From March 11^th-March 15^th I had the opportunity to attend SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX. SXSW, as described by closing speaker Bruce Sterling is “the epicenter of the web universe.” SXSW has become the conference for all things interactive. This was my first time in Austin, as well as my first time at SXSW.   SXSW is definitely not your “run-of-the-mill” conference. If conferences were drinks, SXSW would be a triple-shot espresso (or a Four Locos if you are into that sort of thing). There is always something going on, it starts at 9 a.m. and runs until 4 a.m. and there are more people and things to see than one really knows what to do with. To be honest, it can be a bit intimidating for the first day or two. However, here are a few tips from my first SXSW experience to help other newbies get in the groove and conquer the five day madness:

1.       Plan! Plan! Plan! – Most conferences have a few tracks that you can follow for specific interest, SXSW has… about 80 (slight exaggeration). It is really important to determine which sessions and panels you are most interested in and schedule them into your day.  It is also important to note that the sessions occur in various locations throughout the city, so pay attention to where a session is located and  determine if you need to skip something else (or hustle your pants off) to attend.

2.       Throw the Plan out the Window – I know, I know, I just told you to plan and I sincerely mean it, but be willing to throw that plan out the window. The plan is really important for trying to tackle this event, but once you are there things can change very quickly. Sessions, particularly the highly sought after ones, fill up fast. Once the room is full, it is full and the wonderful SXSW volunteers will close the doors. Be willing to find something else, explore the numerous outside activities and sponsored booths or chat-up someone else that got locked out.

3.       Be nice to the SXSW volunteers – They do not determine fire codes, they are not purposefully keeping you out and they are not being paid. Show them a little kindness, because that is not a job that most would want and Felicia Day was once a SWSX volunteer (Moral-You do not always know who you might be yelling at!).

4.       Don’t be fooled by a snazzy session title – This is the oldest trick in the book: create a really awesome -superly -fantastic –hipster- thrashing-can’t- believe- it’s not- butter of a title for your session to get people to come. Don’t be fooled. Look at the title for general interest and then look to see who is speaking. If it is someone that you have previously heard of, great. If it is not, search out who they are and what they do. This helps determine if the session will actually live up to the title and be beneficial.

5.       Location! Location! Location! – As mentioned above, the sessions are scattered all around the city (on that note: Thanks Austin for being so fantastic about a bunch of nerds taking over your city). If a session is in the Austin Convention Center, it is probably a safe bet in terms of content. If it is located at a gas station (another slight exaggeration) 20 miles away, make sure to do your due diligence on what the session is going to offer and if it is worth the trek.

6.       Go it alone – I am lucky enough to have amazing coworkers who showed me the ropes of SXSW right away. However, if you are not so lucky or have a different sleep schedules or different interests don’t be afraid to divide and concur (Data geeks do not bite).

6 ½. If you see your coworker leave the hotel without a bag, inform them at that moment that you will not be carrying their swag – AKA Do not turn into the pack mule, the days are long and the t-shirts get heavy.

7.       Be realistic – There comes a time in your career when there is not a ton of knowledge to be gained from listening to other people talk about what you do. That said, there is an immense amount to be gained by being around 17k people who are just as excited about the new Foursquare update as you are and what that means for the future of LBS. It is energizing and inspiring and gets your mind racing with ideas and how to execute. If that is not good enough; go to sessions that have nothing to do with what you do. If you are a marketer, go down the development track and vice versa. A conference is only as good as what you are willing to put in, so put in.

8.       Charge! Charge! Charge! – You will use all of your gadgets all of the time, so bring your chargers wherever you go or have backup batteries where applicable. Not having your phone normally is not fun; not having your phone when you are trying to stay connected to your team is awful.

9.       Be about IRL – This is the biggest learning from my first time at SXSW. Meeting people and networking is the heart of SXSW. Make sure you take your nose out of your iPad long enough to actually meet people. Go to parties every night to make connections with people (you can sleep when you get home), take business cards, give business cards, follow people on Twitter right away and be open to making new friends. These friends are possible vendors, clients and partners that share interest in the interactive space. Also, use it as an opportunity to further relationships with people from your neck of the woods. I made great friends with someone from Minneapolis whom I had not previously met and that is an invaluable experience that would likely not be replicable at an in-town event.

Obviously these few tips just begin to break the iceberg that is SXSW. Any other SXSWers out there have additional tips to share for newbies or think that I am way off base: Let me know!  See you next year Driskill Hotel, Austin Convention Center and Bar-B-Q Heaven Food Stand.

How do we design for the realities of human behavior?

