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Archive for the ‘Mobile’ Category

Augmented Research, Blog, Co-Creation, Communities, Mobile, Planning, Research Methods

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4 Tips to Liven Up Live Event Research

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Here at FACE, we live for the moment – and we especially like to do it in the name of research. Researching live experiences used to be a matter of showing up, doing interviews at various points, and taking down notes throughout, maybe a survey here or there. But that’s not our style and things have changed (we love change!). Now, people can experience everything the world has to offer in real time while simultaneously contributing and sharing experiences with others through mobile and social media. It’s been great news for us, because we get even more opportunities to delve into understanding what is happening and why.

We’ve been doing more and more research in this area and are fascinated by it. So in the spirit of experiencing and sharing, here are some tips that have helped make our live research live up to the definition on Urban Dictionary: “jumping, full of people, exciting!”

World Cup Stadium
Image by Flickr user Shine 2010 – 2010 World Cup good news

1. Focus

When going into any kind of live event (whether physical or digital, or both) having a clear objective and a plan are incredibly important. Whether we are looking at engagement with a message, understanding behavior in context, or identifying opportunities for improvement, having a focal question helps to narrow in on exactly what kind of information the research should prioritize over all of the other (distracting!) aspects that make live events so fascinating.

2. Technology

Even a few years ago, asking people to do things while they were doing something else was fraught with difficulty (think paper diaries, and intercept interviews). But now, online behaviors have really shifted in our favor in regards to collecting data during live events. Liveblogging, livestreaming, updating, checking in, – all of these methods act as shortcuts that help participants get their thoughts directly to us without getting in the way of the experience itself.

And the best part is that people are already engaging in these behaviors in their personal lives. We’re just extending an already existing behavior into a research situation. Just be sure to choose your technology medium carefully. Make sure that it fits within the situation you’re looking at. For instance, check-ins are useful if you’re studying gym-workout behavior. But they’re not really that useful if you’re looking at the experience of a live concert.

3. Real-time integration

This should go without saying, but I am going to say it anyway. In order to capture what happens ‘live’, the research simply has to be happening at the same time. The information you get from people experiencing something in the moment (even if it doesn’t seem relevant at the time) is extremely powerful and should not be left out of the picture. When people look back on experiences in retrospect, it is often lacking a lot of the rich contextual information that is key to understanding what is really going on in the moment.

4. Thinking about dimensions

Live experiences are akin to animated objects – constantly changing in look, feeling, and experience. There isn’t always a clear beginning, middle, or end, and things can take dramatic turns. There is a lot of reading between the lines.

Where traditional research might normally have limited perspectives across a few points in time, a live research approach gives us the opportunity to explore multiple vantage points over the entire duration of an experience. The added dimension of change over time means that we can better understand the subtleties of live experiences in ways that people might not be aware of in the moment or even after the fact.

Ultimately studying live experiences can be a whale of a proposition but it is always worth it. We are looking forward to the next opportunity to lose ourselves in the moment.

Flashing lights

Augmented Research, Blog, Future of Research, Mobile, Research Methods, Social Data, Wired

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Future Mobile Research. Mining Reality Through the Mobile Phone

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Social media made online social behaviour measurable.

Now smartphones are doing the same with face-to-face interaction – thanks to ‘machine sensing’. Machine sensing is basically data collection through sensor-equipped machines, where a sensor is a converter that measures a physical quantity and converts it into a signal which can be read by an observer or by an instrument.

Traditionally mobile market research has mimicked what can be done on the web, with poorer interfaces and engagement. But with smartphones enabling mobile sensing, the opportunity got much bigger and much more interesting.

Mobile sensing is the passive recording of a person’s online and offline daily life in a quantitative way. Sensors in the mobile handset can be used to capture communication, proximity, location, and activity data alongside the more established prompted inputs: a 360-degree approach becoming known as Reality Mining.

Longitudinal collection of this data produces a depth of information on behaviours, interactions and states that can reveal patterns and insights that would be impossible to spot on an exclusively qualitative basis.

Back in July 2012 I ran a pilot project on a sample of one (me) to assess the potential of mobile sensing within the industry. How could market research use ‘reality mining’ to develop a better understanding of consumer behaviors and attitudes? And how useful would it be?

The presentation below gives an overview of the Reality Mining project. A more in-depth paper will be published over the next few weeks discussing the details of the set up, the research methodology and the outputs of the project.

Blog, Innovation, Mobile, SXSW

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Mobile money: the possibilities (and challenges)

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In the last year we’ve done several research projects on mobile money at FACE, as excitement around the possibilities of “mobile wallet” develops. SXSWi was a chance to hear from leading players in the industry – American Express, PayPal, Intuit and more – on where this technology is going.

What is mobile money?


