This may be less common at academic gatherings, but at events in the technology industry you can now reliably count on the organizers setting up a giant monitor somewhere on site that shows a running feed of all the comments from attendees on Twitter. Usually these are organized by the hashtag that identifies the event. There’s usually little attempt to filter or highlight anything that gets displayed on the screen. It’s as though, after realizing people were not putting away their smartphones and would be providing a running commentary about their experience online, conference producers want to show that they are aware and encouraging of the practice. The monitor, like the buzz of conversation at the networking cocktail reception near the end of a conference, is a way of showing that the whole thing was a big success.
To me, though, Twitter walls at events are a huge missed opportunity, and show how far we still have to go to integrating display technology in a way that’s more effective and sustainable. What gets tweeted during the keynote speeches, plenary sessions and coffee breaks represent an incredible source of data on what resonated with attendees. Instead of capturing and studying it, event producers tend to simply turn off the monitor at the end of the day and rely on people filling out that same paper-based evaluation forms they’ve been using for decades. They fail to recognize that what’s being said on social media is a parallel but distinct event in its own right. It should be a place where experts engage, contribute and provide additional value to what’s being said on stage.
This isn’t just a failing of the conference industry. Instead of a monitor, why aren’t more people implementing software to power actual digital signs which would not be limited to a day or multi-day event but permanently installed in helpful locations within an organization? Examples might be the lobby of a public space where visitors could get a sense of what’s going on inside or tweet questions about what they need upon arrival. Retailers could offer information about products and services right next to a shelf, and curate links to videos, articles and other content that help shoppers get more out of what they’re preparing to buy. There are plenty of startups with good products that could offer some degree of this today, including Tint, SocialWally and TweetBeam, but I suspect there’s also still lots of room to innovate here.
So much of what you see in digital signage is basically a one-way conversation between who owns the sign and those that happen to glance in its direction. There are still untold ways that the silent but never-ending dialogue taking place on social channels could be harnessed, curated and amplified to completely rethink the user experience of being in a particular location. It’s time to pay more attention to the enormous panel discussion that happens long before — and long after — any kind of isolated conference or event takes place.
]]>For obvious reasons, the things that jump out to most mainstream media covering Digital Canada 150 last week were the ones that seemed to have the biggest impact on everyday consumers. There is the promise of expanded Internet access in rural areas, for example, and revamped privacy legislation to keep data safe in an age of increasingly online and mobile transactions. For academics wondering how, or if, their research in areas like gamification, user experience (UX) design or interactive display will ever make it into the commercial market, there was plenty in the federal strategy that could help.
Probably the best news, in fact, was something that had come out before the complete digital strategy was unveiled. This is the Business Innovation Access Program, which was originally announced in the 20123 budget. It’s designed, in the government’s words, “to support innovative research and development that translates into products that benefit Canadians by connecting small and medium-sized businesses with universities, colleges and other research institutions.” Elements of the Business Innovation Access Program almost seem to have been created with things like UX in mind. Eligible technical areas, for example, include “product optimization,” and “process development, analysis or optimization.”
There was a lot more in Digital Canada 150 that touched on commercialization, including intentions to update intellectual property laws and $100 million set aside for the Canada Accelerator and Incubator program, but the Business Innovation Access Program deserves particular attention. It’s less money, at $20 million pledged, but it could represent a highly tactical form of investment.
Many of the breakthrough inventions or technologies in post-secondary labs already take years to develop. Sometimes the thought of bringing it to market must seem equally (and dauntingly) long-term. The Business Innovation Access Program, however, focuses on organizations that normally aren’t candidates for technology commercialization because their pockets aren’t deep enough. Yet small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the predominant corporate entity in this country, and a breakthrough that brings value to SMBs could have a far greater chance of commercial success than something that appeals to what is essentially a small collection of large Canadian enterprises.
