The mobile phone, or third screen as they call it, continues to break boundaries in the content people are ingesting. Of course, the advent of the iPhone layed the ground for a turning point in the industry to treat your mobile device as more than a pure utility machine and into a sort of lifestyle device.
This turning point has opened the doors to a much more “mobile involved” customer, increasing incidence of nearly every phone behavior – with the notable exception of talking – but a particularly large increase in the use of mobile video. At 28%, iPhone users are 3.5 times more likely to use mobile video and TV than non-iPhone users according to GfK study.
There are three factors coming from the market that drive this adoption:
Better phones
The iPhone created an entire new category of phone – one that jargon is beginning to call smartphone plus. The screens are bigger and better, allowing for a vast improvement in video quality, and they are designed with an ease of use in mind that transforms the way we think about our phones.
Better networks
Most major carriers have implemented 3G across their network, which has sent download and upload speeds skyrocketing at near broadband speeds. The normal-speed internet surfing from your mobile has unlocked a lot of the potential for the phones to truly become the “third screen,” making video content simply a click away.
Better content
Here the iPhone had a triple role: 1. Allowing users to view and download the content they could download to their computers, be it podcasts, episodes or full movies, on their phones. Often in the Kress household, this means scrambling to download movies before you’re stuck on a plane for a number of hours. 2. Pulling in YouTube content from the start in an app that allows the iPhone user to watch any video on the site. All of those halarious clips that we talk about with friends became immediately available from our mobile phones. 3. The iPhone helped make another cultural shift when they opened the iPhone app store to third-party developers. This created a marketplace for people to customize their phone experience, with video being one of the obvious first choices. Joost was one of the first in the game, bringing its streaming content directly the iPhone in an app.
The mobile video craze isn’t limited to viewing content either. As phone cameras continue to improve and the software behind them meets customer demand, we are seeing more and more videos taken with mobile phones and uploaded on the spot to the video sharing site of your choice. We expect that consumer generated content, not typical video content, will begin much of the growth of mobile video.
The service Qik allows users to stream video content from directly from their phones to its site, sharing every step and experience immediately with family and friends. In the screenshot below, a Googler is streaming video from the Google I/O developer conference.
We expect to see much more from mobile video in the coming years, especially as the marketplace continues to adopt the large, touchscreen “smartphone plus” phones. Keep on a lookout for opportunities for you brands to get involved on the ground level of this growing space.
Targeting Audiences By Social Media Behaviors
Brian Kress
Forrester and PR-Squared have built a couple of models for categorization of the different types of audiences within social media and strategies for approaching them. Each brings up the concept of developing content and engaging audiences based upon what they’re likely to do once they’ve seen it.
The Return of the Infomercial
John Keehler
It looks like the infomercial is once again enjoying a moment in the sun. NPR’s On The Media explores some of the recent buzz, including a reality show and a documentary.
Mobile: The Swiss Army Knife of South Korea
Jeff Whang
South Korea, a society where mobile phone penetration has long since been a reality, may give us a glimpse of our future, as the iPhone and other smartphones and our mobile networks are finally starting to catch up. Click to read how citizens scan their mobile phone to get on the subway and compare their biorhythms to one another and how college students reserve seats at the library and pay for washing machines in the dorms by navigating to a website with their mobile phone. What’s their reason for conducting all these activities on their mobile? Because they can.
Mobile: The Paintbrush of Japan
John Keehler
In this blog post, a leading Japanese trends analyst looks at how the mobile phone has grown beyond a utility to a creative tool. Like South Korea, are we seeing a glimpse into our own mobile future?
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A Typical Day of Brands
Jeff Whang
A blogger set out to log a very simple thing: how many brands do we use in a typical day? She makes this exercise come to life with visuals and the result is…revealing.
In Defense of Eye Candy
Cam Beck
Stephen Anderson explores how aesthetic design choices influence understanding and emotions, and how understanding and emotions influence behavior.
Do Twitter and Facebook Compete with Google?
Brian Kress
Mark Cuban starts a discussion that weighs the value of Google against that of Twitter and Facebook. He cites from his own blog stats that he’s getting more referrals on his blog from social media sites than from Google search. It makes me wonder if we should spend as much time optimizing our content for social media as for search.
