User Intelligence Blog

What's going ON the tablet?

sluis-th — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:16:24 +0000

App-cessories are the next thing to watch. New tablets are planned for this year and most attention often goes to the newest specs and apps. The most innovative steps this year however will be in the development of tablet peripherals: app cessories.

Obviously there is a lot going on tablets for 2012, the lists of promises, predictions and problems are numerous. One to keep an eye for are the App-cessories (explained by Daniel Donahoo, Wired). App-cessories are tangible objects that can interact with a tablet. He gives a number of working examples developed both in experimental and in commercial settings. Disney for example developed a digital race track on the iPad that can be played with tangible cars (from the movie "Cars"). Or the Gamechanger that literally integrates an iPad app in a physical board game.

Picture: engadget.com

Integrating real and virtual worlds

Danahoo states: "App-cessories take children's play and learning beyond the screen by integrating and providing space for both real and virtual worlds." And we think he is right. From the perspective of interaction design, the interesting thing is that it was the promise of digital tabletops. But digital tabletops are around for quite some years now, and they never had the same impact on consumers (for obvious reasons) as tablets have now. The integration of real and virtual worlds remained in fantasies, installations or academic experiments (for example demonstrated at the tei conference series).

Disney AppMates

Develop and test your ideas with children in our labs

The development of app-cessories and tablets takes our work beyond the screen. A board game for example requires quite a different approach to your everyday wireframe, especially when dealing with children. If you want to develop your ideas, or test your concepts with children we can help you with our services and labs.

Digital trends in Education and ICT

sluis-th — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:58:40 +0000

Publishers need to innovate to help schools with the engaging power of current technology in education

Increase in available technology in schools

January 25 and 26 the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht hosted the “Onderwijs en ICT” event. The event is aimed at Publishers and ICT suppliers for primary, secondary schools and high schools. The event clearly shows ICT in Education is thriving – Digital boards, Interactive tabletops and Tablet computers invite you to try the latest educational software. Big steps have been made in improving interaction design of digital services targeted at schools.

For example the latest version of Notebook (by Smart technologies, the second largest supplier of digital boards for the Netherlands) was demonstrated. Until now the single-touch interaction seemed cumbersome. The windows environment was made accessible at whiteboard size, leaving a teacher running from the menu to the scrollbar as a life-size pointing device. At the ICT event they showed a multi-touch interface allowing a teacher to for example use a 2 finger-swipe anywhere in a window for scrolling rather than the window’s scroll bar on the right hand side.

Improved technology and a positive attitude towards technology in the class room contribute to an increase in well-equipped classrooms. Dutch schools are adopting new technology at an increasing rate. Currently 35-40% of all classrooms are equipped with a digital board (source: FutureSource), and nearly all schools have at least one digital board available (source: Kennisnet, monitor 2011). Furthermore, they found that the number of teachers using ICT is steadily growing, from approximately 55% in 2003 up to 75% in 2010 (source http://onderzoek.kennisnet.nl/vierinbalansmonitor (Dutch)).

Content is scarcely available

Kennisnet also showed that the availability of digital educational content does not follow that development: only 13-17% of all educational material in primary and secondary schools is meant to be used digitally. Currently, initiatives from communities of teachers fill that gap. Closing that gap with established methods seems nearly impossible at the moment as schools and publishers seem to be staring at each other to make the first move. Schools look at publishers, to buy the technology for which their favorite methods become available. Publishers look at the schools to decide on a standard in technology that they can publish their content to.

Solutions in platform independent content, new business models?

Whether or not intended, the result is that at the event in Utrecht developers and publishers literally stood at opposite sides of the floor. Who is going to bridge the gap? We think that publishers should not need to worry about the technology to publish their materials on. Their job is to supply or create the most effective educational methods. Ultimately their content should be supported by multiple platforms, to make research and exploration possible of the most effective methods. On a strategic level, a multi platform approach could mean that a publisher needs to consider a new business model.

In any case, while the publishers make up their minds, developers (e.g. Promethean, Smart Technologies, Apple) and communities of teachers will start to fill the gap. It would be interesting to have publishers team up with developers to jointly explore the technological classroom in five years and the business models that support that. We have experience in both the publishing industry and in the development of new technologies, let us facilitate your next strategic session.

Students visit UI Finland

weckman — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:45:16 +0000

In December 2011, User Intelligence Finland hosted an excursion for students, who caught a glimpse of the field of User Experience and were challenged to show their own skills in a case contest.

In December 2011, User Intelligence Finland hosted an excursion for students. These students did a major in User Experience (or were interested in this field) and most of them studied at Aalto University. The visit to User Intelligence gave the students a glimpse of the field of User Experience research and design. In addition, they were challenged to show their own skills in by means of a case contest.

After welcoming the students with coffee and tea, Janne Lohvansuu, managing partner of the Helsinki office, introduced User Intelligence to the group through a company overview and a few case presentations.

Janne Lohvansuu presenting UI Finland.

