Category Archives: Professional Pontification

Bridging the gap between creativity and usability.

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For the creative person working in marketing and design, ‘be different’ is important. From day one, creatives are trained and usually rewarded for thinking outside the box, pushing limits and breaking new ground. As a result, when a creative person perceives a pattern in an industry, category, approach, etc. their natural reaction is to zag when others zig. In advertising this is often the difference between breaking through work and being lost in the noise.

The agenda of the user-experience designer is different. Someone tasked with managing usability needs to make sure the person engaging with their interface can quickly and easily navigate the system, accomplish their tasks and find their way to the next logical place. This has much to do with leveraging existing paradigms and conventions as appropriate. So where the creative person sees ‘different’ as an advantage. The UX designer sees it as a potential barrier to usability.

Much of the interface design work that goes into websites and apps falls on the shoulders of people who are classified as ‘creatives’. While a digitally native designer might snap to the needs of usability quicker, there is still an overwhelming urge among most creative people to substitute in the ‘new and different’ whenever possible. That could be in anything from the placement of navigation to the use of icons instead of words.

I recently stumbled upon a useful analogy for helping creative people understand where and how creativity and usability should meet and merge. I thought I would share it with you as you might find it helpful too.

My analogy is the automobile. There is all sorts of creativity in automobile design. From aesthetics, to the placement of cup holders, to the shape and position of taillights. However, every car manufactured has some common elements. A steering wheel on the left side is one (for cars in the U.S.). the gas pedal on the right and brake on the left, is another. The shape of those pedals (vertical vs. horizontal orientation) is yet another.

It’s fair to assume that car designers have entertained other replacements for the steering wheel. Joysticks, video-game like controllers, etc. And certainly, some modifications have been made (like adding buttons to the steering wheel for controlling the sound and climate systems). But by and large the steering wheel looks the same now as it did 20 years ago. That’s because the steering wheel is directly related to the utility of the car. If you can’t steer you can’t drive. And if every time you get into a new car, you need to learn to steer again there’d be many, many more accidents on the road.

In fact, when you think about it, if a car’s usability is compromised it can be immediately frustrating. Most of us have rented a car where the lights and windshield wipers are on different sides. Imagine you’re driving. In comes a flash rain shower. You quickly reach for the wipers and accidentally turn on your high beams. Think about what that does as you’re trying to keep your car in its lane and dealing with rapidly diminishing visibility. In a addition to frustrating, it’s also dangerous. Fortunately, digital design usability issues aren’t usually lethal (though they may lead to products being killed).

With web and app designs, it can be tempting to move the navigation or treat buttons in creative ways. Though one should exercise extreme caution in doing so as it can be the equivalent of swapping the wipers for the headlights on the steering column of a car.

Now, you could dig in here and call up the iPod as an example. The now iconic spinner wheel was a huge shift in interface. It was very different, very new and ultimately very successful.  That said, I have two thoughts on the spinner. One, Apple probably spent a small fortune testing usability before it released the product. I don’t know that for sure, but I’m guessing they did. Second, the spinner found its home in a whole new device without a prior paradigm to reference. MP3 players were far different from the mechanical needs of portable CD players. If you’re creating a new product category, the opportunity might arise for a complete break from convention. But if you’re designing for a device with a history – like computers and I would argue even by similarity, tablets (which still rely heavily on the visual concept of buttons) – you’ll likely get better usability by keeping critical aspects of the interface familiar.

By the way, the car analogy is also useful for clients. An agency’s clients often seek to be new and different just like their creative teams. Marketers know that sameness in advertising rarely lead to gains in marketshare. However, websites and apps are not really advertisements. Sure it helps a brand, but by the time someone is on your website or using your app, the goal has changed. No longer are you looking to ‘break through’ or ‘stand out’ in the advertising sense. The job instead is to deliver on a promise and experience. Good experiences can have a degree of novelty, true, but they also should be efficient and easy. They should feel satisfying and never be confusing. Navigating the experience should be quickly familiar even if the screens loaded are full of new information, ideas, games, videos, tools or whatever. This is precisely why designing a website or app is like designing a car. You’re getting into it to go somewhere and do something. Anything that makes that harder in turn makes the vehicle less useful, no matter how sexy it is on the surface.

Pulling The Plug on Your Social Media Strategy

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Today your business has dozens of choices for measuring social media. Platforms exist for evaluating everything from influence to engagement using various counters and algorithms. I recommend you begin with something simpler though. I think you should ask yourself one simple, illuminating question…

“If I pulled the plug on my social media efforts – closed it all down starting tomorrow – what would my business lose?”

To answer that question, first clear the playing field. Set aside for now the industry pressure of having all your competitors in social, therefore you have to be. Set aside too any mandate coming from the corner office.

Instead, ask yourself what your company would be like next week without your Facebooking, Twittering, YouTube channel, Foursquare badges, Tumblrs, etc. etc.

Draw two columns on a sheet of paper. In column A, add up everything you’d save by shutting it all down; the man-hours internally, the cost of content creation, the meetings, the analytics software licenses, the agency retainer fees. This all amounts to the true cost of what you’re doing now and its a good thing to have in mind.

