All posts in design

10 Posts
January 12, 2013 · behaviour, design, digital, Experience Design, IA, usability

Out of the box UX

Here’s a little known fact about me: I never studied design or multimedia or service design way back when I was a student at university in the noughties. I knew what I wanted to do and be part of (even back then!) and I wanted to learn about design, information architecture (I didn’t call it that back then, I was just fascinated in information delivery and consumption), product design, digital (or multimedia as we called it back before the interweb 1.0 proper) and the users interface with ‘stuff’ because I was always a righter-brainer & rubbish at the good stuff. I was working part-time at a CBT (computer based training) company helping put together training CDRoms (remember them?) for Helicopter Pilots and I was really unimpressed with how bad they were to use (the CBT materials, not the helicopters!) and how bad the graphics were – In todays world we’d call that ‘poor experience’, and so I got myself on the ‘Packaging Design’ course at Bournemouth University. PACKAGING? ARE YOU MENTAL?! A lot of my mates (and colleagues at the CBT company!) thought I was insane doing a degree in Packaging, they thought I’d decided I wanted to design milk-cartons and not carry on doing what I was doing… but here’s the thing, I was doing what I always wanted to do… think about the component parts of all packaging;

  1. Form
  2. Function
  3. Instruction / Product Information
  4. Design / Brand
  5. Fast moving, evolving consumer goods

Sound familiar? Not so skeptical now are you!

It was literally the only course I could find that would teach me everything I wanted to know about design. About the esthetic form of something, the information architecture of something, the design of something that needs to stand out in a crowded aisle, the typographic quality of something (print anybody?), the brand of something, the perishability, materials, mass appeal, recognition, touch… you name it and in those 3 years I learnt the lot. I just did it using the paradigm of cardboard, tetra-pack and plastic. We even covered sales & marketing as part of the course. It was great.

It’s also something I continuously refer too today because it’s even more relevant in towards world. All our UX is just packaged design.

Packaging on a supermarket shelf has less than three seconds to grab the attention of a consumer.

Those three seconds are exceedingly important when you consider that more than 70% of purchasing decisions are made at the shelf. Add to this the fact that supermarkets can contain on average 40,000 packs to choose from, then that pack has got to work hard. It’s the same with websites, apps, digital outdoors etc.

Packaging’s role is threefold:

  1. To sell the product
  2. To protect the content
  3. To facilitate the use of the contents

Ditto, the role of digital is the same. The component parts are the same too;

Graphics

Packaging graphics have more to do than simply look pretty. They must work to cut through the white noise that is the crowded supermarket shelf, and attract a potential buyer.

Shape

Packaging comes in all shapes and sizes. The structure of a pack can serve to create shelf standout and sell the product, to prolong the life of the product and to facilitate the use of the product. There’s also a lot we can learn from packaging that ‘just is’. It’s practical & boring in some cases, but absolutely necessary to transport the precious cargo to the end user.

Sustainability

The packaging industry has been vilified over the years, not least on the subject of plastic bags. Yet, brands have always been looking for ways to reduce materials and maximise packaging for both environmental and financial reasons. Web optimisation in UX is the same.

Materials

Traditionally certain materials have been associated with certain markets. But as markets change and consumer attitudes adjust it is unsurprising that material choice has also changed in the packaging sector accordingly. Same in digital, only our material is now ‘content’ and ‘conversations’ and bits of media.

Regulations

The packaging industry spans many markets and so is regulated by many different forms of legislation and voluntary codes. More parallels – I work a lot in Financial Services so I know this all too well.

