A conversation with Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus
 Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus are the authors of Web Design for ROI, and will be featured in a webcast hosted by Aquent on May 22. Their approach to web design, while theoretically informed, is relentlessly pragmatic. As they put it, "Our work is about more than just getting people to think about web design. We want them to act."
If you want to improve the performance of your site, read their book. If you want a glimpse into their approach, read the rest of this post!
1. Web Design Isn't What You Think It Is
"Everyone thinks of design in terms of 'graphic design' - colors, fonts, logos, etc.," says Sandra. "We're working with a more strategic and multi-disciplinary concept of design, one that takes business goals as its starting point. Designing from this perspective allows you to determine whether or not all the elements truly support those goals."
"Our notion of design is really about problem-solving," adds Lance, "and goes beyond interface design or even experience design, because it doesn't just involve the creative folks. It involves all the different people on the team, from the business owner on down, and making sure everyone rallies around the objectives of the site."
"We decided to write this book," he continues, "because we were frustrated at the money being left on the table by under-utilized sites with a lot of potential. Design needs to be about helping a company succeed as a business, and that means thinking about costs, customers, and results. Ultimately, we want to take the discipline up a notch."
2. Small Changes Can Bring Big Results
"People are always surprised when we tell them they can improve site performance with relatively small, inexpensive changes. Well, it's true," Sandra explains. "Consider buttons. We've seen people increase check-out throughput by 40 percent just by increasing the size of the check-out button.
"Now, stop reading this and look at your buttons. Are they large enough? Are they legible? Are they placed appropriately? Do the most important buttons stand out? Adjusting these elements can cost next to nothing and can have a major impact."
"Another quick fix we recommend," Lance says, "is adding a functional tag line to your home page. That can solve one of the web's most common problems: 60 percent home page bounce rates.
"Web users have two questions when they arrive at your site: 'Is this what I expected to find?' and 'Does this site have what I'm looking for?' Your tagline should answer those questions instantly. I'm talking simple text, less than 10 words, that is descriptive, explanatory, and intuitive."
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 I am generally bored by presentations, business, academic, or otherwise. I fidget, I doodle, and my comments or questions tend to fall into the "distracting/sometimes comedic" category. And while I've sat through my share of boring presentations, I will freely admit that I have likewise conducted some of my own. Moreover, I have known the searing pain and embarrassment of consciously doing so.
I've tried to play with the genre in order to liven things up. At academic conferences, I've eschewed the traditional reading approach and spoken ex tempore. In business contexts, I've used Godin-esque PowerPoints featuring provocative images and 5 words or less per slide, and I've even daringly presented without a PowerPointed net.
Still, I have yet to try Pecha Kucha. A Pecha Kucha Night is an event whereat designers present their ideas on design under rather strict limits: Each presenter gets 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide. If you do the math, you'll realize that gives each presentation 400 seconds, or a little over six minutes.
The founders of PK Night, Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham architecture, realized that, if you "give a mike to a designer (especially an architect) ... you'll be trapped for hours." At the same time, they wanted to create "a place for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public." Incipit Pecha Kucha.
I'm loving the concept. Can you imagine a speaker telling you, "Yes, I'd be happy to present at your conference, but I refuse to speak for more than six and a half minutes"?
If that sounds like a dream come true, CALL ME! I would be happy to speak anywhere, on ANY SUBJECT, Pecha-Kucha-style. Even if I'm boring, the light at the end of the tunnel of boredom is coming atcha in twenty 20-second increments. So don't worry. It will be over soon.
Image Courtesy of Sam Takes Photos.
 Random searching in Google brought me to this site: Smashing Magazine. Created by two German fellows (they live in Germany, anyway), who claim that, "Our aim is to inform our readers about the latest trends and techniques in web-development - clearly, precisely and regularly," the magazine threatens to, and I quote, "SMASH YOU WITH THE INFORMATION THAT WILL MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER. REALLY." Well, forewarned is forearmed.
I browsed through the "INSPIRATION" category and found this post on "Beautiful Handwriting, Lettering, and Calligraphy." You have to scroll a bit to get into the meat of it, but they have collected an amazing assortment of lettering styles and approaches.
There's also a lot of great stuff in their "FONTS" category, if you are into that sort of thing. My guess is that, once you get an eyefull of the "Breathtaking Typographic Posters," or the "60 Brilliant Typefaces for Corporate Design," you will be.
Now go get smashed.
Image Courtesy of woodleywonderworks.
 Maybe I was just desperate, but, in order to come up with a blog post today, I went to Google and searched for the coolest thing ever. That search led me to this site, Webware, which features, "Cool Web 2.0 Apps for Everyone."
The Cool Web App they were calling "the coolest thing ever" is this: Viscosity - the modern art generator.
The coolest thing ever? Even though I did use it to make the adjoining hideous graphic in about 10 seconds, I'm not so sure. I'm kind of leaning towards MindHabits, a game that apparently makes you happier and more self-confident. It even boosted the self-esteem of telemarketers and made them more successful.
Now THAT'S the coolest thing ever!
Image Courtesy of Matthew T. Grant.
What Is a Website?