Malcolm Gladwell on Underdogs
John Keehler
Malcolm Gladwell thinks that when David beats Goliath, it isn’t luck… It’s hard work and strategy.
Monitor Your Email Competition
Tonya Klein
Email Data Source (EDS) offers six different email alerts to monitor what competitors are doing. They will notify you when they receive email marketing messages that match the criteria you ask for. Alerts automatically checks more than 40,000 email campaigns a day to provide you the information you request.
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Any Facebook user these days (which is pretty much all of us now) knows how potentially annoying apps can be. From biting vampires to “what literary time period are you,” we’ve all seen our fair share of apps we wonder why our friends use. But is that all Facebook apps are about? Just fun and games?
Well, not quite. Facebook apps certainly do attract the crowd of folks who are looking for some fun (Solitaire and Mindsweeper must have started to get old), but there’s a huge number of apps that have a somewhat more noble purpose for existence.
To get started, point your browser to Facebook’s Application Directory.
Click on the “Most Active Users” tab and you’ll see all of Facebook’s apps based on monthly active users.
Here’s a list of the top 20: (as of May 15)
Living Social: 31.7 million monthly active users
RockYou Live (formerly Super Wall): 20.3 million
Causes: 14.7 million
Movies (Flixter): 14.5 million
We’re Related: 14 million
Top Friends: 13.3 million
Texas HoldEm Poker: 12.2 million
Pet Society: 10.8 million
Mafia Wars: 10.5 million
Music (iLike): 8.8 million
Zoosk: 8.5 million
Birthday Cards: 7.9 million
Pass a Drink: 6.9 million
Slide FunSpace: 6.7 million
(Lil) Green Patch: 5.8 million
Bumper Sticker: 5.5 million
YoVille: 5.1 million
Mobile: 5 million
MindJolt Games: 4.8 million
Sketch Me: 4.6 million
At first glance, these apps seem to fall into wildly diverse categories, appealing to all kinds of niche audiences. But by digging a little deeper, we find that most of them fall neatly into categories aligned along some basic human needs. Here’s how I think they play out:
Entertainment Utility
Apps that have some basic entertainment value, typically silly games but serve their purpose. Apps that fall into this category include: Mafia Wars, Pet Society, Birthday Cards, Pass a Drink, Bumper Sticker, and MindJolt Games. These kinds of apps dominate Facebook and also have the highest annoyance-potential depending on how much of this we get in our news feed.
Texas HoldEm Poker is one of the best known apps in this category. Be careful clicking below – you might get sucked into the world of Facebook poker in one fell swoop:
Connections that Brand
Apps that connect us to people with similar interests, at the same time, branding ourselves. Think of these apps as a way to draw a picture of ourselves, or even find out what our picture truly looks like, based on the groups of people we affiliate with. Apps that fall into this category include: We’re Related, Zoosk, Top Friends, and (Lil) Green Patch. These apps don’t necessarily help us discover new things, but they do “officially” connect us in little groups to people we want to be seen as associating with.
Causes is a great example of this kind of app. I’ve pulled a screenshot of a serious one, Keep the Arts in Public Schools that has over 800,000 members, but you also have ones like “Save Water: Drink Champagne” that are more fun but also says something about the person who’s added it to their profile.
Discovery
These are apps that also connect us with others, but are focused on introducing us to new media, new thinking, new everything. These apps often use algorithms to eerily figure out what we’d be interested based on the crowd we associate with. Apps that fall into this category include: Living Social, Music/iLike, RockYou Live, and Slide FunSpace. Anyone who’s used these apps before know that you discovered something new as a result of connecting with your friends.
Movies/Flixter is one of the most successful discovery apps, particularly its movie compatibility test feature:
What Marketers Can Learn From the Best
As marketers, we should take note that none of the top 20 are created by traditional brands to sell anything. All the top apps, silly games or not, tap into our innate desire to either be entertained, to connect with others or to discover new things.
When we develop apps to drive brand awareness, preference or loyalty and want a strong, loyal base of users, remember to take a look at these top apps and not see them as just a jumble of apps with no purpose, but rather apps that meet a few basic human social needs. We should run any app we think about developing through these filters and identify which need our app would satisfy. In the meantime, try adding one of these apps above and find out which ones are most compelling to you.
