The entire presentation is extremely well done, and the discussion around relationships and our online versus offline social network truly illuminates important factors in social design.

Key quotes:

“We all have very different relationships with the people in our life and designing for them is very different.”

“The emergence of the social web is simply our online world catching up with our offline world.”

“A study of 3000 randomly chosen Americans showed that the average American has just four strong ties.”

Key slides:

I highly recommend all to view the entire presentation.

Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.

Necessarily, the content strategist must work to define not only which content will be published, but why we’re publishing it in the first place.

I particularly like the way he discusses the importance of setting contexts, using context maps, to better integrate content with the overall experience (see example map below).

Example context map from "Fusing Content Strategy with Design"

Such discussions all point to the importance of a fully integrated product experience process where content certainly plays a very big (and often overlooked) role.

The Nielsen Consumer 360 Conference has illuminated many of these changes over the past 3 days. Video excerpts for the talks are up on the conference website and YouTube. Here are a couple that I found particularly interesting:

• Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg talks about the end of email and her personal associations with brands
• Irene Rosenfeld, Chairman and CEO of Kraft Foods said that her company’s iPhone app iFood Assistant brought “20% of their expected year 1 revenue in 2 weeks.”

Here are a some other social media facts:

“Nearly six in ten online consumers (58%) say they start their day by checking email, whereas 20% head straight to search engine sites and 11% check in with Facebook

“Facebook-First Consumers [...] tend to become fans of brands for entertainment purposes, or to show support for brands, but not to obtain deals”

- ExactTarget study via Most Americans Wake Up to Email

There are countless social media infographics and statistics (which I encourage you to share in the comments) but the truth is plain: social media sites are changing how we engage with each other, the world, and organizations.

The Organic Growth Cycle

For all products, new customers are generated through a combination of paid and word-of-mouth marketing. In some cases, the majority of a product’s new customers come from organic, word-of-mouth marketing. While traditional marketing such as online advertising requires a constant input of resources, word-of-mouth marketing can essentially become a self-sustaining system, requiring little or no support—a sort of marketing Turing machine. Such a well-tuned organic growth cycle can help to grow a large customer base for any web product.

Traditional and organic marketing generating new prospective customers.

The key to creating a self-sustaining organic marketing and acquisition loop is enabling and encouraging word-of-mouth promotion buttressed by an outstanding experience that will compel customers to champion the product. Getting to the tipping point where each personal recommendation leads to more than one new customer and more than one new customer recommendation involves fine-tuning multiple facets of this growth cycle.

The organic growth cycle.

Fueling Viral Growth with the Organic Marketing Cycle

Creating the conditions for viral growth requires optimization at the customer adoption, engagement, and organic marketing stages.

Fueling the organic growth cycle until it becomes a looped system.

At the customer adoption and engagement stages, optimization means ensuring that prospective customers are effectively converted to active customers, and that the product excels to the point that those customers will take the time to champion it to people they know. Beyond that, to get to organic product proliferation, the customers’ affinity for the product must be captured via easy-to-find and easy-to-use channels that enable promotion to their friends and family. The following is the outline for the facets of fueling viral growth through organic marketing loop:

• Encourage Adoption.
  • Help prospective customer become familiar with the product.
  • Clearly communicate the value of the product to the customer. Give them compelling reasons to buy or try the product.
  • Make it very easy to buy or start using the product.
  • Meet customers’ needs with the product.
• Increase Engagement.
  • Meet and surpass customers needs and expectations.
  • Get user invested in using the product.
  • Keep evolving and improving the product.
• Enable and Encourage Proliferation.
  • Meet and surpass customers needs and expectations.
  • Create tools that enable and encourage organic, social marketing.

Encouraging Adoption

A product’s growth cycle starts with generating potential customers through traditional or word-of-mouth marketing. In either case, the end result is a pool of people that have some interest in buying or using the product. However, marketing does not generate active customers; it generates prospective customers that need to take steps to become active customers. The key is compelling those people to actually buy or use the product—adoption.

Adoption begins with a prospective customer becoming familiar with the product. For physical products this may extend to packaging. For most web products this includes such things as the homepage of a web site, other accessible areas of a web site, the product description page of an iPhone application, and so forth. The critical step is converting a person’s interest in a product into its usage or a purchase.

In order to optimize the progression from interest in a product to a purchase or usage, the migration process needs to be simplified and freed from usability errors. For example, if the web product can be purchased, the buying process has to be made simple and user friendly. Overall, optimizing adoption means:

• Clearly explaining the benefits of the product and showing the prospective customer what the product does and how.
• Creating a straightforward and fast buying or registration process.
• Ensuring low barriers to everyday usage.
• Getting rid of any usability problems.

