Experience Manifesto

Third Places: Putting People and Experience First

Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, our interaction with the physical world has undergone a profound transformation. In the realm of community building, the concept of the "third place" has gained significance. This term refers to social environments distinct from the home ("first place") and the workplace ("second place"). Examples of third places include churches, cafes, clubs, public libraries, bookstores, and parks. Ray Oldenburg, in his influential book "The Great Good Place" (1989), emphasizes the importance of third places for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and fostering a sense of place.

Consider the innovative office spaces created by companies like Google and Facebook, seemingly designed to blend the second and third places. For younger generations, social life often revolves around work environments, blurring the lines between professional and personal spaces.

Reflecting on my own experiences, I recall frequenting a Burger King with my daughter Sydney when she was young. The indoor playground was not just about the physical space but the social aspect, providing Sydney, as an only child, the opportunity to interact with her peers. This Burger King became a "Third Place" for Sydney, highlighting the social significance of spaces beyond home and work.

In the evolving landscape of retail, the value of real estate is being reevaluated. With the rise of online shopping and the comfort people now have with delayed gratification, the traditional emphasis on merchandise space is shifting. The question arises: If we reduce the need for inventory in retail spaces, what alternative purpose can these spaces serve? The potential lies in transforming retail environments into social hubs rather than purely commercial spaces.

As our work structures undergo significant changes, an opportunity emerges to socialize retail spaces. The trend seems to be moving towards creating a more engaging and community-driven experience. Rather than focusing solely on our purposes, we should consider the needs and desires of our guests, as prioritizing their experience encourages their continued engagement.

In this context, incorporating familiar amenities like coffee bars and DJ booths becomes vital. These additions draw from hospitality, personalizing the retail experience and increasing the "dwell time," as noted by Gensler's Kathleen Jordan. The right amenities complement the products being sold, offering a respite that allows consumers to recharge and extend their time within the space.

Furthermore, the universal need for fun becomes apparent. Fun is a powerful tool to foster understanding and peace. Hate struggles to thrive in an atmosphere of fun. To create meaningful experiences, we should focus on bringing people together to share joyous activities. The challenge is to celebrate the joy we create and continue exploring ways to unite people through shared, positive experiences.

Retail can be the new (old) third place. As Ray Oldenberg said, third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and establishing feelings of a sense of place. Today, more than ever perhaps, we need our third places as a society and what better way for retailers to help than to be our gathering places.

Some additional reading:

• Retail as the New (Old) Third Place
• Why Don't More Retailers Have Genius Bars?
• Creating the Right Experience Post Covid19
• How Lloyds Coffee House Became Lloyds of London
• Great, Good Places
• Are You Telling a Great Story

Is the Drive to Efficiency Hurting Starbucks

A few days ago, Starbucks had a pretty big earning miss, prompting lots of discussion about what went wrong and how to fix it. In a recent interview with CBS, CEO Laxman Narasimhan had this to say:

The company's plan to turn things around includes updating its app and mobile payment offerings, speeding up service, and overhauling its menu to lure customers back.

Ex-CEO and founder of Starbucks, Howard Schultz had no issues jumping into the discussion saying in an interview:

“The stores require a maniacal focus on the customer experience, through the eyes of a merchant,” he added. “The answer does not lie in data, but in the stores.”

As Will Roger says in the quote below, it's never a bad idea to reinvigorate you products and offerings. Afterall, you can't just sit there, can you?

But I have a different take on the situation. I think that it's possible some of their fixes will actually hurt them more than they will help them and that as Schultz says, they really need to refocus on their customer experience.

Starbucks was one of the first companies to embrace the idea of the 3rd place, a place where people can gather. It was a place where people who worked from home, pre-Covid of course, could get out of the house, have some good coffee and get some work done. As importantly, they had a place to gather with others and not be so isolated.

Because you could sit the for as long as you wanted, I think that people didn't mind paying as much as they did for coffee. They weren't just buying coffee, they were getting an inexpensive office and meeting space. They were getting an opportunity to socialize or at least people watch. They were getting some time out of their homes. That was a pretty good deal for the price of a coffee, even if you splurged for a fancy cup!

