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."
Greg Kuchmek, who is represented by Aquent's DC office, has been working on the web since 1994. That's when he was hired to help produce a webzine, Stim, started by Prodigy. [Editor's Note: For an interesting flashback to 1996, read Ty Burr's review of Stim, which he gives a B+, and Slate, which he gives a C+]. When that gig ended in 1997 he discovered that, "3 years web experience was amazing. I was 'senior' automatically."
Flash forward to the present and Greg now has 14 years web experience. If you want to hire someone like Greg (assuming you can find someone like him), what do you have to offer him? He has a broad range of in-demand skills: in addition to ground-up experience with the full suite of web technologies, Greg is also an able photographer, animator, illustrator, and writer. When he goes on a job interview, the pressure is on the interviewer.
What is Greg looking for and how can you convince him to work for you? Listen to his words:
1. Trust
I'm looking for an employer that respects that I have my skills and trusts me to use them. They hire me because I can do something and they can't. It's great when they let me do it.
It's not always like that. I've done jobs where the client was really looking over my shoulder and micro-managing. I understand that everyone's got their personal style, but when that's happening, I don't feel free to be creative and really do what I'm capable of.
2. Flexibility
I don't wear a tie to interviews anymore. I don't need to dress up at this point. I've also got a full studio at home, so I'm even kind of shocked that I have to leave the house! I guess I've been spoiled by working in places like Boston or New York where it's more flexible.
More than flexibility about where work happens, though, I appreciate it when there is flexibility around how things get done. There have been countless little jobs where they needed a photograph and I've told them, "Look, I can spend the day combing through stock or I can go take one." It's great when people are more open to the "I can do this right now" approach, than they are attached to the "this is the way we have to do it" approach.
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.
The fellow who made this, Chuck Lewis, is also known as "The Poetic Prophet," and, more to the point, "The SEO Rapper." In addition to dropping science on the importance of design and coding - "please don't use tables even though they work fine/ when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time/ make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide/ remove font type, font color and font size" - he kicks serious k-nowledge on conversion, social media, and paid search. Check it out, boyeeeez! (I almost can't believe I just wrote that.)
Long story short, if your page rank is illin' and your SEM isn't "fillin'" it, go on and pick up on what the SEO Rapper is puttin' down. He'll school y'all. Peace. Out.
Special "shout out" to Shelli and Mariam in Aquent's Detroit office for turning me on to this dude.
June Dershewitz has been a web analyst for almost as long as that has been something to be. Currently a member of the leadership team at Semphonic, a top web analytics consultancy, June is a passionate advocate for the field of web analytics as well as a thoughtful and informed adviser on how best to pursue a career in it. An involved member of the web analytics community, June was an early instigator of "Web Analytics Wednesday" and is currently running for a seat on the Board of Directors of the Web Analytics Association.
For this podcast, I spoke with June - the first interviewee to ask me, "You do know that I grew up on a goat farm, right?" - about careers in web analytics, the changes she's seen in the field, and avoiding the "report monkey trap." I invite you to listen in on our conversation. You can do so 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. Finally, this and other Talent Blog Podcasts are always available on iTunes.
A few highlights of the interview can be found at the following time coordinates:
02:36 - "Web Analytics" is really about "people"
06:28 - "The technology has changed quite a bit - THANK GOD!"
08:43 - Omniture, Visual Sciences HBX, WebTrends, and the limits of Google Analytics
10:47 - Analysis starts with thinking about your goals
12:25 - Things to consider when hiring a web analyst
13:21 - Avoiding the "report monkey trap"
14:59 - Going from "what people are doing" to "why they are doing it"
17:00 - The value of using staffing firms to get project-based contract work
20:12 - Advice for people just starting out in web analytics
21:13 - The origin of "Web Analytics Wednesday"
23:06 - A WAA campaign pitch: Vote for June!
24:53 - "It's important that every company has someone on staff who owns web analytics"
26:03 - Happily employed (and unemployed) as a contractor
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?