SMBs are also, out of necessity, focused on a more near-term return on investment (ROI), and the Business Innovation Access Program has clearly taken this into account. The government wants “short-term projects for which a business service or technical assistance would clearly demonstrate the potential to contribute to quicker commercialization of products or academic research.” That’s something researchers should want, too.
It’s hard to say how the government’s overall digital economy strategy will pan out, but this program, albeit a piece part of the whole, is probably the only way academic breakthroughs can get a foothold with this particular customer set. Yes, Ottawa is clearly hoping for a few quick wins here, but if the research sector could give them some, the path to applied innovation could become a lot shorter, too.
]]>I imagine for many firms, the success metrics for gamification come down to: “Did this change behaviour (better than any other way)?” Although that may do the job in principle, it also means that it could be harder to figure out why some gamification projects fail to deliver. What we need are better metrics, and a few days ago I stumbled across a pretty good attempt to define some.
Cognizant, a technology consulting firm based in Teaneck, N.J., published a research paper by Rohan Mahadar, who manages its social business unit, called ‘Optimizing Gamification Design.’ I’ve embedded it in its entirety below, but skip ahead to page four, when it talks about “activity value ratings.”
As you can see, Mahadar is suggesting a breakdown within each gamification activity — perhaps starting a game, reaching a certain level, changing the way they do something — and looking at it from several different angles. These include how important it is to the organization (business criticality), the time it took, the difficulty and costs (either those to the user or what the organization might have saved).
Of course, in some organizations these might be phrased a little differently, and would certainly be weighted differently. The Cognizant paper walks through an example within the financial services sector, but in health-care, for example, time to perform a task and difficulty to the user might be a higher priority than costs (because it could contribute greatly to the cost of care). In other sectors, like retail, cost savings might reign supreme if gamification allows a a company to spend less on other forms of marketing, staff training or boosts the use of an online channel.
Although I’ve seen many researchers discuss these factors to one degree or another, Mahadar’s use of activity value ratings strikes me as an effective way to standardize such measurements in a way many business decision-makers could readily understand. If they are articulated correctly, activity value ratings might mean the difference between a gamification project that gets funded or not. Best of all, activity value ratings might also mean that if a gamfication project isn’t immediately successful, it might be possible to hone on one of the ratings (difficulty to the user, for instance) and adjust something rather than abandon a project entirely. That’s what we really need: a way to ensure gamification is seen as something you work on and develop, not just a win-or-lose proposition.
]]>Just as UX has enlarged our sense of what “design” is or could be, it is evolving in tandem with the growing proliferation of mobile technologies. As information becomes more digitized it is also becoming more available, across a range of devices and involving all kinds of transactions. The smartest organizations are beginning to recognize that those experiences need to be shaped, optimized and measured so that customers and citizens get what they need, when they need it, in the most positive and engaging way possible. To further their efforts, we’ve just published UX Design in Canada: How to Compete in a User-Centric World, an eBook that captures how that movement is manifesting itself in Canada.
CommerceLab’s mission is to help get more of the breakthrough ideas generated by innovative academics and entrepreneurs into real products, services and companies. We’re doing that in many different ways, but a big part of it is capturing the best practices in areas like UX design as they emerge, profiling the leading lights in the profession and identifying the opportunities and challenges that they face.
This eBook compiles some of the best writing we’ve done on UX design so far, including coverage from major industry events, conversations with UX designers who talk candidly about the ups and downs of their work, plus some ideas and inspiration they’ve contributed to us directly. Our hope is that it starts a conversation about what a UX designer in Canada can achieve, the kinds of peer community that’s developing, and the kind of person more Canadian organizations should consider hiring. I also hope it will broaden our perspective about the unique skill sets around UX. We need to begin identifying the characteristics required so that we can better educate and nurture UX talent. Canada will ultimately need more intentional UX designers than those who simply wind up in the role.
