The apprehension of an object, thought, or emotion through the senses or mind: a child’s first experience of snow.

Active participation in events or activities, leading to the accumulation of knowledge or skill: a lesson taught by experience; a carpenter with experience in roof repair.

The knowledge or skill so derived.

An event or a series of events participated in or lived through. The totality of such events in the past of an individual or group.

To participate in personally; undergo: experience a great adventure; experienced loneliness.

To most men, experience is like the stern light of a ship, which illumines only the track it has passed — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

a particular incident, feeling, etc., that a person has undergone an experience to remember
accumulated knowledge, esp of practical matters a man of experience

Experience is like medicine; some persons require larger doses of it than others, and do not like to take it pure, but a little disguised and better adapted to taste — Lord Acton

the totality of characteristics, both past and present, that make up the particular quality of a person, place, or people
the impact made on an individual by the culture of a people, nation, etc. the American experience

Experience seems to be like the shining of a bright lantern. It suddenly makes clear in the mind what was already there, perhaps, but dim — Walter De La Mare

the content of a perception regarded as independent of whether the apparent object actually exists Compare sense datum
the faculty by which a person acquires knowledge of contingent facts about the world, as contrasted with reason
the totality of a person’s perceptions, feelings, and memories

to participate in or undergo
to be emotionally or aesthetically moved by; feel to experience beauty

A new element in her experience; like a chapter in a book — Henry Van Dyke

Work that researches well is predicted on what has gone before. Anything different, or out of the ordinary, will test badly, for the very reason that it is different – Bill Bembach

The majority of my work is as it should be… Neat, proper, rule-abiding and by the New Rider book. Packed full of user-centred design and interaction principals. The user at the heart of the story just happens to be me. Occasionally I need to indulge myself and that’s when my work gets all a bit ‘Gonzo’.

Maybe I’m wrong, but is it time for us to embrace ‘Gonzo UX’ as a reality of our industry and recognise it for right or wrong as a reality, because as a tool for the current generation of UXers’ who go to work everyday & follow the ‘rules’ but don’t always necessarily believe those rules it’s part of our lives and so many of us with a slight right-brain skew do it. I’m Gonzo and proud.

We pay lip-service to the methods of UX for the sake of our clients and then just do our own thing alot of the time. Exaggerating things to make them cooler & more progressive. We do our UX with claims of objectivity, but really how objective is it once we’ve put our own spin on the results, ignored the average bits of the insight and just pushed things forward rather than to the side – which to be honest is what the passionate few amongst us really want. If you’re not being Gonzo for some briefs then you’re not innovating, you’re optimising.

I almost always end up including a little piece of myself in the story, concocting a solution with me as the protagonist thinking “I’ll call the persona Gerald, they’ll never notice that crafty 30 something advertising exec from London is really me”… Come on, admit it, how many have you have done it?! More than you’d think. So much of what we do is a subjective, artistic endeavour based on our own objectively collected insights as real life consumers. We’re just scared to admit it because we think it somehow cheapens the solutions and the work is less robust because there’s a large wedge of ourselves in it rather than a real-life bloke called Gerald who probably still owns a monotone Nokia from 2003 anyway… And I’m certainly not user-centring a solution around THAT bloke, he sucks! When that proposal goes live deep-down its somewhere comfortably between subjective and objective and as long as it’s still good, where’s the harm in being a bit Gonzo with the approach. It’s still packed full of insight driven work, the insight just happens to be your own. It’s good. It has a place and you shouldn’t be ashamed (as long as you’re racking up success and you can attribute it back to some fuzzy bit of research or insight someone pompous researcher gave you at work).

Lets look at bit more at the detail. Gonzo UX tends to favor style over fact to achieve accuracy — if accuracy is in fact meant to be achieved at all — because we often use our own personal experiences and emotions to provide context for the topic or solution being covered. It disregards the “polished”, edited solution favoured by the esoteric usability cronies and strives for a more gritty, personable approach. Sometimes you see the personality of a solution is just as important as the problem the solution is trying to fix.

If you have a tendency when you’re selling solutions in to use quotations, sarcasm, humor, exaggeration, and profanity then you may in fact be practising Gonzo UX and you don’t even know it.

So as of today I’m actually adding ‘Gonzo UX’ to our companies list of approaches. As a term, for our clients, and I’m going to make sure our team are proud to do it when the time is appropriate.

“What? The client won’t pay for research and insight?” It’s a Gonzo solution.

