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Persuasive technology is a concept that has received some attention lately, as researchers merge concepts from psychology and technology to help people improve their own lives. By providing incentives and disincentives, companies can design new social games that influence customers to use products and services that help them improve skills and acquire healthier habits. While the science of persuasion advances, so do Web, mobile and software interfaces that can guide users into specific behavior. Some very powerful and useful examples have emerged lately, in the form of Nike+, Vive Coach, Booyah, and others.

Nike+, an online community of runners, is a great example of how peer encouragement, shared achievements, and technology can enhance people’s performance. Nike+ uses a pedometer to track a runner’s performance, and pumps the data through an iPod or iPhone to the Nike+ Web site where the community can view, encourage and support one another around their fitness goals.  This social game, which takes advantage of a well-known psychological concept called the Hawthorne effect comes into play: People perform better when they believe they are being watched.  By sharing one’s goals, improvements and success with the community, individuals perform better and are more likely to complete those goals. A great example of someone taking advantage of these concepts is Floyd Mayweather. Floyd purposely works out in front of other people so that he feels compelled to work harder. Nike+ scales this “public performance” and encourages everyone to share their workout in view of others. This creates the environment that pushes peoples performance beyond their normal level.

In e-commerce, flash sales sites like RueLaLa.com and Gilt.com use persuasive technology to great effect. The psychological triggers used in these sites are: a) the sense of urgency b) limited availability, c) rare discount, d) affordable luxury.  People don’t want to miss the train and loose out on the opportunity to buy luxury items at a discount.

Woot is another site that operates under the same principle: offering only one product per day at a big discount, in limited quantities. In this social game, there is a disincentive to waiting and the incentive is the discount. They have designed a model where the lack of visiting their site on a daily basis would create an aversive experience.  How is this possible?  These sites create a situation where it is easier to simply make a quick visit to the site in the morning rather than risk the disappointment of missing a deal.  This student video does a great job of explaining the concept of “alarm clocking”.

Mint.com similarly uses a number of methods to help users change their behavior.  This site pulls data from the users various financial institutions and displays this data in a very useful way.  In doing this, Mint makes it easy for the user to see where much of their income is being misspent. Once a user sees this graph, or one showing how much they can save by switching brokerages for example, the user becomes much more open to advice from the program.  This is an important concept for a range of sites that may be interested in changing user behavior.

Persuasive technology enhances existing social games and protocols and provides a conceptual framework for creating new social games in which both incentives and disincentives are used to change attitudes and behaviors.  These social games may build off existing social games, for example: in a sales situation when something is given away for free, that encourages the recipient to reciprocate.  Our tendency to “give back” that is built into our biology and cultural education is universally human.  By building off of such almost automatic behaviors, persuasive technology can provide businesses with an ability to reach, engage and even transact with customers on a much grander scale than is possible person-to-person.  By understanding the existing social games people play, and by designing social games using incentives and disincentives, testing them experimentally with real customers (see Naviscent’s Experience Revolution methodology) these persuasive technologies can be effective, scalable, and powerful for businesses and customers.

Written with Chris Bierbower

Term: Persuasive technology (also known as captology) Noun:   A mechanism designed to change attitudes or behaviors of the users through persuasion and social influence, but not through coercion.

Related links: http://econsultancy.com/blog/905-interview-persuasion-guru-bj-fogg

Something that began as innocent and informal socializing among college students has turned into a very serious platform, for e-commerce.  Facebook is becoming a viable business model, still in its infancy, granted, but nevertheless very promising. Let’s look at the big picture.

One of the more recent developments is that the demographics of Facebook users is shifting. Originally composed mostly of very young users, today member in the 25 to 35 age group are leading the pack. This makes the platform more attractive as this demographic is the most commercially active on the Net. Add to this pre-canned shopping cart solutions like Payvment, which eliminates the need to write any custom code for your online shop, and you no longer have an excuse to not try.

