At the beginning of November, our Marketing Manager – Natalia Paprota had a chance to visit Berlin and interview eye square’s Michael Schießl and Friedrich Jakobi. eye square is one of our long-term partners, and we had an opportunity to work together for a while now. Please read the entire interview to see what the eye square officials think of working with us and their plans for the further development of their projects.
Watch the video recording at the end of this post.
Full Interview
Natalia: Hi guys. It’s nice to meet you. I’m glad to be here and have you here. Maybe we can start by introducing yourselves. Friedrich please start.
Friedrich: Yeah, I’m very happy, to do so. Thanks a lot for the opportunity to present eye square and the cooperation. So, I’m Friedrich, Friedrich Jakobi, I’m the CFO of, eye square and I’m also responsible for other areas like internationalisation. And, with respect to DAC, I’m also responsible for the eye-tracking development project on eye square side.
Natalia: Thank you very much. Michael.
Michael: It’s such a pleasure to have you here. My name is Michael, Michael Schießl. I’m the CEO of the company. I’m also among the founders of eye square. Great to have you here. Friedrich and I started the company with some other founders. Great to have you here in Berlin.
Natalia: Great, thank you. So maybe you can tell me more about eye square. What exactly are you doing and how was eye square created?
Michael: eye square started already, well, 20 years ago. We call the things we are doing right now “human experience insights”. So we try to bring the level of psychology and the level of coding together. We want to bring harmony in the interaction, for instance, between a man and algorithms, a man and machine, so we called it human experience. What people see. What they feel. What they think. From the business side, you need that if you want to do good user experience research, if you want to understand how robots function, how cars function, then you need that. You also need that in the area of brand and media experience. It’s also bigger business for us. You want to understand digital advertising, TV, and the third application we call the shopper experience. But it’s really about selling things, selling in eCommerce, selling in the real world. That’s what we call human experience insights. We want to bring a new harmony. We want to help our clients to understand the humanity, the human beings, who are out there. And, we’ve proven that this is very precious also for business success.
Natalia: Okay, nice. And who are your clients exactly, Friedrich?
Friedrich: Well, we have a diverse crowd of clients as Michael explained, the different units. We have clients like Google, and Facebook, but we also have clients like fast-moving consumer goods, insurance companies, and banks, so basically everybody, every company that places ads or wants to find out about their customer experiences.
Natalia: Okay, great. And what business idea brought you to DAC, what brought you to us?
Michael: Well, we have all these, it’s called methodology. So we have technical tools. For instance, we have great tools for assessing so-called implicit attitudes or implicit emotions there, for instance, based on how fast people could react to something. And we have had these tools accessible for years now. And then our vision is to bring all the tools together for a realistic understanding of human beings, which combines the level of perception, the level of feeling, and the level of thinking. And we were searching for a partner who could help us in the integration of these things. So we call that Spark, the Spark platform. And the idea behind Spark is to have a very easy-to-use, very user-friendly approach to combine all these latest insights from neuropsychology, and media psychology, in one platform. And that’s where we came to DAC.
Natalia: Yeah. Perfect. Okay, so what factors were important to you while you were choosing your technology partner, and of course, why you chose us?
Michael: Yeah, we were searching, certainly, for competence. This is the first and most important level. Certainly, we had, therefore, very good impressions, great credentials, great CVs. It was all very good. I would add. certainly, a second very important point. Communication. Do they understand us? Are they asking back? How is the communication? Is it on time? Is it proper? Is it positive? So we also found communication very good. Yeah, I would add maybe a little bit more vague spirit that we have, the feeling, there’s also a spark on the other side, and I was confident on all three points.
Friedrich: Maybe, let me add, I mean, the reason why we have chosen DAC again for the new project, was also because we’ve been quite satisfied and happy with the first one, the Spark project. So, on this eye-tracking project, in particular, we were very impressed with the competence of the team, the timelines, how they are met. It’s very, good to work together, and you have a great project team on site and communication, as Michael mentioned, is very good.
