Catriona Campbell

Catriona's bio

Catriona Campbell is a leading web usability consultant; Director and Founder of Foviance.

“I believe in working hard and playing hard. I play golf, and use Edinburgh’s Hallion Club and a range of London clubs, including the Groucho Club and Soho House, for networking. My interests also embrace work as a mentor with the Prince’s Trust, and taking disabled children on holiday through Round Table. Passionate about living life to the full, I have always been successful at managing a large and varied portfolio of activities – long may it continue!”

This article, written by Catriona Campbell was originally published on iabuk.net and is republished here with permission.

According to the noted neuroscientist Baronness Susan Greenfield, the human brain until the age of ten has the capacity to learn at astonishing rates in comparison to later years. No-one really knows how our learning process is slowed after the age of ten, but slow it does. It is almost as though it has programmed itself, and now just needs refining. Read more…

The current social media consumption chart looks like this according to Forrester.

At a high level it means that there are currently few people creating the content on the social media sites, but a great deal consuming the content that is created. On the one hand this could be explained as behaviour that should be expected. As general consumers have not hitherto intended to submit journalistic quality copy until social media’s advent, so they may be quite rightly reticent about producing content for public consumption. Read more…

I recently created a slide pack intended to give you an overview of making social media pay. It is the biggest challenge today for social media, and according to Forrester’s 5 Eras of the Social Web, it is soon upon us. Read more…

This article, written by Catriona Campbell was originally published on iabuk.net and is republished here with permission.

There has been more written about the iPhone than any other technology gadget in the last ten years. How do I know this? According to PC World’s 50 greatest gadgets of all time, the others on the list don’t even come close.

The iPhone achieves a staggering 315m Google search results, where the Nintendo Wii has 239m, and the Sony Walkman 3m, it’s fair to assume that it is a gadget which creates a good deal of buzz.
However not all that buzz is generated by people enamored by the iPhone. In April Virginia Heffernan: a US Journalist at the New York Times wrote a personal account of her experience: “Why I hate my iphone” It is an article written by a well-heeled journalist, and one we should take note of. She opens with an introduction into the heady world of the iPhone enterprise and how it requires so much attention, organisation, explanation, praise, etc.

“I was late to get one – and maybe that’s the problem. Maybe my hopes for the iPhone curdled in the time it took for my perfectly good T-Mobile plan to expire so I could switch to balky AT&T and purchase one. But I had bided my time. And, really, my enthusiasm survived right up to the moment at the AT&T counter, post-sale, when a saleswoman transferred my address book from my battered BlackBerry to the sweetie-pie iPhone.
“Can you set up my e-mail too?” I asked. She handed me the phone and told me what to type. Pressing her good nature, I asked if she’d do that part too, since I wasn’t yet handy with the iPhone’s character-entry system – the D screen-based simulation of the qwerty keyboard.
She gave me a hard look. Truly, as if she was supposed to be on the lookout for people like me. “It’s your phone,” she replied briskly. “It’s time you started typing on it.”

It is disappointing that the Apple store experience has not been transferred into the AT&T store where she purchased the handset. The Apple store would have delivered a better “out of the box experience” – they may well have had a pre-charged up handset for her – and they would certainly have helped her transfer her data onto the iPhone, as well as showing her how to use it. Apple store staff are trained in each of the Apple products, and staff are encouraged to understand them inside out. The staff are even called “Creatives, Geniuses” or “Specialists” as opposed to sales assistants.

“I didn’t trust myself either, there were warning signs. I didn’t rush to explore the phone or load it up with apps. You can see I wasn’t thinking clearly. To answer the phone, I had to touch the screen. Years of not touching screens – so as not to smudge or scar – made me wary. But I brushed the “answer call” and up came fragments of my mother’s cheerful voice. AT&T no doubt works like a charm in other areas, but as I’d been warned, it wasn’t so hot on holding calls where I live. I let it drop her. I hunted for a keypad to call back, but it was gone.”

The next example she gives in her dalliance with the iPhone is about learning how to use the device’s keyboard. It points out an issue we have with the way we use technology – Behavioural Psychologists call it “Learned effects” – the fact is that once we have learned how to do something – it takes a great deal of time to relearn it, and for some, that is time best spent elsewhere….

“The morning after my sleepless night of charging the phone, a text message arrived from a colleague, about breakfast. It came up in a little dialogue bubble, as if we were characters in a comic book.
Now I had to reply. My throat tightened. “Running late,” I decided on. “See you in 15 min.”
What came out was this: “Runninlate. See you in 15 Mon.”
And so the iPhone made suggestions. Did I want to say Ride? Ripe? Ruin? No. I wanted to say Running. I refused to fight further with the smug phone. Off sailed my text – the work of a blithering idiot.
The failure to appreciate the iPhone was all mine. But I decided not to dwell on that. “I thought you might be back,” the AT&T saleswoman said as I walked in the door. “So?” I said. “You were right.” With some satisfaction, she took the iPhone, and I walked away with a new BlackBerry and money to spare.

