I recently took a look at the websites for two 'super cars'. One is the Audi R8.The other the Koenigsegg CCX. I'm not sure that I saw what I expected, or experienced what I was supposed to.
But a quick word about the cars – they couldn't be more different.
The Koenigsegg is the baby of a Swedish man (Christian von Koenigsegg) who got bored with the import industry and decided that what he really wanted to do was build a sports car. So he did. The first version of which boastes some 650 + bhp and a staggering top speed of 230+ mph. Later version have taken the power output up to 980bhp and untested top speeds. Possibly urban legend, but this car holds the record for the fastest speeding ticket ever given, at 243mph. The car has some real lateral thinking about it, from the way the doors work to the way that the cylinder block of the engine is a rigid, reinforcing component of the chassis.
The Audi is different. Developed from the Le Mans super car then tuned down to something for the top end of the domestic market, it is a design that whilst holding true to the Audi brand style, looks at least as good as the Koenigsegg. The performance, whilst not being quite as extreme is to 200+ mph and given that if doesn't carry the £600K + price of the Koenigsegg this seems like a fair trade off. The Audi is the technological marvel you would expect, from the engine to the aluminium space frame chassis.
This is where something strikes me as funny about the marketing and the way the websites are done.
The Audi micro-site for this model is amazing. The level of interaction and just plain cool it provides is very high and it allows easy access to lots of information about the car.
The Koenigsegg website is not as advanced, showing you information in a common, tested and slightly old fashioned format.
The difference is that with the Koenigsegg website, I found I was looking at the car, and with the Audi site, I was too busy playing with the cool interactions. The upshot of this is that I was left feeling like the koenigsegg was a more honest website with less about the marketing message itself and more about the product in it's own right.
The message I took away from this? Something that echoes an odd request from a client a few years ago who asked us to design them a marketing powerpoint that looked like they had done it themselves. Don't make the website cooler than the product it's trying to sell... and too much glitz and gloss just makes the message look untrustworthy...it's all about balance.
Pale
Monday, 18 February 2008
Blogvertising
Last week I did an internal awareness session on the (mis)use of Social medial to deliver brand/product advocacy and advertising messages. The concept that companies may be crowd sourcing the writing of this kind of copy into blogs, forums and other social networks – including those that aren't your own - was met with some scepticism and a (healthy) amount of disdain. Then I happened to buy a copy of the February 2008 edition of Wired magazine and found an article by and about someone who does exactly this: is paid by advertisers to blog (positively) about products and services. You can find it on page 58 entitled ' Hawker Media: Advertisers paid me to blog about them. Is that so wrong?' See. Told ya!
Pale
Pale
Friday, 1 February 2008
The narrative of now
Whilst a colleague and I spent 3 hours on a tube journey to and from a client meeting that never was (that's a whole other story on why you should virtualise project meetings...), we got into a discussion about car based games, and specifically about licensed vehicles.
It's fairly standard practice that if you make a car based computer or console game, and want to use a real-world car you must pay a significant (tens of thousands of pounds) licensing cost to be able to reproduce the shape and detail of the car and the brand identity of it and it's maker. This practice is understandable from a brand control point of view – you don't want your car brand associated with a game that's going to give you negative publicity. It's common practice for the can manufacturers to insist that no damage is shown on their vehicles, regardless of how they are driven , so that they always appear in pristine showroom condition.
A side effect of this is that it effectively shuts the smaller developers out of a this sector of the market for one simple reason: games that don't have licensed real-world cars just don't sell anywhere near as well. There are a few notable examples of this, the Burnout series being one.
This led the conversation to the obvious next question: Why does it matter is the cars are copies of real world ones?
My opinion is that society and the media does a very successful job of fostering materialistic desire for unobtainable things in most people. For example, I would dearly love to own a Ford GT. I know this will never happen – they only made a hand-full of them and even if I did have the money, I know there is a long list of more rational and immediate things that the money would be spent on.
As I've mentioned, I play games. One of them being Test Drive Unlimited by Atari. It's a driving game with some really unique elements, but the relevant fact it that one of the cars that a player can save hard-won in-game cash for is the Ford GT. When I eventually had enough cash I bought the car and it was a great pleasure to own and drive.
The question again is: Why?
