user experience – Looking Forward

May 9, 2017

Augmented Reality Rising

Last week, I gave a presentation at the Premier CIO Summit in Connecticut on the Future of User Interaction With Technology, especially the combined effects of developments in communicating without a keyboard, augmented reality (AR) and machine learning. I’ve been interested in this for some time and have written about AR as part of the Wearables movement and what I call EyeTech.

First, it would help to distinguish these digital realities. In virtual reality, a person is placed in a completely virtual world, eyes fully covered by a VR headset – it’s 100% digital immersion. It is ideal for games, space exploration, and movies, among other yet to be created uses.

With augmented reality, there is a digital layer that is added onto the real physical world. People look through a device – a smartphone, special glasses and the like – that still lets them see the real things in front of them.

Some experts make a further distinction by talking about mixed reality in which that digital layer enables people to control things in the physical environment. But again, people can still see and navigate through that physical environment.

When augmented was first made possible, especially with smartphones, there were a variety of interesting but not widespread uses. A good example is the way that some locations could show the history of what happened in a building a long time ago, so-called “thick-mapping”.

There were business cards that could popup an introduction and a variety of ancillary information that can’t fit on a card, as in this video.

There were online catalogs that enabled consumers to see how a product would fit in their homes. These videos from Augment and Ikea are good examples of what’s been done in AR.

A few years later, now, this audience was very interested in learning about and seeing what’s going on with augmented reality. And why not? After a long time under the radar or in the shadow of Virtual Reality hype, there is an acceleration of interest in augmented (and mixed) reality.

Although it was easy to satirize the players in last year’s Pokémon Go craze, that phenomenon brought renewed attention to augmented reality via smart phones.

Just in the last couple of weeks, Mark Zuckerberg at the annual Facebook developers conference stated that he thinks augmented reality is going to have tremendous impact and he wants to build the ecosystem for it. See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/technology/mark-zuckerberg-sees-augmented-reality-ecosystem-in-facebook.html

As beginning of the article puts it:

“Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has long rued the day that Apple and Google beat him to building smartphones, which now underpin many people’s digital lives. Ever since, he has searched for the next frontier of modern computing and how to be a part of it from the start.

“Now, Mr. Zuckerberg is betting he has found it: the real world. On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg introduced what he positioned as the first mainstream augmented reality platform, a way for people to view and digitally manipulate the physical world around them through the lens of their smartphone cameras.”

And shortly before that, an industry group – UI LABS and The Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance (AREA) – united to plot the direction and standards for augmented reality, especially now that the applications are taking off inside factories, warehouses and offices, as much as in the consumer market. See http://www.uilabs.org/press/manufacturers-unite-to-shape-the-future-of-augmented-reality/

Of course, HoloLens from Microsoft continues to provide all kinds of fascinating uses of augmented reality as these examples from a medical school or field service show.

Looking a bit further down the road, the trend that will make this all the more impactful for CIOs and other IT leaders is how advances in artificial intelligence (even affective computing), the Internet of Things and analytics will provide a much deeper digital layer that will truly augment reality. This then becomes part of a whole new way of interacting with and benefiting from technology.

June 30, 2015

Intelligent Conversations: The New User Interface?

Recently there have been some interesting articles about how the graphic user interface we’ve had on our screens for many years is gradually being replaced by a new user interface – the conversation.

Earlier this month, Matt Gilligan wrote on his Medium blog:

Forget “there’s an app for that” — what’s next is “there’s a chat for that.”

And just a few days ago, WIRED magazine had an article titled “The Future of UI Design? Old-School Text Messages”.

Some of this is a result of the fact that people are more often using the web on their smart phones and tablets than on laptops and desktop computers. With bigger screens, the older devices have more room for a nice graphic interface than smartphones – even the newest smart phones that always seem to be bigger than the previous generation.

And many people communicate much of the day through conversations that are composed of text messages. There’s a good listing of some of the more innovative text apps in “Futures of text”.

