A snippet from my life

One day, as I was sitting at a company meeting, they handed us these little remote controls with buttons labeled one through 9 (it could of been A through I, but that’s besides the point). After the speaker finished his presentation, he quizzed the audience to see if the main points of his presentation were absorbed. “Neat”, I thought. That was pretty much it for my thinking that day, honestly. But the story gets better, swear.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could skip pre-rolls?

A few minutes later, after I got my Habs fill, I left the TSN site. At that moment,  a friend walked by. He, too, was a Habs fan and I wanted to show him the video I just viewed. I called him over and I returned to TSN.ca and was AGAIN presented with the pre-roll. I was instantly annoyed. I thought to myself, “Hello? I just saw this – why are you showing this to me again. Yes, I KNOW. Samsung. I got it. Thank you…. 10 seconds to go? *insert swear words here*”.

Enter: lightbulb, stage right.

Why pre-roll?

I thought (I do a lot of thinking as you can probably tell), what are the points of these pre-roll ads? Obviously:

• To expose me to a brand…
• To call me to action…
• To place a product at the top of my mind…
• Ensure I got the message, etc.

All marketers want to do is have users recognize the brand they are pushing and hopefully a message as well – but let’s not get carried away here. Wouldn’t it be great if marketers could actually tell that the user either recognized the brand  advertised or remembered the commercial? Wouldn’t it be great for users if they could skip the pre-roll?

A possible solution: The quiz-skip (I’m working on a better name…)

Here’s my (half-baked) idea. While the pre-roll is playing, have an overlay appear asking the user a simple question, “What brand is being advertised in this video?” (or something along those lines). If the user remembers and types the correct answer in, he benefits from skipping the video and the advertiser benefits from having a meaningful metric that a user acknowledged their brand. If the wrong answer is entered, a hint could be displayed, or different video, etc. Apart from getting information about brand recognition, other meaningful metrics could be collected as well:

• Misspellings – this would tell the marketer that perhaps work must be done in emphasizing a product name.
• Incorrect answers – this could indicate to the marketer that the ad is too similar to a competitor’s

The possibilities, while not endless, are plentiful.

What are your thoughts on pre-rolls? Is there any benefit to the quiz-skip?

But what is one to do?

This happened to me a couple years ago. I was going through my web logs and noticed some disproportionally high activity from one particular domain. When I visited it, to my shock, I saw my entire site, photos and all, copied by someone in the US. Not only did he steal my look and feel, CSS and Javascript, the perpetrator had the gall to hotlink to my images. You can see a side-by-side comparison of the two sites here [250K]. See if you can which one is the copy. Hint: I’m not a Mystic Warrior of Rage.

It wasn’t the first time this has happened, but it was the first time I saw my entire site lifted. Granted my site was in a web designer inspiration book, but come on!

Chased by thieves? Outpace them.

So, once again I did what every rational guy in my situation would do, I broke his site [220K] (scroll down for the full effect). Unfortunately, the screenshot doesn’t capture the blinking effect I placed on the image, but you get the point.

Did doing this make me feel better? Of course it did. Was it the right thing to do? I’m not certain. Am I proud of my pettiness and actions? Not particularly, but what’s done is done.

Perhaps I could of gotten the law involved. I could of Google bombed him. I could of just been flattered that he copied my work. But in the end, there’s the right thing to do, and there’s the practical thing to do. Was hiring a lawyer worth it in this case? Not really, the guy was obviously small potatoes, and wasn’t getting much business anyways – as exhibited by his lack-lustre portfolio [250K]. Was I losing revenue because of his site? No, as he was in another country altogether. Was he going to gain business from copying my site? Perhaps he could attract some interest, but he definitely lacked the talent to back it up. So I left it at that. I left his blinking, broken site as is, and moved on.

