How many times have you mentioned Facebook, Twitter, or Boxee (shout out to Avner and crew!) and gotten the an eye-roll? There seems to be a stigma developing in the industry because everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) is attempting to build community components into their application offerings. The bad news is it’s not going to stop anytime soon. The good news is that providers are getting better at implementing these systems and consumers are starting to experience real value.
So, why is the online community not a fad and/or evil? At its core, the online community is designed to build closer relationships between the consumers and the product/service provider. It’s important to distinguish that online community does NOT always have to build relationships between consumers and other consumers. Social networking focuses on connecting people in online communities. Online community is a higher level concept that is simply about the building of a body of active and engaged individuals.
Why do providers need to build customer relationships? In the early 1900’s it was common to buy soap directly from a human being that ran a local soap store. Customers would go to this person’s store and buy soap, share feedback, make feature requests, and hopefully deliver praise for the proprietor’s products. The proprietor would in turn make products that the customers desired. Today’s consumer packaged goods (CPG) giant Proctor & Gamble needed to reinvent this system because they could not afford to place an individual in every town they wanted to serve and they could not afford to manufacture an infinite number of variations on their product. Instead they created the first Brand and marketed their products (a small subset) using their brand promises to replace the direct connection that existed prior. As America endured it’s industrialization more and more companies chose to use brand instead the more costly direct representative approach to representing their products and today product sales reps don’t really exist except for big-ticket items like cars (oh and we all love car salesmen!). What companies like P&G failed to see was that the cost saving brand approach was also stripping them of their consumer feedback. They, like most other businesses following their model, became disconnected from their consumers who in turn became less excited about their products. They also found that they had to use manipulative marketing messages to persuade customers to buy their products. They had to lie.
Today the world is changing, or in a small way reverting back, to the direct connection model. People are media-saavy and see right through manipulative marketing/advertising attempts to persuade their purchases. To overcome this, smart providers are using online community to reverse the system. Instead of convincing consumers to buy their products they are letting consumers tell them what products to make. Providers are finding that watching customers using their products gives them incredible insights. Listening to them talk about their products does as well. Building systems that facilitate these observations and discussions is what online community is all about.
Google is a perfect example of well implemented online communities. While no one really thinks of Google as a community platform, their free applications connect us (search, email, document sharing, maps, etc) and in turn inform them about our desires, needs, and behaviors. They use this information to make their products better and sell other products to us. In return we love them.
Stay tuned… BT2 is coming next week. We’ll be talking about the “R” word, relevance.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on February 3, 2009
The dust has settled, we’ve caught up on our sleep (Rudy is a sleep camel), and now we would like to reflect on the Phizzpop competition. We really had a blast “Phizzing” and “Popping” the challenge. While we don’t usually share intimate project details with the public, Phizzpop was purely conceptual work so there are no lawyers to hunt us down. That said, we’re thrilled to share the gory details with you.
Assignment
Our assignment, from a high level, was to engage teens between the ages of 13 to 18 and get them excited about the 2016 Olympic bid. We were to build a system that would empower them to show their support, build a community, and create momentum showing the world that the 2016 Olympics could be held no where else. The result had to include a rich interactive experience using Microsoft Silverlight technology, three days to design and build it and 8 minutes to present it. You can download the full assignment document here. It’s a great read, very well prepared.
Method
Tanagram, with development partner Geneca, responded to the challenge using the same processes we use to develop social architectures for clients like Tribune Interactive.
- Understand target demographic and project goals
- Define quick-convert subset(s), key penetration points and growth/sustain model
- Prototype, test and evolve
With three days to produce results we didn’t explore the situation with our typical rigor and we didn’t have the opportunity to field test prototypes but initial feedback on the results has been very strong and we’re very satisfied.
Understand target demographic and project goals
During our presentation I joked that Rudy spent the weekend hanging out at American Apparel watching teens. Truth be told the internet and some high-level research from our friends at Ogilvy provided us with our pool of insights. Obvious findings included teens are extremely socially motivated. They care a great deal about social status, peer recognition, and to a large extent fame. Interesting findings included 97 percent of today’s teens carry a cell phone and do a great deal of connecting via SMS or text messaging. The phones they carry are not rich media devices like the iPhone but instead hand-me-down Motorola Razors, or cheap carrier-branded phones.
