It seems every other discussion I enter as of late has something to do with privacy and or the things “they” know about us. Maybe it’s the paranoid circles I travel, or maybe we are seeing the beginning of a significant change in our human paradigm. Digital technology is maturing and enabling us to connect/interact/react in ways we never before imagined. Human nature drives us to interact (you remember that “No man is an island” junk from High School?) and Digital technology is superpowering our ability.

Remember life before Facebook? How many old friends have you lost touch with? How many viable relationships could you maintain before Facebook? How many can you maintain now? (I have 181)

It’s a little overwhelming to think that we are actively crafting a Digital overlay that will enable Digitally enabled beings to interact with other Digitally enabled beings or objects across space (think telekinesis), time (think time-based stitched panoramas made from FLICKR images chronologically navigated), and wordless communication (telepathy?). Imagine being able to see and hear and interact with objects from amazing distances. Imagine wearing a digital outfit. Imagine.

As Augmented Reality, the superimposition of the Datasphere onto reality, becomes more viable we will gain access to vast amounts of real-time data and there are a few issues we need face very soon.

Privacy – The ‘Millenials‘ have already succombed to the collective and have given away the illusion of privacy. Social media products like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter have become platforms for their near-narcisistic need to self-proclaim. They communicate outwardly, freely and without fear. The rest of us, especially those who remember the 60’s are going to face challenging times over the next 10 years. Data availability and detail will continue to improve and we will all be faced with a choice: Does data serve or punish me?

What does it mean that marketers know where I live and what products I’m inclined to buy? Is my cellphone constantly broadcasting my location accurate to the meter? Am I being monitored for selfish reasons? Ok, you can sit down and stop shaking…. It’s not as bad as you think. We at Tanagram firmly believe Digital will serve us in powerful and meaningful ways and we spend a great deal of time imagining what those might be.

The truth – You ARE being watched. There, I said it, and nothing exploded. The fact is the Marketing Industry is facing one of the most challenging times since its inception. Gone are the days when they could ‘tell people what to believe.’ Gone are the days where they could produce a single, one-size-fits-all message that compells consumers to purchase products. Digital has made us (consumers) much smarter and because of this, we require much more sophisticated communication and interaction to even begin to consider a product relationship (that’s what it is when you become loyal to a brand). We the consumer have become extremely powerful and marketers are afraid.

So what evil things can they do with their monitoring? Well, that’s where we take an unexpected turn. You see, the only way they can sell is with the truth. They can no longer pay talking heads tell us what to think, lies are posted on Twitter for thousands to view seconds after they are broadcast. The backlash from a malformed or misguiding ad-campaign can cost millions in revenue but even worse it can cast the originator as not reputable and have significant long term effects. Everybody remembers Blackwater, right? Their brand was so destroyed by blunder and lies they had to rename as Xe. So if they can’t lie to us, how can they push their products? They have to connect with us like real people, meaningfully. To do that they grab gobs of data and look for consumers who would actually benefit from and are interested in the products they sell. They then do their best to be helpful and useful so you, the consumer, will learn they are trustworthy and legitimate. They spend fortunes on non-profits and other ‘Cause Marketing’ to be viewed as contributing members of society.  Ultimately, they work very hard to maintain a real relationship with you. You see how mild mannered this once arrogant monster has become? Joking aside, they cannot take your free will. You will continue to be a fickle and informed consumer and they cannot afford for you to think that they have any intentions other than serving you the best they can. Also, there is no mind-control chip. They cannot hypnotise you into stupid purchase habits (for me this is a non-issue, I only buy stupidly) and if they could, they wouldn’t because the consumer backlash would destroy them.

So what do we do with these needy, shivering, whelp marketers? We give them our data. Why, because they will serve us better if they know our likes and dislikes. They can’t afford to annoy us anymore and they don’t want to waste money trying to sell to those who are disinclined. Broadcast advertising is going away.  Advertising of the future will take place at a personal level in meaningful ways. Here’s an example: Perhaps you are driving home, late from work and you haven’t prepared the family meal. Your local preferred local grocer sends you a text message offering a discount on cooked chicken dinners (or your favorite dish) and saves the day.

That is where we are going, we just have to make the choice.

We seek a curious individual with deep technical roots who can strategize, scope, and manage teams of developers (partner firms by platform). This role is as much about dreaming up new solutions as it is about getting them done. We seek a Senior Design Technologist. 

