Author Archive

  • What I’m hoping for from SXSW

    I’ve been to loads of conferences over the years. Most of them have left me feeling ‘whelmed’ at best and at most other times frustrated.

    I blogged last year about one conference I attended in London last May. There was a general feeling that the speakers offered nothing new, virtually no excitement or insight and most of the talks boiled down to a personal retrospective. That’s fair enough you may say, but the conference was billed as being about the future of the industry.

    It felt as if the speakers had just been asked to turn up and speak about anything they wanted. No vetting by the organiser and seemingly very little brief to the speakers.

    As such I’ve given up on any conferences this year. Apart, obviously, from the biggy. The one we’re all off to.

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  • Time for a reassessment of the human-computer interface

    A great blog post by Lukas Mathis has been floating around Twitter for a few days now. In it he talks about the removal of features in software development. Specifically:

    If you don’t pay attention, what started out as an elegant, simple application that perfectly solves a single problem, can quickly turn into a huge behemoth of an application that solves a ton of problems, but solves all of them poorly.

    This, and some other tweet comments, got me thinking about the iPad (who isn’t?) and how I believe it’s a glimpse of the future for how we interact with personal computers.

    In the 35 years since the arrival of the personal computer we’ve been on a continuous upward trajectory of feature enhancement and specification bloat. It’s not just the software, it’s infecting the very machines that we run the bloated software on.

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  • Pictory – A beautiful example of online editorial design

    I’ve talked before about exploring different ways of navigating and consuming content online.

    I first came across Pictory a few weeks ago and absolutely loved it. But as it starts to fill with stories and topics I feel provides some beautiful and elegant ways to gorge yourself on content and is really forging a path into new areas of content layout and navigation online.

    Their line ‘Your best photo stories’ explains what it is nicely.

    Pictory screenshot

    Let’s look at the evidence.

    Lovely, big images. Navigation via a keyboard which allows me to skip from piece to piece simply by pressing the left/right arrow keys. A balanced mix of captioned images and short stories pulled together to create a rich textured viewing / reading experience. Real-life stories which often cause an emotional stir in the reader. And the designer in me loves the use of Typekit fonts.

    I think it’s an example of crowdsourcing at it’s absolute best. A nice tightly worded brief but open enough for interpretation by the viewer. (Aren’t all the best briefs like this?)

    Being ultra picky. A full-screen view would be nice.

    Anyway, I think it’s best if you go there now and lose the next hour of your day.

  • We’ve sorted the UX. How about the EX?

    I think I can stick my neck out and say that *most* web industry professionals are pretty solid on user experience these days. The heuristics of web usability have become engrained in our brains over the years. When planning a site we often reach consensus on discussions around interaction touch points and navigation hierarchies very quickly and get on to writing the next user story.
    It wasn’t always like this. I can remember observing, and even occasionally conducting, usability tests on site prototypes and early design mock ups as recently as three years ago. It all seemed a bit low rent TV police drama but it worked. Voice and face recording, one-way mirrored glass observation rooms, scripts and lists of questions. A really compelling way to settle arguments between clients / developers / account management / designers.
    After doing this tens and tens of times you start to get a good understanding of how people approach looking for stuff on a site. The natural gravitational pull to the top right when looking for search. The twitch of the hand to point the mouse to the top left of the screen when wanting a home link. All quite predictable.
    I know there are still shocking usability examples out there on the web. In the same way that you’ll always get crap food in some restaurants and shonky service from estate agents. There will always be room for user testing on some level.
    But I think there may be a new avenue to explore. What about the emotional experience of using a site? How do we measure this? Is there any form of measurement for something so intangible?
    Following on form Isaac’s post about surprise and delight in service and product design, what are the metrics for a great emotional experience online? Just having a site that is easy to navigate is one thing, but what does joy look like? Is it the measure of ‘OMGs’ in Twitter mentions with bit.ly links?
    In short, what are the things that make a ‘normal’ web user love a site? Content, conversation, dripping with smooth jQuery loveliness? What do you reckon?

    I think I can stick my neck out and say that *most* web industry professionals are pretty solid on user experience these days. The heuristics of web usability have become engrained in our brains over the years. When planning a site we usually reach consensus on discussions around interaction touch points and navigation hierarchies very quickly and get on to writing the next user story.

    It wasn’t always like this. I can remember observing, and even occasionally conducting, usability tests on site prototypes and early design mock ups as recently as three years ago. It all seemed a bit low rent TV police drama but it worked. Voice and face recording, one-way mirrored glass observation rooms, scripts and lists of questions. A really compelling way to settle arguments between clients / developers / account management / designers.

