Pauline de Robert Hautequere

Pauline's bio

Pauline de Robert Hautequere holds an MSc in Human Computer Interaction/Ergonomics from UCL as well as an MBA from Columbia Business School and undergraduate degrees in Economics and English Studies. A French national who has also lived in the US, she brings to Foviance a unique perspective on customer experience, at the cross-road of business and usability, broadened by her own international outlook. As product manager, she is involved in the creation of new products and the continuous improvement of the Foviance proposition.

"Foviance is the place where it all came together for me: its approach to customer experience was a perfect match for my dual competencies – something I never thought I’d find, and which exemplifies the forward-thinking 'Foviance way' ".

A while back I wrote a short piece on the emergence of QR codes – suddenly they seemed to be everywhere. I had seen QR codes at the bottom of large posters along Tube corridors, on overhead ads on Tube trains, on daily newspapers, magazines, billboards, packaging and even on TV.

Some of these actually did something useful, such as take me straight to a mobile-friendly purchase page; others were a total failure – meaning they did not add anything useful, interesting, engaging to my experience with the brand. But they were everywhere. Yet this morning they were very much absent from Metro – I counted about half a dozen in the paper (and I was actually looking for them) and at least 2 were Metro’s own. So what’s going on? Are QR codes just another marketing fad? Did everyone rush in like lemmings and then realise it did actually take a bit of planning to make them work and so gave up? Is it a budget thing in the current economic climate?

I would have thought QR codes were an interesting way of increasing engagement at relatively low cost, and indeed this morning’s first QR code did just that. It was relatively small red QR code at the bottom of a large red ad on an early page in Metro. It scanned easily and took me straight to Santander’s (mobile-friendly) YouTube channel. There, I could click on links to further info or watch the 30-second video about their 123 card. The video, incidentally, is really good. I’m almost tempted to look into this card…so clearly some companies are getting it right.

To help those who are thinking about dipping their toes into QR code campaigns I thought it might be useful to write down a few guidelines. You can download this article here. Or you could call us to find out how Foviance can help you create a better customer experience using QR codes and other techniques. +44 (0) 20 7448 3100

Also available below

We recently had some interesting visitors in our office. They purport to modify behaviour through the use of “entrained music”. Entrainment, broadly defined, is a natural phenomenon where two or more independent rhythmic processes synchronize with each other. In layman’s terms, it means adding special effects to a music track that you may not consciously perceive but that will have an effect on your brainwaves by bringing them in sync with the beat.

I admit to my initial reaction being slightly dismissive – sounds rather new-agey – but was curious enough to go and look it up further. After all, being an amateur musician myself, I can’t argue with the premise that music can and indeed does change your mood.

Generally speaking, neuroscientists caution that there is still a great deal to learn “While these things are intriguing, we haven’t worked out the perceptual pathways in the brain for processing hearing as well as we have for visual and sensory perception,” said David Spiegel, the Jack, Samuel and Lulu Willson Professor in Medicine at Stanford. However they may otherwise lack accuracy, we do know that EEGs reflect certain mental states.

• A dominance of low-amplitude beta waves (14-30 Hz) was observed in busy and alert states,
• A dominance of wide-amplitude alpha waves (8- 12Hz) occurs in a relaxed, inattentive state.

In the early days of EEG research it was also discovered that some of the alpha and beta waves could be synchronized – entrained – to the frequency of an external, bright strobe light stimulus, and that at certain ‘entrainment’ frequencies of the external stimulus, participants in an experiment would enter deep peaceful states.

Further research has since shown that music with a strong beat will bring brain waves in sync, and that faster beats help concentration and alertness whereas slower beats tend to lead to meditative states. Brainwaves affect other body functions such as breathing and heart rate: think of pumping techno music beats’ effect on your heart rate vs slow beats which lead to lower breathing, slower heart rate and activate of a relaxation response.

