This is a big challenge. But we don’t get out of bed each day to turn a handle so-to-speak.

We formed a short list as follows:

1. Gestures (touch)
2. Drag and Drop
3. Rich media layering
4. Canvas layering / interactive scrolling
5. Data visualisation through 3d

Obviously this isn’t new stuff – but we were thinking about what’s conventional (plenty of the stuff above would confuse a 60yo – so what will become commonplace in the next 2 years and easily understood by the grey people?) – no offence to our ancestors..  Or should I say digital converts as opposed to us digital natives?

The reason we asked these questions is we’re trying to come up with some ground breaking ideas for our clients and we’d really like to see us turn a conventional data / interaction on its head and change the game.

I just saw a quote that said

“ the conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking…”  Cute eh!

So consider a simple user interaction on a tablet device where the user is transitioning from a paper based forms environment:

For example, why point and click/tap a box when you could brush over it as if you were holding a pencil in a tick motion????

So what will will be common place in the near future – maybe as popular as the mouse – who one reporter in the 80’s commented on “there is no evidence that the public want to interact with their computers using such a device… ? EH!

Imminent conventions:

Our in-house emerging tech specialist James has given us the following food for thought about what will become convention soon:

Microsoft Kinnect type interactions

No mouse or keyboard required – voice and body gesture based interface, no physical connection to screen or mouse required (can be done with webcam + mic, kinnect hardware not required)

User Customisable UI elements

(Sometimes) iOS apps let you customise the tab bar at the bottom of apps, they presents you with a list of possible tabs and the users drags the ones they want or use the most onto the tab bar. Perhaps this will spill over to the web, like when you setup a custom Google home page. So you could turn navigation items off you don’t care about, add a top level navigation item to a sub/sub/sub-page that the user uses frequently.

More drag and drop of things

Drag and drop between different applications / environments – I can drag files from my desktop to the web browser based cloud storage (box.net website) in Google’s Chrome browser, or drop a video into YouTube and it uploads, no need to search. Perhaps in the future you can drag more stuff, perhaps drag an image or news article from one tab and drop it onto a Facebook contact to share it with them.

Less clicking

From my personal experience, some people are crap at clicking on things, and often don’t understand what can be clicked on and why

Adaptive UI

The first time I go to a website its often immediately overwhelming – the amount of links and sections, how the site is structured and I often don’t know how to get where I need to, so those big “Click here to login” style buttons are great for first time users. Skip forward in time, I am now familiar with the site, I know exactly where I need to go, and what I need to, so I would like heaps and heaps of links so I can get to where I need to go quickly. Could we build a UI that is initially very simple and layers in addition functionality as the users proves competence (either over time, or by logging in, or by any other bizarre metric we can come up with)?

Express logins 

If I am logged into Facebook, a lot of websites recognise that, and let me make comments on a post using my pre-populated Facebook profile stuff.  So perhaps more personal recognition in UI. i.e. “your friend Sam Smith was looking at this page 5 mins ago, and is online now, chat to him about it”.

Google Labs 

Anything listed in labs.google.com

Right Click

I think ‘right-click’ is making a comeback – ref box.net functionality

Zooming

Perhaps zooming, used as a UI mechanic to help keep context … if you think of a Google map, zoomed in to see all of Tasmania, if this represents an entire website, using Google maps to pan to Hobart and zoom in, you will now see more data about Hobart, but because the transition wasn’t a click and page reload zoomed into Hobart, you gain a sense of scale and position (context).

Device interactions

More device-to-device interactions, doesn’t really relate to UI, like when we sit in our board room looking at the projector, allowing someone to drag a file from their iPad to the screen, somehow. Firefox now has this feature where you can save open tabs to the cloud… their example is if you are looking at flight time information on your PC at home but need to leave in a rush because your taxi arrives, once in the cab you can whip out your phone and open Firefox, it’s on the same page as your home pc, so you can keep checking your flight. So perhaps move to my iPhone type UI elements.

HUD

Augmented reality will be big, dunno how that effects UI

Hidden UI elements 

Ubunutu 11 (Linux) has gotten rid of scroll bars, these guys are sometimes ahead of the curve on these kinds of things. Now (from memory) if you move your mouse to where a scrollbar should be, a mini scroll bar appears outside the window, it’s kind of odd but isn’t confusing at all and saves some pixels which is important on tablets, it’s also very touch friendly.