Golden Rules

There are 8 golden rules of packaging design that we were taught at uni too that I stilI also apply in UX:

  1. Conduct a thorough audit of all competitors in your market before you start, and make sure you understand their respective positionings and attributes. Then create your own.
  2. Look at what is happening in other markets, e.g. if you are just considering the UK or Europe, what is happening in the US or Far East that might give you a point of difference?
  3. Put measures in place at the start so you can track and learn as you go, e.g. measure awareness of and attitude to your packaging now and in the future. A good research agency will tell you how to do this.
  4. Be different and ensure your pack has its own visual equity and has a strong personality and attitude.
  5. Make sure your pack works at all stages of its life cycle, from leaving the factory to ending up in the user’s hands.
  6. Mock up how your pack would look alongside your competition. Test it in store and make sure it really does leap out at point of purchase.
  7. Design with tomorrow in mind. Create a pack that is in keeping with current market trends and future trends.
  8. Consider doing some pre-market testing to make sure your pack will find a willing audience. But be careful how you test it as consumers never quite know what they are looking for until someone shows them something new. Henry Ford once said: ‘If I’d listened to what people wanted I’d have built a faster horse!’

Out of the box UX

Everybody in the field of UX should be digesting and using content and background materials from the field of Packaging Design. It’s a rich seam of knowledge that can be directly applied to what we do. Take a website for example, it’s just in many cases a fast-moving-consumer-good and it comes with all of the same elements. Now that interfaces are merging with the real world it’s more relevant than ever.

2013 is the year where I go right back to my roots and start to bring packaging to the forefront of the area of UX that I work with. I’m going to start taking packaging examples to client meetings & as part of all my Discover, Define, Design phases. It’s actually one of the single biggest areas of parallel comparative research available to us so when you start a new brief this year, make an effort to go down to the supermarket & decide what kind of package your making for your digital content.

Resources

January 10, 2013 · design, ipad, mobile, UX

Skeuomorphic iPad design

Love it or hate it, skeuomorphism has been a popular tool in digital interface design since the birth of the GUI. Following Apple’s own use of skeuomorphism, interface designers have created some visually stunning apps for iOS devices that mimic various features of analogue technology.

I found this great post that showcases 30 fantastic examples of iPad interface designs based on real life objects, from retro synthesizers to wire bound notebooks.

http://line25.com/articles/showcase-of-skeuomorphism-in-ipad-interface-design

January 5, 2013 · design

Why Design Matters

I don’t know if you own an Apple iPhone or an iPad but you only have to pick them up and touch them to realise that they are designed with a genius that goes beyond the physical. They are intuitive and work with an understanding that blends the human experience with technology.

Steve Jobs is maybe “the” design genius of the information age and has made major impact on several industries with his technology designs and creations including;

  1. The personal computer industry with Apple in the 1980′s
  2. The movie animation industry with Pixar in 1986 when he bought the company for $5 million from George Lucas (all of its movies are among the top 50 grossing movies of all time and have generated over $6.3 billion in revenue)
  3. The music industry with the iPod and the Apple iTunes store
  4. The mobile phone industry with the Apple iPhone and Apps store
  5. The publishing industry with the iPad (the fastest selling technology device in history)

In 1996 Steve Jobs was interviewed by “Wired Magazine” and he said this about design.

“Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it “looks”. But of course if you dig deeper , its really how it “works”. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. To design something really well, you have to “get it”. You have to really “grok ” what it’s all about. It takes a passionate comittment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it , not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.”

The term “Grok” by the way is a real word and not a “Jobian” expression.

It means according to the Oxford English Dictionary “to understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with” and “to empathize or communicate sympathetically with).

Wikipedia says “To grok is to share the same reality or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity“.

Author Robert A. Heinlein coined the term in his best-selling 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land. In Heinlein’s view, grokking is the intermingling of intelligence that necessarily affects both the observer and the observed.

I am immersed and enmeshed in the web industry both personally and professionally and have the pleasure and privilege to work with people and their companies with their online stores, web design and digital marketing projects.

The constant challenge is to get under their skin and understand intuitively and empathically what they are trying to achieve and how they want to communicate to their audience. The websites we design and the solution we build need to go beyond the skin deep look and feel and provide the user with an experience that solves their problems and makes life a little easier. In essence we are trying to change the world in our small way.

