One of the things I like about my job working is a customer experience consultancy is that I’m surrounded by people with a very different outlook on life. Our user experience consultants tend to come from a behavioural psychology background and are great at using qualitative research techniques such as lab testing, eye tracking and ethnographic studies to get into the mind of users and to understand what makes for a good or bad experience. That’s obviously a different set of skill and tools from our quantitative, analytical approach to solving problems using vast quantities of data. Each approach is complimentary to the other with quantitative data good at asking the “what” and “when” type questions and qualitative techniques good at helping to understand the “why”.

Every now and then we get into one of those interesting conversations about which approach is best for solving a particular type of problem. Last week ones these conversations was around the topic of segmentation and which types of segmentation are best for addressing particular issues. Segmentation is one of those popular words that’s used a lot these days in the digital marking world and is usually means different things to different people.

Segmentation is the process of creating groups of individuals (customers, website visitors, prospects etc) that have something in common. Importantly what one group has in common is then different to the other groups. The purpose of segmentation is to make you, your marketing communications, your website experience, your product offering on so on more relevant where possible to these different groups. But how are these groups defined? There are three main ways:

• Demographic segmentation
• Behavioural segmentation
• Attitudinal segmentation

Segments can be defined by demographics, ie based on who someone is. Typically classical marketing approaches to segmentation use demographics as the basis as it can then be used for targeting purposes. Demographic segmentation in online can also be useful. For example, “gender” can be a useful segmentation split as the way that people behave online can be very different depending on whether they are male or female. So be able to segment your audience by gender, age, income etc can be really useful.

Another approach to segmentation is behavioural segmentation. This is not classifying people according to who they are but on the basis of what they do. This type of segmentation approach is very popular in digital marketing as it’s quite easy for us to understand how people behave as we have loads of behavioural data. Again it can be a very powerful technique to group people according to different behavioural criteria and to use that knowledge to improve the effectiveness of campaigns or to present different website experiences. For example, the way that people who are on their first visit to a website is often very different to the way that they behave on a subsequent visit and their needs are also often different. So why not present them with a different experience? Behavioural segmentation lies at the heart of personalisation.

Finally attitudinal segmentation is about classifying people not according to who they are, or what they do, but about what they think. Attitudinal segmentation is about getting into the minds of customers and understanding what makes them tick. People of different genders and ages may have similar needs when it comes to interacting with product and services, they may be trying to pursue the same goal or trying to achieve the same outcome. Often attitudinal segmentation is used for the development of “personas” which are used as tool to help designers get closer to the people they are designing for.

So which type of segmentation is best? Well, of course, the answer is that “it depends”. What problem are you trying to solve? What will you do with the segmentation when you’ve got one? The other questions then are “What data do I need and where do I get the data from?” I’ll be looking at the answers to these questions next time. Til then…

“Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you’re about as likely to find someone else interested in it.” — Lore Sjöberg.

Andrew Keen recently posed a provocative question on his blog: ‘Is blogging dead?‘. A master of the catchy headline, Keen effectively answers his own quasi-rhetorical question by asserting that blogging is not dead, it is simply transforming itself. But even transformation is a death of sorts; death of the Old brought about by the birth of the New. And in this instance, the New is microblogging…and the poster child for microblogging is undeniably Twitter.

For the cave dwellers, Twitter is social networking and so-called ‘microblogging’ service which allows its users to post text-based messages of up to 140 characters (or ‘tweets’) in real time. Users can ‘follow’ the tweets of other users and read them on the Twitter website, external applications or devices such as web-capable phones. Created in 2006, Twitter is now ranked 16 in the world’s top 500 websites, according to Alexa.

Twitter evangilists often trumpet the immediacy with which messages can be posted as a key feature but rarely do they mention the quality. When you can condense Homer’s Odyssey into 9 stanzas of ~140 characters, does it still qualify as content? How much gets lost in the translation and how deeply are readers engaging with the message? A recent study by the Brain and Creative Institute at USC suggested that heavy use of so-called ‘rapid fire media’ may not provide adequate time for reflection or, to put it more poetically, for ‘admiration and compassion – the two social emotions that define humanity’, thereby lessening a person’s ability for moral decision-making. Twitter users may well be connecting with the tweet but not with the tweeter…

Which is probably just as well given some of the weird and wonderful ways people have chosen to use it, such as Your plants need watering or I owe you a coffee.

