Experiences at an Airport

Airport is a place, where we are bound to come early for Check In and other formalities. As I reached Bangalore Airport and Delhi Airport 2 hours earlier to the scheduled departure, I wandered around and wondered.......

Some of my observations:

• People go around looking for something new and exciting around the airport
• A BMW kiosk was the center of attention. The Kiosk displayed BMW cars and at the bottom gave information about the airport.
• Many people were also going through the display of clothes by many Fashion retail houses like Tommy, DKNY etc. Interestingly I could not find even a single person buying or even trying out the clothes. But, some people were buying small accessories, chocolates, sweets and  most of the people bought eatables and food items.
• Regarding food items, I have observed that people are increasingly buying packaged food to be consumed on flight. This is becoming a phenomenon after low cost airlines have become a rage. These airlines do not provide "free" food on flight, so, I believe people find a wider variety and better deal on airports rather than on flights.
• Foot Massage chairs are usually kept for demonstration in malls and were available here at airports too. Noticeably, only a few use the chairs available at malls but at the airport, there was a queue to have a demonstration for the same.
• As soon as the newspapers came in, everyone jumped on them. Almost everyone picked up every newspaper daily possible. As I watched a couple of people, they browsed through the spicy parts of the newspapers and then kept them aside. Only a few went on to read some news articles in details. All such papers went into either waste baskets or got collected by an airport staff (I think to be sold in junkyard).A few people also saved the newspapers for the journey.
• When we got onto the flight, just a 2.5 hours journey, the observations were even more interesting.
• Most people fiddle around with every object around them
• The flight magazine
• The safety manual --> Some keep it back as soon as they pick it up, dejectedly, but others pick it back to read.
• People cannot make any calls using their mobile phones on flights. But, they keep playing with the device, just in case it would come alive and get them some entertainment (engagement)
• Alas, some people start small talk with their neighbors over silly things such as: how rude was the airhostess, weather, India etc.
• When we touch down, then somewhere in the back of our minds is there a tiny doubt over our luggage: Will we get it back? When will it come? Is it broken? 
• Public transport and public transport information from the Airports is still not all that great, although we get some options: Buses, Taxis, Metro, Shared Taxi, Autos, Shared Autos; but the challenge is in identifying what suits my needs best and how to know about it. 

I believe, Airports provide a lot of opportunities, and the opportunities are even more attractive because of one major reason:
  "People are actively seeking for solutions!"

Do share what other opportunities come to your mind, or what other observations do you make while in an Airport?

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Dissecting Discipline of Designing Experiences

Often I come across different viewpoints on Experience Design discipline about what it is and what exactly experience designers do. The executioner’s (in software business) school of thought is that experience design is the practice of designing technology products and services (each of which is a human experience) based on the consideration of an individual's or a group's needs, tasks, desires, beliefs, knowledge, skills, experiences, and perceptions. Thus, it results into achieving certain user goals and leads to a successful system acceptance by users.

The other school of thought is more at an abstract level that defines experience design as a discipline of designing mental journeys that leaves the customer with memories of having performed something special, meaningful, engaging, with sense of achievement or just fun and entertainment.

Like any other discipline, I think experience design can also be understood as an organized production system that is about creating output in the form of desired experiences using available inputs such as knowledge and ideas, and finally using resources in the form of design processes and skills.

Let’s take an example of thematic restaurants. Today, food is more of an experience rather than a necessity, as only a minor part of the average income (approximately 10 per cent) is spent on food.

Dining is a combined body and mind (sensory) experience and has aspects of culture and society. The body tastes, smells, sees, hears, feels and digests the food. The mind reads the food consciously and unconsciously in the form of activated emotions and memories.

Theme restaurants are cautiously designed to deliver customer experiences by influencing customer’s state of mind with the right ambiance, environment, lighting, music/live performance, and personal service on top of the food served to stimulate emotions like happiness and so on. A great deal of skills and processes are required to accomplish delivery of such desired experiences in the restaurant business.

Another example could be watching theater, which is another form of immersive experience thoughtfully crafted for audience. The stage performances are scripted around a theme to entertain and educate audience (selective sometimes) by stimulating emotions such as anger, happiness, surprise, confusion, and more.

