Recently in Interactive Design Category

Seems like cool events usually happen on the same night... If blogging and journalism is more your thing, the Online News Association will be hosting a *free* seminar tomorrow (06/18/09) night at the LA Times building. Topics of conversation will include the popularity and the "revolution" of high iPhone usage and how to leverage the technology when it comes to reporting. Thanks to my buddy, Martin Bosworth of ConsumerAffairs.com for the heads up!

Registration closes tomorrow - so sign up ASAP if you'd like to go. 

Of course it you'd like some 101 on Twitter and Facebook, I'll be seeing you tomorrow night at Provecho!

If you're in Los Angeles on Thursday I'd like to cordially invite you to a short presentation I'm giving (sponsored by Staples) to the gracious people at Conexion and the Latina Business Association L.A. It's $10 at the door and will be held at Provecho in Downtown L.A. I'll be speaking about my two favorite topics: Twitter and Facebook and how it relates to *you* in the professional world!

Here's the flyer.

Hope to see you there!

I was planning on blogging about our annual AIGA | Aquent Survey of Design Salaries (which is a bit of a misnomer, as it includes Web Developers and Copywriters), but I don't know if I'm late already.

See that's the problem with Twitter, I'm doing a million other things and getting ready to write about the survey and I see that's it's already been tweeted a hundred times. Now I know how those document copying monks must have felt about Gutenberg.

But maybe I'm just being stubborn. The point is to make sure everyone knows about it, right? Not to be the first person to tell everyone about it.

A warning before you try to print this whole doc up from the AIGA site: it's 48 pages long.

Might want to read it as a PDF.

Be the first to tell your friends!

(From guest poster, Greg Carter)

The night, I purchased tickets online for a theatrical event. Yeah, I know, very exciting, but why I'm bringing this up is because of the checkout process.

Thanks to the email from the theater troupe, I found the show listing with relative ease. But after selecting two tickets and clicking checkout, I was asked to create an account (or login if I already had one, which I didn't), click the link to create an account, and an exasperating five separate pages later, I was finally able to order the tickets.

Lucky for the troupe, I really wanted to see this particular show, or else I would have given up the process long ago.

It's a glaring design flaw such as this that authors Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus hope to combat with their book Web Design for ROI. (ROI stands for "return on investment", or this according to Investopedia.)

True, the theater probably does need all that information to process the ticket order, but a simpler process, something that takes into account the user and his/her reactions, would probably decrease frustration and increase online ticket sales.

Your company may have hundreds of fantastic products for which the public is hungering, but if the home page is too cluttered with information and images, or searching for a specific item turns into a hunt for Dr. Livingstone, or the potential buyer can't tell the "Add to Cart" button from the "Exit" button, then your site may not be doing its job. However, instead of spending thousands of dollars to re-design your entire site, Loveday and Niehaus suggest perhaps a little tweaking to the design, how pages are laid out, will show a quicker and better response.

Take into account your users. Most people quickly skim a homepage, looking for information important to them. Long paragraphs probably won't hold their interest, so why not try headlines in a bolder type, stronger color and have the headline link to another page with that information or story. People also tend to read from left to right, top to bottom, so creating your pages with that flow in mind will make the experience a more pleasant one. Or, as a rebuttal to my ticket purchase example, give the user the option of creating an account or not.

REI's checkout process does exactly that, and I can say from my own experience, I liked not having to create a password and enter account information just to by a one-time gift (for my brother since I'm the farthest thing from outdoorsy you could imagine). Design a good user experience, and the user is likely to return or to even recommend your site to their friends.

Web Design for ROI offers other simple, common sense techniques to re-work the design of a site to make it more productive and effective. For anyone who designs sites or has a say in their creation, this book would be an incredibly useful tool.

(Photo by haydnseek)

Ms. Pistachio was the first to alert me, via Twitter, natch, that Skittles had gone all Social Media on us. Sure as shootin', the current (March 2, 2009) Skittles.com is a mash-up of social media sites where the name of the colorful and intoxicatingly concentrated jelly-bean-oidal confection appears.

Of course, Skittles, with the aid of Agency.com, are following in the footsteps of Modernista!, who took their own website in this direction last year. Still, the fact that a consumer brand has emulated a trendy design shop has got everybody talking, including the ever articulate (and strikingly handsome) David Armano, who rightly predicts, I believe, that we'll see more of this, not less and goes on to link the Skittle move to the emergence of "sponsored conversations."

But what is this "this" that we're going to be seeing more of? I think it's something we could call "aleatoric" design which takes advantage of the fact that web pages, in the end, exist as a set of instructions to be executed by a browser, not a fixed arrangement of text and image (as in the print world). Since these instructions can be linked to dynamic sites themselves (Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.), "design now becomes the quasi-symphonic arrangement of fluid elements that resist control or even predictability.

Given this tendency, wouldn't it be better for web designers to have a background in performance, choreography, or musical composition than graphic arts? Isn't it time we acknowledged that interactive design is NOT graphic design (or that the latter is an increasingly small and incidental component of the former)?

