On July 8th, the Computer-Human Interaction Forum of Oregon (CHIFOO) hosted Cathy Marshall of Microsoft Research at Jive Software (CHIFOO’s new location). Marshall’s presentation, titled Reading and Collaboration in a Digital Age: or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Screen, was a mental tour de force that reexamined assumptions of how we read, annotate, and look at text.

Approximately 60 people were in attendance, and the audience and speaker discussion was lively and relevant. There was never a dull moment or boring segment. I sat there furiously trying to capture every piece, as you will see evidenced below.

A Short History of eBooks

Marshall: I know lots of you are thinking, “what does reading have to do with collaboration?”.

eBooks have really been around for a long time, since around the 1980’s. The first generation was really about hypermedia and multimedia. Kind of the excitement of having these things on the screen, to be able to do things that you couldn’t do before. Peruses was a site about ancient Greece — the reason people loved it was that you were able to look up words in Greek and have them available immediately.

Generation 2 had P-books, or portable books. This turned out to be a bad name. There were multiple jokes about it. There was even a Zippy comic that made fun of it.

The comic shows Zippy and his friend flying through the city on the back of a book. Zippy’s friend says, “I head that the E-book trend never really took off, sales of the things are tanking.” and zippy says, E-books will never replace P-Book!”.

There’s some more text discussing the comparative values of books over electronic media, and the cartoon ends with Zippy saying, “E-books are spineless”.

Marshall: I think there’s a real sort of cultural anxiety about the end of books, and the death of text. And there was also skepticism about reading on computers, Like Sven Birkerts, Richard Harper, who wrote about how paperless offices didn’t work. There were also people in library science who said that these things wouldn’t work out well eighteen.

Marshall brings out a slide of an old cell phone displaying a partial sentence from Moby Dick on its tiny, pixilated screen.

Marshall: For many people, their worst fear was of having to read something on a cell phone while being trapped in the airport.

But there is no reason to laugh about this anymore because people in Japan are actually reading and writing novels on cell phones.

In Family Circus…by the way….does anyone think Family Circus is funny? I think they must have some hidden message or something , and that’s why people keep publishing them.

Audience: I have some friends who carefully cut out Family Circus every day…and then replace the captions with something else. Then they’re funny.

A Family Circus comic shows up on the screen. The kid is talking to his mother. “I’m never going to start reading eBooks,” he says, “it’s too hard to curl up with a monitor”.

And one last point was from Clifford Lynch in the battle to define the future of the book in the digital world. He said, “Try to think of eBooks as personal libraries instead of books” First Monday, 2001. “>First Monday 2001.

Generation 3 - 2006-2008

By the time Generation 3 happened, the generations were getting closer and closer together (as they say in future shock).

In this generation, we asked ourselves, will eBooks somehow renew the social side of reading?

Why was it so hard to see what’s coming?

Reason 1: Changes aren’t always in technology.

There was a very famous article written by Vannevar Bush about a system he called a Memex (portmanteau of “memory extender”). It’s heralded as the introduction to the hyperlink, that you could go from one place to another and record that hyperlink.

“The advanced arithmetic machines of the future…will have enormous appetites. One of them will take instructions form a whole roomful of girls armed with simple keyboard punches and will deliver sheets of complicated results every few minutes”. - Vannevar Bush in As We May Think, 1945.

I took typing class too, on those big clunky computers. And there were no boys in the class. You weren’t a boy in my class unless you were in drag.

An audience member nods.  “Were you in drag?” Marshall asks.

“Depends,” he responds, “what year was that again?”

Why is it hard to answer this question?

Answer: Because it is often difficult to see the whole cost/benefit analysis side of the picture, like this panel I cut out from the back of a box of Shredded Wheat that says,

“Dear NABISCO Shredded Wheat Users”.

Reason 3: Reading is Invisible

“Nothing is more commonplace than the reading experience, and yet nothing is more unknown. Reading is such a matter so common that at first glance, it seems there is nothing to say about it. ”
Tzvetan Todorov, quoted by Nicholas Howe in The Ethnography of Reading.

Marshall: I’m kind of a feral Ethnographer. Sarah has worked with me and knows that I like to have principles.

I was sitting there on the airplane and I was sitting there watching this man read his magazine. There he was, reading this magazine. I thought I was so discreet. And at some point he got up and went to the restroom.

And he looked over at me and said, “you stole my magazine”. and I said, “I did not!” and he said, “Let me look in your briefcase”. And so reading is invisible. And it’s very dangerous to watch people read. And people think it’s creepy!

But in this talk I’m trying to summarize 15 years of studies on cooperation, and reading tech, to really find out what reading is. So you’ll have to bear with me as I tease out a definition.

I starting looking at intelligence analysts - how people gathered and collected things, and then how people annotated things, and found that they aren’t quite the scholarly things people see in the margins, and then looked at it in law offices and law school. Those also who came in and talked to the Vice President and President and briefed them every morning. And I actually got to be there when President Bush got the Osama bin Laden briefing.

I went to work at Microsoft and looked a Microsoft reader, and then I looked at shared annotations, and then how people clipped things out of magazines and how they read. So we looked at reading in some detail. Then I worked with some people t Microsoft at the New York Times Reader application. Does anyone have one of those?

One audience member raised his hand.

Well then, it was a tremendous success! The photos in it are really nice. You don’t really notice how nice the photos are in the Times until you view them in that reader.

Then she showed a photos of a guy sitting on the subway reading a newspaper seated next to a guy who was sitting there with a tremendous cathode ray tube monitor and keyboard on his lap, the computer unit on the ground underneath his feet. It was making fun of Reading, of course.

How Do Most People Think About Reading?

We think it’s private, individual, stationary and passive. We think it’s something as immersive, and sometimes soggy (she shows a picture of a guy reading a newspaper in the bathtub).

But what we found instead was that reading is mobile. That’s why reading on a screen was so dismal at first, because nobody wanted want to carry around a screen with them everywhere. Because reading was so mobile. What we found at first was that mobility overwhelmed many things at first.