The two examples mentioned above can help us dissect different aspects of organized experience delivery system.



Core Activity
The core activity is what a customer wants to accomplish as a task or an activity. For example, watching a play in a theater or eating in a restaurant.

The Concept (or the ‘Feel’)
The core concept is the theme that the customer admires and what the product stands for. For example, a concept “Happiness is in small moments of life and must be shared” is the theme of Unilever ice cream brand and is well translated into the design of ice cream packaging and ice cream vending machine designs where in a customer is delivered ice cream when he/she smiles into the face recognition system. See demo

Peripheral Experience
Peripherals are supporting experiences (part of the overall customer experience) to which a customer initially pays extra emphasis. For example, the way seating is arranged, welcoming gesture at the entry, cleanliness, and so on.

Core Experience
Core experiences are activities in which a customer gets involved physically and mentally. For example, taste of the food, dialog delivery of an actor, sound and music and so on. Developing core experience is a skilled job and the output is actively consumed by customers. However, core experience cannot be appreciated without a good theme.

Support Services
Support services are materials such as cutlery, menu, and order delivery that are used to accomplish the core activity.

Such a dissection would help in understanding design and delivery of experiences. In my next blog I will make an attempt to explore how a similar approach can be applied in design for software applications.

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Lost in Translation? Not Anymore

A tourist in a foreign country can only dream of knowing the local language beforehand. Problems begin at the airport itself, when signage are of no help, and go all the way to the local transport, making it tough to reach places or communicate with cab drivers, and especially when it comes to restaurants' menu to select the right stuff.

When you are in such a situation, you are always worried about either running into a problem or missing out on stuff of your interest (locations, food, etc.) because you cannot communicate or read in the local language. Now, Google has launched a smart iPhone app, Google Translate, that supports translation of 57 languages.

The app allows you to translate in and out of using words or using your iPhone's microphone. While Google Translate doesn’t allow you to translate without an active data connection, you can store your most likely used translations and phrases and use them offline.



When Google Translate generates a translation, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents to help decide on the best translation for you. By detecting patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators, Google Translate makes intelligent guesses to judge the most appropriate translation as output. This process of seeking patterns in large amounts of text is called statistical machine translation (SMT). However, in SMT, since the translations are generated by machines, not all translations are perfect.

While it is a great utility in time for travelers, it is still a machine mediator between you and the people around you who do not speak and understand your language. And the capability to translate the natural, free communication between the user and the people in real-time does not exist still. As a user of the application you are never sure of other persons’ interpretation of the translation either because of inter-language subtle cultural differences, voice and tone of the language, and/or lack of gestural explanations.

A company called Quest Visual has tried to resolve this small yet important aspect of communication. Quest Visual has invented a magical ‘World Lens’ application for the iPhone with amazing augmented really capabilities.



The application allows users to scan live views using the iPhone’s camera and translate words from Spanish to English (or vice versa) in real-time, replacing the originals in the same size, color, orientation and perspective. So now it doesn’t matter anymore whether it is a newspaper article, website content, hotel menu, or signage, all you need is Word Lens. The other exciting stuff is that the application doesn’t use active data connection to do the translations and therefore saves hundreds of dollars for travelers with active roaming data charges.

The application pushes handheld computing capabilities to make the optical character recognitions algorithms perform. The program runs the captured image through a filter to remove shadows and identify the sharpness around the text and removes everything that isn’t sharp enough. It then converts the image into black and white to further enhance text readability and do a dictionary look-up of the probabilistic text string for a closest match.

Finally, it re-renders the originally captured image by removing the original text and replacing it with the translated text string on top. Although it may sound straightforward, it is not really that simple by hand-held computing standards.
With companies such as Quest Visual creating such interesting and innovating stuff to make the overall travel experience more convenient, the future will be of an app-mesh created between augmented reality apps such as Google Goggles, World Lens, and utility apps like Google Translate with sophistication of two-way voice-to-voice translation.

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How to use QR Codes, or rather, how not to use QR codes!

A count of Smartphone users, counting only US users, at the end of February 2011, gave an astonishing figure of 69.5 million! This number is definitely going to rise exponentially and the proof is visible everywhere around us. We find at least a couple of Smartphone users in our circles and others who don’t own one, always eye the new Smartphones from the corner of their eyes.

