The age of brand functionality?

The web should have been the death of the brand.

The web was measurable and rich with meaning, meaning that could be extracted and associated with tangible goods and services (Planting a garden? Buy a shovel now!).  Things that are less tangible, whose only unique differentiator is brand identity itself, should have faded away.  It should have been the rebirth of advertising, providing information on differentiators and attributes so consumers could make informed decisions on the product or service that was just right for them.

But brand advertisers were tenacious, and were used to aggressively spending without measurable results. They tried their best to exploit the web.  They created sites with games, sites that entertained, and while they and their ad agencies won many awards,  ultimately a brown fizzy liquid is just a brown fizzy liquid. And really, there's just not much more to say about it. While one can create a perception of value in more traditional, less data-oriented media, it is much, much harder in an information-rich environment.

Then social networks came along and saved the brand.  Like chugging a fizzy brown liquid, social media is, at its best, immediate and fleeting. While it rarely provides value in revisiting (and more often than not embarrassing in retrospect, though the facebook timeline feature may prove me wrong -- or right), there is a persistent, nagging longing for more.  Thus the challenge for brand advertisers is that they must maintain a constant presence in and around these networks, ready to exploit those brief, fleeting moments when they are #mentioned.

There is another way. What if brands built and delivered web-based functionality that made their customers' lives easier, better and more efficient? Functionality that reinforced brand expertise and unique selling propositions? For example, what if realtors, who expend enormous amounts of effort and money to endear themselves to neighborhoods and communities, instead built a website to support community interactions (calendar, bulletin board, directory, etc.) and gave it away free?

The challenge, of course, is when trying to make people's lives easier, intrusions (er, advertising) can greatly diminish the offering and experience.  Sure, the real estate company's name would be omnipresent but it would have to be non-aggressive and of less visual weight than the functions that attracted folks to the site in the first place. Of course, tasteful and subtle are not necessarily popular notions in branding, but in the long run, delivering functionality that improves your customers' lives will pay far greater returns and be a much better investment than spending on social media buys.

What defines a user experience practitioner?

There has been an ongoing LinkedIn thread in the User Experience (UX) group regarding just what defines a user experience practitioner. This is something that I have noodled as well as I have tried to determine what my last decade as a software entrepreneur has turned me into (professionally, at least). Of the many hats I have worn, ideation, prototyping, interaction and interface design and user testing has been the most interesting and personally satisfying, but does that make me a UX expert?  The LinkedIn thread leads me to believe there are two distinct groups, the traditional practitioners who come from industrial design, architecture, etc., and digital practitioners, who are more visually inclined. Certainly I am more of the latter, tho with a strong foundation in marketing fundamentals and keen knowledge of business process methods, both of which I think are additional strengths for effective digital UX design.

Anyway, I thought I'd share my recent contribution to the conversation as it describes a key notion of mine regarding software design and user interaction, which is the ability to achieve greater clarity of purpose by freeing yourself from constraints and rules:

"I have been following this conversation for some time, and I think a key distinction between these two UX camps is that one is governed by immutable rules, and the other is not.  User experience in the real world, as defined by architects, industrial designers, etc., is constrained by reality -- things like gravity, friction, mass, and so on.  The digital user experience is constrained by none of these things. In fact I would make the case that the more the real world intrudes on the digital experience, the more it is potentially diminished. Just because a physical object is known for a specific purpose does not necessarily make it the best metaphor to represent a vaguely similar action.

And as much as I respect the deep training UX demands in the real world, perhaps that same training, when applied to a primarily visual experience, is detrimental when it comes with so much psychological and creative baggage. Artists, on the other hand, excel at imagining possibilities without constraint. The beauty of the web and web toolsets are that they provide an easy way for artists to realize their ideas without making too many compromises. This is not to say anything should go, but it is always easier to scale back big ideas than to take a small idea and make it more than it is.

Certainly a balance of both skill sets would be optimal, but moving quickly and being good enough for the medium is going to win most of the time."