“If I’m going home to Colorado, I have to be really sure I’m going to read something if I’m going to bring it. Otherwise, why should I bring it [if it's large, heavy]. [The Pocket PC] is small, it’s handy.”. Quote from a college student talking about a Pocket PC with his course texts.

Marshall: Note that he actually didn’t end up reading his coursework on over the break.

So reading is mobile, material, passive.

In The Places of Books in the Age of Electronic Reproduction, Geoffrey Nunberg of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Stanford University said this about eBooks:

“Reading what people have had to say about the future of knowledge in an electronic world, you sometimes have the picture of somebody holding all the books in the library by their spines and shaking them until the sentences fall out loose in space” (Representations 24, Spring, 1993). Also in Howard Bloch and Carla Hesse, eds., Future Libraries, University of California Press, 1994.

“You get this little screen, so you get no sense of even how long the work is…but you have 600 pages, which means what? No one knows. So I definitely don’t see it as a literary experience”. An English Lit Grad student talking about reading on the Jordana Pocket PC.

(Note from Amber Case: This is what I continually think about when I encounter a computer, because no matter how much data I stuff into it, it never gets heavier. A book weighs the same as a leaflet – nothing).

Marshall: Navigation is fundamental to the material of paper.

“Something else that I think I sometimes do when reading an article: I’ll be like, ‘boy this has been going on a long time, and sometimes I’ll even flip ahead and think, how many more pages do I have? And if it’s going to end on this page, then I may just read it. But if I see it’s three more pages, the…I may just either give up. Or just go into scan mode, where I just flip, you know, see what grabs my attention”

Marshall: Reading has a basic physicality.

(Note from Amber Case: Here, the materiality allows scanning, weight, and thickness).

“I usually read in one of the chairs in the living room. That’s partly because I don’t have a desk in here. The chairs are very comfortable. There’s a occasionally much too comfortable, that’s why I have blankets around every chair in the house, so I can always be prepared to go to sleep.” - An English Lit major talking about where she reads.

Then Marshall shows a quote from the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard.

“I can’t read this without a French accent,” she says, “else I can’t get away with it. Does anyone have a French accent?”.

No one in the a audience had one.

“The compact disc,” says Baudrilliard, “It doesn’t wear out, even if you use it. Terrifying. It’s as through you’d never used it. So it’s as through you iddn’t exist. IF things dont’ get old anymore, then that’s because it’s you who are dead”. Jean Baudrilliard, Cool Memories II.

Marshall: Maybe you don’t want the pristine copy - you want the one that is like the one you first bought in the 70’s. The one that is used. The one that is well read.

You think about how interact with books online - you don’t have to think about that with a paper book. You don’t have to think about how to annotate.

Audience: The medium of the book is to have it be as transparent as possible. But when you have these different mediums that have types of media placed, you can’t read them anymore. You’re inhibited by the medium. You notice it.

We’ll get back to that later - I have a big rant about that too.

People interact with text far more than they own up to. People don’t remember making the annotations, they idealize them, they make far more than they actually remember. And when you show someone their annotations from a few days back, they don’t know what many of the annotations were referring to.

Audience Member: Have you ever heard of the book as a sacred object? Because I’m a librarian and I can’t annotate a book. I buy one copy for me and another to annotate.

Marshall: And what about the Ebook? Do you value the Ebook?

Audience Member: There’s nothing sacred about an Ebook because it doesn’t have a material embodiment. And I know I’m not going to pass it along to anyone else.

Marshall: Not unless you violate the DRM you won’t!

Audience Member: Is that sacredness of the book genetic, do you think?

Audience Member: Well I don’t know.

Librarian: Well, I was one of those, “Matchbox car collectors, a ‘never open the package’ kind of person.

Audience: What about the notes taken by college students?

Marshall shows the image of a page that’s been completely highlighted.

Like this? Or some people carefully save all of their college notes and them look at them later, or think they will look at them later. Or value them highly, but never look at them.

Literally, though, this highlighting goes on for pages. If you find that at the beginning of a math book, it means that the person’s going to drop the class.

Audience: I could never buy a book that was already annotated, because I’d go through the book and be like, “that’s not worthy of being annotated! or that section is not important enough to be highlighted!”.

Audience: Can you tell me the context of this study? How it was formed? Where you got the information?

Marshall: I’m smushing together many years of research here, but I can tell you about a few experiments.

For instance, for the highlighting, annotation one, I staged myself in the Stanford bookstore and pretended that I worked there, and I stayed there 2-3 weeks, looking through 1000’s of textbooks, watching people buy used and new textbooks, eavesdropping on whether or not they would buy what kind of book, and interviewed them about f they would by

And a lot of them would look through books to see what had been outlined before they decided on purchasing them.

This was a study I did a dozen or so years ago. It was one of the first studies I did, and it was just to get an idea of what people did when they purchased textbooks.

Audience: Did you ever find out the answer, “why did you highlight this entire text? Like why so much?

Marshall: Well, I think it happens in instances where there’s really complex information placed in front of someone who doesn’t understand it. The highlighting becomes more of a tracing of general attention. Sometimes it is from multiple readings.

In Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren’s How to Read a Book, there’s a whole section on active learning. Sometimes I see those results. One time I saw a book with multiple different colors and I found a student who said, “Oh, I do that!”. I asked why, and she said, “Oh, I just change colors when I get bored”. Evidence of why it is important to ask.

Annotations May Quickly Lose Their Value or Be Forgotten

“Some of them are absolutely ridiculous and I can’t believe that I actually wrote this in pen in the book. Some of them are - I have no idea what I’m talking about. Some of them are really interesting, and it’s something I’ve forgotten. It just depends on the notes….when I did Milton, we were doing the epithets about Satan or something, so I underlined all of them. And when I was going back through it, I’m like “what on Earth!?” A grad student talks about annotations she made as an undergrad.

Marshall: The reason I found out about the subconscious stuff is that I’d go back with them through their notes a week after they’d done it and ask them about it, the notes, the diagrams, and some of them would say, “I’m sure it had some meaning at the time”. So annotations have more meaning than we think.