The genius in design is to ask enough questions and spend enough time so that we “get it” and blend the technology with the human so we can provide an experience that goes beyond the ordinary and into the realm of of intuition and maybe a little magic.

Do you get under your customers skin?

Original article by Jeff Bullas

November 7, 2012 · design, digital, IA, mobile

Responsive vs. Adaptive

What’s the difference between adaptive and responsive web design?

In the world of web design, the only thing harder than keeping up with the ever-evolving standards in HTML, CSS, and other technologies, is keeping up with the vocabulary! Among the latest hot new terms in web design: Responsive Design and Adaptive Design.

What do Responsive and Adaptive web design have in common? Both responsive and adaptive web design are essentially about creating web designs that are optimized for the size of the screen or the type of device that is used to view them.

The basic concept is that instead of creating one web page designed for one target screen size, you create a web designed for multiple screen sizes, most commonly to work well on at least three different screen sizes — a small mobile screen, a tablet-sized screen, and a larger desktop computer monitor. Of course the new mini-tablets might also cause us some headaches now… but for now, lets assume it’s just the Fixed, Tablet and Mobile designs – which is how I’m directing my teams and my clients.

In recent years, most web designers have created page designs that are 960 pixels wide so that they fit comfortably on a computer monitor that is 1024 by 768. But today, you need to design for everything from a 320-pixel iPhone to giant HD TV screens, which are increasingly being used to surf the web thanks to Google and Apple TV devices.

Responsive designs respond to changes in the size of a browser window by fluidly ajusting the width to fit the space available. Thus, as you drag the side of a browser to make it larger or smaller, you’ll see the design change in realtime. Changes to a responsive design includes adjusting the size and positioning of elements to better fit the space available as you see in this example.

Adaptive designs are generally based on a defined set rules based on device capabilities, as well as screen size. As a result, the change to the design may be more dramatic, and there may be many variations. Using device targeting, you can adapt a web page to include multiple versions of images or to remove video from the smallest screens. In many case, you may not even be able to tell that a website is designed using an adaptive approach if you only view it in a desktop web browser. The most advanced adaptive web designs, such as the one American Airlines created at aa.com, use a sophisticated auto-detection script to identify each device that visits the site and then deliver the best version of the site, adapted to display based on the size and capabilities of each device.

If you have developed a fully adaptive mobile web design strategy, you may deliver a page that includes multimedia (video, audio, aniation) to your desktop users, and then adapt that entire page design to more limited mobile devices by not only changing the design, but also removinge the video and large images before you ever serve the page to low-end cell phones. Similarly, you might make the phone number and directions more prominent in the version designed for mobile phones, while featuring a video introduction, more prominently for desktop users.

Adaptive web sites may look dramatically different from one device to another, adapting not only to the screen size, but to the capabilities of the device.

A little history and credit for Adaptive and Responsive Design

The term Responsive Design is generally credited to Ethan Marcote.

The term Adaptive Design has been around a lot longer, but some give credit for this term to Aaron Gustafson who wrote a book called Adaptive Design.

Another terms get tossed around when we talk about mobile design “Mobile First.”

Luke Wroblewski deserves credit for the term Mobile First, which means designing the mobile version of a site before you design the larger, desktop version (historically most sites were designed the other way around).

Article source: Digital Family

October 30, 2012 · design, digital, Experience Design, Social media, usability, UX

How excited am I?!

I’m not late to this party. I saw this when it first landed last month. What I have been doing is studying it… and quite intently… because from what I’m seeing ‘IF’ this is the experience they’re going to go live with and it’s not just a really polished up demo video (we’ve all done it to sell something, it’s what Computer Games have been doing with their advertising for decades; “Not actual game footage”) then this could be potentially game changing. Not just for social networks, but for the way we design our websites.

