The following is a mini-interview I conducted with Nanqian (Nancy) Xu, a design researcher who studied design strategy in the U.S. and now works for Samsung in China. I asked her to describe her work and interests.

PB: Please describe your current job role.

NX: My current job is the product researcher of Samsung Design China. Which my output will be linked to the design part. Mostly we do ergonomic research and sometimes quantitative and emotional research. We are trying to understand the local market and comparing with global market, to see what are the key driving factors of localized product usage.

PB: How design research similar, and how is it different, in the US and China?

NX: 1. Do be conservative. people in China are more conservative specially in less developed part or in higher income level (premium). Using camera (DSLR) is very disturbing while doing home visits. Not mentioned about the video. Best way to do it is to inform the people ahead, then use your iphone to take photos or videos. Do not point it to the user.
2. Do not bring foreigners. People in China will be more cautious, or curious about your peer than the topic.
3. Do check with the interviewee before your interview. Their availability, time length….Best is talk to them in person(phone), make them understanding you are not selling things or spam…
4. Methods? keep it simple. either direct or indirect, do not use complex tools. They will be frustrated than u do.
5. Gender? it really matters, or not. If you are going to a single lady’s home, might be good to bring only girls. (at least ask them before you go, to see if they are Ok with the group of people)

PB: What are the biggest things on the international design horizon that you’re interested in?

NX: To keep updated with the most best things, in every field of design.
We all know that youtube, facebook, flipboard or those good & fresh media are banned in China. Then I really need to know, and keep the social network and knowledge as a global level. To be localized in the research insights. but not be localized with the vision.
If you guys are having really good resource, like organizations, conferences,…etc, can be both online or in reality. Just let me know and I will try my best to make it spreading in the design field in China.

And last, dont get scared when I say do not bring foreigners. In a different type of research, like double mirrored room, market visit, focus group, you guys who are interested in China are highly welcomed. And with the help of local researcher, you can also peak into the real life of Chinese. People are open-minded in megacities.
Anytime in China, let me know. I will introduce some nice spots to enjoy the original Chinese living.

In Usography’s recent UX Audit, we reviewed the e-commerce sites of 100 top retailers. We were looking for the presence or absence of 30 features that we had derived from previous site reviews across a wide spectrum of e-commerce sites. A summary of the results are provided at http://www.usography.com/audit.

One result that surprised us is the absence of top tier e-commerce sites that have the option of viewing a product detail page in Spanish. The only sites that we were able to find Spanish product pages on, of those we reviewed, are listed below:

- Newegg

- Lumber Liquidators

- Victoria’s Secret

- Rooms To Go

- Sears

Rooms To Go link to view product page in Spanish

I don’t want to list the sites that didn’t have Spanish product pages, but they are easy to find in the list of sites we reviewed in the audit summary (http://www.usography.com/audit ). The audit summary also has a link to the product detail pages of all 100 sites reviewed.

Shop.org, comScore, and Social Shopping Labs have recently published their 2011 Social Commerce Study: Consumer Shopping via Social Media. The top line summary is reproduced below. Clearly, social shopping has not yet hit its stride, although the adoption curve is trending in that direction. The report recommends actions retailers can take to bring their social strategy in line with consumer expectations. In Usography’s field studies, we have observed and can confirm comScore’s assertion that mobile is a multiplier of social, not a separate channel.

1) The U.S. online shopper has gone social. Our study focused on the adult online population of the U.S. The study identified that 77% of the online adult population has adopted social platforms. Clearly the critical U.S. consumer for ecommerce is already social.

2) Consumers are ready and willing to shop “socially”. 42% of consumers have “followed” a

retailer proactively. This means that they have sought out the Facebook, Twitter or retailer blog

for a given retailer and opted-in to be contacted by that retailer via social channels. While the

overarching purpose of social media will remain to connect with friends, this shows that

consumers are also actively welcoming brands that they know and trust into a new level of

contact and dialog.

