UPDATE: The video has been removed from YouTube which is sad. I’ll try to track down another version.
What would happen if a large corporation had to design the stop sign? This video has a look at “The Process” with an alarming result!
30
Jul
Design in a Corporation
I’ve been pondering an interesting question today. In designing a new application which displays the status of an item in three states; ‘available’, ‘unavailable’ or ‘mine’, I’ve had to think of which colours to use to indicate the state.
The team here are divided. 1/2 think that as the application needs to convey a number of states to the user, the choice of colour needs help the user build a mental model. There people are leaning towards the green is available, yellow is mine and grey is unavailable. The other 1/2 are in favour of using the brand colours (pink and blue) to convey available/unavailable. All agree that grey is a good colour for unavailable.
My preference is for the yellow/green approach but I’m certainly no marketer.
What do you think? Is there a reason why you would favour one approach over the other?
Facebook was a bit of fun for a while. I resisted joining for a long time and then joined, primarily to check out what all of the fuss was about and to research the platform. I quickly built a network of friends (some who I see in the real world and some I haven’t seen for ages. 2 months later, I’m REALLY over it. Heres 6 reasons why:
- Relationships aren’t so simple
- Too much SPAM
- I don’t want to install an application just to read a message
- Sponsored ads in Newsfeed
- IS
- All those people
I have a bunch of relationships with people I deal with, am friends with, live with, see rarely etc.. Each of those relationships has its own dynamic and no 2 relationships are the same. Facebook over simplifies the whole relationship dynamic, meaning that everyone who you are connected with is of equal importance. Sure, there are some simple algorithm governing what goes into your news feed, but generally, the people who’s news fills my feed aren’t the people who I would prefer to fill my feed. I have actually adjusted my Newsfeed Preferences to receive less news about some people, but I still receive a heap of news about them.
I hate the fact that I have to wade through a sea of crap each time I review my inbox or notifications. Zombie invites, Jedi invites, Pirates invites etc. I couldn’t care less about some stupid game that someone in my network thought might be cool and was peompted by the application to SPAM everyone within coo wee!
All of a sudden application developers (read new age SPAMmers) are able to abuse people’s networks by virally sending out invitations to people’s friends en masse.
Those emails telling me that someone has written on my X Wall, when I don’t even have the X Wall application installed. Install application, read some message that is crap and not solely written to me. Uninstall application, untill the next time someone else does the same thing.
It’s my news feed. Not an ad feed!
Why does the status update have to start with IS. Why can’t I say Rob hates five things about Facebook instead of Rob is hating 5 things about facebook!
How many contacts can you say you’ll actually stay in contact with? It’s great to see and hear from people you haven’t seen for ages, but generally, after the initial “Hi, how’s it? what’s been happening for the past 10 years? you married? got kids? oh how cool!” kinda stuff, those people will sit in your friends list, neglected. No way to piff someone without upsetting them. It all becomes too noisy, very quickly.
I’ve started a Facebook group about being over Facebook. Will people join or will they get over it first?
Scoble writes that iMovie now comes with really tight integration with YouTube. Remember my AppleGoo post? Still on the cards? Me thinks so!
Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how technology has changed the way we live. Last night, I called my mum at home. No answer. I then called her mobile. No answer. I sent her an SMS and she called me this morning. It made me think about how we used to contact people. Before answering machines and mobile phones, we used to call back, and call back and call back - until someone answered the phone. Today, we just make sure there is some record of our ping, and the ball is then in the pingees court.
Something else I am thinking about is how marketing must change in order to be effective in this time of social networks and mass connectiveness. People are now connected to their friends en masse, all the time! Need to have a question answered? Post it to Facebook and have a bunch of responses within the hour. Where is a good place to get new tyres for my car? Where should we go for dinner tonight, feel like Indian? Which mobile phone should I buy? These used to be the questions that marketers pondered. Need they bother any more? Is anyone listening to marketing anymore or is it all just spam?
I know that I pay much less attention to advertising or marketing than I used to. What I’m not sure about is whether that is because I am becoming older and more cynical wiser or whether I am more inclined to go to my network when I have a decision to make.
I think marketing/advertising is the one area that will suffer a lot from the change in the way people make decisions, but then again, I suppose the US$550 million that MySpace made from advertising revenue last year may counter that assertion.
What do you think?
10
Aug
When Users Matter
I recently attended a great course - Designing With Users - at Hiser. While the majority of the concepts covered in the course were not new to me, the way that Hiser work them into a process for bottom up requirements gathering was fantastic. From user interviews/site visits, through affinity diagramming, collaborative design and ultimately user testing, you could really get a sense that the process ensures the end product is in line with both business and user needs.