Infographics

Infographics are big, perhaps we could do more dynamic infographics for overview information in complex environments

Data visualisation

Stream graphs started making an impact last year, a great method of visualising complicated data.

Here are some good data visualisation references

http://flowingdata.com/

http://www.visualcomplexity.com

http://chartporn.org/

Basically, I tried to express that there should be a philosophy behind his work and that he needs a body of evidence regarding that in terms of an expression of applying that philosophy.  It was a pretty heavy set of advice but I had hoped to get him on track at a root level.

Anyway, after chatting for a while he mentioned a new group that had been forming in the north of Tasmania for Web Professionals and that the group had asked “are there any real web strategists in Tasmania”?  To which my young associate had said “yes, I know one”.

It reminded me that we’re thin on the ground here in Hobart.

Considering the designer in front of me and how he’d arrived at calling himself ‘a designer’ it occurred to me there’s a number of ‘web strategists’ or ‘digital strategists’ popping up too.  And, I’d argue with a great weight of evidence in my pocket that these self-proclaimed ‘web strategists’ suffered from the same founding issues as the designer in front of me.

It sounds cool to be a digital strategist doesn’t it?

From http://bentremblay.com/en/category/social-media

Sums it up pretty well really.

The emergence of web strategists / digital strategists

This is not a new title.  Go back in time to big tech companies of the last decade and they’ve been around for ages.

I remember meeting with a director of a recruitment firm 4 years ago and said to him “keep an eye out for the emergence of a new role that will become very important in the crossover of marketing to digital – digital strategists”.  I stated that there would be few but they’d be of high demand as media convergence became common place.  I expected a bit of gold fever by the end of last decade.

Where there’s a gold rush the mining experts (or should I say hopefuls) emerge.  And, with there still being limited web education processes I haven’t seen a Web Strategy Degree being offered at Uni.  We have to piece the role together through specialisation in certain areas.

Is web strategy and digital strategy just gobbledegook for online marketer?

There are plenty of people around that have been commercially involved with the web for some time now and the role is often bandied about and usually in the context of marketing.

But is a digital strategist just about marketing?

What I’m observing at the moment is this:

1. Ran a website before
2. Been involved in planning a website
3. Taken a website from concept to go live state
4. Done a bit of digital marketing i.e. ran a few SEM campaigns in Adwords
5. Created a facebook page or similar
6. Maybe worked in or ran a project team

Done those things more than once and you might call yourself a digital strategist.

Well to the low end of the market you’d clearly know much more than the average bear.  But you’d fall well short of my view of a digital strategist.

What characteristics and experience do we look for in digital strategy development people?

Strong depth of knowledge of the following:

1. Business process, business models, and business fundamentals including budgeting and financial flows
2. Marketing process, brand development, brand strategy, path to market, value propositions, productisation and product / service segmentation, market trends, direct marketing, digital marketing, and convergence of media platforms.
3. Creative direction, visual differentiation, market relevance, marketing platform integration and cohesion
4. User behaviour, usability testing, demographics, recruitment of test subjects, focus group management and unbiased processing of user feedback
5. Technical development, web technologies, mobile technologies, understanding the software development lifecycle
6. Systems integration, database development, data warehousing, and back-end platforms such as CRM and core business software.
7. Project Management, stakeholder management, methodologies such as agile, communications strategies, risk management, and governance.
8. Social Media, influence, viral, and touch points.
9. Conversion methodology, persuasion architecture, design optimisation.
10. Reporting metrics; not just traffic and conversion but behaviour interpretation, and how to leverage this
11. Consulting frameworks and processes for extracting organisational needs and converting them to digital roadmaps.
12. And more I’ve probably looked over…

And if you really want to set all that apart: 

1. Innovation capacity, ability to distil concepts into commercially applicable but boundary pushing results, an ability to step back and see the big picture and the trends
2. Hands on experience in architecting, designing, developing actual solutions
3. Leadership capacity to drive multiple stakeholders, teams, suppliers, and resources to common goals.

Lastly, how much experience is required?  How did the ‘web strategist’ earn their title?  What body of work shows their credibility?

That’s up to you to decide.

So is digital strategy all about marketing?

In many ways I’d have to say yes as sales drive organisations BUT sales don’t equal profits.  Profit comes from so many other areas such as effectiveness of support, service costs, consumer relevance, transactional and operational flow awareness etc.  And, whilst digital strategy work may be seeded by marketing types I believe a proper digital strategist is a helluva lot more than a marketer.

