by Kate O'Neill
Praise for
Pixels and Place
The age-old push and pull between form and function in design conversations usually misses a key question: function for whom? Now as the intermingling of online and physical worlds becomes a constant in modern life, it’s time to address our ability to answer that question. The constant data trail streaming from individual experience can power ever-greater meaning, utility, and profit in daily life— if we can just drop the tech buzzwords and realize that through all of it, people just want to do things, feel something, connect, and remember. This is a topic that needs exploring right now and I can’t think of a better explorer than Kate O’Neill.
— Gavin Ivester, founding partner at FLO | Thinkery; former product, design, brand, and innovation leader at Gibson Guitar, Nike, and Apple
We all straddle our "real" and "online" lives with various degrees of success. The rules are being made up as we go along, and it is very difficult to remain completely off the grid and still participate in modern life. Kate O'Neill explores what we are gaining and losing in this transition, and what it means to be human in the digital age.
— Tim Ash, CEO of SiteTuners, Author of Landing Page Optimization, and Founder of Conversion Conference
"Pixels and Places" addresses the emerging importance of elements that create human experiences worthy of remembering. To build empathy with users, a design-centric organization empowers employees to observe behavior and draw conclusions about what people want and need. Those conclusions are tremendously hard to express in quantitative language. Instead, organizations that “get” design use emotional language (words that concern desires, aspirations, engagement, and experience) to describe products and users. "Pixels and Places" lays out the roadmap for thinking to accomplish that aim. Well done and needed by any organization that desires to succeed in the Digital Age.
— Jay Deragon, Top 50 over 50 Global Marketing Thought Leaders
Kate O’Neill’s Pixels and Place is a must read for those of us fascinated by the tidal shift taking place around us in the way we envision the world and our experiences within it.
— Mitch Lowe, startup advisor, CEO of MoviePass, former president of RedBox, and a founding executive of Netflix
PIXELS
AND
PLACE
Connecting Human Experience
Across Physical and Digital Spaces
by
Kate O’Neill
Also by Kate O’Neill
Lessons from Los Gatos: How Working at a Startup Called Netflix Made Me a Better Entrepreneur (and Mentor)
Surviving Death: What Loss Taught Me About Love, Joy, and Meaning
Copyright © 2016 by Kate O’Neill
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
Published in the United States of America
Acknowledgements
Thank you to everyone who has helped me research, has engaged in endless discussions about meaning and place, and put up with my obsessing over the topics. Big thanks to Sumit Shringi for designing such a wonderful cover. Huge thanks to my editor, Jocelyn Bailey, for her keen eye, the insights she contributed, and her positivity. And an enormous thank you to Robbie Quinn, my photographer and now my husband, whose work I use on the back cover and “About the Author” page, who makes every place more meaningful for me.
Dedication
To my mother, Georgia, who was my earliest introduction to both of the titular ideas in this book:
a curiosity about computers, and, through her tireless work within our Chicago-area hometown, the value of community and what a place can really mean.
A note on my use of the generic gender-neutral singular pronoun “they”
Throughout this book, as I describe scenarios involving unspecified actors, instead of the arbitrary use of a single gendered pronoun in generic use, whether “he” or “she,” instead of the clunky “he/she” or wordy “he or she,” and instead of painstakingly alternating between the uses of gendered pronouns, I have adopted the use of the singular “they.” It was the American Dialect Society’s 2015 word of the year, and it reflects a trend toward more inclusive language. Just like the convergence of pixels and place, you’ll get used to it.
Chapter One - A Call to Action
Pixels and Place . . . and People
The Opportunity
Who Is This Written For?
Chapter Two - Defining the Undefinable: Place, Experience, and How We Create Meaning
Meaning, and Why It Matters Here
How We Make Meaning
The Intentional Design of Human Experience
Experience and Meaning
Senses in Place; Sense and Technology
Cues, Triggers, and Metaphors: Sensory Experience Design
The Selfish Perk of Meaningfulness
Measuring Experiences Meaningfully
Chapter Three - Convergence and Integration
Balance Versus Integration
Responsive Design and Integrated Human Experience Design
Data Determines Success; You Determine the Data Model
Chapter Four - The Humanity in the Data
The Data Layers that Connect the Physical and the Digital
The Human Component of the Internet of Things
The Data Trail: Everything Has Data History
Our Digital Selves
People, Community, and Connection to Place
Selfies and Metadata Dimensionality
Chapter Five - The Meaning of Place
What is “Place”? What Does Any Place Mean?