As they added mobile ordering, they created a situation where they were often ignoring the person actually in the store for people who were somewhere else. I remember once waiting for 10 - 15 minutes to have a barista take my order and then waited for it to be made while I could see them making lots of mobile orders, making them the priority.

Now Starbucks is building a lot more of their stores with drive throughs and putting even more emphasis on mobile orders. While I'm sure this will help them drive better efficiency, I'm not sure that it will solve the issues they have. There are plenty of places to grab a quick coffee. There are many small, wonderful coffee houses where you can still sit and relax with your coffee. The advantage Starbucks has is that you can find them everywhere and they had a good and consistent menu. They were comfortable.

Maybe in our stressed, overscheduled world we don't always want or need that much efficiency. Maybe sometimes we need to good comfortable place to go, where we can slow down a little and be around other people. Maybe that's worth paying extra for a cup of coffee!

As always, love your thoughts too! #futureofretail #customerexperience #topretailexpert

A Tale of Two Theaters

We have just returned from a 10 day cruise to Alaska (amazing, BTW) and since it was hot, muggy and rainy this weekend, we went to the movies. Of course, we saw two of the hottest movies right now, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. We did enjoy them both, but it was the experience around watching the movies that I want to write about.

I've written about my love of watching movies in the theater here, but here's the main point:

Seeing a movie in a theater with an audience also creates a group catharsis that almost never happens for me when watching at home. Part of the issue is the many distractions that I have at home that don’t happen in the theater. I’m constantly looking up trivia or checking emails or doing something completely unrelated at home. In the theater, I’m focused on the screen and the story. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been totally engrossed in a movie in the theater and sometimes even questioned how I thought I liked the movie when watching it at home. Or thought a movie was really funny when surrounded by other people laughing and then sat bored while watching it at home.

And more importantly, I said this:

Plus, I can assure you that my wife will never count it as a date night if we watch a movie at home.

We saw Indiana Jones at the local AMC theater in Clifton Commons. This is a very good theater as far as tech goes, with all of the latest in projection and sound technology so watching a movie there is very good. AMC has worked hard to make sure their tech exceeds expectations of todays cinema audience. It's part of their effort to get people to watch movies at a cinema instead of streaming at home.

What they haven't done a great job with is really educating the audience on how to be an audience. First, I get that sometimes people forget to turn their phones off, so they might ring during the movie. I mean, we've all done that. But people are on their phones throughout the movie. Person in front of us looked like they were going to record the entire movie. They had recorded all of the previews already. People text non-stop; people have conversations that don't have anything to do with the movie and generally treat the cinema like it's their living room. It's not the best environment for watching a movie.

In contrast, we saw the new Mission Impossible at The Clairidge in Montclair. Run as a non-profit by the Montclair Film Festival (full disclosure, I do a lot of work with them), it's a very different cinema. For one, the theaters and screens are much smaller. They have been upgrading all of the projectors and sound systems, but I don't think they're as good as what AMC has. But that's only one part of the in-cinema experience.

I don't know how to say it without kinda' sounding jerky, but they obviously have an audience that's better at being an audience. It was certainly an older audience, although honestly I'm not sure it's as simple as that. I think it's more that the folks who support a film festival generally know what's expected of them as an audience. There was one woman who made excited utterances about the movie, but there wasn't the level of talking we experienced the night before. And no one was on their phone during the movie.

I don't think simply making the on-screen experience better will help drive people back into the theaters. And I don't know the answer to making an audience better. I'm not even sure what I mean by that. For our family, the non-stop phone activity and talking completely takes us out of the movie and ruins the entire experience. I'd rather have the screen not as good but a quiet and engaged audience. How can we teach audiences to act in a theater? Should we be doing that? I get many distractions while watching from home, I don't want them in the theater. Am I just simply old? What do you think? LMK in the comments.