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  • Creative Review, D&AD and Adobe round table discussion on the Future of Advertising

    Back in the summer William and I were invited to take part in a Creative Review round table discussion to debate the ‘Future of Advertising’. Chaired by Patrick Burgoyne, Editor of Creative Review, we were joined by the great and the good from agencies across London.

    Over the hour and a half chat the topics we talked about varied from measurement mechanisms for digital campaigns, payment models, client-agency relationships and a load of other stuff.

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  • Life after Verdana

    Typekit launched recently amid a tremendous buzz from designers and bloggers across the web.
    What typeset offers are ‘real’ fonts on the web. Don’t quite know what this means. Surely Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Tahoma et al are all ‘real’ fonts. I think what they mean is that there is now access to a huge library of extra fonts to employ in browser-based design.
    This sort of follows on from my previous post about Art Direction on the web. This wider choice of fonts should allow greater freedom for the designer to inject some personality into their designs and help achieve some differentiation. As, arguably, one of the nicest serif-fonts online Georgia is used all over the place for online publishing. The arrival of Typekit should help reduce the reliance on Georgia for this purpose.
    So how does Typekit work?  It’s actually very clever. You see, the problems with fonts online are the same as digital music publishing, namely DRM. As soon as I install a font on my web server and use it on my site then I need a license for the distribution of that font. And those licenses don’t exist. Ot they do but their prohibitively expensive.
    Typekit have got round this problem by allowing you to rent the font from their servers for use in your site CSS and HTML. You pay a monthly subscription (on a freemium model), the level set depending on how many fonts you want to use and how many sites you want to publish those fonts on. Once you’ve chose your fonts and enter the URL of the destination site and it spits out a couple of lines of javascript for you to place into the <head> of your HTML file. It looks a bit like this…
    <script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://use.typekit.com/etn1iee.js”></script>
    <script type=”text/javascript”>try{Typekit.load();}catch(e){}</script>
    This works in all major browsers (Firefox 3.5 and up, Safari 2.4 and up) and even IE (version 5 an up).
    It’s all quite ingenious really. And a very elegant solution to a problem that looked insurmountable a few years ago.
    However, I’m slightly wary of where this might lead. The old saying ‘just because you can, doesn’t mean to say you should’ needs to be plastered all over the Typekit site. The font catalogue may be extensive but there are some absolutely hideous examples of the typographers art on there. Allow the user to set them small onscreen any they’ll be completely illegible.
    This may also open up the floodgates for some crimes against typography. Remember when, in the early-mid 90s the PC became more and more pervasive. The world became filled with rainbow coloured, Times, Comic Sans and Brush Script-rendered signs in corner shops? The same people who used the <blink> tag and texture-mapped animated gifs. I fear we may be treading the same path again.
    Whatever, in the right hands this opens up a very exciting future for web-based editorial design and art direction. A future that may be even brighter when some of the larger foundries come onboard with the likes of Garamond, Franklin Gothic, Clarendon etc.
    For those that care about typographic nuances I found this useful tool for seeing exactly how the font will render in a browser, at different sizes, white out and at varying shades of grey.
    It’s probably worth pointing out that there are others doing similar things to Typekit. Some use a different method of linking back to the font file (@font-face) but the principles are the same. These include, Kernest, Fontdeck (coming soon) amongst others.

    Typekit launched recently amid a tremendous buzz from designers and bloggers across the web.

    What Typekit offers are ‘real’ fonts on the web. Don’t quite know what this means. Surely Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Tahoma et al are all ‘real’ fonts. I think what they mean is that there is now access to a huge library of extra fonts to employ in browser-based design beyond the standard set of ‘browser-safe’ fonts.

    Screen shot 2009-11-17 at 14.10.50

    This sort of follows on from my previous post about Art Direction on the web. This wider choice of fonts should allow greater freedom for the designer to inject some personality into their designs and help achieve some differentiation. As, arguably, the nicest browser-safe serif-font, Georgia, is used all over the place for online publishing. The arrival of Typekit should, if nothing else, help reduce the reliance on Georgia for this purpose.

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  • I’ve been Bosewatched

    For those who don’t follow my Twitter stream, I’ve been running a ‘bosewatch‘ hashtag campaign for the last couple of months. You see, my desk overlooks Regent Street and the Bose store is directly opposite. I tweet casual observations about what’s going on there, often passing comment on how empty it looks.

