by Kate O'Neill
But a bigger issue is that most people don’t even fully realize yet what’s already happening. In that same 2015 survey, 70 percent of consumers didn’t know what in-store beacons were.59 We don’t fully know how people are going to respond as they become aware of beacons and related technology and the privacy considerations that go along with all of them.
However, when the technology is implemented with a healthy dose of respect for the customer’s sensibilities and relevant messages are offered, it can go beyond the perception of being a greedy ploy to manipulate customers into spending more money. It can indeed be a huge boon to customers, too, in helping them find the product they’re really looking for or that solves a particular problem they might be having.
Large retailers and brands like Macy’s, McDonald’s, Target, Starbucks, Lord & Taylor, American Eagle Outfitters, Old Navy, Giant Eagle, Universal Music, Apple Stores, and Rite Aid have all implemented beacon technology in various ways. I’ll explore a few case studies in the rest of this chapter.
The Check-In, Registration, Onboarding Pattern
Checking in at a desk or some sort of gate authority is a process that happens in healthcare, hospitality, food service, travel, and more. Even retail, museums, universities, and cities have services and functions that relate to this idea.
Take a hotel, for example. When a guest enters the lobby of the hotel, their location can be detected and they might receive a push notification on the hotel’s app showing reservation information. All they have to do is confirm the information shown—perhaps simply by swiping the screen—and they are checked in. No waiting in line necessary, no searching for the reservation number.60 For now, that typically has to happen through a proprietary app or through a platform app like Passbook. But if the guest has the option, this is an especially nice perk in the context of a hotel, since anyone who’s been through an airport lately knows there’s a pretty good chance the guest has had a long and stressful day of travel.
Although I’m not one to advocate the reduction of human jobs through technological means, it is possible that companies could reallocate some of the staff resources for this function while guests and patients can reduce their wait time. This kind of redistribution of effort opens up the question: what value can human-to-human interaction have that interacting with a screen doesn’t offer? What nuance can a person add if they’re there to answer questions in person?
Onboarding
When you think about what we can learn from what user experience designers have learned about “onboarding” in digital products and apps, it’s interesting to bring that full circle to the term as it relates to getting “on board” a train or a plane. (Yet another metaphor of the physical world in the digital world.)
A good onboarding process in an app or online product not only authenticates the user into the system, but also it orients them to the flow they’ll need to take to be successful.
Museums and Interpretation: Holding Space for an Idea
Museums and monuments exist to hold space for an idea. And it stands to reason that in order to convey that idea most effectively, they want to make experiences as immersive as possible for the visitor. How can connected experiences help museums live up to the ideal?
Interpretation and “Tilden’s Principles”
In addition to museums, there are integrated experience applications for educational, natural, and recreational resources. With these resources, especially around natural landmarks, comes the field of heritage interpretation. This discipline sometimes incorporates explanatory text, maps, or photographs.
One of the influential voices in the interpretation of natural resources was Freeman Tilden. Tilden established, as one of his six principles of interpretation61, that “The chief aim of Interpretation is not instruction, but provocation.”
Among his other famous quotes:
“Heritage interpretation is an educational activity which aims to reveal meanings and relationships through the use of original objects, by firsthand experience,and by illustrative media, rather than simply to communicate factual information.”
These thoughts lead directly into an appreciation of the meaning of place as key to its appropriate protection, which is perhaps an important idea for cities wrestling with balancing historic preservation with innovation and progress.
In his 1957 book, Interpreting Our Heritage, Freeman Tilden defined six principles of interpretation. Here are those principles, interspersed with my own comments:
1. Any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile.
Note: relevance.
2. Information, as such, is not Interpretation. Interpretation is revelation based upon information. But they are entirely different things. However all interpretation includes information.
Note: relevance.
3. Interpretation is an art, which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical or architectural. Any art is in some degree teachable.
Integration.
4. The chief aim of Interpretation is not instruction, but provocation.
Call to action.
5. Interpretation should aim to present a whole rather than a part, and must address itself to the whole man rather than any phase.
Holistic.
6. Interpretation addressed to children (say up to the age of twelve) should not be a dilution of the presentation to adults, but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best it will require a separate program.
Again, relevance. And thus we come to the idea of meaning in interpretation.
