He says shoppers’ current experience in retail environments is lackluster at best. He’s developed an interactive digital retail display called POET, or Point of Experience Terminal, which is designed to give users a rich, multimedia-based experience with the product or subject they’re showcasing. POET was originally profiled in CommerceLab in July of last year.

POET was installed in a pilot project at the City of Waterloo Museum for a recent exhibit celebrating 100 years of Seagram’s Whiskey. Neill spoke with CommerceLab about lessons learned in the pilot and why he thinks there’s a massive opportunity in retail for this type of technology.

Matt Neill, POET Displays

Tell us how the POET displays were used to enhance the public’s experience at the Seagram’s Exhibit.
In October we did a project with City of Waterloo Museum at Conestoga Mall – 100 years of Seagram’s VO Whiskey. We put together an interactive installation where users come up and scan objects related to the distillation process – wheat in a jar, a particular bottle and that sort of thing – and when they scan that, the receive all kinds of information.

How did the project get started?
Last year in May we had an open house at the Felt Lab. We had a simulation of POET going on to demonstrate the possibilities of what we were trying to do. The City of waterloo representatives attended and we talked to them about the museum. This was the first really public installation and it was nice to have an actual physical installation that people in the public were interacting with. The city really let us test things out.

Describe the interface and display used at the Museum.
We were experimenting so we had to work with what the museum had on hand. Typically, the user interface is touch-screen, but the museum didn’t have the budget for that because they can get pretty expensive. To compensate, we integrated Leap Motion, a gesture based controller. At $80, it’s a relatively inexpensive solution, and allows users gestures to translate into actions on the screen. We integrated this hardware to simulate the touch screen experience.

Your original focus with POET was on the retail market. As your research continues, what are the biggest challenges you see in penetrating that market?
Our original focus was to go to retailers such as Sportcheck, for example, and install a a shoe wall – display for running shoes – with information served up on all the various types of running shoes. Sportcheck, in turn, would go to Nike, Adidas, Reebok and others to get information and feed it back to us. It seemed like a good plan, but who pays for this – the manufacturers or the retailer? The technology isn’t the question; it’s the politics around it.

We shifted our focus and instead will target the manufacturers directly. They already have a lot of content on their existing Web sites – videos, product images and useful information. Give it to us and we will make it look awesome.

Beyond retail and gallery types of spaces, have you had any interest from other industries?
We’ve been thinking of restaurants – the form factor doesn’t matter. You just need to scan something and learn about it, such as items on the menu. We’ve also been brainstorming about airports and how the technology could be used at gates.

We will be doing a lot more pilots in the near future to better understand how users use the technology. We will then take that data to potential clients and say this is the kind of thing we did. It raised sales by X and people used it X percentage of the time. And these are the benefits it can bring.

What inspired you to develop POET?
I worked in retail for seven years at Tim Horton’s and Starbucks. I want to change how people perceive retail environments. A lot of the time retail is a lackluster experience, hindered by not finding information or having to rely on someone. I want to change that and hand power back to the customer so they can make an informed decision.

What has been your greatest lesson as an entrepreneur?
It has become more apparent – as I dive deeper into this culture – that being an entrepreneur is half about what you’re selling and half about the relationships. A lot of companies have amazing developers, but if they don’t have people who can relate to customers and their business issues it’s going to fail.

How did being profiled on CommerceLab help POET’s entry to the market?
Especially since we are a student-run startup, exposure on the site was helpful to show people that we are taking things seriously.  For example, many early-stage startups tell people that “we are having conversations with company X or Y,” when really they have somewhat exaggerated their relationship with that party. For us, it was useful to have a reputable source recognize the relationship the Felt lab/REAP has with industry experts, and consequently what POET has in terms of professional support.  It allows us to tell people that what we’re doing isn’t arbitrary; we’re actually doing our homework and utilizing our resources.

