts of different things: motion, pressure, light, noise and even air quality and posture.
Accelerometers are one of the more popular sensors, and allow devices to detect movement and orientation. Using accelerometers some Nokia phones allow users to reject calls by turning them upside down, and some iPods offer a "shake to shuffle" capability.
Nintendo are about to release another add-on to the Wii console called a Vitality Sensor. It’s a fancy name for a simple idea - a sensor that checks your pulse. But think about the creative ways game designers could use it, like gauging when a horror game is too horrific, or when you aren’t working out hard enough when playing WiiFit.

Q: What innovative ways can you use sensors? Could you determine engagement by the way customers lean forward in their chair? What if customers could shake your interface like they can with the iPod?
 
Individually, each of these innovations is interesting and useful, but I think the true power is when we start to see devices with all of these attributes combined.
Some organisations have tried to peek into the future and imagine what life will be like with mobile, location-aware, touch-enabled and context-ware devices. Check out these videos from Microsoft and Nokia. (Thanks to LukeW for the links).
I don’t know what the future looks like but as more and more devices get smarter and smarter and the group of people who use them grows and grows, I am convinced that we ain’t seen nothing yet.
 
In the next article we’ll cover Part II: Social interactions.
 

The overall goal of the E-government Strategy is for New Zealand to "be a world leader in using IT to realise its economic, social, environmental, and cultural goals, to the benefit of all its people."
Optimal Usability › Edit — WordPress
We certainly spend taxpayer money pursuing this goal. Last year 64% of public sector agencies expected to spend money on a new/upgraded website in 2008/09, and 53% expected to spend money on new/upgraded online services.

However, despite spending all this money New Zealand is falling behind in public sector innovation.
 
A 2008 UN report (PDF, 1.5MB) ranked New Zealand 25th in the world in terms of e-government readiness. That’s a drop from 18th place in 2005. 

Despite promises of dramatic change and innovation, the public sector today looks much as it did when the Internet started. Instead of transforming government, innovation has tended to be small-scale and gradual.
 
I believe that there are four steps to reversing this trend and creating government websites that rock.
 

Step 1. Create a citizen-centred culture
 

A. Ditch the shared accountability model
 
Currently many government departments have a shared accountability model. Someone creates content based on what their team is working on, gets it approved by the comms department and a techie tucked away in a corner somewhere publishes it to the web. 
 
Things like optimizing content for search engines, rewriting pages to make them easier to read and cross-promoting other departments are mostly lost in the busyness of day-to-day operations.
 
The trouble is that when something is owned by everybody, it is owned by nobody.
 
For example, one government department we know of doesn’t have an online strategy for their public facing websites or their four intranets. They’ve got no governance group and they’ve got hundreds of authors. The result can’t help but be mediocre.
 
B. Hire a Chief Citizen Officer
 
To create a superlative citizen experience public sector agencies need to get away from this shared accountability model and hire someone who can call the shots at the highest level. I believe that every public sector agency should have a Chief Citizen Officer (CCO), whose role it is to manage the customer experience across all the channels.
 
Hiring a CCO takes guts. But it takes this kind of commitment to run a great website. Real money and real people.

 
Step 2. Create an actionable, citizen-centric online strategy

 
A. Stop trying to design for all citizens
 
Government departments often try and design their websites to suit the needs of "all New Zealanders".
 
I understand that most public sector agencies have a vast mandate, to which they are held publicly accountable. But I believe that public sector agencies are mistaken to try and design for all citizens.
 
The trouble is that when you try to design for everyone, you design for no-one. All you get is a mediocre website.
 
One great way to stop designing for all citizens is to use personas. Personas are pretend users of a website, based on research, with details to make them "real". They are a tool that is used to help make design decisions. Suddenly you aren’t designing for everyone, you a designing for a specific someone.
 
One tip though - personas must be based on data, and there are few shortcuts. Don’t believe anyone who says they can create personas in a day.
 
