Imagine a world where on walking into a store at the mall you are greeted by a shop assistant who welcomes you by name, asks you how you enjoyed your last purchase of brand X and whether you would to go to your personalised changing room to (virtually?) try on a selection of clothes they have identified as possibly interesting to you based on your last purchases (in store and online) with the company. 

E-commerce sites gather data (now a controversial practice, if the EU is to be believed, and one that is newly regulated) that help them understand out how customers shop, which site they came from, and use this to target promotions and advertising even after they have moved on to another site (Visit Lands End for instance and you see ads from them everywhere else you go online: not a coincidence, in case you were wondering). In the bricks-and-mortar world, similar attempts are made through the use of loyalty cards and store credit cards as well as direct mailings but linking to foot traffic is a lot harder.

Footpath technology has now cracked part of the problem and promises to get retailers at least some of the best of both worlds, by leveraging mobile phone signals. The technology, created by UK company Path, monitors the signal (more specifically the unique ID for the phone – a bit like IP addresses for computers) and uses triangulation to track their whereabouts in the mall, providing insights into traffic patterns. Their analytics let retailers get a measure of, for example, how many people walked past an ad and then went to the store. In the words of the CEO, Sharon Biggar  “Now we can produce heat maps of the mall and show advertisers where the premium locations are for their adverts and perhaps more importantly, we can price the advertising differently at each location.” Similarly in larger retail spaces, as she explains, “We can now say, you had 100 people come to this product, but no one purchased it. From there, we can help a retailer narrow down what’s going wrong.”  

 (graphic from the Mail article)

Indeed. The analysis can reveal how many people went into, say, both The Gap and Monsoon, or how long the average visitor spends at Starbucks – or which areas get very little traffic. All of which is fascinating, but may not be to the taste of all the mall visitors.

The mall owner trialling this system posted a warning on its signage and stress the company does not collect personally identifiable data (in fact the system is not capable of doing so: carriers are very protective of their customers’ data), they just use the “signal fingerprint”. Personally I think the little notice below is unlikely to be noticed by everyone (do you even look at the map when you go to your local shopping centre?) and that there are some privacy concerns here.

The system does give an accurate enough record of the phone’s path. Mall owners could sell other available data such as CCTV footage (bearing in mind some and this could actually be matched malls actually use face recognition software as a preventative measure to deter shoplifting) which retailers could also match to credit or debit card transactional data – and then would be in a position to make very specific targeted offers to customers as they walk into the store.

In fact there seems to be some uncertainty over the legality of the system since although it does not identify individuals per se, it does provide the means to do so to some extent if matched with the right data. That in itself is a data privacy red flag, especially given recent developments in European data privacy and storage laws.

According to the company the system is already used in Europe and Australia and most shoppers do not opt out (though I would question whether the visitors are really aware of it?). Moreover malls have long been tracking shoppers through other methods – people counters, CCTV, and undercover researchers who will secretly shoppers around – which also generated heatmaps, albeit slightly less hi tech ones.

But what happens the day hackers break into the data store (as has happened to a number of high profile companies this past year – Sony, AT&T…)? Path says to protect information they scramble the data twice…which I would not put much faith in, personally. The last word belongs to Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru, with whom I agree wholeheartedly on this: “I’m sure as more people get more cell phones, it’s probably inevitable that it will continue as a resource, but I think the future is going to have to be opt in, not opt out”

Thought so – and so have a host of other people. There have been two approaches to this – one of which I blogged about earlier which is trying to improve the online experience by using virtual mannequins based on your measurements. Hawes & Curtis has now implemented it and in fact the same company has now released a female form.
The other approach is to set about improving the off-line experience – the dreaded retail changing room.

The latest innovation in the field is the virtual mirror. Possibly the first major retailer to implement a version of this was Macy’s in New York City, who trialled a virtual mirror about a year ago for a limited time. The Magic Fitting Room was set up in the dressing room area and featured a body-length mirror along with an iPad tablet. The shopper stepped in, a photo was taken to calibrate position and body orientation. They could enter their Facebook log-in information, an e-mail address or a mobile phone number on the iPad then browse a (rather limited) selection of tops, bottoms, dresses and jackets. On selecting an item, a digital representation of it appeared on the mirror, superimposed upon the reflection of the shopper as if she were actually trying it on. When they are done, shoppers could share the look via e-mail or Facebook to see what their friends thought. They could also receive a text message or Facebook post indicating the location of these items in the store. “Reaching out to and engaging with the digital-savvy, young consumer is something all retailers are striving to do,” said Joe Feczko, Macy’s senior vice president for innovation.