    It’s all been a bit tongue-in-cheek. Casual brand stalking if you like. But everything changed at lunchtime today. I got a phone call which began…

    “Hello, is that Simon?”

    “Yes, hello.”

    “Hi, I’m Martin from the Bose store on Regent Street.”

    Oh. My. God.

    A brief conversation followed where we discussed my tweets, their footfall and occasional quiet spells. To be honest I was absolutely dumbfounded that I’d been called. He asked if I would like to visit the store, get a tour and ‘expereince Bose’. I didn’t need asking twice and duly went along with Stuart.

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  • Looking towards more flexible web-based editorial design

    Isaac and I have been discussing how users consume media and news which has raised some interesting questions around online publishing. Specifically: how we construct content templates, how that content looks when it’s in place, art direction at a micro level and how we can create richer, more engaging and, importantly, more ‘useful’ reading experiences online.

    Over the last 4-5 years there has been a gradual convergence in how most newspaper sites construct their article pages. Based on a grid system, they employ a wide central column for the body copy and a number of other columns, usually on the right of the screen, for related information, links to other stories, MPUs, tools, etc. We should know, we’ve designed a number of sites for media owners, as well as countless blogs that conform to these conventions.

    No matter how long the article is it is wedged into the same template. If it’s 200 words, stick it in. 800 words? No problem, paginate it and reap the ad impressions.

    There’s loads of sense to this approach. The beauty of the web is its democratisation of publishing. Drop your text and image into a well crafted template and you’re away. But I think there’s room for another approach.

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  • We love you Spotify, but wouldn’t it be great if…

    There’s no denying that Spotify has taken the world of online music to a new (legal) level. Their ever-increasing catalogue of artists and albums, coupled with the acceptance of their app into the iTunes store will, no doubt, alter the way millions of people both pay for and consume music.

    The application is a model of elegant simplicity. It easy to find your way around the service, listen to music and create and share playlists.
    However, there are times when you open the app and you have no idea where to start. To torture the metaphor – you have a potential fire hose of music content but turning the right tap can sometimes be difficult. What do I fancy? What’s my mood? What am I doing? Do I just want some background noise or some hum-along favourites?
    And there’s the problem. Discovering music on Spotify is difficult. They have the ‘Top Lists’ tab but that’s far too coarse to be an effective browsing or recommendations mechanism. And the chances of the ‘What’s new’ tab giving me a starting point for listening is remote at best.
    So I thought it would be a great idea to look at some ways to enhance Spotify. To devise some mechanisms which could effectively surface a wider range of their catalogue of tracks and help me decide both what to listen to and discover new music.
    I will caveat at this point that what I have done is by no means exhaustive. It’s not a usability review or an interface rework. It’s an idea, a sample of how we believe the Spotify experience could be extended and enhanced. Also, I have the luxury of not having to work out the technical feasibility of these ideas. Although it’s all ‘doable’ no account has been taken with regard to performance issues or other potential technical constraints.
    So, with that sorted out. Let’s take a look at some ideas. First, the ‘home’ screen.
    Instead of the ‘Artists you might like’ panel I feel there should be more of a ‘Your trends’ panel. This is an easy way to get back into music you’ve listened to. A 30 day (or longer) retrospective on your listening habits. Like what you put together last Wednesday. No problem. Click the chart to line up the tracks again and away you go. Also, should Spotify wish to develop more community features longer term this could be a great way of comparing tastes and habits with other users.
    <img>
    As I mentioned earlier, sometimes you just need to listen to music but have no idea where to start. Artist, genre or album just doesn’t always cut it. The creation of a mood browser would open up a whole range of music unconstrained by genre or artist. Clicking one of these links could take the user to a screen showing maybe 100 tracks as a starting point for listening.
    <img>
    One of the great things about digital music is that the old barriers and constraints of albums have disappeared. A playlist generator would work by allowing the user to input some simple criteria and generate a body of music. The way I envisage this working is that the user could input as many or as few criteria they like. Add some genres, add a couple of artist names to ensure they get added to the mix, set how long you want the playlist to last, hit generate.
    <img>
    Outside of your own experience (the middle of the screen) the right hand side could provide a glimpse into the activity of other listeners by location. Spark lines accompanying each track could click through to show listening trends for that piece of music. How has it’s popularity risen or declined over time compared to other tracks. Providing feeds from other services such as We Are Hunted also gives the opportunity to find out about emerging bands and tracks which may be popular for a very short space of time but may never appear on the ‘Top Lists’.
    <img>
    Once you’re off the home page and listening to music there are some other problems with the current experience. Related artists is, in my opinion, currently very inaccurate. And, once you have listened to an album from an artist there is no way to extend that experience. It’s back to search or one of the lists pages.
    Creating a side bar which could accommodate useful information such as artist influences and a ‘likeness’ finder. Influences could be real i.e. from the artists themselves as opposed to generated. And the ‘likeness’ slider could find artists or tracks which are either very related or completely different to what you have just listened to.
    <img>
    Surfacing the rich data that Spotify holds, there’s potential to expose data around an artist. Their maximum number of simultaneous plays, how often their tracks appear in playlists, how many total plays their tracks have had. In fact, there’s probably a whole data visualisation project right there.
    Anyway, back to music discovery.
    What I’ve done here is just a few quick ideas to release the potential for a much richer experience facilitated by opening up Spotify’s data. More useful music discover could also convince more people to sign up for the Premium account. Or even add a middle tier account which allows rich music discover coupled with some social features to allow easier sharing.
    Here are the full-size screen shots of the ideas.
    <img>
    <img>
    To stimulate the debate and because I, in no way ‘own’ the Spotify design, here is a link to the PSD files I created to do this exercise. If anyone wants to pick up the mantle, run with it, remix further then be my guest. Just be sure to post a comment with a link to your work.