In our process the design technologist’s role begins at project inception. She participates in client discussions gathering information and providing references to current and leading edge technologies that may benefit the client’s requirements. She references new trends, hot topics, and examples used by like and non-like competitors. Once requirements are gathered, she works with the project team as an innovator and strategist representing concepts through the lense of technology. She is then responsible for determining the scope and resources to be used to implement the solution. Tanagram is not a programming shop, we work with partners to provide the technology solutions our clients need. The design technologist is responsible for our “stable” and insuring we work with the very best partners. While she is not a project manager, the design technologist is responsible for the technology solution and spends a portion of her day talking to the development teams and making sure everything is on track. She has a good understanding of analytics software, and is responsible for setting up the specified monitoring programs. 

Here is a link to the official role description. 

Please note this is primarily a technologist position. We are looking for someone with 10+ years of programming experience. Please do not apply if you do not have the required experience. 

Please send all inquiries to careers@tanagram.com

NOTE: The goal of this post is not to troll and get attention by posting negative comments about media giant AT&T. Instead this post is intended to help all of us better understand what is happening in the world as we embrace micro-transactive interaction. 

At the risk of sounding a little “Hippy”, today our thoughts, beliefs, and consciousness are traversing the digisphere in real-time at the speed of light. Because of this we know things much faster (true or not) and are on the way to becoming a digitally connected meta organism. Patchouli aside, the “Twitter Effect” has been linked to very rapid attendance drop-offs of bad movies (including Bruno), leaving the movie executives stunned and broke. No longer does it take a week or two to hear you really shouldn’t see a movie, it happens instantly. Similar effects have been noticed in politics, and stock trading as well. So what do we do? 

We learn!

“The Feed” has the power to share knowledge in a more relevant and timely manner than any other medium that exists today. Try searching Twitter for the answer to a problem instead of Google. I was surprised to find my answer in one search after over an hour working the Google query strings. Even better, The Feed offers responses. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, make a post, ask for a Re-Tweet (RT), or use hashtags (#) to get to individuals who are interested in a specific topic. Connected people are an amazing resource. 

So that brings us to the purpose of this post. In addition to being a powerful resource for answers, The Feed is an outstanding tool for gathering insight into customer opinion. The successful companies of today realize that building close, meaningful relationships with customers is the only truly defensible business strategy. In other words, Intellectual Property is easy to steal, but you aren’t going to steal my friends unless I upset them and drive them to you. That’s how social media works. It’s close relationships founded on seemingly insignificant communication transactions that are very similar to those you might have with a friend walking in the park. 

When it’s time to address the potential issue of your customer’s viewpoints it’s a good idea to take a long look in the mirror and evaluate how you appear to the public. With the newly available RSS query subscriptions offered by Twitter and Google Blog search it’s relatively easy to set up a series of searches that will provide you a view (a mirror) into the shared opinion of your company (or yourself) by the meta-organism/feed. 

We’ve created an example here. It’s an iGoogle page that hosts RSS feeds that are designed to eek out positive and negative views expressed about AT&T. (You’ll need an iGoogle account to subscribe to the tab) but we think it’s worth the price of admission. The story is passionate, dramatic, emotional, and bleak. 

In addition to the views into The Feed via RSS windows, we’ve provided a number of links to resources including Hashtags.org, MicroPlaza, Twendz, and TWIST. We would like to invite you to develop your own opinions and discuss them here or on Twitter or FaceBook. What do you think AT&T should do? Do you think these people are all crackpots? Do you think blog posts like this will increase negative comments for companies like AT&T?

We look forward to the discussion. 

Screen shot of the iGoogle page. 

You can get the shared iGoogle tab here 

Greetings and Salutations,

Our last post stated that the Nike+ site didn’t have an analytics engine running under the hood and I’m happy to say Heidi MS and the fine folks at R/GA have corrected us. In the process we got our learn on too. I’m going to share the dialog so that all may benefit from our interaction. Thanks again Heidi! We are huge fans!

Here is Heidi’s response:

“Thanks for your reply. I am glad to learn about the plugin since I didn’t know of it. I googled a bit but couldn’t find anything.

Heidi “

Heidi reminded us that Rich Internet Applications (RIA) do not use the same tracking technology as HTML based applications. RIA can interact with web services without a full page refresh. That’s part of why they are so cool and also don’t require Counter Pixels (CP) for traffic analysis. 

I fired up Fiddler2 to confirm this and was interested to see traffic resolving to nike.112.2o7.net. This is a screenshot of Fiddler2 in action:

Launching a browser and opening the 2o7.net URL concludes the expedition as seen here:

So consider this a retraction AND an extra congratulations to the R/GA / Nike+ team for leading the RIA community by example. You all get an A+!