Incident at Fran's House

My daughter, Sydney, is a sophomore at Bucknell and like many students, she has had a tough year. Between suddenly having all of her classes go remote, the food program being really hard (at least last semester) and the lack of social experiences, it's been a hard year for her. But one thing that was awesome, is her experience at her residence hall, Fran's House.

But last week, she had an experience that no one at college should have. Her house was attacked by a group of graduating seniors, members of a fraternity that had previously lived in the building that she now lives in. As reported on the Bucknell website:

As reported to Public Safety, a group of male students approached the house at 825 Fraternity Road, which formerly housed the Tau Kappa Epsilon (TKE) fraternity until that group's removal two years ago. In the events that ensued, these men allegedly harassed and intimidated the residents of Tower House while attempting to enter the building. We note that TKE does not formally exist at the University, is no longer a recognized student organization, and is banned from campus operations. It is clear from multiple accounts that the students violated the physical space and, far more importantly, the residents' sense of place and security. Further, it is equally clear that Bucknell Public Safety's response to the incident was lacking in myriad ways.

Fran's House RA, Tyler Luong gave more details about what happened when the campus security in a note to the President of Bucknell:

When Public Safety arrived, they laughed at the situation. President Bravman, the officers bonded with our offenders, reminiscing their college days and calling them handsome young men. President Bravman, the two officers didn't even speak to me. Neither of the two officers came up to us Fran's House residents to ask if we were okay. AND THEN THEY PROMISED TO TALK TO THE CHIEF OF PUBLIC SAFETY TO GET THEM ACCESS TO OUR HOUSE WHEN FINALS WEEK WAS OVER, SHAKING EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEIR HANDS.

This was an outrageous act on the part of campus security, ignoring the victims while volunteering to do what they could to help the attackers. TKE was banned from the University and has no official presence at Bucknell at all. But that apparently didn't stop this group of people from coming back to what used to be their house and terrorizing the current residents. And make no mistake, that was their goal. To make the current residents feel unsafe in their home.

Not enough people understand what it is not to have a safe space. I certainly don't. I, like many other, live in a world where all of their spaces are safe. So we don't understand the big deal. I've seen the comments of people who said Hey, they were just being stupid kids, don't make it such a big deal. Someone on Twitter actually asked:

Ask yourself: Would you rather the world was run by these drunken louts or by the students who wrote these letters? I'd pick government-by-Neanderthal over government-by-Cultural-Revolutionaries every time.

Only someone who has lived their lives in constant safe spaces would even dare suggest that the world is better off being ruled by drunken louts over people asking to be treated equally and to have a safe space to live. It's amazing how many folks seem to think being held responsible for your actions is a cultural revolution.

Fran's House is an incredible haven. During this awful, stressful year for all students, my daughter has found a support system in Fran's House that quite frankly should serve as a model for all residential living at Bucknell. For that matter, every university should be thrilled to have a housing community like they have at Fran's House. We are grateful every day that Sydney has found her people who support and love her. 

While this attack has been terrible on so many levels, I would be remiss if I didn't commend the faculty/staff who created their own sign-up system to sit at Fran's House and let the residents know that they are loved and protected. When I arrived Friday evening, it was just so encouraging to see a dozen plus people, on the front lawn, there to protect all of the residents of Fran's House. And while I didn't stay there all night, my understanding is that there were people there throughout the night. The faculty/staff who both organized and were there should be the example for everyone on campus and they should be recognized publicly for what they did.

 

Every parent wants a safe college experience for their child. They should never have to worry about being safe in their own space and they certainly shouldn't be made to feel unsafe by campus security staff. This incident helped me to truly understand the need to have safe spaces for everyone.

 

At the end of the day, change will not come from those that need the safe spaces, but from those of us who've never even thought about needing safe spaces. Until we change, incidents like this will continue and those involved will never be held accountable for their actions.

 

I look forward to hearing what Bucknell will be doing so that my daughter never has to go through what happened last Thursday.

