Of the general mobile phone market with web browsing capabilities, only 14% actually browse the web on their phones. However 90% of iPhone users browse the web.
Wow.
Mobile phone companies have been pushing their web browsing phones into the marketplace for years, yet not until Apple created a better experience -- a better design -- could usage increase this tremendously.
We saw a similar result when we launched an updated navigational system in our StyleList site several months ago. Our traffic rose ten-fold the very day it launched.
As we evolve our web sites, let us take note. Success is not always about getting new features into the marketplace. Sometimes the greatest success can come from inventing new solutions to radically transform current features into even greater effortless and delightful experience.
At this week's "Graphing Social Patterns" conference in Washington D.C., attendees perched on ends of seats, focused on gleaning hints or tricks or otherwise silver bullets to turbo-boost their web properties' social syndication quota.
"Design for the Viewer," advised a panelist.
"Not just the user. Design for the Viewer."
Focusing on the "Viewer" rather than the user in this context means to "make your widget noticeable." Utilize your arsenal of brand and creative design to grab the user's attention, quickly. As Chris Anderson recently observed, in the "attention economy," a person's time actually is money and gaining even a split-second of it will commensurately enable monetization opportunity.
Make your placements visually vocal. Make them shout "This Thing is Grabbable!" or "This Thing Does Something With Facebook!" or "Like MySpace? You'll Like This Too, Then!" Images move faster to cognitive recognition and association. Images are sexy, free-tv-bundled FIOS where text is generic dial-up.
"Grabbability" - the ability to be taken and embedded elsewhere - was noted as a function without standard iconography and widely misunderstood or plain missed by the target audience. Separately, the Facebook logo (and by extension other logos with a brand afterimage) was cited as an element which "speaks to" Facebook users, and increases clickthrough by a multiple.
Text alone will not suffice to evoke the concept of intersite portability - at least not within the split-seconds available before whimsy or flashing hamsters distract. Often, site owners utilize text to describe a social app's value, and the text gets lost in a quick scan with other page text. To gain notice from attention-lacking social surfers, employ something visual, persistent, and relevant to the viewer's experiences or affiliations offsite.
The inference drawn is to design a system of visual prompts or cues (suggested to me earlier by John Kilpatrick) for what page elements refer to activities a Viewer may carry on to other favorite web destinations. And then, one will hope, back again.
At the SxSW conference, I enjoyed hearing Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert share best practices for design critiques. Here are some key takeaways:
1) Introduce your varied concepts without interruption
2) Introduce the team discussion by asking "What works? What doesn't?"
> Keep the conversation moving, as the team may get hung up on details. At this early stage however, it's best to capture overall feelings instead of tiny details.
> Make sure each design is discussed adequately. Sometimes the team will say "that's the one!" and not chat about the other designs, but much can be learned from what is/isn't working in the other designs to help the refinement stage.
> Stay "problem-focused" as the team will likely share solutions instead since it's easier for them to articulate those. A typical "solution" is to take one thing from the first concept, another from the second and yet another from the third. Recognize that if you say "yeah, we can do/change that" during the review, it may screw up the design when you actually try it out. Say that a potential solution is something you'd like to explore, but you'll keep the actual problem in the forefront and will solve that in the refinement stage.
Click "read more" for more tips.
Next June (sometime between June 10th and June 13th to be more precise) I will be presenting a session on Web Typography at the Voices the Matter Conference to be held in Nashville, TN. The conference, run by the book publisher New Riders, brings together some of their top authors for a four day lovefest of everything Web design. This is my first time at the conference (of course, this is only the second VTM conference) but it looks pretty exciting, with some authors I know well and others I'm looking forward to meeting.
If you want to attend, you can register before May 2nd and save $200 and (just because I'm a sweet guy) you can use my special promo code at ANY time to save another $200. Use the priority code WDDSPKR during registration to save $200 on any of the packages.
I hope to see you there.
At this year's South By Southwest (SxSW) conference, I had the pleasure of listening to Kathy Sierra speak about how to create passionate users. She reminded us that we can make our audience fall in love with our experiences if we can make them feel great about themselves while on our sites.
Here are some of her suggestions on how to do this:
> Try to create human-ness in our designs. Recreate subtle, real-world elements -- like the iPhone screen scroll bounce -- in our animations to make things feel more alive.