Footnote: Click here to learn more about Omniture’s 2o7.net domain.

Deploying a new or revised application can be a scary process. Are you confident your user-centered inquiry captured all of the needs? Are you certain your customers will like the new system better? 

Typically, we’ve found the more expert the user—meaning the greater the amount of time they have invested in understanding your application’s complexities—the more likely they will be averse to change.

We’ve developed application UX for military pilots and there are few people who have spent more time learning an application (think thousands and thousands of hours). The good news is there are ways to insure your new release is a success. 

Make sure your updates reflect real user improvements

Changing to a different platform is NOT a good reason to ask the customers to use a new application interface. You must learn how and plan to better serve them. Observation is your best tool: watch your customers work and look for opportunities to improve their workload efficiency (we call this workload assist), their decision-making efficiency (we call this cognitive assist), and provide them tools to forecast and measure the impacts of their decisions (we call this real-time performance assessment). Having used the above techniques with our cranky pilot user groups, we saw very positive results. 

Enhancing your site is a marketing event. Be prepared to sell it

For your upcoming deployment plan on having a number of communication channels open to educate and engage your customers. Your goal is to solicit feedback, and develop trust. Nike+’s new “beta” site is a perfect example of the power of conversation. 

Here is a shot of their existing site (not authenticated):

Notice the strong “hero” content talking about the value propositions of the new beta version. They even provide a link to the new version immediately below. It’s important to convey to your customers what they will be getting in this change and how it will impact them. Nike+ has done an excellent job with this. 

Here is a shot of the new Nike+ beta site (also not authenticated):

The new site picks up where the old site left off explaining value and benefit for users. We won’t go into the specific benefits of the new site; suffice it to say they spent the time and learned what the users needed. 

Teach the value to authenticated users

Once your customers authenticate into your system, you have enough data to be able to show them how your new system will better serve them. Take this opportunity seriously: Show them. 

Here is a screen of the old Nike+ interface (authenticated):

Note the link-callout stating “see your runs in the new Nike+ beta.” This link provides a direct comparison of the dashboard pages and exposes the customer to a real-time comparison of the applications. It is also a “vote” button.

“Crowdsource” the vote

This is a good time to mention one of the strongest tenants in this approach: NEVER TAKE AWAY THE OLD SYSTEM. You have to wait like an observant parent for the child to discard the item before you can make it disappear. This is because the old system is their safety net. The really exciting part of this approach is that we can measure the users who have opted to use the new interface moving forward and those are SOLID conversion rates. If, after you deploy a new app using this technique and you don’t get many people willingly converting to the new application (voting that it’s better for them), call us. You more than likely missed a real need in your redesign or aren’t clearly communicating the improvements to your customers. 

Provide feedback mechanism

The following three images really just show various views throughout the site, but notice two elements that remain consistent. The “feedback” tab on the right of every page (the last image shows an expanded view of the features) and the “Beta” flag in the upper right corner. Feedback is extremely powerful. Enable it, respond rapidly to the feedback and build trust that you are serving the customers’ best interest. Also, don’t disqualify this input channel just because it’s qualitative in nature. While accuracy of submissions will vary, bug notifications tend to be pretty accurate (something they can react to) and feature requests tend to be lofty but always worth validation. Our favorite part of this approach is the customers’ ability to send congratulations to those who developed the site. As developers/designers/strategists/etc, we need to realize we are part of the application ecosystem too. Kudos go a long way for both parties in building trust and respect.

Note the “return to classic” link on this page. Always provide an escape hatch for those who aren’t quite ready to convert.

This image illustrates the feedback toolset. It’s a third party app and very well done.

Measure measure measure

You can see at the bottom of each screenshot that my browser is reporting NO CP for all of the pages. This may be because Nike+ is using a beacon free traffic analysis tool, or more likely have forgotten to add analytics to their ecology. It’s important that the systems we design capture as much data about the use of the system (and its data) as it does capturing its core data (the data it was designed to share/collect). What we’re saying is the movement between data points by users is as valuable if not even more than the datapoint itself. These measurements can be formed into insights that can help you build a stronger relationship with your customer. That’s something the competition cannot steal. 

Greetings and salutations. It’s a short week here at Tanagram as we prepare to celebrate our nation’s independence. We’ll be closed on Friday July 3rd. We hope you are too.

Here is a recap of this weeks interesting discussions:

Facebook 3.0 for iPhone Adds Events and Photo Albums, But No Push (Yet) 

An awesome blogpost from Deb Lavoy (productfour) about the end of information asymmetry

EveryBlock has released its source code!