Now in column B write down all the things you’d lose as a business without your social media campaign in place. What would happen if all those Facebook fans and Twitter followers simply went away?

Take a cold, hard look. If closing your social media campaign means losing a few coupon redemptions, the occasional mention among the bazillions of tweets happening daily, and the bragging rights to some six-figure ‘fan’ count you’ve yet to figure out how to make use of, then your social media strategy is probably in need of some refinement.

On the other hand, maybe closing down your social media stuff would mean you’d know less about your customers. Maybe it would mean you’d not have that convenient focus group for getting feedback on new product ideas. Maybe it would mean you couldn’t service your customers as efficiently, or detect and address their concerns as quickly. Maybe it would mean your brand awareness would drop because your name wouldn’t circulate as much on the blogs your customers frequent. If any of that’s the case, then your investment in social media is probably paying off even if you still haven’t been able to attribute sales to it, let alone define what an ‘engagement’ really is. (That’s okay, by the way, the entire social media industry is struggling to agree on terms like ‘engagement’, ‘activate’, and ‘influencer’.)

If you’re using social media to distribute coupons you’re essentially treating it like an online FSI or DRTV spot. That may provide some sales, but the cost of maintaining that program almost always comes out of profit margins as you continue to give away coupons in return for nothing more than a click count.

For a real return on your social media investment, your column B should be full of words like ‘insights’, ‘higher satisfaction’, ‘feedback’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘quicker’. These are the things social media can do that FSIs, DRTV, and advertising simply can’t.

Most companies are looking at 2012 and asking themselves what to do with social media. Everyone is going to invest in it, true, because no one wants to be the Luddite in their competitive set. But how much do you invest? And where?

Look down again at column B on your sheet of paper. What’s missing from that list that social media could do for you? Whatever it is, that’s where you should aim your strategy and make your investment this year.

Thoughts on Influencer Strategies in Social Media

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Just as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian are famous for being… well… famous, so an increasing number of people are becoming influential today because they continually discuss being influential. Set aside the irony of a space where simply talking about influence can lead to you being labelled influential. The term ‘influence’, as used in today’s discussion of social media, is too generalized in my opinion.

Is conversation, sharing and retweeting a measure of influence? Sometimes.
If a blogger puts out an opinion that is well received and results in numerous retweets and shares, does it mean this blogger has influenced all those retweeters?

By today’s measurement methodology the assumption is yes, but I’m not so sure.

In the world of editorial, someone who agrees with your post enough to retweet it immediately is most likely to have already been in your camp to begin with. The political gridlock in our nation demonstrates this well. Democrats rarely influence Republicans and vice versa. Yet all of the candidates, when they publish perspectives, see them shared rampantly. That’s because the vast majority of this sharing happens among their pre-existing supporters. In this sense, what we today call ‘influence’ may in some instances be more a measure of the general acceptability level of an idea rather than of the influence of the blogger. It’s important to remember that social media networks tend to connect us by commonalities not differences.

Leveraging networks organized by commonality is very powerful for certain strategies like rallying a support base or solidifying brand loyalty. There are more challenges, however, when approaching new markets as one would with a growth strategy.

Influence and Growth Strategies
When it comes down to actually influencing people to the point of persuasion, where they change brands, opinions, preferences, etc. leveraging an influencer is trickier. True influence between people sits squarely in the domain of those qualitative human dynamics that semantic keyword analysis is still not very good at accurately recording.

There is more at play when influencers are seeking to succeed at persuasion. Two additional factors, beyond the influencer, play an equal if not greater role. They are the influencee (person being influenced) and the product or idea being decided upon.

For example, if you aspire to be like Katy Perry and Katy Perry drinks fruit juice X, you can probably afford to indulge your desire to be like Katy and buy that fruit juice. Here Katy Perry is very influential on your choice because the barrier to adopting Katy’s preference is low. The same holds true for bloggers who vouch for low-cost, impulse item type purchases.

But if Katy Perry drives a Porsche and you want to be like Katy it’s harder to realize your dream. You can’t necessarily go out and buy a Porsche right? True, Katy is still influential on your desire to have a Porsche but her value as an influencer is compromised by the socio-economic situation of the fan and the high-price of the product.

If you’re targeting people who can afford Porsche’s and those people are not generally influenced by the likes of Katy Perry, well then she’s not the right influencer. Conversely, if you’re targeting people who like Katy Perry and trying to sell them a Porsche but as a group they can’t afford a Porsche (or aren’t old enough to drive yet!), then your strategy (and target) are misaligned with your influencer.

Anyone in marketing will recognize this as the exact same dynamics that play out in traditional celebrity endorsement strategies, which is of course what social media influencers are within their circles of influence.

Higher involvement decisions bring challenges to influencer strategies.
Generally speaking, as products become more expensive they become a higher-involvement choice. Higher involvement decisions tend to mean that the ability of any single influencer is mitigated by the alignment of the influencee and the nature of the product. Other factors come into play beyond simply being influenced.

