Catriona Campbell podcast transcript
Interview with Catriona Campbell of Foviance
RT: Ronan Tighe
CC: Catriona Campbell
RT: Welcome back to another Foviance podcast. This is podcast 10 in the Innovations in eGaming series. I’m Ronan Tighe, and today I’m joined by the founder of Foviance, Catriona Campbell. Catriona, it’d be good just to start off by telling us a little bit about your background, and I guess your current role in Foviance and maybe how Foviance started out.
CC: Thank you Ronan, thanks for having me on this series of podcasts. My background is pure HCI user experience and background, so having studied behavioural psychology at university, I swiftly realised that none of the types of psychology that I was being instructed in at university I actually liked and wanted to work in the field, so I very quickly realised that there was a form of psychology which was merging with computing, called human computer interaction, and I became an expert in the field of user experience, or human computer interaction, and then founded Foviance. So my role at Foviance includes strategic account management, and I do a lot of speaking at conferences and writing chapters of books and things like that, so it’s really trying to be a thought leader in the space.
RT: You recently talked at three really high profile gaming conferences, starting off in May with the eGaming Review Power 50, and only yesterday talking at the bingo summit in London – can you tell us a little bit about what you were presenting, and also what kind of trends that you saw that other people maybe were talking about?
CC: Sure, so the Power 50 event is the MDs of all of the big gaming companies from around the world all gathered in one place for two days, and the second speech I did was in Sweden at a social media conference on gaming, and my last speech yesterday was at the bingo summit, again on social media. Now, the reason I mention social media is because one of the incredible trends at the moment in our everyday lives is that of social networks, social media and the different application of those within industries, and I think within gaming, because of the community elements of gaming and the societal elements, social media’s going to play an ever-increasing more important role in gaming, particularly the bingo and some of the other community-focused gaming applications.
RT: There is a lot of challenges for gaming companies to introduce social networks on their site – what process do you think they need to go through to understand what social elements users want?
CC: Well, interestingly Ronan, I’ve been speaking to a lot of MDs in gaming, and a lot of marketing directors in gaming – they have some kind of insurmountable issues really with social media, because if they’re running their gaming interface, but it’s actually located on the desktop, so let’s say it’s downloaded app, they have no control over that, once that’s been downloaded, they have no control over what the interaction of that device looks like, so they cannot mash up some of the social media applications, so they can’t include, for instance, a Facebook profile mashing up into the community section of their site. So yesterday, a lot of the bingo operators were saying that it was so much easier in bingo to add those community elements and to do mash up, because actually you’re playing online, rather than mostly in a downloaded app. So I think some of the challenges they’re going to come across is, one, they really don’t necessarily have people in house who actually understand social media. There are so many fires to fight with the existing gaming operations, that actually what they’re doing is they’re just concentrating on churn at the moment, they’re concentrating on getting players back playing, spending money in a recession, and most of their marketing budget’s being spent on affiliate management, rather than actually being spent on any kind of social media strategy. So really it’s getting that understanding in house on social media, getting some of the, perhaps some of the younger people in the organisation to actually take this book with the understanding and start to control it.
A second thing, I think, that the gaming companies haven’t really quite got yet is anything really around customer segmentation, and when I spoke at the conference yesterday, the bingo summit, it was pretty clear to me that the microgaming platform, Parley platform, etc, etc, they’re perfectly capable of allowing you to segment your audience, but it’s probably the last thing on people’s minds when they’ve got churn and all these other activities to do. So really, the thought needs to go into who are our customers? – what are they currently using outside of our application? What are they currently using outside of our bingo, for instance? If it’s Foxy, are these ladies on Facebook, etc, etc?
And a third thing would be to review that analytics data – see where they’re going, where else they’re spending their hard-earned cash, and trying to enhance the interface to allow for things like that, and then lastly I talked about, at all of these conferences, obviously about co-designing content, so using players in good user-centred design to actually enhance the application, so using players’ feedback appropriately, getting them to help you redesign the content.