So what about it then? It’s an important piece of design because it’s gone balls out to be awesome. Which means no compromises. It means giving people the time and the bandwidth to do something amazing. Working within those variables inevitably means great (no, AMAZING) work emerges. All too often as UX practitioners we’re given the brief, but we’re not given the time or budgets to do the brief justice. A deadline dictates the output. The budget dictates the deadline. The competition / competitors dictate the deadline. What we end up with is work that quite often we are not happy with and that shows in the output. I believe that.

So just do what I’ve done for a while now and go over this video again and again and again and absorb the quality of the interaction design. The dedication to the experience design. The attitude of the team (which this oozes by the way – ATTITUDE – the attitude to want to produce the greatest interaction experience on the internet… it smells of hunger and want, doesn’t it?!) to win.

In four words: “I already love it“.

October 17, 2012 · behaviour, Books, design, digital, Experience Design, Infographic, UX

The UX of Visualising Data

Introduction – Visualizing the abstract

I’ve been working on  a project over the last couple of months that’s opened my mind to a whole new place in UX that I’ve fallen deeply in love with. It’s always been there and I’ve always admired it, but I’ve never had to interact with it first hand and given it much studying until now. The area of Data Visualisation or InfoViz as I’ve been calling it with my clients.

I’ve got some new heroes in the form of Hans Rosling and David McCandless. Men who not only do the visual part, but have become voices that help articulate the importance of visualising data in ways that the normal user can consume. I love that quality in people.

By visualizing information, we turn it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes, a sort of information map. And when you’re lost in information, an information map is kind of useful. We should allow the dataset to change our mindset and if we can do that, then maybe it can also change behavior. It’s a fascinating area.

David McCandless in one of his Ted Talks said the following; “We’re suffering from information overload and data glut. We need to help visualize information, so that we can see the patterns and connections that matter and then design that information so it makes more sense, or it tells a story, or allows us to focus only on the information.” Never truer words spoken about ANYTHING we do in UX, not just InfoViz.

Data is the new oil?

Lots of wonderful comparisons to natural resources when I having my adventures round data land. If data is the kind of ubiquitous resource that we can mine and can shape to provide new innovations and new insights, and it’s all around us, and it can be mined very easily if we set our UX up to gather and harvest at the right times.

Graphis diagrams: The graphic visualization of abstract data

I recently found out about this book by Walter Herdeg, which is truly a great great thing if you can actually find a copy of it. The original was published in 1974 but still has some genius to it and the v.2 book is also full of thoughtful quality. A seminal vision for the convergence of aesthetics and information value, which codified the conventions of contemporary data visualization and information design. One of the 100 most influential design books of the past 100 years, it features work by icons like legendary designer and animator Saul Bass, Brain Pickings favorite Milton Glaser, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman and many more.

For instance, check out this beauty:

Examples

During my exploration for this project I’m working on I’ve stumbled upon a whole wealth of amazing InfoViz and I wanted to share my favorites with you so you can marvel at the Data, but also at the incredible Interaction Design and Visual Design that go into making InfoViz so magical.

Four Ways to Slice Obama’s 2013 Budget Proposal

With Obama’s recent budget for next year proposed, Shan Carter et. al of The New York Times let you explore the plan in their new interactive graphic. It provides four distinct views of what the breakdowns look like, all the while keeping a distinct link between each click with smooth transitions and consistent objects. The transitions make this graphic. It’s often useful to see data from different angles, and the smooth transitions (rather than abrupt jumps) let you see how things are and how they have changed, effectively. This is fine work. Click here to check it out in all its interactive glory.

The London Riots from The Guardian

The Guardian newspaper in the UK are the bonafide gurus in visualizing news information. Here are two amazing examples from the same news topic – The London Riots – and both prove just how incredibly talented the Guardian designers and InfoViz experts are + just how fascinating some of the data from the London Riots is.