“Oh my god, that insight work sucks but I’ve only got 2 days to craft a response!” It’s a Gonzo solution.

“This project is just going to be DULL and UNINSPIRING if I follow this research and tailor it to this dudettes life” I’ll go a little bit Gonzo for the sake of making it good rather than average.

• Interaction design is not respected as a design discipline.
• Only designers should design.
• Designers are not built for strategy.

My three rockstars of the evening were Giles “we’re not heart surgeons we’re communicators” Colborne, Abby “don’t be in a rush to put on your smart pants (trousers to you and me) and go into the boardroom” Covert and Jason “All fart and no shit” Masut. Why? Because they’re communicators (as Giles said). They say it like it is and not in some over thought out, mental keynote designed to be persuasive by invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery. I like that. I actually believe it more too. It’s less cynical. I want those guys to be leading our charge and inspiring the new vanguard not the over-achievers and lecturers (and that’s not to say I don’t respect the academics either, I do). It makes me smile when I listen to people who talk from the heart and not from the text-book… They are artists not scholars.

For the record, the new “nicest man in our industry” award goes to Dr Andrea Resmini. What a great guy. I’m going to be honest, I have no idea what he’s talking about half the time, but I love his thinking and his words inspire me. I’m also incredibly jealous of his current project. Good luck with that.

Two things happened. I really enjoyed myself, but I also came away feeling slightly disgruntled and just a bit disappointed by what I heard. Disgruntled because I didn’t belong there, I felt like a ringer. I enjoy my craft way too much to have to stand up and justify it… What we do ‘just is‘ and we’ve got to stop being apologetic about it and over pomping it and letting people over think things that ‘just are‘. I get this horrible feeling that some of ‘the great ones‘ are more interested in gazing through the looking glass than jumping head first into the rabbit hole and having an adventure.

When I stood up to take the microphone for my part of the debate I froze. I lost my words and I paused for a few seconds. Now to the audience two things were probably going through their minds: “who the fuck is this schmuck” and “he’s blown it“… But if you were to speak to anybody that knows me professionally they’d tell you I don’t freeze up and I’m definitely never lost for words… I don’t tend to suffer from a lack of confidence (infact the opposite to my detriment sometimes) and I’ve almost certainly got an opinion. But on the night, after all the hot air and hyperbole I’d listened too in parts, I was left speechless… Utterly speechless. For 15 seconds of my 3 minutes I just could not put into words how confused I was to be on that stage. I’ll tell you why if you care to read on…

There’s a reason in the last 15 years you’ve never seen me at a conference either in attendance or talking and its not because I’ve never been invited. Its because I’ve been working. Honing my craft and trying to be better at my job. There was nothing in a book or a lecture that I couldn’t learn from getting my hands dirty or speaking to a colleague down the pub, mulling over the great design & interaction challenges of our time. When you looked at the stage and saw me lost for words and thought “who are you?” I was staring right down the barrel of your eye guns thinking:

“I’ve been trying to innovate at the speed of culture. I’m the man who helps design and communicate the real stuff you use everyday that you don’t really think much about it. I’m the man who is making your bank accounts easier to use, fighting your corner and wearing your hat. I’m the man who helped you book your holiday and made it easier to find the right TV online. I’m the man whose team entertained you with that sponsorship campaign that you went back too twice or sometimes more. I’m the man who helped you find something using your mobile phone when you were in a fix… I’ve been busy friends, making ‘stuff’ and I wish I’d had time to hone my vocabulary and spend more time on stages talking about a job, but in reality I’ve been ‘doing’ one instead. I’m one of the crazies.”

To the man who heckled me when I said “You can’t train a designer to be a good designer, they just are or they’re not” I feel pity for you sir. Where you work must be a sausage factory of same-same design being done by people who are programmed to think they’re a designer but don’t feel like they’re a designer and that was actually my key take-away from the event. There are ALOT of people who think they’re a designer because they can quote the lingo but they’ve probably never picked up a pencil and doodled, they’re probably more likely to pick up the polar bear book or a Dave Malouf paper and decide what to do that way. To those people I say come join the crazies or go be a BA. We’re having much more fun and our stuff is still usable, useful and delightful most of the time and when it’s not we’ll apologise, iterate and fix it. I urge the audience at these events to learn to gaze at the sky and see solutions and patterns in their minds and invent new ways of doing things rather than polishing up what’s already been done and slapping a new title on it. Start going nuts people. Design is obnoxious and you should be proud of that. When Henry Ford asked people what they wanted they said “a faster horse“, so he designed and built a car. When Steve Jobs decided not to do user research it was because “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”. You can’t predict the future you have to invent it. I saw designers in the room who are getting themselves ready to follow the leader rather than be the innovator.