Narrowing down your constituency and knowing exactly who your visitors are, has always been a problem. Since the first days of online shopping we started working on ways to determine the demographics of our customers and channel them accordingly. The range of solutions spans from simple cookie-based tracking to third-party research firms that will analyze your traffic, capture clicks and embed surveys. Even though the latter gives you a fairly accurate picture, is far from cheap, and is often only cost effective to big players.

Facebook attempts to level the playing field. By putting your retail front-end on Facebook, as the theory goes, you solve this problem once and for all – on Facebook you always know who your visitors are. Something that required a great effort and expense comes for free. However, this new platform calls for a different and nuanced approach to earn your new clients business.

We’re basically dealing with a reverse paradigm: in a classic online store, we don’t know who is looking at our site, so it needs to be generally attractive, with convenient ways for any potential customer to drill down to what is interesting to them.  On Facebook, we already know who we’re dealing with, so we need to address customer needs and desires specifically, not generally. This I believe means to do away with a classic one-fits-all design. We don’t need a site as such, but rather a view that suits the person we know just landed on our page.

Secondly, the fact that Facebook people are there to socialize, not to shop, the shopping experience needs to respect that fact and leverage it as much as possible. Besides obvious things like user’s physical location and age, previously unknown data such as the customers interests and traveling habits, Facebook API allows to fetch any user’s friends list. This fact opens up a wide range of opportunities.

1. Personalized recommendations based on demographics, beliefs, and activities, likes and dislikes as they are revealed in the Facebook profile.

2. For businesses, personalized recommendations based on occupation, industry, and title.

3. Personalized products that incorporate media from Facebook, like memorabilia, picture books.

A good example of this type of application is the Gifting application embedded in some birthday reminder apps on Facebook. These apps remind people of their friends’ birthdays, enable sending an electronic birthday card, and suggest sending a physical gift. Can the product suggestions be more targeted? Yes.

The potential hasn’t been fully explored yet since this all is so new. We need to look into a completely new way of engaging potential customers.  Even the highly targeted audience by itself turned out to be not enough. Facebook launched its ads engine in November 2007 but it hasn’t yet yielded the kinds of returns that Google’s relevant ads do, despite the belief that ads on Facebook are any advertisement team’s dream-come-true. We need a different design approach, a new breed of a Web application that revolves around social interaction.

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Ever since I was introduced to the Semantic Web back in 2000, the idea was to help computers better understand connections and relationships between objects and data that were being presented on the Web.  The vision is to put data in context, relate it and organize it in ways that only humans can currently do, so computers can then inter-relate information from multiple sites and perform more useful functions in an automatic way.

In a world where all pages are semantically marked, if one website indicates that George Harrison is a member of the Beatles, and another quotes George Harrison mentioning that he learned to play sitar with Ravi Shankar, while yet another annotates the musical scales of Mr. Shankar and those used in Sgt. Pepper, then a semantic search engine might relate the music to the time, place, and style and even play passages from various related songs available for sale on the site.

Likewise, another semantic-search might map out crime data for a neighborhood and show that houses with a particular security system are safer (and for sale on the site). A semantic-based travel site might give you a budgeted and targeted range of options for a $3,000 vacation in Hawaii based on your favorite things to do as you expressed in your newsfeed on Facebook, and from data from various travel sites.

In the medium-term, some of the examples of the changes to come are in what I call product companioning sites.  These sites add value to a customers shopping experience by suggesting items that could be part of a set.  One such companioning site is Polyvore.com.  Polyvore provides users with the tools to generate clothing outfits from a range of retailers and share the ideas on a single site.  These new and innovative affiliate marketing sites give a huge amount of creative control to their community, create strong relationships with that community and sell product.

More structured, semantically-tagged data will enable even more new and innovative applications. So e-commerce sites that tag products semantically can benefit as new sites as innovative as Polyvore begin to emerge.

For ~ Vaga by ~Adorable~T “Birthday Dec 21″ featuring Ted Baker

That’s the medium term. In the short term, semantic tagging will pay off to retailers as major search engines channel more volume.  As more and more search engines  use semantic data to create more valuable search results, it will become a race for retail sites to boost their page rank and organic search click-through rate.