Mar 25, 2008 @ 10:03 AM · Matthew Grant
 This is a snapshot of Modernista!'s new website. Yes, they are using their Wikipedia page as their homepage (though apparently Wikipedia took it down for a while due to this unconventional usage). They also use Google News for their "news" section and Flickr for their portfolio.
I'm not the first to write about this. PSFK wrote about it last week, as did MarketingVOX and others. Before that, a number of bloggers - Gareth Kay, Paul Isakson, and Tom O'Keefe, among them - weighed in both for and against this novel approach.
Some (like Mitch Caplan) found it "Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant." Others, like Mr. O'Keefe, were less impressed. The pro-camp sees it as the ultimate acceptance of Web 2.0 reality, in which your online reputation defines who you are. The cons see it as lazy, ugly, or just one step beyond what Zeus Jones had already done.
I think the difference between the Modernista! site and the Zeus Jones site is significant insofar as the latter is an actual site with links to Zeus Jones-flavored content, whereas the M! site is really just a widget leading you to M! content across the web.
At the same time, Modernista!'s move reminds us that, in spite of the spatial metaphor inscribed in the term, a website is not a place or a location. It is a set of relations between disparate elements. In fact, the elements related are often sets of relations themselves, such as Google search results.
This may be the reason that information architecture seems more cutting edge than graphic design on the web. When "sites" are reduced to their content, or even more radically, consist primarily of continually changing content from other sites, who cares about white space, color palettes, and buttons?
I know this much, the content doesn't!
In Part 1 of our podcast interview with James Intriligator, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Wales in Bangor, we talked about branding, loyalty, and consumer psychology.
In Part 2, we discuss personae and customer motivation, different neuormarketing approaches, and how understanding the brain can help us make more effective commercials (among other things, of course).
Listen in on our conversation by clicking on the Flash device below. You are also welcome to download an mp3 of this interview by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) on this link. You can also check out this and other Talent Blog Podcasts on iTunes. Heck, you can even subscribe to our podcast there!
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A few highlights of the interview can be found at the following time coordinates:
01:50 - How to Get the Most out of Focus Groups
03:52 - Aunt Sally and the Straw Man
05:03 - Customer Motivation: Dreams and Aspirations (not just Fears, Uncertainties, and Doubts)
09:59 - Marketing and Branding from a Strategic, Artistic Perspective
11:55 - "There are a lot of good things you can do with marketing"
13:39 - Defining "Neuromarketing"
15:16 - Pros and Cons of Different Neuromarketing Approaches
17:15 - "If someone wants to pursue marketing from a neuromarketing perspective..."
20:44 - The Classic Mistake that Most Ads Make
21:58 - Another Classic Mistake
24:16 - Segment the Emotional and Attentional Aspects of Your Campaigns
Image Courtesy of Looking Glass.
 The other day an SEM specialist told me, "Marketing is a hard science."
She said it, at least in part, ironically. "Marketing? A science? Come on! What's next? Fishing?"
Marketing may not yet be a hard, or even soft, science. Nevertheless, scientists are indeed taking a hard look at marketing and beginning to paint a very interesting picture of how and why marketing actually works IN THE BRAIN.
James Intriligator is one such scientist. Having received his doctorate in psychology from Harvard for work on "attention," James did a stint as a consultant to the automotive industry, among others, before assuming a post in the Center for Neuroscience and Consumer Psychology at the University of Wales, Bangor.
I've known James for many years and decided to call him up when I wanted to get a handle this "neuromarketing" thing. He was kind enough to walk me through this emerging field as well as his own findings regarding brand loyalty (Hint: It kind of makes you act like a crazy person!), segmentation, and literally getting inside the customer's brain.
I invite you to listen in on our conversation. I think you'll find the discussion illuminating and, at times, even entertaining. (Where else will you hear people talk about "brand build-up," "brand flossing," and "brandectomies"?) I had a lot of questions for James and he had a lot of answers. For this reason, I've split the interview into two parts.
You can check out Part 1 right here by clicking on the Flash device below:
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You are also welcome to download an mp3 of this interview by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) on this link, or check out this and all other Talent Blog Podcasts on iTunes.
A few highlights of the interview can be found at the following time coordinates:
02:35 - How Brands Build Up in Brains
04:06 - Ways to Quantify Brand Loyalty
05:06 - Brand Loyalty, Brand Familiarity, and the Attentional Blink
06:45 - Dealing with Excess Brand Build-Up
08:13 - How to Forge a Robust Representation of the Brand (in the Brain)
10:27 - What Counts as an "Experience" in "Experiential Marketing"?
11:40 - Problems with Product Placement
13:23 - Brand Loyalty and Brain Damage
17:43 - A Brand Is the Net Sum of All Experiences You've Had with a Product/Company
19:22 - The Web as a Branding Medium
23:09 - Segmenting the Brand
26:09 - The One Rule that Fits All Branding and Marketing Activity
Image Courtesy of debaird.
 Way back in late 2001, Adam Greenfield published an essay entitled, "The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes (and other notes on the distinction between style and design). In this essay, he posits "problem-solving within constraints" as an essential component of design. In fact, as he sees it, this component separates design most definitively from "style," which is characterized by a relatively personal, unconstrained creativity. That some designers, he cites Paul Rand and Saul Bass as examples, were, in spite of real constraints, able to develop a recognizable style, testifies to the level of artistry they achieved with their work.
