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DXY Summer BBQ in Berlin

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DXY is Growing - Meet Paul McAvinchey

DXY would like to welcome Paul McAvinchey as our new Director of Client Services for North America. He'll be working with Dan Young to provide an improved level of customer service and inspiration for our clients. Paul joined DXY after successfully exiting MedCity Media where he was the director of new product development. On the side, Paul's the founder of Tech Pint, an extremely popular series of tech events based in Northeast Ohio. What Paul brings to DXY is a long tenure of working on new ideas and products to enhance a company's top line revenue and ability to service current business models. He's well equipped to work with companies to help chart a course where technology can be used to elevate business. If you'd like to talk with Paul, you can give us a call or visit his Twitter profile.

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Google Expects Mobile-Friendly Websites

by Felix Wieduwilt

On Tuesday, Google started rolling out an update to their mobile search algorithm. The change "boosts" the ranking of mobile-friendly webpages over those pages that are only designed for desktop browsers when users are searching on their mobile devices. This will have an enormous impact on site traffic, conversions, and revenue generated through web users.

Mobile-friendly websites are those that have simple navigation with large text, easy-to-click links and screens that resize according to the device on which they are viewed. According to Business Insider Google will favor those websites and rank them higher than websites which aren’t mobile-friendly.

Why is this happening?

According to Google, 60% of web traffic comes from mobile. And websites with old desktop layouts and interfaces now present a clunky user experience when users try to find information by using a smartphone. Google is eager for you to fix this in order to make mobile surfing a smarter and more effective experience.

To avoid being seriously affected by this and harming your business you should be making plans to go mobile now. If you have already done this, great! Otherwise DXY is happy to help you. It’s important to remember that it’s often more effective having a mobile site with reduced content than an overloaded non-mobile site that’s difficult to use.

Content is not the only king anymore. Now, according to Google, a good user experience will contribute towards search ranking just as much as content. This is a major change for sure, and a wake up call for anyone who has ignored mobile in the past.

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Writing In The Digital Age [review]

by Paul McAvinchey 

From the very start, Anne Trubek, Founder and CEO of Belt Magazine, had us quarreling over what constituted good writing. Which was good since she was at Tangent @DXY on April 14th to discuss that -- how has texting, tweeting, updating, and emailing altered our habits of communication, our spelling conventions, our writing and, most provocatively, the English language?

She first read a beautiful essay on how written language has changed over the centuries. From Socrates time when he argued that writing wasn’t going to work, to the first printed word when punctuation wasn’t used and finally to the modern era when we all seem to bemoan the destruction of language itself through our use of abbreviated communication on our phones.

Normally I would be quite cautious about writing a piece like this very one here. I’d be careful not to break any rules that I was meant to learn in school. But, for now, I’m throwing this caution to the wind. Anne taught me that all the facets of our written language; prose, literature, punctuation, are bound to evolve. What we know as true, such as the ‘rules’ of grammar, will change and we shouldn’t be so particular about following them.

Reminds me of something Steve Jobs said, “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”

© Photos by Susanne Feldt / DXY

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The Future of Money

by Felix Wieduwilt

All of us have a relationship to money. We work for it, we save it, then we spend it. Sometimes we hold it as cash, while oftentimes money is represented as a number in an account. Our relationship with money is highly personal, so as the Financial Technology sector (also known as "FinTech") experiments with new currency (e.g. BitCoin) and methods of payment (e.g. Apple Pay), how will these new technologies alter our relationship? As we explore new technology within the financial industry, we need to consider how we move forward. Money is a highly sensitive factor in our lives; one that we guard like few other things. If we want to better understand FinTech products, we should look to the history and evolution of money as we look to the future so we can be better equipped for the future of money.

Once we remove the tangible object of money, we see that it is only a promise allowing us to store it into a common denominator only to convert it to tangible objects we want to consume. We started using gold and silver to exchange goods, then converted to paper and other metals and stopped at plastic cards, which store money virtually. This plastic card separated the value entirely from the material; there’s a tendency that we are losing the tangible form and with that loss, we get rid of the belief in its physical value, like we value the gold in a gold coin. From now on, we must believe in the reliability of the smartphone, computer and of course the Internet, which stores and displays our money. Money disappears and flocks, so to speak, anywhere in predefined structures.