Remember the Apple Think Different campaign? Seeing as how there’s been a few references to Steve Jobs and Jonny Ives (strategist / tactician and a designer working in harmony anyone?) both on the night and in this post let’s admire it again:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.

Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Below is the Steve Jobs narrated version by the way.

It’s a beautiful piece of poetry by two incredibly talented wordsmiths Rob Siltanen and Ken Segall from Chiat Day. I was lucky enough to visit and work at Chiat Day in LA back in 2008 and it reminded me why I love what I do. Meeting someone as industry defining as Lee Clow was humbling and a grounding experience. These guys make things simple. They’re designers of words and thoughts and they make it approachable and elegant and I think the debate reminded me that element is what we’re losing in the interaction design industry and it’s ‘community’. We’re trying so hard to make our GUIs and our NUIs and all that good stuff simple, but we don’t make ourselves simple. That’s why I froze on the stage. I didn’t know how to talk to my peers without sounding afraid of them or looking dumbed down. I realised I was too simple.

So what does happen when Mr Trainor unfreezes & talks. Well he has a point of view that many of you disagreed with and I’m at peace with that. Our debate topic was “Designers aren’t built for strategy“. I’m gonna be honest and say its a bit of a dumb topic to debate… Of course ‘some‘ of you are built for it… Everybody is a strategist in some shape or form. The cat at the end of my garden trying to work out how to break into my house to steal my sons fish is doing strategy of some kind… And so in reality I was in agreement with Abby who I was meant to be rebutting. The topic in my head that I decided to base my case on was actually “just because we could, does it mean we should be strategists“… Or even “do designers make good strategists” and the answer is “no“, we don’t. Frankly if we’re GOOD designers we shouldn’t be doing it at all because we should be too busy solving design challenges, not strategic ones. I learnt this the hard way and in many ways I’m still learning. Why should we be? We’re left brainers who need right brainers to give us polar north. We can’t create really objective, grounded work without the efforts of a good strategist at our side. For any designer in that room who put their hand up and said they wanted to be a strategist you’ve probably never worked closely with a really good one. You’re basing your desires on filling a void in your professional lives. My professional life changed dramatically about 7 years ago when I started working with a strategist called Atan at TBWA. He called himself Head of Insight or some such shit, but make no bones about it, he was a heavy weight strategist. He blew my socks off. He just saw the world in a different light than me and that’s quite a profound moment. It became that epiphany moment when I went “thank the career god for that, the strategy is safe in someone else’s hands, I can go back to being an IA and Designer until the next bad strategist comes along and I have to start sticking my oar in again“. As designers we’re not great right-brainers and if you are then maybe you’re not really a designer and a better, more suited job awaits you. In fact why not go and be a strategist friend and stop clogging up our design departments. I want people with two eyes on the screen, whiteboard or notebook not one eye on the door. We’re meant to be too emotional, too impulsive, too intuitive and bias. We make stuff for the end users and that is our camp and the strategists can own the business need. That’s why we need strategists in our life, because they complete us and round us off. Be one or the other and be the best you can be at it. Be an amazing designer or an amazing strategist and don’t try and do two things in a mediocre way. Be yourself. Don’t be ashamed to be a designer and don’t be in too much of a rush to leave the studio, your businesses need you to be the craftsman of a vision that is often engineered by some really very clever people we like to call strategists. Amen.

I’m at ease with being an experience designer and a Creative Director… I’m even quite a strategic one ironically. At SapientNitro I quite often create decks of gleamed knowledge that I use to brief (shock horror) the Strategists. I work closely with them and help give them perspective and vice versa in much the same way that an art director / copy writer team works in an old school above the line agency. We often have a love / hate relationship. Arguing and fighting over head and heart matters. But that’s good. It’s appropriate. It means we all love our jobs enough to defend them and fight for what we believe. If I’m both at the same time then surely I’m at conflict with myself and that friends is pretty schizophrenic isn’t it!?

I make experiences and I give them to the users. I design interactions and make them fluid and intuitive and engaging. I create viral loops and interfaces people can touch and I’ll continue to do that for as long as I work (if I’m allowed to do so). I’m not an academic. I’m not a strategist, I’m a designer and I’m damn proud of that. I’m one of the crazies.

