Archive for November, 2006|Monthly archive page
Great piece from Matt
Leave a Commenthttp://schulzeandwebb.com/blog/2006/11/22/the-life-of-products/
Products are not nouns but verbs. A product designed as a noun will sit passively in a home, an office, or pocket. It will likely have a focus on aesthetics, and a list of functions clearly bulleted in the manual… but that’s it.
Products can be verbs instead, things which are happening, that we live alongside. We cross paths with our products when we first spy them across a crowded shop floor, or unbox them, or show a friend how to do something with them. We inhabit our world of activities and social groups together… a product designed with this in mind can look very different.
Activities
What activities occur between me and a product? Taking a book as an example, there are a number of obvious ones: reading, marking a page, noting a comment or reference. There are also a number of activities that are due to the book also being a product which is made, bought and sold–we’ll call them the intrinsic activities. The book is involved in all of these:
- Design
- Manufacture
- Discovery
- Selection
- Being wished-for
- Purchase
- Being shown-off
- Discussion/review
- Resale
Each of these activities associated with a product is a place where stories gather. Each is a hook for experience. When the experience is bad, the story is bad. When the experience is good, the story is good… and stories travel.
Yesterday I talked about Generation C and the way they expect products to fit, as peers, into their connected and creative communities. I said that products, media and services must transform themselves to meet these expectations.
The stories Gen C tell spread in their social and communication networks, and are used by these discerning individuals to assess products. With online and mobile stores, every moment is a buy moment. From a sales perspective alone, the stories had better be great.
At a more conceptual level, the peer relationships Generation C expects mean that the traditional do-as-you’re-told products are inappropriate: A brand that says “I’m cool, associate with me” or “You can be a great runner too” can feel condescending or trite. Gen C likes to be involved in conversations–products should express their brand through the experience. The brand, the stories, the interactions: These are all part of the product.
When we’re trying to design for the whole product, we try to remember to do these:
- Identify the activities associated with the product, media or service. Design for the whole life-cycle, not just to make certain functions available
- Focus on the activities intrinsic to the particular product as a thing that can be bought and sold. These are so often overlooked as experience hooks that good design can make a real difference. The intrinsic activities listed above are a good start
- Use advertising to associate stories with the experience hooks, and to communicate the brand experience. Products are continually assessed, and always communicating the brand through the progression of experiences
Living with products
Amazon and Apple and both companies who pay a great deal of attention to the entire relationship a person has with a product. Especially good is how they deal with those intrinsic activities, those that belong to a thing by virtue of its physicality and existence in the marketplace.
Take Amazon: They don’t just sell products, they sell the whole life-cycle. You discover a book, select it using the reviews, consider it, hang onto it in your basket, finally choose to buy it. Wishlists and permanent book addresses (suitable for emails) understand that, even before you buy it, a book is a social object, present in our social world. Then afterwards you can recommend or review the book, and the site helps (even prompts!) you to sell the book on second-hand.
Apple, both in their online presence and retail stores, understand the ongoing relationship with an Apple product. The online product pages are brochure quality, always with the link to the online store. Putting together a system online is a joy; you gradually select components, learn about them, and ratchet up the price… but slowly, slowly, so there’s never a sticker-shock moment when you realise quite what you’ve specced. The retail stores are made for the funnel from aspiration (gazing into the brightly lit store) to try-out, to select, to purchase, to learn about, to come-back-when-it’s-broken.
The big problem with Apple retail is that it’s not enough about the various experience hooks of what they sell. It’s still too much like a conventional shop, with a sales counter where you do everything in one go. The stores should work more like Oslo Airport where, instead of a single, monolithic check-in experience, you have security check at one gate, boarding card at another, passport at another, and cafes and shops in-between. You move at your own pace, which means queues are smoothed out, and you only follow the process all the way to the end if you’re flying abroad, high security, international and long haul.
An Apple retail store, built like an airport, would have a big desk where you assemble your system, maybe with a form or a Lego-type toy, with assistants to help out. You’d take it to a desk to fetch your computer, and leave with it a few minutes later. In that couple of minutes, you’d make payment almost incidentally, to pass the time. Apple supplies and iPods should have a much simplified process–why not swipe your card when you enter the queue, so your transaction is pre-authorised by the time you get to the front?
It’s important to consider the owner and all the people they encounter as the “user” for any particular product. No design surface is out of scope: Aesthetics, online social software, embedded displays, the billing and vending processes, and more.
Interaction design
To summarise: Generation C, needs new products, media and services. These have to be situated in social lives, be open to co-creation, acknowledge the networks they’ll inhabit, and respect the creativity of the Gen Cs. At S&W we call these, in shorthand, 3C products. The Cs we use are creativity, connectedness and community… but pick any three.
Today I talked about our lives with these products, and the activities we have together. There are activities specific to the product itself, and those intrinsic to the thing as a bought-and-sold product… and all of them are experience hooks, opportunities for functionality appropriate to the context of use, and to bring about the brand experience. Designing for activities – interaction design, really – and taking the lessons of the Web and social software is the best process we’ve found, thus far, to provoke good thinking about the new world of stuff in our homes.
I’ll finish tomorrow with a look at a few experience hooks in particular.
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Leave a Commentteens online status
Alloy Media + Marketing and Harris Interactive just released findings from a collaborative study
Key highlights include:
- Email and social networking sites allow young people to expand their social connections by contacting and becoming friends with people who they have not necessarily met in person”
- “In some cases, online social networks allow for more intimate connections than offline relationships”
- “Tweens(ages 8 to 12) prefer spending time with their parents than with their friends (58% vs. 31%), by the teen years (ages 13 to 17), this preference has dramatically reversed”
- “Teens are much greater users of email or Internet Messaging (IM) (74% vs. 26%) and text messaging (37% vs. 9%) than their tween counterparts”
- “The number of friends young people attract to their social network profiles is an indicator of their status among peers.”
