Adaptive Path Blog

On an internal mailing list, we’ve had a thread titled “Social is not a channel,” spurred by Andrew’s tweet, “‘Social’ is not a channel. It is people having a conversation over multiple channels. A successful strategy addresses those concurrently.”

The conversation was quite good, and then, as such things do, descended into silliness. At one point, Jamin asked “What’s a channel?” to which Ben responded with the following graphic, and attendant explanation:

The dotted blue lines represent “mediated conversations.”

On a client project, we were trying to articulate a set of high-level principles to explain desired media experiences. One of the first ones we came up with was “simplicity”, but realized that it was insufficient.

One of the challenges is that “simplicity” has become overloaded, and as Don Norman pointed out, when he wrote “Simplicity is Not the Answer,” the desire for simplicity is often simply a desire for lessening frustration.

We realized that when were describing people’s desired media experiences, we often used the word “frictionless.” It was meant to evoke an “it just works” sentiment. While akin to simplicity, it is different. For example, Kindle is a surprisingly frictionless device — no wires, you ask for a book and get it in less than a minute. The Kindle experience, however, is not simple — there are hundreds of thousands of books to choose from, there is serious power in the reading experience.

When it comes to media, friction is often a result of technical barriers and constraints — the spaghetti of wires that connect televisions to DVRs, DVD players, set-top boxes, game consoles, or the challenge of getting media from one device to another, wireless connectivity getting interrupted. I think about my recent experiences with the Flip Ultra HD Camera. It’s dumb simple — press a button and it records, press it again and it stops. But I found immense friction, either due to massive file sizes, which took forever to copy or process, or due to startlingly low battery life, which required frequent replacement.

This is not to discount the importance of simplicity. In contradiction to Don’s claim, we witnessed that, at least in the realm of media experiences, people desired simplicity, and increasingly favored solutions that were simpler. Whereas friction was about barriers and constraints, we saw simplicity as being about cognitive load. Simple things don’t require a lot of thought. Choices are eliminated, recall is not required.

I’d love to hear how others have handled this, and if anyone has developed a language or taxonomy to help make critical conversations more meaningful.

I tweeted something last night and I wanted to get your collective take on it. I think I’m right, but I also know that there are nuances and exceptions to this.

“The newer the customer relationship is with a brand, the more disruptive the experience needs to be.”

What I mean by this is that when trying to acquire new customers or attract focus, the experiences that a brand must have should be disruptive and attention getting. For example, a brick and mortar store with a loyal, repeat base of customers may not have to do a lot of obvious outreach. Their existing customers may be happy with the product or service and continue to shop there. However, newer customers may not be aware of the business. Therefore, in order to attract this business, the store has to do something to grab the potential customers’ focus. Maybe this is a new sign, or display. Maybe it’s a touchscreen at the front of the store or maybe it’s a promotion. The point is that newer customers require extra effort to be won over and thus their first experience with a new brand must be a more disruptive one.

This supposes, though, that existing relationships will not ever suffer from stagnation. I’ve spoken publicly before about the need for older products to become disruptive in order to maintain relevance. So, I’m not sure that statement above means that the opposite is true : that the older the relationship is, the more stable it needs to become.

So, at some point, the “newness” of a customer gets must be reset in order to maintain their business. When does this happen? With a new product launch? A new ad campaign? A lifestyle shift in which a second product becomes valuable?

Is disruption the right word here and what does that mean in this context?

We communicate with other people every day. Over the course of our lives we’ve developed verbal, written and visual communication skills that help us convey our thoughts. From time to time, we find ourselves in a position to share these ideas in a business context, often in the form of a presentation. And, it’s usually at this point where we completely forget how to talk.

I remember in 4th grade, I desperately wanted to ask Jenny Grubb to dance at a school event. Like every other 4th grader, I was plastered against the wall with the boys, while the girls giggled against the other wall. My friends pushed me to ask her as they wondered why I couldn’t do it. Jenny and I hung out all the time. Why couldn’t I ask her to dance?

In my heart, I knew I could just go up to her, but my head told me that was totally wrong. I had convinced myself that asking someone to dance was different than asking them to sit with you at lunch. I was sure that I should talk to her differently in that situation.