Outside of the actual debate there was a lot of dogmatic hot air around ‘GUI NUI‘ from lots of different people I spoke too. It’s not a new thing. Xbox didn’t commoditise it. iPhone and multitouch didn’t invent it. It’s always been there. We just latch on to whats cool. I was working on Virtual Reality interfacing with a chap called JP back in the late 90s and we were mucking about with what I suppose was NUI even back then, we just didn’t have a buzzword for it, we were inventors and gut-instinct workers, not pattern pushers and uniformity sellers. Inventing digital spaces you could walk around & touch online… Virtual towns & training programmes where you wore gloves or helmets with sensors in. We were being crazy.

By the way, the NUI thing doesn’t work on scalable interface which is what you should be focusing on. So enjoy it, but don’t get too wrapped up in it. It’s fun, but it’s ultimately what me & JP et al were screwing with 14 years ago – a fad. But I do hope that in the near future it will ‘just be‘ and we’ll be integrating it into our worlds and plans seamlessly as a norm and not as a planned abstraction. That it’ll be as ubiqutous as the Mouse. Instead think about ways of scaling these so called NUIs up from Phone to TV and retaining the integrity and then you’re problem solving. Because I bet my house that the post Jobs era will bring whole new hardware that re-writes the world again and very soon you’ll be flipping screens from your iphone interface, to either your 15″ laptop which still loves a mouse or trackpad, or your 60″ TV mounted on your wall that will be using gesture rather than mouse or touch and we’re the ones who’ll be designing for all three in one scalable single entry point. Dream about that for a second. It’s going to be crazy. Your thinking needs to start being crazy as well.

So with that idea of ‘thought shift’ in mind what if a digital agency did things differently too. I had a fascinating debate with a planner at an agency I was working at who was suggesting the agency might sell 100 little experiences to a client instead of 1 big one. A brilliant idea. It fitted neatly into my distributed experience idea I was trying to sell the same client too… The client agrees to pay a wedge of money and the agency agrees to concept, design, develop, and launch 100 individual digital experiences (sites, apps, whatever) in 52 weeks rather than one huge one.

It makes sense when you consider that an agency for ‘now’ needs to increase their odds of creating a big hit when it’s impossible to predict what’s going to catch on?

Most digital agencies rely on selling the execution of a big beautiful campaign or website. The more complex the site is, the more expensive it is, and the better it is for the agency’s business. But, the market for that business is disappearing.

When an agency pitches to clients, they don’t just come up with one big idea, they usually come up with lots of ideas and then choose the best ones to sell-in hoping that one will make the cut. The ideas that got the chop originally might have the winning formula in there, so why not just do those as well?

No one can predict which idea is going to become and internet sensation. And not every potential hit will get approved by the client’s legal or PR department. These concerns don’t matter because you’re going to launch every good idea you come up with. Work for the client initially launches without the client’s name attached. If it takes off and becomes a hit, they get to claim it. If they don’t want it, the agency can either take it for themselves or kill it.

Everything is iterative – A tiny fraction of what you launch will be worth additional time and investment. Create strict qualifications for what makes the cut. Work on all of these select projects using an agile process, making small changes as you go. There’s no finish line, there’s just one improvement after another.

What do you think?

Have a look at this set of alternative grouping from some user interviews conducted & a study of internet behavior. The belief is users can be categorized against six common primary behaviours for information seeking (I’m sure there are more, especially in todays world and this is excluding mobile obviously):

• Starting: Identifying relevant sources of interest
• Chaining: Following and connecting new leads found in an initial source
• Browsing: Scanning contents of identified sources for subject affinity
• Differentiating: Filtering and assessing sources for usefulness
• Monitoring: Keeping abreast of developments in a given subject area
• Extracting: Systematically working through a given source for material of interest.

So what exactly does this mean & how does it actually affect the way in which future proposals should be formed? Quite simply, by identifying & modelling the above personas we can create sets of tools that keep everybody happy! Well that’s the theory anyway…

Behaviour: Starting

This refers to identifying relevant sources on an average, content driven website. There are four principle ways in which users should arrive at given content on the site:

• Typing in a URL directly
• Referring to a bookmarked URL
• Following a link from another section of a website (or another website)
• Using the search engine (internal and external)

Example features to support Starting:

• Thoughtfully-designed URLs for sections that are easy to remember
• Unique URLs for different sections of the Website
• Page construction that allows for easy and accurate book-marking
• Carefully worded page titles that provide a useful context

Appropriate use of page tags to describe the content. This should not only facilitate indexing by the search engine on the website, but also yield meaningful descriptions in search results lists. Tags init.

