free scribbles

Links of the Week

1. iGraffletopia

2. SitePoint Blogs » Are You User Experienced?

3. 7 Principles of Prototyping | toddwarfel.com

4. Applying Divine Proportion To Your Web Designs | How-To | Smashing Magazine

5. 6 Ways To Subliminally Tell Users Don't Come Back

6. The Psychology of Web Performance - how slow response times affect user psychology

7. Project Cartoon: How Projects Really Work (version 2.0)

8. 43 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid | www.jamiesgalacticblog.com

9. Untitled Document about Breadcrumb Navigation

10. Labnotes » Web Architectures and HTTP Mediocrity

11. An A-Z Guide to Being an Architect

12. Economics of New Media: Pay to Play or Free?

13. On Twitter, architecture, and lying in the grass

14. uiGarden.net - Weaving Usability and Cultures: Is Universal Design Really Universal?

15. 7 Essential Web Design Principles to Earn Trust. And 4 Things to Avoid! » 10e20 Blog

16. 15+ Tools For The Best Golf Season Ever

17. Otaku, Cedric's weblog: 140 characters should be enough for everybody

Links of the Week

1. Business Area Knowledge Map

2. WHEN TWITTER IS DOWN 

3. Digital Web Magazine - Design Decisions vs. Audience Considerations

4. YouTube - What matters to you // me? - VFS

5. Good Experience: The top 8 mistakes in usability (and companies investing in it)  

6. Paths vs. Hierarchies - Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog

7. YouTube - Adaptive Path's Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for a...

8. The Rise of Contextual User Interfaces « Alex Iskold Technology Blog

    

Qualities We Should All Have...

I am participating in the Institute for Advanced Advertising Studies (IAAS), a sixteen week program that educates young professionals in all the aspects of advertising from strategy to creative that is run by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA). 

During this week's lecture on Brand Planning, which is considerable more than I am going to address, the speaker put up a slide which held his characteristics for a brand planner:

1. Voracious for information
2. Always learning
3. Adapts well
4. Collaborative
5. Engaged with material
   
6. Generous with ideas
7. Humble
8. Intuitive

While he didn't out right say this was only applicable for brand planners, it made me think about what I would want in an account manager, producer, art director, developer, information architect, copywriter, maintenance worker, waiter, journalist, garbage man, administrative assistant, video editor, rocket scientist, librarian, etc.  Here's my list:

1. Voracious for information
2. Always learning
3. Adapts well
4. Collaborative
5. Engaged with material
   
6. Generous with ideas
7. Humble
8. Intuitive

You'll notice the similarities between the two. 

What do you think?

A Better User Experience Analogy: An Iceberg

I'm not oblivious to the intricacies of good, logical, and effective website design, but as someone who works on the client side of the business, I miss out on a lot of the real work (not for lack of effort, as anyone on my team will attest) that goes into a website.  More important than how it looks is how it works for the user. 

A good website offers an experience not only derived from where the necessary buttons, fields, and images are on a page, how they look (Do you understand when you need to click them), but also what they and the rest of the page say, and where they go.  And once you get to that next page, where does the next page come in? 

Recently, I read and reviewed The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett but I wasn't as succinct as Trevor van Gorp of affective design in translating the value of the book to those less familiar with web design. I saw the book as a good outline of the process from strategy to final visuals filled with good analogies along the way, but I primarily built on my previous experience at each of the planes and strengthened my understanding. 

Trevor's iceberg analogy better expresses the true nuances of a website, especially when time is short and design knowledge is lacking (A complaint I hear of clients up and down the hallways of work).  The visual look and feel of the website is only the superficial that lures a user in.  It is the strategy which drove the project and the skeleton, logic, and underlying code that makes for a healthy website which makes users want to come back.

The real value of this analogy is not for those close to the work, but those who are clients and work with the clients, allowing everyone to be on the same page, realizing that all those approval steps that came along the way weren't for the sake of protocols but the creative process.  But it doesn't hurt for those close to the work to get it too!

