Observe others use an iPad "in the wild", take a look at Apple's guided tours or simply use one yourself. You will reach the same conclusion: the iPad is not a table-top device. It is meant to be held in your hands, not lying flat on a surface. Yet this is precisely the way the N/N group conducted their testing: with the device lying on its back under a document camera.

At Flow we understand that this is an unrealistic setup, and have arranged our own lab to match the way people actually hold their iPad.

We recently tested an iPad app for watching videos. We realised that this application was likely to be used while comfortably seated in a sofa. So we brought a sofa to allow this in our lab too.

Then came the question of what should be recorded during the sessions. For a typical website testing session, we use a desktop computer with Morae to record the participant's screen and a picture of their face via a webcam.

There are now options to get the iPad screen replicated on a external monitor for viewing or recording. But these involve plugging a cable in the device, which restricts how the device can be held, so we decided against it.

Instead, we used a camera located behind the sofa to take an over-the-shoulder look at the iPad screen. This also allowed us to also capture how the device is being held, what the user hands are doing, and what the user’s hands hide. These are essential to understand how a touch screen interface is reacting.

To also capture the facial expression of participants, we used another webcam that was positioned on a coffee table in front of the sofa.

By allowing the participants to hold the device how they would at home, we can take away some of the awkwardness of the lab setting, observe a more authentic experience and potentially discover issues that wouldn't have surfaced otherwise.

More change is yet to come with the advent of connected TV (CTV) such as the high profile YouView. CTV is essentially the next generation of freeview; the merging of Digital TV, VoD, PVR and Web Apps.

Some describe YouView as “genuinely market leading”, others claim that despite the opportunity the current fragmented experience presents, by 2012 the market will be very saturated (NMA, 2011).

As the diagram below shows YouView is not the only contender, CTV can come in many forms; a set top box, similar to those used by IPTV companies such as Sky, directly into the TV or via a games console.

The current and connected TV landscape - Connected TV as the “Pay TV platform without the Pay”

The rise of online viewing: Suggested discovery and disintermediation and the affect on audience, broadcaster and advertising power

As TV becomes more interactive, the challenge is now to ensure that what is great about TV is not lost. The flexibility of viewing and sheer volume content available has already proven hugely popular, allowing a more personalised experience, where views can watch what they want when they want to.

So I went to hear what Bill Scott (Easel TV) and Marc Goodchild (BBC IPTV) had to say at the recent Bristol Media Innovation Academy event; IPTV & YouView – What’s in it for us?

“The most important consideration is to retain the serendipity and simplicity of the TV. Consumer habits are slow to change and whilst, over time, people may get more used to interacting with their TV, the default viewing mode is to sit back and watch. The user experience is very different to the web on a PC.” Bill Scott.

Bill proposed a solution of “suggested discovery”, replacing the linear broadcast schedule with a personalised suggested playlist generated using a combination of viewer and social trending data. Rather than relying on search boxes and keyboards.

He also explained how the rise of online viewing may result in ‘disintermediation’ of the broadcasters as advertisers pay content producers directly or third party aggregation services which enable users to bypass channels. This reduction in the position of power of broadcasters could negatively impact on advertising revenue disrupting the whole commissioning model.

However, Bill believes that the knowledge of their audience that Broadcasters possess and the resultant trust users place in the Brands (channels) to meet their entertainment needs will remain an important factor. CTV will also mean that for the first time brands will be able to uniquely identify viewers. When this is combined with the potential of CTV to provide a more personalised and engaging TV and advertising experience, by drawing on valuable unique viewer data, brands could potentially demand more for advertising slots.

So in line with what YouView bosses and partners claim in the recently published NMA Cover story: Delays risk making YouView 'irrelevant' (Feb, 2011), it seems clear that the key to it’s success is to turn a complex technology product into a simple, transformational and opportunistic user experience, to consumers and advertisers alike.

Nevertheless, “Interactive TV” has actually been around for a while, as Marc reminded us with his insightful overview of the lessons learnt from developing BBC red button experiences. The great challenge now for the UX industry is to start to define what a great user experience is when TV finally becomes truly interactive.

We are UX designers not UX artists. We design for a purpose, but that does not mean that creativity is not a large part of what we do. Design via a UCD process supports creatively with freedom and low risk if implemented properly. In the context of the business objective and the users’ needs, the UCD process allows us to inject creativity into the design process with little risk of creating something that has little or no value to either the business or the customer. UCD also supports collaborative working with a multidisciplinary team, increasing the creative gene pool. UCD is user-centred, not user-led.

Why is this so? First, we are afforded a true understanding of what a business is trying to achieve via business research, establishing their objectives and goals and agreeing what success looks like. Second, we also acquire insights into the users’ context via user research. User research doesn’t just tell us what the user thinks they need (as users are not designers) it provides us with the stories that we use to not only solve the problems they are facing, but to innovate in a way that will extend the solution beyond what they could possibly imagine. All of this is done while still supporting the goals and objectives of the business.