> Read facial expressions during usability tests -- you have to see people's faces (not just read a report afterwards) because we naturally simulate other people's thoughts in our own brain. When we see a face frowning, we infer what that person is thinking. They're not articulating it, but we can see it and use those perceptions to influence our design strategies. (Click "Read More")
For the past 6 months we've been working with Adobe on a few AIR desktop products that leverage web-based services and content to create rich internet applications (RIA). It's been great to be part of the future of such a powerful new desktop authoring environment like AIR which combines web technologies including, html, JavaScript, AJAX and flash with a rich cross platform technology. The possibilities are truly limitless for what you can do...just look at the full spectrum of apps presented on Monday.
Ebay Desktop Buyers App
http://desktop.ebay.com/
New York Times Mobile Content Saving
http://shifd.com/
Nasdaq Market Replay
https://data.nasdaq.com/mr.aspx
The slide above is a simple animated build landing the point that AOL Programming is developing a diversity of brands to appeal to unique segments of the market. Aside from the header it has just ONE line of copy for a relatively complex idea. The pictures basically land the point before you even read the line.
If you do these things odds are good that everyone will think you are a ROCK STAR next time you present...
It was a very basic primer on Agile, and included information on other methods of process, such as the waterfall method and the snowman method. You can read about all things agile at Jeff's site (link above). Much emphasis was on speed to market, and how Agile methods can support a faster turnaround on product completion.
We did a "real" agile project, where teams had to work with a "User" to define and develop a product end to end, splitting up tasks appropriately. The products were cars, and they were drawn on a puzzle board so each person could take a piece and then put it together at the end. We were of course terrified of the Homer Simpson factor, an incredibly accurate depiction of what you may end up with if you rely completely on what users think they "want" without reality checks.
The Homer Car:
Sorry about the delay in getting the promised software round-up from Macworld out, but not only did I comeback from the conference with a suitcase full of new goodies, I also came back with a head full of a nasty virus that kept me in bed asleep most of last week.
The first product I want to talk about has already started to change the way I'm sharing design comps for feedback. On the face of it, Skitch is just another very cool screen capture tool for the Mac. It lets you capture all or part of the screen, as well as click on interface elements (such as a window or the Dock) to capture them isolated from all other elements on the screen. Once the screen is captured, the image is brought into the Skitch interface, where you have some simple drawing tools that allow you to add labels and then save the final results to your desktop.
And if that were all Skitch did, it would still rank as one of the best screen capture apps I have tried. However, Skitch goes one step further, by giving you single button publishing of the image either to your own .Mac account or to the Skitch.com, which works a lot like a YouTube for still images. You can email out the link to your screen capture and get feedback directly on the page or the viewer, if they have the Skitch application on their own machine, can download the image, add their own comments directly and then (with the press of a single button) put their changes back into the originating Skitch.com page.
The up-shot of this is that, rather than passing around screenshots in emails with bulleted lists of vague comments underneath, we can use the image to enter a running dialog with each other with the image being the focus and, hopefully, provide more accurate and meaningful feedback during during development. I've only just started working with Skitch and it is still in beta (although seems perfectly stable), so there may be some bumps ahead as I try to integrate this app into my work flow, but I invite everyone on the Blog to download Skitch and give it a try.
The auditorium at the Rem Koolhaas designed Campus Center in Chicago was the perfect setting for a discussion about design process. Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners), Jason Fried (37signals), and Carlos Segura (Segura Inc. ) lead a "presentation and discussion on design, entrepreneurship, and inspiration."
Lately, I find myself focusing on creative process. How to create great work, keep the team inspired and avoid some of the pitfalls that happen to a creative team while working at a large organization. So, I headed out to the Seed conference in Chicago to get an outside perspective.
It was a strong group of speakers, and I enjoyed the range of disciplines. I was inspired by the broad range of work from Carlo Segura's design studio, and the high level of design he maintained over the years. The redesign of Corbis is briliant. But, I really went to hear Jason Fried from 37 Signals talk about his work process. Jason Fried's work philosophy centers around the principle of working with small teams, but I still took away some basic concepts I could apply to the AOL entertainment design team.
A few key points from Jason presentation that hit home:
Ship when the core product is ready. Nothing is worse for team morale than long development cycles.