 

Official Bucknell response and the letter from Fran's House residents.

 

Articles about the incident can be found here, here and here among others.

 

The residents of Fran's House

One Season Attention Disorder

I've noticed something lately as it relates to my content viewing habits. I watch a lot of shows for one season, but rarely have I watched beyond that. Even shows I really like, it just seems to be very hard to keep going into multiple seasons. I have one season attention disorder!

Now, clearly, part of the problem is me and my normal ADHD, but I also think the way content works today is part of the problem. One I was growing up, there were two TV seasons, the fall and the spring. You knew that shows generally started in September and ending maybe around May. It some ways, it was a much easier time to plan and watch TV. I mean, there were really only 6 or so channels, so there were a lot less options available. I think about how much time I scroll through Netflix/Amazon/Prime/Disney+/Hulu looking for something that catches my eye. I think of the number of times where I've watched an episode (or less!) of something, before bagging on it as it wasn't keeping my interest.

Plus, I have to spend so much time trying to figure out where the shows are that I want to watch, when there are so many options available. I wrote about that challenge here. There are days that it's been easier to not watching anything than to try and find something I want to watch.

I know that all of this content and all of the many ways we can now watch that content was supposed to be good for consumers, but sometimes I do miss the days of knowing which days I watch which shows. It was much easier on us!

TikTok and Music Discovery

Unlike most folks my age (60), I'm actually on TikTok quite a lot these days. Started as research for a client and frankly, was pretty addicting for me. In fact, I recognized Charli D'Amelio before I recognized Boomer Esiason in the Sabra hummus Super Bowl ad. She has about 1.7 billion view of TikTok, far more than most brand views I've tracked on the site.

Yes, there are a lot of things that are just silly and yes, most of what's happening on TikTok isn't fundamentally different than what's come before it. Frankly, many of the things I watch on TikTok are sort of things we did when I was in high school, we didn't record it. To be fair, according to my daughter, we just barely had electricity when I was in high school.

But one thing I've really liked is the amount of new music I've discovered on TikTok. Not surprising, given where it started, But they've made it very easy to find the songs used in the various videos and that's made it very easy to find new artists. For example, even though Roisin Murphy has been around for a good number of years, I had not heard of her until her song Ramalama (Bang Bang) became part of a dance challenge on TikTok. Once I created a Ramalama station on Pandora, that led me to a variety of artists that I had not heard of before.

I know that TikTok has issues related to privacy, but the teens who spend an average of 52 minutes/day on the site don't seem to be worried. And honestly, what SM site these days doesn't have a privacy issue? I have seen some inappropriate material and a few fake news pieces, but I'm still on the surface even though I watch a lot. And I've only posted twice, both times about dogs we have that are looking for their forever homes.

According to a recent article in Forbes, TikTok was downloaded 123 million times in the US, about a third of our population. And we're far behind both India and China in total number of users. The average time spent per day is just under an hour, and most videos are under a minute. They've had some controversies around the monetization of the music on the site and they will need to address that as they continue to grow.

You don't need an account to watch videos on TikTok, so if you haven't checked it out, you should. I've posted some of the music I've discovered though TikTok below in case you need some new artists to follow. I might start posting more, so say hi to Old Fart if you actually have an account.

To Bundle or Unbundle, That is the Question

[This is a repost from this article that we wrote MediaVillage.]

For several years, I gave most of the presentations at the AT&T AdWorks Lab and of course, the entire discussion of un-bundling and cord-cutting was always part of the discussion. At the time, I used to say that I thought that cord-cutting was potentially more of a point in life thing and less of a generational issue. When you're single and loving alone or with roommates, you don't want to be the one stuck wit that monthly bill, so it makes sense. As you get older and have a family, you start to realize how much all of the channels cost to deliver all of the content you really want. Just take a look at this piece from last month about the costs for various streaming services.