3) Consumers are following multiple retailers but this behavior is still in early stages. The

average consumer that has “followed a retailer” now follows an average of 6.3 retailers.

Consumers are liking and following retailers with – for now – low opt-out rates. The opportunity

for retailers is to build their fan base now and focus on genuine connection and interaction to

maintain that relationship long term.

4) Consumers want product discounts and deals but are also interested in product information. Retailers should consider a “VIP” execution whereby the proven tools of promotion and product information are given a unique and valuable spin for the retailer’s social fans.

5) Over half of consumers who follow a retailer say they have clicked through from a social platform to a retailer’s website, browsed products or commented. Retailers should take this established interaction as a strong indicator of intent.

6) Retailers must project their product stories on Facebook and Twitter without delay. Nearly one third of consumers who follow a retailer also indicate that they have made a purchase through a link they saw on a social platform. Also, when asked about their future intent, over one third of all consumers on a social platform said they would shop directly through Facebook if they were provided the capability.

7) Mobile is both an accelerator and a transformer of social commerce behavior. Mobile is a driver of social frequency: as smartphone usage grows, consumers increase the frequency with which they use social media, including shopping tools such as customer reviews. As retailers expand their mobile strategies, they must also consider how Facebook and Twitter interaction can be built in.

Channels are increasingly blurred to the consumer. Almost half of all consumers report accessing customer reviews using a mobile phone while in-store, a trend that will accelerate as more consumers migrate to smartphones. As women catch up to men in adopting smartphones, this trend will accelerate even more.

9) Consumers are not engaging with retailer blogs. Only 4% of consumers surveyed stated that they followed retailer blogs. With the exception of larger brands and lifestyle brands, retailer blogs have very low usage by consumers and may be better suited to goals other than community. Each brand must make its own call whether to develop a community on its site (blog, etc.) or to drive community using Facebook or other tools.

10) Consumers want access to what their friends think about products on the retailer’s site.

Retailers should consider Facebook Graph API tools as a way to bring the friends along.

More details at: http://ht.ly/5I2Yk

Google launched two new mobile commerce services that are likely to have a big impact on the retail shopping experience. Google Wallet and Google Offers are new Android apps that will enable customers to pay for products and redeem coupons with one mobile interaction at the point of sale. This convergence of mobile features promises to be a big step forward in the retail customer experience.

Google Wallet can use multiple cards, including a new prepaid Google card that the customer can use to make contactless payments at the point of sale. Google Offers is a marketing program that lets users redeem digital coupons that are dowloaded from mobile sites or swiped at the point of sale.

Field trials will take place in New York and San Francisco, with a wider launch scheduled for this summer. Google partnered with Citi, Sprint, MasterCard and First Data to launch the NFC payment service, but the platform is open to anyone who wants to join, said Stephanie Tilenius, Google’s vice president of commerce. Retailers partnering with Google include Macy’s, Toys ‘R Us, Subway, American Eagle Outfitters, Walgreens, Noah’s Bagels and more.

Tilenius described a more long-range vision for Google payments and deals. Google imagines that when customers enter a store, their NFC Android phones will automatically determine the location and begin working with Google Wallet and Google Offers to tailor the shopping experience. A welcome screen will launch with a shopping list based on your previous buying habits. I could see how this would be a good response if I requested it, but I certainly don’t want it to occur at times that are determined by someone other than me. I’ve asked several dozen millennials what they thought about such location-based services, and their response was more negative than positive, unless they had complete control over the experience. Watch a video of one of the negative responses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_1kOFVY3Bw.

To check out, the customer swipes the NFC phone across the reader and Google Wallet will automate the payment, and will include loyalty card and coupons if they exist. All three data elements are transmitted to the terminal at once. The cashier confirms, then the customer signs.

Google has said they plan to expand the functions covered by Wallet, including tickets, IDs, and health insurance cards. It will be interesting to see how retail decision-making will be impacted by these types of digital capabilities.

