Only Dead Fish

Google Firestarters 18: Mobile UX is Eating the World

For our latest Google Firestarters event last week we focused on all things good (and not so good) in mobile UX. We'd wanted to do something around mobile for a while at Firestarters, and the opportunity to line up three great speakers to talk about what it takes to create exceptional experiences for a mobile-centric world was too good to pass up so now was a good time. 

Daniel O'Connell, Digital Experience Director at Barclays talked from the context of reinventing long-established services for mobile, and how that might bring a heightened level of agility to a large, 300 year old global business. He used a great quote via John Maeda:

“It will no longer be the big fish eating the small fish. It will be the fast fish eating the slow fish – agility over scale.” —Klaus Schwab

— John Maeda (@johnmaeda) October 26, 2015

Agencies, he said, often under-appreciate the dependencies within large organisations, and underestimate the time and expense it can take to navigate through design, build, system integration and testing, and also to adapt these processes to become more agile ('when you've been lifting weights for years it's hard to suddenly be good at Kung Fu'). Mobile first, said Dan, does not equal mobile only. The physical parts of the existing service delivery (paper and branches) are still a fundamental part of the experience for many customers, and they still have a proportion of customers who don't use digital at all. Yet the rapid adoption of mobile and shifting customer behaviour and expectation is a positive driver of change, and an opportunity to redefine services and also ways of working. They have, for example, adopted more concurrent project working with some of their agencies to redesign services from the bottom up. Dan's talk was a fascinating insight into how new approaches, thinking, and methodologies and can not only contribute towards designing new customer-centric services, but can also bring a new level of agility to a large organisation.

Kartik Poria, mobile UX specialist at DigitasLBi was a late stand-in for Chris Ball (Exec Experience Director) who sadly had a last minute client emergency (we've all had those), but did a great job of running through a series of great mobile experiences that had been crowdsourced from the UX team at LBi. Kartik drew out some broad themes from some great examples. He talked about the importance of dialogue in creating an ongoing relationship, using as an example MumsNet's pregnancy tracker app that delivers content in a timely manner and which visually changes to reflect the stage of your pregnancy. There was a nice point about apps that successfully represent different states, like the AirBnB app which, alongside an elegant, simple UX excels at presenting two user states (renting or wanting to rent) and enabling you to switch seamlessly between modes. On a similar theme, there was Citymapper's ability to assimilate large quantities of data and present it in a fantastically usable interface, and a nice example of the re-emergence of augmented reality in the Tylko app which allows you to see what furniture pieces will look like in situ before you buy.

Umesh Pandya, Design and Product Lead at UsTwo, then talked us through the brilliant Wayfindr project which is the first open standard for audio-based navigation, empowering vision impaired people to move independently through their environment, and arising from a collaboration with the RLSB. Ume talked us through the rigorous user research and design process in which many of the team wore blackout goggles whilst travelling around London in order to get a true perspective on the needs of the end user.

The interesting thing about Wayfindr is that it is designing for a mobile experience like no other - it dissolves into existing digital navigation services to ensure that the experience is as consistent and reliable as possible.

Ume also mentioned that in order to achieve the scale of impact that is needed, they have set up the Wayfindr Alliance which is designed to bring together like minded organisations from various sectors to contribute towards the development and adoption of Wayfindr Standard. It was a fascinating and insightful talk about a worthy project.

You can see the Storify from the event here, and as always Scriberia have done a great job of visualising the talks, and you can see the output in all its glory here. My thanks to Google for hosting, to the excellent speakers, and to all those who came and joined in the debate. We're moving into planning for 2016 Firestarters events now so if there are any themes that you think would be worth covering do let us know.

From Descriptive to Prescriptive Analytics

How do most businesses project likely future scenarios? I suspect that most currently use conventional techniques like brainstorming, maybe predictive analytics, and limited numbers of external sources like thought leaders, and market research. In fact the latest IBM C-Suite study (which surveyed 5,000+ business leaders from around the globe) indicates that that's exactly what they do. Far fewer it seems (at least according to IBM) draw on more advanced and potentially complimentary techniques like simulation, crowdsourcing, insights from adjacent markets or even their own customers.

