Dear agencies: Some toolkit suggestions courtesy of Salt, Pepa & Braden. Just replace what a startup calls ‘product’ with ‘campaign idea’ (app, site, DOOH, loyalty, whatevs…)

Clickable mockups

Most teams think they need to build an interface that functions and looks real before showing it to customers to get feedback. Nope. It turns out that if you string together a few simple mockups with clickable hot-spots, you can still get great feedback in a fraction of the time. 

Customer interviews

Instead of working in a vacuum, gather data to use as fuel for designing your product. Specifically, go out and find the people you think will use your product and talk with them about the problem(s) you’re aiming to solve. I know you’ve heard this a hundred times. Customer interviews are like flossing — everyone agrees it’s good for you, but it’s hard to build the habit.

It’s easy to get hung up on the details: How do you find people who will talk with you? What do you talk about? Relax. User researchers have been doing this stuff for decades, and there’s a wealth of knowledge about how to do it quickly and accurately. For starters, you can write a short survey called a screener to help you recruit the right people to talk to. Then, create an interview script to help guide the conversation.

Fake doors

You can quickly see whether customers will engage with a new feature by launching just the first part of it. Instead of laboriously building the whole feature, we just launched the first button. When we observed a huge number of visitors clicking the button to access that function, we knew we were onto something and built the rest of the feature. After a few changes like that, we saw a 3x increase in engagement.

Recon

When teams design a new product, they come to the table with all sorts of assumptions about the competition. It’s easy to look at another product and have an opinion about which parts are valuable and which parts are broken. But if you guess wrong, you might just copy a bunch of functionality that your customers don’t actually need.

So we like to think of competing products as free prototypes. We watch customers use these products and learn very quickly which features are loved, unusable, ignored, or hated. With this knowledge, we can make better decisions in product design, marketing, and sales.

Micro-surveys

Surveys are a tempting way to learn from the comfort and safety of your office chair. But designing a good survey is surprisingly tough. Whenever I talk with survey scientists, I’m overwhelmed by all the ways you can screw up a survey design and unknowingly get bad (read: useless) data. So when we run surveys, we stick to a pattern we know works well.

We put the survey as close as possible to the behavior we’re trying to study. For instance, if we’re interested in why a customer picked one of our pricing plans, we’ll ask them with a small pop-up survey in the moment, not an email that might get read days later.

And we rely on open-response questions that let us hear directly from customers. You’ll learn more from reading 100 short responses than knowing that 32 percent of users chose option B in your survey. 

Prototype with real data

Clickable mockups are a good first step, but you can learn even more when you build a prototype that integrates real data. You might be tempted to start building the actual product at this point. You might even call that work-in-progress a prototype. But it’s not. Building a real product always takes longer than you think. If you really want to learn fast, build a true prototype – one that you’re not afraid to throw away.

Site visits

Go to wherever your customers are, and watch them actually use your product. I know that sounds like common sense (or it should). But it’s too easy to think we know our customers from all the meetings, phone calls, and reports we’ve read about them. To deeply understand how people actually use our products we need to go to where they work, where they play, and where they live.

… today, much of Western society has gone from meeting their needs to gorging on disposable clothes. Take a weekend stroll on London’s Oxford Street or on New York’s Broadway and witness hordes of teenagers on their weekly shopping pilgrimages courtesy of mass-market retailers.

For this audience, ‘clothes’ are not cool enough. ‘Fashion’ is what lures young people into stores, which is the raison d’être behind these designer collaborations. But make no mistake, what is called ‘the democratisation of fashion’ is really the bastardisation of fashion; that is, taking a designer’s ideas and watering them down for mass consumption.

Real style is a matter of taste. And taste is a matter of experience. Just like one’s tastes in music, art or books, taste in clothes forms over time. It takes effort and knowledge. Buying into a style, quickly and cheaply, inevitably leads to the disposability of style. It’s like reading the Cliff’s Notes instead of the book.

Search YouTube for “H&M collaborations.” You’ll see bleary-eyed kids lining up hours before stores open in order to get some “designer” bargains. In one such video, a young gentleman says he arrived at H&M nine hours before the launch of the Comme des Garçons for H&M collaboration because “Comme des Garçons is a cool brand.”

Ironically, such brand worship was exactly what Maison Martin Margiela was against. For years Margiela was a designer’s designer, an intelligent creator and a pioneer of deconstruction who refused to talk to the media, letting his work speak for itself. The tags on his garments did not carry his name, but were pure white. He was a tinkerer, a sartorial engineer whose clothes often concealed their complexity.