And along with Smartphone came in smarter things like QR codes. A QR Code is a 2 dimensional matrix code created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The "QR" is derived from "Quick Response". The creator’s intention was to create a code whose contents could be read at high speeds.

QR code is in the limelight and there are no ways about it. In a horde to use this somehow or the other companies are breaking their head, day and night. QR codes are seen everywhere from an outdoor hoarding to a magazine cover. An example of how the importance of QR codes is growing:

“Along with HTML5, QR codes will become a far more important part of the travel experience.  These barcodes may soon be providing TV channel listings in hotels, in flight entertainment instructions on airplanes and itineraries on cruise ships.” -Ayan Banerjee, Senior Consultant, MindTree Ltd. Read the full article!

The tool is simple to use. Point the camera towards the QR code, and an in-built app will de-code the QR code to some data. This simplicity may have a lot of potential and appeal with the growing Smartphone user segment, but as long as it is not in the face of a user.

Here are some of the direct uses of a QR code:

·         To initiate a browser session – This is the most abused one!

·         To display text

·         To initiate Email Transaction – An email can be initiated and even the message body can be populated

·         To initiate SMS transaction

·         To initiate Audio/Video Streaming

A prevalent use by marketing companies is to replace the sexy looking advertisement with an ugly looking black-and-white QR code. QR codes are supposed to enhance the Mobile Experience of a user. But, this should not be at the expense of ruining the physical appearances and experiences.

Let’s see what happened when some marketers used QR codes in this fashion. Most of the users who still don’t have Smartphone, struggled to understand what it was about. Smartphone users who didn’t know about QR codes struggled to understand how to use it. Smartphone users who had enough of it, passed on! Effectively the marketer lost on the customers, who looked at that advertisement, and could have read on about it but moved on, since it was either not understandable or too boring! What we also observe is that most of the marketers end up using the QR code as an alternative for people to click links. Therefore, it is not surprising when people perceive QR codes as just a link to the main advertising page of a company!

Is this what the advertisers/marketers were looking for? I believe not!

Some golden rules to keep in mind when devising campaigns using QR codes:

• Everyone does not have a Smartphone
• Every Smartphone user does not know how to use a QR code
• Smartphone user who knows about QR code may be fed up of seeing them everywhere

Another key lesson for any marketer will be, to realize that QR code is not an alternative to a link. This has been over used and abused in all senses. It’s time that we think beyond this. Innovative use of these codes is the need of the hour!

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Information Design for Product Display on e-Commerce Websites

Designers often get biased to widely used interaction design patterns on Web. It makes it difficult for them to find a completely different way of looking at how people would like to deal with information dissection, manipulation, and retrieval on Web.

Many times there is too much of information, too much data, or too many options and choices to make sense of. Users can easily become frustrated or disengage if they can’t find a connection with what is presented to them. One such example is e-commerce websites serving millions of products across thousands of categories.

Most e-commerce websites serve product information in a list or in a grid view. Facet search panel on left comprising either check boxes or links, with bracketed number of products inside each category, is another universal pattern used for product retrieval and filtering. For example, a website selling digital cameras, printers, or flat panel television sets will allow users to filter assortments by technical information such as megapixels, aspect ratio, screen size, FPS, make, model, and more. Most of these facets are not useful for people to make buying decisions anymore.

Few websites show number of reviews to prove product popularity in the market without caring for how long the product has been there on the shelf. Comparing product features is not desirable either because it just rearranges the technical information in a big table where each product is a column and users are forced to scan the information row-by-row to understand which product is better over others. And as mentioned before, technical information does not anyway affect people's choice of product.

BE HUMANE

When people buy items of such kind as mentioned above, beyond the technical information they are interested in the purpose and use of such products. Let's take an example of an office purchase manager searching for a large flat panel television to be used in a conference room with a seating capacity of 10 people for presentations and Internet video calls. Internally, it can be mapped to technical information such as resolution 1024x768, low priced, and Internet ready, and more. Similarly, let's look at a man who wants to buy a digital camera to capture his son’s Tennis game. Suitable camera can be internally mapped to technical information such as high FPS, bigger aperture, and in-built filter, and more. In both examples, the important point is that people want to buy stuff that is aligned to their needs. They find it very difficult to map their needs to the technical search/filter/compare criteria provided by websites.

