Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Distinguishing Yourself as a UX Professional
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The Softer Side of UX Consulting
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Is Your Experience Strategy Science or Alchemy?
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Search vs. Social Media: How Audience ‘Intent’ Can Affect Content Marketing Performance
Want to rank high in search and earn high social engagement? You can’t do it with a single piece of content. Learn how understanding your audience’s intent –on search or social – can make a difference in your content marketing success. Continue reading →
The post Search vs. Social Media: How Audience ‘Intent’ Can Affect Content Marketing Performance appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
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How to Get in Front of the Podcasting Trend [Growth Tips and Tools]
Could podcasting be the next big thing? With only 3% using podcasts, it’s an underused tactic that should appeal to marketers who target a more educated and higher-household-income audience. Here’s how to get in front of the trend. Continue reading →
The post How to Get in Front of the Podcasting Trend [Growth Tips and Tools] appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
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User Research With Small Business Owners: Best Practices and Considerations
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Thursday, November 19, 2015
trendwatching.com | 5 TRENDS FOR 2016 | Consumer Trend Briefing | December 2015
5 actionable, delight-inducing trends to run with NOW.
Read the 5 Trends for 2016 Consumer Trend Briefing from trendwatching.com »
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The Future Of Shopping Is . . . Second Life On Acid?
British designer Allison Crank imagines a virtual-reality mega mall to replace the social element shopping has lost to e-commerce.
When Victor Gruen invented the shopping mall in 1956, he wanted to give suburban citizens a sorely needed third place to socialize and shop. Today, malls have been usurped by e-commerce. And while the ease of one-click shopping fulfills the consumerist part of Gruen's equation, it ignores the equally therapeutic leisure element.
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Brands Evolve With Faceting Strategy
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What Brand Strategists Stand to Learn From Carl Sagan and Scientific Thinking
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PSFK’s New Report and the Core Needs of Online Safety
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Industry Experts Weigh In on the Future of Retail 2016
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The Future of Airbnb’s Shopper Experience Journey
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The Future of Jawbone’s Shopper Experience and the Power of the Subscription Economy
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Why Brands Need to Invest In Building Community [Future of Retail]
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The Future BMW Store Experience Is Provocative, Experiential and Educational
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Macy’s Imagines the Shop of the Future in Time for Black Friday
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PSFK Labs Launches Our New Future of Travel Report
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How Brands Can Bring Their Products to Everyone [Future of Retail]
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The Future of The North Face’s Guided Shopper Experience
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Artificial Intelligence Can Make Shopping Fun Again [Future of Retail SF 2016]
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Finding the Line Between Data Collection and Authenticity
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Why Startups Lead the Future of Retail in 2016
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UIE Article: Your Job Ad – The Start of a Great Hiring Experience
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UIE Article – Bending the Protocols: Useful Variations on Usability Tests
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2016 Content Strategy Conferences: Any Favorites?
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The Basics of Digital Governance: What Content Marketers Need to Know
Wish your organization had a more organized, more business-savvy way to manage content decisions? Lisa Welchman, an authority on digital governance, knows how it’s done – and shares how you can do it, too. Continue reading →
The post The Basics of Digital Governance: What Content Marketers Need to Know appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
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Danger Ahead: When Content Distribution Is On Auto-Pilot
One of the best teachers on search engine optimization, email marketing, and social media shares why great content creators don’t always come out ahead, and the dangers of putting your content distribution strategies on autopilot. Continue reading →
The post Danger Ahead: When Content Distribution Is On Auto-Pilot appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
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Unleash Your Visual Superpower!
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6 Ways Analytics And The Internet Of Things Will Transform Business
Guest author Scott Amyx is founder and CEO of Amyx+McKinsey, a wearables and IoT (Internet of Things) strategy and execution agency.
The tech industry is no stranger to change, but the data derived from the IoT is taking disruption to a new level—sforzando.
At IBM's Insight conference last month, Bob Picciano, senior vice president of IBM Analytics, talked about the rise of the “cognitive business”, or an enterprise that engages with analytics to improve its customer relations, business processes, and decision-making capabilities.
There are dueling predictions over how ubiquitous the Internet of Things will be, but most indicate that the marketplace will host between 50 and 75 billion connected objects by 2020, signaling novel challenges for hardware manufacturing and development. Software engineers, likewise, may need to completely revamp programs to better exploit the influx of data, while innovators need to wrestle with the changes wrought by analytics.
