Latest Viewpoints by Derrick Fountain

If we know the radius of a circle, we can calculate its circumference. Personas can give us the radius by which we square to get the diameter or breadth of your audience. The circumference forms the basis for designing touch points and scenarios that address the needs of your inner circle of key purchasers and influencers. This inner circle is where the primary focus should lie. The long tale kicks in with people outside of the inner circle. A tangent touches the circle but does not penetrate it. When we apply this to the realm of personas, we find that a similar tangent metaphor exists with personas constructed out of thin air with no underlying ethnographic research to back up the collective assumptions that form the basis for opinions about how a person might interact with your product or service in the real world. Organically developed personas also polarize people. It’s better to use a persona to get it right for at least 50% of the circle, as opposed to shooting blindly and addressing the needs

The biggest complaint and "perceived" barrier to adoption of news and information consumption on mobile devices in America is a constant nagging over the size of the screen and keyboard on mobile devices. The logic is based on the assumption that the same mode of consuming information on the desktop web, will carry over to the mobile web. Day after day, I receive alerts in my inbox announcing new ventures or new mobile product launches that attempt to extend web-based products and services to smartphones. At no point has any of the mobile publishing platforms or application developers stopped to come up with an original idea that leverages the inherent nature of a smartphone. What is it? It’s first and foremost, a phone. And what is the primary method used by human beings to store and retrieve information on these devices? By speaking and listening. Now how about a desktop PC? What is the primary means of storing and retrieving information on your desktop? By typing and reading. Let's see, speaking

There is a growing need for a seamless bridge between those who constantly publish new text information on the web and the growing number of users with mobile audio devices such as iPods and mp3-players. This insight combined with extensive research lead to the birth of SyndOut. SyndOut stands for "syndicate out" and is a product geared towards publishers and owners of branded news portals. Today these organizations make their information accessible through websites, RSS feeds, and in some cases also as embeddable content widgets. Most people don’t have the time to read all this information and have difficulty picking out the relevant parts from the massive amounts of generated content. In my research, I have come to find that most people have some time per day to listen. People have time to shift an audio version of a piece of information from a website to a portable device and access it while they are driving, traveling, exercising or doing work around the house. About the Author Derrick Fountain is a vi

Over the years, I have developed platforms that single-handedly sought to usher in the age of the Spoken Web. This work predates the work that IBM is currently doing with its newly-formed research lab in India and their Spoken Web Project. The Spoken Web is a solution that I've been researching and developing for the last 4 years to help human beings overcome what I like to call "situational disability." Situational disability occurs when any human being finds themself in a situation where they that lack the "ability" to access information due to internal and external handicaps. The common way for human beings to overcome these situational disabilities is through the use of assistive technologies. As human beings, we can only carry so many grocery items when we walk through the aisles of a grocery store. A shopping cart is an assistive technology that helps us overcome this handicap. Remove the shopping cart from the shopping experience and you will see a cascading negative effect that imapacts both c

As a mobile product manager, I noticed that the patterns of consumption across the network of sites that I managed were wide and shallow. I attribute this to the "how" and not the "what" of the content that was being delivered. In a mobile context, the biggest handicap is time and physical ability. Response times are not fast enough for the click and wait paradigm of the regular web. You don't think about the time in between screens and rarely see the entire screen go white before you have to make another selection. This latency makes it nearly impossible to cruise around and "browse" the mobile web and has forced the medium in the task-oriented paradigm of today. Get in, grab, and go. There's no time to sit around waiting for a screen to load. When the latency factor was removed and broadband became mainstream, we saw a huge shift in behavior. People started using the web differently. I remember not being able to embed a video clip in a page because of the impact it would have on its performance. So

A few years ago a close friend of mine emailed the following quote to me. "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often." I disagree with Mr. Churchill. In my opinion, frequent change can lead to nothing other than perpetual imperfection. I have trouble understanding how such a varying way of being can result in anything but something less than perfect. Perfection, for the most part, is a product of human perception. I am reminded of an interesting quote on the matter of "perception" as penned by Giacamo Casanova in his book "History of My Life." "I saw that everything famous and beautiful in the world, if we judge by the descriptions and drawings of writers and artists, always loses when we go to see it and examine it closely." I would venture to say the same about things perceived as perfect by human beings in general. Similar to the way a microscopic view of a diamond can reveal imperfections, human beings, upon closer observation, can also reveal imperfections. And just like diamonds, h