As users we are losing the mastery of money to a certain degree because money as a virtual/digital good can only be exchanged under command. I call it a command because the user must constantly trust technology blindly. The user has no choice to determine the true value of the transaction because he or she doesn’t ‚see’ the money anymore. It doesn’t matter if someone uses PayPal, Visa or any other service to make a payment or manage accounts. BitCoin is such a utopia to establish money as a global universal. Emotions and the culture-specific forms in which money was carried around as a physical medium is no longer available. Hence, only the knowledge of the value as content is left over. A bank robber always knew the value of stolen goods when he touched those goods. There was an immediate relation to money through his senses. We can predict that the future of money will be one without using our senses in order to prove its value. What should we conclude from these thoughts on digital products in the world of finance?

Building FinTech products is to build the imagery of a special belief in technology managing your money. Such trust is to a higher degree very fragile and will chase users away once that trust is broken. We have to make sure that the user feels safe by using FinTech products. Let’s say it must create a majestic character in a user’s mind; the look and feel of the design must be seen as mature and serious which exudes safety and trust. The moment we’ve lost our nostalgia to physical money we must at least retain its appearance by good design. Without the belief in the value of money even traditional paper bills would be viewed without value. Only the likeness and the contextual images on the paper gives money its majestic and nostalgic touch; it’s something that’s only allowed to get printed by the government. Hence, we can advise that online platforms managing your money should also exude an imagery of safety. The loss of its physical form and nostalgia must be replaced by proper design.

Let’s play devil’s advocate. Even when a lot of economists call for a society of no physical money, is this something that should really happen one day? Such a question must be asked out of the field of the economy, nevertheless it supposes to be a utopia yet. One reason to keep physical money is due to myths and a good deal of romanticism. When we look at films, a lot of them would be very boring without a symbolic moment when physical money has been exchanged for an occasion. Paying somebody for a business transaction (may it be legal or illegal) has a strong symbolism, which a virtual transaction can never exude. In Norway we’re finding developments, which are strengthening the status quo of physical money. The country decided to create a newly designed paper bill that reflects their current generation’s state of mind and reflects on their value system. This can be seen as a sociological decision and pays respect to the emotional value of paper money. We may conclude that digital money or/and its platforms should be adjusted design-wise to the specific culture where it will be used. If the utopia of the global usage of BitCoins comes true we may see the rise of culture specific platforms including a unique design.

Let me highlight two principles we should keep in mind when we build FinTech Products:

#1 Trust and a re-establishment of the form by design should be the focus

#2 Create a strong commitment to a local culture by a unique design 

Money is a strong part of our daily experience. Therefore a great user experience by good design is pivotal to attract and keep users. We don’t need to talk about safety, it’s the most implicit factor once you think of money. A clear and strong design must be the solution because it was always the key principle to make a sheet of paper valuable and a coin something special. It also helped to differentiate money from counterfeit money. On top of giving a digital product a specific value design also helps to let users understand how to uses these products in our daily life (if we build them). In the perfect case, it guides users intuitively while they use FinTechs product without even thinking about it. That must be the goal at the end of the day.

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[DE] Interessenkonflikte als Produktivitäts-Killer bei IT-Systemen

Dieser Text wurde aus dem Englischen übersetzt. Das Original ist hier zu finden.

von Daniel Young & Felix Wieduwilt

Hier ist folgende Situation, die vielen Unternehmen bekannt vorkommen könnte: Außendienstler im Vertrieb kämpfen sich mit einem IT-System ab, das nicht annähernd auf der Höhe der Zeit ist und nur noch begrenzt funktionsfähig ist. Der Außendienst benötigt in diesem Moment spezifische Produktinformationen, Preise und die Möglichkeit vor Ort etwas zu bestellen. Alles was sie jedoch haben, ist eine schwerfällige Plattform, gebaut für den Web-Browser, die täglich zu Frust führt und auf neueren Geräten erst gar nicht verwendet werden kann. Alle wissen, dass sich etwas ändern muss, sind jedoch mit der Herausforderung konfrontiert, das sich die anderen Abteilung über eine Neuausrichtung nicht einig werden können.

Die verschiedenen Abteilungen hatten also ein unterschiedliches Interesse daran, wie das zukünftige System aussehen sollte. Das Business Development wollte ein System, das auf ihren eigenen Geräten läuft. Das Marketing wollte mehr Kontrolle über die Nachrichten, die vom Unternehmen an den Kunden geschickt wurden. Die IT-Abteilung hatte wiederum Bedenken zur Datensicherheit und verfiel deshalb immer wieder in ihre alten Denkstrukturen zurück. Keine Abteilung war also in der Lage, sich in die notwendige Sicht der anderen Abteilungen einzufühlen. Wie wir nun weiter annehmen können, verursacht dieses kollektive Problem eine Art Blockade, die es fast unmöglich macht, voranzukommen und das IT-System zu modernisieren.