Though he does not refer to it, Greenfield's essay was preceded by Jeffrey Zeldman's, "Style versus design: Why understanding the difference is what it's all about," which first appeared in 2000 (and was reprinted in 2005 by Adobe). Zeldman too emphasizes the real-world pragmatism of design over and against the modish self-referentiality of style. He laments that young web designers, along with design competition judges, fall for the trendy allure of style and thus overlook and avoid the less sexy, though more critical, challenge posed by plain-old usability. Eschewing a reductive "either/or," Zeldman simply states, "Not enough designers are working in that vast middle ground between eye candy and usability where most of the web must be built."
To show that this debate is far from dead, viddy this recent post by Eric Karjaluoto, provocatively called, "F--- Style." He echoes the positions of Greenfield and Zeldman by advocating "hardcore" design, which he defines as, "design focused on results." "This kind of design," he writes, "forces us to see ourselves as intermediaries, who facilitate defined outcomes. To do this, we consider and weigh business, marketing, communications (and other) challenges, and work to resolve them through design. The end-result doesn't have to look good, even though it might, but it absolutely must work."
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 Ron Leland of Real Life Brand Architecture is an architect by training, a surfer by vocation, and happens to be the president of the Orange County Chapter of the AIGA. He's an enthusiastic, reflective, and interesting guy who has worked with a broad range of clients including mutual fund companies, wineries, and jazz prodigies like Matt Savage.
I had the chance to record an interview with Ron towards the end of last year but fate conspired against my posting the interview until now. It was worth the wait. Please listen in on our conversation as Ron talks about the power of architectural metaphors when communicating with design clients, his sometimes serpentine career path, and getting inspired to go to the next level.
You can check out the interview right here by clicking on the Flash device below:
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You are also welcome to download an mp3 of this interview by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) on this link, or check out this and all other Talent Blog Podcasts on iTunes.
A few highlights of the interview can be found at the following time coordinates:
00:46 - Defining the word "brand"
02:36 - The power of architectural metaphors
03:50 - Brand architecture in practice: A case study from the film industry
07:07 - The need for a flexible brand development process
09:00 - Branding challenges when a company reaches the age of 130
11:33 - Measuring brand success: "Clear $30 million in 45 days"
15:47 - Branding a jazz prodigy
19:20 - High-end designer homes, surf club newsletters, and "real estate propaganda"
21:42 - What's interesting about design conferences
22:26 - Getting the most out of the AIGA (Hint: It involves giving!)
26:00 - The outsider's perspective and the dangers of "techno-speak"
30:19 - "Oh my gosh, I've got stuff to learn"
Image Courtesy of d'n'c.
 So here's how things work sometimes. While doing research in preparation for my conversation with William Lunderman, I discovered this interview with him conducted by Debbie Millman. Since her conversation with William tended towards the philosophical, as well as the physiognomic - they spent some time discussing whether or not brands should target the reptilian or the mammalian brain - I thought she might appreciate my conversation with him. Well, I scoured her blog looking for contact information but could not find any. [Insert "sad face" emoticon here.]
However, I did find her BuzzFeed feed, and after reading about the wayward Ms. Sophie Anderton, I came across this feed devoted to Tilt-Shift Photography, something that I had never heard of before but is really cool.
Essentially, tilt-shift photography relies on a special lens to allow you to take photographs of cities or mountains, for example, and make them look like miniatures. If you want to see what I'm talking about, check out the work of Olivo Barbieri or Vincent Laforet.
Being unusually tall, little things usually freak me out, but not pictures of little building I could squash like Godzilla!
PS. Debbie Millman, if you are reading this, I like your paintings and would love to interview you.
Image courtesy of Photonoob.net.
 As everyone knows, "Green" is in. Even car manufacturers and oil companies are green!
If you are a graphic designer and want to get greener, you may be interested in this blog: 101 Things Designers Can Do to Save the World. It covers everything from why you should avoid bleeds to finding inks that don't contain "volatile organic compounds." The site was created by The School of Visual Concepts, with the cooperation of AIGA Seattle and Aquent.
If you are interested in other resources that help designers design more greenishly, aside from the links you'll find on the "101 Things" site, you should also explore re-nourish.com, which has an illuminating "Sustainability Toolkit" section.
Image courtesy of janusz l.
 In this third and final installment of our podcast mini-series, we speak with Carol Burke, Senior Director of Marketing and Communications at AMN Healthcare. Carol discusses how she makes sure that her team is using the marketing channels most preferred by AMN's constituents and what she does to create marketing content with a life beyond marketing.
You may listen to Episode 3 here:
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You can download this podcast by "right clicking" ("control clicking" on the Mac) this link, Episode 3 MP3, or check out The Talent Blog Podcast feed.
Image courtesy of pingnews.
 In this episode, I speak with Jim Hauptman, Creative Director and Managing Editor at LL Bean. Jim addresses the complexities of "multi-channel" marketing, an approach that seeks to leverage the specific advantages of diverse channels, as opposed to "multiple channel" marketing, which tends to push the same message or content through many channels. He also reveals how winter camping off-sites can lead to great marketing insights.
Listen to Episode 2 here:
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You can download this podcast by "right clicking" ("control clicking" on the Mac) this link, Episode 2 MP3, or check out The Talent Blog Podcast feed.