    The application is a model of elegant simplicity. It easy to find your way around the service, listen to music and create and share playlists.

    However, there are times when you open the app and you have no idea where to start. To torture the metaphor – you have a potential fire hose of music content but turning the right tap can sometimes be difficult. What do I fancy? What’s my mood? What am I doing? Do I just want some background noise or some hum-along favourites?

    And there’s the problem. Discovering music on Spotify is difficult. They have the ‘Top Lists’ tab but that’s far too coarse to be an effective browsing or recommendations mechanism. And the chances of the ‘What’s new’ tab giving me a starting point for listening is remote at best.

    So I thought it would be a great idea to look at some ways to enhance Spotify. To devise some mechanisms which could more effectively surface a wider range of their catalogue and help me both decide what to listen to and discover new music.

    I will caveat at this point that what I have done is by no means exhaustive. It’s not a usability review or an interface rework. It’s an idea, a sample of how we believe the Spotify experience could be extended and enhanced. Also, I have the luxury of not having to work out the technical feasibility of these ideas. Although it’s all ‘doable’ no account has been taken with regard to performance issues or other potential technical constraints.

    With that sorted out, let’s take a look at some ideas. First, the ‘home’ screen. For a start, you’ll notice that I’ve relegated the ‘What’s new’ to a different tab. I’m not sure if there is record label pressure commercial reasoning for this list but it seems like a bit of a space filler to me. Anyway, for the purposes of this exercise, it’s gone.

    Your activity
    Instead of the ‘Artists you might like’ panel I feel there should be more of a ‘Your trends’ space. This is an easy way to get back into music you’ve listened to. A 30 day (or longer) retrospective on your listening habits. Like what you put together last Wednesday? No problem. Click the chart to line up the tracks again and away you go. Also, should Spotify wish to develop more community features longer term this could be a great way of comparing tastes and habits with other users.

    activity

    Play by mood
    As I mentioned earlier, sometimes you just need to listen to music but have no idea where to start. Artist, genre or album don’t always cut it. The creation of a mood browser would open up a whole range of music unconstrained by genre or artist. Clicking one of these links could take the user to a screen showing maybe 100 tracks as a starting point for listening.

    moods

    Playlist generator
    One of the great things about digital music is that the old barriers and constraints of albums have disappeared. A playlist generator would work by allowing the user to input some simple criteria and generate a body of music. The way I envisage this working is that the user could input as many or as few criteria as they like. Add some genres, add a couple of artist names to ensure they get added to the mix, set how long you want the playlist to last, hit generate.

    playlist

    Outside of your own experience (the middle of the screen) the right hand side could provide a glimpse into the activity of other listeners by location. Sparklines accompanying each track could click through to show listening trends for that piece of music. How has its popularity risen or declined over time compared to other tracks? Providing feeds from other services such as We Are Hunted also gives the opportunity to find out about emerging bands and tracks which may be popular right now but may never appear on the ‘Top Lists’ longer term.

    SpotifyHome_d01

    A reworked Spotify Home Page

    Music related to an artist or band
    Once you’re off the home page and listening to music there are some other problems with the current experience. Related artists is, in my opinion, currently very inaccurate. And, once you have listened to an album from an artist there is no way to extend that experience. It’s back to search or one of the list pages.