By enacting the above points, more prospective customers will become active customers.

Increasing Engagement

Of course, just because someone buys or uses a product doesn’t mean that they will advocate it to their friends and colleagues. In fact, the opposite might be true; they might turn their friends away from the product if their experience with it is poor. It is, therefore, critical to ensure that customers will fall in love with what they are buying or using. This simply means developing an amazing product.

Customers will love the product if it efficiently and elegantly meets their needs. This means ensuring that the product is designed with the users’ needs in mind, that it is easy to use, and that it looks, sounds, and feels good. The fields of user-centered design, usability engineering, graphic design, and industrial design can enhance their respective elements of the overall product experience.

In addition to creating a great web product, one can create systems that can further engage the customer through the use of goals, games, and community. Game-like models create a compelling experience for the customer. For example, reputation points on a web site can encourage users to write reviews, and thereby, make the web site more interesting and valuable for others.

A community component can also engage customers by giving them the opportunity to form valuable social networks within the context of the product. Allowing users to connect with others within an iPhone application such as FourSquare, for example, makes them invested in the application because they create a valuable community that is not readily available elsewhere.

Some popular ways to create greater customer engagement include creating:

• A reputation system.
• Community involvement.
• Game-like systems such as earning points for user’s activity.

An engaging product experience leads to greater customer loyalty and impetus to advocate the product to their real-world social circles.

Enabling and Encouraging Proliferation

Once customers grow to love the product and have a strong desire to advocate it to those in their social circle, it is important to empower them to do so by developing mechanisms that make it easy to do so. Beyond true word-of-mouth advocacy, there are numerous other ways that a product’s fanatics can champion it, and consequently there are many systems that facilitate those varied forms of advocacy such as the ones below.

• Enabling customers to invite friends via email, messaging, or social applications to use or buy the product.
• Enabling customers to broadcast their affinity for the product on social applications and sites such as Twitter.
• Communicating the customers’ use of the product via social web sites and applications.
• Enabling customers to easily submit your product to bookmarking services and review web sites and applications.
• Incentivizing customers for their advocacy via distinction, special products, special treatment, or other rewards.

Creating and optimizing organic marketing systems such as those above will ensure that more of the customers’ affinity for the product will be transformed into action. Of course, all this work would be in vain if the customers do not love the product in the first place. That is why fueling the organic growth cycles necessitates optimizing adoption, engagement and proliferation.

Gizmodo’s Mark Wilson highlights the user experience improvements as:

Despite the redesign, you’ll find the experience is remarkably familiar. The basic fonts and menus are unchanged, with a few key differences. Most importantly, instead of seeing one page at a time (like being in Now Playing, then clicking to a new screen with a particular show), you see two pages at a time—a logical design update to the widescreen format that speeds up navigation enormously.

Check out the screen shots below:

TiVo Central

My Shows

Browse Collections

Single competitor shooting with infograhic (from nbc.com)

Two competitors shooting with picture in picture (from nbc.com)

On the actual broadcast, these small information units of hit/miss were stacked up beside appropriate flags to show multiple competitors at once. Although hard to follow the progression, it was a great way to show a lot of information in very little space and in real-time.

• New interface layout and interaction structure (see diagrams below)
• Consistent look and feel across all applications
• Contextual menus providing quicker access to common actions
• Customizable home screen

New Interaction Models in Symbian^4

Below are some diagrams from the Symbian^4 User Interface Concept Proposal (PDF).

Symbian^4 UI Model Diagram (via Symbian.org)

Symbian^4 UI Dialog Diagram (via symbian.org)

Nokia Symian^4 Concept Screens

The proposal to the Symbian developer community also includes concept screens:

Nokia Symbian^4 UI Concept (via engadget.com http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/03/nokia-offers-sneak-peak-at-improved-symbian-user-experience/)

Nokia Symbian^4 UI Concept (via Symbian.org)

Symbian^4 Homescreen (via Symbian.org)

Symbian^4 Photos Screen (via Symbian.org)

Symbian^4 Video Player (via Symbian.org)

Tell us what you think of the Symbian’s new design.

iPhone's Big Problem (created on pixton.com)

In a sentence or two, how would you describe Netvibes (the elevator pitch)?
I have [an elevator pitch] because last week I had to present at a thirty-second pitch, and then I entered the twitter pitch contest. Netvibes is the best online publishing platform that empowers everybody to take control of their digital life, should it be an individual or a business.