Image courtesy of davelanders..
 In conjunction with the webcast we're presenting today, I interviewed a few folks we work with and asked them how they coordinate their marketing messages and programs across a variety of media from print to web and beyond. I then created a three episode podcast mini-series of these interviews.
In this episode Dave Harrell, the Director of Advertising at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, talks about some of the grassroots, infotainment marketing efforts that his group has undertaken recently. In doing so, he also discusses the processes they follow to keep messages and branding consistent from channel to channel and audience to audience.
You can listen to Episode 1 here:
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You can download this podcast by "right clicking" ("control clicking" on the Mac) this link, Episode 1 MP3, or check out The Talent Blog Podcast feed.
Image courtesy of jimbowen0306.
 A passion for visual communication "of any sort," an "inner sense of professionalism," and a sincere interest in "people asking me to do something new," characterize Betty W., who has been working through Aquent for the better part of 10 years. Having done her time in the design and agency world in Boston, and run her own design business for 14 years, Betty told me, "When the last company I was working for went belly-up, I realized that I was not meant to have a full-time job. I started telling people to call me 'Betty D. Temp,' because I knew I was meant to be this way."
"This way," has meant going into high stress environments, such as the office of the chairman at a major accounting firm, and to consistently succeed. "At that place, there were no weekends, you were on-call 24 hours a day, and it was a real pressure cooker. We had to produce proposals that were like annual reports in terms of their quality - they even had their own high-end, duplex color printing equipment. They made you take a test when you first got there. They'd give you the materials and you had from 8-5 to put together a proposal. I passed the test and was off and running."
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 Please take a second and visit Aquent.com. I'll wait.
Thanks for coming back! Now, based on the homepage, what is it you think we do? Specifically, is it clear that we place so-called, "creatives" - designers, print production artists, writers, etc.?
Granted, the title of the homepage does read, "Aquent :: Search for Marketing and Creative Jobs" (though aside from search engines?), I'm not sure who looks at those - I know I don't), but most of the body copy focuses on marketing. "Aquent helps top marketing organizations and talented marketing professionals achieve their full potential" is dead center, layout-wise, and is typographically offset by the phrase "staffing for marketing organizations" beneath it. Even the business scenario depicted, while possibly evoking a futuristic ad agency, reinforces the "marketing" slant of the site. I mean, there is definitely a guy wearing a suit in that picture. Need I say more?
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 In typical blogging-daisy-chain fashion, I found out via whosucks.com that the folks at Coming Anarchy had posted this new logo for the Japanese Ministry of Defence. Aside from the strange Web 2.0 look and the utter lack of any predatory animals clutching weapons, as can be found in the many logos displayed on the aforementioned sites, I was struck by the fact that the logo was chosen from among 767 designs submitted as part of a design competition.
Certainly, asking designers to compete for business is not new -- it effectively occurs whenever you send a job or even an RFP out to several studios or agencies -- but the process is certainly becoming more organized and even commoditized. Consider, as a for instance, the contests listed on sitepoint.com.
Is this a step forward or a step backwards? I say both. The copy on the site says, "Need something designed? Don't Outsource it. Crowdsource it!" Sitepoint then allows you to solicit designs from folks around the world -- the web is "worldwide," after all - and you only pay for the one you choose. Sounds simple enough and a clever way of using the connective properties of the web. But isn't it also asking people to work "on spec," a practice actively discouraged by groups like the AIGA?
As I understand the AIGA's position, spec work devalues the graphic design profession and makes designers vulnerable to rip-offs. If I understand sitepoint's concept, their service allows designers everywhere access to jobs for which they would otherwise never be considered.
Who's right?
 First of all, have I ever mentioned how consistently impressed I am with ADVERTISINGLAB, the self-proclaimed "blog on the future of advertising technology"? Well, if I haven't, let me just say for the record that I find this blog consistently impressive, chock-full as it is with posts and commentary on the cool, the interesting, and the downright mindboggling. You want an example? Why don't you check out this post on the Fog Screen. That's right, a projection screen made of fog. Is your mind boggled, or what?
And for all you creative types looking for cool places to work, why don't you check out this post on the design of creative workspaces? In addition to listing several books on inspiring interiors, the post also points you to a site called, "This Ain't No Disco," which features pictures of ad agencies from around the world. If you work for an agency and it isn't represented on this site, you can upload the appropriate images. Also, if you like or don't like what you see at a particular firm, you can express your opinion by voting.
All I can say is, "Some designers sure like to wrap their desk and everything on or around it in aluminum foil."
Voyeuristic zebra image courtesy of Cati Kaoe.
 The New York Times published an article yesterday on the significance of Apple creating the iPhone without a physical keyboard. While some may find this foolhardy - apparently humans have grown use to the responsiveness afforded by pressing keys with thumbs and fingers - others, such as Mark Rolston of frog design, see it as a move giving "software an increased importance over hardware in product design."
Oddly enough, this is precisely the point made by one Zachary Jean Paradis way back in January when he wrote, "iPhone - the death of product design." As he saw it then, "[The] iPhone presents us a singular moment at the end of the era of 'things' and the beginning of an era of information'."