RT: So there’s a lot of challenges for companies, as you said, and how would you encourage them to put this kind of agenda, that they have to research the user experience, have to allow their users to co-design and mash up kind of social elements – how can you measure the relationship between improving that side of the experience with long-term financial success?
CC: As I said earlier on, and a number of the businesses I’ve spoken to, and the Power 50 was a great example, managing directors of the biggest gaming companies in the world are really interested in proving to their investors that everything they do adds value, and is relevant to the brand, so really it’s all about understanding the analytics, understanding where people are going, what they’re doing, understanding the length of play, the length of visit; understanding what side games people will play, it’s about cross sales, in terms of gaming; understanding for instance the bingo world, what they do during that interval time – can we get them playing a very quick game with some of their peers in the community forum? So really, for me it’s all about understanding those users’ behaviour, but measuring it via the analytics to prove the return on investment from that understanding, so understanding from the analytics where people have clicked, how long they’ve stayed on for, how much more they’re spending by enhancing the gaming experience.
RT: Can you give any good examples of what sites out there do you feel are listening to the users, and then designing for them?
CC: I think a really good example I spoke about yesterday at the online bingo summit was 888′s ladies’ bingo site, so it’s called 888ladies. 888ladies have really tried to tap into the mental models of their gamers, and one really good example of something they’ve done recently is to change the home page image, so when a new gamer comes to sign on, a new bingo player comes to sign on to 888ladies, they used to be confronted by an image of a lady with a very low t-shirt line, and let’s just say her cleavage was on display, so some of the in house design team had been listening to feedback, and that was just in the forums, the feedback from the forums on the site, so they decided to alter the image, they altered the image, and if you go onto 888ladies, you’ll see that it’s a very very similar image to a car insurance brand in the UK, which is called Sheila’s Wheels – because of that feeling of security, player registrations went through the roof, overnight literally, they could see the change that had been made, and I think that’s a fascinating example of just one very small change, but a very simple change, and a very clever change, because it was giving people a little sense of security, that if they’d seen the Sheila’s Wheels advert on TV, and it’s an insurance product primarily targeted at the young female market, then they’re going to feel a wee bit more comfortable about registering on something like 888ladies, if they associate the image with another offline brand they’ve seen. So it’s a really good example.
They also have a great amount of user-generated content on their site, so the UGC that they’ve used in their forums and places like that is all about their community, and they’ve realised that a lot of their community might meet up outside of 888ladies, and what they do is they ask for you to submit your photographs from your meet ups, and so there’s a real sense of community, which I find is fascinating – they’ve got 300 community forum ladies working from home, all managing the community and forums.
RT: What innovations do you see in the gaming industry that in the future are going to change the experience for users?
CC: I think, Ronan, that a lot of the talk at all three of the last conferences has been around convergence. I can absolutely see convergence happening, and we no longer consider the mobile phone to be a disposable device, we used to change our mobile phone a lot, we used to get given it for free by the telecoms provider; now, with more and more smartphones in the market, and the iPhone in particular, what that’s meant is that it’s no longer a disposable device, it’s now a PC or a Mac in your pocket, so by introducing really this PC in your pocket, you’re going to have far more of the gameplay happening on your handset as opposed to just on your PC, and I also wanted to point out yesterday that there’s also the gaming platforms, as in Xbox and Nintendo and Playstation getting involved in the home, in gaming in particular, and I think that now that the browser in the Nintendo and the Microsoft Xbox allows you to access the web from your TV room, I think organisations are going to start taking advantage of that for social gaming, etc. So I think that the convergence across platforms is important, and I also think that social media’s going to have a huge impact on gaming, purely because of the viral effect of information being shared amongst friends. So I think convergence and social media are going to be the big things to look out for in the coming year.
RT: Brilliant, thanks Catriona, we’ll leave it there, and thanks to you all for listening. Please come back to Foviance.com next week for another podcast.