A designer should experiment with visual/information graphic facets that will allow people to filter and compare products on their practical and emotional needs instead of technical information alone. A very simple visual representation of information can help people make better decisions, and understand something that's really complex, and connect them emotionally.

POPULARITY

A product’s social popularity on the Web has become very important. Buying decisions have started to get influenced by people's online reviews of a product. It is time that e-commerce websites graduate from traditional popularity display patterns. Merely showing information such as "number of people recommendations," "number of people liked or disliked" or "number of reviews" is not good enough anymore.

Interface designers need to start experimenting with ideas that can generate popularity based on people’s reaction in a particular context, time, and specific need. For example, one could use data visualization, like pie charts, scatter plots, and relationship circles to compare two point-and-shoot cameras and display one being more popular than the other among amateur photographers for taking home pictures and not so popular among professional or wildlife photographers along with comparative results achieved. Such generic visualization patterns will add depth to the user interface and eventually make it more useful for buyers to make right decisions.

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adiVERSE virtual footwear wall

The future of retail lies in bringing together the worlds of digital and retail to offer extraordinary in-store customer experiences. Unveiled at the 2011 National Retail Federation Expo in New York, this interactive, real-time rendered product installation for adidas demonstrates UK brand agency Start JudgeGill’s belief in “connected retail.” The experience brings shoppers the products they want, even if they’re not currently available in a store, and gives adidas the opportunity to offer its largest range of products in even its smallest stores. Behind the scenes, the system is currently gender and age-aware and presents relevant products faster; adidas will eventually enhance the shopping experience by placing products in the context of the sport for which they’re designed. Once the success of the adiVERSE system for footwear is tested and demonstrated, there are plans to expand to apparel and accessories, in stores worldwide.



While this is a cool in store experience design concept. I am still wondering that this concept is very similar to web experience of http://www.nikeid.nike.com/.

In store experiences are all about touch and feel and in store social interactions. Customers walk in to Adidas store with bunch of friends and they spend time comparing assortment based on style, color, pattern, texture, price etc. Customers often see stuff online and make purchases in a nearby store. It is good that customers will be able to see all products even when they aren’t available. But can be a bad experience if they like something and not able buy instantly (specially for impulsive buyers)

I believe such digital displays can be a good idea for mobile stores where stores have dummy phones on display.

This installation works well when customer service reps are busy and there’s no one to explain the details. However, most customers typically wear the shoes, walk around a bit to check if it the right one. Maybe, they can use a combination of haptics and Kinect’s technology to give a real feel of the shoe.

Why a person need another interface such as iPad to check out the shoe?

Well, there can be various reasons to do so. One of them can be: In major metros the rental spaces are going sky high, the display is limited and in western countries even the labour is expensive. In such cases, you cannot have all the shoe models out on display in a mall commercial store. So, it is better to give alternative mediums to customers for checking out the collection. One such medium is Ipad, Iphone, or big touch screens as shown in the video.

But then why don’t we integrate later part (iPad) with the initial one (wall)? Suddenly, there is change of experience and person has to wait on the shop keepers to receive the iPad.

Possibly becuase when the person on the video said “now you can checkout” I was thinking OMG checkout on that screen …where world can see all the personal information !!!.

So having the checkout done on a smaller personal display is a clever way to maintain individual’s privacy. I am curious however to understand how they can transition the session from wall to a device like iPad, that is probably beginning of new era in transitioning from one device to another without breaking the flow.

Imagine you are working in office and you are half way through filling your appraisal online…., then you walk to train station and complete the remaining form filling on the phone (same session)…. Later submit it from home computer in the (same session). It is a good a way, to keep the our transactions secured.

Then the other question would be, why the checkout is not happening at the checkout counter?

Well, if we have same session then will it not affect the security, I would imagine that someone could get to the sensitive information. Well, that’s a valid point, But, for us to understand it, let’s go through a small exercise.

Suppose you walk into a shoe store. There is a security guard at the entrance. You go to the display counter and look through the range of shoes on display. When you like a couple of them, you ask the salesman to get the sizes for those particular shoes. You will even like to try out those shoes. Then you zero down on one of the choices, and move towards the payment counter. There the cashier bills you accordingly and you walk out of the store. The security may again check your bills and match it with the purchased items.