Um diese ‚Blockade-Haltung‘ zu lösen und mit den unterschiedlichen Abteilungen gemeinsam eine Lösung zu erarbeiten, hatten wir die Methode des Design Thinking angewandt. Wir haben zusammen mit dem Kunden geschaut, wie ein erfolgreiches System aus Sicht aller Abteilungen aussehen kann. Jede Abteilung hat dementsprechend ein anderes Ziel und damit auch Zielgruppen, die bei der Umgestaltung beachtet werden müssen. Nachdem wir das entdeckt hatten, setzten wir gezielt Prioritäten in der Entwicklung und förderten ein gemeinsames Bestreben, das System schnellstmöglich voranzubringen. Teamgeist war gefragt.

Nun mussten wir noch ein wenig in die Vergangenheit schauen, um zu verstehen, wie und warum das System bis zum heutigen Status Quo entwickelt wurde. Auch haben wir untersucht, wie vorherige Versuche aussahen, um das System zu verbessern, daraus zu lernen und Fehler zu vermeiden. Wir sind aber noch einen Schritt weiter gegangen und haben relevante Stakeholder getroffen sowie Endnutzer, die ebenfalls vom alten System betroffen sind.

Die Ergebnisse wurden nun genutzt, um erste Hypothesen als Grundlage für die zukünftige Plattform zu erarbeiten. Diese sind nötig, um mögliche Funktionen und Eigenschaften des späteren Systems darstellen können. Diese Hypothesen haben wir dann in einen Design-Prototypen umgewandelt und sie als fiktive Plattform bei ausgewählten Nutzern getestet. Das Feedback, was wir von den Nutzern bekommen haben, wurde genutzt, um zum einen die Hypothesen anzupassen und zum anderen weitere Prototypen zu entwickeln. Diese Anpassungen wurden dann die Grundlage für die spätere Entwicklung des finalen Designs sowie der Programmierung der Plattform.  

Da wir diese greifbaren Ergebnisse nun als Design dargestellt hatten, konnten wir eine Übereinstimmung aller Abteilungen mit ihren jeweiligen Vorstellungen erzielen. Durch das dedizierte Leiten des Kunden durch diesen Prozess, waren wir in der Lage, alle unterschiedlichen Interessen in Einklang zu bringen, sodass jeder Beteiligte angehört wurde und entsprechendes Feedback für jeden sichtbar im Design zu sehen war. Das gab jeder Abteilung ausreichend Bestätigung und machte sie glücklich.

Was lernen wir daraus? Wenn wir emphatisch denken wollen, so müssen wir im Kollektiv die jeweiligen Erfahrungen, Einstellungen und Neigungen konstruktiv teilen und entsprechend aufarbeiten. Es ist somit unsere Aufgabe, diesen Dialog zu leiten und die Ergebnisse konstruktiv zu strukturieren, um erfolgreich Produkte entwickeln zu können.

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Design is a Process. Learn how DXY does it.

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Using Technology on Conferences

by Daniel Young

For some of us, conference season is about to begin. We'll soon be inundated with panels, breakout sessions, display booths, and stacks of business cards. Trade shows, conferences, and congresses (as they're called by our European counterparts) have changed little in the past decade; technologies we take for granted in our daily lives haven't permeated the trade show industry. As a result, it's ripe for change.

Here are a few concepts we'd like to gain traction in 2015:

Using a Smartphone as a "Second Screen"

When we're at home, enjoying a television show like "House of Cards" or a game, it's not uncommon to use our iPad or phone while we watch. May it be fact-checking, stats, or just curiously searching Google to see where that new character may have been seen before, we'll use our "second screens" to create a deeper engagement with the primary content we're enjoying. So why are we not doing this when we are at a conference?

We expect to see trade shows and conferences move beyond simply presenting speakers, schedules, locations, and notes within their apps. We anticipate that apps will truly evolve into a second screen, where attendees can fact check the speakers (which might embarrass a few), read their CV and career on LinkedIn or Xing, download their notes/deck, buy their book, secure their services, etc. A well-planned app can provide a higher level of engagement for attendees, thus making the price of admission that much more of a value.

