Now the more than 5,000 Canadian-based Shopify retailers can use the same software that powers their digital storefronts in the real world.
“You can sell in store, you can sell on the go using our mobile phone app, and you can sell online using one system,” said Adam Mcnamara, vice president of product at Shopify, during the company’s recent pop-up event in Toronto. “What we’ve managed to do is bridge the gap between online retail and in-store retail in a way that’s approachable by small business owners.”
Shopify’s POS system
Retailers using the POS system for in-store payments, which attaches to any Apple mobile device, will now be able to put their business online and accept credit card payments with the push of a single button. At the same time digital retailers will be able to accept cash and card payments at pop-up shops and brick and mortar storefronts using the same software that powers their online storefront.
Mcnamara believes that at $49 a month for unlimited payments and locations, and credit card rates as low as 2.1 per cent, the Shopify POS system will have no problem competing with similar payment processing systems such as Square, which charges retailers a flat 2.75 per cent on all transactions with no monthly fees. He also believes the lower price point will translate into a better shopping experience for consumers.
“For the customer, lower prices to accept credit cards translates into lower price to sell products, so we’re hoping to bring down the merchant’s overhead so they can run a really streamlined, polished business, which translates into savings for the people who shop there,” he said.
Other features, such as automatically emailing receipts to customers and faster payment processing have the potential to improve the retail shopping experience for customers, but the real selling point for Canadian small businesses is the ease of having all their vital sales information in a single location.
“It’s the same interface, it’s the same setup for inventory and product and customers and orders, all managed in one place,” said Mcnamara. “From a merchant’s perspective, I understand my business better, managing outstanding orders and coordinating by customers becomes easier — it’s a quality of life improvement.”
While negotiations with Canadian banks forced Shopify to provide the service in the United States first, Mcnamara is excited to bring the POS system back to where it all began.
“We’re a Canadian company, and we’re really proud to finally bring Shopify Point of Sale back home to Canada now that we’re worked with the banks to allow us to accept credit cards here as well,” he said.
Photos courtesy Andrew Williamson
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Connor Dickie,
Synbiota
“Instead of bioengineering costing millions and taking years of your life, it costs just thousands now and takes months, and in fact it could be just hundreds of dollars and days,” said Dickie. “If the cost is going down, that means more people are going to get involved, and not just more people in big companies and governments, it will be designers and students and mothers. They’ll come up with really interesting ideas that were never thought of before, just like what happened in computing.”
Dickie, along with co-founders Justin Pahara, Pantea Razzaghi, and Mason Edwards have created an ‘open science’ platform called Synbiota, which provides complete access to some of the 400 projects currently being pursued by its 800 users.
The platform provides users with access to researcher’s electronic lab books, allowing them to either collaborate or build off of research that is already being conducted. It also allows for Twitter-like mentions, attributions, and hashtags, to provide users the ability quickly find existing research in areas of interest. This means that instead of requiring a lab and a research grant, everyday people can contribute their research and ideas from an iPad at a coffee shop.
“In terms of user experience for collaboration, we’re using the common tools that remote collaboration has been doing for the past 20 years in computing,” said Dickie.“A person who’s interested can inspect a project and look at any DNA codes that has been stored in that project, they can look at any lab notes and lab book entries and experimental results that have been included in that project, they can ask to join a project, and if they think there is valuable stuff in that project they can fork it into their own repository.”
Dickie adds that Synbiota has also recently partnered with a venture capital firm in Ireland called SOSventures, which has opened up a $300,000 fund to finance some of the projects that result from the platform, and provide an incubator-like environment for the life science innovations.
“People that come on our platform, they can sign up, start projects, do research, bring in colleagues, and they can also take their projects to a marketplace that we provide,” said Dickie. “The idea is to really empower the user with the full capabilities, from research right to market.”
Dickie believes that these tools will be vital in empowering everyday people to contribute to biotechnology projects, and while DNA coding isn’t as common today as computer coding, Synbiota has had some encouraging signs that the industry is moving towards the mainstream.
“We won the South By Southwest interactive accelerator, and we got the top prize in the innovative world technologies category, and that was fantastic for us because it really is proof positive that synthetic biology and this new type of biotech is breaking into popular culture,” he said.