Project goals included:
- Building a large community rapidly (the Olympic bid decision is October 2, 2009)
- Designing a system that would be valuable before, during, and after Olympic events (we added 2012 AND 2016 to our goals)
- We added building a system that would capture and execute upon the goals of WorldSportChicago, an Olympic bid leave behind organization dedicated to encouraging youth to achieve athletic excellence
- We added help change the U.S. perception of exercise and athletics including motivating people to get out and burn a few calories
- We added pushing the social networking domain by exploring real-time connectivity experiences
Define quick-convert subset(s)
The key to rapidly growing a social network is to leverage the power of multiples for expansion. This is done by identifying those members of your demographic set that are most easily captivated and converted to use your system and giving them tools to recruit new members for you. We chose “athletically inclined youth” as our champion subset because we found they were most likely to have knowledge of and be interested in the Olympic institution, they were already participating in an athletic program, and likely had some form of basic support network (meaning potential recruits) already in place.
Key penetration points
Key penetration points are valuable offerings that enhance the lifestyle of the champion subset. Key penetration points for our system included:
- A place to record and publish athletic achievement
- A place to voice opinions and build integrity among a community of peers
- A platform that provides easy addition and presentation of text, audio, photos, and video streams
- A mobile component that leverages available technology in ways currently unavailable to our champion subset
- A system that encourages real-time participation and interaction multiple times daily
- A brand association that improves the desired perception of the athlete
Growth/sustain model
We found that one of the keys to the degree of success of an athlete was a strong support network. Friends, family, peers, and even competitors connected to give support and guidance for the athlete in training. We designed our system to enable athletes to recruit a support network by adding fans to their distribution list for their training blog. With a meager goal of converting 1 million athletically inclined youth each recruiting an average of 10 fans we were satisfied that we had a model that would expand appropriate to our needs.
We built a ranking competition / reward system into our model to help motivate the recruiting process. The athlete’s ranking in our system would be determined by the number of fans in their network, the amount of interaction with the system, and donated calories provided by exercising fans.
Fans, once signed up, would receive both blog and statistics (i.e. new best time) updates from the athlete and could respond with messages of encouragement (improving ranking). Fans could also “donate” calories burned doing basic exercises to athletes to further add to the athletes ranking score. It was critical that all of these activities be tied to the Olympic bid. At the very start, sign up as an athlete or a fan includes a digital petition showing support for the 2016 bid. Athletes could also flag themselves as Olympic potentials in the system and in doing so gain additional ranking points and benchmarking capabilities.
Athletic training requires dedication and daily commitment. Our system was designed to be a key component in the training process and because of that it would be very relevant to our champion subset’s daily needs. We designed our system so that athletically inclined youth could capture/monitor their training progress, share it with their supporters and even benchmark it against peers and Olympians. Our system would provide connections between athletes at various levels of training; novice athletes could connect with Olympians for inspiration and guidance, expert athletes could connect with others for support and to share best practices. To maximize the value of the interactive system we built a rich-media blogging platform that enabled athletes to post (in addition to text) audio, image and video streams of meets and other events. The video blogging system was enabled by Microsoft’s Silverlight Streaming cloud service, a system that allows simple upload, conversion, and hosting of video files (up to 10GB for free). Our goal was to develop a system that enabled athletes to build a digital record of their career, a monument of their effort.
Finally and perhaps most exciting to us, we built our system to be fully enabled through SMS. For the demonstration we used a 3G GSM modem connected to an ActiveSMS server to show a small scale version of what our system was capable of. For purposes of the presentation we did not expose the full feature set (even though we sent and received ~300 SMS messages in a period of 8 minutes) but our system was designed to enable subscription, bi-directional communication to multiple subscribed circles (perhaps by sport) for both athletes and fans, performance statistics entry by the athlete on the field, and the ability to send cheers to athletes as they compete. We thought it would be cool if athletes carrying a cellphone on silent could get occasional nudges (vibrates) from fans wishing them well. Testing would determine if this was annoying or distracting. We were on the fence.
Why Big Shoulders?
Carl Sandburg has had his poem “Chicago” associated with far too many initiatives but for us we referencing it allowed us to talk about Chicago without making our concept about Chicago (the Olympic bid is a U.S. initiative) and it also allowed us to talk about a support network in an interesting manner. Big support comes from big shoulders.
A note about athletics in the U.S.
It will probably not come as a shock that athletics in the U.S. are in decline. We found one study tying the decline in athletics to the tripling of obesity in teenagers since 1974. Another study found that today’s teens are less able to get and hold jobs because of lacking athletic experiences. Obviously studies all have their slants, but it’s clear to us that athletics in America need our help. We built our system to allow fans to donate calories with the hopes that if one person did 10 push ups and it wasn’t that hard and did it again, perhaps they might consider a regular exercise routine, maybe even develop over the years to have Olympic aspirations of their own. Physical fitness is a key health issue in the U.S. increasing fitness will reduce health care costs, improve stamina and positive attitudes in practitioners and even teach values like honor and commitment. The value of hard work is a lesson being lost on today’s teens and America will benefit if we can find a way to teach it.