Written with Chris Bierbower

Google: Introducing Rich Snippets

When Naviscent applied its Social Media Merchandising Review methodology to evaluate the customer experience of twenty major retail sites, Polyvore led the pack in its ability to connect customers together in a passionate community that promotes the products of participating online retailers. Of the other sites we reviewed, all considered top e-commerce sites, we found many significant opportunities for improvement.

Top five sites according to the Naviscent Social Media Merchandising Checklist:

#1 Polyvore (score: 5.9)

#2 Shutterfly (score: 5.6)

#3 Amazon (score: 4.1)

#4 Vans (score: 2.7) tied with…

#4 Zappos (score: 2.7)

The full report details the key factors for building a Social Media Merchandising strategy, the criteria to use when engaging with an agency, and an epilogue forecasting future trends.

>>> Download a copy of the full report <<<

You may know haptic (the sense of touch) technology from playing home video games (of course you play!)  Since the advent of PlayStation DualShock controllers, we and millions of kids have enjoyed feeling the virtual road as we drive over bumps in car games because the controllers vibrate like we’re hitting those bumps.  This is called, in technology circles, haptics.  You may also be familiar with the BMW automobile user interface and the Volkswagen user interface, which use haptics to guide you through menus and provide visual and sensory cues to help you know when you have landed on a particular item in your car’s menu.

One recent device, heavily promoting its haptic interface, is this MP3 player:

Haptic technology emerged from the aerospace industry, a breeding ground for many advanced technologies.  When fly-by-wire was developed for airplanes, the pilots no longer had direct feedback from the controls to know when their aircraft might be about to stall.  Off-center weights on motors were added to the control set so that when fly-by-wire reaches a critical angle, these off-center weights afford feedback by vibrating the control stick, similar to the experience that direct controls afforded. Haptic interfaces in the medical field are being used to increase clinical proficiency and decrease medical errors and costs and to provide interactive medical image analysis.  Haptic feedback provides additional information that makes digital environments and interfaces more real, and therefore safer as a result of engaging more of our faculties.

Many recent developments using technology to add haptics include manipulating objects in 3D environments and feeling the boundaries of a virtual environment.  This extends the purposes from haptic feedback in videogames and the added level of realism to the use of sensory feedback in other computer applications and in personal digital assistants (PDA), such as iPhones.  The iPhone console already uses a vibration generator to signal the arrival of a phone call, text message, or anything else the user chooses. That same off-center motor can be used to simulate a number of different tactile responses, despite the surface of the iPhone being completely smooth.  It’s actually possible, knowing where a person’s finger is relative to a button, to provide the sensation of activating a physical button when in fact the surface is flat.

Other areas of exploration might include sensing when a photo is out of focus, when a direction is deviating from the planned route, or when a compass point has shifted, all by combining many of the existing elements within the iPhone.  Although the technology is now just experimental, the popularity of the iPhone and the fact that it has a robust and heavily supported programmed interface makes it easy for interface designers to consider not just the visual cinematic and audio aspects of the interface, but also the sensory aspects of the interface.  Not all of this tactile feedback is understood, yet, but as evidenced by the research, these sensory feedback controls will soon be available out-of-the-box to programmers and designers.

This new range of interface possibilities raises the desirability of applications, and their ability to differentiate themselves by providing a truly integrated or lifelike experience.  Haptics integrates a more complete use of our sense of touch with the senses of seeing and hearing.  We can expect even wider ranges of delightful experience through our expanding multi-sensory experience of interfacing with devices and the rich environments these create as they connect through location-based data, visual input from cameras, and data available over the network.  When the device knows where you are, and can present visual, aural, and tactile feedback, the result is a rich interaction with the interface. The possibilities are broad for exploring an environment that is connected through three of our five senses.

Written with Mary-Anna Rae

Long the holy grail for smartphone developers and recipients of much fanfare and funds, location-based services (LBS) present a number of big design challenges when it comes to sharing location information. Some LBS applications provide useful utilities by reading the user’s current location and using that information to provide useful location-based information to the user, like Google Maps, the mapping and directions service; Yelp, yellow pages plus business ratings; Nike+, a log that keeps track of how far users run; GyPsii, a diary that stores text, location and images; and cool augmented reality applications like AcrossAir’s London Tube Finder.