The first time I heard about Twitter I immediately pictured Jack Torrance in Kubrick’s The Shining endlessly clacking away at his typewriter: ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy… All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy…’. There’s an old Japanese proverb which says ‘the wise man only speaks when he has something worth saying’, and it seemed to me on first glance that the vast majority of what people were saying on Twitter was frightfully inane, but then the same could be said of the early days for any new communication media. This, then, begs the question: Can a tool be considered stupid if the user does something stupid with it? Do we blame the hammer when the carpenter hits her thumb with it? Is this a case of ‘don’t hate the game…hate the playa’?

Keen would have us believe that microblogging is the new blogging, but that simply makes it the latest frontrunner in the race to publish less and less meaningful information more and more frequently. If Twitter’s exponential growth continues along its current trajectory, one could conceivably extrapolate a future in which people will be spending all of their time doing nothing but twittering, and Twitter posts will eventually degenerate in to a collective Torrancian ‘I’m Twittering… I’m Twittering… I’m Twittering…’

I’m prepared to concede that Twitter could be used in productive and sensible ways, but until very recently I struggled to find suitably compelling evidence. All of that changed when the horrific events surrounding the Iranian elections began to emerge, nay explode, and not on state-sponsored media (which was highly censored) or even Western media (which was shut out) but via Twitter. Here at last was a true example of technology giving power to the people, the mouse (and keyboard) that roared. In the face of such outrage and suffering, even a flinty-hearted jerk like me has to admit that Twitter can potentially be a powerful force for change in the world. The only news coming out of Iran was on Twitter, and all of the traditional news networks were scrambling over each other to trawl the legion of tweets for scraps of information. But that doesn’t mean that people were connecting with the events in Iran on an emotional level. Did reading about it as it was happening make it any more real? Did the fact it was brutal and violent and upsetting spark an emotional response in any of us? And if so, how does that differ from traditional news media? Does Twitter stand apart? Is it the future of news?

Interestingly, Andrew Keen posits that very question in his shiny new column for the Telegraph: Twitter vs. CNN: Blood on the streets. He provides an insightful contrast between Twitter and the old guard news media and, while not proclaiming Twitter a winner, he sees it as a contender. The biggest problem facing Twitter is the credibility of its contributors, the difficulty in discerning fact from fiction, rumour from opinion (although the same could be said of traditional media). Twitter is an instantaneous and voluminous source of information, but it’s not a particularly reliable source of news. As Keen says, ‘Its immediacy…compromises its reliability.’ Regrettably, in world news there is little room for idealism or chaos which, without some form of aggregation and validation, are all Twitter has going for it at the moment.

With a wealth of knowledge into human-computer interaction, psychology, technology and usability, Foviance will show how these tools can be applied to real-world solutions and how they can best serve clients.

Usability Tank : Blog Posted by Lara at 11/21/2008

I’ve been reading a great book that I highly recommend you get hold of. It’s called ‘Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are” by Rob Walker. It’s a cracking book on a number of counts, but what’s particularly interesting is what Rob Walker describes as the “Pretty Good Problem”. He discusses how, when Consumer Reports tested 53 kitchen ranges a couple of years ago they found that all 51 were rated either ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’ while two were rated ‘good’. None of the kitchens tested rated as ‘fair’ or ‘poor’.

When we started out in 2001, most of the work we did was focused on identifying and eliminating functional usability issues on websites. Our clients would usually ask us to conduct research to help them understand why people could not buy, register, subscribe, bet, book or whatever else, on their site. Our recommendations helped these brands make significant improvements to their respective conversion rates but the issues invariably had something to do with layout, terminology, process, content or functionality.

Nowadays, most websites are ‘pretty good’, meaning that most of the low hanging fruit has been picked. So why is it that people still choose one site over another or more importantly one brand over the other? The answer is not usability but rather the overall user experience offered. Relatively speaking, it’s much easier to conduct research to identify usability issues than it is to uncover why people feel compelled to choose one brand over another (and more importantly remain loyal to that brand over an extended period). The particular websites and brands people now use are not just consumer choices but are conscious expressions of who we want to be perceived to be. Of course, nobody in their right mind will disclose in a room full of strangers that they feel a pathological kinship with a particular brand, and as such, focus groups are almost useless as a market research technique in these circumstances.

Psychologists estimate that 85 percent of decision making occurs in the subconscious which means that most market research is tapping into 15 percent of what matters. We’re currently carrying out work using EEG (electroencephalography) which involves monitoring emotional response by measuring the electrical activity in the brain when presented with certain stimuli. Previously the preserve of laboratory experiments, we’re finding that it has direct applications in measuring customer experiences. For example, it’s possible to research three to four different design alternatives and conclusively show which elicits the most positive emotional response.

So here’s the bottom line: when you and all around you are ‘pretty good’ you need to know how to set yourself apart from the crowd!