Reading is Interrupted and Variable

I think this is at the root of “what is reading”. It’s not this image of a little girl in the window seat and she’s totally engrossed in a book, uninterrupted.

“We do not read everything with the same intensity of reading; a rhythm is established, casual, unconcerned with the integrity of the text; our very avidity for knowledge impels us to skim or to skip certain passages (anticipated as ‘boring’) in order to get more quickly to the warmer parts of the anecdote…” - Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text.

Marshall: Reading is not a single, undistracted stream of concentration. Has anyone read all the words of Proust, or War and Peace?

Audience member: Yes. But it was not normal circumstances.

Marshall: Right, most of the time, reading is fragmented.

Turning a Page as a Complex of Lightweight Navigational Acts

A series of actions: Constance is reading the first page of a review, but halfway through the article she turns the page halfway over, so she can see the next article while still reading the first one.

She looks at the cartoon before she goes to the next page because she thinks it’s funny.

She goes through the next page, which looks like a lengthy review, looks at the ads, because the likes to look at the ads.

She successfully flips over the magazine so that she can read the next article.

She changes the orientation of her hands so that she can comfortably read again.

I have so many videos of people moving their hands to their face or moving them when they’re

I’m going to claim that reading is social. Not that it is intensely individual, as many people may think.

“It is also worth noting that solitary reading always was, and still is, inherently social: how we read is ultimately determined by social convention and community membership”. -David Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age

Marshall: Now I’m going to bring up our old friend, the CSCW matrix.

When, Where, same time, different time, Same place, different place. It’s been around so long that I couldn’t figure out how to source it.

Audience: Stands for Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

In the upper left: reading together, same time, same place.

We were watching students read on the web and we seated each one in front of a computer. We just told them to ‘go and browse the web’. And very quickly they had organized themselves in twos or threes around the computers instead of individually exploring the web alone.

And then we did studies with an early Web TV, and I thought, “ ‘ho hum!’ big deal, the Web on your TV!”

But then I watched as one kid was messing around with the Web TV, and another kid joined him. Before long, they were negotiating about where to go next on the web.

And then there were situations designed to read socially, like reading groups.

One of the things I noticed is how people stayed together while reading together. One of the problems with some books is that people go to the used bookstore and buy different editions, and people all have to align in class on the same class. They’re all different ways people use to get to the same page. Chapters, indexes, page numbers, ect. What we noticed is that people can be productively engaged in the discussion but not actually on the same page. This sort of things people would get punished for.

Audience: Was it established why it was important to be on the same page? Reading together: on-the-spot research enhancing discussion or digression?

Marshall: Well, we did some studies where there would be a line in the reading like “Did they really hang dogs a witches?” This was an interesting quote so all the kids reading on their pocket PC’s began to look it up. Some teachers found it to be good, and others a distraction.

But a problem with sharing reading materials occurs when one tries to share them electronically, especially with a Kindle.

Audience: You can share books on a Kindle!

Marshall: Even DRM ones?

Audience: You can share them if they’re in the public domain.

But that’s not the same as sharing a book. The problem is that you have to have an ID or account to share that data. You can’t just pass it to the next person, like you would with an analog book. You can’t share the data itself, or annotations, or things you’ve torn out.

Speaking of tearing out data; we all have experienced this. Tearing out data makes us this of our mothers, our mothers or brothers or sisters, tearing something out and mailing it to us.

H3>A Few Questions About Sharing Encountered Information

How important/ubiquitous is the information? Do people cut out things to annoy people?

It’s kind of like, you buy a magazine because of the things you might find in there. But you don’t know what’s going to be in there.

Audience: I now look at people’s Twitter feeds to see what I should look at.

At this point, @brampitoyo said (on Twitter) “@caseorganic Twitter is made for sharing artifacts encountered everywhere else. RT is one of the forms.”

Marshall: What are some of the reasons people share?

1. Sharing for mutual awareness.

2. At work, in customer-focused jobs.

3. At home, keeping up with friends and family
short of a way to keep in synch.

4. Sharing to educate or raise consciousness. Valued by sender — perhaps not by receiver.
Mostly occurred for personal topics/home

Audience: I was thinking with Twitter how funny it is, how the more boring Twitter users just send out links, and we don’t get to know them as person.

Audience: Well, I like those people!

5. Sharing to strengthen social ties
“I’m thinking of you”
“We have common concerns”
“We have the same sense of humor”.

Audience: Or sometimes you’re sharing to make people think you’re smart

Yes, we just notice it because it’s so obnoxious, but it’s rally not that prevalent. Just sharing knowledge to show off.

Audience; Or sharing to “hint”, like “I’m thinking about getting a camera”.

P2, a high school student, receives links to online article from her dad sometimes as often as 2 or 3 times a day. She usually reads he article son the screen and doesn’t keep them. For example her dad recently sent her an article from the NY Times. “Sending these articles is nice. I don’t know how we started doing it, but it feels nice to know people are thinking about you. It’s our way of keeping in touch.

Marshall: Here’s an example of sharing to educate.

P15 has a pre-adolescent son has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of high functioning autism. The mother found an article on educating children with Asperger’s syndrome and photocopied the “really good” article from Time. Then she told the her son’s teacher that she should read it.

The Social Role of Sharing: Myth Busting

All four participants in our study shared information. None of them dominated in sharing the inormation, and none of them were the single sharers of information.

This busts the idea of people setting themselves up as “information brokers’ not many people just
send out completely, or one-way. Everyone sends out a few links.

Audience: There are some people on Twitter who Retweet. I don’t really like that.

Audience: Tell them!

Marshall: I’m worried about you and Twitter. We should talk later.

Audience: I work alone, so it’s my water cooler that I check every few hours.

Marshall: Still, I think you’re spending too much time on it.

It’s more complicated than that!

Riox looked at why people share or don’t share data.

Do I have the recipients email address at hand?
What will it look like?
Will this seem impersonal?
Will the Email look like spam?
(Riox, 2000).

Form is important.

A technological solution for sharing should:

-Present a sense of layout and article boundaries.
-Allow the sender to limit or expand scope or context (compare sending a photo plus text vs. part of text).