Does one person’s experience make a universally popular device unusable? No, of course not, but unfortunately the iPhone does expect a different kind of human interaction, and one that takes some time to get used to or “learn”. Above all else – if a device is not intuitive, as I would argue the iPhone is not, then it needs to be taught. When the iPhone is sold in non-Apple stores you rely on the non-Apple staff to sell the product, this dilutes the brand experience.

In order to gain a true picture of the customer experience of modern, cross-channel businesses, it is essential to trust consultants who understand the importance of striking the right balance between quantitative and qualitative research.Currently, the new media research industry as a whole is getting it wrong too often.

These two research methodologies are quite distinct approaches that are used to understand customer behaviour through very different practices.

Quantitative research largely revolves around the precise analysis of numerical data: numbers of visitors to a particular website, clicks on banners, time spent reading pages, frequency of referrals – that sort of thing. Quantitative data can be ripped directly from weblogs, but it can also be gained through the structured, objective questioning of a large sample of users of a given service or product. Such surveys produce statistics, calculations, formulae, margins: ‘facts’.

Qualitative research attempts to explore and understand conceptions, attitudes, behaviours, interactions and of course experiences, of individuals and smaller focus groups. Data collected is largely non-numerical, more in-depth, more subjective, and more tailored to circumstance. It must be analysed and interpreted through observation and judgement, with results dependent to a great extent upon the skill and experience of the consultants.

Broadly speaking, quantitative research attempts to objectively nail down universal, repeatable rules for perceived trends, whereas qualitative research tries to subjectively develop a rich understanding of behaviour.

The market research community has been conducting both quantitative and qualitative research since the First World War, when Cadburys won the government contract to provide chocolate to the troops by researching the needs of this new market. Now, in 2009, the global market research industry is set to spend $40 billion, according to Research magazine.

The fledgling experience industry that we operate in certainly has its issues. It is young, fragmented, undisciplined, varied in methodologies, ungoverned by a single guiding body and threatened by a perceived lack of credibility. I believe this has to change, and fast, if our industry is to be taken seriously by the marketing directors accustomed to seeing only the enormous sample sizes typically generated by purely quantitative market research.

At Foviance, our strength is our experience, our ability to specialise, and our judgement about when and how to engage our clients in surveys, panels or web analytics work. I believe that more than any other organisation in our industry, we have the varied skill set and broad abilities to combine both quantitative and qualitative methodologies in innovative, synergetic media research practices. And with 43 of the Top 100 FTSE already on board as clients, I’d say the industry’s top marketing directors agree.

‘Chipping’ has been a common, if largely illegal practice in the world of gaming hardware for nearly a decade now. If you’re not familiar with the term, it initially described the act of adapting games consoles solely for the purposes of circumventing copy-protection and region-coding, allowing gamers to buy and swap cheap pirated titles and avoid commercial prices.So why is this practice of interest to usability and customer experience consultants? Well chipping has expanded its horizons beyond physical media piracy in recent times. Increasingly ingenious modchips are available to unlock the processing power of today’s consoles. Unscrupulous gamers can install operating systems, choosing from a wide range of Linux distros and other open source OS, or even Mac OSX. Couple this with the increasingly sophisticated connectivity options of modern machines, and you can quickly see how gamers are transforming locked consoles offering gameplay through downloadable clients, into far more powerful open connected clients and even web servers.

The home gaming scene is pretty much dominated by three consoles – Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Sony’s PlayStation 3, and the Nintendo Wii. Handheld devices such as the Nintendo DS Lite, Sony PSP and the LeapFrog Leapster 2 have some say in the market, but the big three account for over 70 percent market share. Over the past three years, an increasing number of Generation Y console owners have begun chipping and using their consoles to hop over walled gardens and make the most of open access. The risk of breaking an extremely expensive games console through chipping no longer holds so much fear for gamers who have seen console prices plummet.

In the right, or wrong, hands, a chipped Xbox 360 Elite, for example, is an extremely handy device, not just for downloading and sharing illegal software, but also as a formidable gaming platform. And with its 120GB hard drive, PowerPC Tri-Core Xenon processor, Falcon 65nm chipset, USB 2.0 ports, 100Mbps Ethernet and Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g adapters, the same casinos and gambling services that are open to PC users are accessible in glorious widescreen straight to the living room. Piracy is rife through illegal downloads and emulation of all manner of other platforms. So is access to adult gaming services.

It’s not just Xbox owners of course. I recently heard that large numbers of early adopter 30-somethings were getting together to play poker in a whole new way, using wireless controllers on Wiis in their living rooms. Because it’s illegal, and perhaps because it’s easier to stay in denial, internet gambling companies haven’t yet opened up their eyes to the fact that non-PC gamers are enjoying their services. The question is then – are they actually missing an opportunity here?

