Mobile

…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”

As a regular commuter, I’ve started to notice a few QR codes appearing on adverts inside the tube carriages and even on a poster in a tube corridor. The other day, I spied a large half-page M&S advert in the Metro that sported a conspicuous QR code. It was probably a special edition (13th October), since today’s paper did not contain anywhere near as many QR codes.

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.

In light of Apple’s launch of Siri, the mobile personal assistant for the new iPhone 4S, I thought I’d take a brief look at why voice control has, to date, never managed to truly hit the mainstream. There have been automated speech recognition tools for longer than you’d think. Bell Labs developed a system that could recognise numbers in the 1950s. By the 1980s there were systems capable of recognising a small vocabulary of words, with the vocabularies increasing to the size of human vocabularies (10,000 to 150,000 words) by the early nineties. In the early noughties Orange had a system called Wildfire, which did many of the same things that Siri will do. Wildfire, however was ahead of its time and was discontinued (upsetting many customers with disabilities who had come to rely upon it).

One problem that has prevented this technology from widespread adoption is the rate of errors. There are a number of factors that contribute to this, particularly noise, diction and accent. Background noise is a real problem in speech recognition systems to this day. Equally challenging is the issue of how a user speaks. Strong accents or indistinct diction has continually caused issues with recognition accuracy. Anyone who has used automated customer service lines will be only too aware of these problems.

One way in which speech recognition systems used to achieve higher rates of accuracy was through learning the user’s voice (Dragon Naturally Speaking for example) and thereby becoming better at understanding what a user was saying. However, not all systems have this opportunity, although Siri will.

There are two other issues that are likely to have affected how willing people are to use speech recognition systems; the interaction and the context. Tackling interaction first. In the past, systems that permit voice control have tended to shy away from natural language style interaction, as technically it’s very challenging. This results in users having to adopt a more machinelike style of interaction, such as “Search, restaurants, submit”. This feels unnatural and makes the sequence of interaction harder to remember. You also sound pretty odd talking like that in public.

This brings us onto the second issue, context. Just how comfortable are people talking to a machine in public? Speech recognition customer service lines are ok until you reach the “I’m sorry…” moment, at which point the repetition and frustration often result in a level of embarrassment. If the language you use is more natural, then tasks become more like a conversation, which in turn makes it more comfortable to use the system in a public place. Even so, I suspect it will be a while before people are comfortable picking up their phone and demanding it to give them information like they’re an extra in Star Trek.

However, if any company can convince people to change their behaviour it’s Apple.

If Siri does succeed and developers have the opportunity to take advantage of the functionality it offers, they should consider the following aspects of their users’ interaction:

• Appropriateness of task: is your task suitable for voice command use? Shorter spoken interactions are likely to be more successful (and satisfying).
• Context: where are your users likely to be when they interact with your product? This will influence the types of phrase they use and the brevity of those phrases.
• Privacy: what information will your users need to speak out loud? Will they be comfortable broadcasting this information? Are there points at which you’ll need to switch to a different type of input mechanism?
• Triggers: what is likely to cause a user to begin a specific command or information request? This will govern how the interaction should flow.
• Mental models: if you’re replicating a real world interaction, make sure that you do so accurately as any mismatches will be jarring and confuse users.
• Errors: ensure that recognition or interaction errors are handled gracefully so that the illusion of a conversation is not broken.

Voice control has, and has always had, a lot of promise. It will be interesting to see if Apple can help to embed this style of interaction into our daily lives.

Social and mobile are two of the largest growth areas in the technology world. It is therefore inevitable that commentators are keen to identify (and understand how to monetise) convergence between the two. There is great synergy between the two areas. Both are focused on communication, both are undeniably personal and both are very immediate.

Whilst a computer is a window onto the web and into your social connections, a mobile, be it an iPhone, iPad or Android smartphone, is your personal window. And unlike a computer it brings extra data and functionality with it. With a mobile, you can share where you are and what you’re doing, generally in a much richer way than a simple status update. This is all becoming fairly commonplace and the level of use of this type of functionality is growing inexorably. The question is, once you’ve gained access to your social network of choice through your smartphone, what is there to tempt you to do more than what effectively amount to multimedia or spatial updates?

This is the question put to business and organisations who seek to engage with users in the social mobile world. Some businesses have an easier time answering this question than others. Foursquare, for example, is a great example of a social mobile offering. Find, visit, share, rate, all a great fit for social mobile and one of the key factors behind its success (as well as the gamification). But your business isn’t Foursquare, so how do you work out where you fit in this space?