My theory is that this all comes back to something that is innate to all of us, since a large amount of our communication is based upon it: stories.
From the way I describe to you now, what happened on the tube train yesterday, to how I might explain the fall of the Roman Empire or how an alpha channel on the surface of a nerve cell contributes to that nerve firing, each is encapsulated in its own story, described from the 3rd person.
This brings me to immersion and player emotional investment in games and social environments like Second Life. I'm invested in my virtual Ford GT, on it's virtual island of Hawaii. I worked hard to earn the cash, it's a wonderful design and it out performs a lot of the other virtual cars in it's class. It satisfies the desire for the unobtainable, and is a significant milestone on the story of my experience in an environment that, lets face it, isn't real. But I do have to say when talking to someone who plays the same game, the discussion about what's in our virtual garages is exactly the same as if everything where real. We project ourselves into the virtual, willingly adopting the parts we play in the game, comparing our progress, our status in an imaginary world.
I find it very interesting how easily people settle into a text based social environment. Just looking round at the people I see working, tools like Skype have gone from being relatively rare a couple of years ago to be on the majority of desktops now. Then there's SMS.
When conversing in these types of environments, we begin to insert narrative elements where they are missing to complete the experience. LOL is a prefect example. I may have laughed out loud, or just thought it, but in the shared narrative of the conversation, from your point of view, I laughed. This evolved from early text chat users adding in descriptive elements to replace the missing visual and tonal cues about their emotional state whilst chatting. These then where reduced to acronyms for ease of typing.
This becomes more apparent in visually represented worlds like Second Life or MMORPG games like World of Warcraft. People having conversations in it find that the conversation becomes more and more embellished with narrative detail, echoed by the animated gestures of the avatars. This isn't just the stuff to provide the missing social cues, but additional narrative. This all leads towards better immersion, more emotional investment, a better conversation and the people in that conversation retaining more of it for longer.
These are the stories of now. Narratives communally written about what is being discussed right now. Adapting to changes of focus and projecting the emotional state of the co-authors.
I think that these stories exist and work because they are presented in textual form. The medium naturally encourages the reader to use their imagination as they read each line. But here comes VOIP – Voice over IP ... a relatively new technology being deployed to allow users to chat using microphone and speakers to hear the voices of the people they are conversing with.
This has two effects. Firstly, making it harder to break the bond with reality and become immersed in the world with which you art interacting (finding out that the eight foot tall Orc you have been adventuring with has the voice of a twelve year old American kid, doesn't help the suspension of disbelief). Secondly it adds back in all the social cues that have been missing in the typed conversations, making for a more genuine social experience.
There are other considerations in this that I won't explore here ... one is the ability of people using text based chat to hold a number of parallel conversations, often with a number of people in each conversation. The fact that the communication is typed text allows this to happen. I also read a something on a blog recently that was saying that people using a virtual environment like Second Life, and VOIP so that they could hear each other talking, found that they got a better sense of being somewhere together than using web cams with VOIP to have a video conference.
Text chat will I think continue for quite some time alongside technologies like VOIP – it offers too many features that are not available with spoken communication. Just as it suffers from the things that are missing, but I think we are very good at finding ways to fill the gaps and immerse ourselves in the virtual environments we use.
Pale
Friday, 25 January 2008
The magic first half-hour
Over the years I have spent quite a bit of time (probably a little too much) playing computer games of one type or another. The experiences from them vary widely, but there is one common element that in my view either makes or breaks that experience and will set a lot of the tone for the next 100 hours.
'The magic first hour' is the experience of how a new game – a new world – caters for your arrival, manages the suspension of disbelief at the same time as explaining to you exactly what it is you are supposed to be doing.... and does this in a way that makes you want to continue.
Car race games don't need to make a great fuss about mechanics and controls at this point and have the freedom to focus on backstory and plot. Fantasy games and MMORPGs (Massively Multi-player On-line Role Playing Games) in particular have a much more complex player interaction as well as (usually) a deeper and more convoluted story. It is this type of game that offers us some of the best examples of how to bring a new user to an environment that can be difficult to master.
World of Warcraft (WoW) is a great example of a good strategy for doing this. They player starts and makes as few permanent choices as possible and well placed in-game pointers and pop-up help continually adds new information and help for the player. As the player progresses, in-game characters reveal more information, choices and instructions. This ensures that the player starts with a relatively small amount information that they need to retain, and that this is expanded in line with their growing experience of the game. Both the plot and the geographical area that the player is exposed to grow in the same manner.