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!
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
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:
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
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."
I'm going to set aside my "career advice" hat for a second and put on my "marketing thought leader" hat so that I can briefly discuss some interesting things I noticed about the Super Bowl ads.
First, GoDaddy. For a few years now, they've been posting the "hot" versions of their notorious ads on their website. While last year the message was "marketing has all the fun," this year, the message seemed to be, "the hot ads are on the web." In fact, the commercial explicitly mocked people for watching the ads on television.
So, Interesting Integration Strategy #1: Create a television ad that is basically an advertisement for the on-line ad (which happens to be on your website).
Second, Under Armour. Apparently, as their Apple-esque ad ended, if you were on their mailing list, you received an HTML email allowing you to pre-order the future of the athletic shoe. The obvious assumption is that even when watching television, people are on-line, either via their cellphone, their Blackberry, or their household PC.
Interesting Integration Strategy #2: Supplement broadcast advertisement with immediate on-line call to action.
As part of the follow-up to webcast Aquent sponsored devoted to Seven Key Insights for Global Marketing and Brand Management, I called up Sarah Schuh who is general manager of Aquent's Multilingual Communications offering. Sarah has been working in the marketing translation and localization space for many years now and I thought she could help some of you out there with her experience and insights.
I recorded a podcast with Sarah and in our conversation she made one thing perfectly clear: when it comes to localization, translating copy from one language to the next is actually the easy part. Indeed, the real work happens well before any copy is handed over to the translators. That work involves clarification of your core marketing message, ensuring that this message meaningfully addresses a real audience in the target market, and planning for eventual localization when designing critical marketing instruments such as websites. There's nothing worse than having to add to the cost of translation the cost of redesigning your site to accommodate the expanded text produced by moving from English to, say, German.
To get down to the nitty gritty, you can hear the podcast by clicking on the device pictured below:
You can also download the mp3 by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) this link here, or check out all the Talent Blog Podcasts on iTunes.
Highlights of the podcast can be found at the following time coordinates:
01:08 - Does your target audience even exist in another market?
03:18 - It's not just words: How do your visual elements translate?
05:20 - Take localization into account when creating the original message
07:20 - Define the use of company terminology
10:00 - Plan for expansion of foreign text
12:08 - The investment in planning vs. The cost of getting it wrong
13:33 - What companies should look for in their localization partner
17:35 - The cause of localization disasters
20:39 - Is "success" just the absence of "disaster"?
Jim Sterne, the producer of the eMetrics Summit and the president of the Web Analytics Association, has been talking about the internet and marketing since 1993. Indeed, he was kind enough to talk to me about it just the other day as part of the Talent Blog Podcast. We discussed highlights from the various eMetrics Summits in 2007, how the conference is evolving, and what folks can expect from the summits in 2008. We also talked about changes in the field of web analytics since he and Matt Cutler issued their landmark 2000 white paper, "E-Metrics - Business Metrics for the New Economy."
You may listen to our conversation by clicking on the device below:
You can also download the mp3 by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) this link here, or check out all the Talent Blog Podcasts on iTunes.
Highlights of the podcast can be found at the following time coordinates:
00:45 - 2007 eMetrics Summit Overview
02:50 - Summit Content for 2008: More Mainstream Marketing
04:29 - The Buzz around "Engagement"
06:40 - The Slow Growth of "Standards"
09:29 - Website "Slipperiness"
12:20 - Measuring the Success of the Website Overall
16:39 - The People Component of eMetrics
20:18 - Your Website is Your End of the Conversation: Are You Listening?
23:20 - "Website" Is a Verb
Mr. DePalma has written extensively about the challenges associated with taking a brand or a business global, including this article on global toe dippers and toe stubbers, and characterizes the web-based, global marketplace as an "eighth continent," with all the peril and promise that that image implies.
If your company has already gone global, and your toes hurt, or if you're thinking of wading into the global waters and want to know how cold they are, you should tune in on November 29th.