Josh Clark, a well-respected voice in the field of iPhone app design, talks about three mindsets mobile users tend to have:

• Microtasking, when a user is engaged in short periods of intensive activity
• Local, when a user seeks information about or to support them in their current context
• Bored, when the user is looking for distraction, novelty or entertainment

As Josh himself has recently pointed out, these mindsets map nicely onto Google’s categorisation of mobile information usage; repetitive, urgent and bored.

Now, social mobile can fill one or all of these categories. So we need to delve a little deeper to understand what aspects of social interaction match these mindsets.

When thinking about the different types of interaction possible through social media, I found this model by Isra Garcia particularly useful.

<Click to enlarge>

 From this model there are effectively four different types of interaction:

• Connecting to others
• Exposure, viewing information and activity within your network
• Sharing information with others
• Providing feedback on shared information or on a specific topic

There is also an associated interaction that can be facilitated or initiated through social media:

•  Communicating directly with others.

When combined with the mobile mindsets different types of social mobile interaction emerge. Using this, albeit simplistic abstraction, we can start to see how organisations can understand where their business and any potential mobile offering might fit.

<Click to enlarge>

 If we return to Foursquare we can see that it covers the following areas:

• Researching – what’s good in my area?
• Situational support – is there anything good near me right now.
• Reporting – I’ve found something great, or I want to review this too.
• Matchmaking – are any of my network available to join me?
• Reaching out – well, what could I do today?

Which is quite a large portion of the spectrum, particularly the local part. Interestingly if we look at the social networks themselves, we can see that Facebook covers the entire spectrum (depending upon which of their suite of services you use), whereas the professional network Linkedin, is rooted firmly in the microtasking area, with some small forays in local.

So, how is this useful? There are two aspects, understanding what situation you find a user in will directly influence how you can engage with them and what the likelihood of them wanting to engage with you is. This I will cover in a future article. The other is determining which aspects of a product or service could benefit from a social aspect. A couple of examples might help to illustrate this.

iPad video app:

I have an app that lets people insert their face over the lead character in short clips of popular films. It’s a great timewasting app, but after the initial rush of downloads, sales have stagnated. There are several aspects of social interaction we can target. Broadcasting and the flipside, consumption, would allow people to share their videos with others. If we add in reviewing, via commenting, then we cover off a neat conversion of a bored user into a microtasking (and therefore more engaged) user.

Customer reviews app:

I have a service that helps people to view and share reviews of cars. I only focused on letting people easily view the reviews database (the researching goal). This is great, but I’m missing two other goals that would help to harness the community. If I were to provide an easy route to information about “that car there” (situational support) then I add to the utility of my app/mobile site. If I were to offer the ability to review a car (reviewing/reporting) or even ask a question (conversation) then I would increase both the utility of and engagement with my app.

Or how about a real world example, Groupon. Groupon is an offers site, with the key to their success being the sharing and viral spread of deals. Currently the Groupon mobile offering lets people find offers near them and share them with their network. This is simple, straightforward and it works. However, there are a number of ways that this could be enhanced. What if the service were to recommend deals that my friends have looked at or taken up (consumption)? What about reviewing or rating deals (reporting)? For dinner deals in particular, how about the facility to invite other people in your network to take advantage of a deal (matchmaking). All of these could enhance the Groupon service. As I was putting this article together, Groupon and Foursquare announced that Groupon daily deals would now be available through Foursquare. This looks to be very much a win-win situation for both of these companies.

It’s important to stress that I don’t intend to advocate simply bolting social elements onto a mobile offering. The appropriateness and likely appeal of the social aspect should be carefully considered. For example it might be good to use a service to find reviews of local doctors, but you probably don’t want to connect to your doctor or share with others that you’re visiting them.

The question then becomes, how do we gauge appropriateness and appeal? A great first step is to look at what similar services are doing and the level of engagement they attain. This will provide some indication of what social features might be useful and whether people will actually use them. If you have an existing product that you’re looking to socially augment, then depending upon your budget you then have a couple of options for determining which social features would be best for your product. Surveys provide a cost effective way of building a picture of the types of features people might use. Focus groups and one to one interviews can then build upon this insight.

If you don’t have a product yet, then your silver bullet is ethnography, whereby actual user needs are collected in context over an extended period of time. This is a very powerful method for understanding a person’s interaction, not only with technology, but also their environment and the people in their lives.