Of course, this eBook marks only the beginning of this story. Look for our continued coverage of UX design research and adoption every day on CommerceLab. Join our audience by commenting on our work or authoring a guest post. Share this eBook widely with people who will capitalize on the insights it offers. Doing any of these things will help CommerceLab succeed, and for that you have our thanks.
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The turnout was better than I expected. At least three dozen families must have shown up in the ballroom of the Americana Hotel in Niagara Falls that night to watch Charlie Tuna, who performs there every week. His repertoire included all the classics: juggling, card-guessing, multiplying handkerchiefs and, most dramatically, levitation. It wasn’t until about half-way through, however, that I realized that all of us in the audience were not merely watching. We were playing a game — the kind of game that could be instructive to researchers and businesses working with gamification.
Though Tuna’s onstage patter and instructions were obviously the key element, everyone in the room was contributing something vital to his magic act. First there was the suspension of disbelief. He forced us to pretend, for example, that a ball he threw in the air was “invisible,” and asked one of the other dads to catch it. People laughed and played along in ways that sometimes seem challenging in gamification, where employees struggle to believe their organizations are trying to engage, rather than manipulate them. Tuna reinforced this notion by reminding us that the key to magic was imagination, cutting off any hecklers before they could begin.
Whereas many gamification initiatives also seem based on point systems or other forms of achievement, Tuna’s magic act reminded me that playing a game can be driven by something more nuanced, like wondering how things work. I’m pretty sure all the kids (and most of the adults) were silently playing each trick backwards to figure out how he got a Loonie to mysteriously pass through the bottom of that bottle, or how he made that little kid seemingly float in the air after removing the board and a chair that was supporting his body. You don’t need to “score” in a situation like this to feel intellectually stimulated and relaxed at the same time.
Finally, just as some experiments in gamification seem to hand users an app or a Web site and ask them to get busy, Tuna’s magic act reinforced the need for effective leadership throughout the process. He made sure things were interactive and got volunteers to take part, but at every stage he was showing, joking and encouraging. No wonder he got so much applause.
Perhaps some elements of a magic act wouldn’t transfer to a gamification project, but Tuna made one other comment that stayed with me. Magic, he told us, was about making people pay attention to one thing while something else was going on behind the scenes. That could be a way to measure success in gamification: If what they’re playing is genuinely enjoyable, users won’t be so quick to try and look at what may be up their employers’ sleeves.
photo credit: kennymatic via photopin cc
]]>In the post, Kevin Hartnett discusses a recent research paper from a pair of Wharton School professors that more or less debunked the value of gamification in corporate settings. In an experiment at a tech startup, a basketball-themed game seemed to have a middling effect on sales performance and was detrimental for those who weren’t up for playing.
“There’s . . . something especially depressing about being told by your higher-ups to regard something as fun when obviously fun isn’t the point, for anyone involved,” Hartnett wrote. “If we’ve got to trudge through the sludge, we might as well be real about it.”
When I dug a little deeper, however, I discovered there was more to this research than the Boston Globe was letting on. Harnett’s post was not based on the Wharton research paper itself but a much more balanced article on the Knowledge@Wharton website which interviewed the paper’s authors, among several other sources. The professors say that even if their gamification experiment didn’t yield universally good results, they described it as a “first pass” at measuring the impact in the workplace. They also say what most Canadian researchers have also learned: “If you give people choices, and they get the choices they want, that helps increase buy-in,” one of them notes, and that buy-in, of course, is key to making gamification less an act of parental desperation than a tool for real engagement.
The research paper, by the way, is not really that new, having been published last June. Rather than merely go with what was mentioned in the Wharton article, I downloaded and read it through. ‘Mandatory Fun: Gamification and the Impact of Games at Work’ is really good, and contains as many valuable insights about how to pursue gamification successfully as it acknowledges the potential pitfalls. It’s really a study about the need for consent, and thoughtful ways to achieve that consent. Here’s the part that stood out to me:
“We found that the most powerful predictor of consent came from employees who were immersed in non-work worlds where gameplay was common. Those employees who regularly played the type of games used in gamification were much more likely to consent to the use of games in the workplace.”