- “Teens have an average of 75 people on their online profile, 52 on their IM buddy list, 39 on their email contact list and 38 contacts on their cell phone”
Second Life has a life
- Second Life citizenship grew 995% just this year.
- Commerce, a more important statistic, rose to $9M, up 287% this year
- The male/female split is close to even -57 to 43%
- Finally, more than 55% of citizens hail from outside the US.
BusinessWeek’s Inside Innovation quarterly has a good package on Corporate America entering Second Life virtual world: main story, tips for companies, branded metaverse destinations, developers other virtual worlds worth exploring. The most important part, however, are these statistics – some of which come directly from Linden Labs. What’s notable?
nice move to web 3.0 from fred
Toward a web 3.0?
Posté le 19 novembre 2006 dans Web 2.0 (aucun commentaire)
The web 2.0 has just hardly shown us its potential that we are beginning to think about it’s next iteration: web 3.0.
Is this mysterious web 3.0 a reality? No, not at all. Is it timely to talk about it right now? Yes, because foundations of a new era of online services are being shaped.
To have a sharper understanding of the stakes of this (hypothetical) web 3.0, it is important to look at ancient models, to compare them with actual models (web 2.0 oriented) and to anticipate a near future.
Web 1.0: an integrate experience
The first version of the modern web, the one corresponding to the end of the 90’s (I am disregarding the laborious beginning of the web),is basically based upon an integrated experience from beginning to end by big actors.
If we take the example of choosing and buying a cultural product (a book or a CD), one of the most complex online experience, we can see that actors like Amazon are present on every link of the value chain:
- products’ discovery within home or orientation pages ;
- evaluation with users’ notes and reviews ;
- purchase with wish lists or shopping cart ;
- payment thanks to an integrated service.
Web 2.0: a collaborative and destructured experience
If we now look at power users, they have access to a much wider array of online information sources and merchant services. Those stands as new links which substitute for older ones in the value chain:
We are now observing major shifts in the user experience:
- products are discovered in blogs, social networks, on recommendations engines like Pandora or within shopping community like ShopWiki ;
- choice can be validated on social shopping portals like Crowdstorm or on specialized sites like LibraryThing (for books) or Yahoo! Tech (for gadgets) ;
- purchase can be made on shopping engines like the ones provided by Amazon (aStore), eBay (eBay Stores) or Zlio ;
- payment can be made thanks to deported systems like PayPal or Google Checkout.
Web 3.0: an immersive and extended experience
If we anticipate growing innovating services, we can again identify new links for the value chain which is no longer limited to the web:
Users’ buying experience will be more immersive but also extended outside of web browsers:
- products’ discovery could be made inside virtual worlds (like the ones from Habbo Hotel and Second Life), inside online gaming network (like World of Warcraft or Xbox Live) or thanks to widgets (like those provided by Apple’s Dashboard or Yahoo! Widget) ;
- products’ evaluation could be based on independent services which relies on universal reputation management systems (as those provided by BazaarVoice, iKarma or Rapleaf) ;
- purchase could be made on merchant mashups like Cooqy or through connected applications like the Mozilla Amazon Browser ;
- finally, payment could be directly handled by the operating system (by using the upcoming CardSpace in Vista), on other devices (like mobile devices with Mobile PayPal) or with virtual means of payment (Linden Dollars for example, since banks are working hard on providing banking services in Second Life).
What about semantic web?
A recent article published in the NY Times (Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense) describes web 3.0 as the semantic web. It’s an interesting vision, but let me remind you that semantic languages like RDF are being in use for years. Many other initiatives have been developed to structure data and information: syndication with RSS, forms with XForms, financial reports with XBRL, digital identity with FOAF, microformats…
Adding an operational semantic layer to the web is a huge work, which will require years (decades?), furthermore this work could be slow down with recent progress made by search engines and databases which can enable similar usage as those described in the article.
To conclude with this semantic issue, let me precise that semantic layers are especially relevant to softwares and systems, which means semantic technologies doesn’t appeal to end users (the ones which are responsible for the web 2.0 revolution).
When can we expect a web 3.0?
For the moment, it is too early to make a sharp prediction, all the more since my comparison is limited to the web’s merchant side, which is far from reflecting is richness. For printing purpose, you can find a bigger overhaul schema here: Web 3.0.
But what is certain, is the fact that we will progressively migrate a part of our usage from online services to connected applications (thanks to RDA or widgets) or mobile devices. Likewise, digital identity management will take a far more bigger importance.
Thus, behaviours regarding online information or services will shift from web (HTML pages) to internet (connected applications). So it is wiser to talk about internet 3.0
than web 3.0
.
Stumbles of mary meeker @ web 2.0
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mary_meeker_web20_summit_2006.php
Mary speaks at a million miles per hour and data points go past faster than one can type them. So check out the slides for all the data details. Some quick notes:
- It’s tough to succeed on the Web – around 2% of tech companies create close to 100% of the wealth.
- International markets are becoming crucial, as US share of world internet users falls from 37% to around 20% in 2007. China obviously, but also India and Russia are noted by Mary.
- Mobile – entering the “adoption sweet spot” in 2007.
- Growth is still going up – especially outside the US.
- Just as Apple monetized online music, the market for online video is poised for similar growth
- Momentum for online video continues to build
- Effective editing of video will become more important – e.g. Yahoo’s The 9.
- Audio search will become more popular
- Only 13% of top 15 online retailers are pure internet plays (Amazon is #1)
- Watch where the younger generation goes
we love love
Squid labs smart relevant and fun the invention 2.0
www.squid-labs.com
