Peter Rivera's Blogs

Shameless Promotion Department:

We've just released our PIXCETERA app in the Apple iPhone store. The experience was designed and created by the Key Experiences team within MediaGlow. We kept the experience very simple, very focused, and basically ported the value proposition of the site onto the hand-held device. Users can explore hundreds of original world-class photo galleries created by the photo-editors of the site as well as galleries published from across our content network. Check it out and let us know what you think. The app is significant for us in that it solves both a technical and UI convention for delivering photo browsing experiences within our upcoming iPhone apps. Very soon look for releases for "The Unofficial Apple Weblog" (www.TUAW.com), as well as Asylum.com. In the meantime, enjoy the pictures on PIXCETERA!

A friend and associate of mine (David Link at WonderFactory) recently twittered about the fact that all the three major content portals are basically the same and asked "what's next?" in a Web portal experience.

Here it is: http://twitter.com/WonderfactoryNY/status/1354194077

The suspects here would be Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL. I wanted to reply to the post and... (sort of) agree with David. I do think there are major differences but listing them out is too easy an answer and not where I think he is going.

Hey, twitter posts are half a calorie in terms of value and content. So I'll answer from an AOL perspective as we continue on our roadmap of super-setting the Web and giving our users more and more control.

At this point in terms of portal reinvention I think we're on the right path; but we know that "re-inventing", as in top-to-bottom, is not what the entrenched public really wants in many cases. They don't want a car with 3 wheels just so we can call it progress. When you have 50 million or a 100 million people coming to your sites, you have a tendency to listen to their needs. One of those needs is consistency and accepted formats. When you want to truly break the mold that can be an obvious inhibitor.

So I think the experience of a portal will change but not necessarily relative a Web page as we experience it today. It will be in your hands via smart-phone and projected on the living room wall and, like the wiii, you'll gesture to get what you want. This is not as far-fetched or far off as it could have sounded just three years ago. This is already upon us.

This portal will know no boundaries to data, or networking, or inter-connectedness to people. It will be ubiquitous and won't chain you to any one experience. And, though it will have a social networking component, you'll start to find shades of meaning beyond just "Friends". How many of you want all of your Facebook friends on the Living room wall and at that level of intimacy? ("Friend" possibly the most incorrectly used term of the age.)

You'll be able to filter the "news" in powers of 10, zooming outward or inward: your personal events ("I hear water outside"), your social circles ("Our neighbor's kitchen is flooded!"), your neighborhood ("Spring St. is flooded!"), your town ("Taxes just went up 10% to help fix flooding problem!"), your state ("State taxes just went up 5% on top of that local 10%"), your nation ("Obama to lower taxes!"), your entire world ("Taxes outlawed by G7 nations!"). And you'll be able to zoom in and out at these various levels of resolution and meaning and inter-connectedness. Meaning is everywhere. A good portal shoud be able to help you find it. Experiences today are so compartmentalized, dominated by the "module". We have to hammer at that one.

And all that said: personalization is the true next wave. Yes, all of us have been talking about it for years but NO ONE as done it well yet. Or at least to its full potential.

So the Portal is really you. And YOU are the portal. That is what it's going to be.

The team here will keep pushing toward this vision, whatever it is branded, and whatever device it sits on.

I love how the designers of this IBM micro-site interpreted their subjects (along the bottom) into stark and simple iconography while staying true to a consistent visual language. Very often we're tasked with taking cliches and making them fresh and invigorated. I think this team has done that well here across these 14 concepts.

I was stuck for a couple of extra hours at the airport in Dulles and I noticed this amazing visualization of the Internet from AT&T Labs and a company called "Lumeta". Yes, I know these have been done before, but rarely with any sense of aesthetics in mind. Alas, some extensive searching revealed no aditional information on this monstrosity (it is rather large). It is one of those things you'd really like to get a copy of, but for some reason, a company smart enough to map the Internet is not smart enough to put an URL on the poster to follow up on their creation. Something this cool deserved a "How We Did It" type of explanation somewhere. Oh well. If you are in Dulles or Reagan airports, be sure to check it out. It color codes major nodes and networks, and that faint gray "haze" is actually thousands of labels for major servers in the network. A great marriage of science and design.

And apologies for the quality of the picture. It was taken with my phone.

Our team of designers and engineers has been steadily working on a re-launch of our portal in October that really pushes AOL into some new places. And this is just the beginning! Here is a link to the info on TechCrunch. More details coming soon but the new page has features such as RSS, mail, and soc|net aggregation, customizable navigation, and some other surprises. Stay tuned.

This is the best interactive idea of the year (ok, for beer drinkers) and I am sure many of you may already have seen it: the labels on some beer bottles change color to blue when the beer is the right chilly temperature. All this is the magic of temperature sensitive inks.

One of the keys to designing great interactive is that the system provides feedback to the user. Questions are answered consistently such as "where am I in the system?", and "Why am I waiting and for how long?", and "What just happened and how do I fix it?". There are many other examples.

I was surprised to see a beer bottle do a better job at this than most websites. Considering that the mass market beer bottle label or can has not changed in any meaningful way for decades, this is a pretty significant innovation. Hmmm... getting thirsty.

The last post on quality of design and development seemed to get a lot of traffic (hopefully for the right reasons). The "Q" word being such a loaded proposition I wanted to now go a little deeper into how agile practices and quality are inter-related.

Click "read more" for the goods...

I had a little idea this morning for aol.com and I'd love your input into what could make it special.

Imagine a module that allowed you to easily flip to any ranking chart (box office, billboard, aol music song streams, nielson rankings, comscore site rankings, top stocks, etc.). Maybe 20-30 ranking charts, all in one place with cool navigation to move between them. Feed driven. The New York Times calls this "Most Wanted" in their newspaper and it has about 7-8. This would be more powerful and cut across a seemingly endless array of topics. All the most popular stuff, all in one place. If you were writing requirements for this, what would you ask for? As a user what would you need?

I love this. OK, twitter was having some problems, but look how they handled it! An illustrator worked with a developer to make sure that this, in itself, was not a total bummer to the consumer. Really nice wacky brand experience.

Next time you're thinking about the drudgery of error handling, think about your audience: cold, confused and alone with an ERROR screen confronting them... Many are sure that whatever just broke was their fault. Then think of this ... whale, being lifted effortlessly over the waves. Not only is this feedback from the site on what is hapening, it is an extremely polite way of saying we did not properly plan load capacity and messed up--please come back later.

The opportunity to surprise and delight an audience is everywhere! Even, and maybe especially, in the areas of weakness. Sounds like a zen proverb, but it's all about the details.

You've worked hard, sacrificed nights and weekends, your site is out there for users to click around in, the beer from the launch party is now flat. And yet, there is an outstanding list of design bugs that goes around the corner. Columns are uneven, colors "off" from spec, fonts the wrong size, links going to the wrong places if working at all. Hmmmm... Obviously, something is wrong. Everyone is saying the site is live and celebrating, but it looks... unprofessional and not representative of the team's best work.

I'll state the obvious that this is not where anyone wants to be in this business. So, how to deliver quality each and every time? This post looks at each major role in the creation process and posits the questions that need to be asked individually to keep professional-level design a strategic priority.