Now, we see that there are at least 3 people involved in the whole transaction for one customer. Many stores go away with the security guard. The store that we saw in the video has gone a step ahead and removed the cashier and salesman as well. In effect we have highly reduced the manual intervention, which is highly desirable in high labour cost economies or businesses where ratio of labour cost to purchase cost is high.

I agree upon the point that it would reduce the manual interventions. Here store keeper approaches the customer with an iPad. It do not seem to be a practical to me, to keep a person ready to take iPad to customer.

As discussed before, the experience at the store is to have social interaction through touch and feel.

Being to show rooms of cell phones, I look up those cell phones and I hardly read any information that is printed next to the phone. Instead, I ask the sales representative about the product. And make him compare on the different products that I am interested in. And, I know I might be able to get the relevant information from any other web source. At store, I am getting the experience of interacting with other person, who can somewhat able to relate to me.

I think a retail store is about the personal connection, real experience (look, touch and feel) and also to help buyer make their right decision. For instance – Some time back one of my friends wanted to buy a sports watch (Having features of Altimeter, Barometer, Thermometer, Tide Graph, Heart Beat etc.). He was getting a discount price online but not in the store. So he short-listed some models browsing the online product list, specifications and prices. He also read the reviews of those watches but was not able to finalize the model that he should go for. He was skeptical as the watch was pretty costly and the virtual image differed from the real one (look, touch and feel). Finally he visited the store (Bangalore Central Mall), had a real experience (by trying out, comfort, product aesthetics when he is wearing it, etc.), and talked to the sales representative and zeroed down the final one. After that he confidently placed an order online.

Focus here (Adidas) is to guide and motivate people to purchase by leveraging information of 8,000 pair of shoes (without having to be a flagship store), technical specifications, related videos and user feedback. But the real product display and sales man shouldn’t be replaced with the touch screen. (The salesman helps buyer to try out different shoes, Buyer decides the final one based on the comfort and similar other parameters) Therefore I think creating a virtual experience in a physical store will only help in getting information about the products in a smart way but cannot succeed in the real experience of buying the product by physically going to the store. If that was possible then the consumer need not go to the store and can buy the stuff online itself from home.

Success of a business depends on the end user’s satisfaction after using the product. One of the criterias to satisfy user is to ensure user to use the appropriate and right product for him. Physical store helps and guides user to do this in an effective and simpler way.

- Post is sumamry of email discussion on virtual footwear wall concept. Thanks to all discussion participants - Vallabh, Baizil, Ankush, Jana, Chinmoy and Veena.

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User Experience: Less is more?

The Argument
The concept of less is more stands true for content but not for images. While providing content and navigational patterns, users like to see less to understand more. But with the case of images, users need to feel it—which means that doing more with it is more effective and appealing it is to users’ eyes.

Have a look at what Alex does with his website: http://www.alextrochut.com/. With representative images and interaction, he proves that the more he showcases, the more his users would want to hang around.

On the other hand, with respect to providing content that is focused, the less you provide, the more you gain. An example of this could be seen at the homepage of Google: http://www.google.com/.

The Judgment
The contexts are completely different. If you want users to hang around and watch you, you give them more interaction elements along with an appealing visual design. On the other hand, if you want your users to handle a focused task at hand, you might want to consider the ‘less is more’ principle.

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Twittering My Life Away…

This has been contributed by Ujjwal Singh Grover, an employee of MindTree.

I want to share a slick web 2.0 application known as 'twitter' (http://twitter.com/) that allows to you to shoot short 140 character updates/response to people on what they are currently doing. It is one of those things that one would find completely frivolous and useless when one reads about it for the first time. You wonder, "Why would I want to do that?" Once you start using it and start following other people’s updates, it becomes extremely interesting and addictive.

It can also be tied to your IM so you can interact with twitter via Gtalk. There is no need to login to the website. It can also be tied up with your cell phone's text messaging so that you can always stay in touch with your updates. It’s fast becoming the telegraph system of the whole web 2.0 ecosystem since it offers an API (API is a way to build your new application using the infrastructure of twitter). That is, if I build a new application, I can use twitter as a pipe for communication between my users. As there is a restriction of 140 characters, one has to be very specific and concise which makes conversations on twitter very crisp.