Modes of Sharing are Important

“My plan is to actually give a hardcopy of an article from nature to him and talk to him about it, rather than just put it in his inbox because he’d kind of wonder where it came from or why he was getting it. And I’d rather say, hey, I saw this online and it’s pretty interesting. Check it out”.

Because he wants to get this higher into another person’s attention instead of the low attention the recipient might give the article should he receive it through a digital source.

“I have come to view margins as a literary commons with grazing room from everyone - the more, the merrier”. - Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris : Confessions of a Common Reader, London : Penguin Books, 1998.

Of course, sharing annotations is more complicated than it looks.

See, for example, Shipman et al., ECDL 2003.

I was working at Microsoft Research and a guy on my team said, “wouldn’t it be cool if the annotations you wrote would be sent to the author of the book?” and I said, “No! I’d be dead!”.

But, I thought, is there a way to take multiple highlighting, annotations of multiple copies of the same book and see commonalities between them, in order to deduct the most useful pieces of text — a sort of wisdom of crowds sort of boil-down?

Annotations in the Aggregate

Consensus is significantly more common than predicted by strict probabilistic calculations of overlap.

Annotators converge on important text that is different than the text that the authors and publisher designate as important.

Annotation; collective effects. If you had dozens and dozens of books, could you use a ‘wisdom of crowds approach to zoom in on something that was important? Something that many different people underlined across all of the books? Some essential passage?

Audience: The Folksonomy of Cliffnotes? Is that what you’re getting at?

Marshall: Maybe… Kind of.

Audience: Or like a Wiki?

Collaboration and reading technologies; What of displays - are we thinking enough about “looking on” or shared focus?

How do social expectations interact with restrictions introduced by Digital Rights Management?

Which collaboration architectures will work for people using the same collections (i.e…annotation, reading rooms, bookmark servers)?

Are there new modes of collaboration enabled by digital devices?

Collaborators:

XLibris studies: Morgan price, Bill Schilit, and Gene Golovchinsky at FXPAL.

About Cathy Marshall

Cathy Marshall is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley; she has knocked around in both the product and research divisions at Microsoft. Cathy has long worked in the disciplinary interstices of computer science, information science, and the humanities, with occasional collaborations in the arts and the sciences. She was a long-time member of the research staff at Xerox PARC and is an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University. Cathy won the ACM Hypertext conference’s best paper award in 1998 and 1999, and the best paper award at the IEEE/ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in 1998 and 2008. She has delivered keynotes at WWW, Hypertext, Usenix FAST, CNI, VALA, ACH-ALLC, and a variety of other CS and LIS venues.
MS Reader study:
Contact info: http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall

cathymr [at] Microsoft [dot] com.

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist studying the effects of technology on the way humans think, communicate, and act. She can be reached at caseorganic [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter @caseorganic.

Yesterday I attended WebTrends Connect ‘08 in Seattle, Washington with Ryan Summers of ISITE Design.

The event was three hours long, and fast-paced. We arrived at 9:00 Am to find a speaker from WebTrends discussing the future state of news. He asked us to consider what could happen if one used online traffic to drive what is written about in analog newspapers.

As the seminar progressed, the ability to stitch together a holistic view of customer experience became a primary area of concern. One of the first major points was that Marketing and IT need to be working together.

“There is a lot of information locked behind closed doors”, said the next speaker, who was from TeraData. “There is no way to get the data out of the web analytics solutions and into the reporting dashboard.

He proposed the idea of business intelligence tools that could access this online visitor data and put it into an enterprise data warehouse.

He pointed out that one of the current difficulties of using data is that we are making a transition from 2nd Generation Enterprise to 3rd Generation Enterprise systems.

The 2nd Generation is Closed + Proprietary, whereas the 3rd Generation is Open standard-based. You simply can’t inegrate data systems when they are separated by proprietary, closed systems.

As O’Reilly once stated, “The internet is becomnig an enormous database that can be quiried, sorted, and applied to existing models and practices to change things”. WebTrends, TeraData, and other new systems seek to integrate many different systems with Analytics. The only way to streamline the spaces between data and change is to remove the closed doors betwen that data.

He stated that tech solutions should be open source based. These technologies seek to implement solutions that bring the two together and erases the nodes between them. He also pointed out that standards need to be in place that everyone agrees about across the organization.

Data Flow and Analytics

Online data can influence customer marketing, call centers, data warehouses, CRM and merchandisers.

Business Centric
—-
Business strategy
Performance Management
People — Processes
Analytics Processes
Analytics Applications
BI Platforms
Information Management Infrastructure.
——————

The next speaker was Paul Barrett
Global Director, Customer Management and DIgital Advertising

“How does one create one vIew of your customer?”, he asked, responding that the solution was “an Interactive marketing Intelligence across the enterprise”.

“Marketing an IT don’t like to play together — they have completely different mindsets.” A solution is to create Integrated Data warehouses so that the website and the customer service can blend into each other. Bringing that relationship closer together allows a more holistic view of all of the data coming into a company.

One of the most difficult issues is getting the recommended changes implemented in a shorter period of time every time.

It’s not about the data you can get at, but the risk of not knowing the data you’re missing.

The metrics are cheap, bu the metrics you don’t know are not.

Case Study: Travelocity

Tavelocity took the idea of using the CRM to drive customers to offers through the website. They had to avoid things like, “if you get a flight to NY for $500, and you log back out, when you next visit the site you can’t be shown an offer for $300, since you just bought the $500 one”.

They have a lot of dynamic decision making since you’ve already placed an order for $500.

Whne you become able to share the data between these systems, you become able to provide customized experiences for your customers with data that revolves around them.

You can also begin to bring unstructured data, such as the data on blogs into analytic understanding. For instance, when people blog about your website you can bring that data into your data warehouse.

The next speaker was Kevin Bobowski: Vice President, Client Services at Statigent

Stratigent is Partnering with Exact Target to provide a variety of KPI’s, such as benchmarkeing, competitive intelligence, visitor engagement measurement, optimization, proactive reporting and analysis, website testing and optimization.