And later:
“Fun essentially is in the eye of the beholder, and requires either selecting individuals who have a uniform view of what is ‘fun’ (likely a difficult task) or else working hard to implement the initiative in a way that engenders greater consent. One way to do this could be for managers to be very clear about the rules of the game. Another way might be to solicit ideas from employees about what games might be fun and to be clear that the game structure emerged organically from the ideas of co-workers.”
Beyond the reminder that gamification can’t be generic and is not an off-the-shelf solution, the point of all this is that superficial coverage does a disservice to the discussion. Anyone who reads and shares that Boston Globe post may believe they have evidence for the naysayers. A deep read suggests otherwise. In a media culture that increasingly relies on curation, aggregation and traffic-baiting headlines, researchers and business people need to realize that when they hear generalized conclusions about gamification, they may be getting played.
photo credit: Eldkvast via photopin cc
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These questions and more will be addressed by an online panel whose expertise covers IP licensing agreements, legal and financial issues.
On Thursday, March 27th, 1pm EDT, VIEW online at the CommerceLab YouTube channel: youtube.com/theCommerceLab
JOIN in with your questions via Twitter addressed to @theCommerceLab.
This online panel will be run as a Google Hangout On Air. If you would like to join the panel, we have spots for up to 2 academic researchers exploring the licensing option. If you would like to participate, email [email protected] with a couple sentences on where you are in your commercialization process and why you would like to join.
]]>“It was a frosted cake with LEDs that could tell you if someone was happy or sad as you approached it,” Mason, former chief scientist with Bit.ly and now data scientist in residence at Accel Partners, told the crowd at CODE Inspiration Day late last week at the University of Waterloo’s Statford, Ont. campus. “I’m a huge fan of hackathons, because it’s an opportunity to take some time, meet a lot of people and make something awesome. Don’t worry about how much money you’re going to make, or whether you’re going to win a prize. Just do something that kicks ass.”
CODE, otherwise known as the Canadian Open Data Experience, was a cross-country event led by the federal government’s Treasury Board to encourage use of the resources it has made available on Data.gc.ca. As Mason pointed out, the open data movement doesn’t just offer extra material for those involved in the user experience design of citizens. Used correctly, open data can have a profound impact on critical services.
In a project that involved former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Office of Analytics, for example, Mason showed how researchers sought to speed up ambulance response times by looking at the order of questions operators asked over the phone. “They reduced response times by more than a minute,” she said. “(This is work that’s) saving lives.”
Mason offered other open data projects that were less dramatic but equally compelling. There’s an app, for example, that sifts through health inspections and can send a text to users who “check in” via social networking service Foursquare at a particular restaurant.
“Unfortunately, it usually only arrives once you’ve ordered,” she admitted. “There’s still some tweaking to do there.”
In some cases, the volume, variety and velocity of what’s being released by governments might qualify as “big data,” which is typical defined as unstructured information difficult to analyze using traditional technologies. However Mason said that advances in computing are making the possibilities of working with such data increasingly accessible, and encouraged Canada and others to continue exploring avenues to empower citizens with it.
“It has to be open. It has to get to as many people as possible,” she said. “Even if it’s just an Excel spreadsheet, someone will make it useful. Data and technology give us superpowers — they give us capabilities we would never have had.”
Which may mean that if UX designers can harness open data, they have the potential to be superheroes.
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The Research Opportunity: Data.gc.ca was revamped last year to be eager to navigate, with new data sets being uploaded regularly for researchers that want to apply them to problems they’re investigating.
The Commercialization Potential: Keep an eye on the CODE site for news about apps that came out of the hackathon. Some may have a built-in market of Canadian citizens.