Regardless of the implementation specifics, these new features will definitely affect the way that customers interact with retailers. Retailers who start now to understand multichannel shopping behavior will definitely be more prepared to do battle in the digital shopping world that is rushing upon us. Usography is focusing a significant amount of time and resources on field research to understand how millennials (Gen Y) shoppers expect to shop using digital tools. Take a look at a sample research session at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFdo1jKphSQ. Using field data, Usography is helping retailers plan their digital design strategies.

Senator Jay Rockefeller finally introduced the long-awaited Do Not Track bill that is likely to wreak havoc on data-driven design strategy. The bill restricts the ability of companies to collect information on consumers who have indicated they want to opt out. The bill creates a universal legal obligation for companies to allow customers to opt out of being tracked on web sites and mobile devices, and authorizes the FTC to punish companies who don’t abide by the regulations.

For retailers, the bill could have significant consequences, especially if it functions like the “Do not call” legislation of a few years ago, with one call covering all the possible companies involved. It’s not clear what the final bill will allow and disallow. I agree with the need for privacy, but I think retailers should be able to track people anonymously without restriction, meaning that all personal identifiers are left out of the record.

We’ve conducted quite a few interviews with millennial females about privacy (see video about location tracking at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_1kOFVY3Bw).

We’ve found that, once people understand the benefits of being identified, they are usually in favor of surrendering a limited amount of personal information. Retailers will have to find a formula that incentivizes the opted in customer in order to be granted permission to track them. I think the best way to do this is also the best way to gain long term relevance: Provide value-add content that engages customers on a topic of common interest related to the product or service offering of the company. This path not only supports various programs like opt-ins and social media campaigns, but also helps SEO/SEM and long-term loyalty in the Attention Economy.

“Recent reports of privacy invasions have made it imperative that we do more to put consumers in the driver’s seat when it comes to their personal information,” Rockefeller said in a statement. “I believe consumers have a right to decide whether their information can be collected and used online. This bill offers a simple, straightforward way for people to stop companies from tracking their movements online.”

After a user makes a request to stop being tracked, the companies in question would only be able to continue collecting certain information on customers if it’s absolutely necessary in order for the site or service to function. That information must still be anonymized or destroyed after its usefulness expires, and the user must still give explicit consent for the information to be used that way.

For more info about the bill, see: http://tinyurl.com/5u8kxp2.

Thanks to Eric Schmidt of Google announcing that mobile has taken off much more rapidly than expected, and also to the surprising traction that the Android is experiencing in the marketplace, mobile is HOT. I’m happy about this from a shopping research perspective, because I think that mobile helps consumers make much better decisions than they were able to make in the past.

But I’m having a hard time with the concept of mobile as a channel. The more I think about it, the more mobile web seems almost arbitrarily associated with the mobile phone. The mobile phone came first, with big clumsy units tethered to car terminals as some of the widespread examples. But mobile is really NOT something more than it is something. Mobile is your digital data source (retrieval and capture) when you are NOT at a computer in your home or office. This is depicted in the image below, which is based on a painting below by Paul Klee, Rouge et Noir. It's the interstices that are interesting, Life.

At first blush, this is of course, semantics. But “just” semantics, I don’t think so. The solutions we have today are based on the phone, and on web sites made small. If you subtract phone calls, SMS, email, quick hit info sites that provide addresses or weather, games, special purpose apps, and Facebook, there’s not much left. That may seem like a plethora of programs, but the needs for mobile information are much broader than that. At any moment, I would like to have more information about my health, my finances, the whereabouts of my children, my marketability, decision making factors and alternatives, and much more.

The path from here to there is not simple. It will start when the user experience strategists and designers break out of the phone and little web paradigm that we currently are stuck in, and imagine a connected life. This is the kind of ethnographic research that Usography is conducting, and pitching to retailers. To give retailers first of all a multichannel digital design strategy and conceptual user experience, but then to go further and place mobile within a larger life context, so that we can solve needs that haven’t been solved before digitally.