It is perhaps easy to see how technology that has an awareness of the context of a visitor’s movement through place could serve unprecedented functions of mediation and interpretation. Technology could help hold space for the idea as a visitor progresses through an experience by filling out the sensory dimensions of the experience, by enriching the narrative, and by contextualizing time or space or other relationships between elements.
This ties back to the curation discussion because curation, in a sense, is a way of tying threads together between distinct pieces of art or work or culture. Curation and heritage interpretation are different ways of thinking about what is basically the same process. In either case, there are aspects of the content being explored that can always be enriched through technology.
In a physical exhibit, the experience is bound to be linear in at least one way, since a human has to progress from point to point to consume it. So one area for adding richness through technology is through defining a robust metadata model and ensuring that it is complete enough to enhance the content. Providing dimensional attributes about the elements in a collection or exhibit can make for alternate ways of exploring the content and experiencing it.
Technology is poised to make the museum experience even more relevant than it has ever been through personalization, proximity-based experiences, and more.
Beacons can deliver content and experiences based on proximity, which has incredible applications for museums. The experiences can also include interactivity, such as commenting and sharing an exhibit, or games that encourage engagement with the idea of the exhibit or with other visitors, whether they are currently at the museum or have been there previously.
They can monitor “dwell” times—the amount of time visitors spend in front of exhibits—and recommend similar artifacts and products in the museum shop. Curators can use this information to optimize layout. Certainly the ability to track visitor movement allows for great insights about what exhibits are well-received and which are not getting the exposure or foot traffic.
At the Philips Museum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, visitors are encouraged to play a game with up to three other players called “Mission Eureka” on an iPad. The game offers the players challenges to solve as they explore, and it reinforces the learning behind the ideas presented in the
museum exhibits.
The first museum to use beacons, the National Slate Museum, has at least twenty-five beacons set up throughout the museum that help visitors explore the exhibits and view explanations, just-in-time demonstrations, and more.
In 2014, in observance of the United Nations International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action, the New Museum in New York City hosted an exhibit that used beacons to simulate a minefield. Created by digital agency Critical Mass along with the United Nations Mine Action Service, the experience asked visitors to download an app called “Sweeper” and wear headphones. The app sensed the visitor’s proximity to any of the beacons throughout the exhibit, and triggered a loud audible “detonation” in the visitor’s headphones when they approached a virtual land mine. The audio was followed by a recorded testimony of a person’s actual experience with land mines. The overall aim was to raise awareness, and visitors were invited to donate five dollars to help ensure that no one else would ever have to go through in real life what they just experienced in digital space.
Healthcare: Healing and Care as Experience
Healthcare is fundamentally about healing and care. These words are the basis of a lot of the stock language of healthcare, but most of us have experienced situations where the practices don’t bear out that ideal in practice.
How can connected experiences help healthcare facilities and services live up to the ideal?
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For many people as they age, there’s a fierce desire to continue to live as independently as possible, even as certain risks increase—such as falls and the medical complications that can result from them. In fact, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) reports unintentional injury as the leading cause of death in people sixty-five and older, and falls as the leading cause of injury62. Of course these risks and outcomes affect the aging person’s loved ones, too, so if you have a parent or grandparent who lives independently, it could be a great comfort to you to know that they’re safe.
This is why so many companies, from huge enterprises to startups, are developing products and services to monitor senior wellness with connected devices and data services that can alert a caregiver if medication isn’t taken, if the senior isn’t moving for a while, or even if a routine appliance, like a coffee maker, isn’t in use by a certain usual time63.
Integrated innovations in healthcare aren’t all about the elderly, either. People of all ages have embraced the “quantified self” trend since ubiquitous smartphones track their calories, physical activity, sleep quality, and more. Thanks to wearable wristbands and the like, people can monitor an even wider array of biometric and environmental information.
And that’s not even taking into account the clinical settings, where there is an enormous variety of connected devices, “smart” equipment, location technology, and access to increasingly rich patient data. Given all this, healthcare is poised to be an industry that can make excellent use of the convergence of physical and digital experiences.
Restaurants and Food Service: Sustenance and Nourishment as Experiences
At its core, restaurants and food service are about sustenance and nourishment. This is low Maslow’s hierarchy stuff, so it’s fundamental; but meaning is high Maslow’s, so there can sometimes feel like a disconnect between these ideals.
