The Power of Inclusion: Why Having Your People Matters

The Next Big Thing in User Experience, Part 1

Why Emerging Technologies Are the Next Great Frontier for UX

Traditional User Experience Is at a Crossroads, Part 2

UIE Article: Design’s Fully-Baked Deliverables and Half-Baked Artifacts

In this week’s article, I revisit the topic of artifacts and deliverables within the design process.

Here’s an excerpt from the article

Deliverables are how we tell the story of what the design will be. Of course, the classic deliverable is the finished product itself. Nothing tells the story of the design better than the product.

In the days of old, the finished product was the only deliverable. There were no plans or blueprints, just what the craftsman completed.

Collaboration across the organization changed all that. Others needed to know our intention—what we wanted the design to be. Thus, intermediate deliverables were born.

Read the article: Design’s Fully-Baked Deliverables and Half-Baked Artifacts

How have deliverables changed since you started designing? Tell us about it below.

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Client Experience Design

Accessibility: Improving The UX For Color-Blind Users

A Roadmap To Building A Delightful Onboarding Experience For Mobile App Users

How User Segmentation Really Works in Content Marketing

Successful marketing is all about laser-targeting a niche and then making the most out of it with regard to engagement and profits.

If you’re like me, you’ve learned by now that holding up a mirror to people’s dreams, values, and desires is the one thing that will have people flocking to you a la the Pied Piper. That being said, I see a lot of marketers throw everything and the kitchen sink at the wall in the hopes that something will stick. That approach not only wastes time, but it wastes resources that could be used in more profitable ways.

User segmentation isn’t something that is alien in the marketing world. The big brands have this down to a T, and the little guys are just waking up to the power behind having a laser-focused strategy — laser-focused on user segmentation.

How does this work?

For some motivation, let’s turn to brands that are doing it right.

Mercedes-Benz, the famous German luxury car manufacturer, uses market segmentation to make sure that its content is seen by the people who have the money to purchase a high-end car and are primed to identify quality. Mercedes-Benz realizes how success, the desire for luxury, and the best of the best are prevalent within segments of Generation X and Y who number in the tens of millions in the United States. It locks into this target demographic by offering a vehicle with an affordable price point, creating a customer-brand relationship at a young age. As this demographic gets older, the car company slowly increases the prices of future models, knowing that this group — now customers — will keep buying Mercedes-Benz vehicles given their tendency to want to keep up with the Joneses.

Generation Benz, an online community created by the manufacturer, is a way to bring together similarly minded individuals and create an informal social media place, which also serves as a way to collect insights on current and future Benz fanboys.

On top of that, Mercedes has made sure that it dominated areas such as the Super Bowl as well as prime-time ad slots for maximum visibility in front of the aspirational group of Generation X and Y.

Source

Thanks to its hard work, Mercedes Benz was able to achieve:

• More than a million views online of the new CLA model
• More than 300,000 models of the car built in its online portal
• A younger demographic (The average age of people who showed interest in the campaign was 46, an 11-year drop from the average age of people who showed interest in previous campaigns.)
• Highest number of visits to MBUSA.com compared to any other period in its history
• 82% conquest rate, which essentially means that it was able to convince a new niche of buyers to go for the CLA model

Developing a successful content marketing strategy is no different. You have to hone in in a surgical manner when it comes to your preferred client base in order to hit the jackpot.

While narrowing down your audience, you have to answer basic questions such as:

• Which age range should we target?
• Which cultural era did these people grow up in, when it comes to media and products?
• Which part of the world or country are these people most likely to live in?
• What motivates them to make a certain purchase?
• What price points are they most likely to go for without straining their wallets?
• What problem(s) are they looking to solve with this product or service?
• Can I relate to this market segment?

You must develop a clear strategy from the get-go, or you will fail. In addition, if you really don’t know which user segment to target, you may want to consider testing a few segments before singling one out. This will take some time, but it’s better than throwing money and energy on one niche only to find out months later that it’s a dud.

Do a simple Google search or rely on data-heavy apps such as Quora and Tapatalk to identify major forums where your audience or subjects may be discussed. Use the search functions in these apps and type in a few interests to see what types of questions people are asking, and the kind of help they are looking to get from other senior users.

Now let’s take a look at how to use user segmentation to get to the Promised Land:

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More Than Personas: How to Know What Your Audience Really Wants

1.   Use your brand voice to restate what user segments want and are looking for

From the moment that clients-to-be access your site, they should be able to see themselves. A landing page could highlight a series of questions they may be grappling with or a video that presents a simple solution to their problem (with the solution only partly visible).

If you are targeting two or more user segments, don’t forget to ask visitors to enter information about themselves before moving forward. Ask them a few questions to identify which segment they fall into (e.g., age, problem needing solution, geographic area). That way you can put them on a more effective journey within your site.

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2. Regardless of segmentation, maintain a focus on a streamlined and usable user experience

Information fatigue is something that’s common in today’s ADHD world. The last thing people want to see the moment they access your site is an avalanche of information that paralyzes them.

Simplicity is the best way to go with regard to segmentation, if not all of marketing. Keep your website clean, uncluttered and matter-of-fact, without compromising on important aspects such as design and interactive ability.

Should you want to share more information on the site, use “read more” hyperlinks as well as a content vault or hub that provides dozens of articles on their specific needs, safely tucked away at a discreet but prominent side of the website.

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3. Regularly find out how user segments are changing

If you build it, they will come, right? But how long will they stay? Identifying and attracting the right segment is just the beginning of your content marketing game; you now have to keep these people happy, sated, and engaged.

Ask them what they would like to see more of from your content, and what other problems they may have and are looking to have solved. You can secure this information via an email list that allows for feedback or blog posts that encourage comments and discussion.

In addition, continue to refine the user segments so you can hone in on an even more profitable sub-market, effectively weeding out poorly performing or non-responsive individuals in the bigger niche. Casting a wide net before you narrow it will help you become an expert in your field and the go-to guy online via recommendations by word-of-mouth or social media.

Conclusion

User segmentation is something akin to an art, mixed in with the ability to collect data, all the while being able to feel out people’s psychological motivations.

It is imperative that you get clear on what you want to achieve, the numbers you are looking to target, what your long-term segmentation goals are, and how to preemptively douse any fires you may encounter along the way.

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What are some of the challenges you’ve encountered in user segmentation?

Let CMI help you stay on top of your user segmentation and other key components of your content marketing strategy. Subscribe to our free daily or weekly newsletter.

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31 Types of Content We Crave [Infographic]

Can you imagine what it would be like to not just have an audience consume your content, but to crave it?

Well, if you apply what I am about to reveal to you, then your content could become much more craveable. (English majors: Please don’t hate me. According to Dictionary.com, Random House Dictionary 2016 edition, “craveable” is a word.)

Four years ago, I shared that your content must resonate with your audience so they follow you where you want to take them.

I also asked what kind of content universally resonates with people. It’s content that:

• We never get tired of
• We always have time for  
• We don’t forget
• We want to share with others

This is the kind of content we must create if our goal is to influence, inspire, and move to action the unique group of people we have chosen to reach.

To help, I originally created a list of 21 types of content we all love to consume.

Do these types of content still resonate with people? Absolutely. But other types can help marketers as well, which is why I created a follow-up infographic with additional content types.

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More types of content we all crave

I thought a lot about other types of content we all crave. I’ve come up with another 10 powerful types.

The 31 types of craveable content can be used in many ways and in many forms (stories are just one way we can harness their power). However, I will simply share the most powerful way – use them to frame your content. Use these types of content to create the lens through which your audience perceives the rest of your content.

As legendary advertising executive Leo Burnett said, “Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read.”

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Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read via @LeoBurnett #content
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If you employ the types of content we crave, then you’ll be able to create content like you never have. It doesn’t matter whether the content is words on a screen (or paper), audio, or video. These types of content work in any and all forms.

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My challenge to you

Print this list and put it somewhere you can see it regularly to help you develop irresistible content as part of your content marketing strategy.

