I was watching the track & field participants in the Olympic sprinting events, and noticed huge, flashy, HEAVY gold anchors hanging around their necks. Mind you, they did streamline the rest of their bodies with Flash Gordon shoes, X-men shades and Spiderman suits. In an effort to be as light and drag-free as possible, there’s something very amusing about vanity’s influence over common sense.
Are they running for gold, or just with it?
Posted in Random Observations | Tagged common sense, olympics, sprinters, vanity | No Comments »
It seems yet another virtual world has been spawned. This time in the form of a soccer-centric universe that offers an experience for playing on and off the field. (Second Life meets soccer).
Playing the Massively Multi-player Online game (MMOG), you can play in virtual matches online against other people around the world. The key differentiator is that you only get to control your player. The remaining players on your team and the opposition are each played by a different person online. The exception are the goalkeepers, which will be controlled by artificial intelligence.
Judging by the quality of the game-play, I highly doubt this is going to effect sales of soccer games such as EA Sports FIFA series. Instead, it seems that the draw will rely on the community and “off the field” aspects of the sport.
If you’re interested in Football Superstars, register for the game today so you can be notified when it’s launched. Or visit the Football Superstars website for more details.
Posted in Games | Tagged community, EA Sports, FIFA, football superstars, MMOG, multiplayer, online gaming, second life, soccer, virtual | No Comments »
Watching Brazil against Argentina in the semi-final of the Olympics, I felt like I was in a timewarp back to the late 1980’s. That’s because NBC, in their infinite stupidity, are breaking for TV commercials in the middle of the game.
And just as it routinely happened in the late 1980’s (including the 1986 World Cup when televised by U.S. TV), the broadcast of the game came back to show that a goal had been scored during a commercial.
Wake up NBC. It’s 2008. Let’s come up with a better solution for televising soccer matches that doesn’t include breaking for commercials.
Posted in Television | Tagged commercials, goals, NBC, olympics, soccer, TV | No Comments »
Researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology have developed a humanoid bot that can use communicate using gestures. The 187-pound robot stands about five feet tall and uses a 3D vision system to recognize gestures like pointing and bowing and determine their meaning — and then use the same gestures when appropriate.
The researchers say they envision the tech being used in caregiver robots for the elderly, and for anyone wanting a companion who doesn’t answer back in a verbal fashion. However, it does have the ability to respond with either the two finger or one finger salute, depending on its regional configuration.
Posted in Robotics | Tagged humanoid, Japan, robot | No Comments »
Destined to support you in your state of involuntary abstinence, the U-Tsu-Shi-O-Mi system maps a pretty girl onto the robot’s anatomically correct, green-cloth surface with the help of a sensor-equipped head-mounted display worn by the lonely, lonely man. The result is a 3D character you can touch and “interact” with. Researcher Michihiko Shoji hopes that the system can be commercialized for arcades and for general use around the home.
Posted in Robotics | Tagged girl, interact, Michihiko Shoji, touch | No Comments »
The importance of brand presence and perception has always been an integral part of a company’s marketing strategy. However, as the internet has emerged as a viable marketing and communications outlet, brand perception has now encompassed, brand experience. And it is through this brand and user experience, that brand integrity needs to be maintained.
How a user might experience and interact with a company’s website, now reflects directly on the company itself. The web site is as much responsible for the success or failure of a company’s message, as any TV commercial or brochure might be. While web sites might in some cases serve as supplemental platforms for advertising campaigns, they can also exist as the message and content of an entire company’s brand.
While the internet can be seen as a medium, it is really a platform that supports multiple mediums. It is a digital stage setup to accommodate almost any message in any format, whether it be visual, audio or textual (or any combination thereof). And it is because of these infinite communication possibilities, that there are so many important user experience considerations which ultimately affect brand perception and brand experience.
So, how does one maintain brand integrity within the online user experience? By being meticulous and by planning during the development of the website! The following steps are a summary of how to approach building a website that maintains brand integrity.
Step 1 - Analyze the company’s brand.