In considering Starting as a behaviour, it is important to remember that users probably first come in contact with a given section of the website from a referring source, e.g. another section or elsewhere, such as a work colleague forwarding a link or other referring sources. The decision to go to visit one section over another is often based on micro-content found in the page title and meta-tags.

Behaviour: Linking

Linking is the act of following and connecting new leads found on initial pages. Chances are that when users arrive at a given section, they are not on the page they need to be. They must be able to orient themselves quickly, often within seconds, and determine which links they should follow.

Example features to support Linking:

• Accurate, descriptive and mutually exclusive link names that make sense to visitors in terms that they can relate to and understand
• Consistent navigation through design elements such as placement, style and general look and feel
• Sense of orientation created with page titles, global elements, consistent use of colour and graphics
• A way out or back – Generally this means not disabling the back button or using unnecessary extra windows or new browsers
• Icons with clear meanings
• A limited number of well-organised navigation options – 7 options are generally accepted as standard, although research shows that fewer than 5 are even better.
• Navigation that provides the appropriate, relevant associations related to page content to anticipate users’ probable next moves.

Behaviour: Browsing

Browsing means scanning site contents and informally grouping items by subject affinity. This is a behaviour that is hard to image NOT occurring in every section. Browsing is a chief web activity. Supporting this behaviour in the new design, structure & architecture is essential.

Example features to support Browsing:

• Meaningful categories that themselves convey a message and the purpose of the site
• Prioritised navigation – separating navigation into meaningful types to facilitate browsing of options.
• Clearly presented and readable text
• Content overview – the Website offers the possibility to “chunk” content. That is, it is not necessary to present all content at once, rather in digestible pieces that provide a clear overview.
• Bulleted lists, tables and other constructions that facilitate scanning

Behaviour: Searching

This refers to direct and targeted searches using a the internal search engine or similar functionality. Important considerations here are twofold: the design of the search interface and functionality, and display of search results.

Example features to support Searching:

• Allows users to limit in meaningful ways – standard operators (AND, OR and NOT) should be available, in addition to others
• Query syntax is standard or easily learned
• Search results provide a context for understanding hits, such as page title, date, description –even show part of the sentence in which the search string was found
• Opportunity to revise search and to search again
• If no hits, suggestions to similar, possible sources are presented
• Spell check with corresponding suggestions for “correct” spellings

Behaviour: Differentiating

Differentiating is the act of evaluating information for relevance to the information need or problem. In some ways this is the combined goal of the above-mentioned behaviours and features. Additional features, however, can directly help visitors uncover the value the Website has to offer. Designers should strive to strike a balance between control and freedom.

Example features to support Differentiating:

• Logical and meaningful headings that explain content to some degree
• Appropriate text lengths that are suitable for reading online
• Chunking content into layers and allowing random access into different sections of information
• Summary texts and abstracts that indicate the quality, usefulness and scope of content
• Providing deeper content for those who need it
• Contact information and help to assist people who need more information or who couldn’t locate exactly what they need
• User comments and reviews of websites, Web content or products sold over the Web
• Indications of and links to semantically related material

Behaviour: Monitoring

Monitoring is the behaviour of studying content from a distance. That a Monitoring User watches what happens on a site on a regular basis, but prefers not to actually visit the site because of time or location constraints. Users who monitor often don’t spend vast amounts of time on the internet and want delve straight to regularly visited sources on the occasions that they do.

Example features to support Monitoring:

• Easily bookmarked pages for quick and easy access at a later date
• Newsletter subscription
• Email alerts that notify users of changes in content, current status, updates, etc.
• SMS message to communicate up-to-the minute changes and breaking news
• Online agents that collect, control and communicate information and changes
• Customised pages that allow users to configure site elements to their liking
• Personalised page that react dynamically to user activity

Behaviour: Extracting

As the name implies, extracting refers to taking and using the appropriate, identified information or pieces of information online. It is the final use of information.