IBM's Insight event unfolded in light of this wave of disruption. The lineup of corporate presenters converged on the same message: Analytics is for everyone, and your viability in the marketplace depends on it.
Six takeaways from this year’s conference include:
Design Will Never Be The Same
Iterate, test, repeat: That's the old way of problem-solving. It will continue, but it will now be supported by massive quantities of data. Data aggregation from diverse sources will form the foundation of everything, from prototyping and manufacturing devices to the way IT departments react to security breaches.
Data Will Inform Data
It’s snowing: Why not text your customers about a new movie they can stream online instead of trying to get them to go to the theater? New data sources will inform existing ones. Increasingly, corporations will partner to draw on and share available data—including data freely available from government, social, and media platforms—to create exhaustive snapshots of needs, correlations, and trends. At Insight, IBM announced an agreement with The Weather Company and Twitter to create more comprehensive consumer insights—and shortly followed it by buying The Weather Company's digital assets.
Artificial Intelligence Will Drive More Personal Data Through Interactions
The most valuable data is often locked in our heads. As the interactive abilities of artificial intelligences improve, they'll prove a key way of extracting this data from customers, employees, and citizens alike. IBM was showing off Watson at Insight, but many companies are rapidly developing AI technology to address a range of issues—look at Facebook's M, which responds to a variety of requests via its Messenger app. Natural language technologies are crucial to allow artificial intelligences to comprehend human speech and generate appropriate responses.
Predictive Maintenance Will Replace Break-Fix
IoT devices and sensors can highlight failing appliances or dangerous home conditions before they become serious issues. Whirlpool’s Laurent Borne noted that IoT sensors on commercial appliances can make a big difference in customer satisfaction. A leaky hose will immediately trigger a text message to your phone, encouraging you to get the problem fixed before the house floods. Ever pulled out an empty milk carton from the refrigerator? IoT sensors will make that a thing of the past, as the device will send a resupply list as soon as you run short.
Everyday Problems Will Get Massive Computational Power
Remember ENIAC? When the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer made its debut in the ’40s, it was used mostly to take the load off of humans who were trying to develop accurate firing tables—not answer their questions about the best new Tex-Mex restaurant. The most advanced systems have typically been used for addressing complex issues and had limited access. That era is over. Raj Singh, CEO of Go Moment, showed off his Ivy app, now used by more than 20 million consumers. Ivy is a virtual concierge service that not only helps guests quickly get what they want wherever they are staying, but it does it using Watson’s natural language API.
Cognitive Systems Will Shine A Light On "Dark" Data
Companies often have the opportunity to harvest and exploit enormous quantities of data, but they don’t, for a variety of reasons. This kind of data exists in unstructured forms; for example, companies may store call-center logs or archive sales emails for years without that information seeing the light of day. This so-called "dark data" isn't just a missed opportunity—depending on what it contains, it may become a liability. As cognitive systems develop, more data will be captured, and the data we're already capturing will be put to better use.
IBM's Insight 2015 conference sounded off on the most important trends in data usage and management. It also served a wake-up call for developers, engineers, and tech leaders. As the Internet of Things alters the landscape of analytics, hardware design needs to change, software development requires novel approaches, and tech management must become more agile in order to realize data's greatest benefits.
Photo by betancourt
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How to Make Every Piece of Content SEO Friendly
If you want your site to rank high in search engine results, don’t focus on SEO. Today, Google and other search engines reward user-friendly sites. Those sites focus on great content for their users. Then, the SEO friendliness follows. Continue reading →
The post How to Make Every Piece of Content SEO Friendly appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
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Tuesday, November 10, 2015
The updated service model canvas
Find out how to explore, de-construct and document an existing or new service with the updated version of the service model canvas. A great new service design tool.
The post The updated service model canvas appeared first on UX for the masses.
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Branded House Versus House Of Brands
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Monday, November 9, 2015
Minorities are Becoming the Majority of the United States Demographics
Here’s a riddle. When is the minority, the majority? I’ve written about the boomers as the huge demographic impacting the US consumer spending. For many years, the focus of many consumer marketers was on the baby boomer generation. Don’t get me wrong, there still is a huge buying group of boomers, but now it’s definitely … Continue reading Minorities are Becoming the Majority of the United States Demographics →
The post Minorities are Becoming the Majority of the United States Demographics appeared first on Branding and Marketing.
