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:

1. A fruit tree that wiggled, popped, and enabled you to flick the fruit off of the tree.
2. Flowers that opened, closed, and encouraged you to “play” their petals like musical instruments
3. Background trees that allowed you to drag them around and discover the “fruit people” on them
4. 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.

[tweetmeme]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.

Time for eCommerce Window Dressing Highlighting Brand Value (on practicalecommerce.com)
Shopping User Experiences (on practicalecommerce.com)
Snowboard Connection consumer highlights reel
Snowbird concepting & wireframing
How to film customer insights camera operator

For more information on this project, please send us an email. We would love to hear your thoughts!

[tweetmeme]Digital still and motion imaging has come a long way. As technology continues to grant us the luxury of shooting in the dark, record events unseen like a ninja and render them with emotive qualities, it’s becoming easier for researchers to share stories from the field and stir the emotional pot. As one of our Design Directors point out, Ken Fry, video is a compelling outlet to get the emotional draw we need as part of our research goals. Below I’m going to share a few quick thoughts on what we’ve learned so far as we get deeper in all this video business.

This is going to be a 3 part series on how you can film participants as part of a customer insights deliverable.  This is a specific type of output that does 3 things for us:

1. Greater client engagement by selling high level insights from the participant themselves
2. Greater audience immersion (designers and clients) in the research without the paperwork
3. Greater distribution and communication because of its sharable format

I will cover this in 3 parts because there are key roles that need to be filled in order to do this smoothly.  Having an individual for each role would be ideal, but I understand that constraints due to resourcing can be a challenge. I advice that you get at least 2 people on the team because there are a lot of variable to track and you need someone to pay attention before things go wrong. Next, clarify who is in charge of each role and how the responsibilities are divided. Let me repeat, make it clear like oil and water that everyone knows their role.  The first of this as you can read is the Camera Operator (CO). Following this post I will focus on the Producer and then the Researcher role. The CO seems like the most unique role in terms of a traditional research study, so I will dive into that first.

Responsibilities

Generally the camera operator is in charge of all things related to the image and sound of the capture. It’s rather vague, I know, but I will go into a little more detail about how these two things can make or break a final reel. To learn more about shooting film, check out the resources below. What might be more interesting is how those practices impact the research output.

Composition

Framing can be an artistic exploration, but for our purposes, we wish to follow a documentary style. There are 3 simple ways to talk about it:

• Establishing your scene
• Providing perspective
• Showing emotion

An establishing shot is a wide angle shot that captures the context that you are filming. If you’re filming an in store shopping experience, show the entire store from the outside and also show the person you’re talking to surrounded by their environment. This tells the viewer where the person is and what to expect from the video. You will always need an establishing shot any time you introduce a new context. It makes it a lot clearer to the viewer what is going on and makes it easier for them to enjoy the video. Viewers are smart people, they can connect dots really quickly.

B-Reel/Roll

Sitting and watching a talking head is only marginally interesting. Instead, you may consider capturing extra footage on other things that are relevant to the scene itself. For instance, if a person is talking about how much text messaging they do in a day, it would be good to not only note that, but to also take some footage of them holding and gesturing their phone. You can then cut that bit into your video with a voice over of them speaking to it. These cut scenes keep the video interesting and engaging. More importantly, you want to incorporate the artifacts that make up the person’s experience and tells a more holistic story. You can capture B-reel footage during the study with a second camera or you can capture it before/after the study has completed. If you do the latter, take note of what was interesting during the study and use that as a shortlist when you’re ready.

Another way to think about it is considering it as a field visit. It’s not uncommon to visit a location to understand environments potential users experience. You look at the same things such as technology availability, activity flow and key interactions (software and human to human). By capturing these different observable things, you essentially have your B-Reel footage halfway captured!

Lighting

If you can help it, rent a lighting kit. They’re cheap ($25 for a day) and it makes life so much easier. Otherwise, find a location that gets a lot of light. The more light you have, the cleaner your video will be. Increasing gain, or sensitivity, on our camera to compensate for the low levels of light should only be used as a last resort. Doing so will make the footage noisy and you will end up losing details that make an image feel sharp.

