For Jellyvision’s first ever Community Give Back Day, a whole bunch of us schlepped over to Chicago’s Food Bank to help pack up milk that was later distributed to the less fortunate.  With our thoughts going out to those suffering in Haiti, it was nice to do something tangible to help those in need.

Thank you to the Chicago Food Bank for doing such good and important work, and thank you to the Jellyvision gang who pitched in.

We’re very proud of our 68% employee participation rate.

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…the Huffington Post, that is.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-remington/interview-with-harry-gott_b_375452.html

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Jellyvision’s Interactive Conversation for Eloqua wins the prestigious Groundswell award:  http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/.  (And Jellyvision sends mad props to Eloqua for being an innovative partner who inspired us to do some great work).

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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You had me at hello, too. Here’s a nice (and totally self-serving) piece for your reading enjoyment:

http://onbrands.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/hey-brand-yeah-you-you-can-have-me-at-hello/

(2 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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I love TED.com. TED is the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference and the site contains short talks (5-20 minutes each) from the most brilliant minds in, well, technology, entertainment and design. Two of the talks on the site are my personal favorites – one is from Malcolm Gladwell and the other is from Barry Schwartz.

Malcolm Gladwell’s talk is about Harold Moskowitz – a food scientist who revolutionized an industry by realizing that there’s no such thing as a perfect spaghetti sauce. People’s tastes are different and there’s no one spaghetti sauce that will make all of your customers happy. However, if you make a spaghetti sauce for each type of taste preference out there – plain, spicy Italian, extra chunky, etc. – you can have a spaghetti sauce for everyone. Prego’s website currently boasts 22 different sauce varieties. Again, there’s no one spaghetti sauce that makes everyone happy, but there are many spaghetti sauces that can make everyone happy. Find the one that’s right for you and your taste buds are thrilled. Pretty cool concept.

The other talk is from Barry Schwartz about the paradox of choice. Schwartz’s work is based on a study originally done by Mark Lepper – the chairman of Stanford University’s psychology department who studied the effects of multiple jams. Yes, you read that correctly. Multiple. Jams. Lepper did tests in grocery stores where he would have two different display tables selling jams. They were identical except that one table had 30 different types of jams to choose from (grape, strawberry, raspberry, etc.) and the other one only had six. Only 3% of people actually bought a jam from the 30-jams table, but 30% of people bought a jam from the six-jams table. 3% vs. 30%. If people are faced with too many choices, it makes them unhappy and they’re less likely to buy. Again, pretty cool concept.

So, who’s right – the many spaghetti sauces or the few jams? The answer is that they’re both right. The more specialized you can get your product line, the more likely you’ll have a product for a customer that they’ll absolutely love, but the more choices you put out there, the less likely a customer is to actually buy one of your products.

Luckily, Interactive Conversations are great at solving this problem. Interactive Conversations allow you to get the diversified product line to the consumer so they can get the product that’s just right for them, but they break up and reduce the amount of choices the consumer is exposed to at any one time by asking them small, bite-sized questions along the way.

At Jellyvision, all of our questions have only two-to-five possible answer choices and we keep them pretty simple, so there’s no choice overload – we have a couple small questions instead of one big one. After a handful of small questions we can point your customer to that perfect product whether it’s the spicy Italian spaghetti sauce or the blueberry surprise jam without overloading them. The same idea can be applied to computers or health insurance or cars or…

(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Newsflash: People have different ways of learning things. Also, the world is round and Prince is very short.

Yes, it’s common knowledge that your way of learning a new idea may be different from your friend Dwayne’s, but what’s interesting is that there are actually models that profile these different learning typologies. Psychologist Neil Fleming created one such model called VARK which stands for Visual, Aural/Auditory, Read/Write and Kinesthetic. Here’s a brief summary of each of those learning categories:

• Visual learners learn best from visual/graphical representations of information.

• Aural/Auditory learners learn best from hearing information.

• Read/Write learners learn best from reading information.

• Kinesthetic learners learn best through physical participation and dynamic videos or visualization.

One of the great things about Interactive Conversations is that they cater to all four VARK categories. For the Visual learners, we have art moments – illustrations, photos, charts and graphs to help explain a concept or an example. For Aural/Auditory learners, we have all of our Interactive Conversations voice hosted and we also include sound effects for emphasis. For Read/Write learners we provide text on screen for the majority of the explanations as well for all questions and answer choices. For Kinesthetic learners, they get to physically click on all of their answer choices, “explore” certain content with their mouse and take in dynamic art moments and text edits.

Interactive Conversations fill a unique niche in the new media/rich media marketplace – since they convey information across four different communication channels, they can serve everyone while a graph, a podcast, a text document or a video can only serve one group of users at a time. So, if you’ve got a complicated/tricky aspect to your product and/or service that could use a little VARK attention, chances are we can help.

And if you’re curious about which VARK category you fall into you can take an online survey to figure out what your learning style is. So, go VARK yourself.

(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Jump into the wayback machine, faithful Jellyfollowers, as I recount an incident from my early days with the company. The year was 1939. Gone with the Wind was tops at the box office, Amelia Earhart was officially declared dead, and a massive earthquake killed 30,000 in Chile. In the midst of these tragedies, I was learning the ropes of Interactive Conversation.

I had written a path that included the following question:

“Do you ever need to track down information or consult with colleagues to do your job?”