Regularly pick one or more items from this list and ask yourself one of these questions:

1. Does the content I am writing meet this criteria?
2. What can I do to make the content I’m creating fall under this category?

What types of craveable content do you use that isn’t on the list? Share in the comments along with your examples of content you crave.

Looking for more insight on creating craveable content? CMI’s 2016 Content Marketing Playbook has tips, insights, and ideas that can help increase your success with 24 of the top content marketing tactics.

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The Content Marketing Book of Answers: Strategy & Planning

No matter how familiar you may be with the principles and potential benefits of content marketing, it’s natural for questions to arise when it’s time to get hands-on and apply the techniques in a real-world setting. The CMI team thought it would be helpful to build a road map of sorts to help you track down answers you’ll likely need along the way.

Let’s start with some considerations we hear marketers asking about all the time: How to manage the strategic planning process.

Content marketing strategy

Q: How do we get started?

The first step in getting started with content marketing is so simple that it often gets overlooked: You need to make sure you have a clear definition of what content marketing is, as well as what it isn’t (for example, it’s definitely not native advertising). Otherwise, you will always struggle to understand what goals to pursue, determine how well your efforts are performing, and get the necessary buy-in from your company’s stakeholders.

Another element that is essential if you want your content efforts to contribute to the business’ goals is a content marketing strategy. In fact, in our 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends research, we found that 53% of the most effective marketers are those who have planned their strategy and documented it so their team can reference it on an ongoing basis.

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Find more answers: If you want additional clarity on the content marketing process, as well as step-by-step guidance for managing its most essential components — CMI’s Back-to-Basics series is a great place to start.

Q: Is a content marketing strategy the same thing as a content strategy?

While people often use these terms interchangeably (which is understandable, as the lines are somewhat blurry), content marketing and content strategy are two different practices.

CMI typically defines content marketing as creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action. A content marketing strategy is a plan specifically focused on what content to build — and how to apply it — to achieve that objective.

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Content strategy, on the other hand, delves deeper into the creation, publication, and governance of that usable content, seeking to manage it as a strategic asset across the entirety of the organization.

Find more answers: Razorfish strategist Melanie Seibert breaks down the similarities and differences between the two, and discusses where content marketing fits in with other related business roles. You can also use this chart she created as a cheat sheet.

Q: What information should our content marketing strategy include?

While there are no definitive templates for building a content marketing strategy (each one will be unique to the business), some key components typically include:

1. Your business case: Outline what you expect content marketing to help your business achieve, explain why you believe it is a technique worth exploring, and offer evidence to support your claims. The business case is critical for gaining executive buy-in to build and run your content marketing program the right way.

2. A business plan: Detail how you will use content to achieve the goals you’ve outlined. Include a summary of the specific goals, the value you expect your content to provide for your audience, and how your efforts will align with your company’s overarching marketing plan.

3. Your personas: These composite sketches identify and characterize the audience segments to target with your content. They actively inform your strategy and drive buyer engagement.

4. Your brand’s editorial mission: Outline who you are as a company, the ideas and messages you want to communicate through your content, and the impact you expect them to have on your audience. This is your guiding light whenever you create a piece of content and should be the measuring stick by which you evaluate its potential worth.

5. A channel plan: Govern where, why, and how you will distribute your content, and include the platforms you will use to tell your story, as well as the criteria, processes, tone, and objectives for each one.

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Find more answers: Our guide to developing a content marketing strategy offers more detail on each of these key components, along with a clip-and-save list of key strategy takeaways (shared below).

Need help developing your strategy? Our e-book, The Essentials of a Documented Content Marketing Strategy, can walk you through the process.

Q: How do we get the necessary executive support for our program?

Many companies begin content marketing with a pilot program, testing the waters and gathering evidence to convince stakeholders of its potential for success. But if you want to get the approval, budget, and participation, you need to run a successful program over the long-term. It’s helpful to set expectations right from the beginning by presenting executives with a clear and compelling business case.

While the points will vary based on your company’s priorities and marketing goals, in general these buy-in conversations should cover issues such as:

• Why your company needs content marketing – for example, you can point out how integral it has become to remaining competitive in any industry and the important role it can play in consumers’ purchasing process

• How it can help your organizations meet its marketing goals – for example, you can discuss the role content plays in building positive brand perception or how it can be used to drive increased engagement — particularly when marketing to younger demographics

• The budget and resources you will need to execute on your strategy effectively — including staff, materials, and media

• Your expectations for success – what results you see your efforts achieving and how long you expect it to take for those results to be realized

The following checklist can help you assure stakeholders that you have positioned your content marketing strategy for optimal success. You may not be able to get every element in place before you ask executives for their support, but the more boxes you can check, the more effective your content marketing program buy-in pitch is likely to be.

Find more answers: Check out our essential starter kit for stats, talking points, and helpful tips to build your business case for content marketing.  

Q: How can our content help us stand out from our competition?

As part of your strategy development process, it can be useful to identify your content tilt — the unique perspective you have on your business niche and unique value your content will provide for your target audience. This distinguishes your content from that of your competitors as well as from other distractions that compete for consumer attention.

As Joe Pulizzi often mentions, all content marketers should ask themselves, “Can we be the leading informational provider in our subject area?” If you don’t believe your content marketing plan will enable you to “own” the relevant conversations in your chosen niche, you may want to drill down and find a more narrow focus where your content will have a bigger impact on the audience.

Here are some things to consider when searching for your ideal content tilt:

• Your audience: Identify a segment of your customer base for which your perspective will be uniquely relevant and useful.

• Your story angle: Is there a different spin your company can put on the topics commonly discussed and/or debated in your industry?

• Your content platforms: Is there an opportunity to explore a new channel or content format that your competitors aren’t using?

• Your subject matter: Are there areas of your industry that other companies are overlooking in the content they publish?

Once you’ve discovered your content tilt, it will be easier to identify opportunities to delight readers with content they need – and can’t get anywhere else.

Find more answers: Joe’s Content Inc. blog offers more epic insights, examples, and inspiration to help you discover your content tilt and apply it to create a more successful content marketing strategy.

Q: How can we ensure that our content will stay on-strategy?

Once you’ve defined your strategy, target audience, and content tilt, you can start to plan topics, ideas, and approaches on which your content marketing efforts will focus.

At the same time, you probably recognize that not all content ideas will be equally worth pursuing. For example, some content pieces (like videos or podcasts) may require more production resources than you have available; others may be well within your team’s capabilities but might not be the best fit for your target audience; and some ideas might be brilliantly creative but just aren’t likely to have the bottom-line impact you are looking to achieve.

It may be helpful to put a system in place for gauging the relative value of all your content ideas and keeping them on track with the marketing outcomes you want to achieve.

For example, Brain Traffic’s lead content strategist Meghan Casey has crafted a content decision-making matrix, which her team uses to evaluate and prioritize their story ideas. Each idea is given a numerical score based on its capacity to serve the needs of the target audience while also contributing to your own business goals.

To use the matrix, display it on a screen or whiteboard, and talk through each topic or content idea as a group. Through discussion, have stakeholders agree to a score for each idea on a scale of 1-5. Meghan recommends discarding ideas with a total score of 3 or less, as they are unlikely to perform well against your strategic goals. She also suggests using the total score as a means of prioritizing the ideas you should move forward with.

Find more answers: Once you have selected your ideal topics and ideas, you still need to determine the formats you will use to craft your stories. Our 2016 Content Marketing Playbook serves as an excellent guide to choosing the best formats for achieving various audience goals.

Audience questions

A basic tenet of content marketing is that you need to understand — and create content specifically for — the consumers you want to reach. Seems easy; but gathering, prioritizing, and applying the necessary insights to build a solid content plan can take some significant legwork.

Q: How do we determine our best target audience?

As mentioned, your strategy needs to include how your content will help you achieve your business goals. The next step is to identify your core customer base — i.e., the target audience you think you can help the most.