That’s all well and good – but having gone through this virtual try, you still had to traipse through the store to find the item on the racks and probably try it on for real just to make sure (assuming it was in stock, that is). Not exactly a time saver then.

Style me  has also come up with an interactive virtual mirror, slated to appear in stores sometime next year. It is not meant to replace the changing room but rather augment it or enhance it. After the system calibrates your body size and shape while you stand still a few seconds, the user standing in front of the mirror can browse by brand or clothing item the same way they would with a Kinect (e.g. swiping the air to turn a page, hand hovering over an icon on the screen rather than touching it). The next thing is to try it on virtually – so the item appears “on” you. You can then save, take a picture to share by email or on Facebook, and decide if you want to actually try on or not. It’s an opportunity to share a laugh with your friends, they say. Really?…

I can see quite a few things “wrong” with this. For one, this comes across to me as a “digital savvy young consumer” approach to shopping – an afternoon out with your friends, you try on a lot of things – some quite unlikely – have a giggle, post a funny pic on Facebook. For grown ups, the perspective of standing in the middle of the shop floor virtually trying on clothes probably does not appeal so much – nor do I know many adult women (let alone men) who shop with friends all that much or who have the time, especially those with children, to virtually try on a bunch of things before deciding which to take into the changing room. And if I have to do this in the privacy of the changing room I might as well be trying the clothes on anyway.

I also seriously doubt that calibrating by just standing a few seconds in front of the mirror will provide an accurate enough body image – you still need to try the item on for fit. While I see the sense of having an online virtual me based on my measurements (see above, fit.me) to help online ordering, I suspect the technology is still not sharp enough to make it reliable enough in helping select a size. The one technology which currently seems to offer real benefits in this area is the Intellifit system which actually scans your body to tell you what size and model to buy.

Other companies doing similar things:

Using Kinect:

TC2

Glasses to You

Frames Direct 

Finally, what about men? Would they use this?…

Arguably it depends who you are talking to. Depending on your audience, the scientific way may not necessarily be the best way. Many lay people have little idea of how to interpret a graph, after all and what will really matter to them is the story and whether the graph helps make it visually clear or perhaps memorable. They will not even notice whether the right type of graph and scale was used or not. In user experience terms, making something – a web site, an application – usable may well means sacrificing a feature that only a small number of power users would even consider using.

An illustration of this is that a recent post on the Bitly blog was picked up by people all over the Internet because the story it told resonated and the graph seemed to put it in a nutshell. The post was about the “half-life” of links, which is the idea that different links will generate different levels of attention. In this post a further assumption is made: that a link’s potential for generating attention depends on the site or platform where it is first seen and clicked on. In other words, a link on Twitter may have a shorter life span than one on a blog. The graph below compares how long a link “lives” online on different social media platforms: this graph is the one that was picked up yet from a purely scientific point of view, the axes’ scales are probably not the clearest they could have been.

Does it matter? Not really: the overall picture it provides is accurate and illustrates in one neat package what the blog is saying, which is that links on Twitter or Facebook are much shorter lived that links on YouTube.

The conclusion is familiar to us at Foviance and applies here as well: you can’t be all things to all people, you need to understand your customers and create an engaging experience for them.

A few days ago a friend handed me a card that advertised an exhibition at the V&A Museum here in London. It is called “The Power of Making” and she thought my son (who is 9yrs old) might enjoy it.  As you can see on the right, the front of the card carries very little information –  but the reverse (below) had me smiling.

There was a cute little monster/robot image at the bottom, which turns out to have been a well thought out, functioning QR code! When you scan the code and access the link, it takes you straight to this page.

This is a great example of a good use of a QR codes, in my opinion. It is playful, visually reminiscent of a little monster made of Hama beads (in fact they call it a “beaded QR code”) or canvas stitching. It is in colour, much more visually appealing than the usual black and white ones, and the colours actually match the image and text colour on the card. Last but not least it takes you to the exhibition’s information page on the V&A website, i.e. relevant and useful content.

My only gripe?  The website itself is not mobile-friendly…

Mike holds a PhD in Systems engineering and has also completed post-doctoral work in various places using a wide range of data analysis methods – time-series, computer-based video analysis and other complex mathematical modelling – to study neural changes in fruit flies or how T-cells’ response to an antigen expresses itself genetically over time. He is now going to apply similar methods to the analysis of online behaviour – the links people click on.

