Brian David Johnson is a Consumer Experience Architect within Intel’s Digital Home Group. His responsibilities include researching, defining and mapping the public’s experience with future products and services.
Before joining Intel, he served as executive producer on several interactive television deployments in Scandinavia, Europe and the United States for British Airways, The Discovery Channel and New Line Cinema’s The Lord of the Rings.
Johnson holds a BA from the New School for Social Research. He is the director of two feature films and the author of several science fiction novels.
We bring the perspectives of ordinary people into Intel’s product planning, development and marketing.
Our group includes two teams. The first team consists of social science and design researchers who spend time in people’s homes all over the world. This team is really dedicated to getting a sense of what makes people tick, what they care about, what frustrates them, what they aspire to. This research is focused around getting a sense of the larger cultural patterns and practices that shape people’s relationships to and uses of new technologies. In 2006, we conducted more than 400 field interviews in 16 countries, and we will do the same in 2007.
You can readily see this is not typical research, like the traditional focus groups or product testing with which many of us in the electronics field are familiar. Our group’s role is to develop a deep understanding of global cultures and how people integrate technology into their daily lives. Beyond that, we want to bring back insights and research findings that help us better understand what people really want from the devices and technologies in their lives, and what opportunities we have to use this data to guide Intel’s product development.
This is especially important as we move into the Consumer Electronics 3.0 era, where the Internet and TV will come together and set the stage for new usage models and experiences.
After we have observed people in their homes, our ethnographers get together with our second team, the human factors engineers and research designers. This group takes the data, and the opportunities we have identified, and begins to build them into platform requirements and product specifications.
Through a set of rigorous processes and methods, the team creates personas, usage models and experience assessments that help drive the development of genuinely user-inspired and user-centric technologies. This process provides Intel with a uniquely valuable reference for our long-term product roadmap as well as a means of validating that our product development will meet the consumers’ needs.
These core values are important because they are the foundation for the experiences that people really want in life. As we move around the world to different countries and cultures, we observe the deep undercurrents of what people value on the most fundamental level.
One example is the enduring importance of being sociable and participating in a larger set of social networks. In particular, we seem to have a lasting desire to share aspects of our lives with our friends, our families and our social networks. The act of sharing encompasses communication, from letter writing to blogging, and everything in between. Our research is an effort to tap into what people want to share – and why.
Another fundamental value or desire is the insatiable appetite for a good story.
In India, the sharing of wedding videos is an example of very social activity that combines sharing with entertainment. Now we are seeing families beginning to move these videos from VHS tapes to computers and cell phones, inventing new ways to share these meaningful and entertaining experiences.
While we see core values that are almost universally shared, we also observe social values that are quite culture-specific. A good example is how people define their privacy and private space.
In some cultures, take Korea for example, there are rooms called an-bangs which are really just for members of the family, sometimes only the wives and mothers. These are extremely private spaces. Compare this with the salon or front room of an Indian household where it is often perfectly acceptable for extended family members and friends to drop by unannounced at virtually any time of the day or night.
In our group we don’t focus on these differences, but we do make sure that we are aware of them, allowing them to enrich our concepts or the way we think about the homes we are designing for.
To gain a true understanding of these differences, and how they might apply to consumer electronics products, you need to do the work.Let’s go back to sharing for a moment. As we study people within their homes comparatively, across five or six countries, portraits begin to emerge. We see people sharing memories, pictures, videos – like the wedding videos in India – and their electronic media files. We are looking for experiences and usage models that we can support with specific kinds of product functionality.
For example, can Intel build our consumer electronics platforms to make it easier for people in India to share their wedding videos, or protect them, or store them for easier retrieval, or make them even more entertaining? We look at Intel’s product roadmaps from the technical side to discover what technology can do to enhance these usage models. We work with human factors engineers to look at specific product attributes.
The process is essentially one of coming up with definitions of consumer experiences that reflect what people want, and then using this information to create a value proposition for a product. In other words, a definition of why people would want to buy the product.
After coming up with a number of these value propositions, we incorporate them into usage models that provide the basis for platform specifications, test plans and process flows. Usage-based data is also used as part of product validation. Often times we will get very specific in our definition of a particular experience. The out-of-box experience or the consumer’s initial experience with the product is extremely important and typically we’ll specify or craft the consumer experience in great detail.
The short answer is that if we want people to buy our products and take them into their homes, we need to go into their homes to discover what people want.
One of the essential questions that must be answered is how we can create a meaningful combination of the Internet and television. How do we bring the richness of the Internet experience and bring it to the living room without changing the act of watching TV?
There have been attempts to do this in the past, with varying degrees of success.
What is essential is to take what is good about TV and make it better. Television does what it does very well. People all over the world will even change the layout of their homes to accommodate the central role of television in their lives.
One of the things may be how to download movies to a PC and move them to the TV in a practical and meaningful way. Or how to integrate streaming data and video services like local traffic videos, weather, surf conditions, or virtually anything else and integrate them into the TV in a non-intrusive way. We need to do it in a way that makes sense and that makes people instantly recognize its simplicity and functionality.
Or to take just one more example, how do we make applications such as video telephony work concurrently with other rich video services, like live sporting events or multiplayer online games, to help people satisfy their fundamental need to share their experiences?
Time and time again, all over the world we talk to people about how they would love to watch cricket or the World Cup or NASCAR with friends in other cites or countries. Again it shows us how entertainment and technology can be an experience that draws people together.
Some of these usage models sound enticing. Our job is to determine whether people really want them, and then create products that deliver on the promise.
It is easy to see how the combination of the Internet with TV can provide a much wider selection of content, exemplified by the explosion of user-generated online video that we are witnessing today. TV has become a medium of social interaction. It seems logical that the Internet will amplify and enrich this trend.
Conducting research programs in countries such as Taiwan, where broadband access and Internet usage is quite advanced, gives us the opportunity to provide a lens into what consumers want. We are working with service providers there to collect data which will be incorporated into Intel’s future consumer electronics products and platforms.
At this point all I can say is stay tuned in the months ahead. The results are going to be quite dramatic.