Example features to support Differentiating:

• The ability to print; print friendly formats, if needed. Dark coloured page backgrounds and frames complicate printing greatly and are a huge strain on ink resources
• Cut and paste as an option – this means providing key bodies of information in HTML format. Other formats, such as images or flash, do not allow for cut and paste.
• Download possibilities – Portable document files (PDF) have become standard and readers for this format are ubiquitous and free. Other formats for download can also be considered depending on use and target groups
• Applications as filters of large bodies of information
• Sorting functions

Conclusion

So I’m not dumb enough to think Ben & his irritating vanilla life are ever going to go away and we’re going to be liberated of such useful hyperbole. But I am interested in moving our clients away from what they think they know and into new ways of thinking about user-centered design. To me user centered design is about basing things around the behavior of users and not necessarily their personalities, it’s irrelevant if they read the guardian and ride a bike when they visit a banks website.

Some more sources for these behavior types:

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1962324&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=61696963&CFTOKEN=32720603

http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/729/638

http://crl.acrl.org/content/71/5/435.abstract

http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~donturn/papers/asis98/asis98.html

http://ec2-50-19-240-191.compute-1.amazonaws.com/1292/1/435.full.pdf

• 65% of consumers have had a digital experience change their opinion about a brand
• 97% of them report that experience influencing whether or not they purchased a product or service from that brand

Actions Speak Louder Than Advertising

Branded experience is the new advertising. And consumers are increasingly hungry for them, sometimes ravenously so:

• 97% have searched for a brand online
• 77% have watched a commercial on YouTube
• 69% have read a corporate blog
• 65% have played a branded, browser-based game.
• 73% have posted a product or brand review on a site like Amazon, Facebook or Twitter

Brand Culture Or Fan Culture?

Conventional wisdom holds that consumers don’t want brands encroaching on their social lives – but that’s just not true:

• 76% of consumers welcomed brand advertising on social networks (FEED, 2008)
• 40% of consumers “friended” a brand on Facebook and/or MySpace
• 26% of consumers have “followed” a brand on Twitter

The Outlet Malls Of Tomorrow? Facebook, MySpace & Twitter

Marketers shouldn’t assume that consumers are as passionate about their brands as they are: Consumers don’t want a conversation with brands – they want deals.

• 44% of consumers who follow a brand on Twitter do so for deals
• 37% of consumers who “friended” a brand on Facebook and/or MySpace do so for deals

Bottom Line: Digital Brand Experiences Create Customers

Digital is not simply an “awareness” or CRM play, it’s a customer-creation play. The overwhelming majority of consumers who engage with a brand online move from passive “receivers” to advocates almost instantly:

• 97% report increased brand awareness
• 98% show increased consideration
• 97% will more likely purchase a product
• 96% may recommend the brand to their friends

Consumers Turning First, Foremost To Digital

According to Forrester consumers now spend nearly as much time online as they do watching TV*. We found that their technical fluency is far greater than most believe:

• 57% of consumers actively customize their homepages
• 84% share links or bookmarks
• 55% subscribe to RSS feeds
• 33% get their news from Facebook
• 20% get their news from Twitter

*Forrester 2009 Technographics Survey

Mobile Internet Service Use Skyrocketing

Mobile Internet services are being consumed broadly. Majority of consumers own a smartphone and;

• 57% access the Internet from their phone
• 50% have downloaded an app for their phone
• 30% have interacted with an ad banner on their phone

Connected Consumers Are The New Mainstream

Are Consumers Really In Control? Conventional wisdom says that every generation of consumer grows smarter, shrewder and more immune to marketing. But that’s not true – consumers are actively choosing to engage with brands, everywhere.

• 40% have “friended” a brand on Facebook and/or MySpace
• 26% have “followed” a brand on Twitter
• 77% have watch an advert on YouTube
• 69% have read a corporate blog post
• 73% have posted a review of a brand on a site like Amazon or Yelp
• 52% have blogged about brand’s product or service

Facebook And Twitter Creating Fan Culture For Brands

After deals, the main reason consumers “friend” a brand? Because they *really* are a fan (or a customer, at least). Social media platforms are proving to be customer service platforms.

• 33% friend a brand on Facebook/ MySpace because they are a customer
• 24% follow a brand on Twitter because they are a current customer
• 23% follow a brand on Twitter for “interesting or engaging” content, which shows promise for a new type of relationship

Fans And The Future Of The Marketing Funnel

Brand culture and fan culture are dramatically reshaping the traditional funnel as consumers leap from experience to advocacy (or the inverse) almost instantly.