In fact Mike is particularly interested in predictive analysis  (which link a user will click on next) and characterising human behaviour against that of robots. It turns out that before you analyse all the clicks on bit.ly URLs to make sense out of them, you need to be sure they were “genuine interest” clicks. It could after all have been some random bot scraping around, or a specific attempt at boosting clicks for affiliate purposes. There are in fact companies whose mission it is to sort out this human vs robot issue – pay per click is big business after all, and no one wants to pay for clicks made by code.

What I find interesting, though, is that Bitly’s service allows the company to collect a wealth of information on the content being shared across the web, and therefore gathers great insights from the social web: millions of people use the service to shorten links they share on Twitter for instance. The company has a team of computer scientists engaged in quasi-academic mathematical research to create models of user behaviour that predict what they will be interested in and therefore what they are likely to click on. This could be used for example to help users discover new content by making more intelligent suggestions. The end result would be an enhanced user experience when consuming content online. There is also, of course, an underlying commercial logic: predictive analytics wizardry is being used by online businesses to better target different segments of users, to try and optimise response rates on email campaigns, among other things. This is one of the many areas Foviance’s analytics team combines its expertise with that of our user experience team to bring added value to our clients.

Serendipity was clearly at work: what started as a quick informal chat turned into an hour long conversation during which I learnt that fruit flies carry out a sophisticated courtship song and dance (who knew?) and we discussed the challenges of data visualisation, a topic I am particularly interested in.

Mike – thanks for the chat!

However, in this particular paper, inside the first page was a “Metro on the move in four easy steps” box with a QR code and a very brief explanation of what they are and how to use them. Within the paper I counted no less than 11 adverts with QR codes.

I decided to carry out a brief review of the QR codes using an iPhone 4 on a 3G connection in the same location within the hour. The results of my findings are below:

Non- mobile friendly web pages:

• Metro’s own QR code took a considerable amount of time to load because of the non-mobile friendly web pages.
• Wowcher advert on saving on paintballing: It was slow to load to the relevant voucher and went straight to the main non-mobile friendly website.
• Simplify digital advert on price comparisons was slow to load and after a lengthy amount of time passes, I’m still waiting.
• Lloyds Pharmacy advert on men’s “problems” (let’s leave it at that): Leads to a non-mobile friendly website. Although a funny advert with three naked men pictured holding hats in front of them.
• Flu Camp advert to recruit people for clinical trials: Another non-mobile friendly web, a pity as the actual advert and code were very creative.

QR codes leading to different advertised pages:

• M&S Dine in offers in store (dinner for 2, £10); although the advert stated the offer ran to the 18th of October the code simply led to a web page to sign up for text alerts
• M&S Women’s full page coat advert: M&S lead users to the site’s women homepage, although mobile enabled, it would be much easier if the QR code diverted users directly to the coat.
• AirFrance (general advert): Again, goes straight to their mobile home page, I would have benefited more if it had linked straight to the advert on display.
• Motors.co.uk advert about researching second hand cars: Lands straight to the iTunes download page. (Except the title of the scanned code is not relevant – it is simply the iTunes url)

QR codes working well:

John Lewis/Sony Bravia TV: A QR code that takes you straight to the mobile enabled buy now page. In my basket with a click!

Heathrow general advert/download free app: It goes to a video page (showcasing the advert) but you can skip it to get the app download page. This takes you straight to the iTunes download page.

The final verdict is, if advertisers expect to go mainstream with QR codes, they really need to improve the experience for users.

Having happily purchased from Gap.com, though in a distant past (we are talking around the year 2000) – I was stunned. To me, search boxes are an essential element of a good user experience. For most sites I can think of, an included part of the landscape along with the logo top left and the privacy/contact us links at the bottom. Just to make sure I asked a colleague to take a look, thinking I might have missed it – but no. Not there. So to find those trousers I needed to click on Women, click on trousers and scroll down scanning dozens of images to try and find those cords. Needless to say I gave up.

Gap.eu – missing a search bar, top right.

It niggled though, as I was pretty sure the US site did have a search box. And lo and behold, there it is – top right, where there was a blank space on the .eu site. If anyone from The Gap is listening out there, you might want to put in that search box and close the gap?

 Gap.com – including a search bar, top right.

