As much as I’d like to elaborate on ubicomp topics and the concept of everyware here at the Change Agency Blog, I thought you’d be interested in reading my post at Bolin Digital about the matter instead. Please let me know your thoughts and feel free to share your ideas here.

I just stumbled across a Mashable article on five of the best user experiences of 2010. As part of the 4th Annual Mashable Awards Mashable is asking you to share your thoughts on the best of the best in UX. I’d love to know about your thoughts here, too.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time working with brands, products and services whose managers are transposing their offerings to the digital arena. Many times, they rely heavily on traditional conceptual media and insights models to sculpt a view of their consumers. The problem is these models don’t take into account the digital roles audiences play or actions they take in digital places.

You’re probably all to familiar with the persona I’m referring to (e.g., Alexandra, age 33, married with two children, average household income of $75,000. Shops at Super Target, etc.).

The audiences that experience planners and strategists plan for aren’t any different today. But the methods to account for them has changed significantly. And the information needed is much more faceted. Traditional account planning practices typically don’t have the framework or tool sets to understand these nuances. For instance, demographics tell us about their propensity to gravitate toward certain products or services. Psychographics can tell us what they may think about the product or service (or what they think they think), but they don’t tell us much about how these audiences actually navigate the world.

I know I’m rehashing an old conversation here. But it’s frustrating because many have yet to adopt a framework to understand their audiences beyond this model. Or, maybe the tool sets to figure it out aren’t in place. Or maybe account planners are simply ignoring it.

Maybe we (user experience strategists and planners in the marketing world) have done a poor job of evangelizing the concept of user-based analysis in digital planning.  Some of the more astute distinctions between market segmentation versus user segmentation have been celebrated in UX circles for a while, but the practice has a long way to go before being mainstreamed into a broader UX/marketing mindset…at least for those who are “UXperts” teaching their clients the difference.

So it’s good to see there is an evolution in account planning. Finally, we are witnessing some thought leadership in terms of how to think about and plan for digital audiences from a marketing perspective. When experienced, notable (former) account planners consider user experience to be the new account planning discipline, a lot of UXperts in the marketing world should get excited. But we have a long way to go.

Lenses for looking at audiences as users – in their digital and real worlds
So, where do we begin? This is the question that inspired me to write this post. There is no simple answer. This is an ongoing work in progress, as I don’t profess to have all the answers a typical digital account planner might need. The methods listed below should help drive the analysis, however:

• Focus on small sample sizes and examine their digital online footprints – Identify your core set of audiences, take a look at a few key users and follow their digital footprints. Spend some time in their specialized communities. See what artifacts sit on their digital curbs and inside/outside their virtual doorways (and garbage cans, for that matter).

• Hit the real streets to witness what your audience is doing, where they’re living and who they hang out with. Watch them as they navigate their real (and digital) worlds in their native habitats. And take copious notes. This is labor and time intensive, but the gold nuggets are always somewhere at the bottom of the river.

• Bring key audience members into your brainstorming. This should come as no surprise: your core users might have good ideas that lead to better ways to serve them. It’s amazing  how often they’re excluded in the conceptual design process.

• Spend some time to understand key movers and shakers. These might be the influencers. They might be the connectors. They might create a lot of chatter. They might carry a lot of online currency or “clout.” Take the time to discover them and watch what they do, because their followers will mimic them.

• Know your data and look for patterns. Get access to any information dashboards available. Keep looking for similar behaviors, activity, conversation and movement.

• Understand what has gone before. Dig for relevant secondary research that seems to match up with the cohorts you’re studying.

This is just a start to a growing framework on discovering the nuances of key audiences in a digital world. Specifically, these steps take our thinking and ideation well  beyond the traditional model for how to better service our audiences as users, not just marketing targets.

What are you doing? Where are you doing it? Who are you doing it with? What do you like? These used to be things we kept to ourselves or shared with our friends and family. Now we’re willing to broadcast them to whomever is willing to listen.

- David Armano, from Why Social Sharing is Bigger than Facebook and Twitter – Harvard Business Review

More than ever before, the information people now freely share through their social graphs enables us to efficiently and quickly develop more effective, useful and desirable experiences for online social audiences. Many times, it’s merely  mashing up the right content for the right person at the right time in the right place.

So, how can these questions help us design better real-time, tailored, participatory  user experiences? What are the best applications for them?