“Don’t start with strategies that are too high-level that you don’t see value from them in the short term”, Bobowski said.

Primary challenges facing organizations today:

• So many initiatives and not enough time to implement all of them
• Picking and choosing what to do in a timely matter reduces liability
• Intense pressure to produce results
• Increasingly complex demands (coming from your business stockholders — their demand for information, customer insights)
• New marketing technologies create more data and more silos
• Balance to Building out these Capabilities

Strategy + Business Process

Do you have a unified strategy and clear goals that are measurement?

Infrastructure

Is realible and flexible technology in place to meet the evolving needs of ke sakehodes?

Value Creation Tactics

(Any processes a business uses to glean value from your data, testing, campaign analysis, conversion testing, customer segmentation).
What actions are you taking — on a consistent basis - to drive ROI?
Are the building blocks in place for this?

Isolated Successes vs. Long-term success

An organization with isolated successes - look at the successful campaign. This is often an indicator that there’s an executive sponsorship.

Where did you get your data, how did you get your data? instead of how to analyze your data.

Building a ‘culture of analytics’

The organization needs to invest in value creation tactics.
Demonstrate short term results that allow you to gain greater sponsorship and credit for lager projects — with the long term strategy and goals in mind.

He coined the term ‘Stratactical’, which he defined as, “of or relating to a strategy driven-approach using value based tatics”, adding that “while it’s great to have a long term strategy, you also have to balance it with results on the short term. You need to develop reliably, stable success.”

43 Percent of organization say they’ve started the process — but they’re not seeing any value.

How can you get hte results? How can you guarantee that those results will net short term wins

Key Preformance Indicators

It is difficult to show ROI from a seamless cross-channel customer experience with personalization and customization in place.

It is less difficult to Show ROI from a trigger-based communications program with customer profiling and predictive modeling.

4 tactics for a successful business case

-Build an actionable strategy
-Connect your marketing data
-Establish relationships (where are the shared pain points across the organization? Data silos make it difficult to have everyone on the same page).
-Optimize, Test, and Repeat…
-Incorporate resting to amplify the value you generate

Building an Actionable Strategy

-Optimize the Media Mix (return on ad spend)
-Increase the most productive spend
-Increase E-mail spend if cost per acquisition is less than direct mail and other marketing tactics
Reduce acquisition costs and increase profits per customers
Find and understand the total cost per Acquisition.

5 Types of KPI’s

-Outcome/Business driver

Return on Ad spend (Answers the question of”how well am I doing?”

-Diagnostic metrics (Helps you answer the question “how can I do better?”. An example is a conversion rate — click through to a landing page).

-Smoke alarms (Helps you anticipate potential problems that may exist. Example is number of unopened E-mails. That’s an indicator that something might not be right — might be sending E-mails to the wrong audience. Allows you to dig deeper).

-Predictor KPI’s (Allows you to look into the future — Answers the question of will I do better tomorrow? A client may invest in a banner campaign. Customers may need an amount of time to evaluate the purpose. Banner clicks might not convert immediately — in a day, week or month. Some organizations know up front, and they can prepare for revenue and stock — for how well they’ll be doing in 45 days).

-Latent KPI (the most valuable of all. Helps you answer the question of where are my marketing opportunities. Can take the form of customer surveys on the websites. This data sometimes sits solely in the marketing department and is not let out, but the data there should be shared across many channels — because it can help every department understand how others are seeing their organization).

Business Philosophy

Don’t let the KPI’s change every week or month, or else everyone in the organization will have a difficult time synching with each new idea, method, or direction. Focus, and slough off things that don’t match that focus.

Connecting your Marketing Data

The question is where are you as an organization? If your organization is not advanced enough

ExactTarget Email Integration

You can exact a customer’s E-mail address and the Product SKU’s they’ve purchased/looked at, as well as sales funnel abandonment info.

You can use ExactTarget automation to pick a file up, bring it in, and send and email leveraging that data.

Creating a targeted,one-to-one message using our proprietary scripting language.
Press the “Start” button and go about you your daily business.

Promote product A, but you know that customers who purchase product A also purchase products B and C. So you can include those in dynamic E-mails based on their interest in product A.

Promote product B and C automatically, but only if that product is in stock.

Optimization

Optimization is bigger than testing but testing plays a key role in the organization. Testing can drive short term wins.

Optimize emails creatives to increase click-throughs

-Headlines
-Offers
-Message/Copy
-Images
-Call to actions

Try different calls to action — when you begin to use multi-variate testing, you increase the capability to really increase your ROI.

Increase lending page conversion rates by multi-variate testing in the same way

-Headline
-Form field
-Color scheme
-Calls to action

1. Be Stratatical. Make sure that strategy is actionable.
2. KPI’s. Abolsutley essential.
3. Breaking down data silos allows data to flow into larger areas. These data areas combine into one bigger view of the customer. Which allows a richer view of the customer.
4. Optimization testing. It cannot be said enough how important optimization testing is. How else can you know what is successful in the site and wha epople are looking at.

KPI’s can exist on every level.

For copies of the Slides, E-mail:
Kevin.Bobowski@Stratigent.com

Many Ways to Get One View

Barry Parshall, Director of Product Management

The more plugged in the rest of the organization is, the more successful that organization can work together.

We see more and more organizations taking the data out of WebTrends and turning it into their own

Microsoft has categorized all of their key metrics into dashboards.

WebTrends 8.6 Demo

The UI was taken from Microsoft Outlook.

OTBC Drivers

A means for getting direct access to WebTrends data bins with an ODBC-compliant application.

Same driver for WebTrends Analytics and WebTrends Marketing Warehouse

Easy to install and use.

Demo, WebTrends ODBC Driver

-Open Excel 2007
-Click Data from other sources —> from Microsoft query
-WebTrends Demo — the data source for WebTrends already set up.
-Click ‘ok’
-This will connect you to the webtrends backend — select the profile. double click the ones that one cares about. Can grab multiple data channels and pull them into the same Excel data sheet.
Next –> you can sort by anything you want.
-Choose ’sort by revenue’, descending.
-Click Finish.