The Project: LaFrenz works with industry partners to develop research-based academic prototypes, created within the SurfNet community, into commercially viable surface computing apps.

SurfNet’s Jeff LaFrenz

“A lot of my role is around connecting industry with researchers, and it’s purely focused on business development because we see so many opportunities for applying the research to solve actual business problems that exist today.”

That commercial opportunity lies in creating new ways for people to interact with data, especially massive data sets, such as those used in the oil and gas sector or in emergency response work, which involve interpreting and interacting with geospatial data.

“Think of any type of environment where people stand around a table and have to made a decision,” says LaFrenz. “We’re taking about maps, inherently,” he says. “People intuitively work with paper maps on tables, and translating that into a digital format or table is fairly easy.”

The Progress: Since SurfNet’s launch in 2010, LaFrenz says the pace of development in hardware has had a major effect on how SurfNet researchers develop their applications.

“The hardware interaction has changed dramatically. In the early days, we had a lot of focus on the fundamentals and, very much, the applied aspects of this. Now we are seeing big progress in multi-device interactions. Touch tables with the ability to interact with smart phones and other devices.”

LaFrenz and others are betting on surface computing becoming a mainstream social networking tool for many types of businesses – from hospitals to vehicle delivery fleets to oil development, and more.

“We’re seeing, for example, a lot of opportunity for interactive technology to support analytics in the energy space.”

The Prospects: The product development cycle for a SurfNet-developed app roughly follows this path: Industry identifies a problem, SurfNet develops the solution – with industry feedback – and Vizworx, LaFrenz’s consulting firm, facilitates the launch of a commercial product.

SurfNet has worked with a variety of commercial interests in various industries, including emergency response and disaster planning organizations as well as pipeline outfits – to create surface computing applications.

“The (early adopters) are organizations with a lot of maps or those with control rooms that require a collaborative environment. In oil and gas, for example, they deal with a lot of geospatial data and have difficulty understanding it and interacting with it.”

The Passion: LaFrenz’s professional fulfillment comes in the form of solving complex problems and working with “brilliant, exciting people.”

“There’s an opportunity to see the new technologies being developed, and to be part of providing solutions to challenges society and industry are running into,” he says. “It’s also great being around really brilliant people doing this work.”

But he also expresses frustration with the conflicting messages some academic researchers receive in pursuing their development of projects with commercial viability, and sacrificing the traditional publishing imperative.

“In academic environments, we strongly require people to produce publications, and we don’t reward commercialization of research or patents that result from the research.”

The site allows citizens, non-government organizations, researchers and others to leverage the more than 270,000 datasets the government has made publicly available – everything from air and water quality to border wait times, permanent residency applications, crime statistics and vehicle recalls to name a few.

When Treasury President Tony Clement announced the formal relaunch of the site in June, he said the government plans to increase the number of data sets by many thousands, but that there are constraints they must consider when doing so.

“We have to abide by the legislation, we have to protect national security and we have to protect people’s privacy,” he said. “Absent those constraints, there are many thousands of datasets that can be posted.”

Before the site’s makeover, however, the portal had been criticized for its not-so-friendly user interface as well as for the poor quality of search results.

“The previous layout was difficult to negotiate,” says David Eaves, a public policy commentator, who also sat on the open government advisory panel and hosted focus groups to generate feedback on and recommendations for the site.  According to the report Eaves produced as the result of the focus groups, the single greatest complaint about the federal open data portal was search quality.

“Participants talked of searching for datasets they knew existed, but could not find them without typing an exact phrase or knowing a key term,” stated the report.

Another aspect of the site that lacked muscle, according to Eaves, was in its approach to community, or creating a space where users can easily share their experiences and exchange ideas about data use. He says the new portal is slightly improved in this area, but that building community is an ongoing struggle in the Web world.

“They have tried to do that with the developer area of the new site, but it’s not easy,” says Eaves. “You have to work hard to cultivate community and I don’t know that they’re doing that yet.”