I don’t think people 30 and older will usher in new forms of shopping, because it will require substantial personalization and customization, that they have disregarded in droves up to this point. It may be millennials, who have customized Facebook profiles as a matter of course. Or it may be the next generation, the digital natives, whose experiences have been supported by digital since they reached the age of awareness.

]]> http://www.digitaldesignstrategy.net/it%e2%80%99s-not-mobile-it%e2%80%99s-life/feed/ 0 http://www.digitaldesignstrategy.net/4-essentials-for-retailers-to-win-in-mobile-social-local-commerce/ http://www.digitaldesignstrategy.net/4-essentials-for-retailers-to-win-in-mobile-social-local-commerce/#comments Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:21:54 +0000 Paul Bryan http://www.digitaldesignstrategy.net/?p=246

Mobile / Social / Local commerce has arrived, as evidenced by the daily introduction of new businesses and offerings in these areas, and by conferences such as Social Loco next month in San Francisco (http://www.socialloco.net). In fact, I’m writing a book on this topic, called simply “Mobile. Social. Local. Stories from the Attention Economy. To take advantage of the opportunities presented by these developments, retailers need to comprehensively address 4 fundamental aspects of the rapidly evolving multichannel customer experience.

1) The Vision
The vision of Mobile / Socal / Local commerce is that, as a consumer, I can determine my best options nearby for spending my time and money, and that I can connect with my favorite people and companies whenever and wherever I want. The vision is not being able to blanket consumers within a 5 mile radius with messages about current promotions. Imagine being in downtown Atlanta or NYC or LA and being messaged by 5000 companies in a 5 mile radius all at once. That cacophany of voices would be a nightmare for consumers, not a dream. Some retailers might say that nearby consumers don’t yet know that they want to hear from us, and that’s why we need to message them with promotions. But that’s the wrong approach for the long term because this type of messaging will only make potential customers shut off the noise as quickly as they can. Instead, retailers who want to connect with new customers should first develop content that customers find valuable, while also supporting the brand and their product offering, and then once they are engaged, they will allow you to surface promotions that make sense in the context of that relationship.

2) The State of the Art
Some of the technologies for Mobile / Social / Local commerce are aready in place from companies like Facebook, Groupon, Foursquare, Google, Gowalla, Shopkick and more. It’s an area undergoing constant large changes, so it will take some resources to stay aware of the state of the art. But the effort is worth it, because shopping as we know it will evolve rapidly in the coming years, and imitating others’ success is not likely to produce the anticipated results. It’s a personal journey for each retailer to determine how to connect and engage with their customer base across channels in a social, content rich environment.

3) Steps to get from the Current State to The Vision
Retailers need to map out the steps from where things stand today to achievement of the vision. This will take some research to understand how customers want to use different types of digital devices to help them shop across channels. This isn’t known yet, because mobile and social shopping capabilities are so new that customers have not yet developed a clear, consistent set of cross-channel shopping behaviors. Trial and error took much too long in the development of e-commerce. Instead, retailers should hire customer experience research firms, like Usography (http://www.usography.com), to help them understand their customers’ behavior and plan a digital design strategy that offers a compelling cross-channel shopping experience.

4) Obstacles in the Path
Hopes are running high for Mobile – Social – Local commerce. But there are obstacles that stand between where we are today and the vision. I mentioned one obstacle above: the cacophany of irrelevant messages will confuse customers. Another major obstacle is privacy. New laws are in the works to protect consumers’ personal data and whereabouts. To overcome privacy concerns, particularly with respect to 3rd parties knowing a customer’s exact location, the major phone platforms will have to develop more intricate customization and opt-in settings, allowing customers to precisely specify who should know what about me. One last obstacle that I’d like to mention is Relevance. We have entered the attention economy, where information is ubiquitous and the cost of knowing your options is approaching zero. In such an environment, retailers will need to figure out their own unique relevance in the minds and hearts of their customers. Retailers who don’t determine their most compelling basis of being relevant may find themselves shut out of their target customers’ curated content streams.