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Creating Good User Experiences by Focusing on Content
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Error Messages Are an Anti-Pattern
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UIE Article: Designing without a Designer
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How To Save Money When You're Shopping Online
This post is sponsored by ChameleonJohn, a provider of online coupons, promo codes, and daily deals. It reflects the views of the sponsor, not ReadWrite's editors.
When the Internet was introduced to the general public, it brought changes of all sorts. Some, we could have predicted; some, we couldn’t. Through the Internet, we now have conveniences like buying items from halfway around the globe, learning any language we desire, making friends, expanding our knowledge, marketing our businesses, and even saving money.
Hey, the cost of living is rising and our paychecks don't always keep up. So these tactics may well be useful for you when you shop online—because every penny counts.
Add Items To Your Shopping Cart—And Leave Them There
This strange-sounding method works because, the way most sites work, the price of an item you leave in your cart without checking out will always be updated with current discounts and promotions. (Look out for websites that automatically remove items in your cart after a certain amount of time—they're on to you.) Some sites will email you if you leave an item in your cart—and give you an incentive to complete your purchase by offering you a discount! You'll never rush to check out again.
Add "Coupons" To Your Search
The Internet is filled with coupon websites that are ready to offer you savings when you purchase online or offline. You can search on Google for the brand you desire and include the word "coupon," and you’ll be rewarded with a number of promotions that will help you save some dollars. One popular coupon site you might find as you search is ChameleonJohn.
Compare In-Store And Online Prices
Sometimes your favorite brand may sell certain products at cheaper prices online than they do in their physical stores. This can be for several reasons—to increase traffic on their website, achieve more online reach, or hit a certain target for online sales. There are also companies that are secondary sellers for products that you’re looking for or regularly buy. For instance, buying your preferred brand of protein shake from Supplement Warehouse may be cheaper than buying from the brand's website.
Sign Up For Email Newsletters And Use Social Media
Most brands and companies would want to divert customers’ attention to their store, and a popular way of doing so is by giving discounts and offers to those who’d sign up for their newsletters and emails. At Rebecca Minkoff’s, you’ll be entitled to a 15% discount on their products when you sign up with your email address. When it comes to social media, companies do engage their customers and potential customers in contests where they can win products, coupons or even cash prizes. These contests are a great way to save some money or to win some money!
About ChameleonJohn
ChameleonJohn is a brand-new website where everyone can get the best coupons, discount codes, and learn other ways how to save online. It's worth your time to explore, with a vast amount of stores, services and fun activities to choose from. At ChameleonJohn, you will find all the places you want to shop at, and always get the best discount deals, too. This online-coupons website offers excellent discounts from thousands of the largest online retailers. You'll always be able to save money!
This post is sponsored by ChameleonJohn, a provider of online coupons, promo codes, and daily deals. It reflects the views of the sponsor, not ReadWrite's editors.
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Mind Control 101: A Neuromarketing Primer, Part 2
This post also appears on Wearable.ai, a news summary and intelligence gathering service for the emerging wearable computing industry. For inquires, please email interviewer and publisher Mark Brooks.
This is Part 2 of a two-part Q&A with author and neuromarketing expert Darren Bridger. For Part 1, click here.
Neuromarketing involves the study of how the human brain responds to particular stimuli in distinct ways, and and how businesses can employ that information to connect with customers and increase their business.
Its foundation on neuroresearch offers a route to deeper insights and better design. The following covers ways this strategy can accelerate business, and the opportunities it presents for Internet of Things (IoT) and wearables initiatives.
MB: How is neuromarketing using wearable computing and Internet of Things. What are the challenges and opportunities?
DB: The most obvious place is with wireless/portable wearable sensors. The main ones are wireless EEG caps, heart rate sensors, GSR (skin conductance) sensors, and wearable eye-trackers.
At the moment, most of the devices used for research are specialized kit, and not the typical consumer wearables. As devices like smart-watches become more widely used and have better sensors and become more web-connected, the potential could be there to tap into data from consumer wearables.
There are more challenges with collecting brain/physiological data out in the real world than in-home or lab. For example, if you want to understand how people respond to a real world experience you could send them out with portable sensors, but for each person within your test-group you then need to correlate where their head and gaze were pointing at each second. It’s just a more time/computational intensive exercise compared to sitting them in front of a video-simulation, where you know exactly what every person saw second-by-second, so you can more easily compare and aggregate their responses.
