I am the Place
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2011 talk to Chicago Tech Week on designing information for place
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I am the Place
- 1. Techweek 2011 | discover + innovate + connect I am the place delivering information to a mobile society
- 3. Saturday MatineeMovie of the WeekVCR / Cable / PPV
- 4. analog to digital P L A C E iTunes Netflix Streaming Hulu Plus HBO GO MLB.com at Bat ABC Player XFINITY TV WatchESPN
- 11. Content = relevant information User Experience
- 12. Content = relevant information User Experience = consume information
- 13. Experience Models / Consumer Journey
- 14. Consumer Journey = Funnel
- 15. Experience Model = User Process
- 16. http://www.labnol.org/internet/blogging/day-in-life-of-part-time-blogger-with-job/4720/ Day in the Life = Timeline
- 17. research : BIG or small
- 18. I am the place finally -- it’s all about me!!! alicetoth@me.com
Editor's Notes
- I’d like to talk to you today about information and place and our association between the two. Or rather, how as a society we’re decoupling the two and what that means for our users’ expectations and, ultimately, how we design digital products Information and Place is an idea that’s been noodling around in my head for a while -- actually, what started me thinking down this path was when a friend made a comment about his little girl being very comfortable watching movies wherever she finds herself and not thinking it’s odd
- In her mind, watching movies is not something that’s associated with a specific place. After all, why would she? her first experience with movies was in an iPod touch and she’s now progressed to the iPad. In other words, the movies come to her regardless of where she’s at. This is a new mental model. It seems radical, but in many ways its just a continuation of progress.
- Let’s stick with movies for a minute. Think about it -- when we were kids, we had our time and place to watch movies. [CLICK] For my mom’s generation, it was Saturday matinees and the local cinema. When I was growing up, Sunday night meant sitting in the living room with the family [CLICK] and watching the Movie of the Week on t.v.. Still a strong connection between time and place -- but the place had now moved into the home adding some level of convenience. If you missed the movie at the theater, you just waited until a time when the networks chose to air it. Time, therefore, -- the airing time -- was still decided by someone else, but the place was yours. [CLICK] A couple of other innovations that continued unraveling the tight integration of time and place: VCRs. Pay per View. Cable. We were no longer dependent on one specific time that someone else chose to show the movie -- granted, we were still tied to a place but time was more fluid in that we now had the ability to watch a movie when we wanted to and as often as we wanted to. Time was now decided by us.
- Place began to become a little more fluid with the switch from analog to digital. With DVDs we began to move out of the living room and watch movies on the computer or take it with us on the laptop or portable DVD player. It was now possible to take the movies with us and watch them when and where it fit into our schedule. Granted, we were still dependent on the hours posted by the video store, at least until NetFlix came along, but with DVDs came the idea that you didn’t have to be in your house or a theater in order to have watch a movie. Progressing right along, the expansion of mobile devices along with the greater accessibility to WiFi succeeded in cutting the ties once and for all between information and place. [CLICK] Progressing right along, the expansion of mobile devices along with the greater accessibility to WiFi succeeded in cutting the ties once and for all between information and place. Thanks to the ever growing list of available products, we can customize our viewing experience to exactly suit our needs. [iPad apps] But it actually goes beyond being able to customize it, we expect it. [CLICK] But it’s not just entertainment that is unraveling time and place and making this new paradigm the norm. We’re seeing it in the medical field with their greater adoption of digital and better integration of information systems. Heart monitors that collect data on a watch-like device and transmit it to the medical center via an application on the patient’s smart phone. Their doctor can access charts and graphs of an individual’s vital signs from any internet-connected device and make decisions in real time. That’s incredible - talk about removing constraints of time and place. In fact, It may be in the future that making a doctor’s appt will be viewed as quaint and as old fashioned as winding your watch. So back to my friend’s daughter [CLICK]
- she’s only 4 so she probably wouldn’t put it this way I’ll bet she thinks that it’s her inalienable right to have information available when and where she wants to -- car, restaurant, park, or living room -- it should be there, when she’s ready for it. And why wouldn’t she think this way -- she is growing up watching her parents search for and find information that’s relevant to the moment -- driving direction, making reservations, texting meetup info -- the list is almost limitless.
- It’s small wonder she’s associating information with where she’s at – she IS the place. Information being delivered where I’m at and in a form that’s relevant to my needs. This mindset is what is fast becoming the norm -- the mental model we need to design for. So yes, progress and innovation have moved us towards this direction, but a major factor in allowing us to move beyond our four walls and redefine our definition of place was the Internet.