This is also something you can do and monitor while doing your initial field visit. As you shoot the B-Reel, you will visually see how well the lighting looks and how that impacts the quality. Take note of where the good spots are and where you will run into complications. For our Snowbird project, we spent a day hanging out at Snowboard Connection with our cameras shooting people shopping, buying stuff and racks full of merchandise. We were able to see where we can bring people in to get enough lighting, as well as capture some of the B-Reel that tell the viewer what the environment is like as part of the experience.

Sound

Here’s the funny thing: You can have poor video quality and great audio and still have a good story. On the other hand, you cannot have great video quality and poor audio and still have a good story. The clarity of the sound trumps the visual part of video. Plain and simple. You would be doing justice to your deliverable by ensuring the audio you record is clean and noise free. This requires that you purchase a decent lavaliere and you control everything in the area that makes noise.

Untethering audio

I recommend a lavaliere because you can find wireless sets for a good price and they will always record at a consistent level no matter where you are with the camera. Using other devices like a boom mic will result in excellent audio as well as eliminating the mic being clipped onto the person’s shirt. However, using it means you need another person who is responsible for holding it and moving it as the person moves. Not very unobtrusive. A shotgun mic might also be an affordable solution, but if there is a lot of movement in a run and gun situation where the person will change distance from the camera then you end up with inconsistent levels. So really, stick with a wireless lavaliere for now unless you can guarantee more resources.

The location you choose to shoot might have noise coming from different places. It’s important to take the time to eliminate them before shooting. If you’re in a person’s home doing an in situ recording, ask to unplug the fridge or air conditioner if it poses a potential problem. At work, we tend to have music playing. Take a moment to remind people that a session will be running and to keep music low with signs around the area. These simple things will make a big difference. Not to mention, you only get one shot at it with a participant who only has 60 minutes available to you.

General Tips

• Get a decent video tripod or a monopod
• Take time to learn the ins and outs of your camera. Once you do, turn off the auto settings
• Bring extra batteries on hand
• Bring extra tapes on hand
• Coordinate with the researcher on what shots to expect in relation to the discussion guide
• Take at least 30 minutes between each session to break, review notes and adapt

Resources

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_operator
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_(visual_arts)
• http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1554-how-to-film-customer-case-study-videos
• http://lifehacker.com/software/digital-video/8-ways-to-shoot-video-like-a-pro-214043.php
• http://www.desktop-video-guide.com/shoot-video.html
• http://digital-photography-school.com/digital-photography-tips-for-beginners

(concept 034: the matchmaker)

[tweetmeme]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.

More to come…

Snowbird Video Ethnography from Artefact on Vimeo.

[tweetmeme]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…

Meet John Logic, Store Owner and Problem Solver of Snowboard Connection from Artefact on Vimeo.

Meet John Logic. As co-owner and all around great guy of a popular local board shop, Snowboard Connection (Snocon), he works hard everyday solving problems as they walk through his doors. To him and the rest of his staff, it is about solving problems. We came to John to talk to him for 60 minutes about what makes Snocon a special place for him and his customers. The video above shows some of the highlights from our conversation with him. Below are additional notes from the interview.

Observations From The Field

Motivations

• Motivated to get people excited about snowboarding, or board sports in general
• Motivated by Nordstrom quality service (sales approach, policy and culture)
• Snowboarding is more than a sport, it’s a lifestyle
• Desires to make Snocon a place to hang out and socialize
• Major challenge this coming year is a decrease in consumer spending for an already expensive recreation

Behaviors

• Exist to solve people’s problems. Finding the right match based on customer’s experience and equipment
• Snocon reaches out to their community through events that they hold in store
• Some customers tend to make decisions solely off of aesthetic design of the graphics vs actual usefulness
• Girls shop by color where guys shop by brand
• Once a customer has a bad experience with a brand, they don’t return to it
• Limit to 3-4 choices at any one time, otherwise it becomes overwhelming for customers and they lose attention
• They serve beer in store as a gesture for trust and comfort

Roles

• Energizer
• Problem Solver
• Community Leader
• Decision Maker
• Facilitator
• Connector

Environments

• Limited in store brand presence to keep Snocon brand the more predominant one
• High online brand presence to sell products through ecommerce channel
• In store experiences offer a perspective that customers can’t get from just reading (trying out boots or boards)

Technology

• Vendor links and P2P business is the most efficient use of money for their online marketing
• Point of Sales (POS) and the E-Commerce site are the same. Everything is web based
• Brands design and provide fixtures for Snocon to use in store as a way to advertise and market
• Computer available on the floor to look up products via web

Our favorite insight? Snocon is driven by the quality of customer service other retailers like Nordstrom offers and competes with them on delivering that level of service for board sport products. It goes beyond just an amazing return policy, but also how personal sales staff interact with their customers to make sure that their customer’s needs are satisfied without blowing the budget.