You might think that it may be distracting to twit while working. But to me it serves as a tool to keep a tab on my own work 2 play ratio.

If you need to access me: http://twitter.com/ujj

Thoughts from Afshan Kirmani, User Experience Analyst

Targeting Different Markets
As compared to the west, this application can be used widely by other markets like India. Its popularity isn’t as high as it is in the other parts of the world. This could be because of several reasons like:

· The lack of informational knowledge
· The lack of motivation
· Poor targeting and marketing
· Poor internet connections

What we really need is the right knowledge, the awareness and the relevance of twitter today. Why would each market need this service? What would they use it for? What drives them towards it? This targeting is essential for a service to be widely known and used.

The whole system is built around conversations and with competitors like pownce, jaiku and plurk, twitter has several reasons to show itself off.

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Brand Experience in User Experience Design

There is a direct connection between customers’ perception of a company’s brand and the brand experience available through all customer-contact points— both online and offline. Defining, then consistently presenting a brand message increases the likelihood that a company can successfully deliver that message.

The 5 key elements to a customer centric culture by Forester research
- view customer experience as critical to meeting business goals
- share an accurate understanding of customers and their needs
- align company strategies with those customer needs
- support customer experience initiates from the top down
- have common goals across the organization

Some interesting pointers by Steve Baty
- recognizing that both online and offline customer experiences contribute to a brand image
- highlighting the importance of consistency between the customer experience across all touch-points
- working from the premise that an organization engages in a broad, complex set of interactions with its customers, of which the brand experience portrayed through its web sites is only one
- acknowledging the fact that a brand is inherently something we can only influence, not control

Reaching Larger Heights
As user experience designers and analysts, we need to begin working closely with business analysts and clients to provide them with what we know about user experience and in turn learn about brand experience which will help us build a team that satisfies end users with a powerful strategy that is determined by design, branding, and experience.
- make promises that a brand ends up keeping
- convert these brand promises to interaction requirements

Read more at:
Brand Experience in User Experience Design by Steve Baty

Brand Experience and the Web by Dirk Knemeyer

Branding and Usability By Jared M. Spool

Watch more at:
Forrester Research: Delivering A Great Customer Experience

8 Steps to Delivering an Exceptional Customer Experience

Forrester Research: Customer Experience = Competitive Weapon

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The Pret Cake Box

I was reading the label on the Pret Cake Box the other day - it's a simple paper box with flowery prints. On the side it reads

"Sorry about the ghastly paper wrapper. When you bake a cake at home, you take it out of he oven and cool it on a wire rack. Then you east a large slice (as a reward) and keep the rest in a flowery cake tun, like your Grandma used to!

Think of this nasty wrapper as the cake tin. It's the only way we can keep the cake moist and delicious. As is often the case, the beauty is on the inside"

There is a strip of greaseproof paper on top of the icing - it says, "Please peel off - greaseproof paper doesn't taste very nice!"

Look at it from a Customer Experience perspective.

1. I was smiling even before I took the first bite. Infact, I was smiling when I was paying. There was a sticker on the cashier's till that said, "We need to charge a VAT when you eat in. Nightmare". A good Customer Experience begins even before your customer has 'used' your product.
2. The person who designed it thought about the joy & fun of eating a cake. They could have very well used "Please peel off before you eat", which would have made me frown (What do they think, I am dumb!).
3. The VAT Sticker, The copy on the Cake package helped me relate with the product.
4. The copy on the cake subtly reminded me of postive and happy memories. It's a very intelligent use of words to make your mind be receptive and positive.

Much of these flow from the kind of company they are trying to build. Take a look at the Franchising page

"Franchising – sorry we don’t. Please don’t call us and ask for a franchise because we don’t; we really don’t. We don’t franchise. The fact is, we don’t like to franchise, so we don’t."

Or the About our Company page

We turn over roughly 150 million pounds a year and would like to make 9% profit but haven’t yet. One day we will.

The Experience is consistent on the website as well. It portrays an image of a open and honest company. A company that has your interest in mind and is not in the fray to make a quick buck.

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