Commentary

Letter from the Guest Editor

How tomorrow's user is changing the way we buy, sell, and consume

Letter from the Guest Editor: David SkoknaIf you haven't changed every aspect of how you work by now, I'm sorry, but you're fucked.

Because they're here. Already.

They're defining how we shop, what we eat, how we communicate, and for me, how we design customer experiences.

They're the kids scanning hundreds of RSS feeds, reading hundreds of blogs, sending an average of 81 text messages a day, chatting with their three thousand Facebook friends. The ones who watch dozens of TV shows without owning a TV.

I call these maniacs Superconsumers. They're the most important group for anyone who cares about the future of their business to understand. Yet almost nobody in the marketing community seems to get them.

What's worse, the fuckers just keep evolving.

When we started Huge more than a decade ago, our vision was simple: We just wanted to create digital experiences real people would actually use. We weren't willing to fake it and create things like flashy campaign sites that only performed well in client meetings. All of which forced us to get obsessed with why people really went online and how they behaved. And the more we understood user behavior, the more we realized the standard assumptions about what people wanted from the Internet were wrong.

In reality, people were driven by highly specific goals and tasks, and they wanted to control every aspect of their experience. They also switched from one channel to the next without thinking there was anything special about it. But brands didn't get this. They still wanted to tell stories and get their messages out and do it their way. They especially didn't get it in the case of younger users, who are so essential because they tell us where behavior is going.

Part of the problem was that people were asking the wrong questions in research and failing to observe real user behavior. The old model just didn't work. I'll give you an example.

In 2005 we helped conduct a study on in-store shopping for one of the biggest retailers. The client wanted to understand shopping behavior across various segments. They wanted to look at the differences across generations. As part of this, we asked people what they did first when they went online.

The moms told us exactly how many times they checked their email, the weather, the news.

Then we asked the young women the same question. And they all just stared at us like we were crazy. They didn't understand what "going online" meant. They were already there. Kids think of the Web as running water or electricity -- it's always on. At that moment we realized we were going to have to evolve even further to keep up with this group.

So how do you keep up with them? Try this. Pick the sites you truly value, the ones you use everyday. Now print them out and put them on a wall. They're really hideous. You may think I'm exaggerating, but you really have to do this to understand. The ones the new Superconsumers use are probably even uglier than that. And I'm not talking about obscure sites. I'm talking about Amazon, Gmail, Wikipedia, Netflix, Facebook, and most of the blogs you read. They're the opposite of pretty, and not just aesthetically, but conceptually. Yet they enhance your life and you connect with them on an emotional level.

As designers, we're still trained to deliver according to mid-century ideas: gridded, pretty, formal, fonts, colors, rounded corners, all that stuff.

While I was a student at Cooper Union, Paul Rand, one of my professors and the godfather of traditional American graphic design, gave an assignment to represent water. Everyone drew a perfect image of water with shading, texture, gorgeous representations of the sea. And then one kid just took his pencil and drew a wave in two lines. If you focus on the idea and how to communicate the idea, you'll create a concept that everyone can understand. It's important to understand the foundation, but then to move beyond it.

Digital design for the web is still stuck in two schools. One comes from print, and one comes from TV. They're both trying to funnel the beauty in from other media. In terms of the results, both are mediocre. They create a decent landscape, a decent portrait, but everything beyond is very superficial. Superconsumers have been telling us for years that digital is its own medium.

We have a running joke here among new designers, that we run our own school, the Brooklyn Community College of Design. It doesn't matter what school you went to or where you came from; you're going to come here for six months and we're going to teach you a very different way of designing.

It requires an ability to think about how something is going to make you feel when using it. It's very important for our team to design for emotion, but not by making things pretty. It's very, very easy to make a digital platform feel trendy or beautiful. But try making someone fall in love with it. Suddenly the task changes dramatically. You stop thinking about the basics, the tools, and you start thinking about having a deeper engagement with someone you're designing for. Then design is no longer an aesthetic discipline, but a way of solving business problems.

If you're still thinking in terms of pretty campaigns, you're not thinking of the real context in which today's consumers operate. It has to be about long-term engagement. Good digital platforms don't have an expiration date.

Consumers instinctively reject anything that's not utility-based. Unless you provide a true service to me, I'll abandon it. RedLaser, an amazing utility that scans any barcode, was recently bought by eBay. So now when you scan something, it won't pull up Amazon results. I'll never use it again. I don't want people filtering my life for me. Digital products are easy to replace. Unless you can create tools and services and content that are the best in their category, don't even bother.

Take Twitter. It's going to be dead in a few years if it doesn't change its product. Right now it's primarily used to broadcast irrelevant information or to blast annoying ads. Something better will come along.

So who am I designing for? Not my social graph. If I'm building a site with Facebook Connect, none of my friends would be on that site, because I have a paltry hundred friends on Facebook. Rather, I'm designing for the interns in my office who have thousands of friends, the kids who don't know branding from user interface. You have to not only understand them, but you have to hire them. The best talent is coming to Brooklyn. We're proud to say we've filled our ranks with this young generation, and the numbers are increasing everyday. Because honestly, no one can design for Superconsumers better than one of their own.

David Skokna is a founding partner and the creative director of Huge.

2 comments about "Letter from the Guest Editor".
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  1. Lori Wilson from icrossing, September 10, 2010 at 6:02 p.m.

    Astoundingly compelling perspective

  2. Carol Phillips from BrandAmplitude, LLC, September 20, 2010 at 6:40 p.m.

    They didn't understand what "going online" meant. They were already there. Kids think of the Web as running water or electricity -- it's always on.

    Great insight and consistent with what we see in our "Superconsumer" Gen Y marketing group and on Gen Y panels. Thanks.

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