aspire to enquire

Green means go

If you come across one of these whilst you're out and about, it's reasonably safe to make a few assumptions; you are on foot, you are trying to cross a road, and you know what these do.

I've not yet been to a country that doesn't have a similar system, but I think ours is the only country that has to spell out exactly what a red and green person mean every time someone encounters it.

Seeing as they were introduced nearly 50 years ago, I think people probably get it by now. So not withstanding the need for the little rotating knob underneath, and a wait sign (to acknowledge the button press), couldn't we trim these down a bit?

 

Lauren Moffatt Fall 2012

I've been really inspired by this Lauren Moffatt press event recently. 

If you're a follower of my Pinterest you may have seen some of these shots already, which were taken by the awesome and highly followable Calivintage. But I wanted to comment here too.

From the little I know and have seen from the fashion world, catwalk/runway shows seem to be the standard way of showing your clothes every season. My impression has always been thatthe shows are about showing how the clothes move and fit, in a way that works for magazine editorials and buyers alike.

But then why are they over so quickly? It always seemed strange to me that more time is spent getting people in and out, doing the mingling and blagging than actually looking at the clothes that the designers have spent months on.

I've seen the likes of Acne do a more static display before, just asking models to walk into tableaus in a room, but what struck me about Lauren Moffatt's show was that the whole set and situation is tied into the look and spirit of the clothes. It must have happened before but it really inspired me to think about other presentation standards: Why is the accepted wisdom on performance or demonstration so accepted? Is there a way to give more value to your audience by doing things differently?

In Lauren Moffatt's case, the show cleverly speaks to the way designers of her level are talked about and shared around the web these days. These images, whilst still highly aspirational, have their qualities displayed in a much more tangible way than the often abstract catwalk would allow. It's meant that mere mortals like me can easily pick up the images, find something to say about them and share them with my own networks.

By redefining the audience and their interaction right from the start, Lauren Moffatt has been able to reach a far wider and more engaged audience than more traditional channels might have allowed.

Fool-proofing delight

Those of us working in and around the internet are generally in agreement that it's a good idea to reduce the number of clicks/taps it takes a user to complete a task. By reducing frustration in an experience it's likely that someone will return and use your product again.

But sometimes it is good to introduce some friction. If you just give users exactly what they expected to find, what is there to set you apart from other sources?

Picture credit 

Google earned our trust early on because they were able to give us relevant results quickly and with zero fuss. Their competitors at the time were bloated portal sites like lycos, aol, yahoo, and Google's simplicity won the day. Compared to MySpace, Facebook 'just worked' (I can think of another example there). But those sites haven't stopped there.

Having my mind switched on to this in my current role has made me realise that this is going to be a continuing trend as the world truly becomes digital native and the internet of things surrounds us in our 'offline' lives - it will not be enough that your product works the best, or is the most popular right now, it will need to surprise and delight people, connect emotionally, and seamlessly enhance the user's own self-projection in a meaningful way.

I guess branding people have understood this for a while, but it totally applies to user experience design as well. That's why we see Google adding circles, +1, places, and updating the look and feel of their entire suite of products. Their core business is still search, but they compete on a much broader plane because of the extended value they can offer to that search.

I just the other day learned from John Gibbard that there's a well-establised term for this concept; it's called 'poka yoke'. It was traditionally used in manufacturing, as a fool-proofing method. By adding steps or barriers to factory processes, companies are able to reduce production errors. Essentially, if you put an unavoidable thing in the way, you will make sure that it's always done. On the internet, it's sometimes been little things like suggesting purchase add-ons as part of a payment funnel.

And we've always been doing our own little poka-yokes in our own lives as well. There are some great examples on Dan Lockton's blog.

So I guess what I'm realising is this: you can deliver the best user journey with the most rewarding end points, but what is there to stop a competitor popping up and 'building' on your 'best practice'?

As well as being best-in-class we need to start thinking about the opportunities to delight people. What steps will users be ok with us adding to processes so that we can make sure that they're getting the most from their time with us, and that they're taking away a memorable experience they can share, and a brand they can return to?

We have the video to prove it

I'm working somewhere between IA and this thing called 'experience planning' at the moment, at a courageous digital agency. I'm really enjoying it. Major agency, major client, lovely and inspiring colleagues.