Placemaking and the Idea of Intentional Place
What Is Digital Placemaking? (Or Human Experience Design?)
Starbucks, “Third Place,” and the Power of Strategic Framing
Stories and Place
How Do Online “Places” and “Spaces” Create Meaning?
People in Place: Neighborhoods and Community
Chapter Six - The Ethics of Connected Experiences
Fair Isn't Always Fair
The Ethical Burden of Too Much Data
Adding Value Instead of Over-Optimizing
Privacy and Data in Place
The Convenience—Privacy—Access Relationship
Chapter Seven - Metaphors: Digital Experience Through the Lens of Place
Metaphors: Experiencing One Thing in Terms of Another
The Metaphors of How We Experience Digital as Place
Metaphors and Metadata
The Evolution of Place Metaphors Online
Traffic, Cost, and the Nuance of Metaphor
Movement Versus Stillness
Metaphors of Digital Experience as Printed Matter
Metaphors of Digital Experience as Architecture or a Building
Rethinking the Metaphors
The Language of Relative Place and Movement
Connected Ideas and the Metaphor of Curation
When Online Goes Offline
Maps: Mapping Physical Place Versus Maps of Experience: Empathy Maps, Journey Maps
Chapter Eight - Reality, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality
Experiencing Place with Augmentation
Augmented Reality Games
Augmented Reality Shopping Experiences
Virtual Reality and Stories of Place
360-Degree Video
Camera Drones: “Augmented” Perspective
Chapter Nine - Algorithms and AI
Filter Bubble
Humanlike Nuances
The G
uided Experience Economy: Artificial Experience and Conversational Commerce
Chapter Ten - Considerations for Meaningful Human Experience Design
Intentionality, or Purpose
Dimensionality
Value and Emotional Load
Metaphors and Cognitive Associations
Alignment and Effectiveness
Adaptation and Iteration
Chapter Eleven - Patterns of Use / Putting It Into Practice
Ownership Versus Access and Privately-Owned Public Spaces
Opportunities for New Cues and Sensory Experiences
Just-in-Time Convergence of Physical and Digital
Smart Homes and Ambient Tech
The Human-Centric Data Model: A Look at Airbnb’s “Don’t Go There; Live There” Campaign
Digital Interactions with Place: The Starbucks App
Meaningful Strategies for Integrated Experiences Across Industries
Beacons, Micro-Location, and Proximity-Based Targeting
The Check-In, Registration, Onboarding Pattern
Museums and Interpretation: Holding Space for an Idea
Healthcare: Healing and Care as Experience
Restaurants and Food Service: Sustenance and Nourishment as Experiences
Hospitality: Making Guests Feel at Home, Only Better
Everything Everywhere
Retail: Transcending the Transactional and Creating Value Beyond the Purchase
Going Where the Customers Are: Food Trucks, Fashion Trucks
Payment Disruption and the Virtualization of Value
Pop-Up Retail and Dining Concepts
Navigation and Wayfinding, Outdoors and Indoors
Patterns: Cities, Urban Design, Urban Planning
Cities and The Smart City Imperative
Open Data Initiatives
Balance and Flow
Chapter Twelve - Epilogue: Where Do We Go From Here?
About the Author
“When you tug at a single thing in the universe, you find it's attached to everything else.”
— John Muir
“All models are false but some are useful.”
— George E. P. Box
“Careful. We don't want to learn from this.”
— Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
CHAPTER ONE
A Call to Action
I intend this book as a treatise, a manifesto of sorts, a call to action for anyone who designs experiences—in retail, healthcare, cities, in marketing of all kinds, and so on.
It is framed in the examination of pixels and place—of the convergence of our physical and digital surroundings, experiences, and even identities—because our future is beckoning us forward with little distinction between these layers of our reality, and we need to understand fully what it means to be human within that context. But the underlying message goes further: We need to understand context when we design experiences, because so many experiences—so many web forms, so many stores, so many services—are presented as if they exist in neatly contained isolation, where every person encountering them is in an identical place and mindset, on an identical screen, when the opposite of that is increasingly true.
This is not just about design for mobile or design for differing screen sizes, although that discussion belongs within the scope of our consideration; this is about recognizing that your brand or offering may be consumed on a laptop today, a phone tomorrow, then on a watch, then by voice command, and perhaps eventually as a passive service prompted by sensory cues needing only the bare minimum of interactions with the human consuming it. This is not a distant future vision; these interfaces and non-interfaces exist today, and their adoption by brands runs the gamut from bleeding-edge to blissfully ignorant. The bleeding-edge are risking and spending a great deal to understand the emerging possibilities, but the blissfully ignorant are taking risks, too: They risk the possibility of becoming out of step with widespread cultural understanding of how digital experiences mesh with our physical surroundings, and eventually, if the brands continue to ignore the trends, they risk irrelevance.
