dear doreen
happy mother's day mom - here's a smattering of songs that remind me of you for various reasons. xox.dtw
happy mother's day mom - here's a smattering of songs that remind me of you for various reasons. xox.dtw
“Evaluate everything you have been told and dismiss that which insults your soul.” ~ Thoreau
Since soap companies began sponsoring and producing original content – initially with radio serials and then tv soap operas – the lines have blurred for both advertisers and their creative agencies. Increasingly I find that we (agencies) are sought-out less to create ads and more to extend a brand's offering by creating modern-day soap-operas: applications and experiences that will be useful, valuable or entertaining to customers and prospects. Are banner ads the next :30 second spot?
Banner ads, the historical back-bone of internet advertising have had declining engagement rates for years – just like tv commercials.McKinsey & Co. report that 2010's "traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990." Many online advertisers consider successful campaign as 0.5% or higher click-through rates… a metric with devoid of actual sales impact of the effort. Applying this direct mail inspired model assumes that 99% of engagement opportunities are written-off well before the advert even sees the light of day.
Google's entire business model is based upon creating these 'modern day soap operas'. They are, as one blogger* described, "the new TV network"… creating program after program which fulfill a need while serving ads against the personalized content (Search, Gmail, YouTube, et.al) are the updated version of the game show, soap opera, or variety show. Continuing the trend, the tailored nature of ads are sure to deepen with the expected growth (and subsequent data sets offered up) by Google Health, Google Latitude, and Google Docs. Google is actually the TV network AND the advertising buyer for PPC advertisers.
In a counter-strike, Facebook and Microsoft's Bing search engine recently partnered to take personalization to next level by employing digital peer pressure directly within search results. This tactic was effectively applied by Levi's heavily social site redesign, where your shopping cart is automagically pre-populated with items your friends 'liked.'
Sophisticated brands understand that their constituent's usage, subscription, and participation within *lightly sponsored* properties are actually the new engagement model for advertising, seeding brand preference, and (eventually) sales conversions.
*apologies to said blogger whose name escapes me
Palmolive image (cc) compliments of X-ray Delta One via CompFight
Tonight, tenfour is honored to be hosting the UX Book Club (PDX) latest book discussion: Kristina Halvorson's 'Content Strategy.'
Content Strategy, the next buzzword that's catching fire online, has historically been an editorial/usability/strategy practice that lived within the realms of UX. The concept has resonated and become more widely applicable as more companies evolve into micropublishers with their web properties sans a chief editor. The sweeping responsibilities of a Content Strategist can span the ongoing maintenance, analysis, location, presentation, as well as the management and commissioning of new content.
A majority of marketing efforts focus on driving traffic to the site. Far less resource investment and attention is spent on ensuring the destination is full of relevant, current, and most importantly - useful information. The individual ownership of web content is often gray at best. This 'elephant in the room' is rarely addressed, can be contentious, and doesn't officially live under one person's charter. Until now.
The book is a great starter guide and brings process to a wily and evolving practice. I particularly enjoy Halvorson's passionate ownership stance evident in this 2008 write-up for A List Apart:
…until we commit to treating content as a critical asset worthy of strategic planning and meaningful investment, we’ll continue to churn out worthless content in reaction to unmeasured requests. We’ll keep trying to fit words, audio, graphics, and video into page templates that weren’t truly designed with our business’s real-world content requirements in mind. Our customers still won’t find what they’re looking for. And we’ll keep failing to publish useful, usable content that people actually care about.
Stop pretending content is somebody else’s problem. Take up the torch for content strategy. Learn it. Practice it. Promote it. It’s time to make content matter.
It's not too late to join in, download a free chapter, RSVP on Upcoming, and come on by tenfour.
Melinda Gipson from Digiday recently interviewed me about Air New Zealand's iPhone app series. While a bit jet-lagged, I was coherent for the most part.
The iconic plastic milkcrate is an industrial design marvel of simplicity. This staple furniture accessory of college students continues to be an illegal building block of utility adored by tinkerers, collectors, artists, and the resourceful.
Join me in a salute to the venerable plastic box:
/imagery via: Apartment Therapy, Milkcrate Digest, Inhabitat
Soon after the birth of my daughter, my first iPhone proved to be indispensable. With this *magical* gadget I was able to operate and navigate any program one-handed while holding my sleeping baby … typically with one thumb.
The action of dragging a finger across a screen to interact, or to ‘swipe’, is just one motion in the larger haptic and gesture revolution that is sweeping product interface design.
Frank Chimero eloquently highlighted that the classic paper-based scrolls – which Apple based the metaphor for an ever-expanding vertical canvas – should have gone the other way based on the horizontally formatted Dead Sea Scrolls. This was effectively illustrated by publishing the post on Duane King’s laterally expanding blog: Thinking For A Living.
Have mobile touch devices reminded designers that there is another direction to flick? Is it just more natural to think of content in chunks that are somewhat equal in importance and placed sequentially from left to right? Whatever the motivation, users across the globe appear to be keeping up with interaction designers (or vice versa) as more lateral motions are baked into our digital experiences.