What is the current message of the company and what emotional and/or psychological associations do the public possess? Is the company offering a product or a service and what approaches do they use to advertise this?
Step 2 - Explore existing marketing guidelines and materials
Ensure that the website stays within the boundaries of an existing marketing strategy. This strategy should include key guidelines that outline concept, message, writing style, and even visual assets. Remember, the website is a voice and face of a high-level marketing strategy. The website should communicate in the same style, approach and message as print materials, TV commercials, etc. Leverage these assets to maintain branding consistency, and acknowledge the concept of synergy.
Step 3 - Establish website Strategy, Scope and Business Requirements.
What is the current business strategy and will the website follow this strategy? Make sure that a scope is outlined, including goals and business requirements the website needs to fulfill. The budget should be finalized, based on the scope agreed upon and a calculated “level of effort” should have also been outlined by the various teams within the project. Careful attention is to be paid to timing and release dates. If the web site’s launch is to coincide with product releases or announcements, there is an obvious sensitivity to timing.
Step 4 - Study the target audience, and assess their unique needs and expectations.
Consider accessibility, demographics, language, culture and other factors that could affect how you build your website to accommodate for your user’s needs. There might also be processes in place, particularly regarding customer service, that already accommodate for established user behavior and patterns. Know your audience(s) - their wants and expectations, and how they currently interact with the brand. Keep in mind, that your website may have multiple audiences, which affects how the user experience is created for each type of audience.
Step 5 - Assess your competition’s web presence and offerings.
While this may not be a step directly affecting brand integrity, is still important to analyze and assess your online competition. Know what they’re doing well and know what they’re doing poorly. This step could include stringent usability testing in order to quantify website tasks, behavior and opinion. Do not overlook this step, a lot can be learned from user’s opinions, and this may assist in creating a positive brand experience.
Step 6 - Information Architecture: Develop User Flows
This is a critical step in illustrating how a user is presented with choices, decisions and options, and how those actions affect their user experience and brand interaction. By graphically portraying a user’s interaction with a website in the form of a flow chart, the process of surfacing issues and identifying problem areas can be a very productive one. This also acts as a high-level blue-print when engaging with business stakeholders as well as project team members.
Step 7 - Information Architecture: Develop Wireframes
The development of wireframes is a low-cost and time efficient way of illustrating and prototyping web site pages on a tactical level. This deliverable takes on the appearance of a skeletal view, including only functionality and content organization, along with vital elements such as navigation, calls-to-action, and maybe some basic content. By stripping out visual design, teams can focus on functionality and organization, and assess how approaches will affect user experience. The inclusion of annotations are extremely helpful when further elaboration on purpose and reasoning are required. These documents might be seen by various audiences: client, developers, creative, QA, etc. Keep this in mind, to ensure that they are relevant to whom ever will be reading it.
Step 8 - Design Creative and Visuals
This step draws on the Information Architecture documentation as a tactical guide to designing the user interface. Emphasis at this point should be placed on aesthetics and enriching the user experience, within the brand specific parameters. If Information Architecture is the skeleton, then visual design is the flesh and skin. The visual design of a web site is in the front-lines of the brand integrity battle. Its probably the first thing a user will experience, and so quite obviously a lot of attention needs to be paid within this step, to ensure brand continuity across both off line and on-line channels. Be careful of gratuitous animation and design - GAD! as I like to call it. In short, if the visual isn’t necessary or contributing to a particalar story, it shouldn’t be there.
Step 9: Making code invisible
While code is not a visible component to a user, its affect on the user experience is obvious. Badly written code might cause unpredictable web site behavior, slow response times, unexpected results, and other frustrating experiences. In short, good code goes unnoticed by the user, but bad code has a negative impact on user experience and eventually brand experience.
A lot of companies outsource their coding to offshore companies. And while this is a more cost effective path, it is also filled with land mines such as varying hours of operation, language barriers, difficulty with collaboration, etc. In my opinion, developers should not be thrown the job from over the fence, they should be included from the beginning to gain an understanding of how they can support the project within a collaborative and technical context. They are often the group that knows whether something can be built or not, from a technical standpoint. And the earlier on in the project that this can be established, the better for everyone!