B. Create a coherent, lightweight online strategy
 
Once you know what your users’ goals are, you can combine them with your own organisational goals to create an online strategy.
 
I believe that you can actually use a fairly simple process to do this. The approach we generally take is to do upfront research into users and their goals, interview stakeholders, and run workshops grounded with real-world examples of other websites. The strategy tends to come together quickly because most of the work is in the preparation.
 
Finally, don’t develop the online strategy in isolation. The role of the CCO should be to ensure that all services offered across all channels are taken into account as part of a broader cross-channel strategy.

 
Step 3. Improve findability
 

A. Create an intuitive information architecture with the help of users
 
There are currently 10,000,000 webpages spread across 900 .govt domains.
 
The number of pages are only going to grow. For example, parliament.govt.nz might add 200 documents in a single day when parliament is sitting.
 
That’s why the information architecture of public sector websites has to be carefully created and validated based on feedback from real users. The structure and labels of a website cannot be made up out of thin air.
 
B. Remove redundant content, and consolidate sites to make stuff easier to find
 
Governments in general are broken up into competing agencies and jurisdictions.
 
This causes government websites to spring up like mushrooms. Agencies care about their individual "web sites" rather than trying to understand the broader goals of their visitors. Websites should be based around key tasks, not agencies, and should ideally hide of the mechanics of government.
 
Government silos also mean that taxpayers end up paying for the same content in multiple places. I found four different websites that dealt specifically with fuel economy. I would like to calculate how much energy it takes to run all the sustainability websites!
 
In our product development business we refer to the concept of "killing puppies". Sometimes hard calls need to be made to discontinue a product. It can feel like putting down your own cute, adorable puppies. But sometimes, that’s what’s needed.
 
The UK government shutdown 425 sites when it implemented the directgov portal. 425 dead puppies. Maybe it’s time our government did the same.
 

Step 4. Follow a user-centred design process
 

A. Use ISO 13407
 
The New Zealand government spent $1.9B on ICT last year. There is an opportunity to realize immense return on investment from projects that follow a user-centred design (UCD) process simply because government operates on such a large scale.
 
ISO 13407 is probably the most well known usability standard, and documents the characteristics of UCD. It’s a simple, high-level framework with requirements that include the following:

• Project planning shall allocate time and resources for the human-centred activities. This shall include time for iteration and the incorporation of user feedback, and for evaluating whether the design solution satisfies the user requirements.
• Relevant user and stakeholder groups shall be identified and their relationship with the proposed development described in terms of key goals and constraints.
• There are four linked human-centred design activities that shall take place during the design of any interactive system
  • Understand and specify the context of use;
  • Specify the user requirements;
  • Produce design solutions;
  • Evaluate.

(From International Standards for Usability Should Be More Widely Used)

If you follow this standard you will end up with a more effective, easier to use website. Government RFPs should require vendors to comply with ISO 13407.
 

Government websites that rock

We still have a long way to go, but there are many examples of successful government websites.
 
Practice.co.nz is a risky, non-traditional website, targeted at young drivers. The user testing we did showed us that people in the target demographic loved it. (Design by Aim Proximity)

The Retirement Commission used to be three people and a part-time commissioner. They still managed to create the Sorted website that attracted over 1,000,000 visitors/year when they were that small. They succeeded because of their relentless focus on the website - it was and remains their number one channel. (Design by Sparks Interactive)

ACC recently followed ISO13407 to redesign their site, without even realising it! Their emphasis on the user experience and following a robust research programme has resulted in a 25% increase in page views. (Design by DNA)
 
 
With examples like these it’s possible to see how the Internet can transform government. I’m looking forward to the day when public sector websites become so useful and intuitive that we drop the term "e-Government" and just call it government.
 

If you’d like to hear more on this topic come along to a free breakfast on the 22nd of September in Wellington. Those who can’t make might want to check out the slides.