Research also indicates that once this has been done the brain acquires the facility to change speed more easily on its own if/when it needs to. So just as using your mobile phone leads to tunnel vision that lasts well after you finish your conversation (which is why you should never phone and drive) the effect of music carries on after you stop listening to it.

“It’s too easy to forget how fundamental rhythm is in so many things and how important musical rhythm can be,” said Patrick Suppes, the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Stanford, who studies brainwaves and language cognition.

You’ve probably felt it without necessarily noticing it: consider the use of music in many religions, for example, or in cinema where a great score can make or break the film. Who has not felt the suspense induced by the two tone motif in Jaws, the fear in the Shining or the excitement in Star Wars? Well, this is taking the concept one step further: by creating special tracks that include “entrainment” effects, of which there can be dozens, a person’s conscious behaviour can be modified.

What does it mean for customer experience? Foviance is conducting research into how music is chosen in advertising and its emotional effects on mind states. An initial interview on our Emotional Engagement website with MusicMindWaves looks at the neuroscience of music.

With the passing into law of the recent update in European privacy law, cookie management and its impact on the customer experience has come to the fore again.

As it was until this new law came in, it was up to users to decide whether to allow cookies to be set or not. In the early days of the Internet this was largely a geek thing as average users did not know where to find these, but it did not matter so much as the number of cookies was relatively small. As the Net has grown, so have tracking technologies to the point where one of our large clients, for whom we ran a cookie audit, found that a whopping 80,000+ cookies were being set (an average of 10 cookies per page) across its many digital properties, including about a third for tracking purposes (as opposed to advertising which represents about half, or functional purposes). As has been rightly flagged by the authorities, this not only raises the issue of privacy with regards to tracking activity, but also of how much data they actually collect and what they do with it – including how they store it.

The case for this law was also fuelled by a number of high profile privacy debates, most notably caused by Facebook’s somewhat cavalier approach to user data, and a growing realisation of just how much data organisations were collecting about their website visitors. The idea is that now, the onus is on businesses: they must give users the choice of whether or not to accept each cookie.

As a reminder, cookies are little pieces of code that sit on the users’ machine and remember certain kinds of settings so that when the user accesses a site, they don’t have to re-enter their user name for example, or they are shown relevant rather than generic content . The new law basically says that users systematically need to give permission for any data to be collected. One challenge is that for the individual computer to be identified as “allowing” and the company server to know what to show or not to that particular user, a cookie still needs to be set…this is a bit of a catch22 .

At Foviance, we wanted to make the process as seamless as possible for the user – after all in many cases, cookies are very useful and make the experience much more fluid (as an example, if I didn’t have cookies from amazon.co.uk, every time I go to the site I’d have to re-enter my user name. As it is I only need the password…). So we did some brainstorming to identify different types of design layouts, or patterns, that could be used to solve the challenge.

The easiest solution is to accept all cookies from a given site on entry. For these situations, we looked at two possible patterns:

• Light box
• Roll down from the top

The next option was a progressive acceptance scheme, whereby as the user goes into the site, the acceptance for the relevant cookies is presented, as the need for that cookie arises. This is how it currently works when your browser preferences are set to ask the user before accepting cookies. The problem as it stands now is that on a site with many cookies, the pop up is almost constantly appearing and the experience is horrible…our solution therefore looks to embed this type of acceptance into the functionality cookies seek to enable. In general this approach is likely to work best for sites that only use a limited number of cookies.

The types of functionality we have looked at include:

• Remembering user names for log in
• Accepting video-related cookies
• Accepting advertising cookies

We even explored a “gamified” approach, whereby the user “collects” cookies across the site.

Another way in which the user can be given more control over the cookies is by adding a persistent footer to the website, which gives the user access to all the cookies set by that web site and the ability to change preferences freely.

Overall, though, we can’t help but feel these will be temporary measures. Ultimately, cookie management will have to be re-integrated into the browser if the technology stays as is, or cookies will die and a new method for tracking and collecting data will emerge.