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50 CEOs Who Twitter
John Keehler
Do any of your clients have a CEO who Twitters? Learn more about 50 CEOs who Twitter, including what they talk about and why they started.
Wolfram Alpha: The Future of Search Engines
Brian Kress
Harvard smarty pants Stephen Wolfram has developed a new search engine-like service that collects data from across the web and combines it in interesting ways to answer queries. For instance, when searching for “Microsoft Apple,” Google produces news results while Wolfram Alpha compares the two companies’ stock price over time in a side-by-side table. The “computational engine” is set to launch next week.
The Least You Can Do About Usability
Cam Beck
Steve Krug gives a great presentation about how and why to perform quick-hit usability tests on websites, and why it doesn’t have to be a big ordeal.
Yahoo Testing New Homepage
Karen Sznajder
Yahoo has been testing a new layout for the homepage to keep up with the competition. The biggest change is to the left navigation bar which will offer users customizable links to external sites. AOL currently allows users to create their own Favorites; Yahoo will give users choices through third-party partnerships and Facebook is connecting everyone. The homepage layout is not finalized and no launch date has been set.
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So you’ve been given the green light to redesign your website. Your peers have high hopes. Your boss has high expectations. Not wanting to disappoint them, your team must tailor your website to accomplish a number of things for your business. However, your efforts will inevitably fail if the people who come to your site cannot find what they’re looking for. How do you make sure they can find them? And how do you make sure it’s in the most efficient and desirable manner possible?
Here are some general principles your team must follow if they’re going to improve their chances for success.
1. Provide orientation clues
In most public-facing websites, your users don’t think about your organization in the same way you do. They have diverse reasons for coming to your site. You need to be able to immediately answer several of their questions:
Am I at the right site?
Your website should be able to clearly explain to anyone likely to find his way to your site that he has arrived at the right (or wrong) place. There are two ways to accomplish this effectively.
- Put a company logo prominently in the header, preferably on the upper left hand side of your screen. Make it so that clicking this logo will take the users to your home page.
- Include in your header a short website-specific tagline that explains your business. This isn’t an elevator speech and, unless you’re a well-known brand, your audience is fairly well established and static, or it happens to also be descriptive of your company’s purpose, it’s not your company’s motto, either.
Bad Tagline - netmarket.com. "Save Time. Save Money. Save Your Sanity." Okay. Ummm, what do you do, exactly?
Good Tagline - refdesk.com. "Fact Checker for the Internet." That's pretty straightforward. Now, can you deliver?
No Tagline Needed - Yeah. We already know you, eBay.
(Credit for examples goes to Steve Krug)
Am I on the right page?
Not only should your website assure your users that that they’ve arrived at the right site, it should also let them know where in the site they’ve landed. There are a number of ways to accomplish this.
Where should I go next?
Just as important as knowing where they are, your customers are going to want to know where they should go next. For this, you must make your navigation easy to identify and easy to understand.
2. Display system status
The website should always let users know what’s going on. This will help users understand that your website (and by extension, your company) is both helpful and responsive, because it never lets these questions go unanswered:
Can and does the website recognize me?
This is especially important if you offer some sort of benefit for registration and logging in. Prominently showing universally and reminding the user at key places within their experience that the site can recognize and meet their needs can help drive leads.
Though not as prominently displayed as it could be, this message on USA Today lets me know that I'm not signed in and one of the benefits (weather on-the spot) I can get by becoming a member.
Did what I just do make any difference?
Have you ever clicked something and nothing happened? Try to avoid it. Even as broadband adoption expands, it’s still important to keep your website lean by reducing latency periods. When someone clicks something and expects to get something in return, your website should not delay in providing it.
How long will this process take?
Sometimes your website must make some calculations, and latency periods are unavoidable. In these instances, if you know about them ahead of time, provide some feedback to acknowledge that the user has done something, and let him know that the system will deliver momentarily.
Gmail lets you know that what you asked for will be delivered momentarily.
Don’t rely on long-form copy to explain that the process can take between 25-30 seconds, buried somewhere in the paragraph and a half it takes to explain that they should click the button to get to the next screen.