The Sunday Times published a Top 100 list of the best apps a couple of months ago,  which I’m still working my way through. There are many articles and blogs all over the web talking at length about some of these apps, best of  articles, not to mention the App store’s own featured rankings.

That’s the first big problem: the size of the market means it is quite hard to know what to buy or download, not what works or what is fun. It’s like the old saying, about spending your first year at university making loads of new friends and the rest of your time there trying to get rid of them! I find there is not enough good information out there to give you confidence in your purchase. The same applies to the ratings and comments within the app store, quite often there are too few for them to be reliable. While this has relatively little importance for free apps, it becomes more problematic when you consider the cumulative spend on paid apps which range from 59p to £5.99 or more. 

Navigating with one’s hands, tapping and swiping is becoming increasingly natural. So much so, that my 6 year old the other day tried to “click” with his finger on the family PC’s screen. Granted he’s had minimal experience with keyboards, and has much more experience with touch and gestural interfaces, from iPod touch to Nintendo Wii and DSi. Still, shades of things to come, I think.

One frustration however is the lack of consistency from app to app, beyond the general swipe and pinch gestures. Many of the text heavy apps react in quite different ways and have resorted to different modes of manipulating the blocks of text and images. Flipboard folds pages down the middle (almost so it looks like a three dimensional shape), Le Figaro (French newspaper) scrolls up and down as well as turns the pages, while the innovative PushPopPress has published Al Gore’s “Our choice” as a fantastic interactive book – with interactive graphics, video, and voice overs. In a similar spirit, Alice in Wonderland comes with interaction that hints at the future of books, I think. But the only consistent thing is the inconsistency. Tapping once or twice, where hidden menus might appear from, what some of the icons mean even – is anybody’s guess. This should take a while to sort out, and naturally companies like Foviance will contribute to the development of best practices for the user experience on tablets.

Photography on the iPad2 is stunning – the Reuters app, for example, showing an editor’s selection of the day’s news in photo – Flipboard is as great as Scobleizer said it was, allowing single point of access to your news sources and social media accounts. Too many apps are still not optimised for iPad and the rendering is fuzzy if you use the full screen space – like bad resolution on your computer screen when you over enlarge pictures. This should change as more developers upgrade their apps.

I’m not using my iPad as much as I hoped to – for one I still feel such a geek taking it out on the Tube! More to the point, it’s another device competing for my limited time: email and browsing tend to remain PC activities as the screen is bigger and the keyboard more comfortable, texts are sent from my iPhone (a wi-fi connection is not always handy, and watch those data charges on iPad 3G!)…I read a Kindle (more ergonomic to hold than the iPad) and paper books and magazines (but if there is an iPad version available, the subscription will not be renewed).

As a newspaper/magazine substitute it really comes into its own, but it’s an expensive substitution! Luckily there are other emerging uses, I have watched a film on it and found it surprisingly immersive. Literally holding the movie in your hands takes you into the picture much more than sitting in a huge dark room with strangers, and the screen is plenty big enough for this. Of course if you have to use headphones because others are present it becomes a little anti-social, just as listening to music can be.

There are also some excellent educational apps both for children and adults. From learning musical notation, playing the guitar, maths bingo, virtual visits to Ancient Rome and the fabulous photography available on the Nasa and the Hubble apps.

In fact I am seriously considering an iPad for the kids when they are a bit older rather than a first computer. I am also exploring using it instead of a paper notepad (saving the rainforest!). With writing apps – either with digital transformation or without – and a stylus, it’s becoming more of a viable option, and when you throw in productivity apps such as Instapaper and Dropbox you have the potential to completely change the way you work.

All in all then, I am thrilled with my purchase; it was well worth the money, the hassle of ordering, the wait and all. It’s a great device; one that you really feel is changing the game as you use it: and how exciting is that?

Yippee? Actually not quite, there are two ways to look at it: 

• I could be thrilled that Apple was over-delivering and reducing the shipping delay by 2 weeks
• I could be hopping mad because I had planned things so that someone would be there on the original due date (26th April), and now there would be no one there on the new estimated date.

To compound the problem, Apple does not let you either:

• Change the delivery address once the order is processed
• Change the delivery address through DHL online after the first “fail to deliver”: you actually have to call DHL to do it

So I waited for the first delivery to fail, powerless. I had to check my online Apple account to check for delivery then call DHL, all on my mobile and from abroad, to organise for the iPad to be redelivered to my husband’s office. Don’t ask me how much that added to my phone bill. The upshot was that I did not get my iPad 2 before the 25th , when I returned to England, and it sat for almost two weeks on my desk, waiting.