Your work expands to fill the time available.
2 or 3 people work on a core product. If that team can't do the work, they scale the work back. They never add people to the team.
Interruption is the enemy of productivity. At times, collaboration can be considered an interruption and a fragmented day is not a productive day.
Meetings are symptoms and not solutions. Meetings should be a last resort as they require preparation that people aren't going to do anyway. Meetings shouldn't last more than 30 minuets.
"I would rather people grow out of our products rather than not be able to grow into them." Jason Fried
I'm back from Macworld and I am officially Macworlded out. The presentation went great. I had about 100 people in my audience, mostly teachers, who seemed to respond to what I was talking about and I got a lot of excellent feedback afterwards.
I've seen a lot of exciting new Mac software, which I'll be talking about in my next several posts, but one of the most surprising entries in that category is the new AOL client for the Mac. Built from scratch as a native Coco application, meaning that it runs smoothly in OS X, this is not the Mac AOL client of yesterday. It includes a full featured Web browser--using on the same technology as Apple's Safari--a new AIM client that rivals Apple's iChat, and integrated email that keeps both it's own address book, but also ties into the Apple Address Book software. It also includes the excellent Mac implementation of AOL Radio which has been out for a while.
If you are a Mac user, check it out on the AOL Beta Site.
Note: all times AM PST
9:13
Starts with new I'm a Mac ad. "2008: The YEar of the PC" Just gonna' copy everything you did in 2007.
9:14
Steve walks on the stage "There's something in the Air today". Look back to 2007.
9:15
2007 Review. Steve says a big "Thank you".
5 million copies of Leopard. 20% of install base
4 things to report.
9:16
Press quotes on how great Leopard is.
9:17
Office for Mac being released native on Intel.
9:18
Item 1 - Time capsule. Back up device for laptops (and desktops).
Harddrive with wireless networking built in. 500GB drive ($299) and 1TB drive ($499).
ships Feb.
9:20
Time Machine ad "I'm a Mac" ad. Very funny. Also shows a new Keynote transition.
9:21
Item 2- iPhone - 4mill sold. 19.5% market share of smartphone in first 90 days, second only to RIM (39%).
9:23
SDK for iPhone
new features on iPhone: Maps with location. Webclips (make widgettes from parts of a Web page), Customize multiple home screens. Multiple SMS. Chaptering of videos. Lyrics support.
9:24
Demos new iPhone features.
9:28
Demos Web Clips.
Can add Web links directly to main iPhone screen.
Can auto zoom to a part of the Web page.
9:30
Can repositions icons on main screen(s). icons start to "jiggle" letting you know they are ready to be moved. Can create up to 9 different pages for storing Web pages.
Free iphone software update.
9:33
iPod Touch - Adding apps Mail, Maps, stocks, notes and weather PLUS the new iPhone features.
Comes on all new Touches or $20 update cost for current.
9:35
iTunes - Sold 4 billionth song. sold 20 million on christmas day. 125 Million TV shows.
9:36
Item 3 - iTunes move rentals - new section in iTunes. Touchstone, Mirmax, MGM, Lionsgate, Newline Ciniema PLUS Fox WB Walt Diney Paramount, Universal , and SOny. every major studio.
9:38
Will have all of the first run films plus large library.
Launch with 1000 films by end of February.
New films avail. 30 days after DVD release.
Can watch on Computers and iphones.
Starts within 30 seconds of pushing button.
30 days to watch MUST watch within 24 hours of first starting.
9:40
New movies $3.99 Library Movies $2.99.
Can move movie around between devices during watch period.
9:41
Launches today.
New iTunes update.
9:42
But, how to get movies on to your HD TV.
Steve admits that everyone has missed (even apple).
9:43
Apple TV Take 2 - NO COMPUTER REQUIRED.
9:44
Can rent movies in DVD quality or HD quality Dolby 5.1. Can view Podcasts. Can view photos directly from Flickr and .MAC
9:45
Can view all YouTube videos.
9:46
HD rental costs $1 more ($4.99 and $3.99).
100 titles to start with.
All streaming so does not take up harddrive space.
9:47
New interface centered around the movie experience.
9:48
free previews.
