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.

Our interactive design team came together for several hours of inspiration and sketching over the past couple days. It was great to get our NY and VA offices together via video to take a big picture break. Several designers led the inspiration discussions (which I'll blog about later this week) and our UI Directors led our sketching exercise. They planned an interactive group exercise for us, freeing our ideas by eliminating the limitations of the computer while focusing on broad strokes without the noise and clutter of details.

Our exercise reminded me of this Core77 video of a design director at Converse sketching a summer sneaker concept in under five minutes -- it's pretty cool:



Core77 also recently launched this interesting sketching site. Check it out for more inspiration on varied techniques and conversations. How does sketching improve your creative process? What tools do you swear by?

At a Digital Media conference I attended yesterday, the CMO of comScore shared the following fact:

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.

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.

I love this little video expressing the value of twitter as "real life". It's simple communication around a not-so-simple topic for many. Clicking more at the end of this video will take you into a primer on "social networking". Hey, not that most people reading these words need this type of thing, but the simple cut and paste paper approach is really engaging as tutorial. And sometimes we just need a reminder that not everyone lives and breathes this stuff like we do. Thanks for Geno Yoham for passing it on.

Since our website redesigns last year, our main pages have been re-fitted with a promotional module called "Cards on the Table" (or "CoTT" for short). This was a replacement for the classic "Dynamic Lead" module (the usual giant animated picture with text that seems ubiquitous on programming websites across the Web). I based the design on the simple notion that quickly exposing a site's value at the top of the page was a good thing for a time-starved audience. Since users don't have time for animations and rarely use controls to see more promotions, we had to come up with a new strategy to reach an audience skeptical that our sites had value. This post explains the design challenge of the new dynamic lead from a variety of angles and the outcomes.

please click "read more" for the goods...

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.

Oh, how many times have we wished that the value of the design profession was immediately understood by the world? Perhaps talented designers would have been engaged to craft an alternative to the "butterfly" ballots that confused voters in Florida in 2000. Perhaps our grandparents would have a better understanding of the work we do.

Well, now I have an opportunity to help. A few days ago, I was elected to the board of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). This professional association for design is committed to demonstrating the value of design to the public (amongst other important goals).

We have a responsibility to help society understand the power of design to make life easier, more understandable, and simply more delightful.

I look forward to representing AOL with those I encounter through my involvement with this leading trade association and to helping the world understand the value of design.

What would you like to see from the AIGA? Share your thoughts here and I'll be happy to bring them to the table to help give the important work we do every day more visibility.

When working with remote development teams in Bangalore with business hours that barely overlap with ours, we need to employ new techniques to enhance our communication to create greater efficiencies.

A Senior Art Director on our team regularly captures screenshots of issues that need to be updated and includes notes in a PDF for absolute clarity (see example above). These visual instructions are key to great communication.

Back in March, a group of us at SxSW had a conversation about some other ideas on how to maximize our remote collaborations:

> Try having designers brainstorm and sketch during the day and have developers craft a prototype overnight as an example of very agile development.

Click "read more" for more ideas >>

This week, we launched a redesign of ParentDish.com, a site that offers great insights on parenting topics.

The project was one of the best-run and most efficiently-produced design efforts I've seen. This is attributed to the team's focus on:

> clearly defining roles and responsibilities between our varied teams at the onset,
> crafting a solid creative strategy + moodboards with buy-in from all key stakeholders before developing design solutions,
> conceptualizing a significant suite of identity options, and
> fostering ongoing communication amongst the design and development teams to bring about a fresh take on a compelling site that helps raise kids of all ages.

Kudos to the team on their great work.

Our Key Experiences team has just launched a pretty slick integration of Moviefone directly into the site. This distributed experience even includes functions not available on Moviefone itself such as the ability to invite your friends to movies (you can select theaters and showtimes and send out the invite to your pals seamlessly). Aside from that innovation, the user has the ability to perform the basics such as search for showtimes and tickets and track their favorite movies. Our basic strategy to atomize the core essence of our channels and distribute them around the Web where our users congregate is only just beginning...

Hopefully in a future post we can lure our superstar designers and coders to relay some lessons from the trenches on pulling this assignment off. Let us know if you are interested...

I'm thrilled to report that we have seen tremendous growth across our AOL Living sites over the past year with AOL Body increasing page views 760%, Food 319% and Home 475%. Overall, AOL Living is the third-highest-ranked women's network of sites on the web.

How did we do this? Our editorial team's strategy has been to offer practical, solution-oriented and highly relevant content to increase consumer engagement.

Our creative team has augmented this strategy by keeping a close eye on user behaviors/needs on our sites and competitively. We do in-depth user profiles and varied mood boards at the beginning of our projects to ensure every design decision we make is tied back to core user needs and the message we plan to share.

Our design team continues to dream up rich design experiences that reflect a welcoming, inclusive tone to resonate with and deeply engage our audience. And the results are stunning.

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.

In my time at AOL I've observed some curious dynamics and come to some itchy conclusions that I want to get off my chest (in the hopes it sparks a conversation in the comments or in the halls of 770!) It's a big topic around these parts, as we head into a game launch that could shake the Games channel to the core -- in a good way...