To zero in on your target audience, consider these issues:

• Are there relevant yet underserved audiences who aren’t getting the information they need from other sources?
• What customer group is your business struggling the most to gain traction with? Can content help you bridge this gap?
• If you didn’t provide content for this audience, would they care or notice? Can you become the leading information resource for this customer base?

Find more answers: It’s possible that you will find more than one audience that fits these criteria. While you may be tempted to target multiple personas, you could risk watering down the impact of the content you create. Follow the advice Joe shares as part of his Content Inc. model: First, focus on building a strong, loyal relationship with your core audience, and then expand your content initiatives to target additional customer groups.

Q: How do we create a buyer persona?

Persona development is often thought of as a customized process that “thins the herd,” as it’s meant to provide your team with a clear picture of one type of person your content can help the most.

As Marketing Interaction’s CEO Ardath Albee explains, to get value from your personas, you need to create them with enough depth and insight to enable your team to generate content ideas and topics that resonate. You also should be able to use them to help visualize the specific situations your target audience may be experiencing in their current user state. To create richer, more actionable personas, Ardath recommends using the following nine-part approach:

1. State the persona’s specific objectives. Give content creators something insightful and targeted that they can use when crafting content ideas.

2. State the persona’s main problems. If you were asked to write something helpful for readers you’ve never met, which problem description would you rather be handed?

3. State the persona’s orientation toward their job. The more details about the persona’s professional demeanor, the more that persona can help your team decide what content to create and how to communicate in a way that engages the people your company wants to connect with.

4. State the persona’s relevant obstacles. Instead of broad concerns like price, focus on things that get in the way at each funnel stage and prevent your persona from moving forward with their decision-making process.

5. State the persona’s burning questions. Not only will this help you create content that informs your prospective customers, it also informs you about where those prospects are in the buying cycle.

6. State the persona’s content preferences. Include details like their favorite content channels, the social networks they are most likely to use, the tone and style that resonate most strongly with them, the content formats they prefer to engage with, etc.

7. State keywords and phrases the persona would use. Ask yourself, “What are they most inclined to type into that search box?” and capture the most telling phrases.

8. Sketch engagement scenarios for the persona. Visualizing ways in which your persona might want to interact with your content over time helps you imagine useful ways to link that content into a cohesive plan.

9. Create a day-in-the-life scenario. By crafting a real-life situation your persona may be experiencing, you enable your content creators to truly understand how the content might impact the persona’s everyday goals and challenges.

Find more answers: For additional information to include in your personas, as well as a rundown of how to gather the audience insights, check out the second part of Ardath’s discussion on persona development: How to Build Buyer Personas That Build Sales.

What questions are you looking to answer?

While the previous questions tackle some of the biggest strategy and planning issues in content marketing, they are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to everything content marketers need to know to be successful at their craft. If there are other questions you would like to ask, feel free to add them in the comments. And keep an eye out for upcoming Book of Answers posts where we’ll tackle questions about teams and processes, content creation, content distribution, and content measurement.

Want to get more examples, tips, and insight to continually support your content marketing program? Subscribe to the free daily or weekly newsletter.

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The post The Content Marketing Book of Answers: Strategy & Planning appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

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Second-hand UX

Something that I feel is overlooked by a lot of product designers is the second-hand experience of their product. That is to say, above and beyond the target user, who is affected by the product—and most importantly—what is their experience?

If the UX team has satisfied all the needs and desires of the target user, minimized their pain-points, and maximized their ability to enjoy the most common process flows, that is truly awesome—but how does the experience they design affect that person’s social circle? Do product designers currently see that as a question worth spending additional time and resources to answer?

The classical method of product design is for design considerations to be dictated by our insights regarding the target user, as well as the goals (often monetary goals) of internal stakeholders. But as tech continually permeates our lives in an increasingly personal fashion, I believe the need for second-hand experience analysis will begin to shine through.

The power of shared experiences

The experience of the target user is not isolated from the experience of the indirect user. Whether it happens immediately or eventually, the two experiences affect and influence each other.

The target user, as entranced as they may be by their own experience, will continually receive feedback from others who were witness to this experience and will begin to judge the primary experience not only from their own frame of view but also from feedback received from constituents of their social ecosystem. The final verdict on an experience is often a group effort.

The need for second-hand UX

The need for greater focus on second-hand user experience is real. Many existing products already demonstrate a gap in the experience that affects indirect users.

One easy example of this might be the prevalence of texting and how it affects secondary users. What started as a flicker of excitement with the invention of smartphones (even if they were flip phones, sliders, or some other sort of archaic paperweight) has grown into something that has become a contentious social (and sometimes physical) habit.

Whether texting is positive or negative as a whole is a subjective judgement which requires a certain scope to even make a judgement feasible. For example, in a very surface-level, everyday efficiency scope, is texting positive? Probably so, at least for the direct user. But within a different scope, one that perhaps takes a look at the sociological/psychological effects of texting, would you come to the same judgement? Maybe, maybe not, but you’d certainly give it more thought.

Common responses to these deeper-level scopes consider issues such as how mobile phone usage creates a social distance between the primary user and secondary users. The dynamic, generally speaking, encourages less frequent and more shallow interaction between the person using the mobile device and the other people that may be around them. How often do you see people over-indulge in their electronic devices at the expense of paying attention to those around them?

Think back on personal situations where you might have been the secondary user. How did your feelings change towards the primary user? How about toward the product itself?

The smartphone—something that was intended to be a design solution for pain-points of communication efficiency, frequency, and accessibility—brings a complicated dynamic. It has raised questions with philosophical, psychological, and sociological underpinnings that should lead us to question the pros and cons of what I call short-term experience solutions, ones that satisfy the immediate user but don’t necessarily take into consideration the long-term effect these decisions have on the social ecosystem that encompasses the user.

That being said, I’m not here to rag on texting. On the contrary, I am totally addicted to texting and general mobile phone usage, despite the fact that its negative impacts are so apparent to me that I have recently started doing several exercises to try to correct my text neck.

Rather, I’d like to draw attention to the social dynamic that is created by tangible tech, be it a wearable, a mobile phone, a laptop, earbuds, or even a virtual reality headset. Each device, as well as the context it is used in, bears with it a social dynamic. These social dynamics are a much more important part of the experience of a product than the field of UX / product design would demonstrate historically.

I do think that designing for the primary user should be of utmost importance—but I also think product designers need to start valuing how the primary user’s interaction with the product affects their relationship with their social environment.

There is precedent to support an increased focus on second-hand user experience. We’ve read about the social implications of addictive smart-phone usage, the unintended negative interpretations of checking your Apple Watch, and of course the privacy concerns of wearables like Google Glass.

If you somehow think we’ve seen the peak of socially-permeating tech, think again. Technology is only going to continue to penetrate our lives as time passes, further warranting the need for considering second-hand UX.

The big question

This raises the question: When will second-hand UX become an integrated concern within the practice of UX?

Undoubtedly, product designers are concerned to some extent about how their products may affect second-hand users, but how often do we actually involve indirect users in the discovery and validation portions of our design process? To what extent are second-hand users a driving force behind how we generate requirements? (How many times will I say “second-hand”?)

Making this concept of valuing the experience of indirect users a top of mind concern could drastically alter the way UX practitioners do their work.

Just imagine the potential shift in focus for user research. Direct observations of people near someone using their virtual reality / augmented reality headset. Surveys, interviews, and focus groups inquiring about the experience that people had when their friends were using their new smart-watch. The possibilities are vast.

One way to utilize second-hand user research would be to engage existing UX assets, but with a new twist. Instead of traditional personas, we could have second-hand personas that examine the demographics, behaviors, likes and dislikes, proficiencies and deficiencies, and other attributes of the indirect user of a given product / experience. Who is our typical second-hand user? How might we describe them?

Similarly, UX practitioners could start developing second-hand journey maps that divulge the way an indirect user is thinking, feeling, and acting for each action that the primary user takes in their experience with the product. How did you feel as your friend watched a video on their virtual reality headset? What action did you take when your coworker started working next to you with their earbuds in? What were you thinking when your roommate used a voice command on Amazon Echo to lower the song you were listening to?