Who is your target audience? What kind of segments or personas do you think of?
We try to empower every expert. The same way that Lotus 1-2-3 (a company where I worked for five years and one that I admired a lot) empowered the numbers expert back in the nineties, Netvibes wants to empower every expert in the way that they can express themselves and spread expertise to other people. So, the expert can be you, and it can be just building a place for yourself, and that’s Netvibes.com. It can be you, and you want to share your expertise in a non-professional way with people around you, and that’s the web-wide open publishing that Netvibes offers, and it’s free. It can also be you as an expert, and you want to make a business out of [your expertise], and that’s the professional publishing web tool, and we charge for that. And it can be you as a company, and in fact for the past nine months now, we do install Netvibes within your enterprise, and Netvibes can power your intranet.

So, in a nutshell we want to empower everybody to build pages, using the widgets, and the drag and drop, and take advantage of all the widget creation and the 185,000 widgets that are available, to build a page that is the way they see their subject and the way they would like people to engage with them on that page.

So basically your target audience is anyone from an everyday individual to professionals, and all the way up to whole companies.
Exactly. Netvibes, compared to our competitors such as iGoogle, is the only product that is independent. It’s the only one where the search engine is not compulsory. And its the only one where you can publish your own, branded page. And we are also the only one that doesn’t come with [some browser] or any other machines.

At the other end of the spectrum, we are for the enterprise level as well. We are fighting with IBM and Oracle, and those guys don’t have all the widgets and features that we offer.

So how are you competing with IBM and Oracle?
The enterprise intranet market is a market that we evaluate at $2.5 billion dollars today. IBM is the gorilla, according to Gartner. And according to IBM, they say that they own a good $500 million of that market. The thing is they are basically a task force company for the system that they provide—they provide a task flow to control the system they provide.

So Netvibes is an alternative to that system. We provide personalized pages and save extra internal workflow. And that’s the only thing we do, and we specialize in that. The point is that we are open, as we should be, and we are open to external content that we provide with these 187,000 widgets. We are open with all the technologies that we use. There is no monetary, paid, or licensed technologies inside Netvibes. We only use standard and open-source technology. Being that our users have used Netvibes because of the external content, because you can do more than just managing ERP or CRM that your company has. We help all the employees not only to have content focused inside the company, but also to open it up to the [the public].

How do you see combining the two paradigms (personalized aggregator tool and publishing tool) into a coherent experience?
I think the combined paradigm is already happening as users can publish their own pages and create their personalized pages. The reader is the publisher.

How are the different segments that you spoke about distributed or related to your current customer base?
In terms of users, we have about half and half. We have about half  of our users that [create content on] Netvibes.com, and we have a half of our users that are using a page that was built by someone else.

What Netvibes does is help people take control of their digital lives. What this means is that you can create your page from scratch on Netvibes.com, but you can also take someone else’s page built with Netvibes and say on that page: “I like this. I don’t like that. I prefer it in blue.”  We think 2 or 3% of our users personalize their page, and 97% of people just read. It’s kind of the same 90-10 rule like you have on Twitter, or any blog or authoring tool. You want to have the power of these 2-3% of personalization. Rather than reading a regular page, we want our clients to build and publish their page, using our platform so that their audience will engage with their page a lot more.

What would be the value proposition for those people that create their own page?
Firstly, personalization is the ultimate form of engagement. Every company and advertiser wants its customers to engage. As a reader, the only thing you can do is read, print or save something someone else created. With Netvibes we have a fourth empowerment: to set priorities of what you see. It’s a democracy where people can say: “Yeah, I like it, but I like it this way.”

How has Netvibes evolved since its inception in 2005?
Netvibes has evolved a lot from its personalized content stage into a personalization publishing platform. It has been morphing to not only allow you publish what matters to you, but to also allow you to publish to others. That’s what we’ve done in the past 18 months. We continue to add into this element of Netvibes.

You can create custom widgets yourself as well. For instance, we released a simple HTML widget, which simulates publishing to a Blog. It allows you to add your own content to your personalized page. You can also use the wizard to create your own widget from your own or someone else’s RSS. Finally, you can use the UWA (universal widget API) which is open source to develop your own widgets. Today, we have the biggest gallery of widgets of which we have developed only 41.