As part of this process you also need to consider how social features in your mobile offering link up to the rest of your communications channels and services. If the social experience is constrained just to the mobile platform, this represents a missed opportunity to widen the reach of your service. This opens up another set of questions around consistency of experience and handling of transitions between channels.

All of the above can be considered in an ad-hoc manner, but I would strongly recommend creating a mobile strategy to guide the development of any mobile offering. When coupled with a full user centred design approach, you can ensure that your mobile service or product meets the needs of your users, delivers on your commercial priorities and offers a great user experience.

This article was originally published on MyCustomer.com

This article was originally published by Seb Joseph, NMA

When it comes to determining the usability of mobiles, it’s vital to know how people use them and what differs to their use of PCs. Research by Foviance looks at the variances.

The phrase ’mobile usability’ is something of an oxymoron. While users are consuming more content on their mobile devices, the experience is blighted by download delays and awkward input. The lack of usability guidelines from platform owners means brands are struggling to create content that’s as emotionally engaging for consumers on mobiles as it is on PCs.

Part of the challenge for brands is capitalising on the different cognitive interactions users have with content on mobile devices versus PCs.

According to research by usability consultancy Foviance, an increasing number of 18-30-year-olds are using their handsets primarily for entertainment and social interaction.

Surveying 278 candidates aged 18-30 nationwide, the report found that a notable proportion (75.4%) said they only used their handsets to manage their social media profiles, while half claimed they only used their PCs for work-related activity.

In addition, nearly 70% said they typically spend between one and two hours a day on their handsets, compared to the 73% who spend four hours or more on a PC (mainly at work).

The instantaneous nature of interaction on a mobile suggests that people are thinking less about the content they upload to the web via a handset, whereas their use of the PC reveals more contemplative thought processes.

Social media was the most prominent activity carried out on both PCs and handsets, with 90% of those asked saying they accessed social networks on both platforms.

“Social media content is becoming the most important thing people do on both their smartphones and their PCs,” says Catriona Campbell, founder and director of Foviance. “The difference is what aspects of social networks people are using when on either platform.”

This article was originally published by Seb Joseph, NMA

When it comes to determining the usability of mobiles, it’s vital to know how people use them and what differs to their use of PCs. Research by Foviance looks at the variances.

The phrase ’mobile usability’ is something of an oxymoron. While users are consuming more content on their mobile devices, the experience is blighted by download delays and awkward input. The lack of usability guidelines from platform owners means brands are struggling to create content that’s as emotionally engaging for consumers on mobiles as it is on PCs.

Part of the challenge for brands is capitalising on the different cognitive interactions users have with content on mobile devices versus PCs.

According to research by usability consultancy Foviance, an increasing number of 18-30-year-olds are using their handsets primarily for entertainment and social interaction.

Surveying 278 candidates aged 18-30 nationwide, the report found that a notable proportion (75.4%) said they only used their handsets to manage their social media profiles, while half claimed they only used their PCs for work-related activity.

In addition, nearly 70% said they typically spend between one and two hours a day on their handsets, compared to the 73% who spend four hours or more on a PC (mainly at work).

The instantaneous nature of interaction on a mobile suggests that people are thinking less about the content they upload to the web via a handset, whereas their use of the PC reveals more contemplative thought processes.

Social media was the most prominent activity carried out on both PCs and handsets, with 90% of those asked saying they accessed social networks on both platforms.

“Social media content is becoming the most important thing people do on both their smartphones and their PCs,” says Catriona Campbell, founder and director of Foviance. “The difference is what aspects of social networks people are using when on either platform.”

“The world has gone social; it’s just that we don’t know how to measure the value of that yet.” That was one of the messages coming out of the Adobe Omniture Summit here in London. Thirteen hundred people from 500 companies from 30 countries came together last week for two days to learn, share, network, have fun, and digest the views of various speakers on the issues of the day. The other message was that the world’s going mobile – “the eyeballs are moving from fixed web to mobile web” – and there’s loads of challenges to measuring that too.

From the keynotes from the likes of Christian Hernandez of Facebook and Brian Solis at Altimeter, the emphasis is that businesses and organisations need to focus on people and to understand the social consumer. Hernandez talked about “putting people at the centre” and the power of understanding how enabling social interaction can bring disruption to different industry sectors. First of all, there was photo sharing, then there was gaming, next in Facebook’s sights is commerce; social commerce. According to Hernandez, the classical shopping funnel is dead and the shopping funnel is in fact a circle from awareness to interest, to decision, to action, to recommendation, and back to awareness. If that’s true, then it’s going to play hell with those pretty funnel reports in your web analytics tool. But Hernandez said that the future of social marketing was all around measurement and data.

