ONeill - Pixels and place: connecting human experience across physical and digital spaces

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, its 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 cant think of a better explorer than Kate ONeill.

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 ONeills 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 ONeill

Also by Kate ONeill

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 ONeill

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 Societys 2015 word of the year, and it reflects a trend toward more inclusive language. Just like the convergence of pixels and place, youll get used to it.

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 experiencesin retail, healthcare, cities, in marketing of all kinds, and so on.

It is framed in the examination of pixels and placeof the convergence of our physical and digital surroundings, experiences, and even identitiesbecause 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 experiencesso many web forms, so many stores, so many servicesare 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 Ive 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.

Its 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 were 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 others data because we recognize the humanity it represents, and in doing so, make our possible future together a little bit brighter.