We also allow you to have multiple pages. We were one of the first to introduce tabs into the UI to put some hierarchy in the widgets that are on your page. The additional pages allows users to add a third dimension to their content. People have so many dimensions, from professional life to personal life and the many roles within them, so why wouldn’t you add a page with all the content for those various matters. This third dimension was a necessary evolution from an end-user perspective, and it was extremely useful for us as a business. It is the only enterprise solution that supports this.

What classes of widgets are most popular?
It varies. 60% of the widgets used by our customers are RSS. This shows that there is much more than RSS in people’s digital lives. The most popular are Twitter, Facebook, the weather, and then it depends on the product and region. For instance, in Paris, an extremely popular widget is one that locates, in real-time, the bicycle rental stalls by neighborhood.

From the end-user perspective, are you concerned with the performance impacts of using more rich interaction-based widgets?
We employ cached pages, and performance optimizations to enhance the interaction. We also save time for the user by leveraging the fact that other readers are using the same widgets. Whenever we ping the server of one of the RSS feeds and receive new posts, we cache these so that when another user accesses a page with this feed, the new posts are immediately available.

We also take advantage of web RSS clouds that have a similar impact from the publisher standpoint. We are currently working on this completely revolutionary infrastructure to remove the burden of going through peer servers. Every month we serve 4 billion diferent RSS feeds, and we are constantly working on getting and updating these widgets onto our servers so that things are refreshed quickly and in real-time, as you see on Twitter.

You offer a vast array of different kind of widgets. Do you have any concerns that there are too many types and this might be a double-edged sword (barrier to action)?
Firstly, we do offer a program for those publishers that want to push their widgets to our users, and this is a revenue generation model for us. Secondly, in early July we introduced a recommendation system for widgets. Every week, we re-compute all the widgets that you have on your  page and we build for every account a spectrum of interests across the nine categories of widgets. We match your spectrum with people the have the same interests to propose eight new widgets per week that you may not have discovered.

Where do you see Netvibes going in the near future (1-2 years) and the longer future (3-5 years)?
The way we see the future is just as readers can print pages, the user should be able to personalize pages. That has two consequences. One is that the guiding star for our future is the personalization of the internet. We believe that every page on the internet should be personalizable. It shouldn’t be 100% of every page necessarily, but at least a fraction. The second is if you start to have a personalized internet, it means that you as the user have to learn it yourself and own your digital experience all around.

As a company, our main focus is in three areas:

1. Distribution of widgets (We want to be the widget resource center.)
2. Software solution for publishing pages
3. Enterprise intranet solution

How do you migrate users that are mainly creating their private, personal pages into publishers?
We send a newsletter to explain how to start publishing and use all Netvibes’ tools. We hope to inspire people to share their pages. Other publishers create and share the content, and by consuming this content, they are exposed to the benefits of sharing your content.

Let’s shift focus from strategy to the user experience design process at Netvibes. Do you have a distinct user experience design/usability department?
We have one head of the user experience, and two designers.

How does the user experience design team work with your product marketing and engineering teams?
It’s very simple. We have five directors, and they colloborate on everything from A to Z. They have to all agree. These five directors include the lead designer, user experience logic head, chief architect, strategy director and the QA and support director.

So, is the executive level involved in reviewing the product designs and providing input?
Yes. Since we spend three weeks per month in the US and one week in Paris, where the product is developed, we are very disciplined about reviews. We spend three half-days every month reviewing:

1. The situation of the current project and where we are
2. What is going to be released in the next two months
3. Brainstorming where to put our resources: where de we want Netvibes to be?

We are also open and have a lot of shared documents across the company to keep us informed.

And is this typically how you come up with new features, in these half-day brainstorming sessions?
Yes. We want people at all levels to know where we are and be part of the product development. You have to have the two components involved in everything you do to be successful: business and design.

How do you gather user needs and issues?
We do some user testing. We also employ a wishlist feature so that users can say what they are looking for. We want the community to be fully involved in everything—the widgets, language (we have 95 languages), and the design (themes).

How do you measure the success of new features at Netvibes?
That’s a very tricky question. It depends on the goal that we set ourselves, and its not always about traffic. The popularity does give a good sense, but we also know that somethings won’t be immediately popular. For instance, the multiple pages. We knew it would take time to be understood. It was more aimed at the very end-users and the business users; so the feedback from these groups indicated the success.

The interview took place this past September. Many thanks to Mr. Mini for sharing his thoughts and experiences with the product strategy and design community.

For Boston, there are a series of events at South Station, titled “Connecting the Dots”
In San Francisco, check out: Design Matters: An Open House to Celebrate World Usability Day

And of course, please do comment/share any events you have or plan on attending this year!