When we stand in front of a boss or a group of strangers, we transform into boring, fact-spewing robots. We do this out of a perception that “businesslike” is appropriate and required. We’re embarrassed to share how we personally relate to the information on the screen for fear of letting our guard down. Whether we’re providing an update to our superiors, conveying a new idea to a team or training a group of people, we’ve become accustomed to reporting on what’s on the screen.

Now, imagine telling your spouse or friends how your day went in that same tone. Would that person have any reason to become vested in your needs? Could you convince them to do something for you through a series of soul sucking facts?

No.

We’re most effective when we converse and tell stories. Our best stories use anecdotes to move people from one event to another as they wait to see how things unfold.

The Power of the anecdote is so great… No matter how boring the material is, if it is in story form…there is suspense in it, it feels like something’s going to happen. The reason why is because literally it’s a sequence of events…you can feel through its form [that it's] inherently like being on a train that has a destination…and that you’re going to find something…

— Ira Glass

Stories give deeper meaning to facts and satisfy an emotional need in your audience to connect with what you’re telling them. They allow you to add emphasis on key points by tying them to real-world examples. Stories provide inspiration, hope, fear – qualities that motivate people into taking action.

When designing your presentation, remember that good stories offer questions and answers and key moments of reflection. Your audience didn’t come to see you, they came to find out what you can do for them. Your stories provide depth to the facts and figures that they would not get by simply reading by themselves. Your delivery makes their experience successful.

I never asked Jenny Grubb to dance with me, but I recall that story every time I need encouragement to try something new and break away from what I think I should be doing.

One constant that has stood the test of time in new media/technology projects has been the tension between designers and developers. There have been very few places I have worked where this tension was not one of the central issues holding back teams from generating successful final products. We, as a community, have tried countless ways to alleviate this issue, but it continues to persist despite our efforts. Sadly, I feel this issue stems less from process (although that can definitely exacerbate the situation) and more from a company’s culture and organizational approach. The seamless integration between design and technology is becoming increasingly vital to a product’s success. Up to this point, a lot of subconscious time and energy is put into the segmentation of designers and developers, but what we should really be doing is working to blur the lines between the skill sets. The companies that will thrive moving forward are the ones that resolve this tension. With that in mind, what can both designers and developers do in their everyday process to create a more mutli-disciplined approach that still works within a company’s structure?

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Texting. That’s what the kids are doing, what with the cell phones and the chatting and the video games with the crazy kooky beep boing bang pew pew pew.

The other night, I went to to dinner with a friend to eat some sushi and catch up on things, and every minute or so he’d produce his iPhone and quickly tap out a message to his girlfriend. It felt like she was at dinner with us and in some senses she was — a spectral, digital presence in our conversation.

When my friend eventually silenced his phone, we discussed how conversation happens digitally via text these days. We hypothesized that as people evolve, our reliance on text messages to converse might actually cause us to loose the social skills to speak beyond simple grunts. Our vestigial vocal cords would diminish and make way for longer, pointed fingers better for typing on small screens. There might even be a subspecies of loquacious humans — charismatic leaders who vocally direct those of us who stare into the great electric square to type (I for one welcome our orally speaking overlords).

Okay, okay. This vision of the future might seem ridiculous, but it makes me wonder: can the future of typewritten conversation sustain? Does “chatting” pass the muster when a friend explains to his girlfriend that he really just wanted to chill and eat sushi with a pal, and that he isn’t passive-aggressively ignoring her SMS messages because she shamed him into deleting his Xbox Live account? Is the sarcasm or sincerity in this rejoinder even palpable?

Texting falls short in these respects, yet people converse in it because it affords us a certain state of omnipresence.

Writing As Conversation

The history of writing begins, well… at the beginning of history. Writing was conceived as a means to record things, but that use case has changed. We’ve been writing to converse now across great distances (thank you, internet). To that point, modern writing in its clipped use lacks ways to capture the nuance of a face-to-face conversation. It lacks emotional prosody.

What’s prosody, you say? Think of it as the orchestration of pitch, phonetics, and cadence used to reveal our emotional state. It’s a means of communication that predates the evolution of human language. The high, wavering tone of uncertainty. The stressing of syllables for importance. The shriek of pain. The sigh of irritation. The gasp of surprise. Laughter. Dogs growling and cats purring might even fall under this.

There are few indicators in writing to suggest an author’s emotional prosody. We process writing by reading it aloud or using our internal voice, looking to sentence structure, word placement, line breaks, ellipses, etc., to infer how the author feels.

