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.

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.

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.

People are carrying their cellphones and tablets into retail outlets more than ever before. The device that once seemed like an encumbrance to carry around in a store is now an important shopping aid. Customers scan product bar codes, compare with other similar products, check prices at other retailers, read reviews, look at extended product imagery, scan QR codes to get expanded product details and rich media, and, sometimes, make purchases. Retailers are benefitted and hurt by this process, since customers can check Overstock.com for a lower price and complete the transaction while staring at the same product on another retailer’s shelves.

What are the factors that they consider? Traditional e-commerce factors certainly come into play, such as the need to feel the product to judge its quality of materials; try it on to know its precise fit and comfort; scanning of nearby shelves to get ideas that are only tangentially connected to the product being considered.

Now add in location-based services (LBS) and shoppers have even more options, and retail UX teams have even more complexity to deal with. Research has shown that shoppers are not interested in simply getting more information while they’re shopping. The keys to a successful combination of mobile and local commerce are relevance and precision, with relevance far outweighing precision. Retailers who push noise instead of signal will find that their voice has been filtered out of the stream of communication, and they may not ever get a second chance.

Retailers need to understand the factors that contribute to perceived relevance when they design their mobile-optimized sites and mobile apps, because with mobile, it’s not store OR online, it’s store AND online AND everything in-between. Being nearby, thus triggering LBS messaging, does not ensure relevance; it only amplifies it.

Usography conducts field research to help retailers understand the behavioral factors that cause customers to switch from one channel to another for product research and transactions. See a sample research video of a multichannel shopping experience at: http://tinyurl.com/39syeca. In this video, the participant encounters a few disconnects in the shopping experience due to UX gaps in Target’s ipad app.

Note: In April, I will join Dr. Phil Hendrix’ panel on Location-based mobile commerce at the Social Loco conference in San Francisco (http://www.socialloco.net). We’ll talk about the topics above in more depth. Join us if you can!

Social commerce is the combination of social media and digital commerce into a single customer experience. We’re in the early days of digital social commerce, although the analog version has been around for eons. Social commerce is taking many forms in these early stages, but I think we have a long way to go before reaching a steady growth state.

I love social commerce because it gives a voice to the common man and woman that earlier didn’t exist on such a scale. Consider “J” below.

I don’t know if J ever got any material satisfaction. But I know s/he enjoyed expressing intensely negative feelings in a forum that was relevant to the purchase.

This is new. Gone are the days of the one-way onslaught of artificially generated awareness. Today the path to success for retailers is contextual relevance. In the pre-Internet advertising model, the customer’s relevance weas related to how closely they fit the projected image and would buy products to associate themselves with that image (still true of course). But in social commerce, companies are relevant because they fit into the life context of a group of people.

The winning retailers will be those who embrace the two way conversation, and are able to place themselves meaningfully in the context of on-going relationships. It doesn’t make sense for retailers who have the means to continue to avoid plunging into the realm of community, because it is inevitable. The winners will develop a voice that fits the communities they reach out to, and shapes the communities they develop themselves. As I’ve stated before, the “brand voice” is even more critical than it was when the voice did nothing but talk. Now it needs to listen, and see how people relate to it, and what they want to hear from it. Usography has field research methods as well as less expensive remote digital ethnography methods to help retailers understand their customers’ expectations, and design a multichannel customer experience that is social, mobile, and local.

This post elaborates on a topic that I touched on yesterday. In Usography’s studies of mobile purchase behavior, we found that there are three distinct types of interactions, or modes, that customers use they shop using a mobile device:

1) Discovery

2) Engagement

3) Transaction

Customers enter discovery mode to find products, prices, brief description, deals, and availability in a local store. They are aided in this process by mobile search, mobile sites of favorite retailers, coupon sites and group deals, Facebook Places check-in, and search engine results. This is the top of the acquisition funnel, where the number of customers is the denominator in the conversion formula.

Retailers are scrambling to put a stake in the ground to accommodate discovery mode. Many are scraping their e-commerce site to have a mobile “presence.” With the adoption curve of smartphones accelerating rapidly in 2010 and 2011, the discovery front door is rapidly becoming table stakes. That is, customers expect it as a minimum point of awareness for “real” retailers. If something awkward happens at this point, it is back to the dotcom early days, frustration and probable dropoff.

Once customers have made a connection and viewed the high level product information, they may move forward into Engagement mode. In Engagement mode customers are looking for product details, comparisons, multiple product images and videos, reviews, social media support, quick save lists, and purchase aids.

In Usography’s mobile shopping field work, the Engagement mode was where customers ran into the most trouble. The mobile shopping experience has evolved to a point, but Engagement mode is still rife with usability and customer experience barriers. Unexpected ones, like wanting to check availability and not being able to. Or the availability information is wrong. This has one reaction when shoppers hit a dead end on a web site ordering process. It has another reaction when they have taken the time to go to the store and the product is not there even though the mobile site says it is.

The disconnect in Engagement mode is due, in part, to inflated customer expectations. Customers have, by now, had lots of experience shopping on e-commerce sites. They have also had a lot of experience using social media sites on their mobile devices. These two disparate experiences have led customers to expect, unrealistically, the best of both worlds in their mobile shopping experience, one that is equally feature rich and trouble-free. And along with the high-power mobile experience, they are expecting new location-based features, such as nearby Deals, QR scanning, location of friends nearby or who have bought this product, location of a product within the store using a shelf locator, and more.