It’s important to think about the category as “mobile money” rather than simply “mobile payment” or “mobile wallet”. What’s at stake is much bigger than just transfering your credit card to your phone, or simply replicating the functions of a wallet (payment, loyalty cards & receipts) on a mobile device. The technologies available – smartphones, geolocation, the development of 4G and widespread wifi, and of course NFC – mean that what’s possible is in fact much greater: re-imagining the whole human-money interface.

What’s this mean? It’s about looking at every way in which we interact with money, and thinking about the transformations in user experience that are possible if we make it mobile. The transactions up for grabs are many and varied:

  • payment in a shop (of course)
  • paying a friend back for the taxi ride last night
  • checking to see if your credit card payment has gone out
  • transferring money immediately before making a big purchase to ensure your account doesn’t go overdrawn
  • adding up your receipts to see how much you’ve spent on eating out this month
  • calculating whether you’ll be able to get a mortgage
  • buying a flight (or just a coffee) with reward points – mobile money encompasses stored value, not just legal currencies
  • getting a discount email like Groupon and redeeming that online
  • searching for the cheapest iPad retailer online
  • or searching for a local restaurant offering a discount 2-for-1 deal
  • …and much, much more.

Making it mobile doesn’t simply mean “available on my mobile phone screen”. The mobile phone is a smart, location-aware computing device, carried almost always within a metre of our bodies, which is always connected to the internet and keeps us always connected to the people we know. Taking full advantage of these properties is what makes mobile money fundamentally transformative. The word “revolutionary” is overused in business, but making money truly mobile is a much bigger deal than the rise of credit cards in the 1960s, the last biggest step-change in payment methods.

Challenges

There are however some substantial challenges in rolling out mobile money to its full potential. Here are five:

1. Money is a difficult sector to innovate in

Regulation is a big hindrance on start-ups in the money space: there is both legal incumbrance and a cultural resistance (aka trust) to companies taking risks, trying something new – and perhaps not succeeding. The big incumbents are also an obstacle – banks own the central customer account (current/checking accounts), and Visa,  Mastercard & Amex control payments.

Building new back-end processing systems is very difficult, and even the big over-the-top players (PayPal, Google Wallet) are essentially innovating on top of existing card payments i infrastructure. Dwolla – a New York peer-to-peer (P2P) money startup – is worth a note here, for one that isn’t.

2. What’s happening with NFC?

NFC stands for near-field communications. It’s a type of radio communications – like wifi or Bluetooth at a different frequency – that allows for short-range (10cm) communciation between devices and tagged objects, other devices, and merchant terminals. It is ultimately the key way contactless payment will be delivered – although it’s worth remembering that mobile money means a lot more than just in-store payment.

Unfortunately NFC uptake is moving extremely slowly. So far there are only a handful of NFC-enabled handsets in the UK, and many of them are unappealing low-spec phones. The big player is of course the Apple iPhone, and so far there’s no news as to when or how NFC will be implemented on this device.

Without a standardised technology, merchants are naturally unwilling to invest in NFC payment terminals so these remain in a few chain stores only – MacDonalds since 2003; Pret A Manger, and so on. We’re 5+ years away yet from “leave your cash & card at home”.

3. UX benefits of mobile payment in-store

One eye-opener for me about our US trip was just how annoying magnetic-stripe payment really is. US banks haven’t been able to agree on a Chip & PIN standard (as in Europe). As such payment requires the merchant taking the card away (a security risk) and two stages of receipts. NFC payment would clearly be much quicker than this, providing a clear driver for consumer uptake. However, it’s got minimal speed and thus user experience benefit in Europe over the faster Chip & PIN.

4. Trust

Many commentators rate the chances of the over-the-top tech players (mainly Google, Apple, Paypal) as ahead of the banks. Despite some bank mobile apps getting rave user reviews (RBS and Natwest’s mobile banking apps) and a strong move from Barclays Pingit on peer-to-peer transfers, there’s a suspicion that banks are likely to stick to “mobilifying” what they already do, rather than really innovating and reinventing the category. That transformative capacity – and also slick UX design – would seem to be more the property of the tech companies.

But PayPal has a trust problem: we see consistent and frequent stories of how it freezes people’s accounts for months without explanation or recourse. That’s infuriating when it’s your tool for P2P and small-merchant payments – it’s completely untenable if they’re operating your current account. There’s also increasing consumer suspicion of just how much Google knows about us – so giving them access to our finances may be a step too far.

5. Who’s actually thinking big enough?

This was the core insight from a fantastic solo SXSW presentation by Omar Green, Director of Strategic Mobile Initiatives at Intuit, the payment technology firm. He talked about “creating a mobile wallet worth having”, and said he thought the company who would “win” mobile money would be the one offering every transaction listed above and more.

As suggested above, the risk is that too many of the mobile money launches we can see on the horizon are thinking too small. Credit cards on your phone and no additional functionality – so what’s in it for me the user? A couple of dozen big-brand partners rather than available everywhere – so why use? There will certainly be some early adopters who’ll take-up simply to be first and look ahead, but they’re a minority. Strategically banks, MNOs and tech firms need to recognise that these standalone offers must only be stepping stones to something much bigger if they’re going to get any real traction. (Barclaycard have had an NFC credit card since 2003. No-one cares.)