The idea of a conversational interface is also a reflection of the use of various personal assistants that you talk to, like Siri. These, of course, have depended on developments in artificial technology, in particular the recognition and processing of natural (human) spoken language. Much research is being conducted to make these better and less the target of satire – like this one from the Big Bang Theory TV series.

There’s another branch of artificial intelligence research that should be resurrected from its relative oblivion to help out – expert systems. An expert system attempts to automate the kind of conversation – especially a dynamic, intelligent sequence of questions and answers – that would occur between a human expert and another person. (You can learn more at Wikipedia and GovLab.)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, expert systems were the most hyped part of the artificial intelligence community.

As I’ve blogged before, I was one of those involved with expert systems during that period. Then that interest in expert systems rapidly diminished with the rise of the web and in the face of various technological obstacles, like the hard work of acquiring expert knowledge. More recently, with “big data” being collected all around us, the big focus in the artificial intelligence community has been on machine learning – having AI systems figure out what that data means.

But expert systems work didn’t disappear altogether. Applications have been developed for medicine, finance, education and mechanical repairs, among other subjects.

It’s now worth raising the profile of this technology much higher if the conversation becomes the dominant user interface. The reason is simple: these conversations haven’t been very smart. Most of the apps are good at getting basic information as if you typed it into a web browser. Beyond that? Not so much.

There are even very funny videos of the way these work or rather don’t work well. Take a look at “If Siri was your mom”, prepared for Mother’s Day this year with the woman who was the original voice of Siri as Mom.

In its simplest form, expert systems may be represented as a smart decision tree based on the knowledge and research of experts.

It’s pretty easy to see how this approach could be used to make sure that the conversation – by text or voice – is useful for a person.

There is, of course, much more sophistication available in expert systems than is represented in this picture. For example, some can handle probabilities and other forms of ambiguity. Others can be quite elaborate and can include external data, in addition to the answers from a person – for example, his/her temperature or speed of typing or talking.

The original developers of Siri have taken what they’ve learned from that work and are building their next product. Called “Viv: The Global Brain”, it’s still pretty much in stealth mode so it’s hard to figure out how much expert system intelligence is built into it. But a story about them on WIRED last year showed an infographic which implies that an expert system has a role in the package. See the lower left on the second slide.

Personally I like the shift to a conversational interface with technology since it becomes available in so many different places and ways. But I’ll really look forward to it when those conversations become smarter. I’ll let you know as I see new developments.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/122879360432/intelligent-conversations-the-new-user-interface]

August 6, 2014

The Experience Economy In The Public Sector?

B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, the authors of a groundbreaking article in the Harvard Business Review in 1998, followed up in 1999 with their influential book – “The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business A Stage”. (The book was later updated with a 2011 edition.)

The original article and book were widely credited with establishing the field of customer experience management and the idea that a successful business relationship involves more than just delivering the goods or services promised.

As the summary of the original article says:

“In this article, co-authors B. Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore … preview the likely characteristics of the experience economy and the kinds of changes it will force companies to make. First there was agriculture, then manufactured goods, and eventually services. Each change represented a step up in economic value – a way for producers to distinguish their products from increasingly undifferentiated competitive offerings. Now, as services are in their turn becoming commoditized, companies are looking for the next higher value in an economic offering. Leading-edge companies are finding that it lies in staging experiences.

“An experience occurs when a company uses services as the stage – and goods as props – for engaging individuals in a way that creates a memorable event. And while experiences have always been at the heart of the entertainment business, any company stages an experience when it engages customers in a personal, memorable way.”

These memorable moments stick with people and cause them to comment favorably to others. To help them remember, many companies even provide souvenirs – another form of experience. When business people think of souvenirs, it is not necessarily something elaborate. For example, what one business would hand out as a simple receipt a smarter, more experience-oriented business would provide as an elaborate document, perhaps even on thicker parchment-like paper.