It's the start of this learning period that I'm calling the magic first half-hour.
Over the past couple of years there has been an explosion of the number of free-to-play MMORPGs that are available, and I have played a number of them. Some follow a model similar to WoW an lead the player in, carefully expanding their knowledge and experience, helping at every stage. Some however don't. It's all to common a sensation to be dropped into game, with little clue how to use the game or what to do first. It's these games that I don't go back to and are right on the top of my 'things to un-install' list.
The message I think is true beyond just games - either progressively help the new user or risk losing them very quickly, regardless of how good your product actually is. If they don't feel supported and don't engage with it, they won't use it.
I also think that the actual duration and format of this exchange varies. For a web site, the duration is down to below a minute. The exchange is subliminal – a good, well presented design makes it apparent which elements of the site are navigational, or projects the right air of intrigue that the user will feel encouraged to explore the interface to find the content and navigation for themselves.
When first starting to use a new application or device such as mobile phone or mp3 player, the interface is critical to your comprehension of how to use it. For the majority of users of this type of technology (ones that have used something similar before) a well designed product should be intuitive. And these days it's pretty well true – use one mobile phone you can use them all, some fairly minor trial-and-error. But think back 10 years to how easy it wasn't to set the timer on your VHS recorder.
I'd also apply this to things like Second Life, which does a reasonable job of starting you on the path to learning how to use the interface, how to interact with the world itself and your avatar and how to communicate. Having introduced this technology 20 or so people in the last couple of months, they almost all agree that what happens next is the problem. You complete your training, know how to go places and chat with people and are dropped off in-world with little guidance of what to do next. It's an experience a bit like showing someone who has never seen the World Wide Web before and and sitting them in front of a web browser and saying “here you are .... go explore”.Providing starting points would be a great idea.
The same is true for visiting some new locations in Second Life. Bad design leaves me feeling unsure as to where I'm supposed to go, where my introduction is, what I should expect and what this place is all about. The next thing that usually happens is I move on and explore somewhere else – the poor arrival negates my desire to explore: if the start is uninspiring will the rest be any different?
Don't forget the new user experience. I've worked on a lot of projects where the induction for new users is one of the last elements to be added in – often because it relies on the finalisation of all the other elements. The key is not to rush this, to think about the range of your target audience and how to lead them into the experience you have crafted for them, in a way that they will readily understand.
Pale
'The magic first hour' is the experience of how a new game – a new world – caters for your arrival, manages the suspension of disbelief at the same time as explaining to you exactly what it is you are supposed to be doing.... and does this in a way that makes you want to continue.
Car race games don't need to make a great fuss about mechanics and controls at this point and have the freedom to focus on backstory and plot. Fantasy games and MMORPGs (Massively Multi-player On-line Role Playing Games) in particular have a much more complex player interaction as well as (usually) a deeper and more convoluted story. It is this type of game that offers us some of the best examples of how to bring a new user to an environment that can be difficult to master.
World of Warcraft (WoW) is a great example of a good strategy for doing this. They player starts and makes as few permanent choices as possible and well placed in-game pointers and pop-up help continually adds new information and help for the player. As the player progresses, in-game characters reveal more information, choices and instructions. This ensures that the player starts with a relatively small amount information that they need to retain, and that this is expanded in line with their growing experience of the game. Both the plot and the geographical area that the player is exposed to grow in the same manner.
It's the start of this learning period that I'm calling the magic first half-hour.
Over the past couple of years there has been an explosion of the number of free-to-play MMORPGs that are available, and I have played a number of them. Some follow a model similar to WoW an lead the player in, carefully expanding their knowledge and experience, helping at every stage. Some however don't. It's all to common a sensation to be dropped into game, with little clue how to use the game or what to do first. It's these games that I don't go back to and are right on the top of my 'things to un-install' list.
The message I think is true beyond just games - either progressively help the new user or risk losing them very quickly, regardless of how good your product actually is. If they don't feel supported and don't engage with it, they won't use it.