Feedback from the various constituents of users will be critical to the long-term success of the open data portal, says Eaves.

“The web site is important but what matters is the support and community building,” he says. Are they talking to users? Are users showing up to the site? It would be interesting to know how quickly do they respond to the “request a dataset.” What are the response times when they receive a request?”

Robert Giggey, Open Source Lead for the City of Ottawa, agrees that engaging with users is the best avenue to building better usability into an open data site.

“We should have a sense of who’s asking for data; who’s engaging with us, what they’re looking for and how they want to access it. You can get that from accepting comments, feedback and suggestions.”

Giggey says many governments get hung up on policy or technical issues when they embark on an open data strategy, but his advice is to move forward iteratively.

“Adopt an agile development strategy; get a simple table up. If you have a calendar on your site, you should have a downloadable file next to it. If you have pool location, put a link up that has the locations.”

Ramsey is preparing to launch InputHealth, a company that develops software tools for health-care professionals—including medical doctors, surgeons, dentists, physiotherapists, chiropractors, and others— to better capture and analyze patient data. The firm’s software products will be provided through security-enabled mobile devices in the health-care provider’s office, such as tablets or the patient’s smart phone. They will include a variety of scenarios such as patient intake, patient satisfaction, medical history and informed consent.

In one hospital clinic, for example, InputHealth has already run a pilot project to automate the follow-up questionnaire to assess patient symptoms, a 20-year old practice the clinic had been performing manually with paper records.

Dr. Damon Ramsey, Input Health

“For years they had been collecting data in paper form, but you can’t analyze it practically,” says Ramsey. “We converted the questionnaire to electronic form, and now the data is becoming useful, as symptoms can be analyzed over time.”

Research shows that physicians receive more data—and better data—using computerized patient interviews than they do with conventional patient histories, says Ramsey.

“Engaged patients make better decisions without high cost to the health-care system,” says Ramsey. “If we can prevent a heart attack from happening, that’s better than performing surgery—on many levels.”

In a typical clinical encounter with a doctor, patients will be interrupted every 30 seconds or so by nurses, admin staff and so on, says Ramsey. “Being able to mine their answers and put logic into the questionnaire means you can clarify the information.”

The design of InputHealth’s software applications and tools was inspired by Steve Jobs’ “obsessive focus on user-based design,” he says. While Ramsey admits there has been some progress in creating electronic patient records, he says many internal IT systems are fundamentally broken and don’t integrate or communicate properly.

“You have these health-care professionals, all of whom have a need to collect data, securely and in the most efficient way possible. They’re busy people dealing with subpar tech or no tech at all. The Apple approach is to say, let’s ignore this mess and produce something that’s so cool—like the iPhone. That was a paradigm shift.”

InputHealth will formally launch in January of 2014, and Ramsey says pilot projects are going well and that the feedback has been positive.

In one of the pilot projects, for instance, InputHealth has also automated Informed consent — the process obtaining a patient’s permission before conducting a health-care intervention. In the traditional scenario, Ramsey says, this process is ineffective because it overwhelms patients with verbal information, and it’s difficult for a health-care provider to assess the patient’s comprehension.

“With the InputHealth platform, in the waiting room, you give the patient a tablet that’s loaded with an informed consent on his or her specific procedure. They can see, in diagrams, what the potential complications are, and every time something is explained, the module tests the patient’s comprehension. It reduces liability, and given that one of the most common reasons for malpractice suits is the doctor not properly explaining the procedure, this tool will be very helpful.”

Besides creating software tools, InputHealth has also developed a content store of medical questionnaires and educational information they can offer as part of patient engagement projects.

Ayogo uses interactive social games to motivate patient activity, increase engagement and teach new skills, says Michael Fergusson, CEO and co-founder.

“The ability to play is a profoundly important capacity in the brain,” says Fergusson. “It’s how we learn and grow and explore our world. There’s no reason why doing something essential has to be dreary. Doing it in an accessible, fun way is an important consideration when you’re doing things that matter to people.”