How can you be a master of all these trades I mention?  Won’t they be jack of all and master of none?  Potentially yes.  More likely you’ll find strength in only a handful of the areas I look for.  The ones that can cover all areas well are incredibly rare.

…so, coming back to my young design friend.  He can ‘do’ design but does he have what it takes to put together a design with a rationale and strategically justify how it will work for the client and hence minimise their risk in releasing it?  Not really, and this is what worries me about the emerging ‘web strategists’.

Use of the web ‘on the go’ is increasing.  The launch of the iPhone certainly had a lot to do with this and amounts to almost 2/3rds of mobile browsing.  Viewing typical websites on screens a few inches tall became much easier but still not quite right.

But not everyone on a mobile device is seeing the same thing.  Clever people behind the web can make different users see different things depending on the device in use.  And I don’t just mean pretty colours or fewer graphic.

A mobile version of a website can be an entirely different site in its own right with tuned functionality and special design.

Take yellow pages as an example for a moment (and let’s pretend that we’re not all using Google instead). Yellow’s website had a fairly complicated set of input boxes that relied heavily on type to drive it.

Well that’s too hard in a mobile environment – even with the iPhone it was clunky.

A mobile version of Yellow’s website is available instead and it’s got just two input boxes – that’s all – and the design is as simple and clean as possible.

This stuff has been happening quietly without most of you realising.

We built a mobile version of Petrusma Property years ago.  If you’re on a compatible device it will automatically show you a different website.

But why have a different mobile site?

Well, how many intricate search panels are customary in real estate websites?  Heaps!  When you’ve got a full keyboard in front of you and a big screen you’re relatively happy to be very descriptive about what you want.  But on a mobile device, forget it, it’s too hard!

Creating the Petrusma Property mobile site wasn’t just about simpler functionality either.  The audience is different on a mobile device.  The user has different needs and exhibits different behaviour.

We cut huge amounts of content and tuned the site down to the critical items that were relevant.  We had to think like someone standing outside a property with a mobile device in their hand prepared to invest maybe 20-30 seconds of time.

So do you need a mobile version of your site?

That’s a tricky question as it depends on what sort of content you’re delivering and whether or not it’s hard to interact with ‘on the go’.

With the rise of iPhone-like devices it’s becoming increasingly easier to view normal websites with relative effectiveness so you may be just fine with one site.

But if your business depends on ease of use in terms of delivering content that is critical to your users you’re going to have to build tuned websites for each platform your customers use.

This is a bigger problem than you may realise.  With the Internet becoming more of a fabric between the community it’s not just PC’s anymore.  It is fridges, TV sets, phones, games consoles, cars and trains.

I’d place bets that even a toilet will be connected one day!  Hooray I could flush remotely… or use the web with one hand.

My point is that whilst the range of devices accessing the web increases we need to consider the different environments in which our customers and users will interact with each other.

Users will have different needs and perhaps even different ways of physically interacting with devices – take touch screen technology as an example.

It stands to reason that any organisation on the web needs to think more broadly than just showing one web design on one device.

Take the visionary steam power of what America is doing by opening up as many government services as possible via the web ( for the greater benefit of the community) and combine that with Australia’s National Broadband Network buzz and ‘Gov 2.0’ is our national problem.  Oops… I mean opportunity.

Please excuse my optimism slurs.  I’m from the private sector.

Vision. That’s what Barack Obama seems to have.  Issues.  That’s what we Aussies see, and particularly Tasmanians, if the recent Hobart chapter of the round tables was anything to go by.

In front of us right now is a massive opportunity to be a smarter, kinder, more connected community from government down.  Words and promises I’ve heard from many politicians in the last 2 years.

According to the gov2.net.au website its taskforce work falls into two streams.

The first relates to:

“increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation and value adding to government information.”

The second stream:

“is concerned with encouraging online engagement with the aim of drawing in the information, knowledge, perspectives, resources and even, where possible, the active collaboration of anyone wishing to contribute to public life.”

Great! This is the stuff of dreams and is music to the ears of every web professional in the country.  But why are Tasmanians struggling with this?  Why did the round table focus so much on the issues and dangers of opening up data rather than looking for value creation?

I’ve been spruiking the benefits of opening up data systems in previous editorials and hopefully you remember views I’ve shared from visionary web leaders about the value that can be realised from mashing up data from various sources and extracting value for the community.