The shooting of Mark Duggan on 4 August sparked a series of riots, first in Tottenham then across England. This timeline was created to follow the spread in interactive realtime, culminating in what could be the most incredible catalog of an even ever put into digital form. Their version of it for the Arab Springs was similarly fascinating and groundbreaking!

It’s both Visual and Visceral. Articulating time as a road is very clever and breaking events across the timeline by location is equally captivating. Massive kudos indeed – Click here to go have a fiddle and marvel at this one.

However… it wasn’t the jewel in the interactive InfoViz crown for the Guardian. Oh no… they kept that back for this:

The analysis of 2.6 million tweets shows Twitter is adept at correcting misinformation – particularly if the claim is that a tiger is on the loose in Primrose Hill and that’s exactly what they did with this amazing info t0ol:

Throughout the UK riots, many scanned the internet in search of reliable information. In the absence of confirmed news, the web was often the only way of tracking events. Amidst the hubbub, countless topics came and went. As worries mounted, speculation grew. Rare individuals requested sources, countered hearsay, sought the truth. The rise and fall of rumours on Twitter is a striking display of social forces in action. Click here to have a play, it’s really quite a breathtaking thing they’ve created.

Rethinking the food nutrition label

The food nutrition label is on almost every food item, but it can be confusing in the sense that it doesn’t tell you much about whether something is good or bad for you. The UC Berkeley School of Journalism hosted a challenge for designers and food experts to rethink the label.

We are confused about what and how to eat and so we’re eating too much of the wrong things. In fact, we’re eating too much of everything. Two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese. The obesity rate among preschoolers has doubled since 1970. Type 2 diabetes has become an epidemic. We want to make it easier to choose healthy food.

Visual designer Renee Walker won with her rework shown above. The rectangles on top of each label represent main ingredients, and bars on the bottom provide a quick thumbs or thumbs down for a breakdown of fat content, carbohydrates, etc. Icons of spoons and scoops are used to supplement serving size since no one knows what 182 grams looks or feels like. Click here to find out more.

 Electricity Generated from Renewable Sources

I really enjoyed the simplicity and fluidness of this one. It’s basically a breakdown of energy consumption by country, by year. Simples. Check it out. This is the kind of thing that would normally be shown to the consumer as a table of data, or a bar chart. It’s a much more engaging experience when you can reach out and touch the data. Brilliant.

If you liked that one you might also like this one from the U.S, which is Your Electricity Bill redefined.

Political Climate Chart

Another great example of how to break 3 dimensions down into one clean interaction. Time, Issues & Political Party. The norm’ would be to add things onto a bar-chart or similar. This way we get something much more fun and something much easier to digest. Click here and have a go yourself. Some fascinating data.

Here’s another two from the U.S that give us interactive views of similar data scenarios. What a “Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York” and the “US Health Care Spending: Who Pays?” breakdown.

   

Sources & great references

I’ve browsed A LOT of great resources recently and digested a lot of great InfoViz… here are some of the sources I’d recommend if you’re starting to fall in love with Data like I have:

Cartophile Cartographia
Chartsbin Chartporn
Cool Infographics Comicbook Cartography
Daily Infographic Daily Statistic
Data Visualization Everyday Venn
iGraphics Explained iLove Charts
This Is Indexed Information Design
InfoGraphic Directory Infographic Site
Info Graphic World Info Graphics News
Infograph Love Infosthetics
Information Is Beautiful Junk Charts
Flowing Data Fuck Yeah Visual Data
Mind Map Art Neoman Infographics
News Graphics Old Map
One More Graphic PD Viz
Social Media Graphics Mega Maps
Infographic Showcase Visualsing Data
Vizualize Viz World
Well Formed Data
September 18, 2012 · design, mobile

Business Benefits of Responsive Web

As we all know by now, mobile is the new black, pink and whatever other color you can think of. Mobile is not going away anytime soon and it is increasingly becoming integrated into our lives. In fact, studies show that mobile web browsing will outpace traditional desktop browsing within 2-3 years.