Omar Green had a vision of what mobile money could be that I’ve not seen from anywhere else in the industry. The goal is a seamless money experience addressing our fundamental financial and emotional needs – balancing the books, saving for the future, feeling in control and feeling like we’ve spent our money wisely.

Question is, how seriously will the various mobile payment and wallet apps launching this year will really address these?

Augmented Research, Blog, Conferences, Innovation, Mobile, Social Media, SXSW

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The Brand as API. Brand-centered vs User-centered Architectures.

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As someone who has been working on the idea of making brands human by plugging them into the fabric of society, today I definitely couldn’t miss a session called “Brand As API” hosted by Peg Faimon and Glen Platt from the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies, Miami University Oxford, Ohio.

The premise is clear and simple, and extremely agreeable:

“As brands finally begin to deliver on the promise of a 1-to-1 relationship with their customers (through social media, mobile, and data-driven tools), it is critical to develop a new foundation for that relationship. This requires brands to leave the “broadcast relationship” and, instead, build a relationship sharing communication, innovation, and the very product/service itself. Insight into this relationship can be found in the structure, language, and use of APIs (Application Programming Interface). APIs provide a set of rules – a language for connecting to data and services. To remix. To build. To leverage. To extend. Many API calls provide explicit metaphors for the ways brands can connect to customers. Generally, the API relationship provides insights into the role of brands in the customers’ life. This conversation will explore these metaphors, share case studies, and work to build a language for better connecting consumers with their brands.”

You can look at the full presentation below and get the details on how they think a brand as API might work.

The main idea behind the concept of the Brand as API is that it would allow to open up the Brand, its assets and its services and allow people (consumers, businesses, developers) to do things with that Brand, from playing with the contents and the identity of the brand all the way down to designing products and services.

Peg and Glen went on discussing the key elements of an API and how they relate and map against new ways of building meaningful relationships between brand and consumers.

While this is completely agreeable and sensible, the idea of the Brand as API as crafted in this presentation still seems to rely on two assumptions:

1) The assumption that people want to do stuff with that Brand, pulling information and data assets off a Brand in order to create something custom. And while we know this is true, we also know this only applies to a very small percentage of the user base of the Brand.

2) And the mother of all assumptions: the belief that the relationships consumers have with brands are primary while we know that consumers’ most valuable relationships are with other consumers, and what brand CAN try and do is fit in those relationships in a meaningful and/or useful way, i.e. as social currency or enablers/problem solvers.

It seems that while the analogy between brands and APIs has got incredibly long legs, we are still looking at it from the wrong perspective: the brand perspective.

What if, instead of focussing on what the API allows the user to Pull we start focussing on what the API allows the user to PUSH, meaning allowing the user to ingest a controlled and owned selection of brand-relevant personal data into the brand API such as user context, passions, interests and behaviours?

What if I could feed for example my location data to the API of my mobile network operator (plugging in my mobile gps, Foursquare or Sonar data) and get the most customised international plan based on my travel habits?

And what if consumers could ‘sell’ this personal data to brands? Consumers used to pay brands for products. We are now heading towards a future where digital data abundance means brands are going to pay consumers for their personal data. Users get customised offerings while remaining in control of their personal data, brands increase their relevance by investing on live audience intelligence rather than push strategies.

This is why I believe the biggest added value of a Brand API lies not so much in the ability to provide a Brand-to-User stream of data rather in its ability to manage a bi-drectional stream of data, where the user can shape the brand around itself using the vast amounts of personal data he is in control of.

And this is why i believe the biggest and most important asset of a brand API is not the Brand Essence, rather the User Profile.

Such an API would not be shaped around the brand but around the user and his needs. And effectively it would be an Audience API rather than a Brand API. Something that could sit at the centre of the business and power any decision the business has to take, from innovation to marketing to CRM.

But the thing is, in order to be plugged into the fabric of society brands probably need both, or even more than two APIs. Like any other social product/service out there.

Brand As API – SXSW 2012 Presentation

Augmented Research, Mobile, Press Coverage, Social Data, Wired

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Your Mobile Phone Leaks

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Jess Owens talks about mobile data in the latest issue of design/architecture magazine ICON, issue 106 on mobile phones

“This year the number of mobile phones will exceed the 7 billion humans on the planet. For this issue we asked novelists, academics, experts and designers to reflect on this communication revolution, in a 22-page special on how cell phones have changed the ways we behave, connect to and navigate the world. And to make their own predictions about how mobile phone technology will look in the future …”

Jess takes on the issue of mobile data, which data do our devices capture and most importantly what they share?

Does mobile data sharing matter? Some would argue no: users are knowingly exchanging their data for free access to entertaining and useful services. But the impact of such bargains goes beyond the individual.

Read it all here

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