This shift in focus could open up a whole new realm of UX research and design that could lead to interesting new experiences.

Collaborative mode for VR headsets where multiple people share the same vision? More functionality built into health informatics for sharing data from person-to-person? Socially-contextual settings to limit notifications and keep users engaged in the real people that surround them? Maybe, maybe not. One thing is for certain: The ability to definitively and accurately decide how and when to implement design patterns like these will be dependent on empathizing with indirect users.

Next steps

So why is this important? Why should we care what indirect/second-hand users think or feel?

From a monetary perspective, the answer is simple: Purchase and usage considerations do not end at how the product/service will affect the buyer. Considerations extend into how it will affect the things they care about (which transitively affect them)—most often being their relationship with other people.

From a philosophical perspective, a lack of care about the psychological and sociological toll our products may take on users could drastically alter the concept of a traditional society altogether. It’s better to recognize and reverse potentially harmful design patterns now before habits and cultural beliefs lose sight of social concerns that were once fundamental. Despite popular belief, money and societal good do not have to be mutually exclusive. Let’s start taking second-hand experience into consideration and make it a core part of the way we practice UX.

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How UX Will Save the World

Douglas Adams, in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, tells the story of the Golgafrinchians. The people of planet Golgafrincham, the story goes, figured out how to get rid of an entire useless third of their population by duping them into thinking the planet was doomed and that they were eligible for the first ship out. This group was, apparently, designated by profession: Doctors, teachers, and (presumably) writers of humorous science-fiction were deemed worthy to remain; telephone sanitizers, hairdressers, and jingle writers were shanghaied.

Sometimes, remembering this story, I wonder whether this field of UX—to which I’ve given my professional life—would qualify me for the ship. After all, we create no shelter, food, or clothing for anyone; our work rarely inspires anyone to the point of tears (unless they be tears of frustration); and I’ve never met a 6-year-old who wants to be one of us when they grow up.

Despite this, I consider us a pretty useful lot. Indeed, lately I have begun to believe that UX might literally save the world—possibly fairly soon. To be sure, it might happen in such a way that it will never be known. (Perhaps it is happening right now. I certainly hope so.)

Serious thought about the end of humanity at the hands of computers has crescendoed recently. Pronouncements by Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk mention it as a real possibility, and last year’s open letter to the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence signed by them and many others has been hyped (far out of proportion, when one reads the text) as a warning that our fate may end up in the hands of our machines.

Phil Torres, writing for Salon, concludes, “[I]t’s increasingly important for the public to understand exactly why the experts are nervous about superintelligent machines.” His points are, essentially, that

1. A prodigiously capable AI may harm or destroy humanity as an unintended consequence of pursuing goals not fundamentally rooted in human well-being; and
2. In contrast to other types of human development efforts, development of AI can afford no initial failures or dead-ends, because such a dead-end could be catastrophic.

As Torres elaborates in his first point, correctly setting a self-aware AI’s priorities may be tricky and consequential. For instance, merely tell it to minimize all human suffering, and it might try eliminating all humans; tell it to maximize our dopamine and serotonin release, and we might all end up like the Soma-addled vegetables in Brave New World.

But, one might say, t’was ever thus. Across aeons, as humanity has increased its power through its machines, we have always faced the question of what it is, exactly, that we want from all our power.

Among all our various human desires, for which we enlist all our various non-human devices, is there a common element to be distilled and defined?  What will ultimately satisfy us, anyway?

The stakes involved in advanced AI development simply focus us unavoidably on this question, which has been there all along. From one perspective, it seems only appropriate that this most powerful tool of all in the pursuit of human happiness should require us to understand what happiness is.

The pursuit of advanced AI is humanity’s going double-or-nothing on the prospect of fulfillment through tools, a prospect we have embraced since we first put flint to tinder. Of course we will have to figure out what fulfillment really means, in language our nonhuman companions in the universe can understand, if we want to enjoy the “double” and avoid the “nothing.”

And who will be the heroes that accomplish this feat, if any can? Who among us is equipped to solve this puzzle? Why, UX practitioners.

We are the ones who professionally, habitually, bring human concerns to the mechanical world and ask that world to accommodate them. We are the ones who consult our fellow humans to ascertain what they want, with an eye to how their priorities can be most optimally met by machines. We are the right ones for the job. We have, one might say, the right stuff.

To function for long in our position, between the human and mechanical, is to develop a faith the two realms are compatible. A crucial part of that compatibility is the ability of human needs and wants to be decoded from, say, a desire to see ourselves as cool, or to provide for our progeny, and re-encoded from electron positions on silicon chips. The challenge of dealing with advanced AI is different from others we have faced in the past—but quantitatively so, not qualitatively.

Torres’ other problem—of having no room for error and no luxury of prototyping—is, to my mind, questionable. Even the first nuclear bomb, whose makers reportedly described themselves as only 95% sure it would not annihilate the entire earth when used, was prototyped. But let us say that it is a problem, just as Torres proposes. If so, then it is a problem, fundamentally, of design.

No design can anticipate all outcomes of emergent phenomena like intelligence. These phenomena are characteristically chaotic, meaning imperceptibly small variations in initial conditions will recursively magnify to produce substantial variations in outcome. Thus, no one can predict all possible literature from the design of an alphabet.

What one can do instead is design initial conditions that reflect our best understanding of humanity. Possible alphabets (to stick with the metaphor) can be evaluated with respect to things like legibility and pronounceability—in other words, with respect to their human usability. Based on such evaluation, we can at least feel fairly confident that whatever is ultimately written will have minimal relevance, utility, and respect for human beings. Again, UX designers are the right people to do this.

Perhaps it should not be so revolutionary to think of our humble (and by many accounts, our young) profession as so vital to the survival and success of humankind. Our function, if not our job title, has been important for a while now. We might assume that mechanical engineering, for example, was responsible for the wheel, but to me it seems reasonable to think that without UX, a cart would still be a travois.

Without engineers and developers, AI would never exist. But without us, we might end up wishing it didn’t.

Oh, and planet Golgafrincham? Entire remaining population wiped out by a disease contracted from a dirty telephone. And the presumed undesirables they cast off went on, so the story goes, to populate planet Earth.

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What is the Internet of Things?

The Internet of Things (IoT) describes a whole genre of technologies and services that focus on creating a network connection between everyday objects. These objects include just about anything from industrial machinery to your water bottle.

It is almost impossible to talk about the future of of tech, the Internet and almost any industry without hearing the phrase, “Internet of Things.”

But what that really means is a growing network — a broader Internet — filled with networked devices that go way beyond desktops, laptops, and smartphones. These devices will be connected together so that they can track and communicate data with the cloud opens the door to a whole new world of possibilities.

Some popular IoT examples

Your car, for example, will soon be able to drive itself around town. No steering wheel or pedals required! This is possible because of improved sensor technology and artificial intelligence that is capable of surveying the surrounding area, receiving accurate positioning via GPS, and making decisions faster than the human mind. The result is safer transportation that frees you up to accomplish more in a time that would otherwise be spent behind the wheel.

It includes wearable devices like your wristwatch can connect wirelessly to your phone via Bluetooth, enabling it to sync data to and from the Cloud. The number of steps you take during the day, your heart beat, and even your sleep quality can be monitored and stored in the cloud so you can access that information from anywhere.

What IoT means to the consumer

Thanks to IoT technologies, your home would be smarter. Your blinds could open and close with the sun, your air conditioning system could track the location of people inside the home to maximize efficiency by targeting cooling where it is actually needed. Your refrigerator could let you know when food is about to expire and add items to your shopping list automatically. These solutions all fall under the IoT umbrella, and this is really just the beginning.

For many homeowners, IoT technologies are already in place and work invisibly. Smart meters that measure electricity usage in a home have all but replaced traditional mechanical meters that would be ready by a technician once per month. These smart meters make it possible for you to log in to your electric company’s website and see exactly how much electricity you used on a given day, or even a specific hour.

