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!

I'm in the NASA generation... meaning I grew up when space exploration was THE most thrilling news covered in our solar system. It also means that I'm probably a bunch older than you... but we'll proceed anyway.

I recall gathering with my family in the living room, watching our single TV set:

10 - 9 - 8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - 0 - BLAST OFF!!!!!
ROAR of unbelievably powerful rocket engines. HUGE Saturn V rocket engulfed in smoke and flames. INCOMPREHENSIBLE forces inching untold tonnage slowly upward, breaking away from gantry tubes, somehow going straight upward, hurtling its miniscule human cargo toward exciting exploration and discovery missions in outer space.



Not coincidentally, we all just got past the most famous recurring example of this type of cultural artifact:

10 - 9 - 8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!
Woooo Hooooo! Yelling. Noise-making. Kisses. Champagne. Affection. Reminiscing. Resolutions.

Countdowns are Cool!
Read on and learn how to Rock Your UI! >>

Objectively measuring design is critical to a product's success. Usability testing and tracking are powerful tools to evaluate your design with data from real users, and now AOL Designers have another tool at our disposal. With the help of Forrester Research we have created the AOL User Experience Checklist. Building upon the great work of Forrester's original Web Site Review Scorecard, we've added evaluation criteria specific to AOL and our design standards .

Best practices evaluated in the list include messaging to users, navigation and way-finding, visual and architectural hierarchy, and task efficiency.

I am recommending that every product be evaluated once a year at a minimum for a baseline. Then teams may revisit their report and score as improvements are launched.

Please note that a perfect score is exceedingly rare and the goal should be to always be improving the score. If the score is always moving in the right direction then we know our experiences are always improving as well.

AOL folks can find the checklist on our design guide here:
AOL UX Checklist

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.

For those of us that think visually and like to click on pictures (ok, that's most of us btw), PicLens is a pretty amazing app that brings the Web to life as a visual medium. Just download the extension and PicLens turns image and video feeds from top sources into an interactive "wall of media" that animates smoothly across your screen. So smoothly, in fact, that you may actually get motion sickness playing with it (like I did).

Like most interactive things it really has to be experienced to be appreciated. If you have ever felt that image or video search should be more compelling than this one is certainly for you. I recommend everyone on my team try it out. Though if you haven't wanted a more visual, interactive Internet than this plug-in will probably go into the "cool things" bookmark graveyard you never go back to visit. I do believe the new "Shop Amazon" feature is a stretch though.

Speaking as the General Manager of PIXCETERA, this one is a tough act to follow I must admit.

Wordle is poetry design meets thrift store shopping. Take a bundle of words, a quote, a shopping list, a love letter gone awry, and ingest the sentences into wordle. Your words are regurgitated as a well designed and seemingly organized thought cloud. Wordle randomly mixes and matches font, layout, color, language, and your input, into a gallery piece or a printable design.

I started creating one a day, documenting my daily food intake. That guilty bag of blue M&M's suddenly became sandwiched between coffee and asparagus and perpendicular to turkey instead of hanging over my head.

Another company with a name that looks like a typo.

Apture is a killer new publishing application that lets you hook interactive multi-media modules from the Web onto your editorial. It has to be experienced to be really understood, so, for example, if you were writing a blogpost on the Aurora Borealis and wanted to provide definitions, pictures, and video from top sources like Wikipedia and YouTube, you could do so with just a couple of clicks. And then your audience gets to experience multi-media and related content on your website.

It's rare I say "wow" these days since I'm steeped in the Web all the time, but I have to say that this particular capability is stunning in its implications. Now ANYONE can have a site that is supported by some of the Web's top content providers (the Web 2.0 ones, that is).

Here are some examples of media stitched into a sentence (overdone for effect):
"The Summer's reigning blockbuster is still Iron Man, with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull hot on it's heels. Me, I'm now rooting for The Incredible Hulk. And Will Smith's Hancock has yet to take a bow."

OK, the sentence is bad, but the multimedia in-page is really differentiating. Only real flaw is if there is no great content on any of those properties accessible within the application. For this type of interactive plug-and-play experience I can sure live with that.

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.

In AOL Programming we have a document that should be used at kickoff meetings to align multi-disciplinary teams to the mission at hand. It is our take on the classic agency document called a creative brief. Briefs serve the purpose of aligning team members around core strategic principles without inhibiting their creativity in finding a solution.

Click "read more" for my take on the Creative Brief.

PIXCETERA is a fully fleshed-out celebration of the craft of photography and has, as its central innovation, the ability to dynamically "read" galleries being published across the AOL network and consolidate them into one website (some innovations are not so obvious). Our users clicked billions of photos last year so we're hopeful that bringing all of this amazing programming work into one website fulfills an unmet need for them.

It is important to note that the site is not trying to compete with flickr as a UGC play (I myself am a faithful user of the site). Though we do have plans for user upload and gallery publishing and favorites, the main concept here is to bring the best programmed photography experiences in our network into one simple interface and provide the user the ability to "skip" across topics effortlessly.

One of my favorite little features is the ability to reskin the interface to white, gray or black so you can view photos in your own neutral tone of choice.

We've only just begun so expect some interesting innovations out of the pixcetera team over the coming months. And please let us know what you think.

Apple gave our new Horoscopes iPhone application their coveted "Staff Pick" designation. Check it out to use our Love Match tool, Weekend Love Scope and to get an eerily accurate forecast of your day.