I'm not a data expert but when thinking about the analytics side of this there is an interesting framework I like, and one that you might call a maturity model (of sorts) for how businesses approach analytics:

• Descriptive analytics:- which still accounts for the majority of contemporary business analytics and management reporting, is focused on looking at historical data and past performance to identify reasons for success and failure
• Predictive analytics:- sets out to combine historical data with algorithms, rules and perhaps other sources of external data in order to identify probable future outcomes
• Prescriptive analytics:- turns predicted outcomes into recommended actions and illustrates likely results from specific decision scenarios. So it goes beyond predictive analytics in understanding not only what will happen and when, but why, and gives you decision options for how best to capitalise on opportunity or mitigate risk.

I like this because it aligns nicely with another favourite data model (the DIKW model) which is about deriving actionable insight (or wisdom) from knowledge (meaning, understanding), information (structured data), and data (raw numbers or observations). Whilst prescriptive analytics may be beyond the reach of where most companies are right now, it's not hard to see that as data analytics becomes more sophisticated, this is the likely path that many companies will want to take. 

Martec's Law

I was lucky enough to be asked by (friend of ODF) Scott Brinker to speak at his excellent MarTech Europe conference last month. I think Scott has a rare ability for astute navigation of the increasingly (and already hugely) complex world of marketing technology.

I saw the other day that he had tidied up his illustration of 'Martec's Law' (above) which he defines as the quintessential management challenge of the 21st Century, and which relates to the gap between rates of technological change (which is exponential) and organisational change (which is logarithmic). Scott's original point being that whilst technological change seems to be accelerating, organisational change is dependent on things that change far more slowly - attitudes, thinking, structures, behaviours, culture:

'The great management dilemma of the 21st century is the relationship between these two curves: technology is changing faster than organizations can absorb change'.

I've been thinking quite a lot recently about rates and pace of change. In his original post on Martec's Law Scott references how, in his book Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, A.G. Lafley talks about how strategy is all about making choices. This echoes something that Roger Martin has said about how: 'The very essence of strategy is explicit, purposeful choice'. Real, directional choices rather trying to do everything half-baked. So the key to managing this challenging dynamic is making choices. Says Scott:

'That is the crux of technology management. We can’t adopt all technological changes, but we can consciously choose some. Great technology management is choosing which changes to absorb — ideally those that are best aligned with the organization’s overall strategy.'

I'd also add that we should focus on the (perhaps slower) shifts in underlying behaviours that those technological changes bring. On a related point, Scott goes on to note that:

'We also need to recognize how entwined organizational change is in technology strategy. It’s not enough to decide which technological changes to embrace or to deal with the technical implementations of those choices. To succeed, technology management must explicitly address how those technologies will be absorbed into the operations and the culture of the organization. It must proactively coach, coax, nurture, educate, train, elevate, and inspire the people who will wield that technology.'

 Amen to that.

Two Google Firestarters in Two Days

This week we're running not one but two Google Firestarters. Our next London planner-focused Firestarters is this Wednesday, 6pm, Google HQ London, and will be on 'Mobile UX is Eating The World' (an honourable mention to Ben Evan's for the inspiration behind the title). We'll be considering what it takes to create exceptional experiences for a mobile-centric world, the big challenges, and the intersection between mobile UX, design, innovation and planning. We have some exceptional speakers including Daniel O'Connell, Digital Experience Director at Barclays, Chris Ball, Exec Customer Experience Director, DigitasLBi, and Umesh Pandya, Design and Product Lead at UsTwo.

The day after on the 19th at 6pm we have the next in our series of Firestarters for the performance marketing community, in which we'll be tackling the subject of the future of performance marketing agencies. With more media than ever becoming digitised and increasing proportions of advertising ad-served, the role of data in not only targeting and measurement but also in creative and optimisation is becoming a huge area of focus. So does this mean that performance marketing is the defining marketing skill of the future? We have more great speakers for this one including Matt Adams, MD of iProspect and Tom Byrne from Periscopix, and I'll actually be breaking with Firestarters convention and briefly speaking myself, to run through some of the highlights from the recent Future of Agencies work that I've been doing.

As always I have a few guest passes so if you'd like one leave a comment below or let me know direct, specifying 'planner' or 'performance' for which event you'd like to attend.

Post of the Month - October 2015 - The Winner

Delighted to announce that the winner of Post of the Month is Phil Adams for his excellent post on a lesson in pitching. Well done to Phil. The post is entered into the Hall of Fame. Thanks to everyone for taking part.