He compares the iPhone to Motorola's RAZR, which he calls "a modern marvel of complexity, sculpting, and industrial lust" and "the pinnacle of product design." But he goes on to say, "The RAZR's sculpted beauty is also its limitation. It can only have a beautifully sculpted keypad with a set functionality. iPhone's large touch screen elegantly transforms it into whatever it needs to be: a keyboard, a widescreen movie viewer, a random access voicemail interface."
It's clear that with the iPhone, the task of designing what something can do has less to do with crafting its physical structure and more to do with bringing that structure to life as adaptive and manipulable information. As the difference between an object and an interface disappears, the discipline of interactive design, once a subcategory of computer design, assumes a dominant role in product design and development.
Are you ready for that?
Photo courtesy of Celuloso.
 Here's a strange but cool use of Actionscript. It's called glich-gen and, as the name would suggest, uses glitches in image files to generate very curious patterns accompanied by unsettling ambient noises. (Thanks to the folks at turbulence.org for the tip on this, and thanks to Sam Ewen for the tip on turbulence. BTW, if you followed that last link, then you now know that Sam has a cool blog devoted to user-generated media.)
You might ask, "Matt, why are you writing about this on a blog devoted to marketing and creative careers?"
"Well," I might respond, "I assume that people pursuing careers in design will want to know about interesting or at least odd uses of the technologies they depend on for their livelihoods. Similarly, marketers should know who is pushing the limits of content creation and web-based communication."
"Why do you ask?"
Brought to you by our Guest Blogger, Nomi.
The word "icon" comes from the Greek word "eikon," meaning "image. " Put simply, an icon is an image, picture, or likeness that stands for an object by signifying or representing it. Historically, icons were used as signage to communicate larger ideas in shorthand for safety purposes, in religious texts or artifacts, or simply to facilitate the ordering of people's everyday lives. The images tended to be quite literal, only one degree away from the action, object or concept they represented.
With the introduction of digital tools, however, there was an added degree of metaphor placed between icons and what they represented; icons were used to reference an action or idea in the physical world that served as an explanation for an activity in the digital world. For example, you clicked on a picture of an envelope to access your email. This approach to icon design made sense as people were making the transition from the physical world to the digital. But for people born in the 1990s and later, who are growing up immersed from day one in the digital world, is this layer of metaphor a middleman they may not want or appreciate?
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Richard at adliterate really hates brainstorming. He believes it is the enemy of creativity and a time-wasting generator of bad ideas. I think he's got a point.
What do you think?
Image courtesy of ambientfusion.
Following last week's AMA webcast, Successful Creative Briefs: Linking Business Objectives and Creative Strategies, sponsored by Aquent, we convened a virtual roundtable to continue the discussion of best practices in producing effective creative briefs. Our panelists were:
Andy Epstein - Director of Graphic Design and Print Production at BMS Studio, the in-house design agency at Bristol-Myers Squibb
David Haskell - Senior Writer at Digitas, a leading interactive and direct marketing agency
Michael Hunter - Marketing Director for Whirlpool's KitchenAid brand
Sheri L. Koetting - Principal/co-founder of MSLK, an award-winning graphic design agency
I moderated the discussion, which lasted a little over half an hour. For your listening convenience, I split the entire thing into three parts as noted below.
Part 1 - Best Practices: Thoughts on Putting Together Great Creative Briefs
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Part 2 - What Creative Briefs Can (and Can't) Do
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Part 3: Using Creative Briefs to Manage the Creative Development Process
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Thanks for listening. Please feel free to share all comments and criticisms with me, Matthew Grant!
 Pete Mortensen, on the Cult of Mac section of Wired's blog, wrote a head-shaking post describing how an academic journal was beaten down by the secrecy surrounding Apple's design group and their ultra-esoteric process for creating great products.
Of course, if you have to write about something, but don't have access to anyone who could tell you anything meaningful or true about it, why not just make it up? Can't get to Steve Jobs? Why not pretend to be Steve Jobs? (Thanks to BL Ochman for tipping me off to the Fake Steve Jobs Blog.)
I know, I know - that's unethical and, frankly, fraudulent. But disinformation is, after all, a kind of information. Just consider the recent debacle concerning the fake Apple internal memo. Apple's stock hit a rough patch after the fake memo was released, though it recovered somewhat when the "fakeness" was eventually established.
Mr. Mortensen implies that this may have been an inside job to "flush out leakers." If that's the case, it would mean that the people running Apple are pretty sneaky, if not downright evil.
Brought to you by our Guest Blogger, Nomi.
Terms like "user design" and "user-centered" design date back to the 1970's. They have their origins in a progressive, politically forward-thinking movement intent on involving the needs, wants, and preferences of the end user in every step of the design process and often relying on extensive user-testing as a design is being developed.
When the terms were coined, this was radical thinking. Some instances of user design challenged organizational conventions by doing things such as including nurses in the design process of hospital IT systems at a time when medicine was a very gender-divided and hierarchical industry. It was an esoteric and novel approach to design back when it was a designer's market and people were expected to adapt themselves to systems, usually non-optional and work-related, as designed.
