Here are the slides from my talk at Digital Shoreditch.
We are the official app of Digital Shoreditch 2013
May 10th, 2013 by Ben Claxton
nativeye has been chosen to be the partner app of Digital Shoreditch – London’s premier grass-roots digital festival.
Tasked with capturing the ‘feel’ of the festival, nativeye will be used to capture people’s enjoyment, suggestions and best moments of the event.
The festival runs 20-31 May. http://digitalshoreditch.com/
I am also speaking on How mobile research fuels your innovation on Future Brands day 0945 22 May.
Hopefully see you there!
Capturing the real customer experience
April 10th, 2013 by Ben ClaxtonYesterday I spoke at an event organised by the very nice people at Hard to Measure. Great turnout of interesting people from different backgrounds, but all interested in how we can capture the (real) customer experience.
Here’s the blurb…
In the Experience Economy, capturing the real customer experience is more important than ever. But the proliferation of digital technology has both multiplied and changed the nature of customer touchpoints, making this task more complex.
In addition, recent thinking from behavioural economics tells us it is not always straightforward to get to a true understanding of our customers’ experiences. The reasons people do things may be a mystery to themselves, let alone market researchers.
In this talk I look at the shift in the customer landscape and our understanding of ourselves, before looking at practical ways to capture the real customer experience with examples from the nativeye insight platform.
nativeye Android app
April 2nd, 2013 by Ben ClaxtonWe’re excited to announce the launch of the nativeye respondent app on Android. The app is an evolution of the iOS app (which will be caught up in due course).
What’s NEW for Android:
1. Global and assignment navigation
The major change is a restructuring of the main app navigation. This is now split into 2 distinct areas: Global and Assignment navigation.
Global navigation
Accessible via the global nav icon, the global nav is revealed by a slide to the right. Here you are able to access all the main areas of the app no matter where you are.
Assignment navigation
All assignment activity is now clustered by individual assignment. That means that posting, viewing posts, recent activity and assignment information are all now assignment-specific. This provides users with more context and understanding as to which assignment they are currently engaged with.
2. Recent activity
A pre-cursor to community features to come, Recent Activity feeds by assignment show what has been going on, you guessed it, recently (see screenshot above).
3. Design refresh
Overall the colour palette has been updated, with orange out and red in. The gloss has also been toned down a touch.
Elsewhere, icons have been revamped and post images are now in their full-width glory.
We have created a feedback assignment for Android, so we’d love to hear what you think. You can download the app here.
Content marketing and SEO for the clueless
March 21st, 2013 by Ben ClaxtonAnd I include myself as one of the clueless.
I attended SEO London yesterday to try and shed some light on what I’m doing wrong. And these are the things I picked up:
1. Just because you have great content, doesn’t mean people will come
You have to get it into the hands of others – preferably people with high authority websites so that when they link to you will increase your page ranking. So that means doing the leg-work of making contacts and pitching them.
2. When pitching content, why you? why now?
What’s your personal experience or proven authority on a subject? Is there seasonality to the topic? Are there events in popular culture or your industry that you can piggy-back?
3. It’s all about angle
Related to 2., chances are you won’t be writing about something entirely new so what’s your particular spin?
4. Don’t sell, write
No-one wants to listen to a sales pitch. They want to hear the person and read something informative and/or entertaining. Sell yourself not your product/company.
5. It’s about authorship
Not only do people want to hear a distinctive voice, Google wants to know about your reputation as an author. Linking authors to their Google+ profiles (using rel=”author”) helps Google establish their authority which in turn will help your site.
6. Take content to the human conclusion
So even if your content is on a relatively dry topic, if you paint a picture of what it means in human terms, people are much more likely to relate to it.
7. When telling stories with data, look for the 3rd dimension
Getting a little technical here, but as a technique employed by Amazon (queries per second) and Twitter (tweets per second), ‘data velocity’ helps to indicate when something interesting is going on and therein potentially lies a story.
8. Make friends
Keep your eyes out for influencers who might need / be interested in your content at some point. Make the connection so that when the time comes you can feed them your tasty content.
Valuable hat tips from:
Lisa Myers of Verve Search
Nichola Stott of The Media Flow
Supernormal
March 7th, 2013 by Ben ClaxtonThis talk is about Robots. That’s interesting in itself, but it deals with how far they should stretch into human domains and mimic human traits. The ethics of this is one question, but the acceptability within the current paradigm of consumer technology is another.
In other words, would robots like this freak us out?
In the talk, Ben Bashford references the industrial designer Raymond Loewy who advocated the MAYA principle – Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. He also highlights two of his favourite designers, Jasper Morrison & Naoto Fukasawa who have coined the expression, “Supernormal” to describe “products that are designed to cause as little disruption as possible, whilst upgrading the existing framework of normality”.
This is an approach in favour of progress but sensitive to what people currently find acceptable. It advocates in favour of customer-led innovation. Helping you frame your leaps in ways that will be palatable to your market.
It’s got internet in it
February 28th, 2013 by Ben Claxton
Always-on insight
February 22nd, 2013 by Ben Claxton‘Innovation is hard because “solving problems people didn’t know they had” and “building something no one needs” look identical at first.’
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box (via Bokardo)
That’s taken from a post by Joshua Porter called, “Don’t design blindly”. Rather than guessing what people need, do some simple research and observation. Here he gives some clues of what to look for:
- Where are the pain points?
- Are people already trying to solve the problem?
- Are they already spending money on it?
You can commission formal research for this but you have to be careful not to be too focused or closed. Another way is to open up a channel to let the ideas and insights come to you. The advantage of this is:
- Makes unknown unknowns known (!)
- Does this quickly
- Highlights areas for further exploration
- Means you are always plugged into your market
- Fuels agile and continual innovation
Research kills creativity and other innovation myths
February 7th, 2013 by Ben ClaxtonWe tend to mythologise the lone creative genius. The lone genius doesn’t need to do market research – they just know.
The reality? Sorry – the stats say that you’re probably not a genius. It is, however, your job to innovate.
How research helps:
1. It FUELS your creativity
Far from blocking your creativity, research gives you the raw material it needs. And this is perhaps where this whole misunderstanding arose – for good or bad, research isn’t going to give you the answer in 20ft tall pink neon letters. It will give you clues that you then must take and perform dazzling alchemy with in order to turn them into a great product, advertising campaign, fashion line, whatever.
2. Gives you EMOTIONAL FUEL
Research helps you empathise with your subject. If you can feel their pain as well as see it, then it’s more likely you will have the motivation to care and to persist long enough to crack the right solution.
3. Gives you FOCUS
Constraints set you free. So having the insight that your communication will be most relevant in a particular context or that customers only care about particular features lets you focus your efforts. This will make your creativity relevant.
4. Lets you ITERATE
With the proviso that you don’t chuck out early ideas too quickly (remember – research doesn’t give you the answer in 20ft tall pink neon letters) customer research lets you test and refine your early concepts with your audience. And then iterate again and again until you have to ship.
And what does the genius have to fear from all this? That they might be proved wrong?
Soft eyes
January 29th, 2013 by Ben Claxton“If you got soft eyes, you can see the whole thing. If you got hard eyes – you staring at the same tree missing the forest.”
Some Zen wisdom for market researchers from Det. William ‘Bunk’ Moreland.
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