I asked my wonderful daughter Sydney what she thought about all of this, and here's how she replied:

"What do you think about all the new subscription services?" That’s what my dad asked during our 2.5 hour car ride to CT. I answered sarcastically, “It means bad news for Netflix!" But more than that, it means bad news for consumers. Having everyone take back their piece of the pie means it will be harder for consumers to find and watch what they want, when they want.

People flocked to sites like Netflix because it made their lives easier. They are able to access a multitude of shows and movies from several genres. Everything is made readily available and the setup is easy to navigate. You can watch Thor: Ragnarok one moment, a Nat Geo special the next, and then move onto binging a new show all in one place.

Consumers don’t like sifting through multiple layers to find what they’re looking for. While new streaming services such as DC Universe and Disney+ may seem like a good idea to wealthy business men looking to get wealthier, I don’t think consumers will be as excited about this trend. For them, it just means their favorite shows and movies are being removed from the sites they already pay for. They will have to pay for multiple streaming services in order to get the assortment of movies and shows they want. I can easily see this causing strife between consumers and streaming services. Personally, I am very upset that the new season of Young Justice is only available on DC Universe when I watched the first two seasons on Netflix.

As a member of Gen Z, I can assure you we find ways to watch what we want, even if it’s not through conventional channels. Whether on Youtube or another less than legal website, Gen Z would rather find their own way to get the content they desire then pay for something they don’t want. However, there is a point where the desire for good content overpowers pride. In order to appeal to consumers, these new services need to keep their prices down and their options open. Users are more likely to switch if they believe the transition will be easy and painless. It is clear the decision to make individual streaming services was based on a desire to make more money, so streaming services will need to work hard to prove that they care about the customer’s experience too.

Good luck to Netflix when you go toe to toe with Disney +, to new companies trying to find a niche, and to consumers who will have to navigate the sea of streaming services. Honestly good luck to everyone involved in this shift, you’ll need it!

I share her frustration. Sadly, this had been going on for some time now. I wrote this back in 2015. During our SXSW presentation, William, one of our speakers, made an excellent point about content and Gen Z:

If the experience of free is better than the experience of paid, then they won't be paying!

While content providers and cable companies do everything they can to generate additional revenue, they continue to make it more difficult for consumers. It's not enough any more to have a full cable subscription, now you also have to subscribe to individual channels to get certain content. Want to see any of the new Star Trek shows? CBS All Access. Impulse? Youtube Premium. Handmaidens Tale? Hulu. Well, you get the idea. Suddenly, I'm spending $100/month for these services and I don't have premium cable channels yet.

I've now started seeing people asking who will start bundling all of these channels back together again. For example, in this piece in FierceVideo, Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar wrote:

In our opinion, however, ISPs that can create product bundles will be a lot more effective than those creating price bundles but the only company which has invested in this among ISPs is Comcast.

So, we're back to looking at who will bundle all of the streaming sites back together again. In a piece in Vox from March, wrote:

The streaming revolution, which promised to break down lots of barriers in the TV industry, is beginning to morph into something else. And what it’s morphing into looks a lot more like ... traditional television.

With Apple having music & TV bundles, BGR reports that they're now thinking about creating a super-bundle. From that report:

Apple has priced Apple TV+ aggressively on a standalone basis. It only costs about $5 a month, which is a testament both to the newness of the service and to the fact that there won’t be a lot of content available at the beginning — just a handful of shows, compared to the hundreds and hundreds of TV series and movies available on something like Netflix.

What Apple seems to be working on with this new proposed bundle offers some interesting possibilities, such as an opportunity to include the company’s subscription news service Apple News+. Depending on where Apple prices such a mega-bundle, it might be less of an ask to encourage consumers to sign up for it than to try and convince those same consumers that they need another standalone news app or something like Apple TV+.

The real question for everyone involved - consumers, content providers, networks, etc. - is how many of these will the consumers want and pay for. How will we discover shows if I have to pay for a channel to see a single show. Will consumers pay for one month of a service and binge everything (like I've been thinking about with CBS All Access).