Big Shoulders screen shots
Big Shoulders home screen pristine
Big Shoulders home screen with SMS text flowing in background
[caption id="attachment_439" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Big Shoulders home screen with Rudy hot state"]
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Big Shoulders home screen with Rudy Details open
[caption id="attachment_441" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Big Shoulders home screen with Rudy Stats screen open"]
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Big Thanks!
Special thanks to the folks at Microsoft (Chris, Bob, Josh, Brian, Sara) for inviting and supporting us. Thanks to our team-mates at Geneca for their support. Supreme thanks to Rudy Chou and Matthew T. Boeke for staying awake for three days to develop this awesome concept. You guys rock!
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on December 2, 2008
Maybe it’s just me but I could watch this application for hours. It’s so fascinating to have little peeks into other people’s lives and to see where they are in the world. Perhaps it’s the suggested integrity of each person’s post that makes this more compelling to me than the DiggLabs visualizations, but I can’t peel my eyes off the screen long enough to think about it.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on September 4, 2008
NPR reports German social networking site StudiVZ is being sued by FaceBook for User Interface (UI) infringement. This suit marks a shift in thinking towards the value of a user interface. In previous posts we’ve talked about UI as not being defensible. If this lawsuit is successful, we’ll be eating crow. We’re thrilled! Bring on that savory crow fricassee!
(Thanks Adam!)
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on August 16, 2008
For the past few weeks a campaign has been filtering through the blogosphere with exciting speed, reaching the likes of Inhabitat.com, BrandRepublic Treehugger.com and WorldChanging.com.
The ColaLife Campaign started as one man’s idea; to tap into the hugely powerful distribution muscles of multi-nationals such as Coca-Cola, and ask
them to distribute medicines to dying children in developing countries. Through a simple group on Facebook, ColaLife Campaign founder Simon Berry has gained international support and is now in conversations with Coca-Cola! Maybe there is something to this social networking thing after all?
(Thanks Travis!)
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on August 13, 2008
A very popular topic at DUX ’07 was social networking sites. By my informal tally, every presentation of the 3-day conference made at least some reference to Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn and similar sites in order to provide a context to their main subject. I counted 12 presentations that focused specifically on social networking. These lectures addressed issues such as where the space is going and how they’ve been adapted to address traditionally offline tasks, such as smoking cessation. Some examined Second Life, a 3D rendering of Social Network (one of many ways Second Life can be defined). Peter Mortensen and Conrad Wai of Jump Associates gave an interesting presentation on the individual trust social networking sites require for them to be successful.
Bringing this topic back to Tanagram has sparked an exciting debate within our office. Do social networking sites connect or disconnect people? Our staff seems to be divided on this. In the disconnected camp, the argument goes that a Facebook post is short and uninformative. It is a cheap replacement of a phone call that allows me to check in on someone on my time and at my convenience without having any real interaction with that person. I am not required to invest any effort for this interaction and so the value of it is less.
In the connected camp, the argument is that these sites create a new line of communication. People can continue to connect via the phone and email but now you can interact quickly via Facebook to see what a person is up to at this moment. Each form of interaction (social networking, email, phone, blog) has its own value and it is not a choice of either/or communication.
I’m firmly in the latter camp. I do have a Facebook page (go ahead and look me up – I’ll gladly add you as a friend). I admit that I’m not a social networking guru. I’m perplexed by some of the more bizarre interactions it fosters. A couple of my friends – Mark and Andrew – are currently waging between them a month-long zombie war. I see daily updates of this such as: Andrew’s Bishop in the Church of Zombie regulated on Mark’s Lieutenant Zombie! Victory dances ensued. Huzzah! There seems to be no end in sight to this war.
Still, Facebook has allowed me to find friends that I’ve not spoken with in years. I readily admit that some of these friends I would probably never pick up the phone to call because I can’t honestly think of anything I would want to say to them. Perhaps I shouldn’t call them friends anymore? Yet that supposition seems harsh and I do wish them well even though I don’t seek a personal conversation with them. I think there is value in these brief connections allowed by social networking sites. I’m able to see the daily happenings of a friend’s life and I think there is an intrinsic value to this.
What strikes me most about the disconnected argument is that this line of reasoning is quite similar to the arguments against email 10 years ago. Back then email was viewed as a lazy way of writing a letter, lacking any sort of thought or consideration. This too is similar to the debate over proper cell phone etiquette as the mobile device became widespread. Calling a person to chat while you waited for a plane suggested you weren’t willing to invest the time for a proper phone call when you were at home (I believe a Seinfeld episode captured this argument a while back). I think it’s odd we now hold email and phone calls as the ideal alternative to social networking.