Natalia: Okay. So, what did you want to achieve, Michael, from our side, while building the Spark platform?
Michael: We wanted to integrate all our tools, certainly, also to free our consultants that they don’t have to do, you know, all the fiddling and all the groundwork, that they could focus more on creativity. We also want to create a new, well, new interface with our clients that they could potentially use it on their own. That is all automatized. And these were the main business aims. And we were, beyond that, also very pleased that we got extra inspiration. I think we got further with you in the cooperation and this went very well. So Spark here is a highlight project.
Natalia: So I can assume that you are happy with the outcome?
Michael: I’m very happy and the teams are very proud of what they’ve done here. This was going very well.
Natalia: And what about the eye-tracking project? How is it going?
Friedrich: Well, it’s going well. We have just completed the next milestone. So, over the last couple of months, this was a very intense project collaboration. We basically have achieved what we have, what we’re aiming for. So, although the project is not yet over, we now have a prototype and now the prototype has to become real live-action, and has to be integrated into our technology. So these are the next steps on our journey. And we hope that DAC will continue to support us, as has before.
Natalia: Okay. It was supposed to be my other question. What are the next steps from the eye square? So I assume that…
Friedrich: Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned, we are working on the integration. Soon, we’ll be working on the integration of the new technology into our existing core assets, and core technologies. And then we also, of course, need to find and tune the prototype further and test it and evaluate it in the field. So there are a lot of things to do, still, but we are confident in looking forward that we have a good partner on our side.
Natalia: Great. I hope so. Okay guys, so Michael, from the business point of view, what does it mean for eye square to have Spark?
Michael: Spark is a very great success for us. It automatized and integrated the processes. As I said, it frees our internal resources. It brought us to a new level together with our clients. It’s maybe what could be considered a one-stop shop. So this is going very well. Also, the UX help from DAC was very good and we are very confident now, also, to go on to the next level. We call that Mega. Everybody knows that the future will come. We’ll have mega challenges. Mega opportunities. So it goes in both directions. Yeah, so we would define the next steps with this tiny and big Greek word “mega”, mega things are coming for our clients, for us. Where in our corporation, on one hand, we would see the side of psychology that we need, which is an even better understanding of how to integrate perception, emotion, and cognition into, well, what is called attention overall. You know, what is real attention? This is, like, the main topic we are circling around. We work on a lot of solutions to integrate that, to combine it with content, with meaning. This is an important topic. And we certainly see, I tend to call it meta, but I’m not just referring to certain developments, but meta could be seen as a foresight perspective where, for instance, the total connectivity is moving on. All the devices are giving data around you all the time. AI is there, so we will see more AI-related assistance. Robots. This will raise questions. And third, we have extended. We will soon see extended realities. We are unsure, of where they are. Might not be just the virtual world. Could be like with augmented reality. We also see that the big screens are coming back. This is also very interesting. So we have extended interfaces and these three combinations of total connectivity, AI and extended realities with the connection of an extended psychological understanding. That’s what we are aiming for. We’re very happy to work with DAC on these great topics.
Natalia: It sounds so exciting, and like an innovative idea. Something totally new on market.
Michael: Very new. And we are very happy with DAC, with the competence, the communication, especially the skills in computer vision, and AI. That’s really great. Thank you so much.
Natalia: Okay. Thank you guys for having me and for this interview.
Michael: Was a pleasure for us.
Friedrich: Was a pleasure. Thanks a lot.
We are always happy to see our clients satisfied with the work we do for them and with them. We are looking forward to future projects and successes.
Watch the video recording below.
Watch the interview with eye square
About eye square
Eye square is a psychology-oriented, international market research institute. Their drive is to help their clients better understand the customers who propel their businesses. They help businesses to better understand their customers by delving into the complexity of their behaviours. Their unique methods combine psychology, science and state-of-the-art technology to capture and analyze real (neuro-biological), explicit and implicit reactions of your customers in numerous settings. They don’t only show what happens but also why, to better understand the customers’ aims and driving forces.