Gambling developers have become used to the idea that their offerings are only used by people with a keyboard and a mouse. Sure some of them develop for the smaller mobile screen, but they have sidestepped the enormous implications that monetising living room games consoles might bring. These early adopters, outlaws or not, very possibly represent the green shoots of a whole new audience, a new way of interaction. Current gambling portals might look pretty snazzy on a PC using an exacting pointing device, but I’m betting they’re very hard to navigate with a Wii controller. Sooner or later a developer is going to be first to tweak their UI to exploit these new players, and then what? Where could it lead? Ultimately? Legitimately? Well, shopping, social media, you name it really.

Of course when this step comes, customer experience agencies will inevitably have a role to play in educating gaming companies on the access trends of a new user base. The new revenue streams are obvious, and could soon be legally tapped – perhaps somebody should start preparing the ground work.

Ok, so Slumdog Millionaire is a marvelous film and deserves its 8 Oscars, but I think that there was a message for brands embedded into the film that I would like to put our attention to.

In one scene the lead character, Jamal, is seen at work in a Mumbai Call Centre (ostensibly for a mobile phone company) and for those who have never been to see a call centre, it was a highly enlightening experience. The main character Jamal, is a Chai-boy (tea-boy) in the call centre, and is seen taking tea into a daily training session where the call centre staff are being instructed in the day’s plot in Eastenders, thus ensuring they are able to converse with average Brits! A rather crude and clichéd scene, but amusing nonetheless.

Then, Jamal is seen helping out a friend by taking over his seat and answering a call. The call as you can imagine does not go well, the customer asks where she has called as she is calling from Kingussie in Scotland and he replies “ah….I am just down the road (he looks around the room for inspiration and spies a poster of Big Ben and Parliament Square)…at Loch Big Ben!”

Well, it’s played for laughs in the film, but there is a very real lesson here that we need to take heed of, our customers can sniff out a lie, and brands should be measuring the impact of the channels on the customer experience. I bet the call that Jamal hangs up on would not have been recorded, in a typical call centre, or highlighted as a negative customer experience for the customer in Kingussie. This focus on customers across cross-channels is essential in difficult economic times, the more customer-focused brands may do better than others!

In a recent article in Business Week’s Innovation section, Bruce Nussbaum investigated the impact that poorly executed, inadequately modelled and negligibly stress-tested financial instruments may have had on the ongoing global financial crash and pervading economic climate.Nussbaum captured the concept in a nutshell when he wrote: “Hundreds of hugely complex products based on hugely complex mathematic financial models were created and sold around the world-without first being tested out. There was little or no real-world iterative process… …In short, the innovation process was flawed. New inventions were not stress-tested in a real environment.”

It is obvious to draw parallels between this theory and how much effort our own industry puts into soft-launching and stress-testing online systems before unleashing them live on the wider community. Is it possible that similar attention to modelling by our investment banks and a reduced emphasis on getting to market as quickly as possible to reap the highest theoretical returns, might have avoided much of the mess we are now in?

In our experience, there are no shortcuts that can replace the benefits of thorough modelling and testing. We are experienced, working with financial service organizations and employ a range of financial modelling systems when creating products for that sector, regardless of the type and scale of banking application. We test, and retest with customers, conduct user surveys, and run real-world modelling. We listened to the top decision-makers from all sectors of global society at the annual Economic Forum in Davos back in January when they warned of just such an oversight, and we learned. Why didn’t the finance institutions and regulators do the same? Is it possible that they got ahead of themselves, bending over to product guys in order to reach a perceived sweet market as rapidly as possible, rather than following a risk-averse approach?

We work with high-profile financial clients like Barclays to ensure their online customers are provided with easy-to-use, highly secure, no risk products. Of course we are somewhat fortunate in that internet service modelling is logical and predictive – thanks to artificial server loading techniques we can run scenarios that see services oversubscribed by 100 percent and so on. But we also run pilot schemes, test groups, live tests, plus continuous testing and modelling post launch. We find real users to test products, and we ensure they are able to deposit and withdraw real funds long before products reach a wider market.

It appears that the investment banks we all rely upon simply skipped all these logical steps, going straight to market with poorly thought through products. Take the US public credit situation – if loans to citizens had been thoroughly modelled, it is probable that the disastrous toxic loan situation could have been avoided altogether. It’s important to ask the difficult questions – what if 20 percent of citizens can’t pay their loans back? What happens then?

Perhaps it is true that if organisations take the time to research, and model critical products and services carefully and thoroughly, they might miss out on early financial opportunities from time to time. But surely these steps should be considered vital, if not mandatory, to ensuring a solid, risk adverse financial landscape?