With an extensive background in software development and gaming, Fergusson and his partner, Paul Prescod, developed a customizable platform – GoodLife – that leverages gamification components, incentives and social features that entice and motivate patients to take the necessary steps towards health benefits.

“My business partner and I wanted to do something meaningful, and we developed some experience in a previous work life with social networking and game play, and thought there was an opportunity to apply that to solve problems in health care,” says Fergusson.

Ayogo collaborates with clinicians, researchers, and health care professionals to develop custom applications for targeted populations. Most of its business has come from outside of Canada, says Fergusson, noting that tens of thousands of people have used Ayogo’s applications since the company started in 2008.

Working with the Diabetes Hands Foundation and the Joslin Diabetes Centre at Harvard, Ayogo developed Healthseeker, a Facebook game designed for people living with diabetes, which uses achievements, virtual prizes and gifting to create rewards for healthy behavior. This bridges the gap between intention and action, which is fundamental to health management, says Fergusson.

Since its launch in 2010, Healthseeker has become a viral phenomenon in the online diabetes community with approximately 7,500 players who have taken more than 30,000 healthy actions and eaten more than 16,000 healthy meals.

“We’ve also found that players who receive encouragement from their friends in the game have, on average, 2.5 times as many healthy actions as players who don’t—this is the power of social connections,” says Fergusson, who received the 2012 Ernst & Young Special Citation for Social Entrepreneur award for his work in this area.

Biometrics plays an important role in the game and apps, both as a feedback mechanism for players, and as a measure of the level of engagement for game developers, Fergusson says.

“Biometric feedback helps us to understand when and how we’re successful,” says Fergusson. “One of the interesting things we noticed is if you measure what someone is doing – say taking steps, for example – and then ask them how many steps they’ve taken, their answer is usually wrong. They say one thing, reality says another.”

Ayogo is currently working with BC’s Children’s Hospital in Vancouver in a program designed to help children struggling with obesity. The children are outfitted with accelerometers, which provide them with feedback on the activity they’re doing.  Biometric feedback is a critical component to the project because obese children don’t know how to exercise.

“They don’t know what peak heart rate is, but we can watch what they do and give them feedback on it.”

Capital Networks, which is headquartered in Markham, Ont., recently introduced version two of its Audience for Android software platform. Powered by Android, the Audience for Android media player and software bundle is marketed as a lower cost alternative to traditional Windows-based digital signage deployments. But price is just the beginning of the advantages Android offers, according to Jim Vair, vice-president of business development at Capital Networks.

Jim Vair, Capital Networks

“The sheer price point of Android is attractive, but only if it works and is reliable and scalable,” says Vair. “In digital signage, companies are looking to deploy more displays in more places. So, in a Windows-based environment, you can have one or two screens around the office, but if you introduce Android, you can deploy five or eight for the same money.”

The content management and display system features the ability to support multi-zone displays up to 1080p, video in a window, landscape and portrait orientations, touch interactivity, and HTML5 support as well as native support for portrait aspect ratio.

“We have some kiosk-type presentations in malls and corporate lobbies that lend themselves to portrait aspect ratio rather than landscape, and version 2 can handle that,” says Vair.

The updated version also takes advantage of the improved specifications of the hardware devices with which it is paired.

“The software has always been able to accommodate things like aspect ratios, and now the hardware is starting to (catch up),” says Vair.

Although Vair says Android technology in the digital signage market is still in its infancy, Capital Networks has deployed more than 300 installations of Audience for Android, and many of those clients are evaluating version 2.

CBC, Canada’s national public broadcaster uses Audience to power its CBC News Express broadcast service to major airports across the country. The Audience platform enables the CBC to present the latest video content and live data feeds for up to the minute local and national news, weather, business and sports updates to thousands of travellers each day.