Minh Nguyen, a Southern California-based web designer currently working for Sony Electronics, has been represented by our San Diego office for a little over a year. Interestingly enough, his entrance into the Aquent world was fairly coincidental. "A friend of mine was looking for work and I told them about Aquent," he tells me. "I was walking them through the application process by setting up a profile of my own. I didn't think much about it but pretty soon someone from Aquent contacted me."
Minh got into graphic design at an early age. As he puts it, "I owe it to my family. My grandfather taught me how to draw when I was 3. My mom taught me how to color inside the lines when I was 5. My dad taught me HTML and introduced me to Photoshop when I was 14." He was doing web-design casually as a teenager, but by the time he got into college realized he had a passion for it.
Having a hard time getting a full-time design job after graduation, he started his own studio with some friends. Although the studio did fairly well - garnering clients from Jack in the Box to the Surf Rider Foundation - he decided that he was more interested in doing design work than running a business. He turned to Aquent to get back into design and eventually found a permanent position through us.
Since running one's own studio is a choice that many designers make and even more consider, I asked Minh what he learned from his experience doing so. Here's what he told me:
1. Don't just take any job you get, do things for free, or do things on the cheap.
Not only does this lower the bar for other people working in the field, the sites usually aren't that great, and the client will ultimately be dissatisfied.
I was checking out the buzz log over at Yahoo! and came across this ominously titled post, "The Webkinz Will Rise," about the collectible and cuddly phenomenon known as Webkinz. Apparently, "Webkinz" ranks in the top 100 searches on Yahoo! and buzz about the Webkinz.com site has increased tenfold over the last 12 months.
For those of you who don't know, Webkinz are stuffed animals, kind of like Beanie Babies, only bigger, and each one comes with a special code that you can use to visit your new "pet" on-line, buy stuff for it, dress it up, etc.
I refer to Webkinz and their world as "advertainment" because, well, that's what it is! The Webkinz animal gives you access to the Webkinz world, which is a multi-faceted, immersive commercial for Webkinz. In this way, it resembles the Pokemon revolution of 1995, when Nintendo created a video game that became a card game, a comic, a cartoon, a vast collectible menagerie, and a huge merchandising franchise. In a Leibnizian twist, every part of the Pokemon universe became an advertisement for every other part of it.
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.
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.
Bonnie S., who is represented by Aquent's Philadelphia office, got into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) the honest way: by working hard to optimize her own website. "I got a degree in architecture and then worked as an architect for several years before deciding I had to get into something else.
"I set up a design studio with a friend and we went into business providing design services to architecture firms. I created a website for our studio and then worked hard to get us to #3 in Google search results for 'graphic design' and 'Philadelphia.' I knew I was on to something when a friend called me out of the blue and asked, 'How did you get to #3?'"
One unexpected by-product of using SEO to promote her design business was that it actually led to SEO business. "One day I was talking to one of my clients and he said he was paying $3000 a month for pay-per-click advertising. I told him he could pay me a lot less to boost rankings through organic optimization [optimization that's driven by the content of the pages]. He hired me to do that for him. He saw results and began referring me to people, and things took off from there."
It seems like only yesterday I was making a snide comment about future Live Earth-esque concerts taking place on-line to reduce their notorious carbon footprints.
As it turns out, the folks at Zwinky were at least one step ahead of the Minister of Enlightenment. They hosted their own 24-hour concert event in Zwinktopia on Stage Z to coincide with the "live" Live Earth. This concert featured such diverse acts as R&B chanteuse, Kelly Rowland, and Scott Ian of the seminal thrash outfit, Anthrax. I have little doubt that it rocked you (meaning "one") like a (virtual) hurricane.
I strongly believe that anything I think or make fun of has already been thought or made fun of on the web.