Limitations

Ryan Summers informed me that, “you can only quiery one time period at a time. You can’t query two time periods”.

Datalinks for Microsoft Excel

From Business Intelligence, Inc. (a Portland, Oregon Company).

You can join all of that data with other data sources. Provides a real simple way to join that data with other data sources. Will also export the data intelligence to Excel — so that you can go to Excel, hit refresh, and Excel will auto update all of the fields.

Webservices API —> can directly implement data in and out of the data warehouse. Bi-directional data transport for WebTrends Marketing Warehouse
Based on SOAP.

TechnologyLeaders (New York)

Dynamic Alerts lets you know when to act — when a variable changes dramatically, you are sent a notification E-mail.
Event envelope based on historical norms. Alerts are sent when activites exceeded historical norms.

DataMind (Seattle, Wa)

They produce a very slick custom scorecard offering the capability to export all of your analytics to one place. There’s also a browser overlay application.

Demo

All Excel based. Data arranged by tabs. Capturing a thumbnail of your website and overlaying the analytical data over it. Consultants customize the scorecard for your business.

Data Scheduler
Allows the scheduling of an export for the underlying analysis tables that contains hundreds of thousands of data sources.

The WebTrends Marketing Warehouse

-A true data warehouse, based on Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
-Stores and maintains discrete records of visitors, and all “events” taken by them.
-Every campaign click-through, ect.
-Limitless correlations and audience segmentation capabilities
(Get me a list of visitors that met all of this criteria).

The fundamental difference between aggregate web analytics, and customer centric web analytics is the ability to run queries.

Case Studies

Orbitz, a TeraData customer, is using it for:
-Web behavior connected with offline transactions
-Combine data analysis, reporting in its own warehouse.
Polaris
-Web scoring accurately segments diverse audiences
-Use WebTrends Score to assign point values to particular onine actions (as a mean to quickly asses consumer interest in some products vs. others)
-On a nightly basis exact
use this to populate further interaction .

The Microsoft SQL Database is automatically populated with data and assigns each user action with a number.

Polaris Home Page (rule sets)
New vehicle interest: 1 (user clicked here but left after a few seconds)
Racing Interest: 0
Parts and gear interest: 15 (user clicked here and watched a video on parts and gear)
Engaged (how interested is your user?): 10 (video watching)
Total Score: 26

————

Conclusion

While some of these techniques are not new, it was nice to see many of them presented in three hours. It is apparent that bringing data from different sectors into common areas will help many to understand how users and companies are interacting. Analytics are becoming essential for companies to efficiently connect and deal with many customers at once while providing them with customized experiences.

I look forward to watching industries and products that help reduce the data silos that affect many current companies. The technologies are there — it is just an issue of getting these technologies into companies so that more users can be understood. I am sure that interest in these tools will only increase in the future.

———–

About

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and new media consultant living in Portland, Oregon. She likes to attend events and meet people in the industry. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

The first ever Refresh Portland occurred tonight from 6:30 to 8:00 Pm at Jive Software in Downtown Portland.

Tonight’s speaker was Tyler Sticka, an award-winning designer, artist, speaker and educator specializing in identity-driven new media. He was extremely well prepared and engaging.

Micheal Sigler @sigler began by introducing the concept of Refresh.

“Cities have been Refreshing for a while,” he said, “if you visit RefreshingCities.com you’ll find that there are Refresh events everywhere.”

Refresh events serve bring people together who are really intereted in standards based design. The events help them exchange best practices and knowledge. As Sigler said, “towards a portion of design you can walk away with something and use it in your daily lives”.

We just felt that it was time to bring a little design love to Portland.

“We”, being Michael Sigler, @michaelsigler, John Weiss of 5 Edge Media, Josh Pyles @pixelmatrix of Pixelmatrix Design, Carlos @eedorre (a system admin with a background in web development), and you probably Bram Pitoyo @brampitoyo from Twitter.

We really want to make this a community where you provide us comments. Also, we are looking for speakers. Feel free to contact any of the organizers if you know of someone who would be awesome for the event.

“Tyler Sticka is now going to take us through the looking glass,” Sigler began….and we were off.

Through the Looking Glass - How the Web is and Ought to Be

“I work at US Digital from Monday through Thursday”, Sticka said.

“But on Friday though Sunday I design logos, icons, and websites.

“This is because I’m really addicted to the idea of creating something out of the vacuum. Unlike art on a all — art stuck up on the walls.

“Communication is one thing, but conversation is the idea of the dialogue — something that’s been absent from the world of fine art for a while.

“The idea that the Viewer is also able to impart part of their experience into the work fascinates me.

New media is the first to take this concept in completely literally.

Spine Tingling Adventures of the Early Web

Sticka picked two people from the audience and gave them scripts:

“Sam, you’re going to be playing the role of website”.

“And the other will stay the part of the user”.

Website: Would you like to talk about our product, our company history….ect.

User: Umm….talk about our product?

Website: Sure…would you like option 1, 2,3,4,,5,6,,457,,8,67,87?

User: Return to home?

Sticka: Do you see how short and unfulfilling that was?

The companies that weren’t having conversations were dying out.

“In reality, users benefited in the end.

Early Innovation in Experience Design

“I like to show Amazon.com when I talk about early innovation in websites. Their recommendations features is one of the best out there — still one of the best out there.

It’s like a sort of Nerd-tastic natural selection happened.

“This sort of word they gave it afterwards was web 2.0. I don’t like it very much.

The revolution in the computer industry had Three Basic Parts

1. Visual — websites before based on the constraints of html

2. Directly from graphic design. pretty, but only a thousand people card.

3. Thematic - we’re catering to the community and the conversational aspects. .

Example:

Flickr’s Upload Tool.

“Some might say we’re in a renaissance of information.

“But they’re wrong.

We’re not in a renaissance of information, we’re in the pupae stage.

“We’re now just starting to construct the cocoon that will allow us to emerge as something triumphant.

“The idea of this moving into the mainstream is more important than us understanding what’s going on.

(At this point I realized the screen that Tyler Sticka’s Powerpoint was being projected on was made of 8.5 by 11 sheets of white computer paper stuck to the wall. Way to innovate, Refresh Portland

“In essence we are just becoming more understanding of the customer and the customer more understanding of the creator.