Finding that Special Someone

The point of trade shows is to meet new people, learn more about our industry, and hopefully profit from the experience. A challenge at larger shows is that there are too many people, too much information, and too little time to sift through everything to find what you need to make the experience successful. With the tools we have today, this problem should be obsolete.

Most users are willing to share some information to gain a more fulfilling experience. We can create an app that uses this information to make suggestions on whom you should meet. Think of this concept as a "Tinder" for trade shows that provides recommendations based on industry, job position, etc. for those looking to buy, sell, or for a moment of serendipity.

Getting There

Now that you know who to meet and what to see, you need to get there. However, navigation and timing becomes another obstacle with large conferences and events.

Using existing technologies, we can develop an app that can direct you to a college based on where they are in close to real-time. When you want to meet up with that special someone, assuming they want to meet you, the event app could provide suggestions on where to meet and directions to get there.

Once you're done with the meeting, the app can suggest other points of interests to visit on your way back to your booth or next meeting.

There are numerous possibilities of what we can do to improve the event experience. Hopefully we'll see large event organizers invest in these methods and technologies so we can get the most out of our time onsite.

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What can clients expect from DXY's design department?

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Intelligent Wayfinding Systems as a Success Factor for Perfect Visitor Experiences

A commentary by Diana B. Krueger, CEO of VISITORFirst. As an expert and strategist for visitor experience Diana supports DXY in the conceptualization of wayfinding systems.

“Do what you do so well that they want to see it again and bring their friends.“ - Walt Disney

Is the Path the Ultimate Goal? No.

A typical scenario: The plan was clear - they wanted to go to a trade show to check out some company, but also to get informed about this and that, and possibly even meet so-and-so for a quick chat, etc. But then, as if running around in circles, they couldn’t find anyone or anything that they actual wanted to get information about, and so-and-so in question was already gone. How frustrating – even though everything was actually where it was supposed to be and they followed their wayfinding system instructions to the T.…

A lot of companies today already offer digital wayfinding technologies - but the actual motivations and needs of visitors are often unknown or ignored. Instead of wayfinding systems recognizing the visitors’ driving factors, they are simply guided to a generic destination in the most direct way possible.

Too often the wayfinding system creates confusion because visitors simply don’t get to where they want to go, so visitors have a negative user experience. This leads to immediate frustration and furthermore to a long-term rejection of the experience itself. An unfortunate outcome is that a visitor doesn’t return and in the worst case, he or she would discourage friends and colleagues from attending the particular event.

It’s clear that intelligent wayfinding technologies are still a challenge for companies today. Worldwide there are only a few analog and digital wayfinding systems that truly add value in guiding visitors that actually increase the share of wallet for clients. The goal must be to transform the visitor into a happy customer, to inspire him or her with quality that goes above and beyond what the average service offers and to let him become a testimonial of an outstanding experience.

“I’ll Take You There“ vs “Turn Left Now “

Companies are thoroughly aware of the difficulty in fine-tuning methods of guidance. Their approach to successfully face this challenge is hindered by a conflict of interest between catering to the product versus the customer. Companies are aware of the strength of their products very well, but they lack an understanding of the specific needs it could satisfy. 

At VISITORFirst, we focus on precisely delivering this knowledge - and transform it into a crucial competitive advantage. We focus on the visitor experience, align ourselves to their perspective and literally ‘walk in their shoes’. Empowered by this knowledge, we deliver an exceptional experience to satisfy the specific customer needs. Only a profoundly understood customer, whose needs we holistically and literally fulfill all along the way, is truly a satisfied customer. And only satisfied customers are loyal allow for greater profit generation at lower costs – as ultimately it’s at least five times more expensive to gain new customers as to keep existing satisfied ones.

It’s always the goal for VISITORFirst to prioritize the visitor’s overall needs - and to develop actionable strategies with our clients to ensure their long-term success. To do this, we combine academic research tools such as qualitative interviews in combination with our clients’ self-generated analysis. With customer experience journeys we merge fragmented perspectives about customers from individual company departments into a unified picture of the customer. We help our clients to define future earnings potential by creating an optimized customer experience. 

Only if this clearly defined picture of visitor needs are extracted, can one start to meet their needs and motivations by implementing intelligent, perfectly tailored digital wayfinding technologies - systems that accompany visitors at every step of their way and cater to their individual needs instead of simply telling them to turn left or right with generic assumptions which can ultimately create confusion leading to a negative customer experience.