The Next Thing You Should Read on CommerceLab: How big data is reshaping the future of digital scholarship in Canada
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Andrew Pulkrabrek
Pulkrabek has a background both as an entrepreneur as well as a venture capitalist, so after he walked through the basics of the 43North program I asked him why he thought it was so hard for academics to commercialize their work successfully. His answer was so thorough I thought it worth transcribing and posting in its entirety below:
My alma mater is the University of Minnesota, a top five research institution, and you’d hear that exact same concern addressed there. I don’t think people are ever going to be happy with the amount of technology that gets developed (in academia) and what gets commercialized.
Part of the challenge with that, if I step back and look at it from my venture capital background and the private equity side of things, is that the technologies coming out of the schools are so very early stage, they’re so high risk, and what’s happened since the financial crisis is that corporate America has gotten risk-averse. They don’t want to go into early-stage deals, and they feel much more comfortable — because a lot of public CEOs live by the (financial) quarter — to keep money on the balance sheet. I’ll pay multiple times over what it’s worth today if it’s de-risked and commercialized in the market than I would if it was five years earlier and had a higher risk profile. As the CEO in that situation, I don’t want to take the risk profile of that failing, because it looks to the market and I could be out of a job in a quarter. So from that standpoint, the strategic capital has gone very far downstream.
Venture capital has followed suit, because in some cases what you’ve seen over the last 10 years is that VCs start out, they raise $50 million, they invest it, they get the internal rate of return for their limited partners, they come back and say, ‘Well, $50 million was great, but now I want to do a $150 million fund.’ But now they’re collecting two and 20 — a two percent management fee and 20 percent (cut from the gains) — but they have a disincentive to necessarily add more staff to do the due diligence and conduct the deals. They have an incentive to keep their staff at the same levels and put the capital out in the marketplace. Now all of a sudden their internal rate of return drops. It’s a long cycle, a 10, 15-year cycle, and you can raise a lot of capital when you get a 10-year, close-ended fund. You don’t necessarily deliver a return back to your limited partners for six years. So they can tell a lot of story, get a lot of money under management.
What ends up happening, though, is a bull-whip effect. At the end of it, the limited partners come back and say, ‘You know, we didn’t get the return we were hoping for, and so now we’re not going to go back and invest in these small venture capital firms.’ Because again, they’re higher risk. You’ve got folks that may not have that deep experience in having done the venture investing. Now venture capital says, ‘Okay, I can’t invest now in higher-risk deals, because I could lose, and I won’t be able to raise my next follow-on fund.’
So what have they done? They’ve gone right downstream with everybody else. That’s left the academic institutions, which may have some bench-top research done, some maybe interesting IP formed around it, saying, ‘This is something that could address a significant market.’ But you have that major gap between the bench-top research and the ability to get the first significant round of capital to be able to de-risk it and get it to the point where that money can come in.
There are no easy solutions to the problems Pulkrabek has outlined, but anyone hoping to advance what they’ve done in UX design, gamification or interactive display shouldn’t be discouraged. Better to understand the challenges upfront and prepare accordingly. It may mean doing more of the due-diligence before presenting an idea, or connecting with people who can help present it as a safer-sounding bet. Winning a business plan competition is one thing. Whether researchers can win over VCs and the equity markets is the real $5 million question.
photo credit: @Doug88888 via photopin cc
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Among many other things, McMullin is the founder at the Centre for Citizen Experience, a consultancy dedicated to transforming public sector service delivery and policymaking through design innovation. He also recently become a CommerceLab advisory board member, which is one of the reasons we recently spoke to him by phone in Edmonton to get his perspective on UX in the public sector and in general. This interview has been edited and condensed.
CommerceLab: What are the primary ways you engage with the public sector as a UX design professional?