A new industrial revolution

In an industrial application, IoT technologies power heavy machinery and provide critical information about the state and goings on of a complex production environment. IoT sensors can track a machine’s efficiency and activity and make way for improved automation processes. Huge amounts of data can be sent to a single control room where someone can monitor and control an entire production floor from a single point.

Security is another big area where IoT technologies can be put to good use. Home security systems are already becoming widely available with integrated apps and cloud-based monitoring so you can lock your doors and arm security systems from your phone rather than having to do so from a keypad in the home. You can do things like give someone access to the house temporarily from anywhere in the world.

To put it simply: The Internet of Things may be a buzzword, but it’s the best simple term we can use to describe the modern Internet. It describes an environment where your laptop, phone, and even your car are able to communicate with one another in order to make your life easier.

The post What is the Internet of Things? appeared first on ReadWrite.

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The Foundation of Technical Leadership

I’m a front-end architect, but I’m also known as a technical leader, subject matter expert, and a number of other things. I came into my current agency with five years of design and development management experience; yet when it came time to choose a path for my career with the company, I went the technical route.

I have to confess I had no idea what a technical leader really does. I figured it out, eventually.

Technical experts are not necessarily technical leaders. Both have outstanding technical skills; the difference is in how others relate to you. Are you a person that others want to follow? That’s the question that really matters. Here are some of the soft skills that set a technical leader apart from a technical expert.

Help like it’s your job

Your authority in a technical leadership position—or any leadership position—is going to arise from what you can do for (or to) other people. Healthy authority here stems from you being known as a tried-and-true problem-solver for everyone. The goal is for other people to seek you out, not for you to be chasing down people for code reviews. For this to happen, intelligence and skill are not enough—you need to make a point of being helpful.

For the technical leader, if you’re too busy to help, you’re not doing your job—and I don’t just mean help someone when they come by and ask for help. You may have to set an expectation with your supervisor that helping others is a vital part of a technical leader’s job. But guess what? It might be billable time—check with your boss. Even if it’s not, try to estimate how much time it’s saving your coworkers. Numbers speak volumes.

The true measure of how helpful you are is the technical know-how of the entire team. If you’re awesome but your team can’t produce excellent work, you’re not a technical leader—you’re a high-level developer. There is a difference. Every bit of code you write, every bit of documentation you put together should be suitable to use as training for others on your team. When making a decision about how to solve a problem or what technologies to use, think about what will help future developers.

My job as front-end architect frequently involves not only writing clean code, but cleaning up others’ code to aid in reusability and comprehension by other developers. That large collection of functions might work better as an object, and it’ll probably be up to you to make that happen, whether through training or just doing it.

Speaking of training, it needs to be a passion. Experience with and aptitude for training were probably the biggest factors in me landing the position as front-end architect. Public speaking is a must. Writing documentation will probably fall on you. Every technical problem that comes your way should be viewed as an opportunity to train the person who brought it to you.

Helping others, whether they’re other developers, project managers, or clients, needs to become a passion for you if you’re an aspiring technical leader. This can take a lot of forms, but it should permeate into everything you do. That’s why this is rule number one.

Don’t throw a mattress into a swimming pool

An infamous prank can teach us something about being a technical leader. Mattresses are easy to get into swimming pools; but once they’re in there, they become almost impossible to get out. Really, I worked the math on this: a queen-sized mattress, once waterlogged, will weigh over 2000 pounds.

A lot of things are easy to work into a codebase: frameworks, underlying code philosophies, even choices on what technology to use. But once a codebase is built on a foundation, it becomes nearly impossible to get that foundation out of there without rebuilding the entire codebase.

Shiny new framework seem like a good idea? You’d better hope everyone on your team knows how to use that framework, and that the framework’s around in six months. Don’t have time to go back and clean up that complex object you wrote to handle all the AJAX functionality? Don’t be surprised when people start writing unneeded workarounds because they don’t understand your code. Did you leave your code in a state that’s hard to read and modify? I want you to imagine a mattress being thrown into a swimming pool…

Failure to heed this command frequently results in you being the only person who can work on a particular project. That is never a good situation to be in.

Here is one of the big differences between a technical expert and a technical leader: a technical expert could easily overlook that consideration. A technical leader would take steps to ensure that it never happens.

As a technical expert, you’re an A player, and that expertise is needed everywhere; and as a technical leader, it’s your job to make sure you can supply it, whether that means training other developers, writing and documenting code to get other developers up to speed, or intentionally choosing frameworks and methodologies your team is already familiar with.

Jerry Weinberg, in The Psychology of Computer Programming, said, “If a programmer is indispensable, get rid of him as quickly as possible!” If you’re in a position where you’re indispensable to a long-term project, fixing that needs to be a top priority. You should never be tied down to one project, because your expertise is needed across the team.

Before building a codebase on anything, ask yourself what happens when you’re no longer working on the project. If the answer is they have to hire someone smarter than you or the project falls apart, don’t include it in the project.

And as a leader, you should be watching others to make sure they don’t make the same mistake. Remember, technology decisions usually fall on the technical leader, no matter who makes them.

You’re not the only expert in the room

“Because the new program is written for OS 8 and can function twice as fast. Is that enough of a reason, Nancy Drew?”

That’s the opening line of Nick Burns, Your Company’s Computer Guy, from the Saturday Night Live sketch with the same name. He’s a technical expert who shows up, verbally abuses you, fixes your computer, and then insults you some more before shouting, “Uh, you’re welcome!” It’s one of those funny-because-it’s-true things.

The stereotype of the tech expert who treats everyone else as inferiors is so prevalent that it’s worked its way into comedy skits, television shows, and watercooler conversations in businesses across the nation.

I’ve dealt with the guy (or gal). We all have. You know the guy, the one who won’t admit fault, who gets extremely defensive whenever others suggest their own ideas, who views his intellect as superior to others and lets others know it. In fact, everyone who works with developers has dealt with this person at some point.

It takes a lot more courage and self-awareness to admit that I’ve been that guy on more than one occasion. As a smart guy, I’ve built my self esteem on that intellect. So when my ideas are challenged, when my intellect is called into question, it feels like a direct assault on my self esteem. And it’s even worse when it’s someone less knowledgeable than me. How dare they question my knowledge! Don’t they know that I’m the technical expert?

Instead of viewing teammates as people who know less than you, try to view them as people who know more than you in different areas. Treat others as experts in other fields that you can learn from. That project manager may not know much about your object-oriented approach to the solution, but she’s probably an expert in how the project is going and how the client is feeling about things.

Once again, in The Psychology of Computer Programming, Weinberg said, “Treat people who know less than you with respect, deference, and patience.” Take it a step further. Don’t just treat them that way—think of them that way. You’d be amazed how much easier it is to work with equals rather than intellectually inferior minions—and a change in mindset might be all that’s required to make that difference.

Intelligence requires clarity

It can be tempting to protect our expertise by making things appear more complicated than they are. But in reality, it doesn’t take a lot of intelligence to make something more complicated than it needs to be. It does, however, take a great deal of intelligence to take something complicated and make it easy to understand.

If other developers, and non-technical people, can’t understand your solution when you explain it in basic terms, you’ve got a problem. Please don’t hear that as “All good solutions should be simple,” because that’s not the case at all—but your explanations should be. Learn to think like a non-technical person so you can explain things in their terms. This will make you much more valuable as a technical leader.

And don’t take for granted that you’ll be around to explain your solutions. Sometimes, you’ll never see the person implementing your solution, but that email you sent three weeks ago will be. Work on your writing skills. Pick up a copy of Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style and read up on persuasive writing. Start a blog and write a few articles on what your coding philosophies are.

The same principle extends to your code. If code is really hard to read, it’s usually not a sign that a really smart person wrote it; in fact, it usually means the opposite. Speaker and software engineer Martin Fowler once said, “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

Remember: clarity is key. The perception of your intelligence is going to define the reality of your work experience, whether you like it or not.

