The above presentation was presented by Dan Berlin and I at the Advertising Research Foundation’s (ARF) Measurement 4.0 Conference on June 24th 2009 in New York City.

Over the last two years, One to One Interactive’s OTOinsights division has been studying (in collaboration with the Indiana University School of Informatics and Microsoft Massive) the effects of advertising embedded in online games.

You may feel free to download the White Paper titled “Player Engagement with In-Game Advertising” below. This is the Paper that the ARF originally accepted for the conference. This past June 2009, we executed another round of in-game ad research. This is referenced in the presentation as Study #2. We hope to complete our analysis and publish our findings in the next month. Stay tuned!

Here at OTOinsights, one of our research goals is to determine a reliable and informative method for measuring the emotional impact media has on users.  Until recently, we had been using the Geneva Emotion Wheel (GEW) in our research to measure participants’ emotions.  The GEW was developed in 2005 by Klaus Scherer who works in the Geneva Emotion Research Group at the University of Geneva.  The GEW is a visual wheel with 20 spokes where each spoke is associated with a type of emotion (10 positive emotions and 10 negative).  For example, involvement/interest and embarrassment/shame are two of the emotion groups.  The spokes of the wheel are made up of five circles which allow the participant to choose the level (essentially, a 1-5 Likert scale) for which they felt that particular emotion.  Here is Scherer’s original paper.  In our research, we had the participants choose two or three emotion groups and mark the appropriate circle to indicate the intensity of the emotions.  The results of the GEW include an overall emotional score on a scale of -10 to +10 (for two emotions marked) and a radar diagram listing the average score for each emotion on the GEW.  While the score was useful for use in our Quantemo Engagement Index (QEI), the radar diagram was typically met with blank stares from our stakeholders.  “What does all of this mean?” was a common question.  The problem was that there are too many emotions on the GEW, so the results become very spread out.  The confusion intensified when there was only a slight difference in the outcomes between stimuli.  Additionally, the GEW allows participants to write in an emotion if it is not listed on the wheel.  This introduces variability into the final interpretation.  Overall, the GEW was useful for our initial purposes, but was really quite hard to explain to stakeholders.

Then I had a serendipitous moment while attending the CHI conference this year.  The session entitled “Beyond Usability: Evaluating Emotional Response as an Integral Part of the User Experience” was presented by researchers at Salesforce.com and Stanford University.  In their research, they used Emocards to measure the emotions that participants’ associated with Web page tasks (their paper can be found here).  Using this tool, they showed that there was a distinct difference in the emotional impact that the different tasks had on the users.  Emocards is a tool developed by Pieter Desmet at the Delft University of Technology (the original paper can be found here).    The Emocards show faces that depict various emotions and the user gives a 0-4 rating for each of the emotions.  The first advantage that Emocards have over the GEW is that it is a cross-cultural tool – facial emotions are typically universally recognized.  Intrigued, I started looking into Emocards and how I can incorporate them into the OTOinsights research.

I was pleased to find that Emocards have transitioned into PrEmo, an online tool that applies the same concepts as Emocards, but with a slightly different treatment.  In PrEmo, there are 12 characters displaying different emotions (see picture above)  – 6 positive and 6 negative.  When the user clicks on the character, it briefly animates and plays a sound, both of which convey the particular emotion to the user.  The user then clicks on a 0-4 scale to indicate the intensity of that emotion they felt when presented with the stimulus.

Now, thus far I have only run one study using PrEmo, but am pretty pleased with the results.  They have a wonderful interface for setting up the study and the results come back to me in an easy to parse Excel file.  This is much better than manually coding the GEW, which was filled out on paper.  Additionally, I found that I did not have to give additional explanations to the users while they were filling out PrEmo – they understood it right away.  This was certainly not the case for the GEW, which warranted many explanations.  Sometimes, the users did not know what a word on GEW meant and asked about it.  There were probably plenty of users who didn’t know what something meant and just skipped over the emotion without asking about it, which would confound the results.

PrEmo also simplifies the interpretation of the results and offers emotions that are more geared to digital media.  Whereas the GEW contains 20 emotions (10 positive and 10 negative), PrEmo contains 12 emotions (6 positive and 6 negative).  Some of the emotions in the GEW weren’t really applicable to digital media.  How many Web sites have you visited that made you feel guilt/remorse or embarrassment/shame?  Probably not too many.  So, I anticipate that the results we will get from PrEmo will be more applicable to our research.

I look forward to using PrEmo more and reporting the results here.  It seems like changing our emotional instrument from the GEW to PrEmo will give more relevant results that can be easily interpreted.  I guess it should be mentioned that there is one advantage that the GEW has over PrEmo: the GEW is free and there is a fee associated with using the online PrEmo tool.  But, so far, I think it’s worth the price.

One to One Interactive’s OTOinsights research division is happy to announce its latest research white paper titled “Implications of User Engagement with Search Result Pages“. 

It is well established that rankings on a Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) have much to do with whether a user is likely to click on a given result and higher rankings can actually have a positive effect on a brand’s perception and ‘likeability’ (MarketingSherpa, 2009). With the onset of Universal Search, this study sought to measure the user impact of this new generation of search engine result pages that include multimedia elements such as images and videos.  Specifically, we wanted to understand if there was a difference in emotional engagement with the results and if that would impact click propensity in Paid and Natural Search.  The study compared user engagement with Universal search results vs. traditional text-only results by recording the users’ eye tracking, physiological & emotional reactions, and click tracking behavior. 

Our research uncovered two significant insights.