How can connected experiences help restaurants and food service businesses live up to the ideal?
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The food industry is experiencing a great deal of change due to technology and data. Some pundits refer to the phenomenon of the “Internet of Food,” referring to the various ways the supply chain is being augmented with technology and data. There’s also the “Internet of the Sea,” which refers to commercial fishing, and many other subspecialties of food and technology.
But from an integrated experience perspective, the biggest area of focus is dining.
Sometime in 2015, consumer spending at restaurants overtook grocery stores, and has continued to follow that trend ever since64.
Source: qz.com / Atlas
This means several things. Restaurants and food service businesses may not be the first industry you’d think of for using apps, beacons, and the Internet of Things, but depending on the model, there are quite a few opportunities to address customer frustrations and improve operations. Online reservations are already widespread thanks to platforms like OpenTable, and now the food service industry is addressing some of the other pain points.
If you measure the consumption of food not by money but by calories, what Americans consume away from home has increased from 18 percent away from home in 1978 to 32 percent in 2008. In general, food consumed away from home is higher in salt, saturated fat, and sodium, while it is lower in dietary fiber. It’s no surprise, then, that some studies cite the increase in American dining out as a potential contributor to the rise in US obesity.
There’s also a tremendous opportunity to increase awareness of healthy options on menus through interactive ordering and allowing customers to customize their orders from the app. If the customer can visualize how skipping a side of sour cream might save them 100 calories and 12 grams of fat, they might just pass. And that could ultimately cut down on food waste at restaurants, too.
Pre-Visit Ordering or Order from Table
One area where customer frustration and restaurant inefficiency overlap is in the time it takes a server to take the table’s order. Depending on the model, this step might be about placing the order and paying for it online to be served table-side, or it might include ordering food at the table once the customer arrives at the restaurant or, in some cases, if a beacon detects the customer’s reservation. Once the customer is seated, the beacon can trigger the app to display a menu, allowing the customer to review the details of the dishes, including nutrition, price, and customer reviews. Restaurants can offer this service inside of their own apps, or use third-party apps like Allset to address the time people spend waiting around at restaurants, using online ordering to expedite the process of getting food to patrons once they’ve been seated.
So far the third-party apps are charging a flat fee or a percentage on the order that is passed on to customers, although other models could potentially work. In the meantime, pre-visit ordering addresses a customer frustration while also accelerating table turnover within restaurants, which could mean potentially greater profits.
Check-In
Given the same model of using a beacon to trigger a push notification in an app, a restaurant could push a welcome message to a customer showing their loyalty points.
In some cases, the customer can then even choose where to sit. Forget tipping the maître d’ for the best seats in the house.
Promotions, Rewards, and Loyalty
Of course, these technologies will certainly be used to promote specials and will offer discounts to entice customers to visit more frequently or spend more money. They can also integrate with social media and reward customers for social shares of food pictures, location check-ins, and campaign promotions. These social rewards can even be used for discounts or specials, whether through the restaurant’s own branded platform or through a third-party like Yelp, Foursquare, or others. With customers whose order histories and preferences are known, the restaurant can offer tailored promotions around their favorite dishes, as well as the option to use reward points toward certain dishes.
Wait Time
Interactive ordering has one more potential advantage: letting hungry diners know when they can expect their food to be served. Systems that integrate back-of-house operations into relevant displays on the user interface could reduce customer anxiety and increase overall satisfaction in the dining experience.
In addition, the app could help the customer multitasking during their wait by providing additional content. Depending on the style and brand characteristics of the restaurant, that could take the form of, say, trivia about the restaurant’s city, sports news and scores in a sports bar, or pe
rhaps in a family-oriented establishment, quizzes and games families could play together while they wait.
Payment
The final piece of the puzzle is key: payment. The restaurant could digitally send the bill for the food to the patron’s phone or device, from which the customer could settle up and then easily leave the restaurant without having to wait for the server, also freeing the server up to tend to other tables.
Hospitality: Making Guests Feel at Home, Only Better
Hotels and other hospitality businesses are fundamentally about creating a sense of home away from home. We’ve already explored some of the notions of home. So how can connected experiences help hotels and other hospitality businesses live up to the ideal?