I also think that the actual duration and format of this exchange varies. For a web site, the duration is down to below a minute. The exchange is subliminal – a good, well presented design makes it apparent which elements of the site are navigational, or projects the right air of intrigue that the user will feel encouraged to explore the interface to find the content and navigation for themselves.
When first starting to use a new application or device such as mobile phone or mp3 player, the interface is critical to your comprehension of how to use it. For the majority of users of this type of technology (ones that have used something similar before) a well designed product should be intuitive. And these days it's pretty well true – use one mobile phone you can use them all, some fairly minor trial-and-error. But think back 10 years to how easy it wasn't to set the timer on your VHS recorder.
I'd also apply this to things like Second Life, which does a reasonable job of starting you on the path to learning how to use the interface, how to interact with the world itself and your avatar and how to communicate. Having introduced this technology 20 or so people in the last couple of months, they almost all agree that what happens next is the problem. You complete your training, know how to go places and chat with people and are dropped off in-world with little guidance of what to do next. It's an experience a bit like showing someone who has never seen the World Wide Web before and and sitting them in front of a web browser and saying “here you are .... go explore”.Providing starting points would be a great idea.
The same is true for visiting some new locations in Second Life. Bad design leaves me feeling unsure as to where I'm supposed to go, where my introduction is, what I should expect and what this place is all about. The next thing that usually happens is I move on and explore somewhere else – the poor arrival negates my desire to explore: if the start is uninspiring will the rest be any different?
Don't forget the new user experience. I've worked on a lot of projects where the induction for new users is one of the last elements to be added in – often because it relies on the finalisation of all the other elements. The key is not to rush this, to think about the range of your target audience and how to lead them into the experience you have crafted for them, in a way that they will readily understand.
Pale
Monday, 21 January 2008
Why put your business into Second Life?
Second life, the internet virtual world operated by Linden Labs, has enjoyed growing exposure in the press over the last year, every week I seem to read either a book review or an article on it. This is reflected in the continued growth in the number of people registering a Second Life account - now numbering over 11 million, with a minimum of 35 thousand of them logged in at any given point in time.
So what is Second Life? It's official website is at http://www.secondlife.com . Second Life is a virtual world whose content created by the people who use it. Every building, object, item of clothing ... when Second Life launched it was a blank rolling countryside. It is now populated by all manner of buildings and creations from offices to shops, space stations to beaches. The thing that makes Second Life unique is it's approach to copyright: the users who create an object, what ever it is, retain ownership and copyright of that object, and can sell their object to other users for currency that can be easily converted into US$. The same is true for the land itself: it can be bought, owned and resold by the users – Second Life has it's own property market.
Driven but this built-in concept of user ownership, Second Life has an expanding economy and over US$ 1.2 million changes hands every day. I have recently read that the economy in Second Life has been estimated to be worth US$1 billion.
The world is displayed in 3D on your computer using a viewer application that is available free from Second Life's makers, Linden Labs. Registering an account to use the world is also free, although features like land ownership require a higher level of account that has a subscription fee.
Second Life offers a lot of the features that you would expect to find in any real time communications tool – text based chat tools, in-built VOIP (Voice Over IP – essentially the ability to talk and be heard over the internet), user profiles, the ability to exchange landmarks (like bookmarks, but pointing to a specific place in the virtual world) and comprehensive search tools.
Having said that, a business starting up in second life should not expect to immediately find a new revenue stream. The biggest benefits of virtual world technologies is as part of the social networking mix and they present and opportunity for a business to communicate with it's existing and potential customers in a new way that offers an experience that is not readily offered elsewhere. Your business can also benefit from the increased exposure and marketing that you base around your new adoption of this technology.
Translating your business and your brand for use in a virtual world may need some adjustments to the kind of voice you use. In the same way that writing for a printed publication differs from writing for a website, the content that you choose for use in Second Life must be adapted to suit the way it is going to be presented.
One key concept to remember, and this is something that was missed by some of the first businesses entering Second Life, is that having a Second Life office is not the same as having a website. Websites are a part of the communications mix that is still very much a solitary, user driven experience. As a representative of your business, you probably have no current data about how many visitors are viewing your website right now, or a mechanism where you can start a conversation with them.