TV would've failed at the very start if I needed to pay differently for each channel. I don't think we'll see these established channels failing, but there's no doubt that in a few years, we'll be back to paying someone to bundle everything again and complaining about how much it all costs.

Can You Be an Influencer if You're Not Real?

A recent article in Verge, Virtual creators aren’t AI — but AI is coming for them, talked about the rise of AI influencer, like Lil Miquela:

One of Instagram’s hottest influencers is a 19-year-old intelligent robot. Lil Miquela’s 1.5 million followers watch her eat sherbet on the beach, visit her favorite art galleries, and hang out with other robot models. Except, Lil Miquela isn’t really an artificially intelligent being. She’s also not a robot.

According to the article, there's a lot of VC money going into this space, which I guess is how the world works these days. But, can we really call them influencers when there's absolutely no chance they can use any products at all? Now, the influence business has had challenges and more and more we know that quite often, they are really nothing more than paid spokespeople.

Wikipedia defines an influencer as a person with the ability to influence potential buyers of a product or service by promoting or recommending the items on social media. I would add, and I think most people would as well, that they can influence us because we believe that they have knowledge and experience with the product/service they're talking about. If someone you know recommended something to you and it turns out they have never used it before, that would seriously decrease the influence they had to get us to use that product.

So what's the value of an artificial influencer? If you know they have never, and could never, use the product, aren't they just a commercial? I can certainly see this tech becoming a great tool for customer service and creating better in-store experiences, but I'm not sold on it as an influencer. I may just be old fashioned, but I think in order to influence me, you need to have actually used the product. Let me know what you think in the comments!

Marketing in a World of Bots

I’ve just returned from CES, the annual gather of all things technical in Las Vegas. Over 4,000 companies will present their wears, from the largest companies in the industry all the way down to new start-ups being shown in Eureka Park. Last year, almost 190,000 people attended over the several days of the event, all looking to see what trends they should be following. This year, there seem to be a number of key trends being discussed, that for me bring up some interesting future discussions for the advertising industry. They include 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT). Of course, there will also be a great deal of VR and AR on the show floor, some I’m very interested in.

What’s most interesting to me about these trends and how they might come together is what it means for the advertising business. Eventually, IoT will mean that everything we have will be connected, allowing the systems to know how we’re using a particular product. So, if my washing machine knows what size box of detergent I have, then it can automatically order a refill when the time comes. The AI will be able to learn how often I do wash and how long it takes me to go through that box, really taking me out of the ordering equation completely.

While not using really any tech at all right now, we have that system running with dog food today. For years, we watched the food dwindle, reminding ourselves daily for a week or so that we needed food. That usually resulted in a few days of them eating things we made at home before we got back to the pet store to buy more food. By going into the store, we could then be influenced by sales or a desire to try something new. Today, we have a standing order at Chewy and the food arrives about every six weeks.

What this means for dog food manufacturers is that it’s now much harder for them to get me to change my order. They have to get me at the right spot in the cycle to get me to change the order and they have to change my shopping habit, which Chewy has not established. The upside for our household is that our dogs are never without food. The downside for all of the brands that we’re not currently using it that it’s much harder to get into my shopping cart.

Today, we are seeing more and more products purchased this way, these kind of standing orders that happen automatically without any consumer involvement. The Amazon Dash Button is an interim step to this future, automating the purchase, but still requiring the consumer to trigger the purchase.

But as 5G rolls out, making it much easier for a wider variety of things to be connected to the network and more things being automatically connected to the network and AI learning our habits and behaviors, it starts to take me out of the purchase funnel. In the near future, I will be able to program (or they will just learn!) my shopping bots to do a large majority of my shopping for me. And for marketers, this creates huge challenges.

How will marketers in the future influence those bots that are out there shopping on my behalf? Today marketers use all kinds of tools to get me to buy. They can appeal to my emotions or just my budget. They can help me with longer term purchases or connect with me for an impulse buy. But how will an emotional appeal change the behavior of my bot?