Then, it was time to roll up the sleeves and get some hands-on UX design experience through participation in a concept design contest. The idea of the assignment was to design a new concept for the neighboring market. Students were divided into small groups, in which they had to choose three words from a given list and include those in their concept. To get an idea of what is usually happening in the market they had a chance to observe it through windows facing the interior of the market. With a creative imagination and limited time students had to come up with a joyful final presentation.

At the end of the afternoon, a jury consisting of team members from UI Finland named the best concept and awarded the winning team a small present and a firm handshake.

The winning team of the case competition.

Luckily the fun wasn’t over yet; the evening continued with a Christmas party. Excellent finger food and drinks secured the chill atmosphere of the evening. As also customers and partners of User Intelligence Finland were invited, the students were presented with an outstanding opportunity to talk informally with experts in the field of User Experience research and design. Hopefully this has resulted in getting across our enthusiasm for User Experience!

Cinekid New Media Award

sluis-th — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:49:57 +0000

Wouter has joined the jury for the "Cinekid New Media Award"!

Wouter has joined the jury for the "Cinekid New Media Award". The entries for the next award (2012) are open now, so please let Wouter know if you want to enter the competition!

Entries could be video games, digital tools, cross-media productions and interactive installations aimed at children between 4 and 14 years. Productions must be available or accessible to its target audience in the sense that they should be in Dutch. Exceptions can be made in some cases where a foreign language is used in an way which is accessible and suitable to the target audience.

So if you come across a production that has been released between August 2011 and July 2012 and you are very excited about it, let us know!

The winning entries of 2011 can be found on the Cinekid website.

Today is World Usability Day!

deboer — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:59:12 +0000

Congratulations to all User Experience professionals: today is World Usability Day!

Congratulations to all User Experience professionals: today is World Usability Day! The theme of this year is ‘Education: Designing for Social Change’. The contribution of User Intelligence is the publication of ‘Cultural differences in usability testing around the world’.

What is World Usability Day? This event was founded in 2005 as an initiative of the Usability Professionals' Association to ensure that services and products important to human life are easier to access and simpler to use.

Each year, on the second Thursday of November, over 200 events are organized in over 43 countries around the world to raise awareness for the general public, and train professionals in the tools and issues central to good usability research, development and practice.

See the WUD-website for more information.

UI Finland beats United States

deboer — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 22:00:00 +0000

Today we were informed that User Intelligence Finland received the “Triple A” status for credit worthiness.

Today we were informed that User Intelligence Finland received the “Triple A” status for credit worthiness. Only 3,5% of the Finnish companies have this rating.

Does this matter to any of our customers? Not really, although it’s a good sign that our office in Finland is rated as a very stable company. That is a great accomplishment of our team in Helsinki!

And of course, it’s funny (and slightly disturbing) that our score is higher than the United States and several European countries! Of course, we are comparing apples and pears here. Or apples to oranges, depending on the country you live in… ;-)

SlideShare loves 'tablets and kids'!

pagan — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 12:53:28 +0000

The increasing popularity of the tablet computer provides for a whole new range of opportunities. One of them is that children are heavy users of tablets.

Wouter and Brian presented their vision on tablets and kids at the EuroIA conference in Prague. After the conference we moved the presentation to SlideShare and this is where the real publication happened:

SlideShare makes the slides "Top Presentation of the Day"
More than 33,000 viewers within one month
On LinkedIn it was one of the most popular discussed SlideShare presentations

Got you interested? Please see the presentation below, or go to SlideShare to see all our presentations…

Alternatively, their talk can be summarized like this:

Tablets have made children important consumers of digital content
The collective digital content offering is behind the curve on identifying and addressing children's needs.
We need to study the human factors relevant for kids and...
...allow kids to participate in the design process, so we can make better things for them.

Found this interesting? If you ‘Follow us’, we will keep you posted with new stories. And feel free to share this story, as we want to have at least 52.960 views at the end of this year ;-)

Measuring traffic from Twitter apps

geleedst — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 15:44:33 +0000

For long Twitter traffic was treated as 'direct'-traffic by almost all web analytics vendor. Luckily this is changing right now!

Twitter is booming; in one year the amount of tweets per day tripled from 65 Million to more than 200 Million. Due to this exponential growth, it is becoming one of the most important channels for companies to connect with their audience.

To get a better understanding of the visitors that come to your website, you want to identify how these visitors arrived at your website. For example, they might have found your website using a search engine, or clicked on a referring link or advertisement on another website. With the increasing use of twitter, it is becoming very important for companies to identify visitors that clicked on a referring link in a tweet. Shouldn’t be difficult to measure, right?

Unfortunately, more than 60% of the Twitter population uses applications (such as: Tweetdeck, Twitter for iPhone, Tweetbot and more) instead of the twitter.com website. If visitors click on a link in a tweet in the twitter application, they cannot be identified as twitter traffic. This means that only a small part of the twitter traffic on your website is getting the twitter label!