Social networking sites, in my opinion, offer a give-and-take proposition that lets us come out ahead. Our interactions through these sites may be less thought-intensive, certainly less self-invested, but they give us much more everyday connection. Since we don’t live our lives in a vacuum – seeing some friends on Facebook but also communicating with them via email, phone, and in person – it is possible to augment our relationships through these sites.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on November 29, 2007
DUX 2007 is a wrap. We came, we saw, we laughed, we loved, and we even learned. I thought I would spend a few characters writing up some observations. I think first, it’s always important to understand the massive amount of work that goes into putting together one of these events and I know the team that gave us DUX ‘07 was spared no amount of grief. They did a truly admirable job and I would like to thank them.
Thank you!
DUX is not TED, nor is it HCI International, but instead fits nicely in-between them where Living Surfaces used to flourish. A day doesn’t pass when I don’t reminisce about the buzzing energy and enthusiasm for all things interactive that used to eek out of every corner of the Living Surfaces conferences but that’s a story for another time. DUX ‘07 had a nice mixture of creative sensitivity (design) and scientific reason. There were discussions about robots designed to dance with humans, the definition of simplicity, and a ton of thinking done on social networking; fun stuff. Presentations were an interesting mix (about half and half) of representatives of corporate giants and student masters theses. There was a smattering of cool independents, but I couldn’t help cringing when yet another Google or Yahoo! employee got up and started speaking. To further emphasize the vortexes they represent Google even put job postings on the give-away jump drives presented to each attendee. Yikes!
I’d have to say my only complaint about the proceedings was the same one I have at all of the UX / HCI / Ergonomics / etc. conferences; a lack of attention to a few key details. We are experience designers, we care about all of the aspects of interaction and communication and yet repeatedly show a lack of concern for the experience of our conference attendees. For some reason, they decided to pass out printed cards after each speaker’s presentation that were gathered for the purposes of a Q & A session afterwards. This didn’t work out once, questions were poorly worded, lacked relevance, and were often too lengthy to merit responses. The fall-back became, “We’ll post your questions and the answers on the blog.” Why didn’t someone use a live blog to capture questions from cell phones? They could’ve even designed a cool concept to facilitate live conversations the moment the topic was hot in our minds. Real conversations are good things, right?
The other thing that kills me is when the logistics folks provide a really cool looking slide advance gizmo that none of the presenters could use. Yes, I’ve seen this before. The best part is that no one noticed (except for the audience who had to wait for each presenter to regain their momentum after a pooched slide) that there was an issue with the control and made an attempt to correct it. Some presenters in later sessions were even refusing to use the little UFO shaped thing-a-ma-jig.
I realize this is really silly, petty stuff but for me user experience is all about the little stuff. It’s the little stuff that dents brands. Catching the little stuff means you are passionate and engaged and excited about your craft and the industry. This was never a problem at Living Surfaces.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on November 7, 2007
You may have noticed that Vertical Advertising Networks are becoming very popular these days. What’s that? Never heard of a VAN? That’s because it’s the more accurate name for what is popularly being called Social Networking. These information systems are designed to connect people of like minds and interests to share and discuss views in an almost addictive manner.
Their dirty secret is that when they get a bunch of similar minded people into a “room” together advertisers will pay through the nose to expose their messages to them. Why? It’s simple. Advertising these days is extremely targeted and the likelihood of an ad impression becoming a conversion is significantly improved when the recipient of the message shares interests with the advertisement’s target demographic. Simply put, we buy things that are meaningful to us, not someone else. Advertisers spend a lot of money to figure us out so they can make their products relevant to us. You see where I’m going…
We at Tanagram Partners are deeply enmeshed in the VAN phenomenon and have had to face some frightening questions. If you architect an application to maximize ad views are you sacrificing the user experience? The answer, I’m happy to say is no. Why? Because advertising can be a component of an experience without destroying it.
We’ve all seen the interstitial advertising screens that take up the entire screen and make users wait to get to content. I’m not talking about those. Those ARE evil. Instead I’m talking about an image gallery that is designed so that each time the user views a new image a new advertisement is served. I’m talking about a sponsored list of “Ten useful things things to take to the beach” brought to you by Coppertone. We’ve found that users are willing to accept the advertisement or sponsorship as a key component of an experience if they get something useful from it. Users told us that they would value a list of useful things if no more than one of the items on the list was a product manufactured by the sponsor. Users also told us if the advertisement gets in the way, like those ads that move all over the screen or expand to cover content that they will go elsewhere for their content.
The trick to managing this fickle relationship is to maximize the value without overstepping the bounds of common courtesy. Some advertisers are still learning proper internet etiquette when they create an advertisement that metaphorically enters a library with a bullhorn and dances on your book as you read it. We as user advocates can help them.
Please help them.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on September 25, 2007
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