The books go into great detail and elaborate these ideas beyond the simple summary I’ve provided here. It’s worth the time to read.

And the kind of thinking presented by Pine and Gilmore has had a big impact in the business world. Many of the modern heroes of the economy, such as the late Steve Jobs of Apple, were known for the way they built their success on customer experiences.

Yet, the ideas in the Experience Economy have had only a small impact on the public sector and few pubic officials are sensitive to the experience their constituents are having. This is somewhat surprising for several reasons.

First, as a matter of electoral survival, incumbent office holders want the residents of their community (i.e., the voters) to have favorable memories of the experience of being a citizen. Indeed, professional campaign consultants have heard stories of public officials who “did everything right” – these politicians did what the public wanted – but were rejected anyway because people were unhappy with the experience of being a citizen in that jurisdiction.

In the broadest sense, this is about making a difference in the lives of citizens – something that drew many officials to public service in the first place.

Second, in a world where people have increasing choices about where they might live or travel to, the experience of being in a city or state will have a big impact on the economy there. If it’s a positive, memorable experience, more people will want to be there and the economy will grow – as will funding for the government. If not, bad experiences will lead to worse experiences for those trying to lead a community with declining population and declining revenues.

Although great experiences are not everyday events even in the business world, it is not necessarily that difficult to create these experiences. Think about the typical interaction between a citizen and the government. What would it take to turn that into a positive, memorable experience? Not a lot of money; just an increased sensitivity to the experience from the citizen’s side.

And public officials might also find that their staff, rather than resisting the changing to make the workplace more fun and memorable, would become more motivated.

I’d like to continue this conversation by elaborating on how the ideas of the Experience Economy can be applied in the public sector. Let me know if you want to see this and, of course, please share any examples you have of memorable public sector experiences.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/93970296574/the-experience-economy-in-the-public-sector]

January 16, 2014

Images Of Moving?

I’ve written before about spaces that blend the virtual and physical, but those spaces didn’t move. Now we have new vehicles planned that take this blended reality on the road.

Below are just some news items that caught my eye over the past few months featuring the frontiers of vehicle technology, beyond the well-publicized self-driving cars.

First up is Lexus’s Art in Motion, which analyzes the way the car is being driven and reflects that in a portrait of the driver on the display screen in the car, as in the next picture. For more information see http://www.artismotion.com/ and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8cqJptwNVI

Toyota’s FV2, “Fun To Drive”, concept vehicle is not quite a car. But it combines features of a car, a motorcycle, augmented reality, robotics, human/machine communications and sensing of the driver’s mood. Like other concept cars, it may never hit the road, but it’s fun to think about. Here are two pictures and read http://www.toyota-global.com/tokyoms2013/fv2/ for more information from the company. Oh, and they also have a smartphone app, that you can get now, to simulate what the FV2 is like.

We’ve seen self-parking cars on the road, but for those really tough parking spaces you may need to ask your passenger to get out and guide you in inch-by-inch. But what if you’re driving alone? Well, you’ll have to be your own passenger. Just get out of the car and park it using your smartphone. See how this is done with a VW car at http://youtu.be/PfcHm70BHL8

Prof. Michael Ferreira of Portugal’s University of Porto has developed what he calls a “see through” system that lets you see through the vehicle ahead of you. The project has a video that sort of shows the system – http://youtu.be/Esh1EjgBQaI . More information, in English, can be found at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029394.600-augmented-reality-system-makes-cars-seethrough.html

MIT Professor Berthold Horn has developed a system that would tame traffic jams by coordinating cruise control among all the cars. For more information, see http://web.mit.edu/press/2013/algorithm-could-mitigate-freeway-backups.html

Finally, for those drivers who end up being pursued by the police, law enforcement agencies have a new tool from StarChase that’s being tested now. It enables the police to shoot GPS locators on the target vehicles so they don’t have to engage in one of those dangerous car chases.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/73512317522/images-of-moving ]

November 8, 2013

New Uses For Subway Spaces?