For business owners and marketers, this shift can seem daunting as it ads in a huge layer of complexity and perceived cost. What approach do you take? Where do you start, and when?

The when part is really up to you, but for the how piece of the puzzle, I would look no further than Responsive Design.

Here are some reasons why you should consider updating your company site to utilize Responsive Design.

1. You Will Save Money

Before the practice of Responsive Design was widely adopted (it still isn’t, really), if companies wanted to have an optimal mobile experience of their website a separate set of templates or a device-specific app had to be designed and developed.

As you might guess, this can get quite costly. One site for iPhone, one site for iPad, another for Android etc. Then, what happens when a new device comes out? Make another website or app specific to that device? I’m guessing most business owners don’t want to spend that kind of cash just to keep up.

The beauty of Responsive Design is in the fact that it enables your site to fit perfectly in any screen size. One website, all devices. That means that your website only has to be developed once, significantly reducing the cost.

2. You Will Save Time

The fact that you can have the ability to design and build your site in one project will also free up your time. Less meetings, less approvals and less wondering if you’re just going to have to do this process all over again once a new device comes on the market.

3. You Can Beat Your Competition

Since Responsive Design is still in its infancy, there is a strong chance that your competition is not implementing it. Redesigning your website to fit optimally in all devices would take your competition by surprise. Visitors will get a much better experience on your site than on your competitors, and will likely take more action.

4. Your Site Will Be Relevant Longer

When adopting Responsive Design, your site will stand the test of time for longer. You wont be playing ‘catch up’ all the time. Your website will be future friendly, as they say.

5. Your Conversions Will Increase

When people visit your site, they are typically more likely to take action if they have a good experience. This means, giving them what they want with the least amount of ‘friction’. Using Responsive Design, you can greatly reduce the amount of friction involved and give your users a great experience—thus, increasing conversions.

6. You’ll Stress Less

All of the above reasons will help you sleep better at night knowing that your site is actually working at it’s optimal level on all devices. This will give you peace of mind when it comes to your online presence.

6.5 You Can Tell Those iPhone App Sales Guys To Take A Hike With Confidence

We had a client who told me that a salesman approached him and pitched a proprietary iPhone app for his Pizzeria at an astonishing price. The client was smart and didn’t purchase the service and asked if he thought that he should do it. The answer is NO for most businesses. With responsive design, you don’t need to spend tens of thousands on apps for all devices. Just one site for everything.

Now it’s your Turn. What do you think about the topic of Responsive Design and the Mobile landscape in general. How should businesses address this change in the marketplace?

June 1, 2012 · behaviour, design, digital, Experience Design, mobile, UX

The lines of experience

It’s been an exciting couple of years hasn’t it? The whole offline / online thing… the internet went from being a place you visited to ‘digital’ which exists in multiple places simultaneously and intrinsically woven into our lives. The Eco-System effect. How about this one, you’ll like this and be repelled at the implications in equal measures. There are some bars and clubs in the U.S using a novel technology to help partygoers decide where to party. SceneTap, an American start-up, uses cameras to scan the faces of those who enter and leave participating establishments. Its software then guesses each person’s age and sex. Aggregated data is streamed to a website and mobile app. This allows punters to see which bars are busy, the average age of revellers and the all-important male-to-female ratio. The bar owners gain publicity and intelligence about their customers. For instance, did a promotion aimed at women attract many?

It’s the phone angle. You can adapt your behavior in advance when things used to be essentially ‘pot-luck’. We’re almost cyborg in nature by virtue of having our lives augmented with mobile. We can see through walls now. Bye-bye FourSquare, I’m not going to ‘check-in’ because it already knows I’m there and tells people if I opt in to be auto-detected.

Many companies face the challenge of creating entirely new behaviours for new products. However, my thinking is that behaviour change is far more successful when it aligns with a habit we’ve already formed, which apparently shapes nearly half of the decisions we make every day.