1. Yeah, often
2. Sure, sometimes
3. Nope, never

Let’s overlook the fact that that’s kind of a crappy question in general, and focus on the larger problem, which was quickly brought to my attention. What happens if the user picks option three? As I had written it, the host would respond with: Really? You’re an island, no outside info at all? And then I would give the user a chance to say “You know what, you’re right, I DO perform research….” So this conversation, which is supposed flow naturally from the user’s responses, is now second-guessing them and insisting that it knows best.

My defense was “Yeah, but no one in our audience would choose option three,” to which Harry (founder and guru of all things IC) responded “Then why is it an option?” After discussing it, I realized there were two possibilities: either the choice really was unnecessary (cut it) or it was legitimate and should have a legitimate response.

We were able to brainstorm a job or two that really might require no research, so the choice stayed and the host dialog became much less incredulous. Of course, we ultimately replaced the entire question with the far superior How much of your time is spent doing research?, but the point stands.

And that point is this: In an interactive conversation, the user can only say what you let them. So, if you’re making fun of them for saying it, you’ve probably done something wrong.

(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)

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Insurance sites make no sense. They’re loaded with complex, unfriendly terminology. They expect you to navigate your own way through a series of poorly-worded links. And forget about those poor souls who live in any of the dozen or so “special case” parts of the country, who have to read all the small type. (As a rule, do NOT live in the Virgin Islands if you want any chance of understanding your coverage.)

Well, maybe not ALL insurance sites are like this. Take this week’s receiver of Jellyvision props: aflac.com.

They have simple choices on every page. Their wording is natural. And this is my favorite part: they don’t try to detail all of the crazy ins and outs of their policies…

Sometimes people are just better at telling you what you need to know.

Speaking of the human touch, though, there is ONE section of their site that I’d like to try a little IC on: small business.

The small business section is definitely clear and easy to follow, so that’s not what draws me to it. The problem is that they provide just enough selling points to make clicking through all of the links a bit of a chore. A host that could tailor the benefits to the individual user would go a long way. Instead of the user having to find the information most relevant to their situation, Interactive Conversation could serve the key details up on a platter, simply by asking the right questions.

For example…

Host: Now, how familiar would you say you are with insurance laws?

1. I’m an expert.

2. I could probably learn a thing or two.**

Host: Hey, no problem. That’s why we’re here.

Host: So, you mentioned before that you have a group health insurance plan… Um, did you have at least 20 employees – full OR part time – during 50% or more of the business days last year?

1. Yes.**

2. No.

3. I’m not sure.

Host: Okay, then you have to comply with something called COBRA laws. Are you familiar with COBRA? The consolidated omnibus budget reconciliation act?

1. Yes, I know it well.

2. Yeah, but walk me through it.**

3. No, not at all.

Host: Sure thing. COBRA – along with HIPAA – the health insurance portability and accountability act, requires that you temporarily continue certain employee benefit plans when those benefits would normally end – under certain situations. Now, I could go a lot deeper into this – and I’d have to, because it gets really complex – but the good news is that I don’t have to, because Aflac gives you complete COBRA administration. This means we take care of…

Advantages to an IC approach like this might be:

1. More leads (those who would have otherwise missed the key, personal “hook” to initiate contact, will now find it.)

2. More qualified leads (users will be well informed on the issues that matter to them most)

Also – and this is a bit of guess here, but I don’t mind going out on a limb – unlike an employee dedicated to this kind of material in a larger company, small business owners most likely aren’t HR/insurance pros, so a little extra hand holding in this case probably wouldn’t hurt.

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I’ve been subscribing to my daily Astrology.com horoscope for about five years now. Last week I learned that I should start to “expect the unexpected,” because Uranus will be turning retrograde (Ha!) for the next five months.

After reading this startling piece of information, I began relating it to every aspect of my life: Am I feeling more rebellious as of late? Am I seeking out change? Is it wrong for me to still make Uranus jokes now that I’m in my late twenties?

The answers:

Yes.

Yes.

And no. Of course not!

As I started making notes about how this change in Uranus (giggle) might affect my future, I realized something: millions of other Libras have just read the same horoscope. And of those millions, I’m pretty sure a whole bunch of them applied that same information to their own lives.

What I’m saying is that it’s a natural habit for people to personalize general information. We accept that millions of people may experience the same thing we are experiencing, but we tend to ignore it. And for the most part, we’re totally fine with it.

This is definitely something we keep in mind when we write for Interactive Conversations. I mean, as personal as we try to make the experience, there will always be some generalities. I think for us, a big challenge is finding the generalities that the audience will accept, while personalizing where we can…

… and of course making too many Uranus jokes.

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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Most Web sites follow very similar conventions for navigation, which is generally a good thing. The last thing you want is visitors who can’t find what they’re looking for—they won’t be visitors for long. As you might have guessed from the kind of work we do, however, we’re interested in other ways of interacting online.

Here’s a new one: Triple Canopy has come up with an intriguing, innovative example of a way to adapt the technology of the dead-tree press for the Web. They have an online magazine that mimics the experience of actually reading a magazine. There are two basic controls: “+” for turning a page forward and “–“ for turning back. (You can also use the arrow keys.)

It’s like flipping through a magazine, except that the pages don’t stick together. And some pages have embedded video. By keeping design simple, they created a way to interact that is far superior to the vertical scrolling at virtually all other online media sites.

Of course, you can also jump to a particular article from the table of contents. Just hover over the pictures to see titles and synopses, and click to jump to any article.

Their navigation wouldn’t work for all types of sites. Or, really, ANY other type of site, for that matter. But it’s the best magazine format I’ve ever seen. The only major defect is that it doesn’t work well as bathroom reading. You can’t win ‘em all, I guess.

(2 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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