- Mentally it expanded our view beyond anything previously experienced -- in our lifetime at least. The telegraph and telephone are the previous paradigm leaping inventions that I can think of. But with the WWW, from my living room I now had instant access to information from all over the world. And not just hard core data or informational data, but anecdotal vignettes generated by people half a world away -- or right down the block. It humanized the experience. It made it more personal. It kept us coming back. [CLICK] Of course, when the web first began appearing in our consciousness, it was enough for companies just to have a website. That was extremely progressive and as users we really weren’t too sure what to do with it. In fact, if you were designing back then you generally started a project with the end solution in mind -- Let’s build a website!! Who’s going to use it? who cares. What will be on it? don’t know -- We just want one. Our mindset was product focused and actually a 1:1 focus - one website on one device. And this type of thinking worked for a while because (a) the web was new so there were no expectations and (b) browsers were only on one type of device -- the desktop computer -- and honestly our main worry back then was just getting the site to uniformly display across different browsers and platforms. And for anyone who’s still designing for IE6, you know exactly what I mean. Back then, that the users may have seen relevant data, well, that was just icing on the cake. They certainly weren’t expecting it -- it was a novelty. [CLICK] As more and more sites began to be built, our expectations moved beyond the novelty of the device into the belief that anyone should be able to turn to the computer at anytime to find information. It’s become part of our lexicon -- Look on the Web. Google It. What does Wikipedia say? Here’s another shift in information and place -- the web evolves into a research tool. I no longer have to go into the library during the hours that it’s open and stand in front of the card index to hunt for books that may or may not give me the answers. I could now put in a search query and have more information returned to me than I knew what to do with. Is it good? relevant? worthwhile? Meh. Usually yes, sometimes no but the results can send you off in directions you may not have originally planned, and that’s not necessarily bad. We’ve now arrived at this point where we expect to have information accessible with the mere touch of an Enter button.
- And we brought these expectations with us into the mobile realm and evolved it into a 24/7 expectation of accessibility. As far as we’re concerned, matter what you want to do, there’s probably an app for that and if not, then life is suddenly very annoying. Apple definitely raised the expectations there. But it even goes beyond the 24/7 availability. We now want to access information seamlessly throughout the day with each subsequent device being smart enough to know where we left off from the previous one. Smart information so I don’t have to backtrack. [intelligent service system -- ambient intelligence]
- This ad perfectly portrays what I’m talking about [PLAY VIDEO] Here's the new norm -- place is where I'm at and I expect the information to be there as well ... Wherever there is So if this ad is a snapshot of where we’re at, or where the users expect us to be, the relevant question now is: how do we design for this new paradigm?
- Too often we fall into the mode of thinking of the solution first -- the equivalent of saying let’s build a website! or to modernize it, let’s build a mobile app!! Focusing on the solution first falls into the old mindset of information always having a place and disregards the fact that users want to experience the information when it’s most relevant to them and their needs. That’s was we need to focus on -- streamlining the delivery of information into a focused experience that best suits the user’s needs. [CLICK] So where to start? Well rather than starting with the solution, let’s begin with key elements: Content and User Expectations
- Content: what information do we have that’s relevant to the experience/brand/feature. Too often on desktop sites we try to cram as much information on there as possible -- the veritable kitchen sink as it were. Whether it’s valuable or not is another story, at least with it being on there we’ve covered everything, or so the thinking goes. But with mobile, we need to be a bit more particular about the what and when of information display. Screens are smaller and at least as of now, users are less inclined to browse on a smartphone or tablet.
- User expectations : how a user expects to experience your content. Who are your users? What are their needs? How do they consume information? What device are they using and how are they using it? The combination of these two will shed light on when, where and how to deliver information. Think of that NFL video -- and then think of all the different types of info that the NFL has. Player stats; game stats; realt-time updates; schedules; videos; news; blogs; opinions; fantasy football; fear mongering headlines such as: “With a healthy defense, the Packers could be better in 2011 than they were when they won the Super Bowl” And the video showed how all of this could be accessed -- it showed how their information was being consumed; it showed the consumer journey through the digital space.
- How the information is consumed. In order to figure out how the information will be consumed you’ll need to look into where you users are at -- the touchpoints in their day, week, life, whatever where they will seek out your information. It could be something as simple as ‘bored while waiting for the bus’ -- but that’s a touchpoint. This is where we start getting into experience models or consumer journeys or day in the life -- user-centric tool that helps you understand your user’s mental model, i.e., when and where they expect informaiton. They’ll show the user’s activities/thinking and identify those touchpoints where and how a user would be most inclined to interact with your product.
- how to get this data? Well, ethnographic studies are a good start[ CLICK] but if your research budget isn’t unlimited, try and find user proxies. Designing something for teenagers? And you have a teenager? or your nephew is that age? Use them as a focus group. Nothing says you can’t corral family members to help you out. Designing for senior citizens? Ask at the retirement home if you can conduct a survey. All they can do is say no and in any event, I’ll bet the senior citizens living there would love it. It may not be ideal in that your data sample may be small, but it’ll give you a start in understanding how your target audience thinks and acts and their expectations. IN other words, don’t let not having a budget hold you back from researching how your target audience thinks and acts.
- I’ve been in the web world since 1994 and what we’re going through right now is I think even more exciting than when if first started because now it’s no longer a novelty or something those crazy geeky kids are doing, it’s built into our lifestyle. Because of this, more than ever I believe that If we don’t understand how and why users want to interact with our information, we won’t be able to design the best means to deliver it.