Japman Bajaj

As a cre­ative per­son with an embar­rass­ing set of art and design skills, let me be the first to say that I was very excited as well as quite intim­i­dated by this morning’s talk at Social Media Break­fast. The word “Design” is usu­ally some­thing I stiffen up at… It makes me a lii­i­it­tle ner­vous, despite my attempts to be bet­ter at it, so I usu­ally rely upon the peo­ple in my cir­cle who know the stuff in and out. So “Design Think­ing”, by exten­sion, is no eas­ier for me to swallow.

Luck­ily, I put that mind­set aside and made my way to SMBOt­tawa this morn­ing at the Gowl­ings Ottawa offices. It was my first time there, and the setup is great. Out­side of a bit of feed­back in the speak­ers, it was a well exe­cuted event. It’s always nice to meet peo­ple again, and I’ve been a bit AWOL from the Ottawa Scene as I’ve been trav­el­ling alot and try­ing to launch a tar­get­ted social media practice.

I showed up slightly behind sched­ule by about 15 min­utes, and the room was already packed. I was talk­ing to a part­ner at Gowl­ings this morn­ing, and I agree with his per­spec­tive: The peo­ple that come out to events like these have a dis­tinct colour and energy to them, and it’s a plea­sure to be a part of it.

Okay, that aside, Dom Saul from Akendi cap­tured my mind today. This was my first ever SMBOt­tawa event, and his input on things expanded my mind a bit. He talked alot about psy­cho­log­i­cal and behav­ioural things that tech­ni­cal and social media folks tend to for­get. The point is to engage your user base and make it eas­ier for them to com­mu­ni­cate with you and with first-degree peers, and then to give them the option to push out con­tent to their next lev­els of their networks

I think we use these words often — “user-centred” or “user-centric” or “user-friendly” — but Dom brought in Bailey’s Per­for­mance Model and Maslow’s Hier­ar­chy of Needs to help explain why every prod­uct (whether social media ini­tia­tive or not) needs to be user-centred, and that users need to be thor­oughly under­stood. It’s more than just ease of use, it’s about ease of inte­gra­tion and ease of acces­si­bil­ity, and build­ing the prod­uct to fit the end-users’ online pro­file and thought patterns.

For us, on top of using our inno­v­a­tive prod­uct offer­ing to max­i­mize exist­ing SocMed plat­forms, we are conois­seurs of build­ing out pro­pri­etary plat­forms for our clients, should that need be deemed appro­pri­ate for the organization’s goals. I caught myself nod­ding my head in agree­ment to Dom’s insights with respect to under­stand­ing con­text of use, and the behav­iours and stan­dards by which users guide their activ­i­ties, both online, and in real life. Ulti­mately, solu­tions need to meet needs; and users have both rec­og­nized AND unrec­og­nized needs. Our goal is to meet as many (and prefer­ably all) of those as possible.

So to recap, here are my key take­aways from this morning’s event.

• Social Media is chang­ing how peo­ple are liv­ing, and chang­ing people’s worlds. Using it to push civil lib­er­ties in Iran and Kenya show the ulti­mate human rights side of the type of impact social media can have.
• People’s opti­mal per­for­mance con­sid­ers both the tasks which they need to accom­plish, as well as their con­text. This means that peo­ple may accom­plish their tasks more effec­tively based upon their envi­ron­ment, their tech­ni­cal lit­er­acy, their goals, and even some­thing as small as the tem­per­a­ture their room is set to.
• Good Prod­ucts ful­fill expec­ta­tions. Great Prod­ucts ful­fill desires. Remark­able Prod­ucts ful­fill unrec­og­nized needs.
• Social Media is not just about peo­ple becom­ing con­tent cre­ators. Cre­ation is just the begin­ning of the process. The plea­sure of own­ing a cam­era does not end once the pic­ture or video has been taken; In fact, that’s the begin­ning of the process. On top of cre­at­ing that con­tent, there is edit­ing, sav­ing, shar­ing, and prop­a­gat­ing that takes place. We need to under­stand the process that peo­ple go through with their content.
• Prod­ucts must be inte­grat­able (Across plat­forms and devices) and scal­able (across hard­ware and soft­ware platforms).

Need­less to say, I’ll be at the next one!