Directing the Future of Wayfinding Technology

Our goal at VISITORFirst is to prioritize our client’s visitors and to uncover and recognize their needs to allow them to have an exceptional customer experience. Together with DXY we know how to create tools that deliver powerful solutions to ensure outstanding customer experience – thereby creating lasting value. By incorporating this into wayfinding technology, we offer the greatest impact in exceeding customer expectations that go beyond being guided to a physical location.

We create wayfinding systems that incorporate the emotional needs of visitors to assure a satisfactory guidance system. In short: We help clients avoid “Urgh“ situations through  “A-ha“ moments and transform them into “Wow!“ experiences.

We’re able to generate long-term customer data, which could establish a ‘happy customer’ barometer for future customers, guaranteeing data for quality assurance. Our technique will contribute to our clients' wayfinding systems to guarantee a long-term measurable success. 

In A Perfect World... Let´s Get There!

In the ideal world this type of wayfinding system already exists, one which knows exactly where a visitor is and where he wants to go, one that is never too invasive and allows the visitor to switch easily between analog and digital navigation, rewarding him, providing him with valuable recommendations, knows his personal preferences and is simply always there when needed.

Let us simply create this ideal customer experience.

Together with DXY we face each strategic and technological challenge from a holistic perspective - because we are on a mission: to make it common sense for each customer to always be a welcomed guest on his personal customer journey at each touchpoint where he interacts with our clients - right from the very beginning, step by step and at every turn.

__________________________________________________________________

About VISITORFirst

We create added value to visitor experiences by working together with our clients through combining demographically optimized and individually tailored know-how. VISITORFirst identifies all relevant visitor needs at the start to develop actionable strategies to perfectly fulfill these in the short, middle to long term for lasting impact. Always on the mission to build bridges between our clients and visitors, we utilize in-house generated analysis derived from qualitative research and knowledge of target demographics. We translate these into successful strategies that are measurable to create ‘Happy Customers’, and from these we build loyal fans – this is our vision and prom

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Interview with DXY's Embedded Systems Engineer Chris Armenio

Hey Chris, good to meet you! To start, how would you describe yourself in less than 3 sentences?

I am a minimalist engineer. I'm always trying to figure out how things work, how they can be simplified, and how they can be made better.

What’s your position at DXY?

At a very high level, I am an Embedded Systems Engineer. Technically, that means that I've been classically trained in both Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. In actuality, that means that I work on projects that have some sort of interaction with the physical world. I design/debug electronics, program firmware (the software that exists on devices that you might not otherwise think have software), and provide interfaces to the "high-level" developers. When needed, I'll step in and write "high-level" user interfaces, but my "bread and butter" is down in the "bare metal".

Away from DXY, what is the current trend you’ve spotted related to “Interaction with the physical world“; do you have a best case you would die for?

I'd say the biggest underlying trend in the real-world interaction of computers is the ability to offload computing to "the cloud". Previously, if you wanted to perform processor intensive activities (voice recognition, computer vision, data/trend analysis) you had to do _all_ of that processing on the local device or computer. That usually led to significantly higher hardware requirements and a prohibitive rise in power consumption. Now, your end-devices are simply a "conduit" to the processing power of the cloud...this leads to drastically smaller, less power-hungry devices, while simultaneously yielding a smarter, more intuitive end-product.

What are the biggest challenges with communication between man and machine yet after more than 50 Years of ELIZA?  

Sensors and data processing. The amount of data provided every second by all of our senses is incredibly huge. It's impossible to process _all_ of that data in real-time...even the brain does a large amount of filtering before anything even makes it to our consciousness. We're still playing catch-up in this area...in order to provide a compelling human-machine interaction, we need to fuse incredibly large amounts of data from several sources (computer vision, sound, depth-of-field sensors, previous interactions, stored knowledge, etc) into small chunks of actionable information. We're slowly making progress in this area, but we still have quite a ways to go.(Learn more about ELIZA here)

Looking into the future, let us know what you think about how we’ll coexist with self-thinking robots.

To a certain extent, we already are living with robots...we have automatic vacuum cleaners (Roomba), automatic dishwashers, thermostats that are aware of your daily schedule, and the list goes on. In the future, I think you'll start seeing less self-contained, individual systems, and more cooperative systems...almost to the point of one continuous, integrated system. Your phone will be connected with your car, which will be linked to your garage door and security system, which will be linked to your lights, and on, and on. Every electronic device in your life will eventually be linked to one large, overarching robotic system with multiple points of interaction and actuation...it's kind of scary if you think about it...

What’s your most ass kicking technology you are using personally and almost daily beside your Smartphone?