Well over a year ago, I began working with executives at the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to help them envision the future of their facilities. Traditionally, subway and train stations were considered to be nothing more than places where people got on and off trains.

That was obvious. Not so obvious is that the MTA is the largest owner of enclosed public space in New York City and that space had the potential to be so much more than passages to trains.

Practical considerations – barely having enough money to run the trains well – meant that the MTA needed to tie in this vision with some revenue. The MTA gets a small percentage of its total budget by selling advertising space and renting the few locations that were appropriate for retail stores.

But many of its spaces were long corridors, funny corners, big open areas and the like – which couldn’t work as a traditional store. In those spaces, however, it is possible to insert a digital retail experience, which would be both a pleasant surprise in the subway halls and a source of revenue where none was possible before.

And, with considerable planning, a partnership of companies that combined digital advertising and technology and an enthusiasm for innovation at the highest levels of the MTA, last week the idea came to life.

In the Bryant Park station at 5^th Avenue and 42^nd Street, riders came upon a digital shopping experience – a first in the New York subways. As pictured below, in the Intelligent Color Experience by L’Oréal Paris, one panel consists of a virtual mirror that sees what the woman is wearing and her own skin tones. Then she gets suggestions on what cosmetics to select and, of course, she can buy the products with a swipe of a credit card.

For more articles on this experiment, see:

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/66372336558/new-uses-for-subway-spaces]

October 24, 2013

Can The CIO And The CMO Work Together?

Tuesday of this week, I participated in the annual CIO Executive Leadership Summit held in Greenwich, CT. This year’s focus was “Game-Changing Leadership Strategies & Business Models for Market Advantage.” (Note: I’m Chairman Emeritus of the regional chapter of SIM, which sponsors the meeting.)

I led a session on the relationship between the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). The two guest panelists were the successful team at Ogilvy and Mather Worldwide of Yuri Aguiar, Senior Partner & CIO, and Lauren Crampsie, Worldwide Chief Marketing Officer.

For many in the audience – mostly technology leaders in their organizations – there was a bit of unease about the growing role of the CMO in technology decisions.

Part of that unease is driven by headlines such as these:

From August of this year, “CMOs, Not CIOs, Now Control 11 Percent Of Retail IT Spending”, which highlighted this statement: “they’re [CMOs] buying and running hardware, not just paying for software and services without IT’s OK.”
From Forbes Magazine, last year, “Five Years From Now, CMOs Will Spend More on IT Than CIOs Do”

While trend varies and every organization has a different mix of reasons for giving the CMO this new role, the common causes are:

CIOs who focus just on the back-office operations – merely “keeping the trains running on time” – and shy away from playing a more strategic executive role.
CIOs who spend most of their money on maintenance and thus fail to deliver new technology solutions that are needed by others in the company.
CIOs who are less familiar with the newer technologies, such as social media, data analytics, mobile software design, marketing technology, etc., thus forcing the CMOs to look elsewhere for what they need.

So the tensions between CIOs and CMOs have revolved around who gets to spend the money and who gets to control and enforce technology standards.

With this background, it was a pleasure to hear a CIO and CMO who have learned to team with each other. Their experience has lessons for many other CIOs and CMOs.

They start out as equals, both reporting to the CEO, yet they have clearly developed a mutual respect and a relationship built on intense communications – and a willingness to see things from the other person’s viewpoint.

Then together, these two present capital budget requests for new technologies that will help Ogilvy to grow its business.

Lauren pointed out the various ways that Yuri had taught her about technology. But the learning went in the other direction too. With the increased importance of user experience in a world dominated by the consumerization of technology, CIOs can learn from their colleagues who specialize in creating positive user experiences – the CMOs.

Together the relationship can be not a source of tension, but of mutual advancement for both the CIO and CMO – and, of course, for the company as a whole.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/64954921798/can-the-cio-and-the-cmo-work-together]

October 17, 2013

Does Your Website Talk To People The Way They Think?