Good code should be:
These points and many more will ultimately come together, to either support or fight against a positive user and brand experience.
Step 10 - Reviewing, testing and testing.
Ideally, reviews should be held between all these steps, and act as checkpoints to either allow or disallow progress to the next step in the development process. All teams should be actively involved in reviews as well as testing, to surface their concerns, opinions and points-of-view. Quality control and management should not be thought of as the final step in the process, but rather a part of each and every step. By employing this approach, teams become accountable and invested in their efforts to produce quality, and ultimately affect positive brand experience.
There are probably hundreds of other ways to control positive brand experience. This piece is by no means complete, so I welcome ideas and suggestions from other points-of-view, disciplines, processes, etc.
Posted in Brand & Identity, Information Architecture, Internet, Usability, User Experience Strategy | Tagged brand, code, experience, Information Architecture, strategy, test, visual design | No Comments »
I recently attended a Second Life demonstration at the Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas, which by the way is as an ironic place as you get for hosting such an event. Information Architecture in Vegas? Well it may exist, but lets just say if it does, its been designed with the purpose to be awful. That’s not to say it doesn’t serve their goal — to get you lost, and by so doing increase your chances of spending money. Maybe there is a place for bad IA, after all.
To those who don’t know what Second Life is, I’ll quote the Wikipedia,
“Second Life (abbreviated to SL) is an Internet-based virtual world which came to international attention via mainstream news media in late 2006 and early 2007.[4][5] Developed by Linden Lab, a downloadable client programResidents“, to interact with each other through motional avatars, providing an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse. Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade items (virtual property) and services from one another. enables its users, called “
Second Life is one of several virtual worlds that have been inspired by the cyberpunk literary movement, and particularly by Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. The stated goal of Linden Lab is to create a world like the Metaverse described by Stephenson, a user-defined world of general use in which people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate.[6] Second Life’s virtual currency is the Linden Dollar (Linden, or L$) and is exchangeable for US Dollars in a marketplace consisting of residents, Linden Lab and real life companies.
While Second Life is sometimes referred to as a game, it does not have points, scores, winners or losers, levels, an end-strategy, or most of the other characteristics of games. In all, almost five million accounts have been registered, though many are not active, and some Residents have multiple accounts. Despite its prominence, Second Life has notable competitors, including Active Worlds, There, and newcomers such as Entropia Universe, Dotsoul Cyberpark, Red Light Center, and Kaneva.”
In such an exploratory and organic environment, is there a need for structure and information architecture? This is obviously a very relevant question as more and more people are immersing themselves in this world. The few people I have spoken to find it difficult to get started, and wonder what they should be doing, looking for, etc. Three are no inherent / provided goals to be achieved, and while this provides freedom it also removes boundaries in every sense of the word.
Regardless of how obvious or hidden, Information Architecture is in Second life — it has to exist. Whether users are aware of its organization, might be irrelevant. As long as users are finding what they want, when they want, where they want, in an efficient and pleasing manner
Historically speaking, freedom is often fought for, at the expense of structure, and vice versa. Freedom however is a fuzzy notion, or perhaps a mere perception. No matter how free you feel you are, the real universe is still governed by physical laws which include properties such as matter, time, energy and space. Yet with all these properties and laws around us, interacting with us - in fact governing us and our environment - we can still feel free. Our entire existence from a galactic scale down to a cellular level is comprised of hierarchical organization, no matter how organic it might be.
And since Second Life is attempting to mirror real life, there needs to be a similar approach to organization. At this point, I have some key questions:
All these questions really can be summarized by the age-old question, “Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art?”
I will be doing an in-depth User Experience analysis of Second Life, and will be following up this post with findings. If there are any Second Life residents out there, please share your experiences (good and bad) with us.
Posted in Usability, User Experience Strategy, User Psychology | Tagged freedom, IA summit, Las Vegas, second life, structure | 3 Comments »
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