Whilst the long evenings and intense brain excercises going on in the project room can get a bit draining at times, the project itself, if we get it right, could be reasonably awesome.

Anyway. As it's not launching till mid 2012 (which suddenly doesn't feel that far away) and will hopefully be around for a while, we're being forced to really explore where we think people's lifestyles will be over the next few years - the direction of travel, and what the nature of an acceptable intervention/transaction will be. 

A great set of starting points to challenge / examine is this tumblr set of videos by various corporations predicting how technology will become more deeply interweaved with our day-to-day.

This video by Ericsson is one of my favourites, and goes into the exciting world of the internet of things...

Also not to be missed are Berg's fantastic near-future imaginings on incidental screens in collaboration with Dentsu London a few months ago. 

This may be everything I love about the internet

Found via Nickel Cobalt

Mindless?

So the dust seems to have settled a bit around the UK, after the 'riots' of a few weeks ago.

I think most people have thought a lot about the reasoning behind the violence we saw here, and I've been at a few parties and with different groups of friends where the subject has come up. It largely seems to have followed the Conservative line of "this was mindless violence, the people should be punished, they deserve harsher and quicker sentencing than usual because the actions were so severe"

Well, I've found this rationale a bit problematic, and while I waited for alternative opinions to spread past the blog pages of national newspapers (like this great piece in The Independent and another in The Telegraph) and start influencing real public debate, national attention has seemed to move on to more justifed conflicts further afield.

So I wanted to get my thoughts down and see what responses were, because I'm worried that for the young people who were involved in these acts, not much has changed. And if nothing has changed, this could happen again.

Still from the Keep Aaron Cutting campaign site.

The thing that really struck me wasn't necessarily the 'mindlessness' of the actions, but of the targets. For me it raised some questions.

• What could lead someone to think there is no difference between a lone local hairdresser and a global electronics brand?
• How could someone not differentiate between members of their community and state police? And going further, why are the Police/state seen as the enemy at all?

I believe it's true that many of these acts were not pre-meditated, and many people now in custody probably did just get caught up in the moment. But I also agree that that's not always an excuse. But the idea that kids 'should have known better' doesn't wash for me either.

It seems like the answers to the questions above lead to some pretty long-term conditioning that these kids and their peers have gone through.

If everyone is against you, what difference does it make if you burn Oxfam or Foot Locker? If as soon as you do something, people distance themselves from you and persecute you, why would you ever attempt to reach out and empathise? If at least 1 in five of your friends are out of work and being forced to jump through hoops to receive £2.14 per hour while they look for jobs that don't exist, what faith do you have that polititians are on your side, even before they start calling you 'scum' and 'thugs'?

Just lots of questions really, but I hope that as a country we're able to think about answering them. There's a lacklustre speech from Ed Milliband that touches on some of the issues, but in that very middle-class way that doesn't even come close to the kinds of reform that's needed.

I leave you with this video shot before any of this kicked off:

What do you think?

A Fifties mentality

This.

via WWD 

Dear Photograph

While we're on the subject...

This is another set that's been doing the rounds recently.

I found the set of pictures on Dear Photograph incredibly moving - the link to actual memories captured by real humans has a beautiful poignancy to it.

Thanks to the chaps at Sell Sell for reminding me about it.

Robert Trachtenberg for Tatler

Love this.

It's a lot like the sleeveface thing which makes me proud to be from Cardiff.

If anyone was looking for a social media meme idea for a major subscription entertainment service, this would totally work ;)

Cheers to calivintage for the tip

Real digital keepsakes

I love this project by John Kestner at Supermechanical. I tweeted about it months ago, but I've just rediscovered it through the Cool Hunting x Audi thing. Tableau is an internet-connected bedside table that listens to a twitter feed and prints any images it hears. The printed pictures stay in the drawer until the next time someone opens it.

It's a bit like the Howies / Russell Davies thing we heard so much about a few years ago. It would be great to see this sort of technology actually out in the wild - I can imagine it being really effective at events or perhaps at museums where audiences are being asked to share their own perspectives. And at the other end of the spectrum it could join the list of products designed to connect people over long distances through background activity, a bit like the Good Night Lamp.