Introducing Head Tilt: Your New KPI

Introducing a revolutionary new performance metric for the modern age. It's called Head Tilt.

Looking down is old news. What’s even down there? The pavement? Our shoes? Looking up, though, is truly on the up. You can see things in front of you, above you, and sometimes even to the side of you.

But how can we measure this? How can we report it? That is where the Head Tilt Matrix comes in. 

You start by observing the position of your audience member’s, visitor’s, or customer’s head in relation to their body. For those new to analytics, it’s recommended to measure the angle created by the direction of the eyes, which are usually located on the front of the face.

Anything between 0 and 90 degrees means your audience member’s neck angle is likely trending downwards towards their own hands, one of which is statistically likely to be holding a phone.

Anything between 90 and 180 degrees means your audience member’s neck angle is on a solid upward trajectory towards the world around them, the people they are with, and strategically placed objects, content, and messaging.

And for advanced users, the horizontal right-left axis presents new and unique opportunities to measure curiosity, confusion, and intrigue.

Once you start measuring, it’s hard to stop seeing sub-optimal Head Tilt as a common issue in our museums, galleries, supermarkets, theme parks, classrooms, and experiential bakeries.

Don't just capture attention. Encourage it.

Ok, more serious now. You get the idea.

Head Tilt may be a metric I have entirely made up for fun, but there is a strategic shift behind the joke. Don't just capture attention. Activate it. 

Can we judge what we offer by more than just the attention we can measure? Can we design our products, services, and experiences to inspire people to act differently, notice more, feel, discover, and do?

Views, clicks, footfall, dwell time, engagement, and retention. Those numbers tell us something useful about how people use a product or attend a place. But they don't always tell us what the experience made possible.

Did someone notice something they would otherwise have missed? Strike up a conversation? Explore a place? Try an activity? Make something with another person? Leave smiling? Were they even encouraged to?

Visitors might want to spend less time reading interpretation on their phones and more time looking closely at the collection. What encourages that? A family brand might want a digital prompt to turn into an activity everyone can join. What could that be? A broadcaster might want a programme to spark conversations long after the credits roll. How can we support that?

Design for behaviours

Much as neck sensors for visitors, children, or customers would help, Head Tilt is potentially a useful as a design principle and strategic aim. 

It’s one way to challenge your approaches, take new starting points, work with different people, and develop more suitable briefs before jumping to formats, features, and solutions based on the familiar metrics.

Try asking three questions: What do we want people to notice? What do we want people to do? What do we want them to feel? Those questions change the starting point. 

Instead of asking how to increase time spent in an app, you might ask how an app could help a family enjoy a day trip. Instead of adding another screen to a gallery, you might ask what would encourage two visitors to compare what they see. Instead of extending a piece of content, you might ask what it could set in motion beyond itself.

Of course, looking down is not inherently bad. Screens can support creativity, accessibility, learning, and connection. The point isn't to remove the screen. It's to be clear about the behaviour and outcome it serves.

But an observation isn't the same as an answer. How do you work out which possibility is actually worth pursuing?

From a small observation to something worth testing

This is one way I use a framework called NIIICE which stands for Notice, Investigate, Identify, Imagine, Create, Experiment. You can read more about how I use this in Strategic Reviews here.

NIIICE is a facilitated way of moving from a hunch to a clearer challenge, then towards possibilities you can test. 

Let’s take that everyday observation of people heads down, buried in their phones, to see where it leads.

N — Notice

Notice people looking at phones while walking through museums, browsing shops, waiting in queues, or spending time with friends. At this stage, it's just an observation: heads down. Something worth treating as an early signal and getting curious about.

I — Investigate

Look more closely at what's happening. Are people scrolling absent-mindedly, navigating, translating, reading about what they're seeing, or sharing something with a friend? Who is benefiting, and who might be excluded? Observe behaviours, talk to people, look at other sectors, and challenge your first assumptions.

I — Identify

The same observation might reveal several different needs. Maybe people are struggling to find their way. Maybe they want more context about what they're seeing. Maybe an experience gives them too few reasons to interact with the people or places around them. Identify the challenges worth exploring.

I — Imagine

Now explore different responses to that challenge. Could you invite visitors to spot, compare, or discuss things before reaching for an explanation? Could a simple game get families looking for details together? Don't decide in advance that the answer has to be an app. Imagine several routes, including the ones that barely involve technology.

C — Create

Make a few of those possibilities tangible. Try a paper card with a ‘look up and find’ challenge. Mock up a one-screen phone prompt that starts a shared activity and then gets out of the way. You don't need a finished product to find out whether an idea changes what people do. At this stage, making is another way of asking the right questions.

E — Experiment

Try the ideas with people and different versions to watch what happens. Do they look more closely? Talk to one another? Notice something new? How’s that Head Tilt doing? Learn, adjust, and test again before jumping into a brief or tender.

By the end, you might have a much sharper brief for a digital interaction, a physical change to a space, or nothing new to build at all. Observation opens up possibilities, and the process helps you discover which are worth pursuing.

Look up

Sadly, Head Tilt probably isn't coming to your analytics dashboard any time soon. That's fine. I'm at peace with it. It has already done its job if it makes us question what we mean by engagement and what success should look like.

If you’d genuinely like to explore more Heads Up approaches, or have another challenge that could be run through Green Raven’s NIIICE discovery process, it would be great to talk.