    Creating a side bar which could accommodate useful information such as artist influences and a ‘likeness’ finder would help prevent the current staccato experience. Influences could be real i.e. from the artists themselves as opposed to generated. And the ‘likeness’ slider could find artists or tracks which are either very related or completely different to what you have just listened to – updated in real time as you move up and down the scale.

    artist

    In surfacing the rich data that Spotify holds there’s potential to expose some very interesting content associated with an artist. Their maximum number of simultaneous plays, how often their tracks appear in playlists, how many total plays their tracks have had. In fact, there’s probably a whole data visualisation project right there.

    But that’s a different blog post. Back to music discovery.

    What I’ve done here is just a few quick ideas to release the potential for a much richer experience facilitated by opening up Spotify’s database and manipulating the content in more interesting ways. More useful music discovery could also convince a greater number of people to sign up for the Premium account. Alternatively, it could provide a case for a fruitful middle tier account which allows rich music discovery coupled with some social features to allow easier sharing but is still largely display-ad supported.

    What I’ve discussed here is just a starting point. A catalyst for ideas to enhance what is already a great service.

    SpotifyArtist_d01

    A reworked Spotify Artist page

    To stimulate the debate and because I in no way own the Spotify design, here is a link to the PSD files I created to do this exercise. If anyone wants to pick up the mantle, run with it, remix further then be my guest. Just be sure to post a comment with a link to your work.

  • The journalist’s new research tool. Twitter.

    Last Thursday (27th August) at 09:49 I posted the following tweet

    “Ikea want to give the same impression on the web and in print so they use Verdana everywhere. It goes much deeper than just a font folks.”

    Like most tweets, I posted and thought nothing more of it. In fact, I thought I was a bit late coming to this party as plenty of others had been bemoaning Ikea’s new font choice for a few days.

    Anyway, at 09:59 I received this email…

    “Dear Simon,

    I’m a reporter for Time Magazine, and I’m working on a story about Ikea’s switch to Verdana (and the protest it has provoked). I saw your tweet on the subject, and was hoping you would be willing to speak briefly with me by phone (or email!) this morning. I’d greatly appreciate your help…”

    After a small amount of Googling I found the reporter’s, Lisa Abend, LinkedIn profile and discovered that this wasn’t a fake. (The email had come from a gmail account)

    So followed a brief email conversation where she asked me to expand on my 140 characters worth of thoughts. What I wrote in full…

    “Sometimes organisations make changes for the sake of it. They may feel that they need to refresh their identity to stay relevant and up to date. But, on the face of it, Ikea seem to have the right intentions in this case. They say they want to create a unified look across their website and print materials. This is an entirely sensible approach. But it’s rather crude to simply use the same font across both mediums. A brand identity is composed of much more than just a font. It’s about the art direction of the photography. The application of colour and white space, copywriting and a myriad of other small touches.

    Previously they were using a slight variant on Futura – maybe slightly tweaked to lend it a uniqueness that couldn’t be mimicked easily. Looking at the old and new catalogues side by side, the use of a font as pervasive as Verdana only helps to diminish the distinct look the previous generations of the Ikea catalogue exhibited. If, for example, you covered up the Ikea logo on the old and new catalogues, I would suggest that members of the general public would be able to more easily recognise the ‘Ikeaness’ of the old catalogue.

    Regarding the font choice. It’s been said a lot already, but Verdana was designed specifically for screen use. It has open, wide letterforms with lots of space between characters to aid legibility at small sizes on screen. Using it for print imposes all sorts of problems on the designer. The horizonal space taken up by words is huge when type is set in Verdana as opposed to Futura. It doesn’t exhibit any elegance or visual rhythm when it is set at large sizes. And in caps it looks, in my opinion, hideous.

    It’s like taking the family saloon car off road. It will sort of work but will ultimately get bogged down as it isn’t fit for purpose.”

    Lo and behold at 09:20 on 28 August (within 24 hours of my first tweet) I received an email with a link to the finished piece, quoting yours truly, on time.com. The Font War: Ikea Fans Fume over Verdana

    The finished article is full of quotes from other designers taken from both Twitter and probably in-depth phone or email interviews.

    Interesting how, through such a simple mechanism as a Twitter search, a journalist can gather together people who may be willing interviewees about a given subject. What’s also interesting to note is the timing. If I’d been with the initial commenters on this a few days earlier I’d probably never have been approached. The fact that I was late and within a few minutes of the journalist’s search mean I was directly in line for her enquiries.

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