Just as computing was once only accessible to major corporations and government entities, Dickie hopes that biotech will soon break free from the lab environment, allowing everyday people to contribute their innovations to a ‘bio app store.’
]]>Marchessault’s focus on art and technology runs far beyond the aesthetic and academic. “(It’s) about redefining places where art is shown, getting it out of galleries and museums and putting it in unusual places,” she says. Take Land/Slide, an exhibition she curated last year in the Toronto area suburb of Markham. By placing interactive, multimedia art installations within historic village buildings, the show riffed on themes of history, urban planning, cultural diversity, architecture and environmental sustainability.
The Project: In her ongoing Visible City Project, Marchessault examines how new media technologies and globalization influence artistic cultures in Toronto, Havana and Helsinki. In 2013, Marchessault helped launch Sensorium, a set of labs where academic research meets artistic expression and technological innovation. Part of its stated mandate is to focus on “collaborative methodologies between artists and scientists.” Case in point: Sensorium’s Future Cinema Lab, where researchers and artists explore new methods of digital storytelling via film, 3D technology, augmented reality (AR), mobile media and interactive Web content.
Sensorium is as much about technology creation as research generation. For Land/Slide, various AR apps were developed at Sensorium so people could use their mobile devices to enjoy an enhanced experience at the show. “That’s one of the research axes that Sensorium engages with: in situ, site specific technologies that exist in the environment and create new kinds of interaction between public spaces and technology,” says Marchessault.
The Progress: While Sensorium, Future Cinema Lab and Visible City are all ongoing long-term projects, Marchessault does have some new irons in the fire. She plans to transform a tiny schoolhouse museum in Toronto’s North York district into a public art installation using various display technologies to explore “the concept of progress.”
The Prospects: Though no commercial activities have come out of her research yet, Marchessault says some of the components developed for Land/Slide (in AR, architectural projection and embedded media) carry the most potential to become licensed intellectual property or be applied to existing products and services.
The Passion: Marchessault believes there’s a global crisis in ecological sustainability. She says digital technology can help engage people in environmental issues – and art in general – by making both seem more accessible and relatable.
“A lot of artists are using new kinds of media – whether it’s mobile phones or large projections or Internet-based artworks – to forge a new space where art can be a means of both creating this public conversation around relational forms of art or in developing new kinds of pedagogies,” she says. “It’s a whole new aspect of public space with all this digital technology. And a whole new concept of engagement.”
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Harvey Medcalf, co-founder and CEO of Arroware Industries and self-described “tech junkie and privacy advocate” recently launched myApollo, a social media application that hopes to address some of those privacy concerns.
“We want to create the exact same experience, but do it in a manner that’s inherently a lot more private,” he said. “We wanted to build something where users wouldn’t have to worry about a third party watching over their shoulder — something that gave them piece of mind knowing they retain ownership of the material they put online.”
What makes myApollo unique is that it runs on a decentralized peer-to-peer network so that all conversations, pictures, and user generated content is stored on the device of the user and those in their network. This is in direct opposition to traditional social media sites that store their data on a single server. Data is also encrypted so that it is only available to the intended recipient.
“The risk of having all of that information and profile and behaviour all in a single infrastructure somewhere is that someone could potentially compromise it and start pulling out information,” said Tom Moss, director of products and services for security software company Trend Micro Inc. “Even if you trust the service provider to deal responsibly with that information, a compromise to that information means that it could end up in third party hands.”
Moss added that social media users who share a lot of personal information are more susceptible to the threat of identity theft. If someone wanted to create a fraudulent credit profile most of the information they would require is available on social media sites, and the rest can be attained more easily once a malicious user has learned their target’s online habits.
“If somebody decides they want to steal your identity (and) try and open a credit card account or try and open a bank account, you’re essentially facilitating that by sharing all this information,” he said.
It is those types of security concerns that Medcalf hopes to address with myApollo.
“With people that are out there trying to cause mischief in the digital realm, (social media users) can be a very easy target,” he said. “Just by architecting the system in a peer-to-peer manner, we allow people to disperse content among the people that they trust, on their own trusted devices. None of the user generated content is stored with myApollo.”
Medcalf believes that social media users currently accept the privacy risks associated with them because there simply is no alternative.