Following on from the research phase is conceptualisation. At this point, user experience consultants are free to create and express their creativity by producing many diverse, off-the-wall, way out solutions, without restrictions. The freedom is implemented without risk. This is possible because as a result of the research stage, we will have created artefacts that that are essentially used as concept filters. These filters are used to determine which ideas will create solutions that will extend beyond usability; not just create designs to best practice or standard convention. Those artefacts include, but are not limited to, personas, scenarios, business objectives and goals, and prioritised user requirements. Also in the filter mix is foundational knowledge, as UX experts that will include understanding of human behaviour, emotion, and physical and mental limitations of users.

These filters are used to select and extend the best, most innovative solutions. This part of the process, pre-design, greatly reduces the risk of implementing a creative phase between research and design that doesn’t limit creativity but ensures the solution solves the problem and isn’t just creative for the initial wow factor.

So in reply to Steve’s assumptions about user centred design:

• User insights cannot predict future demands, but creative people can easily address this within a UCD process that includes collaboration of a multidisciplinary team.
• UCD does not stifle creatively, but by significantly lowering the risk within a design process allows creativity to flourish, but not run wild.
• The process is not user-led; it is fuelled by user insight. Users are not designers. The products that don’t benefit from the insights provided by user research are notoriously bloated by unnecessary user requirements- making them more complicated and ultimately more expensive and prone to overruns.
• User-centred (not user-led) only leads to sameness if the practitioners aren’t very good at their jobs. You should not confuse poor implementation, skill, or knowledge with what you believe is poor methodology.

Only a bad workman blames their tools. So ultimately, I agree, a user-led process cannot create innovations, but true user-centred design does.

These figures tell us a number of things;

• Retailers with strong brands can still gain sales by entering the online market – customers expect them to be there, so even late entrants such as House of Fraser can make progress.
• The greater your brand reach, the greater your chance of making sales in a tough market. People expect to have choice and convenience. Online-only brands will struggle unless they have a true point of difference in a fiercely competitive market.
• Retailers who really understand their customers will succeed in a fierce market.

I have spent many years working in marketing departments of retailers and in stores, and I have never spoken to a retailer who would ever say they don’t know their customers. They must do – customers walk through the doors in their hundreds of thousands each week. They speak to staff at tills, on shop floors, by phone, via e-mail, on doorsteps and in focus groups, every day. Market Insight teams carefully examine basket data from tills, loyalty cards and web analytics. There has never been more data on what people are doing in stores, online or over the phone.

For many years retailers have prided themselves on their ability to second guess what a customer will respond to. How they should lay out a store, what to merchandise by the till, the front door, on the home page or at a category level on a website. They think about which tools will be useful, which image is right and which promotion is best.

Ever better, retailers carry out multi-variate testing to find out what works best, they test press ads, TV ads, e-mail campaigns and direct mail shots. They can prove which version works best, and back the winner.

But do they know why?

In the course of my retailing career, I put together successful promotions, advertisements and product launches. I was even involved in some that were not so good. For all I would be able to tell you why I thought they worked or had failed but I could never actually prove my theory. Did we hit upon a lucky idea, or find the secret formula? If so, could we re-create it for a new product, different category or new season?

The answer to this question lies in talking to customers, observing their behaviour and listening carefully to what they tell us. When done properly, this can give real insight into the most important question: why?

Can I repeat that, yes, like many retail professionals my experience and skill meant I could get it right more times than I got it wrong, but is that enough when we face tougher trading in 2010 than most of us have ever seen at any time in our careers?

Do you know how much it costs to talk to your customers and what the returns could be? Here at Flow, we do and I know you would be surprised.

X-Ray Listening

Judy Rees, co-author of Clean Language showed us how she teaches people to listen better, using techniques developed in Cognitive Linguistics and Psychotherapy.

I won’t attempt to explain Judy’s method in detail here, as I’m not sure I can do it justice (and, ahem, because my notes aren’t that detailed), but in a nutshell it is a way of combining template questions with the respondent’s own words, to produce endlessly adaptable, open questions. So for example, a template question might be “Is there anything else about...”, onto which the questioner adds a key word or phrase used by the respondent themselves.

After a brief introduction Judy took the group through an exercise. We broke up into pairs, identified some relevant topics for investigation, and took turns at asking questions and listening to each other’s answers. First we did this spontaneously, using our own choice of words, but the second time we used Judy’s Clean Language technique to frame our questions.

The results were striking: everyone said that they felt more comfortable and more ‘listened-to’ when answering the ‘clean’ questions, compared to the spontaneous ones. On the other side, the questioners said that the ‘clean language’ made it easier to formulate the questions on the fly, and elicited more detailed, more honest answers.

At Flow, we spend a lot of time talking to people, trying to ask the right questions, and trying to listen. Most of us find that scripts are too rigid, so we use semi-structured discussion guides to keep us on the right topic, but we formulate or questions spontaneously, using a variety of ad-hoc rules and best practices to get the best results. We are always looking for the best ways to make people feel comfortable, while still getting the freshest and most honest nuggets of information from them.

This brief introduction to Clean Language showed that it is a potentially useful technique for improving both the quality of interview data and the efficiency of the interview process, all the while making respondents feel more at ease. A win-win-win scenario, if I’m not mistaken. I look forward to finding out more about this, and trying the techniques out in a real interview. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The next article in the series is here.