Virtual worlds offer a more social way to browse information and to share the experience, both with a representative of your business and with other customers. Offices in Second Life are much the same as real world offices in this respect – they benefit from being staffed. It is also worth noting that there is a difference in the way that people will interact with your virtual office compared to your website. It is well documented that a new visitor to a website will remain for only a very short period of time (less than a minute) and will be unlikely to explore any links from that page if they don't quickly see something that sparks their interest. People visiting locations in Second Life tend to spend longer exploring, especially if the location has been well designed, and tend to retain more of the experience.
So what is Second Life? It's official website is at http://www.secondlife.com . Second Life is a virtual world whose content created by the people who use it. Every building, object, item of clothing ... when Second Life launched it was a blank rolling countryside. It is now populated by all manner of buildings and creations from offices to shops, space stations to beaches. The thing that makes Second Life unique is it's approach to copyright: the users who create an object, what ever it is, retain ownership and copyright of that object, and can sell their object to other users for currency that can be easily converted into US$. The same is true for the land itself: it can be bought, owned and resold by the users – Second Life has it's own property market.
Driven but this built-in concept of user ownership, Second Life has an expanding economy and over US$ 1.2 million changes hands every day. I have recently read that the economy in Second Life has been estimated to be worth US$1 billion.
The world is displayed in 3D on your computer using a viewer application that is available free from Second Life's makers, Linden Labs. Registering an account to use the world is also free, although features like land ownership require a higher level of account that has a subscription fee.
Second Life offers a lot of the features that you would expect to find in any real time communications tool – text based chat tools, in-built VOIP (Voice Over IP – essentially the ability to talk and be heard over the internet), user profiles, the ability to exchange landmarks (like bookmarks, but pointing to a specific place in the virtual world) and comprehensive search tools.
Having said that, a business starting up in second life should not expect to immediately find a new revenue stream. The biggest benefits of virtual world technologies is as part of the social networking mix and they present and opportunity for a business to communicate with it's existing and potential customers in a new way that offers an experience that is not readily offered elsewhere. Your business can also benefit from the increased exposure and marketing that you base around your new adoption of this technology.
Translating your business and your brand for use in a virtual world may need some adjustments to the kind of voice you use. In the same way that writing for a printed publication differs from writing for a website, the content that you choose for use in Second Life must be adapted to suit the way it is going to be presented.
One key concept to remember, and this is something that was missed by some of the first businesses entering Second Life, is that having a Second Life office is not the same as having a website. Websites are a part of the communications mix that is still very much a solitary, user driven experience. As a representative of your business, you probably have no current data about how many visitors are viewing your website right now, or a mechanism where you can start a conversation with them.
Virtual worlds offer a more social way to browse information and to share the experience, both with a representative of your business and with other customers. Offices in Second Life are much the same as real world offices in this respect – they benefit from being staffed. It is also worth noting that there is a difference in the way that people will interact with your virtual office compared to your website. It is well documented that a new visitor to a website will remain for only a very short period of time (less than a minute) and will be unlikely to explore any links from that page if they don't quickly see something that sparks their interest. People visiting locations in Second Life tend to spend longer exploring, especially if the location has been well designed, and tend to retain more of the experience.
So what should I actually use Second Life for? Second Life is a tool for communication, collaboration and shared exploration. Uses include:
- as a venue for conferences, seminars and meetings where the participants are geographically separated
- as demonstration environment for collaboratively exploring 3D mock-ups (for example, taking a client through a replica of the show apartment in a new development)
- as gallery and exhibition spaces that offer a similar experience to their real world counterparts
- as explorative spaces (for example a fitted kitchen company could use the space to offer a try before you buy experience for it's customers and allow them the ability to switch units and groups around to see which options the prefer).
Are there any other worlds? The future seems bright for virtual worlds when you consider the total number that are in use every day. When you include all the games, like World of Warcraft, that are being played (essentially themed virtual worlds) the the total number of registered users is in the 100s of millions. Soon to launch for Sony's Playstation 3 is Home. A social networking environment designed for players to meet, interact, share experience and start on-line games together. So far, however Second Life is the only world to offer user generated content and content ownership.
Second Life is not a replacement for your website. It is a key part of your communications mix, in the same way that email newsletters and using myspace.com are both valuable channels for reaching clients. Second life also provides a unique user experience which can be tailored to carry your brand and your message which can be reinforced by direct interaction.
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