The office coffee machine. Not only does it grind the beans, it forms them into a "puck", pumps heated filtered water over it, then automatically discards it. The amount of engineering that went into each one of the stages/systems is pretty impressive. Plus, it makes a darn good cup of coffee...

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How does Digital Wayfinding technology such as Apple’s iBeacon engage visitors, save costs and increase profitability?

by Felix Wieduwilt

Our society is overloaded with over-hyped advancements in technology, causing people to lose sight to what’s important versus another toy for techies. Apple’s iBeacon and indoor navigation technology is one advancement that isn't just for the tech savvy, it will have an indelible effect on how we interact and experience the great indoors.

Digital wayfinding helps people navigate through internal spaces such as exhibitions, malls, airports or museums—almost a bit like Harry Potter’s Marauder’s Map. The technology is dynamic, helping you navigate a labyrinth of a shopping mall, showing additional information as you get closer to an object—like a personal tour guide with encyclopedic knowledge. Like all technologies, it takes time and money to implement a good wayfinding system, so there should be an expectation for a ROI. So let's explore what benefits you should expect for your business.

We estimate that after an investment period of two to three years you will continuously save money and increase user engagement which combined,  leads to a bigger profit at the end of the day. Sounds great, doesn’t it? We’ve listed the strongest points for engagement & cost saving and illustrated them below.

I. How do we increase engagement through a Digital Wayfinding App? 

• Exclusive communities Users will feel like members of a VIP community because they get exclusive benefits, features and perks by using the iBeacon-connected app 

• Positive response to push ads Interacting with ads by customers increases 20x by using iBeacon because users are more likely to engage with ads and push messages within the app 

• Pre- and after sales marketing Communities can be targeted directly for in-app marketing campaigns before and after an event 

• Integration of brochures and catalogues Users can easily find relevant information by browsing through an iBeacon-connected app instead of carrying thick brochures and catalogues 

• Ticketing system The app can be used to manage event ticketing, avoiding third-party ticketing fees 

• Individual notepad Users can take notes and pictures within the app and include links to other platforms or exhibitor information 

• Analytics and insights of visitors Businesses can gain insight on users and their interests by conducting in-app surveys, measuring time spent at exhibits and other user-focused data enabled through iBeacon

—> As a result you will attract more visitors through recommendations and by keeping your visitors engaged and involved as a part of the iBeacon community.

II. How do we save money long-term through an Digital Wayfinding App? 

• Printing costs By more people using the app, businesses will be spend less on printing costs 

• Ticketing More efficient ticketing system, resulting in lower ticket fees and printing costs 

• Event staff Reduced cost for in-person assistance. By using the iBeacon-connected app, visitors will not need to ask for directions as opposed to trying to locate event staff or random floor guides 

• Market research Businesses save money on expensive surveys and market research by using the app to send surveys to a targeted audience 

• Signage Through in-app guides and advertisements, there is a reduced need for complex signage 

—> As a result you can reinvest into engaged and involved customers 

We can see there are many opportunities to receive a huge gain of loyalty, great image and feedback at your customers which makes it worthwhile to invest into Digital Wayfinding using a long-term strategy.

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What we’ve learned from the last 20 years

by Daniel Young & Felix Wieduwilt

Many of us don't remember where we were when Apple launched the Newton in the early 1990s, but we know what effect it has had on our moderns lives. The introduction of mobile technology has changed our overall relationship with technology, leaving a permanent mark on our society—it has now become completely integrated into every aspect of our daily lives. So how did we get here? How did we get these beautiful toys? Let's take a moment to look back, but not from the gadget's perspective, but of how our society has changed in the last two decades.

We saw the rise of Generation Y - a demographic which has grown up with digital technology like no other generation before. It showed us that digital technology can become as natural as every other technology we‘ve used since the last 1,000 years. People love technology which helps them to organize their lives efficiently and comfortably. Technology must adapt to users’ needs and behaviors to stay in line with the growing demands and expectations of this generation.

The last 20 years have been a race to maximize power and speed while reducing a device’s size, in order for it to be effective and portable. Traditionally, people wouldn’t have imagined that today’s generation uses smartphones or laptops as such an expected, integral part of their daily routine. No one would have imagined the power such a compact piece of plastic could have. Nowadays, this race has slowed down. You can’t judge the performance and capabilities anymore by  reading a device’s technical specifications like a well written menu in a restaurant. They’re all powered with similar engines which don’t have much relevance anymore: what matters now is the vision of how to do things, and not if it’s buildable.