In a home theater system, you have various types of speakers ranging from tweeters, bass, mids, receiver, horns, and bookshelf speakers. Collectively, they form a surround sound "system." Although you have all of these pieces, you achieve the best sound quality when each of the individual components is from the same manufacturer. You know this and that adds to your perception of quality. You could very well have totally different speakers, but the consistency in the brand adds to the perception of a better sound. In addition, all these 24 pieces make one sound when executed. They come together and form a sort of harmonic convergence. Turning on this system has an interesting affect on what you see. Suddenly, you no longer see the tweeter, the bass, and the bookshelf speakers. They become transparent to the sound. The moment you reach that state where the parts begin to form a whole, you've converted. You have reached a point of total engagement. This point of engagement with a brand that comes after

Scent communicated through trigger words works much the same on the web and can engage users in your story without ever seeing a picture of the model or cute puppy dog in your ad. Trigger words are the words that trigger actions, and these words, when combined with teasers create "scent." Think of the catchy names for court cases on the show "People's Court." I loved that show as a kid and always got a kick out of the contrast between the seriousness of the cases and the humor of the name that was assigned to the case. Telling the name of the case that was "next up", contained trigger words that provided a strong and compelling scent that propelled viewers to keep watching after the commercial break. About the Author Derrick Fountain is a visionary mobile industry professional with a passionate curiosity for life-enabling technologies that transform how we access and share information. Call 916-770-4127 to hear a Spoken Web version of the latest viewpoints by Derrick Fountain. Visit the contact page an

Multiple platforms should be considered in the initial planning process to address the needs of regular users and those that will be navigating your site with the help of assistive technologies. Instead of trying to make one design satisfy everyone, you may see more effective results having separate designs for people with disabilities. After all, people with disabilities share lots of commonalities and experiences, so they too need personas. These personas have totally different information design needs than sighted people. They think differently about how to access information and scenarios must be designed in such a way that the persuasive momentum remains intact even with screen readers. For sighted people, lots of visual cues are used to build and sustain persuasive momentum online. On the other hand, how do you tell that the woman on the Victoria’s Secret banner is the same woman on the landing page? And that the offer being presented on that same landing page is a repeat of what was shown on the

You may end up paying for lots of design considerations and affordances that you may never need, solely based on the internal goals of the design firm you choose. For example, it takes a significant amount of time to debug certain CSS and JavaScript code, not to mention the introduction of hacks and workarounds to overcome browser compatibility issues. Typically, you approve a design that addresses the specific needs of your ideal customers. Once you approve the design concept, often times the target audience takes a sharp detour and your developers spend time building out your design for people that will never see your website or purchase your product. Your user research didn't include personas for people with disabilities. However, your developer is spending lots of billable hours making sure that individuals with such conditions can comfortably navigate the information on your website. If accessibility is part of the business model of the design firm that you choose, then you may end up paying extr

Try designing a single printer-fax-scanner-copier (PFSC) for use in China, Russia and Nigeria. How about designing this PFSC for every imaginable context of use. Even the paper, the most basic requirement of such a machine, is not a product that lends itself to universal design. Although paper comes close to being designed for all possible use cases, even it has specialized formats that are unique to the context in which it is used. When I worked for the FDA in the mid 90’s, I remember getting in trouble for putting fax paper in the printer. "That's fax machine paper not printer paper", I was told. In another account, I remember being told, "No, that's copy machine paper not printer paper." And in yet another account, "No, that paper is for the LaserJet printer, not the inkjet printer." Even paper is polarized for different groups of users. In this case the "users" are composed of various types of machines that share a common paper-type. Nowadays, I hear the interactive community screaming with the de

Businesses are not confident enough to polarize people on the web. They don't have enough esteem that the design will be sufficient enough to convert the target audience, so they want to design for everyone with hopes that the bigger net will catch more fish. The problem is that the design of the net itself gets in the way as it scales. The bigger net means a bigger frame and bigger threads which make it challenging to disguise the obvious nature of the device, thus resulting in fewer fish being duped into swimming into its grasp. Making design assumptions without knowing the underlying human needs and context of use can be costly. Accessibility enthusiasts understand very little about the psychology of the web. I use the term enthusiasts for those that feel that all websites should be accessible by everyone. More and more the form and function are becoming tightly integrated, so that a change to one directly affects the other. Semantic markup, programming frameworks, and externalized style attributes