Around 74.2% of the UK’s population, totalling 47m, will go online at least once a month this year on a range of devices including smartphones and tablets, according to eMarketer stats… and that number has almost quadrupled in 5 years because of the rise of the smartphone. We’re all getting smarter at astonishing rates.

I’m also loving the Nike Fuel Band and it’s bigger applications… At SXSW this year, to promote the Fuel Band, Nike essentially turned the inside of a venue into one huge Fuelband wristband with the same colored lights and ability to track energy level. Except in this case, Nike was tracking the energy level of the whole crowd.

Across town from the gig they had rigged up lighting in a building to react to the audience at the gig. The more energetic the crowd, the greener the building became, so that people outside the event could witness the level to which the crowd was going off. It helped that Nike picked two very high energy bands for this show: Diplo and Sleigh Bells. Nike measured the crowd’s energy level by placing Nike FuelBands on the wrists of a large number of attendees, then tracked the activity using customized wireless technology that functions similarly to the way the iOS app works. It’s an extreme example but think about it… using digital, people influenced the lighting at another location. I remember when I got my first feature phone in 1997 people said I was mad because the SMS thing would never take off!

What happens when all these new ways of doing things start converging and the lines start to blur? For instance… Online sales are expected to reach to a staggering $317 billion by 2016 in the U.S which is phenomenal, right… but I’ve always had this hypothesis that online sales aren’t just about convenience, they’re also about data. People love the fact that they can see something rated or reviewed, or find obscure things that are just too difficult to find on the high-street. It’s a demand thing. I’d be fascinated to see what starts to happen when those ratings and ‘easy to find’ influences start popping up in more Urban environments – “Hey Pete, there’s a huge footfall of people like you occurring at this place not too far from where you are right now & they’re all buying things you might like, let me lead you there“. Augmented behavior offline using online data. Could be huge.

Users understand the importance of the internet and a bad experience can go a long way; 44% of online shoppers will tell their friends about a bad experience online according to a report by KissMetrics. So take that sentiment offline and there is this whole “don’t go in there Pete, a lot of people like you had a rubbish time”…

Then there’s the growing behavior around tablets. Sure, it was bound to happen, we just needed Apple to lead the charge, but it’s the way they’ve altered and augmented behavior that I find astonishing. 69% of tablet owners make a purchase on their device every month, according to stats from inMobi and Mobext. 50% of tablet owners spend at least an hour a day accessing media content on their tablets, and 72% use it while watching TV. So it’s not a huge leap ahead of us to assume ‘shopping the adverts’ is just around the corner. The advertising they said was dead is just about to be supplemented by technology. My behavior doesn’t change, but the experience is augmented by the ability to just a button on my iPad & buy what I’m watching. Makes sense. Especially if there are “100 people like you all doing the same”.

According to an IAB/ValueClick study, 52% of consumers are happy to see online advertising because it allows them to view content or use services online at no cost – they’ve brought their offline viewing habits with them. But 55% said they would rather see advertising relevant to their interests and 59% would prefer a lower number of relevant ads than a higher volume of irrelevant ones. So how long before that mobile or tablet you use influences what adverts you see while you’re watching your favorite shows, so when you reach out and buy it instantly you’re actually just choosing to buy from things you’re really only interested in. I don’t have a dog, don’t show me adverts for dog food… Augmented advertising comes to the TV experience. It’s all totally feasible now.

Digital experience crossing over in the real world is becoming more and more a reality and the next few frontier years are going to be really exciting. The possibilities are endless and impact on our lives can only be positive.

March 4, 2012 · behaviour, design, digital, Experience Design, IA, UCD, usability, UX

Gonzo UX

Work that researches well is predicted on what has gone before. Anything different, or out of the ordinary, will test badly, for the very reason that it is different – Bill Bembach

The majority of my work is as it should be… Neat, proper, rule-abiding and by the New Rider book. Packed full of user-centred design and interaction principals. The user at the heart of the story just happens to be me. Occasionally I need to indulge myself and that’s when my work gets all a bit ‘Gonzo’.