Nowadays, we can have a 'Let’s do it' mindset because we have the capabilities in place with advancements in technology such as microchips and gadgets to be able to focus on our vision. It’s just a question of time when technology will become an integrated, invisible force in our daily life. You can either like it or shun it, but good working technology isn’t enough anymore when you want to survive. The last 20 years trained us to use technology carefully and to actively think about it before using it which had the downfall of being complex, leading to frustration and a poor user experience. Increasingly in the future, technology has shifted to become a customized tool in our everyday routines, integrating our personal needs and daily life to create a more satisfying experience.

So, what should DXY take out of two decades of technology? Let’s say we developed our daily philosophy out of the last 20 years and adjusted it accordingly every day by working with clients and their great projects. Below we want to share our top three guidelines we take very seriously in our work:

Only good Design makes Technology Transparent 

Well working and long lasting technology needs time; so carefully consider every touchpoint

Technology can’t ever exist alone, it must always be integrated into flowing systems 

With these individual guidelines we might look into the future and figure out what the next 20 years bring. Even if it may sound foolish to our future generations, let’s give it a try and read about AI and user experience and predict what the next decades will bring.

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Artificial Intelligence and User Experience

by Daniel Young & Felix Wieduwilt

While it's not perceived as a problem, a limitation on user experience design is that it is an optimization of competing interests to seek the most palatable solution for potential users. We see this a growing limitation of our technology to adapt to who we are, and more importantly, how we're feeling when we use a device or an app. So long as UX is static, our interactions with technology will be limited. 

In the next twenty years, we expect to see these limitation lifted; where the technology we use adapts to our behavior and our personality. Our technology will not only learn from our past, much the way that Big Data makes predictions on what we'll buy, what we want to listen and watch, but will be able to detect our emotional state and physical condition, allowing the interface design to adapt to our immediate condition.

What we see is that technology will be able to connect humans and machines in a "smart" way,  to improve the user experience holistically. With that said there are always emotions we have to deal with which in turn affects our daily experience. As a user we always have a user experience by using technology. Either we drink coffee, play a game or use an app on our smartphones; by the end of the day we want satisfaction from having a good experience which in turn makes us happy.

How do we detect emotions?

As a foundation we have basic emotions such as happiness, sadness or anger. All three are relatively easy to detect by human beings and is he foundation in our daily lives to relate to others. To detect these on a smartphone is a much harder challenge because you can’t simply inquire about the user’s state of mind, as the result would be subjective.

As presently seen and expected in the future the power of smartphones to collect necessary data which can be processed into accurate emotions will be enormous. Modern smartphones are already equipped with several sensors allowing us to record and store sound, motion, pictures and light intensity. By bringing this data into context with our bodies we are able to identify emotions which are different than our status quo. A faster gesture, a louder voice, and even a different mimic than usual can signal that a user is in an angry mood. Based on this we might deliver different designs to calibrate the user experience individually based on his or her current state of mind. 

Possible use cases

A basic scenario looks like this: the smartphone detects a user’s emotion and warns him or her not to perform a particular action to avoid potential harm to others because research has proven that driving while angry can be dangerous. Recommendations based on changes in an emotional state, if relied upon too heavily by users, can have the downfall as a user can become overly dependent on them, but for the intial phase of this technology such examples are necessary to begin to refine their accuracy. 

Let’s examine a few potential scenarios that would be easily buildable using today’s existing applications

1. Customer Satisfaction  

A happy and satisfied customer is more likely to come back and use services again than an unsatisfied customer. A call center is already using voice recognition in order to detect an angry customer who might cause problems. What about smartphone users who have missed a connecting flight? They may be angry and want to check their smartphone for the next flight or just complain about the waste of time waiting at the airport. Imagine a user who engages an app that has the ability to detect his or her emotional state and can provide the right design which helps to generate a positive user experience. He or she is then more likely to remember the positive turn of the situation and walk away feeling satisfied.

2. Buying Decisions

People’s purchasing behavior can be influenced by their emotional state. Many products directly target consumers in a certain mood as they are actually developed to arouse that mood. Other products or services, on the other hand, would not be considered for purchase based on a conflicting state of mind of a product and the intended emotional the product or service is designed to create. If a smartphone is able to detect emotions it can offer the right product for the fitting state of mind of the user which would increase customer satisfaction in online shops by actually directing users in a physical space.