Lets go back to 1995. A Simpler Time.

The browser wars between Netscape and the powerhouse Internet Explorer began to emerge.
There was this sort of idea that there should be one victor, that there should only be one IE, or Firefox.

He then showed a slide with 12 different browsers, ranging from the most known and used, to the least known and used. Starting with Firefox 3, then IE and eventually flock and Epiphany (for Gnome).

He said that he posted pictures of browsers that were used by people he knew. Even Epiphany.
“Because I know people who use Epiphany.
“Well, I don’t know them; they’re online; but its practically the same thing now.

He pointed out that Flock and Songbird are both browsers that are augmenting the browser experience in ways that really help the users.

Android

“Hopefully more agnostic choices will emerge for mobile browsing.

“Google has an open source Android emulator — they’ll subsidize the cost of the phone if people put ads on it.

“There is this blurring argument about what is application design and what is web design.

“Adobe Air (adobe integrated runtime). Chrome + Prism (both taking a browser-like approach)
All are trying to bridge the gap between web and desktop applications.

Confusing the Medium with its Voice

“We’re confusing the medium with its voice.. the medium of distribution.

“We need to realize the web is only distribution. It’s just distribution. As long as it remains open - a community of people developing things, it’s a thing of freedom — a whole pasture to run in.

We need to stop designing websites, and we need to start designing experiences.

“What were we really doing here ? Why was web design all one thing? There are many things. We are designing experiences.

Tip #1: Make Sure You’re Solving a Problem

“I have so many clients come to me. They have funding, or a team, or whatever, and we sit down over coffee and they tell me “all right, I want a myspace killer”.

“So I ask them, “Okay, what are you doing that’s different than Myspace?”

“The thing is, they don’t tell me anything different from what Myspace already is. I tell them that they have to do something different, or there’s nothing there.

“Google killers. There’s a new Google killer every day. Make something that solves a problem.

Tip #2: Try to do Straightforward Before Clever

“Google was straightforward. The Microsoft Office paperclip guy was clever.
But everyone hates that paperclip. Be straightforward.

“You want to say, “okay, we’re doing social networking — but we’re solving a problem”.

“That’s why LinkedIn was started, because nobody in the professional world wants tom as their first friend and hear about movies he likes.

Tip #3: Embrace Web Standards

“If you don’t know what these are, here’s a link to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

“We’re going to have these browsers, and all of these mobile mediums. Do you really want to spend all of your time worrying about whether your thing works on one thing and not the other?

“I didn’t use web standards before. Once you get your feet wet into CSS - it just frees you up. Working in CSS is a wonderful experience for me — I look forward to it.

“We came here so that we could design these experiences for people to enjoy.
“And it will help you not get sued by those who are disabled.

“The State of California recently ruled in the victim’s favor on a Target usability case. It treated Target’s website as if it were an actual brick and mortar store. Target was penalized because it could not be accessed by those with visual disabilities.

Tip #4: Decide Which Distribution Suits you the Best

“Then you can use the master medium as a promotional or auxiliary arm to your business.

“We’re such a new medium, and we have such small visual language to ourselves right now.

“Give your site personality — people will have more and more relationships with their websites and their users experiences. If the enjoy the experience of your site, they’ll visit it.

Example: Ubiquity, by Mozilla Labs

“Web mashups and API’s used to reduce the distance between two points.

“Use open API’s. Google will release ways for you to join in a symbiotic relationship with its data.

“If you use a company’s API services, you’re benefiting from their design/development team, which may probably be larger than yours.

Ubiquity is a great example of a service that uses API’s to reduce user action.

“For instance, I can book a flight or search for pet care by simply writing a sentence to Ubiquity that tells it what I want to do. I can write that I want the information sent to my mom, dad, and sister by simply typing it.

“Ubiquity will parse out the language of simple sentences and combine the conventions that established in those to get things from multiple places done in one place.

Tip: #5: Remove Obstacles

“The conventions that should be broken are those that are obstacles to user interaction.

I like sites that allow me to try a service before I sign up.

Tip #6: Evolve with Your Audience

“One of the best examples of this is Twitter.

“Twitter started as micro-blogging: it was something between a blog and mass messaging. It was like mass chat.

If there is demand/audience — people will make a business plan around it, because there are people who need to use it.

I love the idea of users using something and evolving my product through their use of it.

“This could all be turned into television again. It could be controlled by a small number of companies who decide what we see and hear, and there’s a lot of precedent for that.” - Jamie Zawinski.

“We basically need to peer through the looking glass at the way users see our websites.

“Tyler finished the following quote:

Lewis Carroll said, “It’s poor sort of memory that only works backward — so here’s to the future”.

———-

That was it. Lots of applause. Really nice turnout. Very enjoyable experience.

Enough said. Tyler Sticka is brilliant. Check out his Website Experience at TylerSticka.com, or follow @tylersticka on Twitter.

And if you’re interested in the next Refresh Portland event, it’s tentatively scheduled for October 7, 2008. But check the Refresh Portland Blog as that date arrives for more information.

Refresh Portland on Upcoming! Other Exciting Events!

Refresh Portland will also be posted to Upcoming and is part of the Silicon Florist Upcoming Group headed by the awesome Portland Tech blog Silicon Florist, of course. If you join that group on Upcoming, you’ll really know what’s going on in Portland. And if you have an event that relates to Portland Tech, you can send it to the Silicon Florist group in Upcoming and reach an awesome audience.

———-

OakHazelnut.com is written by Cyborg Anthropologist from Portland who enjoys documenting innovative events such as this one. She’s generally findable on Twitter as @caseorganic.

UIE: How do you define Persuasive Design?

Andrew: An easy way to define persuasive web design is to contrast it with usable design. Usability focuses on giving users the ability to complete a transaction if they so desire. A usable site makes it easy for users to complete transactions, from buying products to convincing users to read featured articles.

Unfortunately, having a usable web site is not always enough to convince users to transact. Even if a user can complete a transaction on your site, doesn’t mean that they will transact.