Comparison between web and app regarding referral information

Why is it difficult to identify traffic that uses the twitter apps? This is because these (mobile) apps are not web browsers. So if a person opens a link within these apps, he or she is taken to the appropriate (mobile) web browser. Since this is the first page that is opened in the browser, there is no 'previous page'. Consequently, the Web Analytics software cannot identify the source of the traffic, so these visitors are put in the category ‘direct traffic’.

What can you do about this? A popular work-around is adding a parameter to all links that you spread in the twitter channel. If a visitor clicks on this link, this parameter will make it possible for Web Analytics software to identify this as twitter traffic. However, this is only partly a solution. For example, if somebody outside your organization tweets a link to your website, they will not add this parameter.

Is there a solution for all situations? Fortunately, Twitter uses a ‘link shortener’ to reduce the number of characters a link takes from the very limited amount of characters that each tweet can have. Last week they started to roll out massive improvements into their own ‘link shortener’, now called t.co. Most notable improvements: links are not only shortened, but are also given a special parameter. This allows Web Analytics software to identify a person that used this link as ‘twitter traffic’.

Referral information is always available regardless of chosen interface

All other twitter applications (both web and mobile) will be using the t.co link shortener in the coming months. So from now on you can have a more accurate picture of all twitter visitors on your website. Problem solved!

So if you are using visitor segmenting in the analysis of your web traffic (which you are already doing, right?!), do not forget to start measuring the t.co referrals!

The power of information visualization

deboer — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 09:56:32 +0000

Today I came across a billboard in the centre of Amsterdam...

Today I came across a billboard in the centre of Amsterdam (see picture below). It shows a poster from the campaign against the budget cuts on state sponsored art (e.g. music, dance, painting). Independent on your point of view on this matter, I find that this information graphic makes the point of view of the protesters really clear. More examples of this campaign can be found on the website of MediaMatic.

Illustrating your point of view is of all times. Information graphics have the power to make complex concepts look relatively simple, like the famous London Tube map. BTW, that map was recently redesigned. Please see this blog post for an interesting discussion that followed.

Billboard in centre of Amsterdam

Within User Intelligence, we often use visualizations in complex situations. For example, we use:

web traffic maps to make sense out of large amount of web data and findings;
conceptual designs to explain the main idea behind an interaction design for a complex product;
customer journey maps for a view on all touchpoints that a customer has with a company and their services;
and personas to summarize the findings from extensive user research activities.

First of all, these visualizations give us a better insight in the complex situation. Second, these deliverables allow us to share insights with our clients and discuss the actions that should follow. Great stuff, I would say!

To summarize: do not underestimate the power of information visualization! ;-)

New Games New Rules, but how?!?

vanderlinde — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:58:27 +0000

How can large companies control their social media channels, without killing authenticity and spontaneity?

On June 21st three User Intelligence Consultants attended the social media event New Games New Rules. This event took place in Rotterdam and was hosted by Insites Consulting and organized in cooperation with R2 Research, Faxion, Wildcard and Blauw Research.

Most interesting learning of the day was that companies seem to handle social media in a very differing way. Vanmoof bicycles illustrated that they handle their social media efforts as ‘enthusiastic amateurs’ (spontaneous, personal), hence reaching a high level of engagement with their employees AND their customers. As an example: their helpdesk is manned by an existing person called Joffrey, who answers questions within 24 hours, except during weekends, when he plays soccer. The enthusiasm, spontaneity and authenticity strengthen the effective use of social media for Vanmoof.

Unilever showed quite the opposite. Like many other multinationals they seem to take uncertain steps on the path of social media. At New Games New Rules they presented a very well thought through, but also static corporate strategy on the use of social media. This strategy showed how one dedicated project team was set out to organize and structure social media efforts for 12 of their brands. More information about their presentation can be found here.

Shown by both examples, there are very different ways of working with social media. It looks like Vanmoof is far more effective in using social media, but the comparison between a relatively small company and a large multinational is not fair. Any organization needs to maintain some control over the use of social media, but this is especially true for larger companies (communication to stock market, liability, etc.). So how can these companies control their social media channels, without killing authenticity and spontaneity?

There is no simple answer for all situations, but we believe the following could be a good start:

Create an inspiring and clear online strategy and be specific about the role of social media channels
Take your brand values and ‘translate’ them to social media values (e.g. regarding tone of voice, appropriate content)
Select dedicated and enthusiastic staff and train them to create content in social media channels , according to the selected ‘values’
Then, give your staff freedom and faith and see what their enthusiasm can do for your brand!
To remain a sense of control, be sure that you monitor and evaluate the tweets and Facebook/LinkedIn posts after they are published. This allows you to react when unexpected or unwanted posts are published, without killing authenticity and spontaneity.
Do not forget to actively promote the tweets and posts to the target audiences and the internal organization. This will increase the success of your social media efforts, but also encourage the enthusiasm of your staff and create momentum for additional social media activities.
Have fun!