3. Storytelling 

The intent of storytelling is to arouse certain emotions that increases the likelihood of a consumer to make a purchase. The question of what story is fitting to which user’s emotions is one that will be addressed in the future. Can a smartphone in the future recognize a user’s emotions well enough to direct ads using the right ‚story’ to him or her to ensure the best fit, thus the strongest interest in a product or service and to enjoy a positive User Experience? 

4. Recommendations 

Which movie do you want to watch? You may have no idea but you can describe your mood precisely. If your TV would have the ability to detect your emotions it might also offer you recommendations for the fitting movies for you that you would have interest in watching with your current state of mind. This would also be applicable for any music or other streaming service that provides recommendations to users.

[dxydoes]

WORKING THROUGH A BOTTLENECK

by Daniel Young

Here’s a situation which may sound familiar. A corporation's field sales team struggled with a legacy system that no longer worked. Their outside salesforce needed access to current product information, pricing, and on-premise ordering. What they had was a clunky web-based portal built for desktop browsers that was simply frustrating to use, especially on newer devices such as an iPad and mobile browsers. They knew that they needed to make a change, but were faced with a significant impediment: their internal teams couldn’t get on the same page on how to move forward.

Their challenge was that they have multiple departments with a vested interest in the sales workflow. Business Development needed a system that could work on their own devices. Marketing wanted to have better control of the company’s messaging to customers. IT had concerns about data security and changes to their existing business logic. Neither team, however, was able to empathize with each other and only saw the situation from their own perspective. As you might have guessed, this created a bit of a bottleneck, blocking any forward progress on moving the project forward. 

What DXY did to break through the bottleneck was to apply design thinking techniques to the situation. We worked with the client to define what success of the project looked like for each department. We explored how they described their audience, practically and empathetically. We identified their priorities and how they aspired to move forward.

We then got our hands dirty with research. We looked at the history of their current system—how they ended up where they were. We probed previous attempts to improve their outside sales platforms. We individually met with outside stakeholders and end-users to better understand their perspective. 

Our design team facilitated an ideation process with the client. The output was then used to create a project hypothesis which outlined potential features and functions for a first iteration of the platform. 

We converted this into a prototype for the design of the platform, which was then tested with key stakeholders and potential users. Their feedback was then used to refine the project hypothesis and later iterations of the prototype designs. These refined designs later became the basis for the design and development of client's sales platform.

While our tangible deliverables were embodied within design of the new platform, an ancillary benefit of our process was consensus. By guiding our client through this process, we were able to bring disparate parties' interests to the table in such a way that each group was heard and their feedback was embodied within the final version of the platform.  

Getting people together to share their collective experiences, preferences, and biases constructively is the foundation of thinking empathetically. Working to shape and structure this dialogue is what DXY does.

[dxydoes]

SEE THE SMARTPHONE?

By Daniel Young

No? Well, that's the point. A well designed piece of technology should be transparent, fading into the background of a user's consciousness, freeing them to engage in their desired task. 

There's an old saying that people buy drills because they want a hole, not the drill. The drill is the means to the end, a hole in this case, and not the point of the purchase. Modern technology functions in much the same way. People select technology based on what it will enable them to do, not for the technology itself. When technology interferes with this expectation, users get frustrated and confused, eventually leading them to simply stop using it, which becomes a very costly problem for a business.

Creating good technology requires good design. When embarking on a project, may it be a website, a mobile app, or connected device, the first task you should do is describe your users and their motivations to use your technology. Sounds easy, especially if you're building an internal application, but it's actually a trap.

Even the best intentioned project leads make assumptions about their users and their project. These assumptions later become the foundation for the project, determining the features, functions, and price points for a product. Oftentimes these underlying assumptions prove to be false, thereby leading the project team down a path resulting in technology that isn't transparent and thus not desirable for users.

The first step in avoiding this trap is to recognize your assumptions. At the onset of a project, document what you think you know about your users and the project, then convert these into a hypothesis. As you proceed through the design process, it's wise to continually test the hypothesis to see if your underlying assumptions proved to be accurate. This discovery process will give you the chance to modify the assumptions as you progress through the project.

In time, you'll gain a better understanding of who will be using your technology, what they'll expect to accomplish, and how to avoid having the technology get in their way. This knowledge then can be applied to the design and later in development, increasing the probability of delivering a piece of transparent technology. 

Using a well designed tool allows a user to focus on the task, not how to use the tool to do the task. Good technology design is the same; this is what DXY does.

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DXY is hiring a designer in Berlin