It shows how out of the mainstream I am that I stumbled upon the Live Earth global concert extravaganza pretty much by accident Saturday night. I tuned in to the live concert stream via the Live Earth MSN site, and though I was viewing the feed in lowly Safari (yes, some people still use it!), I was able to catch some (to may tastes "underwhelming") performances. I'm an old fuddy-duddy, music-wise.
Live Earth, "The Concerts for a Climate in Crisis," were far more interesting to me in concept then in reality. Billed by its promoters as an event that "that will bring together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis," it apparently set a new record "by generating more than 9 million Internet streams." Even if that number fell short of the billions promised, it is still impressive and highlights the "world-wide-ness" of the web. Before the web, ubiquitous broadband, etc., the idea of a global concert actively viewed by millions would have been impossible. Now it's yesterday's news.
Even more fascinating than the global reach of the web, however, is its long temporal arm (or tail, as some would have it). The record broken by Live Earth had been set by Live8, which found that the majority of its streaming traffic, to the tune of 100 million streams, came during the six weeks after the event. Accordingly, the Live Earth folk expect 80% of their traffic to be post-hoc.
The fact that this live event will enjoy an extended lifespan thanks to the web, and that in fact 80% of its life will take place there, illustrates one way that web-based projects never-end. This point was made quite articulately by Gerry McGovern the other day in an essay he posted with the catchy title, "The Web is messy." It is the temporal open-endedness of the web that makes it messy. It goes on forever! A website is not like a commercial or a brochure that is completed and sent to make its merry way in the world. It is more literally like a living place that is changed by its visitors and occupants and must evolve to meet their needs and expectations.
As any parent can tell you - living things are pretty messy. Live events are as well - just ask the folks who had to clean up after the concert-goers on Saturday. Indeed, Live Earth was criticized for the energy required to put on the actual concerts, especially given the fact that some performers (referred to as, " The artists formerly known as huge carbon footprints," by Marina Hyde in The Guardian) flew private jets "halfway across the world to play," as the New York Times reported.
Is the next step for "green" activism a totally web-based, non-stop musical experience? Why not create a virtual, streaming concert made up of great live footage from bands of yesteryear? Wait, wait, I got it. How about "Second Live Earth"?
A friend of mine passed this link along to me. It is a video of a software demo at the TED Conference back in March. The speaker is Blaise Aguera y Arcas who was demoing two software packages - Seadragon, which is used to browse large amounts of visual data, and Photosynth, which organizes pictures into navigable, 3-D spaces.
This stuff really has to be seen to be believed. It represents the future of how we will interact with visual data and also highlights that we are already creating virtual models of the world we live in by uploading content to websites like Flickr. There is also a cool example of an explorable, high resolution advertisement for Honda. Imagine if a picture in a magazine contained the richness of data you could find on an entire website. Mind-boggling.
Microsoft acquired Seadragon back in February. Aguera y Arcas makes a funny comment about that when people start clapping at the amazing things he's showing them. Have you ever attended a software demo where people burst into spontaneous applause?
OK, W+K's new site was an interesting though kind of messy and, dare I say, "ugly," use of Actionscript and database-driven dynamism.
By contrast check out this site created by burst Labs.
Burst is a company that produces/composes/records/licenses music for commercials, movies, etc. As the folks at Brand Flakes for Breakfast point out, this site is designed precisely with the producers in mind, since, when people are looking for music to incorporate in their work, they are thinking of it in terms of the mood or atmosphere it will invoke or in terms of the imagery it will accompany.
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.
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."
1. I checked out their "new" website (launched in April) the other day and was struck by the Yugo Nakamura-esque look and feel of it all. (I was trying to find out if he had anything to do with the site, but my email to W+K's PR folk has gone unanswered.) There is some dispute as to whether the site is cool or lame, cutting edge or same-old-same-old, reflective of their interactive capabilities (or lack thereof), etc. I'm not qualified to weigh in on that subject, but I do appreciate that the site demonstrates at least one way for a multidimensional information space, in this case, the world of an agency's work, to be portrayed as an interactive, 2-D space.