Insight 1:

SERPs which include Universal Search results reinforce eyeballs to stay focused on the first page’s top paid and natural search results

Implications:

• The advent of Universal Search demands that companies optimize not only their text, but also their media (images, videos, etc)
• Image and video results may anchor users to stay at the top of the SERP
• Images and videos will begin to impact what users will click on first in a SERP

Insight 2:

The inclusion of Universal Search results increase emotional engagement during interactions with a SERP

Implications:

• Users will get an ‘instant gratification’ from images – perhaps more so from branded images
• Higher engagement with Universal results may stop users from exploring the rest of the SERP

OTOinsight’s “Implications of User Engagement with Search Result Pages” white paper is free and available to download here. 

Below is a PowerPoint presentation of the research findings that Dan Berlin and I shared earlier this week at the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) Boston’s Annual Conference at Bentley University.

We welcome your comments, feedback, and suggestions.

For over the past 5 years I have held on strongly to the view that success in future marketing communications will be given to those who learn the nuances of game design.  Why?  We live in an interactive world where the customer has infinite choices, unlimited paths to learning about product/services, and expectations for real-time interactions with brands.  No longer is it possible to lead a prospect down a traditional purchase-consideration funnel.  Instead, brands need to learn the game of improvisation; the game of story telling and interest arcs; the game of community building; and the game of engaging multiple players online via environments of their choosing (not yours).

Two resources that I would recommend to both brands and agencies to further understand game design are:

• Mike Bonifer’s Game Changers–Improvisation for Business in the Networked World
• Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lens

One of the catch phrases  in the fields of Usability and Human Factors is “user-centered design.”  Frankly, this has always bothered me a bit.  Yes, understanding the user is extremely important and designers who do not consider the user are bound for failure.  But the user is not the only stakeholder.  “User-centered design” leaves out critical aspects of the project.  What are the business goals?  What are the technological limitations?  Who are the other stakeholders?  These are all important questions that “user-centered design” dismisses.

On the surface, “user-centered design” implies that the user is king/queen and whatever s/he wants s/he gets.  This is extremely short-sighted.  The user does not know what is best for the business.  What they do know is how they interact with an interface.  This is where gathering the users’ opinions is critical.  Sitting users down in front of an interface and watching them perform tasks can tell you if they are able to accomplish the goals of the interface (and in turn, the business).

Is talking to users important?  Absolutely.  Should users be at the center of the design process?  Absolutely not.  They are just one piece of the puzzle.  I think the spirit of “user-centered design” is to align business goals with how the users interact with the interface, but the term does not relay this.  So, may I suggest “goal-centered design” or “stakeholder-centered design?”  Don’t let the user trump the overall goals of your project.

New York Magazine: “In Defense of Distraction”

Anderson on the benefits of distraction:

“The prophets of total attentional meltdown sometimes invoke, as an example of the great culture we’re going to lose as we succumb to e-thinking, the canonical French juggernaut Marcel Proust. And indeed, at seven volumes, several thousand pages, and 1.5 million words, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu is in many ways the anti-Twitter. (It would take, by the way, exactly 68,636 tweets to reproduce.) It’s important to remember, however, that the most famous moment in all of Proust, the moment that launches the entire monumental project, is a moment of pure distraction: when the narrator, Marcel, eats a spoonful of tea-soaked madeleine and finds himself instantly transported back to the world of his childhood. Proust makes it clear that conscious focus could never have yielded such profound magic: Marcel has to abandon the constraints of what he calls “voluntary memory”—the kind of narrow, purpose-driven attention that Adderall, say, might have allowed him to harness—in order to get to the deeper truths available only by distraction. That famous cookie is a kind of hyperlink: a little blip that launches an associative cascade of a million other subjects. This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness.”

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. They aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Their goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

As of now, Wolfram|Alpha contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains.

Credit for Wolfram|Alpha is attributed to Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, A New Kind of Science, and Founder & CEO of Wolfram Research.

Below is a live stream of the Wolfram|Aplha control center:

Watch live video from Wolfram|Alpha on Justin.tv
I am already predicting a Google + Wolfram equation in the foreseeable future.

“The key is, I believe, to design for the edge but create products that can make the shift over the to the mass markets.”

I’ll admit that it was the Yes album cover art that caught my eye on this Engadget article, but it certainly proved to be quite interesting.  Essentially, it says that we should be designing electronics so that they will be initially bought by edge users, but can be easily transitioned to the mainstream.  The author gives a few examples of consumer electronics that followed this pattern and were subsequently successful.  I think this idea can be applied to anything that designers come up with.  For example, think of the first Honda Insight or the new Skittles home page.  These are certainly edge use cases: environmentalists for the Insight, and, well, social media users for Skittles.  Now, Honda is getting ready to release the 2010 Honda Insight which will most likely be bought by more than just edge users.  As for Skittles, we’ll just have to wait and see how that pans out and if other brands follow a similar tactic.

Thanks to @hawleymichael and @AmyCueva for pointing me to this intriguging article.

One to One Interactive has launched OTObuzz.com, a trend spotting dashboard built on Pageflakes and served as a Pagecast.  OTObuzz contains over 200 RSS feeds organized in 16 categories:

• OTObuzz (OTO related Blog/Twitter/Delicious/YouTube Feeds)
• Culture | Trends
• Advertising
• Public Relations
• SEO/SEM
• Social Media
• Design
• User Experience
• Digital Video
• Mobile
• Gaming
• GenY
• Baby Boomers
• Technology
• Publishing
• Stats

This extensive collection of syndicated content is organized as a dashboard for marketers and communications experts to help them gain immediate insights into news, thoughts, and opinions on the emerging media landscape.  Free for all to access and use, we encourage both internal staff and external clients/partners/friends to bookmark OTObuzz or add it as part of their web start pages.