9:49
Shows HD Movie of "Live Free or Die Harder"
9:52
Buy Movies, TV, Music on Apple TV and will automatically synch with Mac or PC computer.
Can rent movies.
9:53
Podcasts also available streaming.
9:55
Photos from .Mac. Not saved on harddrive so not taking up space.
9:56
Photos from Flickr. Can surf around photos and friends photos.
9:58
Glitch in showing Flickr friends photos.
Steve tells us Flickr not serving up the photos.
10:00
Free software upgrade for existing owners. $299 price current -
NEW price $229 ($70 less).
Ships in two weeks.
10:02
Steve Introduces Jim Gianopulos, Chaiarman & CEO of 20th Century fox.
Talks about people wanting easy access to good movies.
Shows Homer iPod hybrid ad (silhouette homer with donut instead of iPod).
10:06
From Jim - BlueRay disks will now include digital version for playing on iPods.
10:07
Item 4 - There's something in the air. New note book.
MacBook Air
10:08
MacBook Air - The worlds thinest notebook.
10:10
Reviews current laptops and their problesm.
Need to be thinner larger display, faster, and full keyboard.
Air will be .76 inches to .16 inches. Very thin. So thin it fits in an inter office envelope.
Pulls out interoffice envelope with a Air inside.
10:11
it's very thin.
Magnetic latch. 13.3 inch widescreen. LED backlit. Instant on. Built in iSight. Full size keyboard Bakcklit.
Trackpad has multi-touch gestures similar to iPhone.
10:15
1.8" hardrive - 80GB OR 64GB SSD
10:16
Intel Core 2 Duo - 1.6 Ghz or 1.8 Ghz. 60% smaller than standard 2 Duo on PCs
10:17
Steve Introduces Paul Otellini, CEO of intel.
Didn't think it was possible to shrink the Duo 2, but Apple challenged them.
10:19
Smaller power adaptor. Flip down door for jacks. Built in 802.11n Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR.
10:20
NO OPTICAL DRIVE.
Can buy external drive.
Steve thinks most people will not miss.
How to install software?
10:21
Remote Disc feature allows you to use any optical drive on other Macs or PCS to install software.
Can install wirelessly.
10:23
5 hours of Battery life!
10:24
Review 3lbs, 0.16 to 0.76" 13.3" display, Fullsize backlit keyboard, multi-touch gestures, iSight, 1.6 GHz Core Duo, 2GB memory, 80 GB HD or 64 GB SSD
$1799 - in two weeks
10:25
Shows new ad
10:26
New feature in demos - Environmental impact - Aluminum case, Mercury and arsenic free display glass, circuit boards BRC and PVC free. Retail packaging 56% less volume.
10:27
Reviews show and other 2008 announcements including NEW Mac Pro.
10:30
"Special Treat" Randy Newman performs. New song for Europeans about America and the theme song to Toy Story.
10:41
Steve says Thanks.
If you don't want to pour through my notes, here is a quick recaps of the top announcements from Steve Jobs Keynote at Macworld 2008.
- Time Capsule - Wireless hard-drive in 500GB or 1TB formats. Allows computers (especially laptops) to use Time Machine without having a tethered external hard-drive.
- iPhone and iTouch Updates - SDK (Software Developers Kit) released. New applications. GPS. Web clips, allows you to clip all or part of a Web page for quick updates. Multiple main screens. Multiple SMS. Video chaptering. iCons can now be moved around for custom layout.
- iTunes and AppleTV Take 2 - New Movie rentals section with DVD ($2.99-$3.99) and HD quality ($3.99 - $4.99) movies. All major studios on-board. New movies available 30 days after DVD release. Apple TV has new interface and no longer requires a computer, but can hook directly to the Web. AppleTV price cut to $229.
- MacBook Air - Ultra thin notebook with full size screen and keyboard. No optical drive (CD/DVD) but can use any desktops optical drive wirelessly. 1.6GHz, 2GB RAM, 80GB HD or 64GB SSD (Flash) HD. Built in 802.11n Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. 5 Hour battery life.
Sorry I didn't get to blogcast live, but there was no Wireless access, and the Blackberry idea didn't pan out. Here are my notes, and I'll post a recap after I eat something. Please excuse the misspellings, poor grammar, and general sloppiness. In my defense there was some REALLY cool stuff distracting me.