2. Russell Davies, who used to work at W+K, but now apparently works for a "global, small business" called, "Open Intelligence Agency," wrote a post almost a year ago, and several months after he had left, entitled, "7 things I learned at wieden and kennedy (portland edition)." A number of blogs linked to the post at the time, but I just read it yesterday. Aside from reminding me that blogs are collections of permanent ephemera, his list of learnings included this old chestnut: The key to creative genius; work harder. How's the old equation go? 1% inspiration/99% perspiration? Having ideas is easy - doing things requires effort.
3. The local W+K offices have blogs dedicated to their work and office hijinks (to provide but one example). They also use the blogs to introduce new folks. In this post introducing a new member of the account management team in London, the newbie is compared to Lisa Stansfield, in part because they both come from the same town and have both traveled around the world, in part because they "both commend themselves to the eye." As much as I admire that turn of phrase, I'm fairly certain that I couldn't get away with referring to a co-worker thusly on this blog. Is it because I used to work in HR? Is it because I work at a staffing agency instead of an ad agency? Or is it just because I work in the United States and not London? Hmmm.
4. I believe that W+K has been a client of ours at one point or another, at least in Portland. (This more in the interest of full disclosure than as a kind of special pleading.)
5. One other thing from the Mr. Davies' "7 Learnings": You can tell from the work if people enjoyed making it. I think you can make a similar statement about customer service; you can tell from the way they treat you if someone enjoys their job. It should also make people consider their resumes, portfolios, blogs, etc.. How much joy do yours emanate?
Brought to you by our Guest Blogger, Nomi. Image courtesy of fo.ol.
In the nineties, one of the loudest voices to proclaim that people don't and won't read online was Jakob Nielsen, never one to shy away from sweeping declarations. Nielsen asserted that rather than read, people scan the page. Readers on the web, he posited, took an active rather than passive approach to reading. With so many pages competing to offer the same or similar information, people don't read just a single page, but tend to move between several pages and create a mental collage of the chunks that most interest them from each. People also take an active role in digesting what is written on the page. They were inclined to click on things that interested them rather than allow the layout of a page to dictate the order in which they were given information, or the relevance of different bits of information to that specific user. Additionally, he stated that readers would not scroll, so stories had to be kept short or risk going unread.
This was in 1997. A decade later, a lot has changed on the web, including Nielsen's position on scrolling. Improved screen readability, improved control over the design of text on the web, and mass-acclimation to a new medium by both publishers and readers are some of the factors responsible. The Poynter Institute recently published a new Eye Track study showing that people do read on the web, even more than they read in print.
Attention Flash wizards and wannabes! The BBC brings us this interactive timeline of British History. It's a cool and slickly designed use of Flash, Check it out. You just might learn something! (For instance: Did you know that Bishop Wilfrid of York was expelled from his see by Ecgfrith, King of Northumbria in 678 CE?)
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.
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.
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 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?
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."
A semi-controversial memo from Starbuck's chairman Howard Schultz to Starbuck's CEO Jim Donald is circulating though the Internet's bustling tubes.
In said memo, Schultz outlines how business decisions - specifically, the replacement of traditional espresso machines with automatic ones and the move to flavor-locked packaging for coffee beans - while improving operational efficiency have degraded the consumer experience of Starbucks. As he points out, the new machines, while shortening the production time of individual beverages, has made it difficult for customers to observe the baristas at work and interact with them. Likewise, the new packaging, while ensuring the freshness of the roasted beans, has removed their pungent and evocative aroma from the store. The result is a generic purchasing experience which erodes brand loyalty and opens the door to competitors.
For those who are so inclined, you can visit John Moore's Brand Autopsy blog and submit ideas on what Starbucks can do to reconnect with its customers.
The rest of us can reflect on the critical role that marketers can play in assessing the implications and long-term impact of decisions that, at first blush, seem entirely operational in nature. In fact, this case seems to imply that separating operations from marketing is not only wrong conceptually, but in fact, misguided operationally.