“We’re trying to show people that it’s not about just abiding by the current system and the current ideology,” he said. “Now is the time when people need to go out there and pioneer the systems that will allow us to continue doing what we’re doing and what we’ve identified as being important to us, and continue doing that tomorrow and in the years to come in a way that’s sustainable.”
MyApollo is currently available on Android and iOS devices with a desktop version available coming soon.
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After completing a bachelors degree in computer sciences at Queen’s University, Bunt pursued a Master’s in computer sciences from the University of British Columbia, where she earned a PhD in 2007. Her research at the University of Manitoba’s HCI Lab focuses on how to make it easier for people to complete certain tasks using technology, “either by having interfaces that are customized to particular tasks, or looking at improving documentation that’s available, particularly web-based tutorials.”
The Project: In pursuit of improved user experience and design, Bunt and her students have been identifying and collecting data on problem areas and are proposing alternatives. For example, Bunt teamed up with the University of Waterloo to study how people interact with comments posted to online tutorials.
“What we found is that people post a wide range of comments on tutorials, a lot of which can be really helpful for people,” she said. “But the comments really aren’t organized in a way that makes them easy to use.”
Bunt and her students analyzed the hitch and built a prototype that integrates comments within tutorials while making it easier for users to search through relevant comments.
Andrea Brunt,
University of Manitoba
The Progress: While Bunt is largely focused on building a body of knowledge on the subject of user experience pain points, having already published a number of papers on her results, her research also attempts to propose viable solutions. One potential avenue that is of particular interest is utilizing the power of crowdsourcing to make interfaces more personalized.
“How can we harness (crowdsourcing) to the point where we can use it to provide help on demand, and provide interfaces that are really truly personalized to individual tasks?” she said. “I think we’re part of the way there. We’ve come up with isolated ways to leverage this human desire to contribute, but there’s still a long way to go in having it perfectly integrated.”
The Prospects: Unlike many innovators in the field of user experience, Bunt has no interest in commercializing or licensing what results from her research.
“I’ve got two young kids, so between the kids and the research and the teaching, commercialization isn’t something that I have a lot of time for,” she said.
Instead, Bunt has published her research in peer-reviewed publications and made it publicly available online.
“The hope is that people will pick this stuff up and run with it,” she added.
The Passion: “For me human-computer interaction is an ideal mix of a harder science and a softer science,” said Bunt, who has been studying the relationship between humans and computer software for over a decade. “I love the fact that we’re working with computers and code but in the end it’s all about whether or not the technology is making a positive impact. I love the interdisciplinary nature of the work.”
Bunt says she’s also driven by the opportunity to collaborate with students. “I really enjoy that relationship too,” she added.
]]>RBC recently got in on the augmented reality act itself, creating its own AR app. It uses the camera, compass, and GPS to understand where the user is, and what they are looking at. It then marries this information with location data for its branches, enabling people to see an indicator representing the closest branch, along with the distance that the user would need to travel to get there. All of this information is superimposed over the video image on your smartphone screen.
Sarah Rogers, senior manager for mobile strategies at RBC, said the bank is excited about how the app could help its clients. “In the original app, we launched a branch locator,” she explains. That used a simple map to show customers where the nearest branch was, but RBC decided that it might be difficult to use, especially if a customer was from out of town, or was standing on a street corner and trying to navigate a confusing intersection.
“Now, if you want to walk east, you might want to know where the branches are that are east of you,” she explains. “It lets you turn the phone in that direction and then see where they are.”
CommerceLab asked the other banks in the Canadian big five (BMO, TD, Scotia, and CIBC) whether they were using augmented reality. Those that responded (TD and Scotia) were aware of it, but not working on anything, they said. That would come as no surprise to Srinivas Krishna, cofounder of AWE Company, based in Toronto. His firm creates augmented reality applications for a variety of clients, primarily in the retail sector.
AWE targeted financial institutions early on for its services, recalls Krishna. “Who wouldn’t? This is Canada – they’re the biggest customers on the block,” he says. “But we didn’t go there. Banks have a high degree of security requirement around whatever they do, and so it seemed like maybe that’s something we could go to a little later.”
AWE focuses on using 3D augmented reality characters in its work, as a means of enhancing customer interactions and other experiences. One example is its “Time Tablet” technology, which superimposes 3D animations on the real world, to transport tablet users back in time and let them view scenes from history. They can also interact with the characters, who are aware of their presence.