That seemed to be the driving theme in BJ Fogg’s Designing for Behavior Change: Human Nature, Hot Triggers and New Habits workshop in Day 3 at UX Week in San Francisco.

The premise was clear: much of first generation of digital design (websites, applications, and related tools) has focused on providing as much information as possible to audiences in order to encourage them to take action. This is commonly referred to as the information (action) fallacy. And it’s been proven to not work. A lot of evidence shows people don’t consume vast amounts of  information in the way that typical information systems present it.

Another reality advertisers are coming to terms with: most research shows attitudinal change in people doesn’t correlate to changing behavior. People generally say one thing, and then do another. In addition, a lot of advertising focuses on enforcing ambient/passive awareness of messages and brands in traditional channels of communication. These also have been proven to not be terribly efficient or effective, either.

So, what really works?

In digital experiences, we need to rethink our context. We need to learn how to trigger able, motivated people to take action while in the normal flow and environment of their habitual lives. To understand this landscape of behavior change in people is to master this guiding principle of designing systems and tools for user experience:

Put “Hot Triggers” in the the path of (able) motivated people.

Let’s start with the “motivated” person. For instance, it’s easier to place carrots or “triggers” in the paths of able, motivated people than it is to go after unmotivated people first, and persuade them to do something differently.

• Example: To encourage bicycle commuting, experience designers hand out easy-to-access bike trail maps to people who own bikes (bike owners are “able”) and want to bike to work (they are also “motivated”), but don’t know the best or most effective routes, or simply need that extra incentive or reason to take action. The activity of the hand out, of course, occurs at the right time–when people are considering their biking routine, for example.

Let’s now talk “Hot Triggers.” Hot triggers are devices that entice, instigate or catalyze action or inaction at the appropriate time (my definition). For example, digital tactics used in the correct context, like email and texting, have proven to be effective in this regard. Mostly because the penetration and adoption of these two channels of communication are so ubiquitous (many of our audiences are ABLE to use these channels). Sometimes these very simple tools are overlooked when trying to engage online audiences. Examples:

• Facebook has mastered email triggers to drive traffic back into the social experience to enhance engagement and encourage ongoing interaction.
• Facebook also uses simple behavioral devices (the ‘Like’ button) to tip users’ affinities in the direction of digital communities they associate with.
• Ebay encourages honest online behavior by incorporating rating systems for buyers to comment on and rank sellers.

Apparently simple stuff, right?

There are a lot more dimensions to this concept that I simply cannot cover in one blog post. So I’ll end by asking some questions that, if answered correctly, can put you on the track to designing better, more productive human behavior in any user experience:

• What behavior do you want to change, or trigger, for your audience?
• What is the simplest behavior that matters to your audience?
• How do you trigger the simplest action for them?
• How do increase your audience’s ability to do something?
• How do you reward or promise to reward your audience?
• How can the little touch points over time create shifts in value exchange for your audiences? For you?

I remember a time when photography was a carefully crafted element of communications. When art directors endlessly perused portfolios to find the shooter that was just right for the job. Today, not so much.

So, is stock photography (often doctored up with photo-shop) good enough? The argument is made that in many applications (online) resolution is too small to really care.  And in an era where consumers have turned into producers, authenticity, no matter how ugly, is beautiful. I disagree.

Inspirational imagery builds brands. It’s our responsibility as marketing consultants to carry this torch in the face of declining budgets and declining expectations. If we don’t believe that it’s worth making the investment in original photography, no one will.  But there’s more: advertising, websites, retail experiences all are part of the pop cultural vernacular. Call me naive; I believe that our responsibility as “commercial artists” doesn’t stop at selling whatever needs to get sold. We can and should make the world a more  beautiful and, ultimately, better place.

Don’t take my word for it. I know you won’t. The argument is better made in Elaine Scarry’s “Beauty and Being Just”.  This elegant manifesto argues that beauty does press us toward a greater concern for justice. Beauty makes us more honest, more judicious, more humble, nicer people. Read it, and next time, talk to a photographer before you go to the stock site.

As everyone has probably heard by now, the famous “Become a Fan” button on Facebook will soon change to a “Like” button. This seemingly insignificant label change is presumably aimed at helping lower the barrier for interaction among Facebook users. No longer are people posed with the internal question “Am I really interested in a page’s content so much as to  become a FAN of the page?” Rather, they probably only will ask themselves “Hey, I LIKE this content and I find it interesting.” The perception change for users probably encourages interaction with content. Facebook has been reportedly notifying agencies of the change and is recommending that they use “Find us on Facebook” or “Like us on Facebook” for the changed verbiage.