But times have changed. Our lives overlap with tools and technology at so many points, with so many options, that if something isn't designed in a way that feels natural and immediately intuitive, if it strikes a dissonant chord with the way we fluidly live, think, and act, it just won't be adopted. It will be guiltlessly ignored like a child's discarded toy. Nowadays, even a completely free information site like Wikipedia has to provide a transparent and pleasing user experience.
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Brought to you by our Guest Blogger, Nomi.
Amazon had been seeking to up its presence in cutting edge fashion for a while, but their brand was considered too diverse to attract the selective and hard-to-win fashionista consumer. Amazon was well-known for its informative, user-friendly experience and offered plenty of big-name brands. Still, to cater to the "certain je ne sais quoi" crowd and penetrate the emerging-designer market, it would have to divorce itself from its "we sell everything" vibe.
To that end, in February 2006, Amazon announced that it was buying Shopbop.com, a fashion-retail site launched in 1999 as an offshoot of a boutique in Madison, WI. Shopbop sells contemporary and new designers such as Marc by Marc Jacobs, Vena Cava, and Lauren Moffatt. Other fashion sites, such as ActiveEndeavors and Blaec offer a similar mix of designers, but the user experience just hasn't created the loyalty and brand identity that Shopbop has.
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Science and Design
Apr 26, 2007 @ 5:04 PM · Matthew Grant
In December I wrote a post about an eye-tracking study conducted by the folks at MarketingSherpa in conjunction with their research partners at eyetools. That study showed that readers of HTML e-mails would click on almost anything and almost always on pictures and logos.
I was reminded of this whilst reading a recent article on Jakob Nielsen's website useit.com. An eye-tracking study conducted by his group determined that one "should show numbers as numerals when writing for online readers."
I love it when we can use science to guide our editorial and design decisions. What better way to resolve a dispute about a particular creative direction than to invoke the data? What better way to prove the effectiveness of our design than by literally testing it?
How many of us actually do this? I realize that testing is a common part of web design methodology; has anyone out there tested their print work recently?
Brought to you by our Guest Blogger, Nomi.
As a designer, have you ever thought that the life of your design has only just begun when your work is "done"? First, you are designing a thing: a product, process, page, or identity mark-- some actualized enactment of your thought process. But what does this enactment orchestrate for the people who see it? How do they interact with it? Do they have a certain reaction? Draw a certain conclusion? Take a certain action or engage in a certain behavior based on what your design made them feel or believe?
Thinking in these terms, and asking these sorts of questions, belongs to an approach that goes by the ubiquitous and somewhat amorphous title of, "Experience Design."
More a process or method than a narrowly defined career path, the concepts of Experience Design can be applied to all media and disciplines from print and web design to industrial, process and environmental design. The goal of Experience Design is to rethink the label of "user" or "customer" and recognize that human interaction with design goes beyond a simple transaction. Experience Design views a design's audience as participants in the design itself, and the goal of design as the orchestration of an experience that brings about in participants a certain perception, instills a certain belief, and then triggers certain behaviors based on those perceptions and beliefs.
As an example, consider Deborah Adler's redesign of prescription medicine bottles and labels, now instated at Target Pharmacies worldwide under the name ClearRx. When her grandmother accidentally took medication meant for her grandfather, Adler, now a senior designer at Milton Glaser, realized that a great deal of patient error could be avoided by a design that changed the patient experience of processing and acting upon crucial labeling information. She conceived her design on a bottle with a clear front and back, versus the traditional cylindrical bottle, and a snap-on color-coding system to help family members keep prescriptions separate. Upon this canvas she reassembled the label info into "primary" and "secondary" categories, reasoning that the medication name and dosage level, for example, had to be given primary placement, while something like the prescription refill number was less urgent and thus lower on the visual hierarchy. By immersing herself in the complete patient experience, Adler came up with a design that has reduced patient error by six out of ten.
Brought to you by First Official Guest Blogger, Nomi.
Within the constellation of stellar design talent working today, what sets a true innovator apart? One way to define design innovation is that it goes beyond aesthetic appeal or even functionality to completely reshape user experience or perception. With this in mind, you can't say "innovator" without mentioning Jonathan Ive, Senior Vice President of Design at Apple. A profile of Ive this week in the Guardian reveals the career path of this iconoclastic industrial designer whose work goes way beyond industrial design. With his small, intensely close-knit team of designers at Apple, Ive has been the mastermind of Apple's genre-defining products: the iMac series, the iPod, and now the iPhone.
Due to his extremely private nature and reluctance to give interviews, little is known about him apart from the legacy of his work. Fair enough, since his designs speak for themselves. Throughout his career, his work displays a common thread: the ability to design a user experience which serves to create an emotional bond with the product. He is also known for being open to inspiration in unexpected places. For his iMac design, with the goal of making personal computers fun and loveable instead of drab and depressing, he was inspired by the gel-clear colors and chubby, rounded edges of jellybeans. He and his team made many field trips to jellybean factories to take notes that informed the production of the iMac shell.
If you think about the collective consumer attitude towards owning a personal computer-any computer, not just a Mac-- the launch of the iMac is directly responsible for that. But as revolutionary as the iMac was, Ive then went on to design a product many people feel is even more emblematic of a generation: the iPod. I cannot think of a single better piece of shorthand for today's self-contained, user-centric ethos. If I had to put five contemporary designs in a time capsule to represent the "now," the iPod would definitely be one of them.