To be successful, sites must go beyond Usability by focusing on Persuasive Design. They must motivate users by taking advantage of persuasive tactics that will make them take action. The most persuasive web sites focus on making users feel comfortable about making decisions and helping them act on them.

What site does a good job of persuading users?

eBags.com is one of the most persuasive sites I’ve seen. The site’s designers motivate users to purchase bags by offering them detailed content that helps them pick the right bag for their specific needs.

The product photos on Ebags.com are one of the site’s biggest strengths. First, they provide multiple shots of the product from various angles so that users can really see what the bag looks like. Second, the pictures show the bags stuffed with the items that are likely to go in them, displaying pens, mobile phones, notebooks, and laptop computers to give users a sense of how much stuff the bag can hold. This is a great example of how providing the right content can help persuade users to buy. (Figure 1)

Figure 1: eBags.com’s pictures provide users with the right amount of content to persuade them to buy.

Some argue that Persuasive Design is a form of deception or manipulation. How do you respond to this criticism?

Persuasive Design is not about manipulating users into doing something they don’t want to do. Instead, the goal of Persuasive Design is to get users to make the right decision. Designers can accomplish this by doing their best to ensure that users get all of their questions answered about the content.

For example, I’m currently planning my next vacation. I’ve just had a baby boy, so I’m very concerned about finding family-friendly facilities. When I visit a hotel site, I’m very interested in finding out what amenities they have for babies, such as cribs. However, if the web site doesn’t provide this content, I can’t make a decision. Right there, I’m stuck because I’m worried about whether or not the hotel will provide a crib for my baby.

Persuasive design is not just about influence. It’s about understanding the user’s decision process and providing the information and tools to help facilitate a decision.

In your book, you describe four different types of users (browsers, evaluators, transactors, and customers), and the best ways to design for each. Can you explain why you’ve taken this approach to Persuasive Design?

As I said, persuasive design is really about supporting the decision process. Each type of “user” I describe in my book is actually the same customer at different stages in the decision process.

The focus is the task that users wish to accomplish at a given point in time. When users are just starting out as “browsers”, designers will want to make it easy for users to gather information. Later, when those users are “transactors” and ready to buy, designers will want to provide quick access to completing a transaction. By focusing on these four stages of decision-making, designers can create sites that move users forward through the transaction process.

Take Citibank.com, for example. When you look at the home page, you’ll see that it’s divided up according to different stages of a user’s decision-making process. Users that are just starting to figure out their financial needs might choose to learn about the available financial products. Users who already know what they need can look for a specific product or service. In addition, those who are ready to open an account can apply directly from the home page. In each case, Citibank’s designers have structured the home page as a starting point to meet users at whatever stage they are at when making decisions about financial products and services. (Figure 2)

Figure 2: The designers of Citibank.com have structured the home page as a starting point to meet users’ needs at each stage of the decision-making process.

In addition to focusing on the four different types of users, what other key issues should designers focus on to make a site persuasive?

If a site is fundamentally usable (for example, the users can navigate through the site and can figure out how to complete forms or a transaction process), the most important issue is content. Too many sites focus on the technology to make the transaction happen rather than providing the content that motivates users to complete the transaction.

If your site sells products, the design must have content that helps users make choices. Why would users choose one product over another? What are the key features? What do other people think about a particular product?

Similarly, if your site sells a service, then why should people hire you? What makes you a credible provider? Don’t just spend time specifying the content management system or how to make slick rollover navigation.

Designers also need to carefully consider the wording they use on transaction screens. For example, if the site asks for an e-mail address, then it’s important that the copy immediately explain how the site will use that e-mail address. If you provide no explanation, you’ll get a lot of John Doe e-mail addresses.

Are there sites you think have missed opportunities to apply persuasive design techniques?

Professional services, such as doctors and lawyers, tend to be the sites that miss the persuasive design boat the most. They often just provide basic office information without emphasizing why someone should choose them as a service provider. These sites could provide more content about their qualifications, experience, and customer testimonials.

In contrast, a clever contractor site could include an article about what to look for in a contractor, which is an implicit statement about how confident they feel about their own qualifications.

Would the Renaissance Roofing site be a good example of this?

If we look at Renaissance Roofing, we see a great example of persuasive content. They provide some tips to users on what they should look for in a roofing contractor.

This does a couple of things to boost the confidence of the user in this roofing company: it educates users so they feel more confident that they know what to look for in a roofing contractor and it also emphasizes that this roofing company meets the qualifications described. Renaissance Roofing even goes so far as to present their information in a checklist format, as if to challenge their prospects to compare them against the competition.

We understand you worked on General Motor’s Canadian Corporate site. How did you use Persuasive Design concepts in your day-to-day designs?

As I’ve said before, online persuasion is about understanding what information to provide and what response to ask for from a user at a given point in time. It’s about understanding “In what state will users come to this particular page?” and providing the right information in that context and then asking “What do I want them to do next?” to move them further along the decision cycle until they get to transaction that you want from them.

At GM Canada, I helped develop a personalization architecture that would help to guide users through the car decision-making process. We mapped out the steps that users would take to decide upon a vehicle and made sure that we provided the content or tools that would address the information need at each point in the decision-making process. Users who knew what they were looking for could simply find a car by model name. Users could also find vehicles by type (such as SUV or sedan) or by a specific attribute (such as price or exterior features). For those who wanted more help, we provided an advisor tool to guide them through the decision process.

For many sites, persuading the user to return is as important, if not more important, than persuading them to buy in the first place. How can designers best get users to return to their web sites?

Users will return to your site if they have a good experience on their first visit. If you don’t deliver on what you promised in terms of fulfilling their order or request, then the likelihood of them returning is significantly lower.

Another effective strategy for getting users to return is ongoing communication. This usually involves some form of e-mail newsletter to keep in touch. With such a newsletter, it’s important that designers keep two objectives in mind. The first is to provide some value within the newsletter, so that there’s a reason for users to open it up and read it. The second is to provide a reason for them to return to your site — this is when you use some of the influence tactics to lure them back for some special offer.