Krishna would like to see this implemented in a financial services environment. “One place where this could be applicable is for virtual ATM machines,” he explains. “There was a mechanical revolution that happened, which is what the ATM was for. Now, there is a digital revolution happening. As services are becoming more digitized, there are ways to improve the customer experience.” Why should you need to go to an ATM at all, when you can interact with a 3-D character in your home, he asks?
Making cash withdrawals and deposits aside, perhaps there would be some merit in being able to interact with a virtual teller in whichever environment you are in, reducing the need to visit a branch at all. The attraction for banks is obvious, as they could reduce a key operating overhead.
Kevin Kee, Associate VP for Research In Social Sciences and Humanities at Brock University and the Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities, sees even more opportunities for financial institutions when they get on board. He believes that banks are already working on more advanced augmented reality applications.
“Augmented reality could be used for personal financial management to display a user’s financial situation vs what it could or should be,” he says, adding that wearable technology will play a large part in bringing augmented reality into the mainstream.
Google Glass, the wearable display that puts computer-generated images in front of your eyes and also uses a camera to relay video and take pictures, will be a key vehicle for new applications, he suggests.
Perhaps in the future, wearables will eliminate the need to carry credit cards as the user will be able to scan an item’s UPC code and have the amount automatically withdrawn from/or credited to a linked account, Kee muses. “Likely there will be apps that allow Glass wearers to scan a cheque and have it automatically deposited in their account.”
Rogers hopes that this will be away to help financial services companies work their way into more intimate relationships with customers. For example, a mortgage is isn’t the sexiest part of buying a house, she says. “It’s about your home, and your hopes and dreams for that home. How can we help you have more relevant information?” One way could be overlaying information to add value to customers about what they are seeing.
RBC seems truly committed to crafting these new relationships. In January, it released its RBC Wallet, enabling customers to pay for RBC Interact debit or credit card purchases with their phones.
It will take a while for people to be comfortable letting organizations beam more intimate customer interactions directly before their eyes. There’s a danger of feeling as though your bank is truly ‘getting in your face’. Experts in user interfaces, marketing, and law will all have to hammer out the issues. But game changing shifts in customer experiences don’t happen overnight.
]]>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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Whether it’s “The Top 10 Hottest Selfies” or “One Super Food That Burns Fat Like A Furnace,” at some point we’ve been drawn to those sketchy headline links at the bottom of most web pages.
The stories often appear under a banner “Recommended For You,” or “You Might Also Like” and are produced by third party content recommendation engines such as Taboola, Gravity, Outbrain and Disqus, whose clients range from TMZ to The New York Times.
These personalization platforms have become so valuable to content publishers that AOL bought Gravity earlier this year for $90 million. The game is to learn reader preferences to keep them drilling down into your content and serving them tailor-made ads.
Now, Toronto-based TruCentric is getting in on the action, but with a slightly different play. Instead of using third-party content, aggregated from “Around The Web” like other recommendation engines, the two-year-old startup serves up reader suggestions based solely on its own clients’ content.
“A lot of those recommendations will take you offsite,” says TruCentric co-founder Dave Datars, who understands online consumer behaviour having worked in sales for Omniture and DoubleClick.
He says the Fortune 1000 companies he targets “want to be their own show, rather than buying an ad next to someone else’s show.”
Datars, 46, also knows how to build a successful startup, having previously co-founded Sparkroom, a marketing software solutions company that was sold to Nelnet Inc. (NYSE: NNI) in 2010.
TruCentric, whose clients include two of the three biggest media publishers in Canada in St. Joseph’s Communications (Toronto Life magazine) and Transcontinental (Canadian Living, Elle Canada and The Hockey News), indexes all the content on the site and marries it with the user’s viewing habits. These it predicts through a proprietary algorithm that operates similar to those on popular shopping sites.
“We’re taking the Amazon model and applying it to content,” says Datars, who claims the old online marketing tactics of buying display ads is “a race to the bottom.”
He insists the future is in understanding your customer more fully and serving them more customized ads that don’t interfere with their experience.