Linda Loppa, head of Florentine fashion school Polimoda and former director of the fashion department at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, wrote via email: “It only appears on the surface that the Margiela concept can easily be replicated, In fact, the garments are not simple. The patterns require a lot of skill; the tailoring a lot of knowledge and attention to detail.”

In 2002, Margiela sold his company to Renzo Rosso’s OTB Group, which also owns Victor & Rolf and Diesel. Then, in December of 2009, he left the brand. And today, we have H&M x MMM. Two opposites have met. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who sees the paradox.

By all means, if you are willing to buy into this collaboration, please do, just don’t think that you are buying ‘fashion’ or a part of Margiela’s legacy — what you are buying are assembly-line knockoffs that you will discard by next year. But if this has become your idea of fashion, I urge you to reconsider.

(excerpt from: Eugene Rabkin / editor-in-chief of StyleZeitgeist magazine)

“The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.”

— George Bernard Shaw

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Facebook newsfeed is an embodiment of the war on noise. We depend on the newsfeed optimizer to protect our limited attention span, and as a consequence, Facebook gets to choose what stories we do and don’t see, just as Google chooses which search results we do and don’t see. Conceptually, this seems very lucrative: Facebook is auctioning off our limited attention span to the highest bidder, as long as the bidder has a candidate news story to promote.

//

What we are witnessing is the unfurling of the full-fledged Facebook business model. Facebook is showing us how they will cross the chasm from low-CTR low-CPM ad-units into what investors have been waiting for since the beginning: a Facebook analogue to Google Adwords.

The newsfeed optimizer

Picture the firehose of potential newsfeed stories that Facebook could show you. There are undoubtedly candidate stories that newsfeed never shows you originating from people that you have forgotten are on your friends list at all. Why is this? In reality, Facebook is already shipping a sophisticated real-time optimizer. Every time you post a story the algorithm attempts to quantify how interesting it is, and is constantly updating the interestingness score based on comments, likes and clicks.

If you only log into Facebook once every few days, the optimizer will go back over that timespan and show you the most interesting content it can during those few days. If you log in every 10 minutes it will show you the most interesting fresh content it can during those 10 minutes. Think about this for a moment: newsfeed is doing realtime engagement optimization that works well enough to be used by a large percentage of the world’s population. Newsfeed already has all of the properties of an ad-server… it’s just that it has been built to optimize on engagement rather than revenue.

The best ad is indistinguishable from content

We can expect to see Facebook deemphasizing traditional advertising units in favor of promoted news stories in your stream. The reason is that the very best advertising is content. Blurring the lines between advertising and content is one of the most ambitious goals a marketer could have.

Bringing earnings expectations into this, the key to Facebook “fixing” their mobile advertising problem is not to create a new ad-unit that performs better on mobile. Rather, it is for them to sell the placement of stories in theomnipresent single column newsfeed. If they are able to nail end-to-end promoted stories system, then their current monetization issues on mobiledisappear.

Open Graph = candidate stories for paid promotion

The idea of Open Graph is that developers and marketers create new verbs and nouns that can be used to model different actions being taken. ie “Bob just watched a video on Socialcam” or “Jane just planned a trip on TripAdvisor”.

Facebook has been systematically testing the amount of virality and engagement of the newsstories created by Open Graph. (You should also note that a large percentage of them are related to ecommerce transactions.) Every single Open Graph action that occurs is a candidate for paid promotion.

Do you see where this is going? Open Graph outsourced the widespread creation of incredibly flexible ad-units that look like newstories… in fact theyare newsstories. This provides a huge amount of potential ad inventory for Open Graph partners. For example, if person X bought a deal on Fab.com, it would make sense that Fab would be interested in paying extra for this story to be promoted to person X’s friends. Without Fab’s initial Open Graph integration, that newstory/ad-unit wouldn’t exist to begin with.

The thing to pay attention to here is the fact that Open Graph partners are creating billions of candidate ad-units every day. The vast majority of those stories will never be seen, but that doesn’t really matter, does it?

SEO/SEM = Fan Page Management/Paid placement

On Google.com, the ad-units are paid search results which show up at the top and side of search pages. (I recall reading a study that said that most casual Google users aren’t even aware that those are the result of paid placement.) From a marketers perspective, the best kind of Google traffic to get is “organic”, (ie free) that is the result of Googles algorithm ranking your page as highly relevant in search results. In addition to organic placement via SEO, a marketer will purchase paid placement to supplement and expand their reach and search-related revenue..