What are you doing (right now)?
Initially popularized by Twitter, this real-time phenomenon of digitally-distributed sharing is a gold mine of insight into user behavior as it happens. How do sharing patterns bring relevant content and people together in real time? Some examples:

• Contextually-relevant content based on real-time keyword frequency. For example, I’m a guitar fan. I also follow and am followed by other guitar fans. Let’s say we’re all chatting about guitars. A service that offers relevant tailored, evolving guitar content in or near the stream of our conversation would be invaluable.
• Real-time proactive personal assistance, much in the way brands and companies leverage  Twitter for their customer service response mechanisms. How many companies do you know that are not yet leveraging this?
• Connecting similar commentary in real time, like a news feed that forms itself based on the individual’s comments as they happen (similar to the way a suggestive search field prefills keywords you might be searching on).

What will you be doing in the future?
Patterns identified in the ‘now’ can theoretically predict people’s future activities. What do our social connections say about what we might do in the future? Some applications:

• Suggestive future purchases and services based on my (and others) current journal of personal activities (from places like Daytum and Me-trics).  Here, a plethora of diet, exercise and health related applications abound.
• Same concept, applied in a financial context, only with a thicker layer of social or peer context in the mix.

Where are you doing it?
Let’s extend the real-time idea of status to geography: I know what you’re doing, and where you are. And over time, I can predict where you’re headed next; furthermore, I can anticipate how I can help you there:

• Location-based services leveraging content based on geographic location. This is not a new concept, but not widely leveraged yet by many brick-and-mortar venues.
• These same services can push relevant information to you ahead of your visits to particular places based on the frequency and duration of your prior visits.

Who are you doing it with?
Some research now suggests your behaviors have significant influence on people within your social networks. In addition, we’ve come to understand the amplification effect of communicating through extremely efficient channels like You Tube: Small numbers can still  take a brand down in a matter of moments. Likewise, large communities around like-minded interests can quickly form to provide momentum for specific causes. Strength is established in both small and large numbers.

What do you like?
Express preferences and sentiment in real time are arguably the best indicators of people’s real (time) intent, much like the guitar fan example above. Even though people generally say things that are inconsistent with what they actually do, express, active preference in real time is probably a better indicator of behavior than any contained, contrived, laboratory-like focus group. What about offering up related products and services content based on real-time purchase activity?

Mash ups in these sharing contexts are the fuel to driving innovation for enhanced user experiences that are either (1) participatory by nature, or (2) could benefit by injecting more tailored, participatory content. With the advent of an  exponentially expanding universe of shared information, where can these or other (better) social user experience ideas lead us?

We’ve all heard about the day when ubiquitous computing will transform the lives of everyone who is immersed in daily physical world activity, at least in the digitally connected world. I also imagine a day when I’m talking to my grandchildren about desktop computing as a hobby, social networking as a giant online community experiment, and leather wallets as erstwhile artifacts of real-world financial transacting at retail.

While pure digital retail settings have advanced to a point of extreme shopping efficiency, there’s a lot of room for improving the digital shopping experience in the physical/mobile/social retail space.

What are some simple steps that bring ubiquitous computing closer to the physical shopping experience? I can think of a few scenarios that shouldn’t seem too outlandish:

• My smartphone’s ability to handle ALL of my financial activities at register (the technology exists, but all  dots are not yet connected, at least not in the U.S.);
• “At register” becoming  any physical point in the store (thank you, Apple. I’d like to know if this has helped in-store sales and productivity–it still feels weird as a customer);
• My mobile (smartphone) camera’s ability to conduct real-time informational reconnaissance on core product information, at the retail shelf  by image and/or barcode recognition (Google Goggles is still perfecting the imaging technology); and
• The instantaneous ability to read and react to peer reviews of the product  (Foursquare, Yelp and Gowalla are progenitors for social mobile real-time peer influence).

These simple evolutions for retail customer experience in the physical world seem reasonable and doable. But what business, technology, infrastructure and user experience hurdles need to be cleared to apply them in a meaningful, value-added way that makes sense for the user experience?

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the inaugural post for the Change Agency experience design blog. This forum is designed to track, discuss, contemplate and debate issues in the world of user experience and experience design, no matter the channel, environment or context. In days coming we hope to post inspiring, thought provoking, relevant commentary  on the latest ideas in user experience design. So watch closely, and please feel free to follow along and participate in the discussion!