However, some location services that share users’ location information on a network, including those built by venture-backed upstarts with funds to the tune of $20 million, actually share location information without users’ knowledge or understanding. These services offer answers to all-important questions like “which of my friends or colleagues are nearby?” and “Here’s a picture of my living room at 188 Chestnut Street, in San Francisco.” These applications often fail to address the interface and usage challenges as they tread on privacy, technology, or social network potholes.

Privacy Potholes
Privacy presents a challenge to LBS application design since people don’t always wish to disclose their location, and want to control to whom and under what conditions to disclose that information.  Applications typically do a bad job of informing users, and of reminding them, when this information is being shared and with whom.  Doing a search on Twitter for “location iPhone” will reveal that people are tweeting their location to everyone, and probably unwittingly.  Other examples include TwitPic, which tweets your exact latitude and longitude along with pictures, and some Flickr apps save their location, too.  That fact is often lost to users.  It is somewhat of a stalker’s dream to Google or search on Twitter for somebody, find their current location or images of their children or other loved ones, and know their location.  Think of a thief who sees pictures of the interior of your house on Flickr and knows where you live.  Is it possible he could just go shopping online from Flickr and come rob your house when you Tweet that you are on vacation? Application designers need to better inform users, and let users control what private details they are providing and to whom.

Technology Potholes
Friend-finding apps are trying to connect people to their close network of friends. But these iPhone apps suffer from the limitation that iPhones do not broadcast location once the application is no longer running.  This leaves one’s network in the dark for the vast majority of the time, since no one keeps an app open for very long.  Android applications can run in the background, but iPhone applications do not.  The consequences for the battery life on these devices, if they are always updating their location in the background, may become an issue, too.  Until these technology hurdles are overcome, we won’t truly know how useful it might be to always know where our friends are right now, or how creepy it might be to feel watched. The killer friend-finding application is yet to be designed.

Social Network Potholes
The location-based social networking services are like unconnected islands that require circles of friends to download and use the exact same application. Until a central repository, possibly provided by Facebook, Google, or Apple, allows everyone to share information more seamlessly, these location-sharing LBS applications will remain islands with few inhabitants and resources.  Getting one’s community to agree on which application/island to join, and getting them to use that application, is a big problem.  I predict none of these systems will take off until there is a shared repository that all the applications can utilize.

Written with Mary-Anna Rae.

Our research and design experiments for e-commerce clients show time and again that visual detail and emotive motion engage customers at an emotionally profound level. Fortunately, technological advances and intuitive interfaces are making deeper engagement possible.

Detailed visuals can be worth ten thousand words

Surprisingly, not many e-commerce sites present visuals well. Although the capability to present inline images has been available since the first Mosaic browser in 1993, and visual overlays since early 2000, not many companies have spent the time and effort to present their products in the rich detail that customers want and expect when considering a purchase online.

Some product sites have clearly differentiated themselves with added levels of visual detail in the shopping experience.  One noteworthy example is Zappos, which does a good job of showing photographs from many different angles, and also provides many levels of zoom to look at minute details that otherwise are lost in images on the Web.

Another clothing Web site succeeds by using a technology called RealZoom, from A Far Site Better, that provides an extra level of visual detail through an intuitive, quick interface.  Betsey Johnson uses RealZoom, and customers notice. The perceived performance of these rich images is important, and sites need to optimize their entire interface with this in mind. The Zappos site does a number of things well in terms of enabling people to filter by size, show all products, and make selections that speed the shopping process.

Dynamic images, customizable for each customer, also create a compelling level of visual detail. Some auto manufacturer sites provide a sense of the final product by visualizing custom cars configured by customers to their tastes.  One of the most expressive sites in this category is Mini USA, which visually displays accessories as they are added and shows how the resulting car will appear.  There are ten million configurable combinations, but the options are seamless to the customer.