With offices located across six continents, Open Text installed Audience for Android as an element of its corporate communications network, which can distribute 24-hour information to employees spread across the globe. The other essential component was that each location would have the ability to display a combination of hyper-local, location-specific information as well as global information to be displayed at all locations.

Capital Networks’ research and development team is working to deliver features that will enable a higher degree of interactivity between personal mobile devices and large, public displays, say Vair.

“Near-field communications is something that’s available today – in the Android phones,” he says. “It will replace the QR codes, which never really took off.  When someone sees content on the screen and touches it, they can transfer that content to their personal device.”

Hospitals, universities and retail environments are poised to take full advantage of NFC, according to Vair, because it will allow them to measure the degree of interactivity between their constituents and the digital signage.

“We want to enhance and improve the integration of the mobile device with digital signage, and this verification that people are engaging with digital signage is a valuable tool in measuring the effectiveness of the content,” he says.

Many companies make the mistake of launching Web sites or digital campaigns without much thought as to how that content flows or the overall picture it paints of their business, says Jesse Korzan, Ethical UX’s partner and creative director. He says the firm tries to be different from other agencies.

“We’re more transparent, more collaborative, and we work with our clients to understand their business so we can become invested advocates for it,” he says. “Especially with the way things have changed with responsive design and the proliferation of mobile devices, we think there are a few ways –process, technique or philosophy – that things should be done.”

Last year, True Collection hired EthicalUX to produce a traditional Web site for its exclusive travel boutique. During the course of its consultation with the client, Korzan says they discovered that the company’s brand and business strategy were outdated and not effectively serving its customers.

“It was apparent the direction they were going to take with the site would be short-sighted and dated, so we recreated their brand and their business strategy from scratch,” says Korzan. “If we went with what they wanted (initially), we wouldn’t have helped them (achieve) their business goals.”

The company also worked with Santa Cruz Bikes for the launch of its new brand of mountain bikes – Juliana Bicycles – designed for women, by women. They came to Ethical UX looking for a digital brochure of the bike and its specifications, but Ethical UX’s Innovation Partner, David Olsson, had other ideas.

“They had a really great brand story, so we did a story design model for the Web site,” Olsson explains. “You get the product information you need, and you get the attitude and meaning behind why they’re doing this. The interaction is a bit different. It’s playful and delightful, and different from what the company and its customers are used to.”

When Canadian comedian Shaun Majumder asked EthicalUX to create a Web campaign to promote The Gathering, an annual cultural festival he hosts in Newfoundland, Koran and his partners admit they had a challenge. Working with a “skinny budget,” Korzan and his partners created a site that diverts from the normal navigation of tabs and pages, and instead features content presented in tiles – all on a single page.

“They didn’t have the money or the architecture for a content publishing system,” says Olsson. “But they had a resource who understood HTML, so we came up with this concept of tiles – a feed-based pattern – that looks and works as great on a phone as it does on the desktop, without compromising the tone of the aesthetic.”

In many cases, clients approach the company looking for a traditional Web site, says Korzan, but they don’t have a solid understanding of what they want to accomplish with that tool. At EthicalUX, clients are interviewed at length, giving the team clear insight into their business and its goals. That’s what the team believes will ensure its own long-term success.

“We want to understand why you’re excited about your business,” he says. “What motivates you to do it, who you’re selling to, (and) how marketing is driving your numbers.”

In a recent episode from a series of UX-related podcasts, Macadamian’s user experience researcher Anneliis Tosine suggested that user testing during the research phase is important as it can help identify important knowledge gaps and fix usability problems early in the process.

“(In previous podcasts), we spoke about workarounds that can come up from ethnographic research or usability testing, and you can get insights into the context of use,” said Tosine. “All of these gaps can help discover – or lead us to discover – new features or functionalities that the product may lack.”

Tosine and her colleagues discussed what they called UX “power tools” that can help move testing along without breaking the bank.