When Ive does speak about his work, he reveals a passionate sense of teamwork with the designers that work under him, and an egoless dedication to getting the product absolutely perfect. "One of the hallmarks of the team I think is this sense of looking to be wrong," Ive has said. "It's the inquisitiveness, the sense of exploration. It's about being excited to be wrong because then you've discovered something new."
While following a link about pencils made from human ash, or, "cremains", I stumbled across this post by Ben Garfinkel, Creative Director at Vancouver's Industrial Brand Creative. [Warning: Their Flash site is cool but slightly disturbing.] In said post, he lays out what he looks for in a portfolio, what impresses him, and what turns him off.
Since a lot of his advice is either common sense - spell his name correctly, tailor your content, etc. - or not actionable - "Fussy, complicated or overly precious portfolios are annoying" - I came away with two questions. The first one was, "Why did he write this?"
I assume that anyone who is sending out unsolicited samples and seriously hoping for a positive response would already be careful about spelling and the like. I would also assume that the applicant would be keen on demonstrating that they not only understand what the firm's about but have thought through why the firm would be interested in them in the first place.
Reflecting on this first question led me to the conclusion that Mr. Garfinkel must have written his piece because, in actual fact, he receives a lot of unsolicited portfolios that are carelessly prepared and demonstrate little more than the applicant's ignorance, or, to put it more gently, naivete. Which led me to my next question: "Why don't people do the right thing, even when it is just common sense?"
I do not yet have a satisfactory answer to that question.
Aquent got its start in "creative" staffing. Back then we were called MacTemps and our stock in trade was connecting businesses with creative types who could use the Mac to do desktop publishing.
As time went by, we expanded out from what the British call "art workers," what we here stateside might call "print production specialists," to work with graphic designers in the broadest sense, copywriters and their ilk, and, as creative media changed, web designers and developers.
Over the last several years we've moved further out from the creative core and into the world of marketing that, for the most part, "creative" serves. Yet, even though this progression was natural and logical, and sometimes the line separating creative from marketing gets blurry, I've been struck by how different, from dress codes to mindset, the two cultures ultimately are.
I have some half-baked theories to explain the difference but, rather than trot them out here, I'll point you instead to this post entitled, "Separated by a common language," that I found on the adliterate blog.
Although the distinction being drawn in this post is between advertisers and designers, I think it captures some of the essential tension, not to say "conflict," between marketing and creative. This can best be seen in the case of the currently all-important concept, "brand." As the author writes, "When advertising people talk about a brand we mean the set of associations that exist in people's minds. While designers clearly think this is important for them the brand is much more about the mark or identity. Our brand is nebulous their's is concrete - it's what the identity looks like..."
I take that to mean: Designers are focused on creating a "thing," and marketers are interested in creating an "action."
Does that sound right? What do you think?
If you are currently pursuing a career in design, then you might want to read a recent post by Bruce Nussbaum over at Business Week Online entitled, "Are Designers The Enemy Of Design?" Aside from the provocative question of the title, Mr. Nussbuam poses another that is at the core of his argument: How do you switch gears from designing for to designing with? [Emphasis mine.]
As "design thinking" and "innovation" have risen to the top of corporate strategic priorities, the design profession has seen its own star(s) rise. Now, the elitism inherent to such star-worship is running smack up against the democratizing forces of "user generated content." Who will win?
I believe that the ultimate winners will be those "designers" and "innovators" who create tools and platforms that allow people to create and share their own work or that allow people to collect and celebrate the cool work of others. Of course, this means moving away from designing things and artifacts, to designing situations, experiences, and possibilities.
The "design" challenge is: How do I do that?
The "design management challenge" is: How do I design jobs and work environments that encourage designers to do that?
I'm a latecomer and a slow learner.
My thoughts on "design thinking" began as a reaction to something written by Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path. Little did I know as I was penning my post entitled, "Thinking about 'Design Thinking,'" that that self-same Dan Saffer had written a post with the exact same title almost exactly two years ago! That article includes a helpful stab at defining the characteristics of "design thinking," "if there is such a thing," as he wrote way back then. One characteristic is "Ideation and Prototyping" - "The way we find ... solutions is through brainstorming and then, importantly, building models to test the solutions out." Actually making things to see if they work or solve the problem at hand is key to designing anything - hence his lament as he sees design schools move to an overly conceptual notion of "design thinking," one that neglects craft and making and, ultimately, produces designers that can't.
Oddly enough, I found Saffer's earlier post in a rather roundabout fashion. The first event in this twisted chain came in the form of an email from David Armano, whom I had name-checked in my previous post. He pointed me to a post on his blog concerning the evolution of creativity in a decidedly inter-disciplinary and multi-dimensional direction. As an example of someone who embodies this emergent creativity, Armano referred to the site of one Zachary Jean Paradis, who graduated from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
What did I find on Mr. Paradis' blog? You guessed it, a long, thoughtful essay on none other than "Design Thinking." In fact, it was via this essay that I "discovered" Mr. Saffer's earlier thoughts and my own intellectual tardiness.