3. Create a recognizable interface
For websites intended for mass audiences, recognition is better than recall. In other words, people who see something should immediately recognize how interacting with it will affect the system. By virtue of the way it looks, they should be able to answer several questions about it:
Can I click on this?
Put simply, buttons should look like buttons and links should look like links. If it’s clickable, it should appear clickable. Conversely, if it’s not clickable, it should not appear clickable.
Example 1: Click Here (Good!)
Example 2: Click Here (Bad)
What will happen when I click on this?
Will it take the user to a new page? Will it submit the credit and billing information he just entered, or will he have an opportunity to confirm his order information before submitting it? Clear, concise instructions and an intuitive interface, designed from an accurate understanding of the audience, can help make it easy for people to predict the website’s behavior given any intended interaction.
Example 1: Next button
Example 2: Proceed to confirmation button
Should I click on this?
Knowing what is clickable and what isn’t solves only part of the problem. The other part of it is communicating whether clicking on something will benefit the user. One tactic that is often overlooked is communicating to the user whether clicking on two different links will take him to the same place, or whether he’s already been to a page where another link would take him. To solve this, use consistent terminology and ensure your links appear different when someone has already visited a page.
4. Plan defensively for errors
You’ve done well, but maybe your users are in a rush, they weren’t paying close attention, and they either clicked on something they shouldn’t have, or the servers are going through convulsions at any given moment. How can you help them recover?
Help users quickly answer a few questions.
Why am I here?
Was it a server error, a bad link, or was it something he did wrong? Use concise, plain language, and format it in a way that is easy to quickly identify and scan.
What should I do next?
Imagine searching for Elvis songs in a music distribution application. What if you weren’t paying attention and you submitted “Elviss” or “Elbis?” If you search for “The King,” will the system return music options from the the or B.B. King? What if you’ve ordered Elvis music before, should the application recognize your preferences and deliver more meaningful results?
Example: Google Did you mean…
Search isn’t the only place where people can experience difficulties. Good prior planning can make sure users have some meaningful choices when they’ve encountered an error.
Will I be able to avoid this problem in the future?
Understanding why something went wrong is critical to understanding how to avoid it in the future. Whatever the reason is, communicate it. Even small, growing companies with server issues can avoid audience abandonment by assuring their users that they’re taking steps to fix the problem.
5. Test, test, test
Guidelines are useful up to a point, but every project is different. It’s a constant struggle to straddle the fence between being unique and innovative and providing something of value that people can actually use.
Since you’re dealing with goals that seem to be at odds (being both innovative and conventional), why not take positions that seem to be at odds with each other?
Be a skeptical optimist.
Don’t be afraid to try something new, but test your ideas. Test your prototypes while in development. After all, your website’s success is measured by how well it supports your business, and to support your business, visitors must have a positive experience on your site.
People find websites useful, enjoyable, and valuable for different reasons. But chances are that very few will speak highly of a company when they get lost on their website.
You’ll never be able to save everyone from getting lost, but if you follow these simple rules, you’ll save a lot more than you lose.
Other resources:
Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics
Don’t Make Me Think
Ambient Findability
The Design of Everyday Things
Defensive Design for the Web
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The Most Watched Viral Videos of All-Time
Brian Kress
Viral video measurement firm Visible Measures has compiled together what they’re calling the 100 Million Views Club – the most watched videos on the web.
Case Study in Building Mobile Community: Nine Inch Nails iPhone Application
John Keehler
One of the best examples of using mobile to build community comes from a band, not a brand. Nine Inch Nails, teamed up with tech visionary Kevin Rose of Digg.com fame, have taken the fan experience to a new level. They offer a mobile version of the fan site, complete with user-generated remixes, but they go a step further, using the iPhone GPS to localize conversations, and much more.
Innovation In…Online News Website Design?
Jeff Whang
CNN, NYTimes, Yahoo News, everything’s looking a lot alike these days, with maybe a snazzy video player being the differentiator. MSNBC has launched a bold experiment that reengineers how news stories on the web are consumed, layering on top of text, interactive elements like photo slide shows and videos. Though slightly disorienting at first, it gives us a glimpse of how a typically staid format can become incredibly engaging by integrating some fancy technology.
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