These elevated customer expectations are met with a number of physical and logical barriers, including:

- Limited bandwidth

- Different UI from home or work computer

- Limited screen size for viewing details

- Limited data input speed and ease of use

- Lack of an easy-to-use, unified folder system for saving the information found while shopping

- Difficulty sharing experience with other people present

- Limited bandwidth for videos and rich media

- Incompatibility among services

These barriers are alleviated to some degree with tablets, which have larger screens and easier to use interfaces. Conversion rates with tablets have already been shown to be higher than mobile phone conversion rates. However, the logical barriers remain, and are in part due to the information processing requirements of backend store systems. Usography posted a sample multichannel shopping video to illustrate the kinds of barriers customers experience when they shop with iPads.

The third and final mode, Transaction, is already well understood. Most e-commerce shopping tunnels are already very disciplined in terms of design elements to reduce information noise. In fact, mobile checkout may prove to have fewer barriers than e-commerce web sites, because marketers will have less room to create last minute “opportunities” that end up obstructing checkout progress.

Usography recommends that retailers focus research and design resources on the customer experience of Engagement mode, because it is there that the battle will be won or lost for shopper attention. Retailers should conduct multichannel research to determine exactly how their customers expect to move among the various channels at their disposal. They should do this sooner rather than later, while most competitors are still stuck on laying the rails for Discovery mode.

Usography has been conducting shopping field studies for many years, and we’re prepared to help retailers figure out the next steps in designing easy to use multichannel shopping tools.

QR codes are well-known in Japan, where they were invented, but only recently are becoming more common in the US. QR stands for “Quick Response.” QR codes are small white squares with squiggly black patterns on them. Swiping a camera phone over the code reveals its hidden purpose, which is to build a bridge between the physical world and the online world. A web page appears on the phone with far more detail than could be placed on the product or location where the code was scanned. In an unobtrusive way, they give people who want more information what they are looking for, while requiring only a very small surface area.

QR codes are especially attractive for retailers, who strive to use all available space for product presentation, rather than using it to display information about those products. The lack of space in the retail environment causes a channel disconnect, because online, the amount of information that can be presented about products is virtually limitless. QR codes can bridge the channel disconnect, making all digital content available through a mobile device in the store. Swiping a smartphone across the code can produce extensive product details, comparisons, usage instruction, photos, videos, interactive brochures, games, opt-in signup for more information or coupons, forms, and more. There is really no limit to the information that the code can bridge to on the web.

The link between physical stores and digital channels will revolutionize the role of user experience in large retail companies. Previously, stores have generated the lion’s share of revenues, and the online offering a much smaller percentage. User experience teams have been focused specifically on designing online interactions. With QR codes, the store experience and digital design are blended into a single experience, via a mobile device like a phone, iPad or tablet. So UX strategists must think creatively about how to exploit their new in-store stage. Multichannel customer experience and design strategy are areas that Usography has focused on for several years, and I’m looking forward to helping retail partners figure out the best approach to optimizing customer experience across channels.

QR codes are easy to create, and they are very cheap or free, depending on the service you choose to create them with. With Google’s free QR code creator, users can simply enter the link to send users to, and it generates an image of a tag that you can distribute. They don’t take any special equipment or technology to deploy, although the person reading them must have a camera phone and one of the many free code-reader apps. The codes can be preprinted on packages or simply affixed to a shelf, a wall, or other object. Usography’s QR code is shown above.

QR codes are likely to appear everywhere before long in the US, because of their unique ability to link a person from something they’re viewing in the physical world, to a location online. The main limitation with QR codes is that whatever information results from scanning the code must be engaging within the first few seconds, and it must be fresh. Otherwise, the early days of web frustration will be redundantly revisited all over again. This time, it’s not a click that has wasted their time, but a physical action and request for information.

Another limitation, although less significant, is that only a certain segment of the population knows what to do with the codes. That population is likely to grow very rapidly as the codes appear in more and more public venues.

Usography conducted a review of 62 retailer web sites during the 2010 – 2011 holiday season, and created the Retailer Social Commerce Scorecard to present the results.

We rated the sites according to the following criteria (illustrated on the winning site below):

1. Email to Friend
2. Customer Reviews
3. Wishlist or Registry (gifting)
4. Share via Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc.
5. Facebook Like
6. In-page Product Question & Answer
7. Customer Tags

The winner, with a perfect 7 out of 7, was: Urban Outfitters!

Also outstanding, with a score of 6, were the following sites:

- Amazon.com
- Sears
- Zappos

Many sites had some combination of featues 1 through 4 listed above. The differentiators for social commerce were Facebook Like, in-page product Q&A, and customer product tagging. We didn’t provide generic recommendations for a social road map, because that guidance depends on the social strategy of each company, particularly their goals for social commerce.

View the list of retailers reviewed, their scores, and screen images at: http://www.usography.com/scorecard. To receive a pdf of the full Scorecard, send an email request to: scorecard@usography.com.