Us Artefactians regularly dabble in new user experiences outside of our daily client work that explore areas such as unfamiliar target audiences, new technologies, new UI mechanisms, or themes that spark our curiosity. As part of our experimentation platform, we recently added a shiny new multitouch display to our toolbox and were quickly inspired to set it up and start experimenting with it. Here’s what we did…
Musical Forest: an experiment in play and discovery
We have been doing a lot of work for a variety of kid age groups, so we decided to explore multitouch solutions for kids ages 3-5 years old for our first experiment with the new display. With this age group in mind, we designed and built a variety of features that helped facilitate “play” and “discovery” as the experience themes, invited kids to play, and asked them what they thought.
The experience
We set out to build a “Musical Forest” that included a variety of single-touch and multi-touch interactions. We wanted to focus on playful colors, sound and simple graphics that enticed our audience to play and discover what it can do.
As a result, we built a few main features:
A fruit tree that wiggled, popped, and enabled you to flick the fruit off of the tree.
Flowers that opened, closed, and encouraged you to “play” their petals like musical instruments
Background trees that allowed you to drag them around and discover the “fruit people” on them
Sound input, that allowed you to make the fruit fall off the trees if you increased the volume of your voice
Our learnings
Kids aren’t afraid to dive in The kids that we interviewed were not afraid to dive in and start exploring the life-sized display from the get-go. Annet, one of the children we spoke to who is 4 years old, was excited at first glance and began to tap on the screen from the moment she saw it. She quickly started tapping every element that she could see with very limited hesitation.
Young kids don’t rely on multitouch We originally set out to explore multitouch features such as two finger zoom. However, the kids who used our experiment never even attempted to use multitouch, so they never discovered these features. The only time multitouch was “technically” used was when multiple kids were using the system at the same time. Individually, however, they were interacting with the system using only 1 finger or their hand as a single touch point.
Kids love sound Sound was used in a variety of ways in the experiment. One of the successes was using playful sounds as interaction feedback along with visual feedback to help the kids discover interactions. For example, when Annet tapped on a fruit element, it made a popping noise. She giggled and “popped” many fruit elements until she discovered that they could be dragged and thrown around.
The experiment also used the kids’ voice as input. The volume of their voices determined the size of the fruit. And, if the kids held their voice at a certain volume for a period of time, it would make all the fruit fall off the tree. This was wildly successful and one of the kids favorite features. In fact, they played with this feature throughout the entire session.
Kids are physical Kids like to move around and use large physical gestures. During the interview, Annet would periodically stand up, then sit down, then stand up again. She also discovered that when she turned around, she could use her butt to “tap” on items and did this periodically throughout the interview.
Young kids like to learn from other kids
The youngest of the interviewees, Moritz, was 2 ½. At first, he was not as aggressive as the older kids in discovering what the system could do, but was very receptive to learning from them. For example, Annet would show Moritz how to use loud voices to make the fruit fall off the tree and she would show him how to make music with the flower petals. He would mimic her interactions, laugh, and enjoy the reaction. Ultimately, he was more apt to discover new things with Annet by his side showing him the ropes.
After completing our research that helped us identify insights and painpoints with current retail experiences, we believe that in-store and online shopping experiences will become much more integrated – particularly for shopping experiences that involve a great deal of research (i.e., shopping for snowboard/sporting equipment, cars, etc.). We also consider a variety of the latest retail projections and trends including:
Online sales are growing faster than the overall retail market at 17-24 percent year over year (according to Shop.org and Forrester research) and even though retail sales are expected to drop, the drop is expected to affect online retail much less than traditional retail.
As the U.S. economy continues to suffer, consumers are beginning to do much more research on both small and big price tag purchases.
According to Jupiter Research, 77 percent of all online shoppers employ user-generated product reviews and ratings and 25 percent consult social and community sites to conduct research on potential purchases.
With this in mind, we developed a solution that illustrates what the future holds for retailers who are attempting to bridge the gap between online and in-store purchases and why retailers can find significant ROI by implementing a different approach to in-store purchases.
Introducing: The Wall
The Wall is an interactive life-sized display that brings online capabilities into the store and onto products. Customers can place physical products against The Wall display and interact with related content aggregated from multiple online sources such as product info, related info, opinions, analytics, demonstrations and media.
The Wall allows consumers to:
find products available in-store and online
match them with other products
bring in opinions of friends, community and experts to bear on their decision
find collections of products to match a price range
interact with the display with their mobile phone
engage in the sport and culture – in the store
The Wall allows retailers to:
increase user loyalty and stickiness between online and offline channels
offer a unique shopping experience
give their sales force a boost
increase up-sell and cross-sell of merchandise
effectively leverage the inevitable force of social media in shopping
offer more than their physical inventory in the store
For more information on our research and envisioning phases, you can read up on our last few entries. If you have any comments or feedback, let us know. There’s been a lot of lessons learned from the project and we’re anxious to hear your thoughts too.