For years I’ve been quoting the Peter Drucker line, “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits [them] and sells itself.”1 Attendees of my workshops and speeches could bet that they’ll hear this quote at some point during my presentations. But Drucker was alive and writing at a time when “knowing the customer” meant using good judgment, conducting surveys, and employing research techniques that generally got as specific as postal codes. Drucker wasn’t speaking of using the finely detailed mesh of people’s search histories, social statuses, social graphs, location tracking, and possibly their email archives as input to research. I can’t speak for what he would have made of it, but I hope he might have had something sensible to say that reminded organizations to design systems with intention that could maximize the purpose of the business. I assume he’d still be asking the same big questions he always asked: What is your mission? Who is your customer? What does your customer value? What are your results? What is your plan?2
It’s not clear what Drucker might have said about big data, connected devices, the Internet of Things, and consumer privacy, but what is clear is that we’re in an age when these considerations are staring business leaders right in the face. What leaders decide to do with all of it will set a precedent for business in coming years. The generations that follow ours will live with the consequences of whether we built disciplined processes for ourselves and created compelling and meaningful experiences for the humans we interact with, or gave in to the allure of ever-more data and ever-greater invasions of privacy.
The best way for marketing to “know the customer” now is to truly function as a knowledge center, iterating through efforts to connect with customers, optimizing for insight, seeking to create more meaningful relationships with customers by getting clearer and clearer about what different people value for different reasons.
We need a framework for meaningful experience creation in a world where our personal data is collected invisibly as we pass through our physical surroundings. We need a model for marketing that can be effective without being creepy, to help companies succeed by being relevant and helpful. And we need a mindset to make responsible decisions with each other’s data because we recognize the humanity it represents, and in doing so, make our possible future together a little bit brighter.
Pixels and Place . . . and People
How vividly do you remember the home you grew up in?
For most of us, our earliest sense of place was a home. We have sense memories of the sights and sounds, the smells of a kitchen, the feel of a carpet, and the stories and experiences assigned to that place. Those formative experiences may shape our understanding of the idea of “home” for the rest of our lives.
Home is a good place to start our journey, too, because it’s a qualitative idea that overlays a physical place, rooted in the experience of that place, and it’s an idea with which we all have at least one association. There are others: “Away.” “In transit.” “Work.” Each term describes a concept that may equate to a particular place or movement through place, or it may be more of a loose idea associated with our experiences. For many of us, “school” encompasses both the building or campus where we were educated, as well as the overarching experience of our time at that institution and our relationships there.
In the last few decades, another place has risen to great importance in our everyday lives: “online.” The word online describes a digital place, of sorts, or a series of places, but it is also rooted in the experience of those places. More and more of our time and attention is spent online, and our relationships are increasingly transacted in that realm.
From the outset of the internet, the metaphors we used to describe online space were borrowed from the physical world: pages, traffic, entries and exits, and so on. Even “home” page. But the distinction between “online” and “offlin
e,” between “digital” and “physical,” once seemingly unambiguous, has begun to blur thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and personal location data, ad and experience targeting, connected devices, wearable technology, the Internet of Things, and additive capabilities like 3-D printing. The meaningful design of experiences in physical space now regularly overlaps with the meaningful design of experiences in digital space.
But most experiences are not yet being designed with that awareness. And these experiences increasingly feel stiff and archaic—even anachronistic—compared to those that are.
Retail brands, cities, service companies, educational institutions, healthcare facilities, museums, and more have tremendous opportunities at this moment. Most aren’t doing anything smart about this convergence of experience. The ones who do truly stand out, and they move us toward an understanding of what our future lives may look like as these blended experiences of pixels and place become more common. Indeed, the biggest opportunities for innovation, for profit, and for moving culture forward are going to emerge from integrating the layers intentionally, with an awareness of the metaphors we use to understand our experiences, a discipline about the data we collect, and a respect for the humanity that ties it all together.
The biggest value and gains from the convergence of our digital lives and our physical surroundings will come from designing intentionally for a meaningful human experience.
Because human experience is the connective layer between the two realms—as our trackable interactions and transactions create the data stream that describes either space—the human experience needs to be designed with respect and intention.