(This blog post is a broadening of the recent post on gamification.)

Almost all governments have some kind of website. Aside from when these sites just don’t work because of bad links or insufficient computer resources to meet demand, they mostly feel like an electronic version of old style government whose employees were often accused of treating other people as “just a number”. These websites talk at people in a kind of monotone, not having a conversation or interaction.

Yet, most of us realize that people have different interests, personalities, cognitive styles and ways of interacting with others. Thus, to be most effective, a website should change to reflect who is interacting with it.

Unfortunately, the only variability that exists in most websites – public or private sector – is usually based on purchasing patterns, such as the different web pages and pricing that appear on Amazon’s website, depending upon your past consumer behavior or perhaps by providing languages other than English.

Glen Urban, who is a marketing professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, calls this the “empathetic Web”. (See the article, “Morph the Web To Build Empathy, Trust and Sales” by him and his colleagues at http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/morph-the-web-to-build-empathy-trust-and-sales/)

As their summary states:

We’ve long been able to personalize what information the Internet tells us — but now comes “Web site morphing,” and an Internet that personalizes how we like to be told. For companies, it means that communicating — and selling — will never be the same.

The authors distinguish between people on the basis of two pairs of cognitive preferences (visual vs. verbal and analytic vs. holistic). At the very least, a website should reflect these cognitive differences.

But it is also worth thinking about other differences. For example, many people prefer a conversational style to the completion of a long form. The widespread use of smart phones to access the Internet has increased the need to have a more conversational style on the web since the screen is too small to do otherwise. (That’s why games are a useful model to consider.)

As the authors note, this is not just a matter of making a website more convenient, but also is essential in building trust, which helps a private company increase sales – and is an absolute requirement for any public official.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/64296674666/does-your-website-talk-to-people-the-way-they-think]

October 2, 2013

Games As The New Model For Business Software?

For most of the last couple of decades, business software has been pretty much the same – a series of forms that essentially automated the company procedure manuals, which preceded the days of computers. Yes, with Windows and the Mac, those forms became prettier, but they’re usually still some kind of form. And, aside from down lists of things like the list of countries or states, there isn’t much intelligence behind those forms.

It’s time to change that approach and learn from enormously popular digital games. Learn what exactly?

For too many people, games are all about vicarious shoot-em-up scenes or, at best, fantasy adventures. Business software designers could have some fun applying those techniques – imagine a “killer sales” app :-). But there’s a deeper level of interaction with technology that game designers have discovered.

Game software does three things well. First it motivates people to continue to play the game. Second, it’s conversational, offering frequent bite-sized interactions with users. Third, it adjusts to the user’s behavior, indeed learns from what the user does – while the user is also learning.

Compare that to typical business software. The motivation to use it is mostly external – your paycheck or your desire to get something from an unfeeling bureaucracy. The form is big and long, like a lecture or sermon, not a conversation. And the course of the interaction varies little from person to person; there’s little learning on either side of the interaction.

Is it any wonder that game players feel so much more engaged than users of business software?

But the three aspects of good game software can easily be adapted to the business world and anyone undertaking a major development of business software today should learn from those techniques.

Three additional observations about this:

Motivation is not just about how many points you can rack up compared to others. The best game designers provide support for the range of human motivations in order to help the many different kinds of players. So, for some, the motivation is very much about winning the competition. For others, social approval in the form of likes and other recognition is more important. For others, getting it 100% right is the goal.

More generally, it’s important to realize that there is a sophisticated use of this tool and also a simplistic use. Indeed, not every game that’s sold is a good example of the value of gamification.

The funny thing is that many of the people I meet who have some control over the development of software in their organizations are avid game players. Yet they ignore the lessons of their personal life when planning what will happen in the business. Does that make sense?

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/62900227376/games-as-the-new-model-for-business-software]