You set the tone

Imagine going to the doctor to explain some weird symptoms you’re having. You sit down on the examination bed, a bit nervous and a bit confused as to what’s actually going on. As you explain your condition, the doctor listens with widening eyes and shaking hands. And the more you explain, the worse it gets. This doctor is freaking out. When you finally finish, the doctor stammers, “I don’t know how to handle that!”

How would you feel? What would you do? If it were me, I’d start saying goodbye to loved ones, because that’s a bad, bad sign. I’d be in a full-blown panic based on the doctor’s reaction.

Now imagine a project manager comes to you and starts explaining the weird functionality needed for a particularly tricky project. As you listen, it becomes clear that this is completely new territory for you, as well as for the company. You’re not even sure if what they’re asking is possible.

How do you respond? Are you going to be the crazy doctor above? If you are, I can assure you the project manager will be just as scared as you are, if not more so.

I’m not saying you should lie and make something up, because that’s even worse. But learning to say “I don’t know” without a hint of panic in your voice is an art that will calm down project teams, clients, supervisors, and anyone else involved in a project. (Hint: it usually involves immediately following up with, “but I’ll check it out.”)

As a technical leader, people will follow your emotional lead as well as your technical lead. They’ll look to you not only for the answers, but for the appropriate level of concern. If people leave meetings with you more worried than they were before, it’s probably time to take a look at how your reactions are influencing them.

Real technical leadership

Technical leadership is just as people-centric as other types of leadership, and knowing how your actions impact others can make all the difference in the world in moving from technical expert to technical leader. Remember: getting people to follow your lead can be even more important than knowing how to solve technical problems. Ignoring people can be career suicide for a technical leader—influencing them is where magic really happens.

 

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Why Snapchat Is Launching a Tech Magazine

A messaging app investing in writing is a little baffling and weird, isn’t it?

Today Snapchat launches online magazine Real Life, in which a staff of five writers publish long-form essays and narratives about life with technology.

It’s headed by social scientist and researcher Nathan Jurgenson, who says Real Life “won’t be a news site with gadget reviews or industry gossip. It will be about how we live today and how our lives are mediated by devices.”

A messaging app investing in writing is a little baffling, isn’t it?

So why is an instant messaging app dominated by impermanent selfies and video suddenly investing in writing? When 100 million daily active users can turn images of themselves into a taco or a pooch or a baby, isn’t the very idea of reading kind of… well, basic, as my teens say?

Said another way: in a disappearing-photo, 10-second-video Snapchat world… isn’t writing pedantic and ordinary?

And perhaps cerebral? Again, from Nathan:

I’ve argued that “online” and “offline,” like “body” and “mind,” aren’t like two positions on a light switch—a perspective I’ve called digital dualism. Instead, all social life is made of both information and material; it’s technological and human, virtual and real. Together with friends and colleagues, I’ve theorized an experience of the internet based less in cyberpunk and more in body horror—and not just horror but other things too, like joy.

Or from an essay today on emojis: “Animative expressive forms are the new normal.”

Whoa, right? Kind of brainy.

But also kind of insightful—at least about Snapchat’s possible motivation for investing in long-form narrative and comparatively old-school tactics like writing and editing and… well, thought.

It puts Snapchat (the app) in a bigger context. And it puts Snapchat (the company) at the center of a much bigger conversation. Such a bigger conversation that even I am having a hard time relegating it to merely content marketing. (And I’m a big proponent of long-form content, especially as an extension of marketing.)

With Real Life, Snapchat is summer cannon-balling into the deep end of the pool. It’s making a splash in deeper waters because, according to its notion of self, Snapchat isn’t a silly app for teens or a nascent marketing tool.

Taking Snapchat Seriously

Instead, Snapchat is a key part of a revolution we are all living. For better or worse, technology fundamentally changes the way we do everything: the way we communicate, work, and live.

And Snapchat intends to both codify and comment on the revolution, while plunking itself down in the middle of it.

Its position is unique, because it’s part embedded journalist observing from the trenches, and part soldier driving the tank.

It’s not planting the revolutionary flag in just messaging, either. It’s already dabbling with augmented reality without actually calling it that.

Snapchat bought a Google glass-like company called Vergence Labs, and it’s been hiring talent from Microsoft, Google, Qualcomm, and Nokia, which could be a signal that it’s looking to further its augmented-reality tech, according to Business Insider.

Snapchat has tapped into something important; it’s not just another social media platform. Again, for better or worse.

Some business reasons

Of course, you could also look at the pure business reasons for the magazine:

• Real Life might attract people older than Snapchat’s huge millennial, GenZ base.
• Real Life gives Snapchat a desktop, non-mobile presence.
• Real Life could expand Snapchat’s ad inventory (and therefore add revenue).

But, right now, it seems focused on bigger context and bigger ideas. Which wouldn’t be the first time a tech company has tried on bigger pants.

Ev Williams founded Medium, he said, to build a deeper understanding of what matters in the world.

Five years ago, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey talked about Twitter in almost existential terms, less as company and more as a movement. What is Twitter? “It’s different things to different people at different times,” he said at a conference then.

Later, Dorsey clarified: “Twitter is live: live commentary, live connections, live conversations.”

Of course, Twitter has struggled to figure out exactly how to monetize a philosophy. Snapchat is well on its way to figuring out how to monetize itself, and is only now turning to the bigger questions.

The kind of questions that extend beyond their business model and beyond marketing, and get to the heart of who its customer—and all of us—are. And, more important, who we are becoming.

Focus Group Feedback

P.S. I asked a Gen Z focus group what it thought of Snapchat’s Real Life magazine. This focus group is a sample size of one, and she lives in my house.

Here is the conversation, reprinted verbatim, for the sake of science:

Researcher: “Did you hear about Snapchat’s new magazine?

Focus group of 1: “No. No one looks at Discover stories.”

Researcher: “No, it’s a magazine they are publishing as a standalone website, about life and technology.”

Focus group of 1: “Why? It’s a dumb idea. Snapchat needs to step back in their lane. No one reads magazines.”

Researcher: “Grownups read magazines. What if they’re looking to attract older people?”

Focus group of 1: “Is this one of your marketing questions? Would you read it? I mean—would you read it, if you weren’t you?”

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The Future of the Web

Recently the web—via Twitter—erupted in short-form statements that soon made it clear that buttons had been pushed, sides taken, and feelings felt. How many feels? All the feels. Some rash words may have been said.

But that’s Twitter for you.

It began somewhat innocuously off-Twitter, with a very reasonable X-Men-themed post by Brian Kardell (one of the authors of the Extensible Web Manifesto). Brian suggests that the way forward is by opening up (via JavaScript) some low-level features that have traditionally been welded shut in the browser. This gives web developers and designers—authors, in the parlance of web standards—the ability to prototype future native browser features (for example, by creating custom elements).

If you’ve been following all the talk about web components and the shadow DOM of late, this will sound familiar. The idea is to make standards-making a more rapid, iterative, bottom-up process; if authors have the tools to prototype their own solutions or features (poly- and prolly-fills), then the best of these solutions will ultimately rise to the top and make their way into the native browser environments.

This sounds empowering, collaborative—very much in the spirit of the web.

And, in fact, everything seemed well on the World Wide Web until this string of tweets by Alex Russell, and then this other string of tweets. At which point everyone on the web sort of went bananas.

Doomsday scenarios were proclaimed; shadowy plots implied; curt, sweeping ideological statements made. In short, it was the kind of shit-show you might expect from a touchy, nuanced subject being introduced on Twitter.

But why is it even touchy? Doesn’t it just sound kind of great?

Oh wait JavaScript

Whenever you talk about JavaScript as anything other than an optional interaction layer, folks seem to gather into two big groups.

On the Extensible Web side, we can see the people who think JavaScript is the way forward for the web. And there’s some historical precedent for that. When Brendan Eich created JavaScript, he was aware that he was putting it all together in a hurry, and that he would get things wrong. He wanted JavaScript to be the escape hatch by which others could improve his work (and fix what he got wrong). Taken one step further, JavaScript gives us the ability to extend the web beyond where it currently is. And that, really, is what the Extensible Web Manifesto folks are looking to do.