• 70% have participated in a brand-sponsored contest
• 24% have produced content to participate in a contest
• 26% have attended a brand sponsored event, such as Nike’s Human Race
• 24% have downloaded a branded application for their mobile phone

Experiences Not Only Build Brands, They Make Or Break Them

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple and Nike are all experiential brands that know consumer preference isn’t formed in reaction to a message, but to a series of experiences over time. There’s good reason. Of consumers who interact:

• 97% report increased brand awareness
• 98% show increased consideration
• 97% will more likely purchase a product
• 96% may recommend the brand to their friends

Getting To The Bottom Of Brand Engagement

Everyone is chasing after a metric to define brand engagement. Millward Brown says “digital consumers” have 15% stronger relationships with brands. The Altimeter Group attempts to correlate social media activity to financial performance, citing Dell, Starbucks and eBay as leaders.

We took a different tack: we simply wanted to know if there was any direct correlation between a consumer’s digital interaction with a brand and their likelihood to purchase a specific product or service. 

Digital Experience Create Customers

The answer was a resounding “yes”. Experiences have a much greater influence over brand affinity and consumer purchasing than even we anticipated:

• 65%of consumers have had a digital experience change their opinion about a brand.
• 97%of those report that experience influencing whether or not they purchased a product or service from that brand.
• 64% of consumer report making a first purchase from a brand because of digital experience (e.g. website, banner, etc.)

Five Brands That Are Excelling In An Experience-Driven World…

1. UNIQLO: Japanese Retailer Surprises And Delights Audiences With Every Interaction
2. Red Bull: Pioneered Experiential Marketing With Subversive Events And Sponsorships
3. Barbie: Reinvented An American Icon For The Pop Sugar Set And Broke Sales Records
   “We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive. We’re in the business of connecting with consumers.” – Trevor Edwards, Nike
4. Nike: Human Race. Chalkbot. Nike Is Setting A New Standard For Experiential Marketing
5. Virgin America: Brand Built By Breakthrough Experiences – And The Marketing Of Them
6. Microsoft’s Bing: Accomplishing The Impossible By Putting Experience First And In Every Ad

I’ve hand-picked a couple of my highlights and it’s no surprise that they all span so many different pillars of the ‘Big D’ and also appear on pretty much every other list you’ll see summarizing 2011. So here we go in no particular order:

Tesco Homeplus – The QR Store in Korea

The objective was to make Tesco the No 1 seller in Korea… but the competition have way more stores… so what do you do? Take the ‘store’ to the people and let them shop with their phones. People should find Tesco Homeplus wherever they are without having to go to the brick and mortar store. Moreover they could make good use of the wasted times and enjoy their free time.

RESULTS: 76% of online members & +130% of online sales. Homeplus became N°1 in online grocery shopping and is a very close 2nd offline. Novelty? Or game-changing? I think a little of both… it certainly helped QR codes come of age a bit too…

New York – The World Park

The concept was simple… Create a museum in the park to create an entirely different experience using QR codes that gave access to other content integrated into the context (including History, pop culture, music & science). They also included elements of gamification.

Again – Another quality use of mobile (I see a pattern emerging) and QR codes… Marketers are sometimes nervous about or afraid of technology but nowadays, technology enables the possibility of amazing experiences. Note that you should be careful about sharing specific content with everyone.

IKEA 365

Create one simple creative campaign everyday including a new product to create a story and engage consumers. I always loved the concept brought to me by a colleague that digital is about a myriad of little ideas not ‘the big idea’ now and this campaign pretty much embodies that to the letter. IKEA proving they’re still one of the most innovative brands on the planet.

Volkwagen – Planeta Terra

Create awareness of VW’s sponsorship of the Planta music festival in Brasil… to an audience who are generally quite apathetic about VW. This was one of several awesome campaigns run using Twitter and Google Maps as the gaming platform. Pretty simple really… Tickets to the music festival were strategically placed around locations high-lighted using Google Maps… the first person to find the tickets wins them… But here’s the kicker… ‘Tweets’ made the map zoom… so the more the protagonists tweeted the closer the map zoomed to the location of the tickets. A beautiful self-fulfiling prophecy of a game.

Microsoft Bing

We’ve already seen a campaign using Google Maps and that was a lot of Microsofts challenge this year… how do you raise awareness of its own service ‘Bing’. In some ways a far more superior service in the same way that Vimeo is to YouTube, but displacing existing behavior is next to impossible (don’t get me started on Google+). So what they did was pretty clever… They placed each of the 320 pages of Jay Z’s book, Decode, in 600 unique traditional, nontraditional and digital advertising placements in 15 cities around the world.

