nativeye has been chosen to be the partner app of Digital Shoreditch – London’s premier grass-roots digital festival.

Tasked with capturing the ‘feel’ of the festival, nativeye will be used to capture people’s enjoyment, suggestions and best moments of the event.

The festival runs 20-31 May. http://digitalshoreditch.com/

I am also speaking on How mobile research fuels your innovation on Future Brands day 0945 22 May.

Hopefully see you there!

Yesterday I spoke at an event organised by the very nice people at Hard to Measure. Great turnout of interesting people from different backgrounds, but all interested in how we can capture the (real) customer experience.

Here’s the blurb…

In the Experience Economy, capturing the real customer experience is more important than ever. But the proliferation of digital technology has both multiplied and changed the nature of customer touchpoints, making this task more complex.

In addition, recent thinking from behavioural economics tells us it is not always straightforward to get to a true understanding of our customers’ experiences. The reasons people do things may be a mystery to themselves, let alone market researchers.

In this talk I look at the shift in the customer landscape and our understanding of ourselves, before looking at practical ways to capture the real customer experience with examples from the nativeye insight platform.

What’s NEW for Android:

1. Global and assignment navigation

The major change is a restructuring of the main app navigation. This is now split into 2 distinct areas: Global and Assignment navigation.

Global navigation

Accessible via the global nav icon, the global nav is revealed by a slide to the right. Here you are able to access all the main areas of the app no matter where you are.

Assignment navigation

All assignment activity is now clustered by individual assignment. That means that posting, viewing posts, recent activity and assignment information are all now assignment-specific. This provides users with more context and understanding as to which assignment they are currently engaged with.

2. Recent activity

A pre-cursor to community features to come, Recent Activity feeds by assignment show what has been going on, you guessed it, recently (see screenshot above).

3. Design refresh

Overall the colour palette has been updated, with orange out and red in. The gloss has also been toned down a touch.

Elsewhere, icons have been revamped and post images are now in their full-width glory.

We have created a feedback assignment for Android, so we’d love to hear what you think. You can download the app here.

I attended SEO London yesterday to try and shed some light on what I’m doing wrong. And these are the things I picked up:

1. Just because you have great content, doesn’t mean people will come

You have to get it into the hands of others – preferably people with high authority websites so that when they link to you will increase your page ranking. So that means doing the leg-work of making contacts and pitching them.

2. When pitching content, why you? why now?

What’s your personal experience or proven authority on a subject? Is there seasonality to the topic? Are there events in popular culture or your industry that you can piggy-back?

3. It’s all about angle

Related to 2., chances are you won’t be writing about something entirely new so what’s your particular spin?

4. Don’t sell, write

No-one wants to listen to a sales pitch. They want to hear the person and read something informative and/or entertaining. Sell yourself not your product/company.

5. It’s about authorship

Not only do people want to hear a distinctive voice, Google wants to know about your reputation as an author. Linking authors to their Google+ profiles (using rel=”author”) helps Google establish their authority which in turn will help your site.

6. Take content to the human conclusion

So even if your content is on a relatively dry topic, if you paint a picture of what it means in human terms, people are much more likely to relate to it.

7. When telling stories with data, look for the 3rd dimension

Getting a little technical here, but as a technique employed by Amazon (queries per second) and Twitter (tweets per second), ‘data velocity’ helps to indicate when something interesting is going on and therein potentially lies a story.

8. Make friends

Keep your eyes out for influencers who might need / be interested in your content at some point. Make the connection so that when the time comes you can feed them your tasty content.

Valuable hat tips from:

Lisa Myers of Verve Search

Nichola Stott of The Media Flow

This talk is about Robots. That’s interesting in itself, but it deals with how far they should stretch into human domains and mimic human traits. The ethics of this is one question, but the acceptability within the current paradigm of consumer technology is another.

In other words, would robots like this freak us out?