The problem now is that writing as a tool for conversation has become too clipped and too fast to pick up on emotional nuance. This is evident in the supplemental use of emoticons, or textual representations of faces used to convey the writer’s mood. We key in emoticons like : ) and : ( to suggest our pleasure or displeasure.

Emoti-cons

Emoticons help, but there is something about them that feels patchwork in their solution.

For one, the gamut of facial expressions can’t be captured through punctuation. Then there are cultural disconnects. Kanji emoticons are different from those used in European alphabets, whereas in the real world, a smile is universal.

Logistically speaking, different computing systems parse emoticons in different ways (case in point: I had to add spaces between the eyeballs and mouth of all the emoticons in this blog post just so that WordPress wouldn’t automatically turn them into its own representation of them). It’s hard to name a file with an emoticon, or use a search system to find them. Typefaces illustrate them differently as well. A Times New Roman emoticon looks different from say, a Fette Fraktur one.

Then there is the fact that emoticons can’t be placed well amidst other punctuation because they are punctuation, and interrupt things. You get a neanderthal (: )) when you try to write a smiley face in parentheses. If you add a period after a smiley face it looks like it’s drooling : ).

Emoticons don’t translate when we use our internal voice to find prosodic cues in writing. When we see : ) we imagine the person who wrote the message to be smiling, but if we don’t know the author we can’t picture their face to glean an understanding how their message is meant to be spoken aloud.

The reason that letterforms work so well together in writing is that they are almost cognitively meaningless until they are assembled into words that direct the intonations of our inner voice. Emoticons don’t share this quality. They will always be an illustration of a face.

Type-Facelift

One thing is evident in the use of emoticons — if we want to improve our written languages for use in conversation, the solutions are probably typographic. We may need to design new, simple punctuations to express our feelings in a timely manner.

This could mean extending the period into a directional line to indicate inflection, or ways to append our majuscules to tag how a sentence is supposed to be read. We might even design common-use phonetic symbols that don’t interrupt a fast read. However it works, I think the adjustments should be easy to read, type, and adopt.

So here’s what I wonder: given the rapidity in which we converse through text, are there better ways to improve our writing systems that will allow us to craft specific emotional cues?

This week we found out that Google is for pandas not lobsters

We were charmed by Ryan and Mike’s lovely picture book.

We were interested in Paul Adams’ research and discoveries about The Real Life Social Network

And we enjoyed some very small celebrities.

We are reading Bruce Temkin on The ROI of Customer Experience: Part 1 | Part 2

And a few of us who don’t find finger painting on the iPad all that enjoyable are lusting over Manual Deskterity’s prototype drafting table that combines simultaneous pen and direct touch input.

Finally, in preparation for the weekend, we found a rochambeau cheat-sheet for the next time you’re engaged in a battle over who will do the dishes.

Several years ago I wrote about the virtues of Keynote as a prototyping tool. In a nutshell: it’s fast, it doesn’t require code writing, and you can turn it into flash and present it over the web.

This week I was shocked with the inventive but pragmatic application of Keynote as a prototyping tool for iPad. See Amir Khella here using Keynote to prototype a realistic iPad application, and (if you skip ahead in the video) run it on the iPad:

Here’s more about how he did it.

Such a good way to test out your concepts fast. Thanks Amir for sharing your good idea!

The Adaptive Path Amsterdam crew has been pretty quiet on the blog since we opened the studio at the end of April. One of the reasons is that we have been growing. In the last few weeks we have been joined by three exceptional people from the local community, and we’re excited to introduce them to you:

Willem Boijens. Willem is a former client who was most recently a Vodafone Group, where he held various roles in Consumer Products & Services, Terminals, Internet Services, Online. He’s passionate about marketing, innovation and design and knows both sides of the consulting business inside and out. He will be leading business development for us in Europe and use his expertise to help us craft client projects and programs that get great stuff out into the world.

Sheryl Cababa. Sheryl joins us from Philips Design, where she worked on a variety of cool projects, including DirectLife. She has been a design lead at both Getty Images and Microsoft and is a food blogger in her spare time. She also brings the number of our employees who have lived in Brookfield, WI to 2.

Monica Nordhausen. As a vet of the Amsterdam design scene, Monica seems to know most of the other designers we run into when we’re out and about. She’s the consummate all-rounder, with a broad portfolio of clients and the ability to jump from research to IA to interaction design effortlessly.