But what does it mean for Marketers within Facebook? One could argue this is Facebook’s attempt to better serve users and build user communities, thumbing its nose at what has likely become a key engagement measuring point for brands and companies. It seems people will generally be more inclined to “like” content than become a “fan” of content, because “liking” something is far less committal than becoming a “fan” of something.

This linguistic change poses some interesting depth-of-engagement questions. How does this simple label change affect key performance indicators for a company or brand? More importantly, how does it change the perception of their value to brands and companies? Does it have detrimental or positive effects on the engagement metrics used by Fan Page administrators? And for users, should “Fan Pages” now become “I Like” pages?

Last night I had the fortunate opportunity to attend the local UPA MN lecture where Susan Dray and David Siegel talked about some of the myths of user research.  Without getting into the details of the presentation, their main message was basically don’t always trust research outcomes, no matter how massive or sophisticated they appear.

We work hard to never stop questioning our approaches to defining customer or user experience problems, in addition to our methods in answering them. But as experience design strategists and designers in agency or consultancy settings like Bolin Digital, we often don’t have the luxury of large budgets to help us inform our design decisions for many projects.

In the methods of our work, we rely heavily upon activity-, user-, and system-centered approaches as models to guide us through the forest of decisions. We hope that one of them or a combination of them gets us to the answer quickly.  Paul and I have also chatted about the common sense approach to design: should we  sometimes  rely on our own experience or instinct to guide decision making (also referred to as Dan Saffer’s “genius” centered design approach)? It seems like even this cost-efficient “gut” check, however, can get us into deep water.

As we continue to grow up in a world of increasingly sophisticated interactions and product experiences, it’s important to understand how we arrive at conclusions about which design paths to take.

All this recent thinking provoked me to ask these questions about design research methods and tools: Wwhat’s the best mix of data and methods?  How much of it is driven by common sense? How do we know when we arrive at the best possible solution?

Aside from all the news about Apple’s withdrawal from Macworld and tradeshows in general, as well as the questions surrounding the health of Steve Jobs, there’s been a lot of speculation about what Apple’s next Big Deal is.

How about an enhanced, more evolved, touch screen iMac? This is not a stretch. HP has it. Or maybe you just call it the iPhone. Will Apple will roll out some application that is more intuitive, more useful, more sexy, more capable of complex interactions than current devices out there? How quickly will non-keyboard gestural interfaces become part of the lexicon of computer interaction?  We’ve seen how the iphone technology works with current ergonomics of human movement. Here are some foreseeable extensions of the idea:

• POP swiping and account transacting (e-money services have been popular in Asia for some time)
• Mobile health monitoring that tracks human movement and vitals
• ‘Smart’ apparel that collects numerous points of data from and for people that wear it
• Any type of research requiring micro viewing

These applications are not only forseeable, but require sophisticated new devices to handle enhanced human interaction. The moment of truth: How will a company like Apple strike out on this front? The pressure is on.

If I had one wish for our user experience and design team here at Bolin Marketing, it would be to spend the rest of the year (and quite possibly the next) focusing on how we could extend beneficial online customer experiences that extend beyond the norm: text, image and video content. Smart navigation and interaction design are also (of course) imperative in this equation. But the real silver bullet will lie in smart interaction design that builds a friendly relationship between customers and a company’s products and services.

While working on my draft for part two of my last post on Customer Experience Strategy, I’ve been thinking a lot about how our interactions with products and services have been changing. Then I read Adrian Ho’s post about the psychology of human movement and what this means for companies and their relationships with their customers. Of course, we all think Apple (iphone) and Nintendo (Wii) are leading the charge, with the way they involve natural human gestures as an essential element in how we experience their products. This is the tip of the iceberg. I think it’s pretty safe to say that gesture, movement, and even ritual are becoming part of the lexicon for the design of future customer interactions.

Our Team at Bolin Marketing is always trying to come up with a thoughtful and holistic approach to how we solve marketing problems for our clients. Beyond internet marketing, we’d like to think we’re making big strides in how we can integrate a smart user experience practice as part of the design process for all our clients. But the real challenge is putting this thinking into practice. If ritual, gesture, and nonverbal communication in the physical and digital world are the next frontier for brand/customer strategy, what is the next best way to integrate this thinking into a design process?

There’s a Chinese proverb that states something to the effect of, “If you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other.”  I think that’s a good conceptual framework through which to analyze content management needs.  Content management rhetoric drips of promises of “marketing empowerment”, implying that changing anything on a site through CMS is as easy as rekeying text, and this is the rationale for CMS existence.

Unfortunately, the reality doesn’t often answer the promise.  Rekeying text may be one of the steps involved in making a content edit through a CMS, but the promise fails to address the flexibility limitations of an object oriented data model, the complexity associated with a multi tiered, role based workflow of approvals, and the CMS interface complexity that tends to grow in indirect proportion to functional capability.