More computational power and larger testing groups could solve this problem. This is why I think there is the potential for tech/software companies to move into this field. A consumer wearable that is being worn by millions of people provides a big sample base, and then it just becomes a challenge of (a) gaining access to that user data, and (b) crunching the numbers.
Even a simple sensor like a camera has the potential to collect useful information on people's emotions and behaviors when combined with the right algorithms. For example, posters with built-in eye-trackers have already been trialed. As cameras and computing drop in price, you could have more eye-trackers embedded around shops, buildings and public places that understand where people are looking and adjust displays accordingly.
You can also extract information from cameras on people's emotions: from facial emotional expressions, and even heart-rate. As blood pumps around our bodies our faces are slightly, imperceptibly 'flushing' different colors. We can't see this, but point a camera at someone's face then amplify the visual changes in hue and it becomes measurable. There are also more exotic camera-based applications such as extracting information from a person’s gait and movements, or eye-trackers built into smartphones.
As we interact more with screens and "smart devices" there will undoubtedly be increasing demand for those devices to understand human responses, to optimize themselves to our levels of interest, emotions, and behavior. This pressure to make emotions and attention "machine-readable" will likely expand these applications out of the domain of market research into other sectors.
MB: How would you recommend startups on a budget get early access to neuromarketing labs?
DB: I see neuroresearch tech at a point analogous to computing in the late 1970s: poised to move from being a big/expensive lab application to something more accessible to a far wider range of organizations.
The tech and computing power to run more lab-based studies are falling in price in many cases and most of these tests don't require many other fancy features. Usually just a quiet office room is enough. However, the software algorithms, and know-how to compute, analyze and interpret the results are still a scarcer resource. I would recommend smaller organizations like startups get some specialized advice before just buying sensors and using the software that comes with them. Often this can lead to misleading results.
A sister discipline to neuromarketing - behavioral economics - offers even more affordable options.
Making a Better Wearable
MB: Do you use any wearable devices? How would you advise them to improve, through the application of behavioral science? How could they do better?
DB: We use GSR, which is a measurement of emotional arousal based on skin conductance level changes, similar to the lie detector test. We also use wireless EEG to measure brain activity, although these currently tend to be more medical than consumer grade.
Behavioral science has two main useful applications in this area:
Firstly, knowledge from the behavioral sciences could be used and enhanced through 'quantified self' type applications. People already use sensors on watches and other devices to learn about their physical fitness. Other applications could give people feedback and insights on their own behavior and thinking and point to ways to improve their lives. Technology that learns and improves the more we use it is very appealing and could encourage more people to adopt wearables.
Secondly, behavioral sciences have a lot to add in terms of improving the usability and appeal of such devices. An obvious area of opportunity is to make them more intuitive and easy-to-use. Here there are many insights to be gleaned from neuroscience on attention and behavior.
For example, we all have limited attention, and there are increasing demands placed on it. Wearables can help deliver information to us in more easily digested ways, through things like better ways of filtering and delivering complex information to us in real-time, or through using communicating information to us through an underused channel. A field called Embodied Cognition can offer insights on making gestures and device interactions more intuitive. Sensory neuroscience can offer insights on making devices more comfortable to wear and more emotionally appealing and desirable.
Lead photo by Dierk Schaefer
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Wonder What Content to Create? Try a Customer-Journey Map [Template]
A customer-journey map can help you answer the perennial question – what content shall we create? Better yet, it can help you answer the question – what content do our customers want? Here’s how to create the map, step by step. Continue reading →
The post Wonder What Content to Create? Try a Customer-Journey Map [Template] appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
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10 User Research Myths and Misconceptions
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Monday, November 2, 2015
How To Suck At Social Media: An Indispensable Guide For Businesses
Facebook, at last count, has 1.5 billion monthly active users. YouTube has 1.2 billion users (watching 6 billion hours of videos!). Instagram has an estimated 400 million users. Those are some big gigantic numbers! I believe that every human with time to spare, and a connection to the web, should be on social media. The […]
How To Suck At Social Media: An Indispensable Guide For Businesses is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik
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Visual Content Strategy: The New ‘Black’ for Content Marketers
A few years ago, you could get away with text-only content. Now, you don’t stand a chance unless your content marketing is packed with visuals. Learn why and how to improve your visual content strategy with these techniques. Continue reading →
The post Visual Content Strategy: The New ‘Black’ for Content Marketers appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
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