Here is run-down of six common uses of lateral motions:
(1) "Boldly Going…" – exploration/browsing of unknown content
Online photo galleries and blogs leverage lateral navigation to present new content that users are not familiar with:
CoolIris photo plug-in creates extremely fluid lateral thumbnail catalogs:
Flipboard iPad app flicks horizontally between dynamic feed-based magazine layouts:
Netflix suggestions expand to the right:
eBook readers such as the Kindle and Stanza simulate animated page turns:
<img src="http://tenfouragency.com/wp-content/uploads/Kindle-iPad-480x360.png" alt="" title="Kindle-iPad" width="480" height="360" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-2660" /></a>
(2) "Bread Crumbs" - illustrating where you have been
Pandora's long-tail presents what has been heard and leaves what's to come a mystery:
(3) "Divide & Conquer" - known segmentation of unknown content
Tweetdeck allows users to organize microblogging status updates by lists, searches, and networks in chosen column order:
NPR's iPad app organizes the news in known segments with older stories in a stream to the right:
Full text stories can be flicked left/right to dive into the previous/next:
The BBC iPad app organizes vertical rows of sections that scroll sideways; selected stories appear on the right:
Plurk's literal stream never really caught on:
(4) "Present & Accounted For" - known segmentation of known content
iTunes, among other of the 'coverflow' knock-offs laterally organize familiar items (songs) within known segments (albums):
The same goes for photos in an album or chapters on a DVD:
(5) "Slip & Slide" - interface controls
Mobile devices, like the iPhone and Droid series use the basic swipe to initiate a session:
<strong>Swiping within apps does not produce standard results even within the same device</strong>. On Apple's standard mail utility on iPhones, swiping across a message is a short-cut to deleting it. In contrast, using the standard Twitter/Tweetie app on the same device provides a short-cut for engaging the tweet by making it a 'favorite', finding out more about the author, or emailing it:
Most commonly across mobile devices, flicking is becoming the way to navigate all of the key applications and offerings on a phone. This is consistent across the Nexus (RIP), Droids, iPhone, and even the forthcoming Windows Phone 7:
(6) "Spoon Feeding" - carousel tours
It appears that every large web portal received the memorandum on including an auto advancing thumbnail/news viewer.
Here we have Yahoo's
then MSN's:
and lonely old AOL:
I'm sure to have missed some of the other common categories of use. Feel free to use the comments to correct me and expand the conversation.
baby iPad photo by umpcportal.com
Finding someone in 'the book' used be code for the printed telephone directory. This has stopped being the case for a number of reasons as people are steadily centering their lives around unlisted mobile numbers and off of the traditional grid.
When LinkedIn was launched in 2003, it not only created an online resume and colleague network... it provided mac users with the benefits of PC users had already received from Plaxo, who launched just the year prior. You may remember the onslaught of emails around that time which asked you to confirm your contact info was correct and update/edit as needed. This centralized address book in the cloud was not only useful for freedom of access - it's 'killer feature' was that the info was always accurate and up-to-date. Plaxo was PC only at launch, so LinkedIn filled the void for mac community and became the way to stay connected with friends, clients, and colleagues without actively knowing their personal email accounts. When someone left a company… you no longer lost touch due to their email address expiring. Your social network connectivity was the constant in a hectic life of change. Many years and networks have come and gone (friendster, myspace, et.al) prior the rise of Facebook; and others still dominate in other international regions. That said, we now live in the age where some colleges no longer issue email accounts and studies show some teens sign-up for email only because it was a requirement in-order to activate their social network account. Facebook is increasingly the default email alternative and increasingly the contact hub for our social lives. Facebook knows this too. It was only in the past year that Facebook stop showing your contact's email address as an image instead of text in order to reduce the ability of mass automation of exporting or scraping the content. It is not an oversight, nor error, that no Facebook application exists in order to export contacts – this is exactly how Facebook is meant to work. While this phenomenon may not be shocking to many in the west. It may be of note that rural third-world communities struggle to connect with each other and are increasingly relying on SIM cards and Facebook to stay connected. In recent post by Dave Foster examining frog design's interface ethnography research for mobile handsets in rural Africa, these observations came to light:“The most basic elements people really need in Kibera are the ability to store contacts, and ability to text,” Ashley said. “People ran home to get contact lists (phone numbers) often. They spend so much of the day commuting and working, there’s no real time to spend time with people. Here, contacts are even more important than the ability to text.”In further discussion about connection, Ashley says, “The internet is hardly available—when it’s used, it’s for Facebook.” (Facebook, really?!) “I was talking with one of my guides when I was doing my basic design research. He said he used the internet about every 2 or 3 weeks, on a dial-up modem and has to pay per minute. The time lag is horrible and cost-prohibitive. As we were parting, he asked me ‘are you on Facebook?’ I said yeah, and by the time I got back to the hotel 3 or 4 hours later, I had 4 or 5 new friend requests, from him and a few of his friends. It was touching for amount of effort it took.”
The social revolution has swept the interwebs in ways that we are still uncovering. The sociological implications will undoubtedly ripple across every corner of the earth for years to come. Let's hope that no one person, network, or company owns the switchboard or can pull the plug.
i have a weakness for the process and 'making of' segments. here is one from our friends at w+k speaking on their brilliant Old Spice spot:
hello. i'm the digital strategy director at www.tenfouragency.com and tend to be drawn to the creative junction of UX, mobile, web, video and social media. i traded my snowboard for a whiteboard… enjoy the ride.