He also runs a blog that regularly updates readers on new promotions, upcoming events and even a memo style announcement to his fellow staffers. Check it out!

As we start getting our data from the field, I’d like to take this time to introduce our project goals.

Project Goals

This Frontier Project, Snowbird, aims to produce a product or service prototype that represents a future shopping experience. The research is focused on understanding if technical details that market products dissuade beginners and if so, how beginners overcome them to fulfill a transaction. We chose snowboarding because it offered an interesting arena we were interested in and snow season is just upon us here in Seattle. Our first step required us to understand a few things about snowboarding in general:

Snowboarding culture. Snowboarding culture is fairly distinctive involving unique terminology (jib, pow pow, flex, etc), clothing style, attitudes and values. So to truly understand snowboarding, it was important to ask a store owner and an expert shopper about the lifestyle. We reached out to Snowboard Connection as a collaborator with this project as a way to help ease us into the unknown.

Snowboard Connection Supporting Local Art

How experts shop. Even though we plan on helping beginners, we needed to learn how they might progress into advanced stages of snowboarding in order to design for a progressive experience.

How beginners shop. We needed to ask the stupid question to be sure we weren’t making any assumptions about their strategies in shopping online vs in store. By recruiting four non-experts, we would have personal stories for our designers in the studio to become inspired by how they currently purchase their equipment and how that compares to the expert approach.

Behaviors of in store shoppers. Our goal here involved cataloging the positive and negative qualities of the in store experience for reference, as well as identifying differences between snowboarding shops. Shadowing shoppers in store gave us an idea of the different types of interactions that happen in store vs online. We also wanted to observe how a specialty store like Snowboard Connection compared to larger retailers like REI. Both companies are successful in enabling their customers to make informed decisions, but they are certainly different in their environment.

Behaviors of online shoppers. We set out to understand where the bar is set for snowboarding sites. We have already identified the disconnect between product sites like K2 and Burton with retailers like Snowboard Connection, but how that impacts the final transaction is still unknown. We have also noticed that apparel shopping is on the rise while equipment sales have slowed. We not only want to learn why, but if it means a shift in motivations: fashion vs recreation?

SnowSports Industries America (SIA) Research Report, Products Purchased In Store

Approach

Ethnographic Video. One of the most challenging parts of this project is the inclusion of video recording. We really wanted to step it up with video and audio and so we acquired some new tools to help us along the way. There has always been something unfulfilling for us at Artefact to report on what the people have shared with us in the field. So instead, we want to bring their compelling stories forward by leveraging best practices from film producers.

In the field with video equipment

Deliverables

Themes and Requirements. Once we’ve collected all the hand-written notes and hours of tape, we can reduce the chaos through an affinity exercise. The outcome will help focus us on the more obvious areas where shopping experiences differ, reveal pain points in the process, and also provide us with a shared understanding.

Customer Profiles. While we can generalize our findings to help understand the insights we will have uncovered, being able to dive back into the gritty details of just one person makes designing for a solution a little more tangible. As part of the process in experimenting with different ways of sharing research, the next few posts will be covering individual customer profiles in greater detail regarding their experiences both online and in store.

First up, I’d like to introduce you to John Logic, one of the store owners of Snowboard Connection.

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!

Multitouch is all the craze these days and it is becoming more commercially available with products such as the HTC Touch Diamond, Microsoft Surface and the iPhone. Since multitouch allows for direct manipulation and gesture recognition, it opens up the opportunity for designers to explore new interfaces that are natural and intuitive for users. A classic example is the zoom gesture that has become a table-stake in multitouch experiences; i.e., zooming in and out using two corner touch points that move in opposite directions on a photo or a map, for example.

With this in mind, us Artefactians set out to join the do-it-yourself craze to investigate ways to build our own multitouch table on the cheap that we can use as a testing platform for multitouch experiments. Our goal was to build a table as quickly and cheaply as possible that would recognize multiple fingers and blobs simultaneously so we can get started with our investigations.

Check out what we built