I've embedded his presentation because there is nothing like a good visual analogy to make a point.

   

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Book Review: The Elements of User Experience

Jesse James Garrett's book was an enjoyable and easily-consumed piece on web design.  Despite being written in 2002, the book still feels very contemporary as the overarching themes addressed haven't changed despite social media and a more "open" internet than at the time of publication.

His simple diagram of the five "planes" of a website clearly articulates not only the stages of thought, but the required skills that need to be utilized at each level.  I am fortunate to work with experts in the fields of information architecture, development, and design (copy & art direction), but any success that is achieved as a unit comes from the ability to get/have them thinking and compromising across channels.

The main premise of the book is to make the connections between final site design and the beginning kernels of purpose and everything in between.  The question "why?" asked of the marketing department early on is very similar to the "why?" asked of the art director right before launch. 

At 174 pages and chocked full of simple analogies, its a quick read and worth the time for anyone in the interactive marketing sector, especially those impacting website design seeking to look at the picture more holistically.

Brand Experience of the Future?

In my post about brands being built on user experiences, I left off a key point about the fact that the digital age is increasing the number of experiences that a consumer is having with brands. 

Thankfully, David Armano of Logic+Emotion wrote a post on the very subject this week.  The below diagram from his Infinite Touch Points piece perfectly outlines the way consumers have/do/will interact with brands.

Because these analog and digital interactions are already connected and in the future will be more so, we, as marketers, need to start thinking more holistically, shunning the notion of silos and opening up dialog with individuals in all disciplines of a brand as well as the consumers. 

Consumers may benefit from this increased interaction, gaining leverage to initiate desired changes or be overwhelmed by too much brand messaging.  And with the huge amount of people participating in social networks, this sort of leverage is already being achieved and will began to blur the line between marketing created brand experiences and individual consumer created experiences. 

Savvy brands will realize this now and work towards what David calls the liquid state of flow before its too late.  Each discipline that builds a brand, from website designers, direct marketers, media planners, to buyers, and advertising writers, needs to work together and not step on each other toes.  Fragmented user experiences will leave a consumer wondering which brand message is the real one. 

I believe that we have a long way to go before we hit this ego-less marketing world, but the idea of noble user experiences certainly inspires me. 

The Evolution of Creativity

Going through the reader this morning, I was enraptured by a guest post from David Armano on the Influential Marketing Blog.  David is a talented blogger in his own right at Logic+Emotion, but his post regarding the evolution of creativity inspired me. 

I don't like to be confined to one discipline in anything.  I'm aware that I don't know everything and must leverage those experts I work with to complete projects, but the notion of being more of an active participant in the design, interface, and development of a campaign is enticing.  Through observation I have learned much of each discipline and at points I may think that if I just did it all myself it would get done a lot quicker.  I say quicker and not better because as the notion of collaboration and networking hierarchies gains ground, leveraging the intellectual capital of others provides a stronger and better marketing campaign.

In the traditional construct, my job role is that of client relationship, deliverable managements and marketing strategy.  But, that's not how I want to think, nor should, and neither should the team I work with.  This sort of new thinking becomes an internal wiring of the brain, which is analogous to the working team mechanism necessary in the coming years: collaborative innovation and participation, where job title does not define the team role.

By stimulating each of these lobes, we not only improve ourselves, but the products that we produce.  The above image's final sentence states, "The result is a holistic approach to creativity that is effective across multiple touchpoints and experiences."  Thus, it serves the wider community and leads to further individuals to work with, learn from, and hopefully teach. 

Creativity will take a while in this new model, but it will gradually move at a more rapid pace as each individual's brain becomes more intuitively collaborative and each team begins to adopt the ability to step into another's shoe and resolve the conflicts between an Information Architect's logic and an Art Director's quest for beautiful aesthetic.