What a let down for what could have been a rather fantastic experience!

When Steve Jobs announced the iPad 2 on March 2nd, I was watching the event live online. I signed up for the email alerts on the Apple store website straight away and of course on the 24th of March I was up late at night. Reloading the iPad2 webpage every 5 minutes from about half past midnight in anticipation of the 1am online launch. After all, I’d been waiting for this second release almost since the first one came out!

By 1:02am I was in the online store purchasing – trying to purchase, rather – the object of my desire, and from 1:06 – 1:48am I tried over and over again to complete the purchasing process. The site was hanging up, crashing, emptying the basket – I must have done the same log-in, select, add to cart, enter payment over 20 times… but then lo and behold, it went through…and announced an April 26 delivery date. So in the end I got the iPad pretty much as originally scheduled.

Thus the whole pleasurable anticipation of receiving my tablet turned into a majorly frustrating experience. If it had not been for an iPad 2, I might even have cancelled the order. But that’s the power of emotional design – users will go through hoops to get their hands on desirable toys.

If I had been able to change the address on learning the delivery date, it would have indeed simplified things, been cheaper all around as well as more environmentally friendly…

According to BusinessWeek, Amazon Kindle sales rose each quarter through 2010 and exceeded estimates with a total volume of eight million devices shipped. The same story also reports that Amazon will have sold at least 60% more Kindles than predicted (five million) when the 2010 totals are finally totted up, representing a 233% increase on 2009 sales. Industry sources say that readers downloaded 15 million Kindle books, ten million of them paid, in the last week of 2010 alone. And Amazon.com itself has just announced a third author has joined the ‘Kindle Million Club’ – authors who have sold over a million Kindle books.

A major factor behind the Kindle’s success has been Amazon’s willingness to stay calm, analyse the market, listen to users and act accordingly. Instead of trying to compete for market share against numerous mobile devices – smartphones, tablets, media player – Amazon has actually developed a Kindle app that works on these other platforms and automatically syncs read pages, bookmarks, notes and highlights across devices (including the Kindle), so reading time can be shared across gadgets. Users and Kindle evangelists can even lend books once to one person for 14 days that can be read on a PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, BlackBerry or Android device.

But when it comes down to customer experience: what do Kindle users really want? Kelly Gallagher, vice president of Publishing Services at Bowker, said: “It appears that heavy to moderate book buyers want a dedicated device for reading that doesn’t have a lot of distractions bundled with it. However, we do see that iPad owners may influence overall sales by bringing new and light e-book buyers into the market.”

Size and weight clearly matters for anyone looking to carry a device around with them most of the time. Amazon’s Kindle is 8mm thick and weighs just 245 grammes, whereas the iPad is 12mm thick and at 680 grammes looks and feels like a brick by comparison. You only have to watch commuters reading on the iPad – they hold it on their knees, while e-book readers hold theirs just like a book.

Readability is also understandably pretty important. Avid readers who spend a long time looking at their screen love the Kindle’s E Ink, much easier on the eye that an LCD display. The iPad wins out for magazine and multimedia readers thanks to colour, graphics and video capabilities, while reading a novel on a smart phone soon gets tiring. Of course those screens also need powering, and while the iPhone does not even make it through the day and the iPad lasts about 10 hours without a charge, the Kindle lasts 10 days with Wi-Fi turned on and a full month with it turned off.

But perhaps the most important factor for anyone looking purely for a reading device is that of price. According to Digital Trends, the total price disparity after using a Kindle and an iPad for two years is approximately £600 once you take into account both the purchase prices (Kindles start at £109; iPads at £439) plus the data services necessary for the iPad.

So, it appears the Amazon Kindle has defied the nay-sayers and gone firmly mainstream, solidly establishing the e-Book market in the process. It only took a decade or so from the first e-readers emerging in 1998 and the Microsoft Cleartype in 2000, but actually that follows the timeline of the classic adoption cycle. These days if you live in a large city, e-reading commuters are a common sight.

So much for the iPad being a Kindle Killer. The Kindle was designed to do one thing and do it very well, and that is precisely what it does. There are always going to be tradeoffs in trying to be all things to all people, and that’s why I’ll read on Kindle over iPad any day.