When experts want to study animal behavior they don’t go to a zoo, they go to the species’ natural habitat, because that is where they are in their truest form. I believe this is analogous to marketers gathering information from a traditional focus group versus using what I call the Limitless Focus Group of consumers sharing their insights through social media networks.
People are more connected than ever. Social media is now used by a significant portion of the world’s population, with Facebook alone boasting over 1.2 billion active monthly users (AdWeek). This creates a huge volume of audiences who are engaging not only with friends and family, but also with brands.
The Psychology of Sharing tells us that there are many reasons social media users choose to further their engagement with brands by sharing their thoughts and opinions through these networks (AdWeek). But what sharing has accomplished for marketers is an enormous amount of data coming from the ‘natural environment’ and therefore more reflective of consumers’ interests, predictive of their future behavior, and responsive to current trends than a traditional focus group can ever hope to find.
Limits of a Traditional Focus Group
Like the animals in a zoo, a traditional focus group relies on a contrived environment to observe behavior. The people included are plucked from the larger population having nothing in common except shared demographics or some other key indicators. But these are indirect connections that cannot possibly reflect the interests of each person in the group and which produce results that are not as accurate, or predictive, as those gathered from people interacting normally within their everyday lives.
So the learnings of a focus group are limited by:
- Making the world static. Focus groups function as a snapshot in time without the ability to take future events into account.
- Operating in a vacuum. Consumers in a focus group are likely engaging with a marketer’s brands but, as people, are also engaging in other things that reflect their interests, such as TV shows, sports teams, and news. By focusing solely on their brand interaction, marketers lose the opportunity to plan across other channels.
- Taking too long. The traditional cycle of designing and testing products can take months or longer to complete and often the world has changed by the time it’s ready to launch.
- Size. A focus group, or even a series of groups, can only accommodate a small number of people, giving marketers insights into only a tiny slice of their target population.
The Limitless Focus Group
By contrast, the Limitless Focus Group created by social media sharing provides a far more powerful resource for marketers by:
- Constantly evolving. Social media not only provides a space for consumers to interact with brands in a more natural environment, but through constant updating it can also track shifting behaviors that allow marketers to predict changes or trends.
- Being scaled across affinities. By showing the many interests and connections of individual users, social media offers insights across affinities, allowing marketers to do better targeting for brands and plan for multiple channels.
- Operating in real time. The Limitless Focus Group provides instant and ongoing feedback on products and trends allowing new products to move to market faster.
- Including billions of people. Because of the ever-increasing number of active users on social media channels, brands can gather feedback from an enormous volume of consumers.
- Reaching further. Social media sharing not only allows marketers to observe responses to its own products but it can also track whole categories and even competitors in real-time.
- Measuring better. Marketers can assess advertising effectiveness both before and after using social media, providing critical short cycle measurement.
By moving from the limits of traditional focus groups to the Limitless Focus Group of social media sharing, marketers exponentially expand the universe of data available to them for making better, faster, and more predictive decisions.
As we venture deeper into 2015, many things tied to the dynamic face of digital marketing remain unknown. The power of Facebook's advertising for one. Does it have what it takes to last ? Or is just a fad till something newer comes along? That is just one.
User Experience, also known as UX however, is one of those aspects that remains very known, as far as its importance in how it impacts everything from app design to social media. Today, we are going to take a look at just five of the top reasons why UX is important and where. To narrow down the topics, we will focus on the mobile platform.
Mobile.
There is a plethora of statistics available that underscore the dire need and importance of mobile friendliness and marketing on the sea of devices in today's digital age. The user experience must be one that provides accessibility and visibility on all these devices out there (or at least the most popular to start). There is no other way about it. The User Experience must be smooth.
Way back in 2014, a bold prediction was made. It was made by Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers' Mary Meeker, a reviewer of tech trends. The stats in this comScore report are pretty much historic in the mobile sphere. Mobile marketing has become not just a nice to have, but a necessity for nearly every type of business on the planet. This necessity has bolstered the importance of.. You guessed it. The designing of the User Experience. As mobile use heads Northward and the diversity of mobile devices grows (Especially Android), it now becomes more of how we analyze those consumers and their behavior when using any of those devices. Providing them with a User Experience that pulls them in and doesn't let them go is what we're all after.
Below I have noted 5 reasons why I feel User Experience is important in 2015 and beyond.
Personalizing the Experience
As competition moves forward non stop and competitors ramp up to get a leg up, showing users what they want when they want is keeping UX designers working overtime. We all know that content personalization has been a mainstay of desktop sites for quite some time via the use of cookies.
Today, designers are using the information they have about user devices coupled with lots of other metrics on user behavior, geographical and demographics to personalize the user experience via content and design. What you present along with how you present it has taken center stage, as visitors are presented with what is most useful to them at the exact time. UX design together with monitoring, collection and analysis of visitor behavior drives the goal of creating a productive and engaging personalized user experience.
There are tools such as Toonimo, that enhance the user experience with animated audio visual guides that are personalized for each visitor.
Making a Splash: Being found Online
When a mobile user seek information, they typically browse and and search through querying or accessing the social networks. UX designers are fully aware of the importance of formatting, labeling and organizing content so that people can access and understand the information that exists on these pages. The techniques they use to make sites easy to find will ensure that both people and search engines will be able to connect in a better fashion in the vast landscape of big data and small apps.
User Input
With the diverse array of mobile devices, where screen sizes run the gamut in length and width, creating a user experience that will satisfy the masses is not so easy. UX designers need to make the process of inputting data using one hand effortless, and with that limits the amount of information asked. The user input experience needs to be efficient and trimmed down to the most needed information. Registration fields need to be one click experiences whenever possible. Airline and hotel booking apps should show default information whenever possible, taken from user preferences or their last options.
Creating a solid mobile user experience, requires UX designers to think outside of the box and choose such input mechanisms such as motion and voice. For apps that don't require security save the login information whenever possible on the mobile device. Keeping the gestures to swiping, tapping and pinching will make for a smooth user experience.
Users like Gesturing
The list of gestures is growing. Not, only that, each platform has its own set of gestures. From tapping, swiping, pinching, and shaking. A big part of the user experience is how they make their mobile device do what they want without having to type or even speak. A few actions to get what they want will make it a user experience users will want to come back to and spread the word about.
Different groups of users prefer different gestures for different things. When designing an app that will be targeting a certain group like generation Xers or teenagers, designers are building apps with those groups in mind. They will know the type of device they are using, what OS and what they like to do to get the latest football scores or the latest stock quotes. So, whether it's a tap, double tap, flick, drag or two finger scroll, great UX means that the designer took all those things into account to decide what is best for their audience
Great design drives great User Experience
UX designers often work very closely with Digital Marketing teams and this will only increase in 2015 as the designers are tuned in the most with the user and can assist with lots of optimization on various campaigns. Digital marketers will continue to see the benefits when working with the UX design teams as it will provide loads of intelligence that revolves around how they position the product for sale and marketing.
What do you feel are the elements of UX that will emerge as most important in 2015. Please feel free to chime in below.