This is analogous to the Facebook playbook: Facebook users and Pages that create high value content which is algorithmically determined to be engaging will get organic visibility in the feed. Additionally, candidate stories that would not normally be placed into the feed by the engagement optimizer can be paid for wider newsfeed inclusion. Good marketers will implement Open Graph everywhere they possibly can: to get both free organic traffic and an ample supply of candidate stories for paid promotion.

/ @dalton laying it out and clearing the air after Cuban’s ‘We’re leaving Facebook’ declaration

Many human games are basically ritualised tidying up. Snooker, or pool if you are non-British, is a good example. The first person makes a mess (the break) and then the players take turns in potting the balls into the pockets, in a vary particular order. Tetris adds a computer-powered engine to this basic scenario – not only must the player tidy up, but the computer keeps throwing extra blocks from the sky to add to the mess. It looks like a perfect example of a pointless exercise – a game that doesn’t teach us anything useful, has no wider social or physical purpose, but which weirdly keeps us interested.

There’s a textbook psychological phenomenon called the Zeigarnik Effect, named after Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik. In the 1930s, Zeigarnik was in a busy cafe and heard that the waiters had fantastic memories for orders – but only up until the orders had been delivered. They could remember the requests of a party of 12, but once the food and drink had hit the table they forgot about it instantly, and were unable to recall what had been so solid moments before. Zeigarnik gave her name to the whole class of problems where incomplete tasks stick in memory.

The Zeigarnik Effect is also part of the reason why quiz shows are so compelling. You might not care about the year the British Broadcasting Corporation was founded or the percentage of the world’s countries that have at least one McDonald’s restaurant, but once someone has asked the question it becomes strangely irritating not to know the answer (1927 and 61%, by the way). The questions stick in the mind, unfinished until it is completed by the answer.

Game theory

Tetris holds our attention by continually creating unfinished tasks. Each action in the game allows us to solve part of the puzzle, filling up a row or rows completely so that they disappear, but is also just as likely to create new, unfinished work. A chain of these partial-solutions and newly triggered unsolved tasks can easily stretch to hours, each moment full of the same kind of satisfaction as scratching an itch.

The other reason why Tetris works so well is that each unfinished task only appears at the same time as its potential solution – those blocks continuously fall from the sky, each one a problem and a potential solution. Tetris is a simple visual world, and solutions can immediately be tried out using the five control keys (move left, move right, rotate left, rotate right and drop – of course). Studies ofTetris players show that people prefer to rotate the blocks to see if they’ll fit, rather than think about if they’ll fit. Either method would work, of course, but Tetris creates a world where action is quicker than thought – and this is part of the key to why it is so absorbing. Unlike so much of life, Tetris makes an immediate connection between our insight into how we might solve a problem and the means to begin acting on it.

The Zeigarnik Effect describes a phenomenon, but it doesn’t really give any reason for why it happens. This is a common trick of psychologists, to pretend they solved a riddle of the human mind by giving it a name, when all they’ve done is invented an agreed upon name for the mystery rather than solved it. A plausible explanation for the existence of the Effect is that the mind is designed to reorganise around the pursuit of goals. If those goals are met, then the mind turns to something else.

Trivia takes advantage of this goal orientation by frustrating us until it is satisfied. Tetris goes one step further, and creates a continual chain of frustration and satisfaction of goals. Like a clever parasite, Tetris takes advantage of the mind’s basic pleasure in getting things done and uses it against us. We can go along with this, enjoying the short-term thrills in tidying up those blocks, even while a wiser, more reflective, part of us knows that the game is basically purposeless. But then all good games are, right?

// HT @ymfy for the article

And for today’s POV, take with as many large grains of salt as it takes to season for your taste:

Confessions of a Big-Agency Top Digital Exec

“The best” isn’t necessarily a product or thing. It’s the reward for winning the battle fought between patience, obsession, and desire.

It takes an unreasonably long amount of time to find the best of something. It requires that you know everything about a product’s market, manufacture, and design, and that you can navigate deceptive pricing and marketing. It requires that you find the best thing for yourself, which means you need to know what actually matters to you.

If you’re an unreasonable person, trust me: the time it takes to find the best of something is completely worth it. It’s better to have a few fantastic things designed for you than to have many untrustworthy things poorly designed to please everyone. The result–being able to blindly trust the things you own–is intensely liberating.

– http://dcurt.is/the-best

// Mind you, this path can be blindingly expensive if you choose to purchase your way to happiness. The artisan route doesn’t accept American Express, but the daily deposits into your soul’s reserves of satisfaction, is priceless.