Jess McMullin
Jess McMullin: I end up working on three kinds of initiatives with public sector clients. The first are projects, and those tend to be on service improvements — how can we actually transform how public sector services are delivered? The second kind of engagement is in building internal capabilities. I do a lot of training and workshops and coaching and mentoring. There’s so much work to do that I certainly I can’t do it all, and we need to grow that capability in the public sector if we want to make this a regular way of doing things. And the third way that I end up working with the public sector is more at a policy and strategy level, not only how to tackle projects and build a policy about designing, but how to use design to create better policies and better organizations of all kinds. It’s more of a strategic design perspective than how we design a particular product or service.
CommerceLab: When you look to when you first began working with public sector clients, how much of an education process do you still have to do to make the business case for UX?
JM: I think the education process that UX practitioners need to pay attention to is their own. (laughs) Very often we think it’s up to us to educate these poor folks about the power and value of user experience, and there is tremendous power in design, but we’ll get opportunities to apply that and to build buy in when we work to educate ourselves about the needs of the people we’re trying to serve. It’s easy to focus on advocacy, when what we really should be doing is practice what we preach and thinking about those people we want to work with — those executives, those decision-makers — as another group of users. To understand what their language and their context is and then, and only then, can you have a worthwhile conversation about educating them.
When a public sector organization tries to transform a service and to deliver better services by taking in user experience, the things a UX project is going to surface are things that are going to require the organization to change. So there needs to be that expectation up front that this isn’t just about improving a service, where it’s going to be prettier and easier to use, but that we are going to have to change as an organization to support that kind of experience. And that kind of commitment, both at an executive level and throughout the organization is really important for success.
CommerceLab: What might be the barriers that prevent UX designers from practicing what they preach?
JM: There’s something I call the “double-S curve” of UX careers. The first curve is your learning curve, where you’re learning new skills and really excited about this. You’re learning about user experience design or interaction design or usability testing. You start to learn this stuff, you get excited about it and you realize how valuable it can be. Then you star to tell other people about it who might not be as excited as you, and the curve starts to taper off. Your skills grow, but you get frustrated because they might not see those things with the same importance. Then you end up grumbling and the classic line becomes, “Well, they just don’t get it.” Anytime we say, “they don’t get it,” it really means, “We’ve abdicated from explaining it in a way they’ll understand.” You can be stuck on that first curve. The next curve isn’t about user experience of users or user experience practice of wireframes or things like that. It’s about how well we can work with the business, how well we can work with the organization. About 11 years ago, I started to think a lot more about business fluency — how can we better understand the dynamics of an organization, how we can grow influence, and understanding the value we can bring to an organization is as important as the technical skills we might be developing. Until we get onto that second curve we’re always going to have pushback from people who think, “I’m hired, I’m good at my job, and now you’re telling me that I’m doing things wrong and that we should change how we do things here.
CommerceLab: Are there ways organizations can establish better mentoring other kinds of support to help them along that journey?
JM: The models that I see in the public sector specifically is there’s often a core team — it’s often not that huge, anywhere from eight to a dozen people within a certain jurisdiction, provincially or federally — that becomes a resource for the rest of the organization. They will often work on projects for a certain ministry or department or branch, they’ll bring a third party vendor, which might be how I get involved. That provides some continuity and some institutional memory for that central group, who becomes a core part of the organization’s capability. They can then become mentors to various folks who are in the front lines or in a particular service area. That’s the coaching and mentoring by doing. I think it’s really important that public sector organizations commit their own people to get involved so they grow those skills internally rather than just relying on a third party, whether that’s some sort of central group within government or a third party vendor.
CommerceLab: How do you see the UX career path evolving?
JM: I think user experience is getting more and more recognized. Certainly when I got started out in 1996-1997, it was sort of the “lone voice in the wilderness” a lot of the time, particularly here in Canada. We now have a lot more acceptance and understanding and demand for user experience design.A lot of that demand is bringing UX closer to production, by combining UX and development or visual design roles. But even more exciting for me is a the trend for UX designers to tackle more strategic leadership challenges like service design and even policy or organizational transformation.
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