Mediocrity of the crowds

Everyone may have a fundamental right to an opinion, but that doesn't mean they know what the heck they are talking about. And put enough of these people together, and well, welcome to the internet, 2010. Loud, anonymous and opinionated with little substance. Credibility and expertise be damned.

While the touted benefits of the hive mind help rationalize this embracing of mediocrity, it in fact makes it even harder to discover information of substance and value as the outliers, both superior and inferior, get clumped together as they are not of the "norm."

Practically speaking, this makes it harder to know what new books to read, what new music may be of interest, or if a movie or play is worth seeing. Not to mention the utter lack of meaningful serendipity. It is not for lack of opinions, but for lack of quality, substantive opinions. While the internet has made it exceptionally easy to solicit and contribute feedback or post one's grandest or most heart-felt insights to a blog (ouch), there is absolutely no guarantee the thoughts shared are of any value whatsoever. And even if there are postings of substance you may simply never find them, having to first wade thru dozens or hundreds of rants and ramblings.

A real problem with this clumping together of outliers is that it also makes it much more challenging to discover things that may be loosely but not directly of interest. Sure Amazon and Google can tell you what has occurred in the past (people who liked this bought that...), but they are lousy at predicting the future because it's, well, unpredictable.

The answer? Well, for as long as they are around, the best resources are still the traditional media, where people are directly compensated to articulate critical thoughts. Skilled writers and reviewers with years of expertise in specific domains. While one may not always agree with their opinions, there is at least respect for the wisdom applied. And by being trusted sources, they enable readers to make discoveries and connections that software simply cannot know to make.

Would you pay for great search results?

In our experiments at Emantix with automating search queries, we discovered something really curious -- the longer and richer the query, more often than not the top result was very, very good. But the following results were not -- at all.  In fact, in our experimental search engine, howdoya.com, we had to tune down the richness of the query so that, at a glance, the entire results page looked good, giving the user an overall perception of quality.  And of course, when we tested with organically occurring ads, the same was true. Really great queries -- fewer, if any, ads, mediocre queries -- more ads.

So the question is, do more relevant search results diminish the quantity and quality of ads displayed? And if so, what are the implications of and opportunities in removing the obligations inherent in a paid advertising revenue model?

Why not an ad-free, fee-based search engine?  A low annual fee that is painless to an individual, but collectively, on a web-scale, could be a highly profitable enterprise?

Would you pay a nominal fee for better results and less visual clutter?

I would like to propose a word, a verb, to describe this opportunity  -- to "craigslist" -- or to disrupt an entire industry by eliminating a critical source of revenue.

The fundamental human benefit of the Web

As a follow up to the previous posting:

The Web empowers individuals to rapidly achieve innovations while reducing dependencies and removing barriers.

And while this may not encourage "team spirit," what it does do is free innovators, creators and thinkers to move at speeds previously unimagined. No longer constrained by middle managers who covet information as means of consolidating power; weighed down and slowed down by forced collaboration with mediocre performers (when was the last time you were in a brainstorming session where no one played devil's advocate and everyone offered real ideas and suggestions without fear of being ridiculed?); managed by superiors who either claim credit for efforts not their own or who claim vast improvements of quality by making trivial changes, the Web removes market boundaries, provides access to highly skilled but reasonably-priced resources, and allows for entire companies and brands to be built overnight merely by creating a well designed, thoughtful and information-rich online presence.

Now this may lead to more frequent job changes for these folks, expected or unexpected, but in the long run, a small price to pay for great leaps in innovation.

There is another risk — just because something is innovative is no guarantee that anyone will want it enough to pay for it. But I'll save that topic for another day.

The fundamental business benefit of the Web

It empowers the individual while reducing the burden on the enterprise.

Fundamental to the World Wide Web is the ability to provide anyone anywhere instant access to information, processes, tools and resources. This empowers individuals by helping them learn more quickly; think faster on their feet; improvise, improve and produce better results; and generally be more productive and self-sufficient.

And, while the same information, processes, tools and resources are accessed by many different people over time, the cost to the enterprise to define and disseminate occurs only once. And, once processes, information and resources are captured, organized and distributed, the enterprise can operate more efficiently — and more profitably.