The web needs to compete with native apps, they assert. And until we get what we need natively in the browser, we can fake it with JavaScript. Much of this approach is encapsulated in the idea of progressive web apps (offline access, tab access, file system access, a spot on the home screen)—giving the web, as Alex Russell puts it, a fair fight.

On the other side of things, in the progressive enhancement camp, we get folks that are worried these approaches will leave some users in the dust. This is epitomized by the “what about users with no JavaScript” argument. This polarizing question—though not the entire issue by far—gets at the heart of the disagreement.

For the Extensible Web folks, it feels like we’re holding the whole web back for a tiny minority of users. For the Progressive Enhancement folks, it’s akin to throwing out accessibility—cruelly denying access to a subset of (quite possibly disadvantaged) users.

During all this hubbub, Jeremy Keith, one of the most prominent torchbearers for progressive enhancement, reminded us that nothing is absolute. He suggests that—as always—the answer is “it depends.” Now this should be pretty obvious to anyone who’s spent a few minutes in the real world doing just about anything. And yet, at the drop of a tweet, we all seem to forget it.

So if we can all take a breath and rein in our feelings for a second, how might we better frame this whole concept of moving the web forward? Because from where I’m sitting, we’re all actually on the same side.

History and repetition

To better understand the bigger picture about the future of the web, it’s useful (as usual) to look back at its past. Since the very beginning of the web, there have been disagreements about how best to proceed. Marc Andreessen and Tim Berners-Lee famously disagreed about the IMG tag. Tim didn’t get his way, Marc implemented IMG in Mosaic as he saw fit, and we all know how things spun out from there. It wasn’t perfect, but a choice had to be made and it did the job. History suggests that IMG did its job fairly well.

A pattern of hacking our way to the better solution becomes evident when you follow the trajectory of the web’s development.

In the 1990’s, webmasters and designers wanted layout like they were used to in print. They wanted columns, dammit. David Siegel formalized the whole tables-and-spacer-GIFs approach in his wildly popular book Creating Killer Web Sites. And thus, the web was flooded with both design innovation and loads of un-semantic markup. Which we now know is bad. But those were the tools that were available, and they allowed us to express our needs at the time. Life, as they say…finds a way.

And when CSS layout came along, guess what it used as a model for the kinds of layout techniques we needed? That’s right: tables.

While we’re at it, how about Flash? As with tables, I’m imagining resounding “boos” from the audience. “Boo, Flash!” But if Flash was so terrible, why did we end up with a web full of Flash sites? I’ll tell you why: video, audio, animation, and cross-browser consistency.

In 1999? Damn straight I want a Flash site. Once authors got their hands on a tool that let them do all those incredible things, they brought the world of web design into a new era of innovation and experimentation.

But again with the lack of semantics, linkability, and interoperability. And while we were at it, with the tossing out of an open, copyright-free platform. Whoops.

It wasn’t long, though, before the native web had to sit up and take notice. Largely because of what authors expressed through Flash, we ended up with things like HTML5, Ajax, SVGs, and CSS3 animations. We knew the outcomes we wanted, and the web just needed to evolve to give us a better solution than Flash.

In short: to get where we need to go, we have to do it wrong first.

Making it up as we go along

We authors express our needs with the tools available to help model what we really need at that moment. Best practices and healthy debate are a part of that. But please, don’t let the sort of emotions we attach to politics and religion stop you from moving forward, however messily. Talk about it? Yes. But at a certain point we all need to shut our traps and go build some stuff. Build it the way you think it should be built. And if it’s good—really good—everyone will see your point.

If I said to you, “I want you to become a really great developer—but you’re not allowed to be a bad developer first,” you’d say I was crazy. So why would we say the same thing about building the web?

We need to try building things. Probably, at first, bad things. But the lessons learned while building those “bad” projects point the way to the better version that comes next. Together we can shuffle toward a better way, taking steps forward, back, and sometimes sideways. But history tells us that we do get there.

The web is a mess. It is, like its creators, imperfect. It’s the most human of mediums. And that messiness, that fluidly shifting imperfection, is why it’s survived this long. It makes it adaptable to our quickly-shifting times.

As we try to extend the web, we may move backward at the same time. And that’s OK. That imperfect sort of progress is how the web ever got anywhere at all. And it’s how it will get where we’re headed next.

Context is everything

One thing that needs to be considered when we’re experimenting (and building things that will likely be kind of bad) is who the audience is for that thing. Will everyone be able to use it? Not if it’s, say, a tool confined to a corporate intranet. Do we then need to worry about sub-3G network users? No, probably not. What about if we’re building on the open web but we’re building a product that is expressly for transferring or manipulating HD video files? Do we need to worry about slow networks then? The file sizes inherent in the product pretty much exclude slow networks already, so maybe that condition can go out the window there, too.

Context, as usual, is everything. There needs to be realistic assessment of the risk of exclusion against the potential gains of trying new technologies and approaches. We’re already doing this, anyway. Show me a perfectly progressively enhanced, perfectly accessible, perfectly performant project and I’ll show you a company that never ships. We do our best within the constraints we have. We weigh potential risks and benefits. And then we build stuff and assess how well it went; we learn and improve.

When a new approach we’re trying might have aspects that are harmful to some users, it’s good to raise a red flag. So when we see issues with one another’s approaches, let’s talk about how we can fix those problems without throwing out the progress that’s been made. Let’s see how we can bring greater experiences to the web without leaving users in the dust.

If we can continue to work together and consciously balance these dual impulses—pushing the boundaries of the web while keeping it open and accessible to everyone—we’ll know we’re on the right track, even if it’s sometimes a circuitous or befuddling one. Even if sometimes it’s kind of bad. Because that’s the only way I know to get to good.

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How Emotions Shape Brand Perceptions

‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ Cliché, but true. In fact, it’s a cliché because it’s true. A battle between pictures and words is like one between Mike Tyson and Tiny Tim: the picture throws the bigger punch. Consider the following:

• Two-thirds of all stimuli reaching the brain are visual (Zaltman, 1996).
• Over 50 per cent of the brain is devoted to processing visual images (Bates and Cleese, 2001).
• So 80 per cent of learning is visually based (American Optometric Association, 1991).

Marketers and brand owners, take note. Humans are extremely visual: we think largely in images, not words. What consumers and employees can’t actually see, or at the very least mentally envision, is most likely going to be lost on them. In ambiguous situations, most communication is non-verbal. Every day, we find ourselves in situations where the other party’s words and body language strike us as either opaque or conflicting. In those cases, what do we do? We rely more on non-verbal clues to evaluate the emotional state of the person speaking. Here are the exact statistics:

• 55 per cent of communication comes through facial expressions.
• 38 per cent of communication is through tone of voice.
• Only 7 per cent of communication is through verbal exchange.

For anyone who wants to ‘get back to basics’, remember that nothing is more basic than non-verbal communication. Human beings have existed for over 500,000 years, but we’ve had the benefit of language for less than a quarter of that time. Moreover, because the rational and sensory parts of the brain aren’t adjacent neighbors, we’re not very good at verbally describing the details our senses detect. Ironically, that’s true despite the fact that our gut-level perceptions are largely shaped by sensory impressions.

Emotions Color Perceptions And Inhibit Change

We perceive matters in ways that emotionally protect our habits and biases.

The processing of ‘facts’ is, in essence, as much about the processing of one’s emotions as it is the processing of whatever external dynamics a person happens to be experiencing.

For instance, how do we ‘choose’ which brands to notice? Well, the first step in the perceptual process is that of screening, which often occurs subconsciously. We tend to screen out the unfamiliar (since paying attention to unfamiliar stimuli requires effort). Instead, we prefer to focus on what we already know and can relate to more easily.