Before I leave the topic of "design thinking" and return once again to more familiar ground, like Second Life, I will mention what I found most illuminating about Paradis' take on "design thinking." First, he conceives of it as an approach to "developing new offerings" which should not, to Mr. Saffer's point, be equated with "professional design as it is taught." Secondly, because this approach is "purposeful," he sees it as inherently integrative. He writes, "When developing some new offering with a team, members share the common goal of producing something contextually relevant." The complexity of product/offering development, and the fact that the process must result in something that works in the world and meets definable needs of end-users/consumers, imposes the dual need for multiple disciplinary perspectives and their successful integration.
Finally, and as he says, "most importantly," "design thinking" provides guidelines for collaborative work rather than prescribing a specific process for executing it. This kind of collaboration requires individuals who possess "a certain breadth and depth of knowledge of complementary disciplines," precisely the new kind of "Creative" David Armano describes on his blog. Paradis ends his essay by insisting that, "... organizations must begin to recognize that moderately deep breadth is as important if not more so than deep specialization in addressing complex problems."
To bring things more or less full circle, I think it bears stating that only bydoing work on a series of increasingly complex and diverse projects, and not through schooling of any sort, can one acquire this "moderately deep breadth."
I had never really thought about "design thinking" until I read the blog post at Adaptive Path that led me to write my last post. The funny thing is that as I started to research the concept, I noticed that earlier that same day I had bookmarked, obviously without much thought, a blog called Design Thinking Digest, which is maintained by Chris Bernard, Microsoft User Experience Evangelist (and which I was introduced to via this post on David Armano's blog).
As if it weren't strange enough that the mighty and mysterious Web would bombard my subconscious with secret messages about "design thinking" to get me to write about it, today on his blog Chris Bernard discusses the design approach of BMW's Chris Bangle and, guess what? Bernard is very taken with the fact that when designing cars, Bangle focuses on "the doing." Bernard writes, "His teams get outside to look at the car, they craft and sculpt designs with their hands. They are constantly on the lookout for new ways that they can make things, they spend as much time thinking about not the actual creation but the TOOLS they use to create with too."
That is, a critical component of true "design thinking" as practiced by a successful designer like Bangle and admired by an evangelizing software designer like Bernard is "doing" - getting your hands dirty, working with tools, making things. But that was, like, exactly the point I was "making" in my initial post on "design thinking"!!!
Is the Web reading my mind?
More frighteningly, is the Web writing my mind?
I subscribe to the feed from Adaptive Path's blog because, as they say here in Boston, the people who work there are "wicked smaht." As a result, and thanks to the magic of RSS feedings, I spotted this impassioned plea from one of the Adaptive Pathers, Dan Saffer, for design schools to start teaching design again.
Saffer's main complaint is that design schools have moved towards a curriculum centered around "design thinking" and away from a well-rounded, practical education focused on "thinking and making and doing." In his view, the real work of design consists in the process of moving from concept to realization; stopping at the idea stage means you've only done the easy part. He writes, "Some notes on a whiteboard and a pretty concept movie or storyboard pales in comparison to the messy world of prototyping, development, and manufacturing," and then puts a finer point on it by adding, "It's harder to execute an idea than to have one..."
Having encountered this lament in one form or another many times - "No one understands good typography anymore;" "People try to design when they can't even draw," "They think the computer's going to do it all for them," etc. - that aspect of his argument wasn't new. Rather, what drew my attention was the phrase "design thinking" and his characterization of it as "just thinking."
Since I was pretty sure that it meant more than that, I did a little research and found a Business Week article from last October called "The Talent Hunt," which describes Mozilla turning to the folks at Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka, the "D-School") in search of a strategy for expanding the adoption of Firefox. In light of Saffer's comments, I was struck by the following sentences: "Business school students would have developed a single new product to sell. The D-schoolers aimed at creating a prototype with possible features that might appeal to consumers." Likewise, in a lecture at MIT entitled "Innovation Through Design Thinking," IDEO's Tim Brown talks about the process they follow often involving "a hundred prototypes created quickly, both to test the design and to create stakeholders in the process."
As I understand it, the "thought leaders" behind "design thinking" (you can find a good overview of them and their thoughts here on Luke Wroblewski's site) advocate the application of design methods to problems of business strategy precisely because it places a heavy emphasis on prototyping and real-world pragmatics. If Saffer is correct that "design thinking" as taught in design schools is primarily about thinking, and not about making things and seeing if they work, then I would say the real problem is that they are not actually teaching "design thinking."
But then again, I never attended design school. If you have, do you think that Saffer's criticism rings true?
Sad to say, even though I have PhD from an Ivy League university, I never learned Latin. So, when looking at some layouts for a newsletter the other day, I was trying to decipher the greeking, and failed. The words of the great Roman author, Cicero, from whose "The Extremes of Good and Evil" the Latin text often referred to as "lorem ipsum" is taken, remained, well, Greek to me.
Thankfully, I need mourn my utter lack of a proper, classical education no longer. The friendly folks at the MIT Advertising Lab, with this post, pointed me to a lorem ipsum generator that is completely devoid of meaning, made as it is entirely of names for Web 2.0 companies.
Hey, Cicero! How do you like these apples? - Eskobo goowy manjam. Guba simpy bebo, zecco plazes moola gpokr. Idio moola umundo zingee jaxtr mikons foldera doostang!
Erin Malone, editor emeritus for the awesome online journal for information architects, Bo |