Now, there will always be things that either require my involvement, big ticket items like major appliances or cars as well as other items that I just like to be involved in the purchase. But if toothpaste, deodorant, laundry detergent and even some of the more standard parts of my wardrobe can be purchased through my shopping bots using AI, I’m not sure I’d want to be involved in that purchase process myself. And that will upend the entire idea of the consumer journey and purchase funnel.

For me, of course, this means brands need to figure out how to connect with me before I programmed my shopping bots, so that their brands are added to the mix. I might not always want just the cheapest dog food, but I may be up for a deal among 3 or 4 brands that I have preselected. It’s critical for those brands to be in my consideration list for my bots.

Think of how many products you wish you didn’t have to shop for every week, where you could just do some upfront programming and then let the system to the rest. If you think you’re one of those products, you need to start thinking about this issue today. For the robots are coming, but these robots will be working for me the consumer and you need to make sure that I’m already loyal to your brand when they’re here.

How Place & Information Will Change in an AR World

Ten years ago, I was in Poland doing an AudienceGames installation for Orange and had an experience that I think illustrates the future of information. We had a free afternoon and decided to walk into the old section of Warsaw to do some exploring. On the way, we passed a large, Catholic cathedral. Since everything was in Polish, we didn't really know what the church was or anything about its history, but it was a beautiful church to explore.

Towards the front of the church, was a statue of St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes (and probably my personal patron saint!). And covering the stature was hundreds of rosary beads, indicating that many people have prayed to this statue of St. Jude. And on the two walls behind this stature were hundreds of little plaques, each with one name on it. Again, it seems like lots of people came to pray at this stature.

That made me ask several questions:

1. What was so special about this church? Did it survive the bombings of WWII? Was it a main cathedral? What was its historical value?
2. What made this stature of St. Jude so special? Almost every Catholic church I've been in has a stature of St. Jude, so why did it seem that everyone came here to pray?
3. What were the stories behind the individual plaques? What were they praying for? Were their prayers answered?

As AR is now becoming a more accessible technology, this becomes the basis for several layers of information that I believe we're going to be expecting in the real world:

1. What's the official story?
2. What are the unofficial stories?
3. What are the individual stories?

As many of you know, I was a Glass Explorer back in the day and still wear them on occasion today. In fact, I wore them this weekend to take pictures and video of the ITP Winter Show here in NYC. With all of the announcements about AR glasses these days (and I expect to see many more at CES next month) and with both iOS and Android releasing AR toolkits for phones, there's no doubt that we're going to see a lot more AR in the coming years.

But, that opens up all kinds of questions that we haven't even begun to think about:

• What's the UX for this new, AR world? Do we really want unfiltered and/or sponsored information overlaid on everything we look at? What's the new input experience for accessing this content? Will we use gestures, voice, eye movement? Take a look at what Alain Thys had to say about the future of UX and see what you think of his ideas.
• What is the backend for all of this content? Ori Inbar believes that it will be the AR Cloud that will drive the massive adoption needed to use AR as part of our every day lives. Information needs to be accessible in a very precise location for it to have value to the audience.
• Who will own this backend and be responsible for the massive amount of data that will need to flow through the system in order for it to be universally used? If I can only access data on one platform or another, that will make it hard for mass adoption to occur. I frequently say if TV had started like tech works today, and you needed a different TV set to watch each channel, there wouldn't have been a TV industry.
• Given how much of social media today has been taken over by trolls and haters, what happens to a society where that hate can live all around us, visually, in the real world? How will we clean up the AR graffiti that we know we cover the world? Who will make the distinction between art and garbage?
• How do we handle the right value exchange for the consumer in this connected, overlaid world? They know when the work we're doing is really only of benefit to us and they don't like it. We will not be able to force them to opt-in to this AR world unless they have a good reason.

Now, this isn't a post about answers. Today we need to start asking these questions if we're going to create an AR world that regular people want to use. As you're building AR experience, make sure you ask this simple question - where does creating a great consumer experience fall on your list of reasons to use AR or any new tech for that matter. If it's not number one, better have a good reason!