We’re in the midst of envisioning the Snowboard Connection project, which includes low-fidelity wireframing used to quickly visualize what the experience could be. So far we’ve generated hundreds of ideas that address the needs, motivations, and desires of both snowboard customers and retailers (insights were identified through our research phase). Through the process, we’re seeing some groupings/themes. Here are a couple that have been emerging:
• Finding/matching stuff
• Publicizing
• Being social
• Online content in the store
• Demonstrating/simulating
• Collecting
• Sharing
• Inspiration
• Gaming
• Instructing
• Opinions
One of our challenges is to design a solutions that meets the needs for two different audiences: the snowboard customer and the retailer, each with her own needs and motivations. We also need to consider feasibility, scalability, cost, and maintenance if the solution were to be implemented. So, for our next steps, we’ll be evaluating each idea based on a matrix of criteria and narrowing them down to the best solution.
When you’re doing the research, you can tell your audience what you’ve learned, or even show them in some meaningful way like photography. But why do that when you can let the people speak for themselves? Above is a video we put together that highlights many of the insights we’ve uncovered from our quick visit to Snowboard Connect and people’s homes. As Jennifer mentioned in a previous post, we’ve taken away from this research a lot of experiences we could brainstorm with. The goal of this video was to share the main messages we heard from customers to get their minds running on creating a better experience.
Recommendations
Here are the recommendations we wish to make to retailers who are involved with “high investment” shopping:
Help customers compare products in the store. You may not like the fact that they want to do it, but they will do it, and wouldn’t it be great if they could do it in the store? You may actually learn from your customers’ research process and adjust your inventory accordingly.
Help customers identify and evaluate products in store that match/complement/are compatible with their existing equipment and clothing – how might you enable this without requiring them to lug all the stuff they own into the store (which of course they won’t do). But remember, different users evaluate differently. For example, women shop by color, men by brand.
Look for opportunities to sustain excitement level between online and offline. If a user has done research online how can they reuse the information in the store? How can you avoid sending them back to block one when they walk into a retail store? And the other way around.
Help customers understand features and technology. Men hate asking questions and they will often walk out of the store if they can’t find what they need.
Hire people who do what they sell. Expertise is precious, even in these internet heavy times.
For any product category that allows for multiple levels of expertise to develop (like sports), consider treating your beginners differently, but be careful not to talk down to the experts.
Putting it Together
In conjunction with the video, we also prepared a presentation deck that contains additional details of what we learned, as well as some alignment with major trends we’re seeing in the world of commerce. We’re learning a lot about consumer behavior and how larger trends in technology and culture will play into evolving business strategies. Check it out and give us your feedback! We’d love to hear more thoughts from others.
Outlook
What’s next? We’ll be writing on some of our lessons learned from shooting video while doing ethnographic research in the field. Run and gun is certainly a challenging exercise that requires a lot of planning and resources. However, being able to replay those tasty observations again is a big plus.
The envisioning of the design phase is nearing an end, and we’ll be posting shortly on that as well.
Now that our commerce research phase has been completed, we’ve officially kicked off the envisioning phase. We’ll be taking a funnel approach where we will be using a variety of brainstorming and envisioning methodologies to generate as many ideas as possible based our research findings. We’ll then go through a series of evaluating and iterating the ideas to narrow them down to the best solution. Lastly, we’ll envision the interaction design for the winning solution.
To get us started, we identified opportunity areas that derived from the research from both the customer and retailer’s perspective and held a variety of brainstorming sessions around the following:
The customer
• Finding the stuff I want
• Finding the stuff I can afford
• Being Social
• creating a continuous experience
• Brand & culture
The retailer
• Creating stickiness
• Leveraging multiple channels
• Offering a unique experience
• Giving salespeople a boost
• Using social possibilities
• Offering more than what’s in the store
This resulted in a pile of ideas. We then performed an affinity, which led us to idea groupings that we evaluated and iterated on.
More to come…
Curiosities never seem to settle around here and we’re excited to share a little information on some work we are about to take on in the coming months ahead. Our goal is to extend our imagination regarding the commerce experience through the voice of snowboarders. More specifically, we want to look at how non experts enter the snowboarding arena and the challenges they endure as they try to not only learn the skills to enjoy the sport, but also acquire the right goods to do it well (not to mention look hot).
The reason over this excitement is because this is information that we can share with the public – transparently and specifically – with tangible examples. Previous discussions might have felt nebulous because we were respecting the confidentiality of our clients. However, this being an internal effort, we have more liberties to share, build upon and discuss our understanding.
What to look forward to? We’re in the midst of finalizing our research plan and acquisition of proper equipment to hit the field prepared to capture our observation. The next stage will include an analysis of what we’ve observed and hopefully an open dialog of the claims we make. We’re going to update this stream, as well as on our main blog to keep you informed with materials from the field, so please give us your feedback in the comments!
Later on, we will begin to explore concepts that have been informed from our observations and share them as well.
Sounds pretty typical right? Well you can make that assumption, but we believe there’s a lot of room to be creative within the processes to make this interesting for anyone, not just designers and researchers alike.
Expect another post shortly covering our research approach and what we hope to deliver. Thanks!