Having just completed a project with Hiser, I was very impressed with their process, methodology, professionalism and documentation. Although we haven’t yet developed the product they assisted us with, you get the feeling that it will be well received by users and will have a positive impact on the business. The research and collaborative design process has ironed out issues with the interface and further testing closer to launch should ensure that the product is fit for purpose and well received.
Contrasting this approach with Facebook’s mini-feed mini-disaster it is clear to me that there is a point in every business (especially a Web 2.0 startup) where what has always worked suddenly fails. It is not possible or necessary for a startup to invest as much in research and UCD as a larger business with established clients. The mantra of the 2.0 startup has been “Deploy, test, refine”. But, what is the catalyst that changes that? In Facebook’s case it was the revolting (as in up in arms, not disgusting) users who were very rapidly very many.
It’s not surprising at all that Facebook’s designers were out of touch with who their users were and what they wanted. In the incredibly rapid growth do you think anyone at Facebook had the time or inclination to slow things down by doing some formal user profiling or research. Facebook has been all about geting it out. Fast!
What this case highlights is that at some stage, the users suddenly matter a whole lot more than they previously did. I doubt that there will be any long term damage to the Facebook brand as a result of this, but I’ll bet that they have started to think a lot more deeply about the implications of their deployments and will be more rigorous in their research and testing with users.
Some great research on user scrolling behaviour breaks down the age old (well, since 1994) necessity to squeeze everyting important ‘above the fold’. The research makes sense but as I’ve learned, not everything that makes sense is accepted by business people when they demand their content appears ‘above the fold’.
Content and structure are still vitally important, but with well segmented (chunked) content and a design that supports scanning, I have finally found some research that will help reduce the need to “get it above the fold”.
08
Jun
London 2012. Crikey!
It’s bad, it’s really bad. The 2012 Olympics brand (it’s more than a logo according to the organisers) has arrived with a price tag of 400,000 GBP. So, what did they get for their million bucks? A hideousley gnarled, flourescent, epilepsy inducing abomination that is the laughing stock of the globe.
Anyone else think that the bit with the rings in it looks like a map of Australia? They even put the ‘TM’ where TasMania should be. How thoughtful!
If you want to work with a ‘brand’ for your olympic games, how about grabbing those rings, slapping 2012 and London on them. Can I have a million please?
18
May
Google Will Buy Apple
iGoogle doesn’t make sense. Why would Google decide to name their personalised homepage iGoogle? My Google makes a lot more sense in a world where “My” is the ubiquitous metaphor websites use to indicate the users’ personal account area.
The “i” is ‘owned’ by Apple and has been used by Apple to identify and brand their products since the first iMac in 1998. Recently we have seen the patent dispute over the iPhone name, which Apple fought vigorously for. While I am not suggesting that Apple should, could or will take legal action against Google, it strikes me as peculiar that Google would blatantly go and name something ‘i’+x.
So, is Google cashing in on the popularity of Apple’s ‘i’ products and hoping that they will get more adoption of their personalised homepage as a result? I don’t see why they would want or need to as they have always led and been innovators (or purchasers) rather than jumping on someone else’s successful bandwagon.
Further, it is well known that Eric Schmidt sits on Apple’s board. What better way to innocuously observe the hunt before going in for the kill.
I think a Google purchase of Apple makes a lot of sense. Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Apple is all about design and the benefit that people get from using well designed products. Imagine the world’s information beautifully organised and elegantly designed.
Google’s and Apple’s (AppleGoo) biggest competitor is Microsoft. Advertising, software and operating systems are the markets. Together as one, AppleGoo would be able to combine and focus their efforts on eliminating the enemy in all markets in which they operate. Apple are currently doing a superb job of developing superior operating systems, music players and software and phones are coming. Google is playing with phones too, is killing Microsoft in search and is developing great web based software to rival Office.
Apple’s market cap is currently about $95 billion. Google has that in the bank.
So, it makes sense to me, how about you? I hope that if this does happen, the first thing Apple does is apply their design to a revised iGoogle logo!
02
May
Digg Users are Revolting
Amazing events on Digg today with users up in arms over Digg removing a post linking to those numbers (09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0) that the MPAA don’t want us to see. All activity on the front page of Digg is around posts linking to the #.
I find it amazing that Digg would even try to censor something that is:
- In the public domain
- So close to the hearts of its community (MPAA bashing)
I don’t think this will have any long term effect on Digg, it will return to normal over the next couple of weeks (yes, I think it will take a little while to settle down) but I think it will have an enormous impact on Web 2.0, user generated and the legal responsibility of a service provider to moderate, control and govern its users.
A lot of organisations will now think twice before giving users as much power as they have been given by the first wave of user generated sites.
Things will change. Web 2.0 has just grown up.
Viva la revolution!
Update: Digg have given up moderating and have decided to go down fighting. I think that may be the end.
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