This morning I received one of those motivational e-mails from a friend of mine in Hong Kong. It was entitled Violinist in the Metro and told the story of a musician playing the violin in a Washington DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. Apparently he played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approximately two thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

After three minutes a middle-aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule. After four minutes the violinist received his first dollar tip - a woman threw the money in to the hat and without stopping continued to walk.

At the six-minute mark a young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, but then looked at his watch and started to walk again. After ten minutes a three-year old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

During the 45 minute performance only six people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The musician collected a grand total of $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He had played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars.

Two days prior, Joshua Bell had sold out at a concert hall in Boston where tickets had averaged $100 per seat.

This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organised by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people.

The questions raised included:

• In a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour do we perceive beauty?
• Do we stop to appreciate it?
• Do we recognise the talent in an unexpected context?

One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be that if we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments, how many other things are we missing?

So my question to anyone interviewing talent for their business is whether you can ever really detect a candidate's true potential during interview? Look beyond the 45 minute time slot you have allocated to make your decision. Look beyond the résumé that sums up their career history and appreciate and recognise what the person in front of you may be able to bring to your business in the long run.

Image courtesy of: takacsi75

I'm still trying to figure this out. When you ask web professionals and the people who recruit or hire them to evaluate the importance of the various attributes used to distinguish one Web professional candidate from another, you get some strong agreement - both groups are in accord that work experience and a specialized skill set are the most important attributes - but you also get some interesting disagreements.

To whit, personality/cultural fit is only important to 90% of web professionals, while it's important to a full 98% of employers. I've made my views on the fit issue crystal clear, so I won't repeat them here, but I will say that, in the staffing industry, there's an old saw that goes, "Hire for skills, fire for fit." In other words, fit definitely impacts on-the-job success. So why the gap?

There are two things I mentioned in my last post on this subject that may explain why web folk view "fit" as, if not totally unimportant, then, at least, less important.

First of all, web professionals want flexible work schedules and the ability to work from home (87% see it as important when considering a new job opportunity). Could it be that "fit" declines in importance when you realize that you won't actually be working directly with others in a particular environment?

Secondly, as we discovered, 43% of working web professionals plan on looking for a new job within the next 12 months and another 35% say they would consider making a move if the right thing came along. It makes sense that fit is going to matter less to you if you're a short-timer, then if you're settling in for the long haul, right?

So much for my speculation on this topic. How sound do these explanations, er, sound?

Note: I'll probably be mining the research on the state of the web profession we conducted with Monster for a while here. If you'd like to dig into it yourself, please do so and then feel free to share your insights.

Image Courtesy of freeparking.

Aquent partnered with Monster to uncover the key to "attracting, keeping and developing Web talent in an uncertain economy" and we presented our findings in an AMA webcast today (I've embedded the slides below for your viewing convenience).

It would seem that, while others in the creative class may be struggling, the web folk are feeling fairly confident. 72% of our respondents said they would rate their current position as moderately to highly secure. 52% feel that they would have a good or excellent chance of finding another web position were they to look (a belief that is semi-bolstered by the fact that 37% of our client respondents said they plan on hiring web talent in 2009). And 51% saw their compensation increase over the last twelve months.

This level of confidence amongst the web-enabled is understandable. From the standpoint of companies looking for web talent, it also makes these folks "available." Indeed, 43% percent of the people we asked said that they will actively seek another position within the next 12 months, while an additional 35% said they would make a move if the right opportunity presented itself. In other words, 78% of working web talent are "out there."

I'm not a math guy, but all signs point to this being a good time to be looking for web talent (and a good time to actually be a talented web professional). If you are in the hiring game, you might want to consider the following to lure the interactive moths to your particular flame: web folk are looking for stable positions, flexible schedules, and access to professional development. If you've got that on offer, then get busy offering!

As mentioned, the slides:

@iamkhayyam turned me on to this inspiredology post featuring intriguing examples of "horizontal" web design (i.e., sites that scroll from right to left instead of up and down). Checking them out made me realize a) that I don't see this enough, b) you can use a lot of different visual metaphors to indicate when a site is loading, and c) some human beings are really, truly, super creative.

The majority of these are portfolio sites. If you don't have time to look at all 25, I recommend that you at least take a gander at these four:

Cesar Jacobi/Mutanz- Pythonesque surreal animation and cool t-shirts (among other work).

BBH London - Very elegant, fluid layout and amazing commercial work.

SectionSeven Inc. - Slick 3D foldout animation.

Ole Häntzschel - Clever use of distortion, illegibility, and rollovers.

If you've still got time, here's two more:

Sonido - Nice "Word Search" Menu Metaphor.

Nile Studio - Russian design studio with a typical horizontal portfolio but very trippy cyrillic type work.

Have you seen any good examples of horizontal design that aren't on inspiredology's list? They've got to be out there...

Image Courtesy of Môsieur J..