Yes, at times people will analyze the ‘facts’ vigorously, but emotions are more basic and more dominant. Remember: we feel before we think, and those reactions are subconscious, immediate and inescapable. That’s why our reactions are often hard to verbalize. Our language skills reside in the rational brain, which may not even get invoked, because automatic reactions are primarily emotional in nature. As the psychologist Robert Zajonc notes, to say ‘I decided in favor of X’ often means nothing more nor less than ‘I liked X’ – and that’s good enough.

Why is instinctive preference good enough? The reason is that emotional judgements tend to be irrevocable. In terms of our basic emotional reactions, we’re never wrong about what we like or dislike. Zajonc notes, the factual reality of ‘The cat is black’ pales in contrast to the more intimate emotional reality of ‘I don’t like black cats.’

What’s the last stage in the sequence of perception? It’s retrieval, which is mediated by our emotions yet again. We tend to store and recall more readily those experiences that fit most comfortably into our existing mental frameworks. Therefore, memory is driven by preferences rooted in being at ease with our choice. Consumers and employees alike often defend their choices or actions based on details they previously deemed rationally irrelevant. Why? The explanation is that emotions are self-justifying and, therefore, emotional reactions can become totally separated from content.

Therefore, remember that what we’ve already seen will predispose us to what we can see the next time around because of our emotional investment in what’s familiar to us. While a company may believe it has a technically or functionally superior offer, consumers’ evaluations are in essence emotionally based. Objectivity doesn’t exist, because everything gets filtered and colored by emotional responses. The bottom line is that there’s almost always more commercial gain to be made by going with, rather than against, what people have already emotionally internalized and accepted.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Dan Hill, excerpted from his book, Emotionomics, with permission from Kogan Page publishing.

The Blake Project Can Help: Accelerate Brand Growth Through Powerful Emotional Connections

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How Brand Assets Drive Brand Growth

How can you accelerate your brand’s growth by identifying the elements in your brand identity that are distinctive and relevant brand assets? Let’s explore.

How Many People Have Their Hands On Your Brand?

It’s not easy being a brand builder. There’s a lot going on. Does any of the following sound familiar?

• You lead or are a part of a cross-functional brand team that works together with marketing, sales, category management, supply chain, operations, R&D, legal, in collaboration with your communications, design, and digital agencies. So many ideas, and even more opinions. There are many influencers when it comes to the expression of your brand.

• Your brand and its communications are likely working around the world, 24/7, in regions with different cultures and distinct need states and occasions; so the reality is thousands of colleagues, agency partners, retailers, and consumers are influencing how your brand’s identity is expressed on TV, online, out of home, and in-store around the world.

• Each day thousands of people are influencing your brand identity, which itself is very complex. There are so many brand elements that could be modified, including, but not limited to, brand colors, brand script, logo lockup, product or packaging shape and design, brand characters and celebrity endorsements, taglines, claims, and sensory cues such as sound, smell, and taste.

To further complicate the situation, marketers usually change roles every 18-24 months. How do they create a name for themselves? By launching that breakthrough innovation, or creating that sexy new campaign everyone’s talking about? Maybe they revolutionize packaging?

Brands are being pulled in a multitude of different directions. Who is ensuring that as your brand evolves, it stays true to its roots and remains relentlessly consistent in its purpose and promise? The tension between breakthrough and familiarity is palpable.

The answer lies in your brand identity; it lies in your ability to better understand which brand assets you own and which brand elements are holding your brand back from its true growth potential.

Understanding The Power Of The Assets Within Your Brand’s Identity

A brand’s identity comprises many different elements, but not all of them have the same value. There are elements within your brand’s identity that are brand assets and they are the key to evolving your brand to create breakthrough, while ensuring you do so in a relentlessly consistent manner.

There are two qualities of a brand element that distinguish it as an asset.

First, a brand asset must be distinctive or ‘owned’ by the brand. This means that consumers unmistakably link that asset with your brand. The impact of a distinctive brand asset is that it attracts attention and drives recognition amidst the flurry of competing messages in communications or variants on shelf. Consumers see the asset and use it as a ‘mental shortcut’ to identify your brand.

Second, a brand asset must be relevant or ‘on-brand’. This means that the asset reinforces and amplifies your brand’s promise. As the asset is iterated consistently across multiple touch points, it reinforces the mental structures that consumers have associated to the rational and emotional benefits that your brand promises to deliver. This creates another ‘mental shortcut’ – one that reminds consumers of how your brand makes them feel and thus they are more likely to add it to their consideration set, pick it up off shelf, and possibly buy it.

So do you know which of the elements within your brand identity are both distinctive and relevant? Do you know which of your brand elements are assets?

How Brand Assets Drive Brand Growth

Can you name the sixteen brands these assets belong to? What comes to mind when you think of these brands? Do you sense the multitude of emotions one brand asset can evoke?

How is it that a simple brand element can cue you to recognize a brand so easily? How is it that just one brand asset can immediately recall your experiences with that brand through previous usage or media you’ve been exposed to? You are able to recall stories and experiences with the brand instantaneously, without any mention of the brand itself, and this activates mental structures that are critical to driving behavior.

This process of mental availability is leveraged by the most iconic and successful brands, as they utilize sensory cues to create mental memory structures. These mental shortcuts make it easy for consumers to recognize the brand, feel a certain way, and hopefully trigger memories about the brand’s promise, that lead to the intended consumer behaviors that drive growth.

These brand elements can trigger brand recognition and emotion better than most 30 second commercials and you don’t have to spend millions of dollars in advertising.

The impact is consumers are more likely to see your brand, recognize it, pick it up, and buy it. Successful and iconic brands execute their brand assets with relentless consistency to drive brand growth.

(Answers: 1. BP  2. GE  3. Nike 4. McDonald’s  5. T-Mobile  6. Coca-Cola 7. Skype 8. Orange 9. HP 10. Cadburys  11. Heineken  12. Caterpillar 13. Harrods 14. Virgin 15. Puma 16. BMW)

The Brand Identity And Brand Asset Learning Journey

Has your organization recently undergone a brand identity and brand asset learning journey?

The benefits of doing so are that you ensure that all of your stakeholders and partners, including communication, design, and digital agencies recognize which of your assets are sacred and must not be tampered with. Further to which, these assets should be iterated across all communications, activations, and touch points with relentless consistency.

However, another important aspect of conducting brand identity learning is that it helps you uncover which brand elements are not adding value to the brand, or worse, holding it back. This provides your agency partners with clear direction on which brand elements can and should be evolved or removed to make more space for your distinctive and relevant assets. It creates freedom within a framework.

Accelerating Brand Growth Through Your Brand Assets

Marketers have two very important goals. To drive short-term business results, while also building long-term brand equity.

To drive growth, remain relevant to their consumers, and create breakthrough, marketers need to push the boundaries of their brand promise and identity. At the same time, we know that true long-term brand growth comes from a brand promise that is brought to life by remarkable ideas executed with relentless consistency. As brands evolve to create breakthrough, they need to stay true to their roots – the associations and emotions that built their brand in the first place.

Your brand is multifaceted; it impacts thousands of stakeholders across the spectrum from creatives to consumers, from marketers to media buys, from retailers to retweets. Having a well understood and remarkably consistent brand across the spectrum ensures that every touch point is maximized.

So when pushing the boundaries of brand promise and identity, how much of a push is too much? Mastering this tension is what separates true brand builders from the rest of the pack and it’s not easy, especially since every brand, its competitors, and the category itself have specific nuances.

Phil Duncan, the Chief Design Officer at P&G positioned this challenge perfectly when he said,

“I tell my colleagues that it is the responsibility of brand teams to write the next chapter for the P&G book, not to write a new book. The goal is always to keep the story interesting and moving forward.”

While this is far easier said than done, deepening your understanding of how hard the assets within your brand’s identity are working for your brand is the first step on this journey.

Simply email me, Derrick Daye for more about how we can help you discover the most important asset in your brand and competing brands.

The Blake Project Can Help: Accelerate Brand Growth Through Powerful Emotional Connections

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

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