  • Can I afford the product? Are there sacrifices involved in purchasing it?
  • Does purchasing it lock me into a platform or brand at the expense of others?
  • What is the cost of ownership?
  • Is it compatible with other interacting devices?

These types of questions come up when you buy things like cars, electronics or appliances.

I explored this in a prior post called the Persuasion Paradox.

The original info graphic from The Persuasion Paradox. Click to enlarge.

Of course, this is a moving measure which is dependent upon the community being targeted: A $600 iPad might be an impulse item to some people and a very special treat requiring disciplined saving for others. The person you’d choose as an influencer for the former might be very different than the one chosen for the latter. Especially since the authenticity of the influencer is so important to their influence on a community or group. Someone who can easily drop $600 on an iPad probably is not an authentic voice to the disciplined saver.

Getting down to brass tacs.
Because of the importance of these nuances on the topic of ‘influence’, generalized definitions without context are insufficient for strategic planning purposes. In fact generalized thinking can lead to assumptions that waste resources (say, like signing a Katy Perry as a spokesperson to blog on behalf of an $85K sports car). An influencer’s impact should be considered against at least two factors.

  1. Does the strategy seek to communicate with an existing community who have already accepted the general premise or ideas the influencer will put forth. If so, traditional quantitative measures of influence are a decent starting point for identifying an influencer.
  2. For growth strategies that seek to infiltrate a new constituency, care must be taken to ensure the sponsoring entity/brand, desired influencee and the prospective influencer are aligned to meet the overall strategic goal. This is easier with low-involvement decisions than it is with high involvement decisions.

As social media continue to mature it is time to take a more nuanced look at how we approach and measure the worth of these new tools and the new generation of celebrities/influencers they are creating.

On narcissism & outgrowing influencers.

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Facebook is a funny company. At first blush today’s update looked as though they were playing catch up in trying to integrate/imitate features of Twitter and G+ (just like they did with Foursquare some months ago). Worse, they seem to dash these updates off, ambushing their customers with seemingly disorienting features that quickly lead to bad buzz among the Mashables, Techcrunches and Twitters of the world.

On the other hand, Facebook is a mature enterprise now. In addition to 750MM users, it has 750MM users’ data. It’s by leaps and bounds the most popular social networking tool on the planet. It has deep pockets and deep resources and let’s face it, there are some smart folks working there. While they’re undoubtedly watching their competitors, I’d be shocked if Facebook felt so threatened by Twitter or G+ – which lag behind in membership by wide, wide margins – to just willy-nilly copy what those two do out of some sense of reactionary fear.

What if instead they were more Machiavellian. What if they were watching their competitors test new ideas and then moving quickly to replicate those that showed promise. This is the second-mover advantage and it has worked before.

Too far fetched? Okay.

What if, instead, Facebook made the changes it made because the opinion of influencers didn’t matter as much? What if Facebook realized its most valuable customers were not influencers?

Facebook today serves two audiences – its membership and its advertisers. (It has certainly erred a few times in helping the latter at the expense of the former.) With 65+% of the Internet using public in America holding accounts and significantly more user participation than other competitor platforms, the importance of social media power users is somewhat diminished in Facebook’s current business model.

To grow, Facebook needs to keep the masses happy, not the influencers (who, realistically, it probably can’t keep happy even if it wants to).

What if Facebook’s latest updates were aimed solely at its most valuable customer – the mass user? In this sense you could say the updates delivered a few benefits:

  • They automatically improve the news stream with algorithmic intelligence without requiring the user to fiddle with settings.
  • They deliver twitter-like friend streams and updates without requiring the user to join Twitter (and hope their friends are there).
  • They deliver circle-like friend handling without requiring the user to join Google+ (though I’m guessing with an average 150-odd friends, most Facebook users don’t have a need for ‘circles’ anyhow).

Forget whether or not we as power users find any of the above to be true. The important question, from Facebook’s perspective, is will the average user? Maybe Facebook’s version of circles and Twitter is good enough for most people. Going to market with ‘good enough’ is a proven tactic for dominating a marketplace.

Admittedly I am hypothesizing here but if the knowledge of what the average Facebook user will find useful exists, you can bet Facebook has it and is putting its top minds to work on making the best use of it.

I sometimes feel we working so closely in and with social media are a little too focused on our own worldview. We say we are advocates for the user, but which user – the average user or the power user? Like Narcissus, we might be talking so much to our conclave of other early adopters and power users that we wind up seeing only the reflection of our own opinions coming back at us. To read Twitter today, you’d have to believe Facebook’s latest update is a massive failure.

Less than 12 hours after the updates hit, my own Facebook newsstream seems pretty quiet. Nary a mention. Instead, people went right back to Facebooking. Were they initially shocked? Some were, yes. Was it truly so disruptive a change that it earned all the ‘hate it’ comments? Not really. Or at least if so, that hate was pretty fleeting.

Who knows, maybe most the masses are happy with the updates, even if we power users are a little outraged. It’s possible.