Let’s solve health problems, predict trends in viral movements, gain intelligence in financial decision making, improve access to services… don’t laugh, but the classic example is the issue of Google not knowing where our public toilets are in our country!

Why can’t we get this data out?

Commercial concerns about owning data sets and ‘they’re mine – you can’t have them unless you pay me’ stack up against internal issues resulting in organisations being too politically hamstrung to work out how to even open the door.  Add to these two hurdles what I’m calling a ‘cultural cringe to an open and connected world’.

Where is this cringe the worst?  At the risk of invoking a covert operation to assassinate yours truly I’ll put my hand up and say ‘at the heart of state government’.  It’s often all too hard and not within mandate or budget to have such a vision.

Thankfully the national taskforce has been led by visionary people and their function is not just to provide a report but to ‘fund initiatives and incentives which may achieve or demonstrate how to accomplish government 2.0 objectives.’

Unfortunately I guess our pessimistic Tasmanian stance in front of the taskforce means there won’t be many good pitches for concept projects and Tasmania may miss out on showing off our shiny new NBN roll out before the rest of the country stands up and capitalises on it.

Where are our Tasmanian internet thought leaders?

Who will drive the culture shift needed to embrace open data sets and create value in our new web future?

Anybody want to join me in a gov2.0 project pitch?

Nobody’s actually asked me that in the last 6 months but this issue has stopped almost every commercial social networking project in its tracks.  I’ve lost count of how many businesses have come to me with dubious enthusiasm to push their product or service and gone home sour after picking apart the fundamentals.  Now hopefully this isn’t a reflection of my character and more so a reflection of the relatively intangible value and uncertain path to leveraging social networking for commercial outcomes rather than individual benefits.

So what’s the problem?

I think the need for fundamental mindset shifts are coupled with marketing challenges to form two significant barriers.  That and of course the wad of cash needed to build something like a Facebook application.

When people group together to derive value from one another online I think there’s a point where a critical mass must be realised.  There’s a point where the return is clear and self sustaining – I call it social momentum.  Facebook has done it, but just because there are lots of users doesn’t mean they want anything to do with your business.

I’m concerned about how we get through this phase of web interaction from a commercial standpoint.

There’s a broad spectrum of ways of taking advantage of this movement.

• Some people want to build Facebook-style functionality into their sites to hold richer member or customer profiles and let them do status updates, blogs, comments, and ratings… but do people really want this?  It can look great for you i.e. ‘you care’ and want to give ‘freedom of speech’ to your members or customers – but – how many of us users really want to have accounts across tens or hundreds of sites in order to contribute?  I don’t!  And so I wonder what business value is there in simulating functionality that exists all over the place anyway?
• Another example would be a brave commercial entity devoting effort to setting up a simple forum – knowing very well that this could be a political and media nightmare that damages them.  Well is that where the customer is going to put a complaint (or maybe praise) or will they vent it through rating a Google search result or some other highly visible and highly trafficked area?  In this case the brave organisation may end up with a disused forum that has moderation staff allocated to it…  It is tough to know where you’ll get the value from.
• If you were a real estate company you could build a Facebook application that let prospective home buyers display and rate properties they were considering from you.  But I don’t think these things work for commercial entities because the data is so limited and consumers don’t work in such narrow channels – they’d want to list properties from multiple agencies.  So if you were a real estate company you’d be better off investing in building a universal application that showed your competitors too.

So we hit on a nerve here.

To do something successful you may have to shift your thinking and be open to abuse, criticism, supporting your competitors, sharing secrets and so on… and maybe give benefit to someone other than yourself.  But that’s kind of the essence isn’t it?  If you’re doing something in the social sphere then you need to play to the need of the masses and not that of your organisation.

Will the brave be the ones that are rewarded for their risks in this open new world?  I think so.

If I could give you advice on this problem it would be to play to your own strengths as an organisation and not fear competitors working alongside you.  Use your brand credibility to build something interesting and of social value and the seemingly intangible return will be channelled via increased exposure and association with something hopefully cherished by your customers.  But what that is exactly will need great consideration and advice.

Considering that blogs, forums, and feedback tools are cheap functions to buy then it has to be worth a punt at face value.  Just don’t expect it to work without a serious marketing push, a well seeded base from which to operate, and some ongoing investment.