#user insight

User Insight Labs here in Atlanta is hosting the "Social TV Event," an interactive, virtual conference taking place on October 20, 2011 from 9:00am – 5:00pm EST.

The day’s line-up includes pioneers in the social TV industry including Tom Thai, market and sales strategy lead at Bluefin; Hillary Henderson, product director of Clearleap; Joe Conboy, director, product management iTV of Cox Communications; Dee Rambeau, vice president of customer engagement of PR Newswire; Derek Van Nostran, vice president of brand strategy at The Weather Channel; Chad Eikhoff, creative director of Trick 3D; Eric Holtzclaw, CEO of User Insight; Dee McBeth, Sr. Digital Strategist of Wieden + Kennedy; Kevin O’Connor, president of User Insight; Chris Snider, senior project manager of Yahoo!; Dave Mowrey, director, connected devices of Yahoo! and Mitchel McAlister, director of product of Yidio.

http://www.socialtvevent.com/

The conference will be looking at issues such as:

How consumers are using social TV today and how they will use it in the future

Defining social TV strategies across products

Which products, technologies and advertising initiatives are leading the pack

Social TV content strategies and measurement

How the social TV revolution stands to change the future of television as we know it

The agenda looks like this:

9:00am – 9:30am EST      

The State of Social TV Across the Nation

Tino Mantella, President at TAG

9:30am – 9:40am EST      

Video Shorts 

9:40am – 10:40am EST    

Who’s Watching?

Eric V. Holtzclaw, CEO at User Insight

10:30am – 11:00am EST  

Video Shorts 

11:00am – 12:30pm EST    

Social TV Product Strategies in Action

Joe Conboy, Director, Product Management iTV at Cox Communications

Dave Mowrey, Director, Connected Devices at Yahoo!

Derek Van Nostran, VP of Brand Strategy, The Weather Channel

12:30pm – 12:45pm EST  

Video Shorts 

12:45pm – 2:15pm EST    

Social TV Product Design from Start to Finish

Brandon Eatros, CEO and Co-founder at Yidio

Hillary Henderson, Product Director at Clearleap

Eric V. Holtzclaw, CEO at User Insight

Chris Snider, Senior Product Manager at Yahoo!

2:15pm – 2:30pm EST      

Video Shorts 

2:30pm – 4:00pm EST      

Social TV to Market – Advertising, Content and Measurement 

Chad Eikhoff, Creative Director at Trick 3D

Dean McBeth, Sr. Digital Strategist at Wieden + Kennedy

Dee Rambeau, VP of Customer Engagement at PR Newswire

Tom Thai, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Bluefin Labs

4:00pm – 4:15pm EST      

Video Shorts 

4:15pm – 5:00pm EST      

Social TV Case Study

In January of this year, User Insight committed to investing $500,000 in a yearlong research project to study how people consume TV and related content. The project, which they called their  “Social TV Experiment,” focused on understanding behaviors exhibited in consumers’ homes and how the social TV revolution stands to change how people watch, interact and consume TV and advertising content.

Over the past few months, User Insight created personas to understand which products and services companies should be building for the consumer, how consumers use current social TV products, and what they will use in the future. They'll be going through those persona as part of the social TV case study.

I started writing/editing as I was attending the Big (D)esign Conference (http://bigdesignevents.com/) in Dallas. A couple weeks before THIS conference, I attended another UX conference, the Usability Professional Association's International Conference, held this year in Atlanta, Georgia. (http://www.upassoc.org/conference/2011/index_alt.html)

I've come away from the Dallas conference with some thoughts and ideas as well, but before I started writing up those notes, I wanted to finish documenting the "big thoughts" that I came away from the UPA Conference with.

Now, as part of the conference, I was able to visit and tour Atlanta's User Insight facility. User Insight is a user research and testing lab here in Atlanta. I'd heard good things about them (a number of my co-workers have worked with them in the past) and was interested in getting a closer look at what they were all about.

Image from User Insight

http://www.userinsight.com/

I was mighty impressed by what I saw. They're very smart about their approach to everything they do. They're smart about how they record users who are participating in testing -- and how they annotate user comments and sync user comments up with the video footage captured during testing. They're smart about their process - their schedule goes something like this: Hour One - Usability Test participant One. Hour Two - Review the comments and findings from participant one, noting major findings. Hour Three - Usability Test participant Two. Hour Four - Review the comments and findings from participant two, noting major findings. Continue for all usability test participants.

What this means is that, at the end of the usability test, you've already got a sense of, not just what your major issues are, but which specific users had those specific issues. And because user comments are sync up to video footage and notes coming out of the test sessions, you can easily call up a clip or comment related to the issues uncovered.

I love this approach.

That's only one of the ways that they're smart.

The company also revealed the progress to date in their year-long Social TV Experiment. This is how they describe the project on their company blog: "User Insight is investing $500,000 of our own resources in 2011 to conduct The Social TV Experiment, an internal research project that will take you through the full life cycle of applying user research to inform product design."

An overview of the company's findings so far can be found here: http://www.userinsight.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Social-TV-Experiment-Overview_0711.pdf

The company has been conducting user research and developing persona in order to "better understand what real people will be looking for from (social TV) products and services in the future. And, we believe that social media is changing television viewing as we know it."

They've developed a set of five persona, plotting users according to the intersections of their interest in TV, their usage of social media, and their technology usage patterns.

I was impressed, not just by the amount of work that the company has put into this project, but that a company would invest this much of its own resources into a project like this. 

Part of the tour of the company included a discussion of this project, and it was obvious how everyone (at least everyone I talked to at the company) was interested and invested in this work, from the most senior people at User Insight on down. User Insight had even set up different rooms in their facility to mirror/showcase the type of environments that each of their user types would watch TV in - and had company employees on hand to "play the roles" of each of these user types.

It was a great tour, and a highlight of the 2011 UPA Conference for me for sure.