However, Solis reminded us that “we cannot measure what it is that we do not know how to value” and therein lies the rub. What is the value of a social media marketing strategy? Solis’ advice was to make it actionable. Social marketing is about actions, reactions, and transactions. If it’s about actions and transactions, then it’s more measurable. But at the heart of it Solis tells us that organisations need to understand the socially-connected consumer. What is it that makes them tick? What do they need or what is it that they want from you? To do this, it’s going to be important to start to segment out your social customers from everyone else and look for those differences in patterns of behavior and attitudes from everyone else. The trick is also not to treat “social” as one big lump but to also look at the different channels within social media such as Facebook vs. Twitter, because, as some of the case studies shown demonstrated, there can be interesting patterns between what people do when using the different social channels. In fact, different types of people might be using different channels to do different things, so you can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. Segmentation is key.

Once you understand the social customer, then Solis says to introduce a social marketing program that works for both of you, and to do that you have to think like a connected customer and give them something to talk about. Often what the social customer wants (i.e., a special offer) is different from what the organisation wants (i.e., a relationship), so you’ve got to find those things that are going to work for both of you. The key thing though is to make sure that you create outcomes; a “click to action” as Solis calls it. If you have outcomes, then at least you have something to measure against.

Of course, I know that these things are easier said than done. Organisations have been struggling for years to define “what good looks like” for their web channel strategies, let alone their social channel strategies, but defining the expected value is the critical starting point to building a social media measurement strategy. By defining the value, you’ll be able to better understand the metrics that will tell you whether that value is being obtained, and therefore the technologies can give you those metrics.

This article was orignially published by Clickz

Apple has been in the media wars of late, with some significantly negative publicity relating to the tracking of users via their iPhone. Whilst the reality is rather different to that initially portrayed, it does highlight some interesting trends…

For those of you that watch South Park, a recent episode highlighted the public perception of end-user licensing and privacy statements. The character Kyle doesn’t bother to read the privacy agreement of an Apple iTunes update and has to suffer the consequences, which cannot be detailed here!

Apple has suffered a significant damage to its public reputation recently, due to the news that it has been tracking the location of it’s iPhone and iPad users.  Apple, along with Google, have been requested to participate in a US Senate panel on the issue of mobile tracking, with Apple adamantly stating that it does not track user’s locations, but uses the data collected to help speed up the use of location based services. As you can see from the map below (produced using the iPhone Tracker tool ), the wi-fi location and cell towers around your phone, can give an impression of your own location – you’d never guess that I use the east coast railway a lot!

<Click to enlarge>

Last year I wrote about the issues of advertising on mobile devices, a theme that I’ll be coming back to again shortly, along with the potential difficulties of mobile tracking. One of the issues related to the latency of the tracking and the corresponding issue of data accuracy. A recent article by ‘Localytics’ has highlighted this problem and it will be an ever more important issue as the use of mobile devices becomes more and more main stream. The common consensus (Wikimedia & Online Marketing Trends)  predicts that mobile devices will surpass desktops as the method of browsing the internet by 2014.

The Apple story is interesting as the issue of tracking on mobile devices, and indeed this specific issue relating to the user’s location, has been known about for well over a year. It only gained momentum in the popular press when the information was visualised!

This really shows the importance of visualising data. We all love a good story and need to be able to relate to the protagonists. Data is great, but insight is better!

Our own Neil Mason discusses the use of storytelling in his recent blog post. We are often confronted with the conflict of making data look ‘sexy’, think of glossy 3D pie charts, rather than meaningful. For me it is vital that a data visualisation tells a story. It should allow the user to experience a journey through the data to gain meaningful insight.

What is interesting, is that the depiction of data can often feel like an uphill struggle, everyone has an opinion on what a chart should look like. It is often only when you have played with a couple of different visualisations that the true meaning comes through. From a linguistic or memory perspective, this would be termed as ‘semantic’ meaning that a greater level had been achieved. As analysts, it is our job to help create this journey for our client.

This is not easy. It may take several iterations before the insights come through, but then again, it wouldn’t be a true story without a struggling hero now would it!

For more about Foviance’s Data Privacy Audit