September 26, 2005

Painful upgrade to Movabletype 3.2

Despite Six Apart's warm promises of the easiest upgrade ever, upgrading to Movabletype to version 3.2 is everything but painless. I'm not sure how well their strategy goes, leaving enough users out there without a clue, hoping they will be drawn to buy the most expensive upgrade version with included technical support.
There is some sort of support through the MT knowledge base and the MT community forum, and of course, you can always find bits and pieces on the internet. All sorts of puzzle parts of information are cluttered around on the net, you'll find them in various blogs and wikis online. I don't know how many Google searches I've done already, desperately trying to move forward. It feels like walking in a swamp. Along the way, I have consulted Elise's incredibly helpful tutorial site for various times and spent half a night unsuccessfully trying to make a full backup using TypeMover. It's a plugin that's supposed to backup everything of a Movabletype installation, including all your blog comments, commenters data, categories and everything else that's not stored in a MySQL database, if you haven't turned on dynamic template rebuilds. Speaking of, those don't work either in the case of dense, because in order to make them work, I would have to get access to the Apache configuration. Which is of course maintained by my host, and that is probably the same case with the majority of Movabletype users, since we don't all have our very own web server, hosting our sites from our kitchen desk.

So why am I going through this painful upgrade you may ask? The new features of Movabletype 3.2 are nice, but what is really convincing is its new anti-spam functionality. According to Six Apart, that alone will be worth all the hassle. For the past month I have spent an increasing time with blocking off unsoliticed comments by some very persistent texas casino websites. All the time I kept asking myself if this was some sort of private revenge of Mr. Bush's clan, a personal raid following my continued comments about his failure as politician and leader of the United States.

Six Apart says it's the easiest upgrade ever. But apparently I'm not the only one having problems:
cantoni.org
Blogging: MT 3.2 Final - 500 Error Bites
MovableType Weirdness Again
mistressmaryse in the MT forums: "Moveable Type development team: Your software is the MOST difficult installation that I have ever attempted to perform on my website."

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 04:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 10, 2005

Oxford Dictionary—Opinionated about twenty something bloggers?

The Oxford Dictionary is implemented in the current release of the Mac OS codenamed Tiger. It is using an odd line for an application example of the word blog in american english. Sure, it's just to show how it is used in a sentence. But how many will mistake this as an explanation? I don't know what they were thinking when they were adding this line. There are obviously better examples to choose from, hopefully considered for an updated dictionary.

The Oxford Dictionary: blog |bläg| noun a weblog : blogs run by twenty-something Americans with at least an unhealthy interest in computers.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 09:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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)

July 23, 2005

A wearable web experience

While 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:

11 global navigation links

35 marketing entry point links, that is 32 too many

1 site map link

Slide shows of Bangkok bikes and Hong Kong housing mixed with fashion shoots are sexy to art directors, but confusing to customers

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.

After 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?

I 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.

So 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)

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

Delicious 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 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 Department, people inside the company and freelancers

Account managers and media booking people

Clients

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)

May 31, 2005

Cézanne is alive!

The innovative font foundry P22 has announced Cézanne Pro, an improved version of its popular Cézanne font. Cézanne Pro makes use of powerful OpenType features: Letter shapes change randomly, making the font look less homogenous. A text written in Cézanne Pro will give the human eye the illusion to be actually hand written. This shows how far typography has developed in the past couple of years, following the desktop revolution. Unfortunately, most of modern typographic features are still limted to print technologies, since the web has not found a solution yet for practical typographic freedom.

OpenType is a technology standard founded by Adobe, Microsoft and Montotype. So far, only Adobe Software such as InDesign makes use of OpenType, whereas Quark Xpress is still ignoring its powerful typographic features.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 06:08 AM | Comments (0)

May 30, 2005

Think dense

For about three months I have been working on updating my website. It's been a work with lots of interruptions, mostly work in advertising and a couple of design jobs for friends. Equally abandoned was core, the blog. Not that I would run out of topics. I had to smile when I just stumbled over older entries, written in the heat of the last elections in the U.S. In the meantime my Powerbook's hard disk died and I a total of about 30% of my entire data, including pictures and music. My visa for the U.S. ran out. I had to go back to Zurich, where I'm now living with my brother for the next couple of weeks, possibly months. And still I'm looking for a permanent position in the U.S. as a Creative Director, ideally in internet business. In short, I simply didn't find the time to write anymore.

Once the heat had boiled down a little, I didn't waste time. This weekend I finally made progress on the site, establishing a new entry page with changing pictures and cleaning up the blog's interface. The blog has a new name, dense, which somehow emphasizes what core is all about.

The new core blog dense will cover all sorts of topics just like it previously did, but I will focus more on core related topics, such as design, usability, conceptual work and the entire internet experience. My last job as an internet consultant opened my eyes to what I had always assumed: This business needs a lot of work to follow up with the evolution of the web.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 09:48 AM | Comments (0)

Think dense

For about three months I have been working on updating my website. It's been a work with lots of interruptions, mostly work in advertising and a couple of design jobs for friends. Equally abandoned was core, the blog. Not that I would run out of topics. I had to smile when I just stumbled over older entries, written in the heat of the last elections in the U.S. In the meantime my Powerbook's hard disk died and I a total of about 30% of my entire data, including pictures and music. My visa for the U.S. ran out. I had to go back to Zurich, where I'm now living with my brother for the next couple of weeks, possibly months. And still I'm looking for a permanent position in the U.S. as a Creative Director, ideally in internet business. In short, I simply didn't find the time to write anymore.

Once the heat had boiled down a little, I didn't waste time. This weekend I finally made progress on the site, establishing a new entry page with changing pictures and cleaning up the blog's interface. The blog has a new name, dense, which somehow emphasizes what core is all about.

The new core blog dense will cover all sorts of topics just like it previously did, but I will focus more on core related topics, such as design, usability, conceptual work and the entire internet experience. My last job as an internet consultant opened my eyes to what I had always assumed: This business needs a lot of work to follow up with the evolution of the web.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 09:48 AM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2005

As We May Think

Why did computers come to adopt the GUI as their primary mode of interaction, and how did the GUI evolve to be the way it is today?--A very interesting and deep historic overview of the GUI (graphical user interface). A must read for everyone who's interested in the foundation of Information Architecture and Usability.

Like many developments in the history of computing, some of the ideas for a GUI computer were thought of long before the technology was even available to build such a machine. One of the first people to express these ideas was Vannevar Bush. In the early 1930s he first wrote of a device he called the "Memex," which he envisioned as looking like a desk with two touch screen graphical displays, a keyboard, and a scanner attached to it. It would allow the user to access all human knowledge using connections very similar to how hyperlinks work. At this point, the digital computer had not been invented, so there was no way for such a device to actually work, and Bush's ideas were not widely read or discussed at that time. However, starting in about 1937 several groups around the world started constructing digital computers. World War II provided much of the motivation and funding to produce programmable calculating machines, for everything from calculating artillery firing tables to cracking the enemy's secret codes. The perfection and commercial production of vacuum tubes provided the fast switching mechanisms these computers needed to be useful. In 1945, Bush revisited his older ideas in an article entitled "As We May Think," which was published in the Atlantic Monthly, and it was this essay that inspired a young Douglas Englebart to try and actually build such a machine.

Related Resources:
Interaction Design
Boxes & Arrows
IA Institute Library
IA Wiki

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 07:14 AM | Comments (0)