The Whitehouse is on FaceBook! New Whitehouse live app. 

Good points on social media in an ironically recursive post talking about talking about social media. 

Google Blog Search now offers RSS Feeds. 

An excellent article on the role of aesthetics benefiting the decision making process. 

Have a great holiday. We’ll see you on Monday!

GOOD.IS “a collaboration of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits pushing the world forward. Since 2006 we’ve been making a magazine, videos, and events for people who give a damn. This website is an ongoing exploration of what GOOD is and what it can be.”

While we’ve just met GOOD.IS, we’re big fans. They’ve recently release a series of transparencies from their magazine as a Flickr pool. Some really wonderful stuff.

Thank you Good for the inspiration on so many fronts. We are now members (free for startsies) and look forward to growing our relationship together. Oh.. and we think your site is quite good too!

We love iPhone applications. Heck we may even be making one of our own, but here are a few of our absolute favorites. Most are free – some are fee – all are worthy. (we are not).

• GeoPedia – GeoPedia is basically a location-based Wikipedia interface for your iPhone.
• AmazonMobile – The note/snapshot feature is still pretty cool!
• iTransitBuddy – a robust, easy to use public transportation schedule application. Multiple cities including Chicago.
• enCamp – BaseCamp application for the iPhone. Best of breed so far.
• Facebook – We hate and love this app. Mostly love it.
• GuitarToolKit – Guitar players this has chords, an accurate microphone-based tuner, metronome and more. Very cool.
• Kindle for the iPhone – You don’t carry your Kindle everywhere but you carry your phone. The UI is super easy and readable.
• NowPlaying – Movie listings, ratings and more.
• OmniFocus – It’s expensive but nothing does GTD better.
• PhoneFlix – Netflix client for iPhone. Very useful when a movie idea hits you on the train.
• Skype – VOIP for your iPhone. We eagerly await SMS capabilities in the upcoming releases.
• SpeedTest – Cuz we’re paranoid that our bandwidth is less than it should be. This app tests WIFI and EDGE/3G bandwidth speeds.
• Tweetie – Absolutely the category killer for twitter clients. Worth the money.
• Weatherbug – The best weather information we’ve seen to date.
• Wordpress – If you’ve got a blog post that needs to be up now. This is the app for you.
• FSS Hockey: Because when you’re waiting for half an hour to be seated at a restaurant, it’s time for a few games of air hockey.
• ICanHasCheezBurger: Lolcats and LOL generation optimized for the iPhone.
• Labyrinth – the most beautifully designed game application. This person knows physics.
• Remote – if you have wifi, this app works with keynote.
• CTABusTracker – really a web page, but use it alot and is very accurate.
• Shazam – this music analyzer works surprisingly.
• New York Times – they have made it more sophisticated, but it is also more unreliable.
• Pandora – use it every day and very easy to use.
• WunderRadio – great streaming radio application.
• Units – the best designed measurement application
• Bejewelled 2 - It’s addictive like crack.
• Ocarina. $.99 turns your iPhone into a flutelike musical instrument.

Honorable mention (not quite applications)

• TrafficGauge – Very easy to digest traffic info for your favorite major metropolitan areas. I use this web app EVERY day.
• Meebo – use it every day

Do you have favorite apps that you can’t live without? Do share!

This site is beautiful not because it is user centric, not because it is ornate or flashy (pun intended) but because it creates a compelling environment for the user to play and experience the song multimodally. I found it nearly impossible to not listen to the entire song just because I was so captivated by the simple visual aesthetic and interaction. I think this site reminds us that some of the most memorable interactions are presented in the simplest of gestures. Nice job to http://www.herraizsoto.com,  http://www.badabing.es, and http://www.zumbakamera.com. We invite you to explore their portfolios for further treats. Great work!!!

Tanagram Partners has collaborated with Baxter Credit Union (BCU) on a second redesign of their website. This effort reviewed the site structure and how to create a more streamlined call to action for non-members to get to the right products more efficiently. Tanagram reduced the number of page designs and created stronger axis points between content areas for simpler viewing. 

iTeller, the member based portal to manage accounts was radically streamlined. The reduction of individual page designs declined by 85%, while increasing efficiencies and clustering content and navigation into a members panel.

This new site is in keeping with BCU’s history of providing members with the best tools to help them meet their goals. Tanagram Partners congratulates BCU on the effort taken to improve and redesign their site.

BCU Home Page