A site that combines visual richness with self-expression, and does it among a community of passionate enthusiasts, is a social networking site dedicated to styling clothing, called Polyvore, which lets members customize visual “sets” of fashion items from different designers, and share their sets with their online peers. This visual detail and expressiveness creates a number of strong, positive emotional responses.

We recently reviewed TheFind, which does a very good job of aggregating product information.  In one interface, it provides product details from sites all over the Web, including detailed views, as well as retailer sales and discounts, and what they call “UpFront” trust-building information that reassures shoppers of the credibility and trustworthiness of retailers participating in the program. The visual richness of this shopping aggregator helps it stand apart from other players.

Motion builds emotion through stories
With increased bandwidth we are able now to watch videos of products being presented, as evidenced by technology from companies like TalkMarket, a company acquired by Amazon last year.  Founded by ex-QVC executives, the service provides quick-to-start and easy-to-use product demonstrations that weave a story, when done well.  The addition of motion and stories to product visuals gives customers the opportunity to add layers of emotional meaning and to imagine its use and how it might feel in their lives, making it more compelling.

Similar to the difference between meeting someone in person and seeing someone’s picture, oftentimes seeing a product video gives a much better sense of a product’s “personality” than viewing a static product shot. When presented well in motion, as a story, a product can be much more compelling than its still image counterpart.

By using visual detail and emotive motion, along with the design recommendations that I discuss in The Design of Sites, Clean Product Details (F2) pattern, customers immerse themselves more emotionally in their shopping experience.

Ref: 2dnt9camgy

Now, new augmented reality interfaces are possible given the opportunities smart phones open up by combining GPS, compass and camera with wireless data connectivity. By being able to know where someone is, in what direction they are looking, combining live video with powerful data, we enable whole new classes of applications.

While definitions vary, in general augmented reality means integrating images and data from computers into pictures of the real world as they happen in real time. Though not new in itself, augmented reality actually comes in many flavors, including the variety that superimpose 3D objects and animations into a user’s view, like this clever GE Eco-Imagination ad you can play with yourself, as well as educational applications like this interactive book.

These augmented reality applications sometimes require special materials or hardware to view, so are more complicated to set up and use.

However, simple, engaging and intuitive new applications are now within the reach of millions of smartphone customers. These tools and games can superimpose on a smartphone screen a real-time view of the world and some very powerful data visualization, like this augmented reality navigation system.

The use of augmented reality information has been experimented with since the helmet-mounted display  systems of the 1960s, when Honeywell pioneered the devices for military use to augment pilots’ information.  Popularized in movies such as Terminator and John Carpenter’s They Live, augmented reality is now seeing some practical applications that challenge interface designers to create compelling experiences for customers.

Some fun and compelling examples of heads up displays have been used in videogames for years, providing statistics on speed of race car, health of a character, score in a competition, options available.  These interfaces point the direction in which innovative companies and designers are taking augmented reality now that technology is providing some practical applications for their creation and distribution.

Written with Mary-Anna Rae.

Eye-tracking as an interface usability research technology to complement less expensive methods has been highly debated among professionals over the years, from Jared Spool’s comments in 2006, to numerous articles by Jakob Nielsen, to more recent results posted by Joe Goldberg and others.

The fact is, eye-tracking tools have evolved in recent years.  Systems such as Tobii now enable researchers to quickly calibrate participants, and no longer require head-stabilizers. And the analysis software now makes it much easier to dissect the data, as it relates to the particular interfaces being tested, the alternative designs being examined, and the ways that research participants self-report their impressions.

With a visual scanpath recorded, the circles indicate locations where the eye dwelled briefly. Larger circles show where the eye spent more time.

Our conclusion is that as a tool, eye-tracking provides additional information that can be useful in a number of cases.  It helps us better understand why certain design alternatives succeed in some situations with participants and fail in others.  This information can be invaluable in diagnosing and improving designs.

Eye-tracking is by no means the only tool or even the primary one in a researcher’s tool chest.  The  multivariate experimental design, error analysis, and task analysis are primary. These tools and methods all combine to help us understand, diagnose,  and interpret user attitudes, intentions, behavior, and performance to maximize the customer experience.

Written with Mary-Anna Rae.