The best of the ‘hide and seek’ games from the year for sure… results speak for themselves: 11 min per visit on the specific website. +11,7% of visits to bing. ~$1,1 B worth of media impressions.

Greys Anatomy Sync app for iPad

The best of the iPad offerings this year (for concept rather than longevity). The Grey’s Anatomy Sync app for iPad lets you experience Grey’s Anatomy in an entirely new way! You’ll get to interact with other fans and get exclusive episode-related content delivered to your iPad in real time while you watch Grey’s Anatomy live on your TV.

So what? It’s just back-channel stuff which we’ve all seen, right? But think about it a bit more. It actually used the coding baked into the show to talk to the app. I love that. Old media being used to control new platform. Awesomely powerful idea.

Empire Avenue

My big big digital addiction of 2011 is without a doubt the genius ‘Empire Avenue‘. I’ve spent more time working on my social share price this year than my actual shares! Fact. It’s a simple concept – Register. Hook-up all your various social media profiles, channels and wasted time interfaces and Empire Avenue gives you a shareprice. You buy other peoples shares and they buy yours. You make money, you lose money and you can’t help but go to that dreaded iPhone App every morning to see how well you’re doing. This is gamification of the highest order and I’m going to need some kind of therapy next year if I’m going to ditch the habit.

Summary

There were so many more too, but I just haven’t got time to highlight them all in any great detail… I will just highlight ‘World of Fourcraft‘ as the best gamification idea of the year… pure genius… and leave you with this round-up:

In 2011:

• Multichannel became Multichannels
• Point of Sale became Points of Sale (sell everywhere using mobile)
• Using ‘Free Time’ became the big success currency
• Gamification stopped being a fad and a buzz word and started being a genuine thing
• Thinking outside of the box became acceptable and not just rubbish ATL buzz generation
• Customer Experience became the new User Experience
• The simple ideas still run the roost!

A recent survey by seven.co.uk announces some rather rather revealing stats on how the iPad.. which is the fastest selling technology hardware device in history with 15 million sold in 11 months, is impacting our media consumption habits both online and offline. The iPad buyers are not exclusively early adopters as is often assumed, as 63% describe themselves as people who normally wait for a gadget to become established before they buy it.

So what are the iPad statistics that you should take notice of ?

iPad’s Time Usage

This has implications on how publishers should be developing content so it is optimized for the appropriate device

• Use of desktop computers is down for 35% iPad owners since they bought the device
• Use of laptops is also down since they bought an iPad at 39%
• 87% of owners are using it every day of the week
• 26% for half an hour to an hour per day
• 32% for 1-2 hours per day
• 24% for more than 2 hours a day.

Where do they use it?

Its versatility makes it a flexible and ubiquitous device with

• 69% of respondents using it in the bedroom
• 42% in the kitchen
• 20% of men can’t be parted from it in the bathroom

The last statistic certainly show that men’s habits for reading in the small room have not changed just the device!

What do they use the Apple iPad for?

• Accessing the web – 75%
• Emailing -63%
• 53% of iPad owners say they use their device mainly for entertainment
• Playing games – 48%
• Social networking – 41%
• Researching products and services – 29%
• Reading books – 25%
• Listening to music – 21%
• Shopping – 19%
• Reading magazines – 13%
• For work – 13%
• Watching TV – 11%

What is interesting to note is that 51% who have read magazines in print and in interactive format on the iPad say they prefer it on the iPad, vs 23% who prefer a magazine in print.

The Stats on Apps on the iPad

The apps market that started with the Apple iphone has not diminished but has continued to grow into the iPad market place. Content is the key driver in app purchases. The survey shows that this is more important to consumers than the price of the app when making a purchase decision.

• 16% have bought a branded app from a company
• 84% of respondents would be very interested in an app from one of their favourite brands, if it was free and non-subscription.
• Free apps are almost twice as popular among iPad consumers as paid-for (the average iPad has 18 free apps on it and 10 paid-for)
• Buying an app is most strongly influenced by the app’s perceived usefulness at 64% of owners
• Content is very important when buying the app at 47%
• Price comes third at 44% when considering buying
• Friend recommendations is important at 27%
• 15% say that recommendations by industry experts are very important when making an app buying decision.

Taken from the Jeff Bullas blog-post.

I love this presentation… it’s so true: