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July 24, 2005

Mike Matas goes to Apple

Delicious Monster co founder, 19 year old Mike Matas moves from Seattle to Cuppertino to work for Apple. He isn't giving away any details on his blog, but if you followed the news on Delicious Monster in dense last week, you'll see the relations, and you will understand why Apple is fishing where the best fish are swimming.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 06:15 AM | Comments (0)

Design patterns help developers and users

The Nielsen Group announced the User Experience 2005 Conference, which will run the same program simultaniously in Boston and London. One of the more interesting of the listed topics is How design patterns can increase usability. Regarding my ventures with core, this is particularly interesting. In 1998, when I started out developing for the web, I studied and utilized modular elements for information architecture and design. Getting more involved in usability and the user experience, I began to understand that these design patterns not only help the developers of a website by eliminating redundant work, they are also useful to users of websites, because in the end, it is patterns on which humans rely on, as defined in cognitive science. Today, pattern modules are a core element of web creation with usability in mind. The Nielsen Group described their feature on the User Experience 2005 Conference this way:

Experienced interface designers depend upon a vast repository of knowledge about "what works" in a given situation. Design patterns, then, allow such knowledge to be captured in a standardized form, making it more accessible to new team members, less-experienced designers, or non-specialists such as writers, marketers, or managers. Individual design patterns are also collected into pattern languages—structural and conceptual frameworks that organize and link related patterns—to help designers generate high quality solutions.

Resources:
User Experience 2005 Conference
The Nielsen Group
Wikipedia: Modularity in Cognitive Science
Wikipedia: Design Patterns

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 05:20 AM | Comments (0)

July 23, 2005

A wearable web experience

wearable_07.jpgWhile American Apparel is making efforts to become the new GAP, small venues like Defunker do more with tees made by American Apparel. T-shirts that make you happy is their slogan.

It's unclear to me what American Apparel wants to be. It's like a brand with an identity crisis. American Apparel's brand design reminds me of the purism of London based designers, slick, cold and very reduced. But the brand experience you get by visiting their site and when you're actually buying something online, is way different: Lots of cluttered elements crunched into small space. There is no consistent use of elements, no design language (icons compete with links in different colors) and it's confusing to get video with some items and only pictures with others.

There's more to the problem. American Apparel products are as dull as it gets. Some call them boring, others say they are refreshingly simple. It may be part of the success story that clothes by American Apparel can be combined with everything. But not all of it is equally boring. Some of the items feature nice cuts and interesting combinations of colors and materials. It seems obvious that American Apparel is a label that wants to break out of its own dullness. It's almost like a couple that's been together for a while and now they want to freshen up their sex life.

A closer look at American Apparel's website reveals severe problems with usability and user experience:

I think American Apparel could use a Brand Manager, or a Creative Director with background and experience in usability and user experience. Someone who helps them to develop a conceptual direction and who starts building a brand structure and a visual language for the young company that is based on user (read consumer) research. It just doesn't look like they're aware of this need.

wearable_04.jpgAfter Amazon's successful book store concept was expanded to include consumer electronics and apparel, more consumer fashion labels dared to jump over the GAP between consumers who are not going to their physical stores but their virtual counterparts. And not surprisingly, users of the net behave the same way they do in the real world. So they're essentially expecting the same kind of shopping experience they get in a physical store. While almost all of the bigger brands get online sales right technologically (or at least functionally working), only few companies realize the importance and relativity of an online shopping experience and browsing through racks of clothing.

When you enter a clothing store, you are allowed to act intuitively. Every kid knows how to pick up a tee and try it on. But how do you try on a piece of clothing on the web? Early pop ups of the brief but intense dot-com era died because of this problem: the lack of user experience. The web can be anything you want as it seems, but can it replace a mirror?

wearable_01.jpgI can see Flash designers rising their hands, waving their fingers eargerly, pointing out you can just hook up a webcam and with a little Flash tweaking and a heavy duty database in the backbone you can create the ultimate user experience. Sure you can, once people have all the same screen with the same resolution, using the same intuitive interface (hint, it will have an X in its name but no P, and it won't be Asta la Vista either—just kidding), and they all have web cams built in their computers. But until we are there, our t-shirt shops have filed insolvency.

What does it take to make the selling experience an actual fashion store experience online? Most sites are kind of getting there, but they don't seem to get it yet. Usability is something that has gained recognition only in the past two, three years. It was the foundation for earlier generations of designers (remember "form follows function"?). Now the economy finally awakes, realizing that user experience translates to business.

Start looking at your customers, your users. Sure, they want just to buy a simple t-shirt, or a pair of jeans. Sure, they want an easy shopping process. But they want to get the feeling for it too. Make them forget they don't look at a mirror. Don't confuse them too much. Let your website be smooth, soft and silky. Make it wearable.

This is more about ideology than it is about the design process. Sure it's important to brief your web shop designers right. Of course it is about good information architecture as well. Testing groups are a decent way to evaluate results. Trouble is, if you lack the philosophy and can't resolve what is important out of what isn't, then you don't know how to transform your testing results into an improved user experience and you won't need any programmers or designers.

wearable_02.jpgSo if you're an online fashion vendor, you have a product line of clothing. In real life, no other product comes that close to skin of your customers. Books can touch me inside, but clothing actually is touching me on the outside. And as a user of your stuff, I'm taking great care in only letting touch my skin what is worth it and represents part of me. Your clothes, in other words, are my expression as a user (always remember formerly called consumers are now users since they're using the web and expect the same quality from a web experience they expect from your products).

If you're a fashion vendor, you know I will let your product touch my skin. It may sound like a given, so we don't have to think about it in daily business. But if you think about it, that's as close as it gets. Quite an intimate story between fashion vendor and user.

In a store, in real life, I will browse through your racks anonymously. A sales girl may ask me if I find what I'm looking for, but that's about it. I want privacy when I'm looking, I want to be able to focus and I want to find surprises among your racks. Even when I'm looking for a jacket, I wouldn't say no to a nice top if it hits my eye.

Thinking like this, analyzing the store browsing experience may lead to the creation of a better web experience. There are some things more or less online stores have in common, but the list is short. In general, browsing for clothes, for fashion, is an entirely different experience than going to shop for groceries, especially online.

Resources:
American Apparel
Defunker
Neighborhoodies
Threadless
KD Dance
webcredible.co.uk: Ten ways to improve the usability of your ecommerce site
Jacob Nielsen's Alertbox: Usability —Empiricism or Ideology?

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 12:14 PM | Comments (2)

Ajax, the new kid on the blog

You may know this feeling. You're at a house party and you go to refill your glas of wine. When you're back the people you were talking to are gone. You look around and join a new group of people. And they look at each other and go silent.

It's not your odor or your tipsiness. It's because you're late. They were talking of a hot topic, but no one wants to introduce you to it, give you a short summary of what they were talking about. But hey, it's just a house party. It's all cool.

Sometimes when I read about new trends on the net I feel like being late to the party. It's like everybody else already knows what they were talking about, only I am asking questions. Being the geek I am, despite my efforts to dissolve that image, this is something that bugs me. I admit it. It's less the fact nobody told me about the new hot topic. It's more like "How could I not see it coming?". Because of course I did see it coming. I was just not paying attention. If you're going with the flow on the internet, if you dig really deep into it, then it's almost impossible to not notice any movement in the developers scene. Still, you may oversee something that's going to be the next star, especially when you don't know what it actually is.

Ajax is the new kid on the block. It's just like that with Ajax: on every blog you read, everybody who is talking about it already seems to know more than you. Some act like they are experts, but don't look for links in their blog entries. Frankly, some of these experts have no clue what they're talking about. I told you, it's just like on a house party.

So what is Ajax? The Amsterdam soccer team? A swiss car? Is it the lesser or the greater Ajax in the Illiad by Homer? Kitchen bleach? Or a fictional company in Mickey Mouse? Ajax may have had many meanings in the past. In future however, it is likely these other meanings of the word will be overheard. At least among web developers, information architects and designers, Ajax serves a different purpose. Ajax is a new hype to be, as more and more big companies are actually adopting the technology. Consequently, blogs are tumbling all over pointing out smart usage of Ajax.

Calling Ajax a technology by itself may be a little bit too much. It's more a smart combination of existing technologies within a set of robust rules. It is a common pattern in web evolution: While big players like Adobe and Macromedia (or now Adomedia or Macrobe) are spending a lot of time, marketing and financial efforts to establish and tigthen grounds for their proprietary technologies, it is the webs nature of evolution that finally comes up with a solution that actually works, using existing technologies, without a plugin.

Programmer Mat Hertel in Germany writes a blog about Ajax. He defines it as follows:

Ajax = Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (+ DHTML)
Ajax programming is an interesting way of bringing real interactivity to web applications by using the proven internet technologies HTML and JavaScript.

You can find some Ajax demos on Mat's website. If you're more experience driven than interested in digging in code, go check out Googles Earth- and Moon-map projects or Amazon's Diamond Search engine.

Resources:
Technorati search on Ajax
Ajax = Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (+ DHTML)
Ajax demos
The Amsterdam soccer team
Ajax, a swiss car
Ajax, King of Salamis in ancient Greece
Ajax, a kitchen cleaner containing bleach
Ajax, a fictional company in Mickey Mouse cartoons
Adobe bought Macromedia
Google earth map and satelite pictures
Google moon map
Amazon's Diamond Search engine.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 06:47 AM | Comments (1)

July 20, 2005

core on netdiver.com

Netdiver is the number one source for cool new websites. It features exceptionally designed websites and news of the industry, mainly focussing on issues of design, illustration, photography, user experience and technology.

In 2003, www.corebasis.com won an award of Netdiver and was featured on their website. It was funny, because I had never sent the link to editor Carole Guevin. She had found it and decided to feature core in the current issue of netdiver. Later corebasis.com was selected to be one of the Best Sites in 2003.

Today, corebsasis.com in netdiver news has been featured in netdiver's news again.

Resources:
netdiver
Imaginative design page on netdiver
Best Sites in 2003

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

July 18, 2005

Delicious

deliciousmonster.jpgDelicious Monster, creator of Delicious Library software has won the prestigious Apple Design Award. I never had the time to check out the software, but it's nifty, with a couple of amazing features, utilizing your iSight camera to read bar codes of books, CDs, DVDs.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 08:33 AM | Comments (0)

July 15, 2005

Why your site visitors don't like error pages

missingpage.jpgChildren around the age of four have a hard time seeing a button and suppressing the powerful urge to push it. At that age children have learned about action, cause and consequence. A child knows that some things do certain things by the push of a button.

This is something a human being learns once, and it will never forget it. It goes so deep down in our evolutionary roots, that even some of the less intelligent animals can learn this pattern of cause and consequence. This is right down to the bottom line of usability. It's about sensing something, being able to touch or pick it up and applying it for a certain purpose.

The same is happening to us when we're surfing the web. Every day, every moment when we look at a website, every time we use the keyboard or mouse to type and click something, we are following the same natural behavior.

The web isn't the first media demanding those usability qualities. Books have a great usability factor because they are all working the same way: books start with a cover, and in western culture, you're reading from left to right, turning pages in a linear left-to-right pattern. You can also go back and forward, or jump right in between chapters. And when you find an empty page, you're able to turn that page to get to one with content you were looking for. This is a given for usability. Something so profound and basic, you don't even think about it. But you'll be surprised how many websites fail with this simple standard of usability. On many sites, when you come to a dead end, there's no way out of it, except with your back button.

Most websites are drawing attention completely away from basic browser navigation tools. You forget about that back button on top of your browser window. I once talked to someone on the phone to help her find a certain link. She didn't know how to go back until I specifically pointed out the back button. It's not such a rare case that people forget about this button, given the sophisticated navigation systems websites are using nowadays.

People behave naturally. They are simply users who want to use your website for their purpose, not yours. When they come to your website for the first time, you teach them a certain navigation system. From the first page on, a user will expect the same behavior pattern of your navigation throughout your site.

This is another given in usability: What you experience once, you will expect to happen in the same way the next time you're using a similar trigger.

If your navigation is inconsistent and uses different terms, various colors and indicators for links, you're confusing your website users. If your navigation is showing up on different spots and in various areas of a page, it is confusing your users as well. It's even worse if they're running into a dead end.

You'd be surprised to learn how many websites, even of big companies, don't get this. You'll run into 401 errors, see missing-page announcements, discover Apache server notifications, and in some cases you will be told to contact the web admin. This is just like you turn on your TV, zap to a different channel and all of a sudden you're informed you did something wrong and you'll have to call the cable guy.

From a user experience point of view, this is bad. This is really, really bad. Consider this: Your users are not only visitors of your site, they are potential customers. And believe it or not, but they are judging your site based on their user experience. They will challenge your site, stroll in various places, try finding out if you're genuine and deliver real quality. In short, they will judge your brand by browsing your website. And if they find holes, or dead ends, or doors with a lock and no explanation, it will add to their negative user experience.

Doing it right on the other hand is not that hard. Just think about what you would like to see and read if you were a user visiting your company's website. Imagine yourself in this role: You've just entered a bad URL. Now you're on a dead end page.


The best you can do is provide help. Give them a way out. Show them alternative ways to browse your site. Give them links to other places. Be nice and gentle. Your users haven't done anything wrong, you did. Ask them what they were looking for. From "Sorry, please try this." (where this is a link to your index page) to a comprehensive site map—anything is better than"405 - Page could not be found."

If you show your website users your effort to help them out, you are actually there for them when they need you, you're adding to their positive brand experience. And that will always translate back into business.

Reference:
core missing page

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 06:53 AM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2005

Creative Director: Misconceptions of a job

How would you define a Creative Director? Is it a senior designer? A senior copywriter? Or is it a manager? Apparently the views about how the role of a Creative Director is described vary. In my opinion, there's a number of great misconceptions out there. On job searching sites like Craigslist you will find job listings for Creative Director, but it will never be the same. Companies are struggling in their attempt to define a role in clear words that apparently appears blurry to them.

It's not new to me that people have different conceptions about job descriptions in this industry. After all you'll also find Art Directors listed in movie titles and business cards of hair dressers. The communications industry is undergoing a transformation process. Along with changing media- and content demands, what used to be divided in advertising, design and web, whereas advertising and design were closely bound to the prepress industry, is now changing into one big chunk of companies offering their set of often overlapping services. It is not uncommon that a former advertising company now has a web department, a direct media or customer relationship department, a pr agency and even does their own media bookings.

A Creative Director, however, usually defines a management position. A person that's usually directing people and commonly occupies a leading position. In some cases Creative Directors are also Managing Directors of a company, or at least member of the management board. Being Creative Director, in my personal experience, involves by far more management and leadership skills than any other senior job in the communications industry. Unlike a Managing Director, a Creative Director is in touch with all three connection points on a social level of a communications agency:


The Creative Director interacts within these three directions, trying to establish a fluent work flow, managing production cycles, getting calls from people who want to be hired, from recruiters, photographers and freelancers, and at the same time he/she is talking with other managers and presenting works to the clients. But the most important skill of a Creative Director is conceptual thinking. He should be able to write and hold his own presentations, with consequential thoughts and a single minded creative strategy. A Creative Director often finds himself in a role of a show master during client meetings: When the numbers have been discussed, the Creative Director takes over and presents the creative work, hopefully in a highly entertaining way. Which pretty much sums up the main reason why this job was always so much fun to me. It's a fast life and exhausting, but challenging you every day.

To promote the creative services of my own company, core, I started looking at portfolio hosting services like Creative Hotlist. It's one of many I'm going to use to post information about core services. Creative Hotlist knows the job Art, Creative Director. So there is no Creative Director without background in Art, which is a common misconception. In my career I've met a number of Creative Directors who had never had a drawing pencil in their hands. As a matter of fact, most highly qualified Creative Directors I met were former senior copywriters in advertising.

It goes further. When you're filling out your profile at Creative Hotlist, you can select Project Management and Writing, but not Concepts or Presentations. The whole experience matches with the one of job offering sites such as Monster. It's clear to me that those who create the database can't add all kinds of jobs offered in the big big world. Creative Director, however, is not such an exotic job that it would lack a clear definition.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 06:02 AM | Comments (0)

July 09, 2005

Underestimating the value of user experience

No doubt, the web is booming again. Users have finally taken over and are now driving the industry with their demands. However, economy is still hesitant in picking up what is necessary to meet the dynamics of user demands.

When I'm talking about people here, I simply refer to them as users. I don't restrict them to be computer- or web users exclusively. My view of the web is a holistic one. I'm taking other parts of life in account and I look at people as users—people who want to do something useful with the web. Because that's how people are: they don't look at the web exclusively. They don't regard themselves as computer users only. That would make them a minority of geeks. What people really do in life is, bringing it all together. They use the phone, a computer and a tv at the same time, and for both, business and entertainment. In social perception, peoples jobs and private lives become more and more one integrated experience.

I work as a creative director and project manager. On the web more than anywhere else, this involves a high degree of organizational skills, as well as a deep knowledge of the matter. My work includes information architecture, usability, data structures and user experience. It's surprising me still how slow the industry is picking up on the most important part of my job, the user experience. In my perception, it's totally underestimated.

When I worked for YVOD, a small web company in Albany, Ca, my contractor gave me the job of reorganizing the company's production cycle. I started at three ends:


My contractor, the CEO of YVOD, shared parts of my vision, but not all of it. To him, the user experience was merely something that would be reflected in the design—the look and feel in his eyes—of the final product. His focus lay elsewhere, based on the idea of clients wanting to make money. I never questioned that approach. Of course it's clear to me that business is about making money in the first place. What I think was wrong though was to concentrate on something else than the user experience. We ended up spending months and lots of money researching Search Engine Optimization.

Don't get me wrong. SEO is a valuable tool for large corporations who want to introduce a new product. It's also great for newcomers, perhaps startups who want to underline their marketing efforts by optimizing their content to get higher ranks in search engines. Other than that, in my opinion, it is wasted money.

The main clientelle for YVOD was small businesses to medium enterprises. We had a number of single-person companies, some of them working at home, and were looking into contracts for website projects around $10,000. A rather small number in web market. To spend a total of eight to ten months in researching and applying SEO to clients, to which we had to explain most times what this was all about, was mildly put an uneconomic effort.

Of course every company with a website wants visitors to look at its site. But if you're a copyright lawyer in Berkeley, people won't find you by typing "copyright law" into Google. It's not even that Google doesn't work like that. It's because of people don't work like that.

A woman who's looking for a copyright lawyer in Berkeley will do one of two things. One, she might ask friends or business partners. Two, she looks up specific directories, like the local phonebook or an online registry or directory. In short, she looks locally, in his nearest social surrounding, and if she is using the web, even if she would look it up at Google, she would most likely enter "copyright law, Berkeley". Because she needs local help, a person to talk to face to face.

So what is important to this person looking for a copyright lawyer? Say she found three or four of them in the area. What she will do then is go look at their website. From that point it's rather simple what happens next. She will look for signs giving her enough trust that she's chosing the right partner. The whole process is driven by user experience, by a mix of trusting your senses when you look at a website and by getting where I want to go quickly.

Is the website complicated? Is it full of content but it's hard to find out what I want to know? Is the site friendly or cold? Is it more about the law or is it about me?

Questions like these appear naturally. They actually reflect a natural user behaviour. Those are questions core is focussing on in user experience research groups. Those are the questions that come out of the users catalogue of needs, wishes and requirements, not out of the clients portfolio.

What is important for a client, in this case the copyright law firm but it's true to any company online, is to present itself in the best possible way. And on the web that means a lot more than it means in real life. It's more than a clean business card online. It means talking to your customers, making them feel home, making them feel understood and making them feel wanted. It means tuning your evangelism into the wavelengths of your customers, the users of your website.

Users don't just look at a website as something pretty or ugly. They make choices based on their immediate experience. The site is boring? Next. The site is confusing? Let's see what else we have... If your website is based on good user experience, you get the best chances that a customer might find you online, find your services valuable and finally becomes not only a user of your website, but also a user of your business.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)