I loved this presentation by Paul Adams of the Google UX team. He explores designing for real social networks by examining relationships, influence, identity and privacy.
The entire presentation is extremely well done, and the discussion around relationships and our online versus offline social network truly illuminates important factors in social design.
In “Fusing Content Strategy with Design”, David Gillis gives a very good summary of content strategy and its interplay with the overall user experience strategy and information architecture. The leading advocate for the field, Kristina Halvorson defines the field as such:
Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.
Necessarily, the content strategist must work to define not only which content will be published, but why we’re publishing it in the first place.
I particularly like the way he discusses the importance of setting contexts, using context maps, to better integrate content with the overall experience (see example map below).
Example context map from "Fusing Content Strategy with Design"
Such discussions all point to the importance of a fully integrated product experience process where content certainly plays a very big (and often overlooked) role.
Consumer behavior has certainly changed in recent times, and the way we interact with brands in increasingly becoming more intimate and familiar. I’m sure a few years ago we would not have thought that we would be “friends” with (or fans receiving daily updates from) our favorite soda or restaurant.
Growing a vast customer base for an online product is a complex process that encompasses marketing, product development, and luck. However, it is possible to stack the odds in your favor and to make the best of your marketing dollars by creating a product experience that fosters the organic growth cycle.
For all products, new customers are generated through a combination of paid and word-of-mouth marketing. In some cases, the majority of a product’s new customers come from organic, word-of-mouth marketing. While traditional marketing such as online advertising requires a constant input of resources, word-of-mouth marketing can essentially become a self-sustaining system, requiring little or no support—a sort of marketing Turing machine. Such a well-tuned organic growth cycle can help to grow a large customer base for any web product.
Traditional and organic marketing generating new prospective customers.
To much fanfare and critical acclaim, TiVo announced last week its new Premiere DVR that features a ground-breaking user interface. I’m very happy to say that we had the privilege to work alongside TiVo’s talented design team to define and design the novel user experience that extends TiVo’s high interaction standards. TiVo, Inc. is featuring the new release on its home page and the device, with its complete redefined HD interface, has already received fantastic reviews from the likes of CNET, TechCrunch, and Gizmodo.
Gizmodo’s Mark Wilson highlights the user experience improvements as:
Despite the redesign, you’ll find the experience is remarkably familiar. The basic fonts and menus are unchanged, with a few key differences. Most importantly, instead of seeing one page at a time (like being in Now Playing, then clicking to a new screen with a particular show), you see two pages at a time—a logical design update to the widescreen format that speeds up navigation enormously.
Check out the screen shots below:
TiVo Central
My Shows
Browse Collections
Watching the winter Olympics this year, I took note of the great use of information overlays by NBC. Overall I have been impressed with their sparing use of graphics to convey the critical information. I hope that this simple elegant design will be the standard rather than the exception in television and web videos that are pushing the limits on pop-ups and unnecessarily heavy overlays. Below is a great example of the biathlon’s simple hit/miss shot penalty information displays:
Single competitor shooting with infograhic (from nbc.com)
Two competitors shooting with picture in picture (from nbc.com)
On the actual broadcast, these small information units of hit/miss were stacked up beside appropriate flags to show multiple competitors at once. Although hard to follow the progression, it was a great way to show a lot of information in very little space and in real-time.
Nokia has started circulating specifications and previews of its new Symbian^4 OS interface and interaction design (via Symbian.org). Some notable improvements include:
Below are some diagrams from the Symbian^4 User Interface Concept Proposal (PDF).
Symbian^4 UI Model Diagram (via Symbian.org)
iPhone's Big Problem (created on pixton.com)
I had the opportunity to speak with Netvibes’ CEO, Freddy Mini, as a follow-up to our original article on the company’s RSS reader. In our interview, we mainly discussed the strategy and vision for the product—who are the customer segments, how Netvibes meets their needs, where the product has been and where it is going. We also discuss the product development and design process at Netvibes. We get a fascinating look into how Mr. Mini plans to stay ahead of the competition, which includes iGoogle among others, by turning Netvibes from an aggregator to an automated publishing platform while continuing to add to its already vast assortment of content.
In a sentence or two, how would you describe Netvibes (the elevator pitch)?
I have [an elevator pitch] because last week I had to present at a thirty-second pitch, and then I entered the twitter pitch contest. Netvibes is the best online publishing platform that empowers everybody to take control of their digital life, should it be an individual or a business.
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Today is World Usability Day. Don’t forget to get involved and see the events happening near you.
For Boston, there are a series of events at South Station, titled “Connecting the Dots”
In San Francisco, check out: Design Matters: An Open House to Celebrate World Usability Day
And of course, please do comment/share any events you have or plan on attending this year!
Montparnas provides product strategy and experience design services for clients worldwide.
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