1. Map it out

Macadamian’s experience map, for example, provides a tangible view of the various touch points a customer has with a brand or product. It helps designers empathize with the journey users go through, and can often result in better quality applications as well as richer user experiences, according to Tosine.

“Experience maps give you an opportunity to ensure your products align with your organizational goals and customer goals,” she said.

But the value of experience maps doesn’t end there, especially in the context of designers working with clients, according to Sara Fortier, Macadamian’s User Experience Designer.

“They also create visibility across your client’s organization in terms of who you are—who Macadamian is, what your services are, and I think you can also help a lot in terms of gaining future business from them,” said Fortier.

2. Include everybody

Another strategy Macadamian employs in working with large clients that have multiple project teams is to gain participation and buy-in from various stakeholders across the organization.

“A lot of times when you are working with a client that is a really big, they may have many different project teams working on various products simultaneously. If you are able to get enrolment on a particular project, it can help to create consistency across their organization and get everyone on board.”

3. Think small

One of the biggest hurdles software creators face in the quest for launching bug-free products is funding.  Usability testing often involves an inordinate amount of time, money and human resources, said Tosine, but it doesn’t always have to be a mammoth undertaking.

“We have conducted very quick iterative – a let’s call them agile testing methods – for clients that do not take months to plan and execute into analyzed findings. You can think small and you can think of a sub-set of tasks or features that you want to get evaluated. By involving UX early on in your design cycle, you are saving time and money further on when you suddenly release a product that is unusable by end-users.”

The key to success in tackling these smaller UX tests is focus, said Fortier.

“We do give a high level list of things that could be tackled, and I think even just having that sort of list of issues and pain points helps you prioritize what should be tackled and at which time along the process.”

The majority of digital displays have screen resolutions that are measured in megapixels, or one million pixels. Apple’s iPad with retina display, for example, has a resolution of approximately three million pixels.  The displays Rushby and other envision have more than one billion pixels, and come in all sizes, shapes and forms. They are not the static, rectangular displays found in every home and commercial space.

“When I was with Christie, I was in Japan with my colleagues discussing displays, asking why are they always rectangular, why are we limited by the number of pixels, why can’t they be any size,” says the retired chief technology officer of Christie Digital Systems, and co-inventor of Christie Microtiles. “People are creatures of habit. We are used to rectangles…and it’s going to take a number of people in different fields starting to say there are better ways to do that.”

Rushby suggests the displays of the future will be regarded more as building materials, and that architects will embed displays in the design of both commercial and residential spaces. But before this technology becomes mainstream in public places, there are significant challenges to address, and the most significant, perhaps, is a lack of software developers working on applications.

“Researchers haven’t thought through this idea of massive pixel displays that are both useful and interesting,” Rushby says. “What does this do for public policy? It means that roads and other public spaces become (canvasses on which to display information).”

Stony Brook University in New York has created the world’s first gigapixel resolution display, the Reality Deck, which features an interactive 1.5 billion pixels. The Reality Deck can be used to explore architectural models while allowing for the accurate rendering of event the smallest details. The large workspace of the Reality Deck allows large groups of users to easily collaborate on building designs.

Montreal’s Arsenal Media is an award-winning digital content marketer that is blazing the trail in the digital canvas arena, according to Rushby, and for clients in diverse industries. Arsenal helped The Nielsen Company transform its corporate lobby with a multi-zone digital space that features MicroTiles, a plasma screen and an LCD. At Christie Digital Systems, Arsenal installed a video wall that runs product and branded digital content at a full native resolution of 23,760 x 2700 pixels – the equivalent of 30 full HD sources or eight 4K resolutions.

The cost of building more interactive displays has also dropped dramatically in the past five years, and that will also make the technology more accessible, Rushby says. Today, a large-scale display of one billion pixels can be built for about $80,000.

“Not so long ago, an 80-inch LCD display would be $70,000; now it’s $3,000 and that’s only a few years.”