One more thing. Currently the law only applies to Europe. Neither American nor Asian sites need comply, and we wonder what they will make of it – somewhat cynically we believe that as with other rules, it will depend on a basic risk/reward analysis. Users may lose out if they simply decide not to bother serving content to European IPs, should it become more costly or even not profitable to deliver sites that comply with the legislation. European businesses could lose out if they do comply and users start shopping and using non-compliant sites from the US and Asia because they offer a better experience…hence the importance of getting patterns right for dealing with the new law.

Although we believe early implementation will be slow, judging by the level of compliance with accessibility rules, we guess that this could change very quickly should a user sue and win. Ultimately, there seems to be greater public concern and media traction for privacy than there ever has been for accessibility rules, probably because privacy touches everyone personally.

The last crumb of advice? Call Foviance to run a cookie audit and plan the implementation of the new rules.

Recently the Four Seasons re-launched their website, for a cool $18million. So what does it look like?

The first thing that strikes the visitor on the Home page is the quality of the photography. The format makes full use of the width of the screen and half the page and is visually stunning. So that’s where at least some of that $18M budget went. The photos immediately give a sense of luxury – crisp colours, cosmopolitan cities, super sharp images – it almost feels as if this is a glossy brochure rather than a website. But right there on the bottom right, you can book a room: clearly the functionality is there.

Another good thing about the site is that everything appears above fold. From the landing page you can either select a destination in the wider sense of the term (continent) or find a room in a specific hotel. The use of a black background for the top half with the photo compared to the white background of the functional, lower half also helps highlight that the lower part of the site is where you go to “do” stuff.

Selecting a destination pulls up a blue-green monochrome map over the top half. One one side, the list of cities in which there is a fourseasons property, with a neat mouseover pulling up a photo of the property (or properties) or area (a couple walking romantically in front of the Eiffel tower for Paris, not very original) and magnifying and highlighting the pin on the map. The map, on the other side of the page, is dotted with pins – a-la-Google maps – locating the properties. Roll over a pin and the photo appears, while the city is highlighted on the left hand side list. Neat. The large logo at the top will take you back to the main home page, so it is easy to change destinations that way. And on every page within a property’s section there is a large, slightly obnoxious red bar at the top for making a reservation: so the functionality is always easily accessible.

The individual hotel landing pages also sport that same widescreen, stunning photography. Unlike the home page, the content goes down well below the fold: presumably the thinking (and one hopes, the testing) is that once a customer gets to a specific hotel page, they are interested enough that they will scroll down for the info. And there is a lot of information – about the rooms, the sizes, occupancy, the view, the floors you might be on, the L’Occitane toiletries you will find in the marble bathroom – and so on. There is also a useful box which recaps policies such as check in time, cancellation and so on. The design is very pleasing to the eye – great use of white space, airy, no clutter – and still manages to put all the essential information right there on the page. The breadcrumb trail lets you see where you are, and is clickable so you can easily move back up one level in the menu. In line with the current social media surge, there are sharing options – Facebook, Twitter etc. right below the photo. So you can let all your friends know that you are going to stay in the presidential suite (for which there is even a floorplan, it’s that big)…

In terms of travel information, the hotel’s landing page also shows a Google map of the immediate region (a section of California for the Palo Alto hotel) with red pins identifying attractions in the vicinity (Golden Gate bridge, Napa Valley): unfortunately the images do not appear properly on rolling over (they are chopped off) nor are they labelled properly – so the execution here is lacking. I also found some of the detail over the top: do I really need to know that their fitness facility is 149 sqm or 1660sqft and that they have four Technogym Synchro elliptical trainers ? I suppose some fitness fanatics might be interested, but it does add a layer of complexity. And what’s “Rooftop Respite” at the Palo Alto hotel? It’s a euphemism for “How to get rid of your kids if you didn’t bring the nanny” – a.k.a. Family services, as it is called most other hotels, such as the concierge organising child-friendly outings or babysitting services.

