The DOOH Audience Is mobile so it’s really important that as DOOH practitioners, we understand our audience’s mobile behavior before we get seduced into investing/designing in sexy mobile technologies. But with our ADD generation, often limited to 140 characters, the mobile UX is frequently an afterthought.

Apple, and before them Nokia, really understand (or understood in the case of Nokia) what mobility meant BEFORE designing mobile solutions.

When we humans are mobile, our experience is often focused on an activity that, if interrupted, stops our mobility in its tracks. We could be walking, driving, playing, shopping etc and if interrupted, that interruption better be for a good reason.

A mobile app (ignoring how it’s discovered) should ideally complement a dominant mobile activity. But if it has to interrupt mobile behavior, it has to offer a compelling enough reason for the user to break away from that activity.

As a designer of a mobile experience, if you don’t think about how, when and why an interrupt-driven message will and can be received, you will almost certainly fail.

Is your user standing in line, pushing a shopping cart, carrying a bag, driving, drinking, watching a concert? How much dwell time do they have to notice, act, react, interact? In many cases, the answer is 15-60 SECONDS (see this post on how UX maps to different types of locations and engagement models).

Now work out if your shiny new smartphone app, NFC app, QR code or text messaging CTA are worthy of interrupting your audience. Now sanity-check that your execution includes giving the user enough time AND benefit (e.g. “The 3Fs” Fun, Fame and Fortune, also covered in the above linked post) to engage.

I hope this interruption to your daily reading was worth while. If it was, please Tweet about it. It is wasn’t, I guess I’ve proven a point – because if it’s not even worth your while to click on a simple Twitter icon, how sobering is it to think about engaging your users?

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Well, the start of Q4’11 has been really hectic.

Not only were we honored to be participating at the Robin Hood event with Black Eyed Peas in Central Park, but we were also chosen to be the interactive social platform behind a launch campaign for South Park’s new series which kicked off yesterday in New York’s Times Square.

Times Square visitors could create a South Park avatar of themselves at an interactive kiosk, and then see their avatar displayed live alongside real time tweets (hashtagged SOUTHPARK) on the famous MTV/Viacom screen in Times Square.

And of course, unless you were asleep, yesterday also marked the announcement of the much anticipated iPhone5 ahem iPhone4s.

Place-based social media is ALL ABOUT CAPTURING THE MOMENT AND LETTING THE AUDIENCE ENGAGE, so the last photo in the set here just about sums it up. A tweet proclaims “The iPhone4s killed Kenny”.

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Last month I wrote about the DOOH Stack and how we can be informed by Google’s purchase of Motorola’s mobile business and its IP portfolio into thinking through related issues in our own neck of the woods.

Today I read a great post on Arstechnica. Just suspend disbelief for a few minutes and read that post, replacing the word smartphone with DOOH and some of the company names (Apple, Google etc) with our own industry Gorillas.

Hopefully you’ll see why I’m excited about DOOH and how a strategic view of our market might play out.

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On Wednesday I’m on a panel at DPAA talking about convergence.

The sexiness of cross pollinating mobile, social and DOOH is a hot topic. The coexistence of these technologies is often characterized as “Convergence.”

But convergence is a myth.

What is more important is interoperability.

If my device/network can’t interoperate with an audience’s device/network, it might as well be dead to the world. Media will be less measurable, less actionable, less engaging, less immersive, less… everything if it cannot interoperate. And when most people talk about convergence, they actually mean interoperability.

Convergence leads us down the wrong path – we do not need to build neighboring technologies into our devices/networks, we need to build connections and interfaces into them so that they can communicate with each other.

That’s why our DOOH screens, players, CMS, networks etc need to display tweets, checkins, Facebooks fans, text messages… because if they can’t they are like yesterday’s newspaper – old news.

Our DOOH screens need to co-operate with the outside world – and each other.

Interpretability is the word.

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Interactive screens, mobile technology and Shakespeare are unlikely bedfellows.

‘Tis true, but Scholastic, the global education and media company, focused on helping children around the world to read and learn, is using LocaModa’s Wiffiti to make learning Shakespeare more fun.

In their Lesson Plan 5: Summarizing by Text-Messaging Shakespeare, they set out how teachers can safely use mobile technology and interactive screens to engage students.

I’ve taken the following excerpt from their website (the link above is well visiting – they do an excellent job of clearly explaining how to set up an interactive screen experience.):

DIRECTIONS
1. The teacher goes over mobile safety and appropriate use before beginning this lesson.
2. Before students begin reading Romeo and Juliet, the teacher reads the opening prologue. The teacher may also want students to be looking at the words as it is being read by projecting them on an overhead.
3. The teacher asks students to think about the prologue, and to summarize it in 140 characters by using their cell phones to send a text message to the Wiffiti screen that the teacher previously set up.
4. The teacher projects the Wiffiti screen along with the information on how to text to the screen (this automatically shows up on each Wiffiti screen).
5. The students begin to send their summaries to the Wiffiti screen via their cell phones.
6. Once the summaries are all up on the screen, the teacher reads through them and asks the students to vote on which one they think best summarized the prologue.
7. The teacher then selects a piece of dialogue or a scene from Romeo and Juliet, reads it, and has the students summarize the same way as above.

I find this so inspiring – not only in terms of the innovation in education (I wish I had such interesting classes when I was force-fed the Bard) but also because every day it is more and more obvious that media professionals HAVE to embrace technologies that enable dialogues with their audiences.

DOOH pros, where art thou?

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