How to avoid being ripped-off

In short, you can’t. You can set up all sorts of mechanisms to protect your work. But unless you’re a large company, with an army of copyright lawyers, there’s not a whole lot you can do to avoid being ripped-off. But if you’re a small enough operation, and agile enough, there is one thing you can do:

One-up yourself regularly

Redesign your site regularly. New CSS and Javascript techniques are created every day, why not use your redesigns as platforms to display and hone your pixel-prowess? Use your redesigns to create an awareness of your talent and your ability to regularly renew yourself. By doing so, not only will you will benefit by staying at the forefront of web design, you help keep yourself relevant. Just remember this:

Talent will outpace the hacks every time.

Have you ever been ripped off? What did do about it?

Special thanks to those who helped me think about this post: Cameron Campbell, Nicolas Roberge, Kirsten Cameron, Anna Gunaratnam, Ara Pehlivanian and Debbie Rouleau

We all love it when brands make us feel special, but how forgiving are we when they get it wrong?

Large strides have been already made in terms of personalization through customized content. Visit Amazon.com for example (my site is on page 24 of that book by the way). If you’ve been there before and sign in, Amazon welcomes you by name, and suggests items that it thinks you’d be interested in. In the case of a hotel, go to a hotel enough times and they’ll remember little details like the fact you enjoy an extra pillow, or what your favorite daily is and provide both of them for you before you enter your room. However, let’s look at this in a different way.

Are the potential gains of creating a positive, customized user-experience worth the risk of getting it wrong from time to time?

It has been said that no two people are alike, but if we generalize enough, we can segment audiences and markets. That’s what all of marketing intelligence is about after all. Web analysts extract behaviours and wants (and hopefully demands) from the volumes of visitor data and all the other internal records at their disposal to serve as the basis of customization systems whose purposes are to make customers feel welcomed and valued. But despite everyone’s best efforts, mistakes do happen.

Consider this, Walmart, a few years ago, “recommended a film about Martin Luther King Jr. to potential buyers of a “Planet of the Apes” DVD” (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10730202/). Damage control must of been in high gear that day and probably left a permanent bad taste in a few customers’ mouths. Whether or not Walmart actually lost customers over this incident is unclear. However one thing is for sure, there was bad press and it wouldn’t be far fetched to assume that even bigger hiccups than this could occur in the future.

Are there times when adapting content for users is dangerous?

Let’s put PR and hurt feelings aside for a moment. There are some cases where identifying personality-types and leveraging this knowledge could be potentially dangerous. For example, take users that can be categorized as substance-abusers or compulsive gamblers. Feeding into their tendencies, though profitable, could be detrimental to their well-beings. In fact, if adaptive systems advance even further, it might be necessary to set guidelines on how they are used to protect vulnerable consumers. And what if governments were to impose their influence on these adaptive systems? Could this be a tool for online propaganda or censorship? Could web logs incriminate users or make them political targets? To deal with these scenarios, it may be necessary for these systems to develop morals.

Customized user-experience: It’s the new black.

Despite any moral implications, customized user-experiences are here to stay, and in fact, they will become more prevalent in the years to come. Consider some other adaptive technologies in the pipeline:

• In 2003, IBM developed a way to customize the grocery shopping experience by helping shoppers know of specials in certain isles, etc via a small terminal attached to shopping carts. It’s only a matter of time until they work out all the angles on this one and introduce it to more grocery chains.
• MIT is working on websites that adapt. These adapting sites change their content and layout for unknown users in order to better suit their preferences. It is predicted that  this technology, when implemented on a site, could increase sales up to 20%. MIT plans to launch their first full version of this technology in the near future in Japan.

If you can’t fight ‘em, join ‘em.

It’s not about whether this will happen, it’s about when it will happen. The web industry has remain vigilant, constantly determine the new metrics, and have the strength of character to remain ethical despite the temptation of possible easy gains. Discussions at the early stage will help steer new technologies and prepare us for the future.

What do you think of customized user-experience? Should we embrace it, or discourage it?