The New York Times published an article this morning about the surprising success of the ubiquitous dancing cowboy ads created by Jennifer Uhls for LowerMyBills.com. I bring this to your attention, esteemed reader, because it reminds us that designing banner ads is first and foremost about getting attention and not necessarily about creating something beautiful or sophisticated.
On a more shameless level, I bring this to your attention because the article quotes one James Gardner, who just so happens to work in Aquent's marketing department focusing on, of all things, online marketing. James maintains a website called Adverlicio.us, an online advertising archive. Aside from allowing visitors to rate a wide variety of on-line ads, James' site also boasts a nice collection of LowerMyBills ads.
"Art school taught me that design's not just about making something beautiful; it's about taking something beautiful and turning it into a clear message." I was speaking with a talent represented by Aquent's Detroit office, Dan Koenig, who recently took a full-time job with an ad agency. Dan started out as a print designer but overtime has come to focus more on interactive design, particularly creating algorithm-based animations in Flash. His experiences in both the print and web worlds reinforced for him the importance of creating things that can speak for themselves.
This was brought home to him in an especially pointed way early in his career. After presenting some work to a creative director, and going over the significance of each element in detail, she asked him, "And where's the little man?" "What little man?" he asked puzzledly. "The little man we send along with the design to explain it to the client." Oh, that little man...
Of course, Dan didn't have to rely on snide colleagues to teach him that the things we design are sent off into the world to face their destiny alone. It's a given on the web where people come to our work and, if it's not intuitively clear how to use or interact with it, very quickly click away. But even before he got into the web, he'd learned this lesson designing packaging.
Dan put it like this, "Package design is a very unforgiving medium because your competition is right next to you. The customer is standing there with their money in one hand and they're reaching for a product with the other hand. Will they choose yours? All marketing comes down to this moment of truth."
Creating and visually representing messages that persuasively influence behavior in "this moment of truth" constitutes both the challenge and true art of design. Because it's an intensely do-or-die way of learning how to do just that, Dan adds, "Every designer should do packaging."
Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path posted this humorous and helpful guide for developers so they can decipher the reactions and behavior of their design-oriented counterparts.
I hope in some small way that passing along Mr. Saffer's words helps to relieve suffering and foment peace between the warring designer and developer clans.
That seems to be the conclusion reached by the research team at MarketingSherpa in their recently published Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007 (you can get a PDF of the executive summary here or read a brief synopsis here). Tests that they ran on real live HTML e-mails they'd received showed that, to quote Anne Holland, "[W]hen people click on your e-mail, they don't always carefully figure out where the clickable link is. They just bang away at their mouse."
These tests used e-mails in which the links were not "live," meaning that no pointing hand appeared when you scrolled over anything, so participants were encouraged to click wherever they thought a link might or should be. They frequently clicked on items that would not have been links had they been live. Anne Holland continues, "As with the Web pages we've tested, some of the most popular 'nonclickable' clicks are on images, including product hero shots, logos, and photos of people."
Not only should designers of e-mail marketing pieces take note, the MarketingSherpa findings highlight once more the importance of testing our marketing assumptions by actually testing our marketing instruments (e-mail, websites, blogs, billboards, etc.).
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."
I'm going to set aside my "career advice" hat for a second and put on my "marketing thought leader" hat so that I can briefly discuss some interesting things I noticed about the Super Bowl ads.
Minh Nguyen, a Southern California-based web designer currently working for Sony Electronics, has been represented by our San Diego office for a little over a year. Interestingly enough, his entrance into the Aquent world was fairly coincidental. "A friend of mine was looking for work and I told them about Aquent," he tells me. "I was walking them through the application process by setting up a profile of my own. I didn't think much about it but pretty soon someone from Aquent contacted me."
The New York Times published an article yesterday on the significance of Apple creating the iPhone 
Here's a strange but cool use of Actionscript. It's called 
In the nineties, one of the loudest voices to proclaim that people don't and won't read online was 