Maybe I’m wrong, but is it time for us to embrace ‘Gonzo UX’ as a reality of our industry and recognise it for right or wrong as a reality, because as a tool for the current generation of UXers’ who go to work everyday & follow the ‘rules’ but don’t always necessarily believe those rules it’s part of our lives and so many of us with a slight right-brain skew do it. I’m Gonzo and proud.

We pay lip-service to the methods of UX for the sake of our clients and then just do our own thing alot of the time. Exaggerating things to make them cooler & more progressive. We do our UX with claims of objectivity, but really how objective is it once we’ve put our own spin on the results, ignored the average bits of the insight and just pushed things forward rather than to the side – which to be honest is what the passionate few amongst us really want. If you’re not being Gonzo for some briefs then you’re not innovating, you’re optimising.

I almost always end up including a little piece of myself in the story, concocting a solution with me as the protagonist thinking “I’ll call the persona Gerald, they’ll never notice that crafty 30 something advertising exec from London is really me”… Come on, admit it, how many have you have done it?! More than you’d think. So much of what we do is a subjective, artistic endeavour based on our own objectively collected insights as real life consumers. We’re just scared to admit it because we think it somehow cheapens the solutions and the work is less robust because there’s a large wedge of ourselves in it rather than a real-life bloke called Gerald who probably still owns a monotone Nokia from 2003 anyway… And I’m certainly not user-centring a solution around THAT bloke, he sucks! When that proposal goes live deep-down its somewhere comfortably between subjective and objective and as long as it’s still good, where’s the harm in being a bit Gonzo with the approach. It’s still packed full of insight driven work, the insight just happens to be your own. It’s good. It has a place and you shouldn’t be ashamed (as long as you’re racking up success and you can attribute it back to some fuzzy bit of research or insight someone pompous researcher gave you at work).

Lets look at bit more at the detail. Gonzo UX tends to favor style over fact to achieve accuracy — if accuracy is in fact meant to be achieved at all — because we often use our own personal experiences and emotions to provide context for the topic or solution being covered. It disregards the “polished”, edited solution favoured by the esoteric usability cronies and strives for a more gritty, personable approach. Sometimes you see the personality of a solution is just as important as the problem the solution is trying to fix.

If you have a tendency when you’re selling solutions in to use quotations, sarcasm, humor, exaggeration, and profanity then you may in fact be practising Gonzo UX and you don’t even know it.

So as of today I’m actually adding ‘Gonzo UX’ to our companies list of approaches. As a term, for our clients, and I’m going to make sure our team are proud to do it when the time is appropriate.

“What? The client won’t pay for research and insight?” It’s a Gonzo solution.

“Oh my god, that insight work sucks but I’ve only got 2 days to craft a response!” It’s a Gonzo solution.

“This project is just going to be DULL and UNINSPIRING if I follow this research and tailor it to this dudettes life” I’ll go a little bit Gonzo for the sake of making it good rather than average.

February 4, 2012 · advertising, design

The Crazies

Remember the Apple Think Different campaign? Seeing as how there’s been a few references to Steve Jobs and Jonny Ives (strategist / tactician and a designer working in harmony anyone?) recently I thought I’d just surface my favourite advert of all time:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.

Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

It’s a beautiful piece of poetry by two incredibly talented wordsmiths Rob Siltanen and Ken Segall from Chiat Day. I was lucky enough to visit and work at Chiat Day in LA back in 2008 and it reminded me why I love what I do. Meeting someone as industry defining as Lee Clow was humbling and a grounding experience. These guys make things simple. They’re designers of words and thoughts and they make it approachable and elegant and I think we as UX tradesman and women can learn a lot from that.

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