Teen Dragons at Over The Air 09

Julia Shalet, a Tuttler who helped us with the TEDxTuttle project also ran a Teen Dragon session at Over The Air 09 (A mobile multimedia hack weekend cum conference). I went along, and it was a fascinating session, Julia's summary is over here, but I agree with her takeaways (here is a precis):

1. Useful won over Entertaining

Whenever I review digital products I advise that the offering should be highly useful, highly entertaining, or preferably both – a useful product must still offer an entertaining user interface.

2. The importance of the user experience

Our current teen generation have grown up with technological innovations and as such, they have experienced some poor experiences with early lifecycle products. If the user experience is too clunky, slow or laborious, they will quickly give up trying and move on.

3. The teens were good at building on the ideas that were presented

I am a firm believer in facilitating end users to help companies build out their offering and keeping users engaged throughout the whole development process. This panel had good ideas for each of the products presented to them and I would recommend further innovation & design workshops with the teens to flesh out the ideas further.

4. Some apprehension towards the overlay of the virtual in to the real world


(Julia quotes a number of specific instances - but this interested me overall, giving the hullabaloo currently going on about Augmented Reality)

5. Be Cool!

Once again, I can’t stress enough how important it is to engage your potential users and ask them what they think is cool. We oldies often get it wrong!

6. Reality hit for offerings where users can build their own games

Aside from the necessity to make the user interface really intuitive, it must be remembered that the majority of users will consume the offering that is presented to them while a smaller group engage in the creation of content..... This was reflected in this teen panel, where one of the teens seemed to like the idea of creating his own games and the others were rather confused.

Also, don't over-egg the potential, the kids will calll it - for example:

While mobile gaming apps can’t (yet) match the high-tech specs of console games, they need to offer something else to attract and sustain the attention of a demanding teen gaming community. Moreover, how much does this target market actually want to be involved in co-creating a game when off-the-shelf professional games are quick and easy to access, relatively affordable and easy to use?”

Anyway, on with the show....

7. Don’t pull the wool over their eyes!

From previous insight sessions that I have run, today’s teens are really savvy and they are prepared to openly engage with brands if they feel the benefit of doing so and/or if they think the brand/product is “cool”. [But, its not as simple as that, you have to make it clear, as Nic Brisbourne also notes here....for one of the apps, the Teen Dragons:]... couldn’t quite understand what the user experience would be. It would have come to life for them if a clear scenario had been presented, for example, a multi-player big screen game brought to you by a particular brand advertiser where users could work their character in the game using their mobile.

8. Blackberry vs iPhone

The two older teens were devoted to their blackberries and the younger teens desperately wanted iPhones. From research that I ran over a year ago, the blackberry was storming the teen market because of free Instant Messaging and ease of using Facebook.

Interesting - the vectors that drive a service popularity probably shifts by demographic group and over time.

The people watching the session felt it was really valuable, comments on Twitter included:

“…Teens asking great questions – answers are less clear…this kids panel is better than venture capitalists when it comes to grilling the presenters…strong feeling people are better at communicating their technology rather than the benefits and uses of it…best tips on product marketing and development that I have heard in a while…”

Someone else commented it was the best session of the conference. It was very educational to me, for two reasons:

- These were real teens, views unmediated by the biases of some of the commentators and researchers who are making livings off teen research

- It was bang up to date - much of the "current wisdom" isn't

I was talking to a friend of mine today about how increasingly one hears nothing new at conferences, especially from the leading lights. This was pretty new stuff, and not an A-lister in the panel .