Bolin Digital’s president, Dane Hartzell, cites surveys he took part in during his participation in the eBusiness Executive council comprised of interactive directors for many of the largest consumer brands in North America.  When asked if they would recommend their current CMS, whether they be home grown solutions, enterprise level big-players, or otherwise, 0% said they would.

How can each be so dissatisfied across the myriad of solution providers, technology platforms, and broad ranging internal support/administration capabilities?  I personally believe the answer lies within the failure to acknowledge specific needs of each interactive property, and match the solution to that need.  If XYZ corporation has entered a license agreement with a big player CMS, even short lived marketing properties are expected to sit atop that CMS.  High fidelity design and highly interaction oriented web applications tend not to play well with CMS solutions.  At the other end of the spectrum, if I were developing an online property whose purpose was provide access to tens of thousands of content pages, each with shared components, I sure as hell wouldn’t want the entire site hard coded and static (no CMS), especially if there were tiered regulatory approvals required prior to publish.

CMS needs often find their way into a project requirements checklist as a single decision point- does the property need a CMS, or doesn’t it?  How can we better scale the solution to the actual lifespan of the property, the dynamic realities of its existence, the needs of the folks who manage it, and a long list of other considerations?  And in the case of simple web applications, how can we simplify management as much as possible?

We don’t claim that our content admin tool (we don’t refer to it as a CMS) is the end-all, be-all, as we don’t believe there is such a solution.  The point being the solution is scalable, and we will tend toward starting simple.  Marketers need to weigh the CMS needs of a web app on a case by case basis.  On a continuum of simple (think WordPress, Drupal, Joomla) to complex (Microsoft, Oracle/Stellent ECM), know that if you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other.  A long list of functional features tends to come along with complexity, lack of flexibility once implemented, high cost, training, and ongoing support.  Whether you’re an agency, an IT manager, or a client side marketer, are you scaling your content management approach appropriately?

I must admit, I’m sometimes a late adopter when it comes to the newest online trends, tools or chatter about technology. I see this as a strength: it’s good to be skeptical and somewhat critical before jumping on any technology bandwagon. I wasn’t among the first to use twitter, facebook, or myspace, and I JUST finished organizing my personal financial outlook on Mint.

Mint is the perfect tool for people (like me) who have spent an inordinate portion of their lives talking about getting their financial housekeeping in order. It’s amazing. Initially offered as a great personal savings-and-expense management tool, Mint now allows users to track investments and custom categorize individual expense items in a simple, easy-to-use interface. It make suggestions on maximizing savings and indicates if and when expenses are outside my usual spending trends. And as an interactive designer, I appreciate the elegant interface and crisp, clean identity. Centralized self-administered personal finance management for the first time. Talk about exceptional customer experience.

Mint - the revolutionary personal finance organizer.

Granted, I still have to go to each account to move money around. Hmm, another great concept. Is Mint headed in that direction?

There’s been a lot of discussion here at Bolin Digital and Bolin Marketing about what distinguishes Customer experience strategy from brand strategy. How are they different? How are they the same? Does one encompass the other when it comes to interactive marketing?

Let me go out on a limb, kind of: brand and customer experience are vastly different models of thinking about engaging audiences. Okay, maybe that’s not a revolutionary concept. All you have to do is buy into what the guys at Adaptive Path are saying in their latest book. I encourage you to read it, and then think about how traditional brand development has to change, or become something else, in order to connect and drive real value for intended audiences. Brand strategies are typically

• Developed from the center of the organization outward
• Describe attributes of how the organization is different
• Communicate the organization’s perception of itself
• Involve stakeholders close to the product, service, or offering
• Are communicated from the organization to the audience
• Speak in a voice that is characteristic of an organization

Customer experience strategies should really, however, come from a different place. They usually

• Take into account the customer’s perception of a product, service, or company
• Are extremely empathetic to the customer’s needs, wants, opinions and perceptions
• Account for language and concepts that the customer understands
• Involve serious ethnographic research and audience participation
• Create ongoing feedback loops with customers
• Engender a culture of customer-centricity in everything an organization does.

We’ve heard it over and over. Companies want to differentiate. Old methods of differentiation are not so different any more. Customer centricity is the new black. There has been so much talk these days about customer centric approaches for everything from product design to marketing communications. The ironic thing is that very few organizations have begun to put any of this to practice.

Next time we’ll discuss some examples of how brand strategies fail to see the whole picture. We’ll also review some examples of organizations who have make customer experience the heart of what they do.