Another niggle – while it’s great that they have provided a photo gallery for each property, and generally fantastic photography, I found these took several seconds to load on my PC at work. It may be somewhat of an issue for someone connecting from their home computer without the same connection speed. Another interesting item is the link to external reviews for the hotel, in particular Trip Advisor: this latter has been in the news recently, with some controversy over the value of the reviews. Personally, I’d question whether linking to these is such a great idea. Moreover, my personal approach would not be to look to Four Seasons to spoon feed me reviews that are to their advantage: I’d be googling for the negative stuff or specific tips on rooms to avoid!

That said, the overall impression is one of understated, mouth-watering luxury. Which might be why I didn’t see any prices…In fact the only way to get prices, it seems, is to request a reservation. There is no page detailing rack rates for the hotel, and even on the offers page there are no prices. It’s the old “If you need to ask…”…and indeed, at USD1,270/Night for a family package in Bali, I think that trip will have to wait…

A little over a year ago I wrote Why the Kindle is burning bright and stand by my original assessment – it’s a great one-task tool.  It enables me to carry around a whole library with minimal hassle, the battery life is fantastic – especially if you don’t use the wi-fi function (which you don’t need to use daily, once you have downloaded a bunch of books) and the reading experience is pretty good. One drawback of digital books is that once you’ve downloaded them, you forget about them – because they have no physical presence, the old “out of sight – out of mind” rule applies: a virtual “to read” pile is not seen, not read.

But I’ve also come to reflect on the wider implications of de-materialising books.  One of the joys of books as objects is having them in your home – yes, even lowly, not particularly decorative paperbacks.  Some will argue that they take up space, gather dust, kill trees – and indeed they occupy an inordinate amount of shelf space in our house. Another joy is the off-line book shopping experience. Go to a good bookshop and there will be tables stacked with hardback copies of new releases, shelves packed with a world of books – from crime to classics, text books to joke collections, children’s lit to chick lit. Walking around the store looking randomly at the titles, glancing at the table top to see what’s new, picking up a book based on its cover and rifling through the pages, judging the quality of the paper, feeling its heft, smelling the paper and ink, reading the back blurb – this cannot be replicated online, only approximated. 

I am always curious when I visit a home, to see what books are on the shelves (if there are any books, of course). Sometimes I discover new authors, other times I find my friend has read the same book(s) and we can have a great discussion about it. With books in digital form, this will happen less and less often. No books, no book-shelves.  No serendipity.
Already these days, I can no longer decide to read a (sometime quite random) book based on its cover, glimpsed in the hands of a commuter on the Tube.  They’re all reading e-books or the occasional iPad, and for all I know it’s an economic text book –or something…

With the increasing disappearance of bookshops, I now largely (but not exclusively) rely on Amazon’s recommendations, which admittedly work quite well for what they are. However the system is creating a virtuous loop – recommendations will tend to be along the lines of what other people (who may be quite different from me and buy for totally different reasons) have bought on Amazon, and ignore what they may have bought and read offline.  In fact suggestions almost never come out of left field and surprise me. Again, it feels like the potential to discover really different books or authors is diminished – and the net result is a poorer experience as a reader.

…and you can’t opt out (unless you turn off your phone) you have been warned…

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”

Hands up if you enjoy the retail changing room experience. Hands up if you buy clothes online.

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?…

As part of my conversation with Mike Dewar, data scientist with Bitly, we discussed data visualisation. One of the challenges in dealing with large quantities of data is making sense of it, and then communicating the important aspects of the set– telling the data’s story. One way of doing this is by creating graphs and infographics to highlight the important points. Sometimes, though, to make the story clear one has to compromise the scientific accuracy of the graph – meaning, telling a story that people will understand may come in direct conflict with the “proper”, scientific way of presenting the data. Does it matter?

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.