In the talk, Ben Bashford references the industrial designer Raymond Loewy who advocated the MAYA principle – Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. He also highlights two of his favourite designers, Jasper Morrison & Naoto Fukasawa who have coined the expression, “Supernormal” to describe “products that are designed to cause as little disruption as possible, whilst upgrading the existing framework of normality”.

This is an approach in favour of progress but sensitive to what people currently find acceptable. It advocates in favour of customer-led innovation. Helping you frame your leaps in ways that will be palatable to your market.

via TechMeetups

Presenting nativeye to the TechMeetups Drinks and Demo crowd

‘Innovation is hard because “solving problems people didn’t know they had” and “building something no one needs” look identical at first.’

Aaron Levie, CEO of Box (via Bokardo)

That’s taken from a post by Joshua Porter called, “Don’t design blindly”. Rather than guessing what people need, do some simple research and observation. Here he gives some clues of what to look for:

• Where are the pain points?
• Are people already trying to solve the problem?
• Are they already spending money on it?

You can commission formal research for this but you have to be careful not to be too focused or closed. Another way is to open up a channel to let the ideas and insights come to you. The advantage of this is:

• Makes unknown unknowns known (!)
• Does this quickly
• Highlights areas for further exploration
• Means you are always plugged into your market
• Fuels agile and continual innovation

The reality? Sorry – the stats say that you’re probably not a genius. It is, however, your job to innovate.

How research helps:

1. It FUELS your creativity

Far from blocking your creativity, research gives you the raw material it needs. And this is perhaps where this whole misunderstanding arose – for good or bad, research isn’t going to give you the answer in 20ft tall pink neon letters. It will give you clues that you then must take and perform dazzling alchemy with in order to turn them into a great product, advertising campaign, fashion line, whatever.

2. Gives you EMOTIONAL FUEL

Research helps you empathise with your subject. If you can feel their pain as well as see it, then it’s more likely you will have the motivation to care and to persist long enough to crack the right solution.

3. Gives you FOCUS

Constraints set you free. So having the insight that your communication will be most relevant in a particular context or that customers only care about particular features lets you focus your efforts. This will make your creativity relevant.

4. Lets you ITERATE

With the proviso that you don’t chuck out early ideas too quickly (remember – research doesn’t give you the answer in 20ft tall pink neon letters) customer research lets you test and refine your early concepts with your audience. And then iterate again and again until you have to ship.

And what does the genius have to fear from all this? That they might be proved wrong?

“If you got soft eyes, you can see the whole thing. If you got hard eyes – you staring at the same tree missing the forest.”

Some Zen wisdom for market researchers from Det. William ‘Bunk’ Moreland.

1. It’s in the moment
Behavioural Economics has taught us we are much less rational beings than we liked to think. As Rory Sutherland has pointed out, anything that helps us get closer to the point of decision will better inform us as to why people do the things they do.

And at a more basic level – people forget! Asking them why they did something 2 weeks ago is prone to hazy recollection as well as any post-rationalisation.

2. Understand the context
Being in the moment means we can get more clues about the context of people’s experiences. The same message to someone when they are stressed out as when they have free headspace will yield very different results.

This is why some have claimed that there is no such thing as channels; only interactions, which are dictated by shifting contexts.

3. Link emotions to events
Emotions are a great predictor of behaviour. Knowing what events precipitate what emotions (e.g. during interactions with customers, in the workplace) can help us design better for them.

4. Empathy drives great innovation
And this emotional content is an aid to better innovation. Being able to feel people’s pain as well as see it makes people care enough (as well as know enough) to want to do something about it. Mobile qualitative research comes into its own here.

Plus that empathy can be pushed up the chain. Having that ‘customer proof’ to take to management will help to drive customer-centric change.

5. It’s quick
And finally, it sounds simple but speed is a real business advantage. Being able to turn around solid insight quickly aids timely decision making and an agile approach. In the words of more than one client, “The right answer but too late is no use to me.”