Design for customer experience, not sales: ddImpact

The idea that businesses do best when they design their products to do best for their customers appears isn’t new. It’s less about using design to trick customers and more and more about coming up with design that meets customers needs and wants.

That was a recurring theme at Thursdays “dd:Impact The Design Edition,” at BRIC Arts & Media Center in Downtown Brooklyn. The event was organized by digital dumbo.

The half day conference was broken into six sessions with a happy hour that followed. Here are a few of the takeaways that jumped out at us from the talks at the event.

• Erin Bermudez of Percolate spoke about the seven patterns that the content marketing platform company uses to guide what it builds: Approachable (is it comfortable for users), Visible (can you tell what it’s going to do), Instructional (helping and informative),  Focused (showing what the objective of a design is), Self Serve (giving users control), Contextual (only what you need) and Flexible (adapting to change).
  

  Small Screen, Big Ideas: Moble App Design Panel. Chet Gulland (Droga5), Jake Katz (Revolt) and Joe Minkiewicz (Prolific Interactive).

• Some long form content is appropriate for small screens. Jake Katz of Revolt TV said, “Everyone seems to think that the length of the content should be proportionate to the size of the screen … it’s not that that’s totally untrue, but people often don’t realize they are spending 45 minutes per night on their cell phones),” Jake Katz of Revolt TV pointed out.
• Wearables are weird. Aaron Schildkrout said HowAboutWe experimented with Google Glass for enhancing dates, but abandoned it.”It’s really hard to figure out a non-skeezy Google Glass dating experience,” he said. “It feels more immediate and less human.” That said, they are working on some sort of internal couple update system with Glass, which he is cautiously excited about.
• Unbundling features into multiple apps is going to get bigger. You can get faster load times in apps and a more focused experience. Joe Minkiewicz of Prolific Interactive said that big apps are starting to realize that they have jammed too much into too little space.
• Apps can get an early win by going to Android users either first or contemporaneously with iOS. Katz said you can score a big win with Android users by launching there first. Android users appreciate it so much that you get a big win by starting there. Schildkrout echoed saying that app discovery is a disaster.
• We’ve written before about the move to the mobile web, but the mobile apps panel argued that native apps are still way better than mobile web. Schildkrout said that HowAboutWe‘s customer conversions are one mobile web conversion for every native app conversion, which gives them no incentive to promote the mobile web.
• Simon Berg held a panel in which he showed off his company, Ceros‘s, platform for collaborating and creating directly in the cloud. When the demo time came, however, he may have demonstrated why many content makers are nervous about moving all their work to the cloud. For a while there, he couldn’t get access to the Internet and some functions never quite worked. Internet access is still far from perfect and not even close to universal. It’s nice to do at least some of your work when you don’t have access.
• Templates are for firms that haven’t budgeted for creatives. Ceros doesn’t start with templates. “If you want to create something truly creative, you don’t start with templates,” Berg argued.

Mobile: next year’s problem, too dependent on google and apple #ddimpact

— Boullevard Creatives (@Boullevard) May 15, 2014

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What will solve deep human problems? Fundamentally, that’s what product design is, the medium is totally irrelevant. #ddimpact @schildkrout — Digital Arts Network (@TBWADAN) May 15, 2014

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“the pinterestification of the web” #ddimpact

— lloyd johnson (@lloyd2nd) May 15, 2014

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• Design can respond to content as well as device. Matt Chmiel of Code and Theory described his company’s redesign of the LA Times website, saying “We are at a point now in the era of responsive design, where because we have to design mobile friendly pages, we can let the content determine the layout of the page. Showed a video of what they have done with the LA Times page that means one day’s look is different from day to day. Daytime visits are headlines. Evening is visual, longform.

• Branded content is a growing revenue source. Lauren Rabaino said it was new to Vox Media. Their company wide mantra, she said, is the magic is the intersection with content, product and advertising. “We are using those same tools we created to do high quality journalism to roll it out and do it with brands.”

• Design can separate branded content from journalism. The Verge tries to make it clear which bits of their content are branded and what’s paid for, with logos, color and strong visual cues. “We are taking everything that is the best of what’s made us so successful and applying that to brand advertising,” Rabaino said.

• Good user experience is good business in media. Chmiel said, “Design for the value of the user, not the value of the page.” We’ve spent a lot of time embedded in news rooms and seen this conflict between business needs and editorial. There’s this fight for real estate on the page. Understanding that there are right times to make asks of users is powerful. A tiny blog post isn’t going to sell a circulation offer, so don’t do it there. A longform piece might, though.

• Iterations of infinite scroll. It’s here to say, Chmiel said, “We leverage normal behavior. I am scrolling down a page. Why do I need to hit a bottom?” Because people want an end to what they are reading, Rebecca Grossman-Cohen of NewsCorp said. Some people like to read a curated set of news and know they are done for the day. At The Verge, they don’t do infinite scroll but very, strongly visual links.

shift in measurement – no way to count engagement. # of people seeing it is not useful any longer – @beccc #nativeadvertising #ddimpact — Todd Cadley (@toddcadley) May 15, 2014

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Love the filter disparity between the content panel & video game panel – hilarious #filternofilter #ddimpact

— Todd Cadley (@toddcadley) May 15, 2014

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• Gamemaking and entertainment is broadening the idea of narrative. Star Wars became a big thread through the whole session, perhaps because its characters are so big and so recognizable that the mind can see them many ways.

• Indie gamemakers don’t have to be digital trinket salesmen. “There’s still space for indie developers who want to say something real,” Jules Ehrhardt of USTWO said. The company just released Monument Valley. It’s the story of a young girl looking for redemption. He said it reflects a purity of intent and thinks it’s a horrible world where you’re getting pushed constantly to “buy smurfberries.”

• Good second screen entertainment can work. Nicholas Fortugno of Dumbo’s Playmatics sees possibilities, such as where one player can see everything that’s happening on their screen and other players only get part of the story through a shared screen. Or TV chidren’s television where the character hops off the screen and onto a tablet for a bit and interacts with the kid.  “There just isn’t a vision in the industry of what second screen is going to look like from the business side and what people actually want to do,” Fortugno said.

• Marketing in narrative multimedia. “It scares me when we see attaching brands to games,” Ehrhardt said. Fortugno described Nine Inch Nails’s Year Zero guerilla marketing story, which started with USB sticks bathrooms and became a strange online experience that ended with a concert in a hidden tunnel and a fake bust by the cops. Ehrhardt said that’s marketing, but it’s cool because it was the band that did it. Ehrhardt added, “As soon as that’s Domino’s Pizza I want to jump out a window.” Fortugno countered that he looks at it differently, pointing out, “All the art we have from the renaissance was marketing for the Catholic Church.”

• What’s next for cross-media entertainment? Fortugno said that we’ll get to a point where a narrative can safely pas the ball from one platform or medium to another, and it will be okay even if not everyone follows it.

Story telling vs. story making in game design. Or is it even called “game” design anymore. Heated debate b/w panelists at #ddimpact — Mavilya Chubarova (@Mavilya0584) May 15, 2014

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I could listen to Nicholas Fortugno from @playmatics talk about gaming and game design for hours. #ddimpact

— Olga Zakharenko (@OYZak) May 15, 2014

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