If you would like to discuss practical steps retailers can take to address these 4 fundamental aspects of multichannel customer experience, contact me: paul [at] usography [dot] com.

A study on mobile search and digital commerce by Performics showed that 49% of mobile searchers made a mobile purchase in the past six months. Furthermore, 84% of respondents who use mobile web say they use search to find retailers. These data points indicate that paid mobile search and mobile SEO should be a major component of retailers’ mobile strategy, and not just an extension of the approach used in other digital channels.

Performics conducted the 2011 Mobile Search Insights Study with ROI Research. The study, which focused on people who use a web browser on a mobile device, also concluded:

- 57% use the mobile web more than once per day

- 77% have used mobile search more than five times in the last month

- 75% said that mobile search makes their lives easier

- 63% said access to mobile search has changed the way they gather information

- 32% said they use mobile search more than search engines on their computers

The study found the following usage patterns of mobile usage:

- 74% while running errands

- 56% while attending social events

- 47% while commuting

The prevalence of mobile usage during these types of activities underline the importance to retailers of reaching customers through a mobile search experience. Statistics about mobile tasks emphasize this point further:

- 84% look for local retailer information (phone, address, hours)

- 82% find online retailers

- 73% find a specific manufacturer or product Website

- 71% learn about a product or service after seeing an ad

- 68% find the best price for a product or service

- 63% search before purchasing offline in a store or from a catalog

To read the Performics press release, see: http://tinyurl.com/5vajkhm

The infographic below summarizes current high-level stats on mobile usage. Microsoft produced it, and there is a small space at the bottom for a plug of Microsoft’s version of QR stickers. One statistic I have questions about is that 35-54 women are the most active group in mobile socialization. First of all, what is mobile socialization? Does that mean that they are being socialized in the topic of mobile phones? Does it mean they are the most active users of social media on mobile devices. If it’s the latter, I flat out don’t believe it. And unfortunately there are no references. But it’s a good quick snapshot of the state of mobile + social.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia opened a high tech bank in Brisbane that combines iPads, iMacs, Asus Touchscreens, a coffee bar, and traditional bank services in a well thought out and carefully designed user experience. Patrons have the option of using multichannel technology to complete banking activities in the most efficient means possible.

As soon as customers walk in the bank, they see a row of iMacs waiting to be used for banking services. A concierge greets them, and helps them figure out the fastest way to achieve their banking goals, i.e. using one of the iMacs, iPads, and Windows Touchscreens, or speaking with a bank associate. They can complete many typical banking activities, such as open accounts, check balances, transfer funds and pay bills online at the iMac terminals, and staff members hover nearby in case they have questions or issues. They also teach customers how to use the new online options available from CBA in order to get faster results. On any given day, 50-plus staff are on-hand to help out. I guess this works a lot like airport kiosks, which are self serve, but which always have attendants nearby to help out in case there is an issue.

The teller is in the back of the branch, so that customers feel more comfortable trying out the technology before making their way to the human service organization.

A large flat screen monitor near the foreign exchange desk displays up-to-the-minute currency.

There are a number of iPads available in the waitng area for customers to use. They can be used to access the bank’s new iPad app (built using HTML5), or customers can use them as a diversion while waiting to speak with a customer service rep. The bank also uses the opportunity to invite customers to test out new bank apps before they launch to the public.

The high-tech Brisbane branch even comes equipped with a coffee shop and barista, offering free drinks to customers who have booked an appointment.

CBA’s blend of channels is a smart way to offer customers self-service options, while giving the bank’s brand a lift by associating it with unexpected technology-supported services and the cool factor of iPads, touchscreens, and upscale coffee.

Excerpted from: http://tinyurl.com/4w6pxfa