“A web experience today is really the same as it was 20 years ago,” insists Datars, noting his personalization tool boosts engagement, measured in page views or time spent online, by as much as 30 per cent.
Datars also claims sites that use TruCentric have seen “two to three times the conversion rates on offers,” which is crucial for media companies trying to flog paywalls or other types of monthly subscription services.
Before launching TruCentric, Datars spent six months on what he calls a “listening tour,” talking to customer relationship managers at various companies and he made three key observations: display ads, also referred to as push marketing, were waning in effectiveness; these companies had more consumer data than they knew what to do with and weren’t able to take advantage of it; and that they wanted to produce more original content as part of their marketing campaign.
While the saying “content is king” has been overused, the future success of online media may be more about how that content is served and the experience the viewer has consuming it. The more personal and customized you can make that experience, the more likely the user is to return.
And the better able you are to predict a user’s preferences, the more content you’ll be able to feed them.
“We’re connecting the dots between the user and the experience,” says Datars. “We think there’s a real growth opportunity here.”
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At the first meeting of the Toronto chapter of Health 2.0 at the MaRS Discovery District two weeks ago, a panel of entrepreneurs — each of whom have found unique ways to fund their healthcare UX innovations — provided advice on how to get to market.
Jamie Tremaine, CEO and co-founder of GestSure — a tool that utilizes the xBox Kinect to allow surgeons to manipulate computer models’ hands during operations — suggests that it’s getting easier to pitch hardware solutions to investors, in spite of their lack of scalability.
GestSure in action
“There’s this growing awareness that hardware is getting as easy as software was 10 years ago,” he told the room of about 50 entrepreneurs, students, and health-care professionals. “We’ve been really enabling leading-edge hardware startups in the consumer space without having to raise as much money. Throw a Kickstarter campaign into the mix and you’ve got a recipe for a pretty large market share.”
The company, which was born out of Microsoft’s Kinect Accelerator program, has raised a seed round of half a million dollars from Canadian and American angel investors.
More than money
Rami Alhamad
Rami Alhamad, CEO and co-founder of PUSH —an armband that tracks weight-training metrics on smart phones — also believes that crowdfunding campaigns are an effective means of bolstering hardware startups, though not necessarily because of the money.
“The key with hardware is very rarely do you get to the point where crowdfunding revenue is sufficient to
The PUSH armband
operate the whole company, so you’re really using it as a proof point,” he said. “Companies that do crowdfunding campaigns have already closed VC capital and are using it as buzz, or they’re a company that are pre-seed and trying to show their investors there is enough interest in the market. We were the latter.”
Get close to your audience
Though crowdfunding is a great way to prove the market exists for a product, Blair J. Ryan, CEO and co-founder of TheRounds — a secure and exclusive platform that allows Canadian physicians to communicate and collaborate — took somewhat of a different approach to funding his startup.
Blair J. Ryan
Though he only recently launched the company Canada-wide from Halifax with $1.1 million of angel and government funds earlier this month, TheRounds already claims two per cent of all Canadian physicians among its membership. Ryan’s advice for entrepreneurs approaching a variety of sources during fundraising is to know their audience.
“Five of my angel investors are physicians who are users and fell in love with the product,” he said. “I’d say, ‘you can imagine yourself using it in this scenario,’ and they said they definitely can, and why wouldn’t other doctors? That’s a much different pitch than speaking to the government, who comes to the meeting with a checklist.”
Seamless Mobile Health’s app
Philip Chen adds that no matter where the funds are coming from, it’s important to start making connections early on, even before opening up an investment round. As the COO and co-founder of Seamless Mobile Health, an mHealth application that allows physicians to receive daily updates from patients and make recommendations, he has raised over half a million dollars from prominent angel investors.
“When we really started looking to fundraise we went out and talked to a lot of people,” he said, adding that he and his co-founders created a list of 50 people they wanted to approach for advice before asking for capital. “We went to show them the deck and if they were interested we wrote it down, and then once we got enough ‘yeses’ we actually opened up the round.”
While each of the entrepreneurs took very different paths to reach their fundraising goals, Nikolai Bratkovski, CEO of Opencare and one of the moderators of the event, argued that, “there’s no right or wrong way of raising (capital).” But there can always be new ways of improving health-care UX.
photo credit: a.drian via photopin cc
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“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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