.oO Tailwind

Nearly 2 years ago here at LBi, we started working with Multimap to redesign their public .com web property.

It was time for their loved, but ageing raster-map offering to be dragged inline with, then new and innovative, Google’s ’slippy’ Maps.

With a raft of new features including drag, zoom, pan, hybrid view,all stuff we take for granted now, we set about defining a sharpened mapping proposition that worked for both Multimap users and advertisers.

It was a brilliant project, great fun, hard work and really quite challenging. The guys at Multimap (which sold to Microsoft in December last year) were all smart cookies and pleasure to work with. Personally I see it as one of the triumphs of the team I work in here at LBi. Not only was it great solution, it was a great learning experience and those two things make for great projects. Certainly satisfactory ones.

Stephen Barber was, and still is, ace on this project. Will Bloor was his usual unremitting creative self, Peter Jupp smashed the design and Mike McIntyre and Gavin Edwards aced some complex interaction and James Norton provided some wonderful interface development. It was also a pleasure to see Lorenzo in action, which doesn’t happen nearly enough for some of us here at LBi.

Well, enough spouting from me. Multimap.com has just been named as an Honoree in the Service category at this years Webby awards.

This is no mean feat as only the best 15% of submissions attain the accolade and this from a pot of nearly 10,000 entries received from all 50 US states and over 60 countries.

Multimap is now owned by Microsoft, so expect to start using it a lot more as it integrates into all their properties. Exciting stuff indeed.

The guys I worked with on this project were:

• Stephen Barber
• Will Bloor
• Peter Jupp
• Mike Mcintyre
• Dave Dunlop
• Lorenzo Wood
• Darren Gerry
• Gavin Edwards
• Phil WHitehouse
• James Norton
• Marcus Alexander
• Suzanne Chapman
• Claire Freund

Amazon’s new eBook device the ‘Kindle’ was released this week.

I find this an interesting one.

It was very well covered yesterday on lots and lots of blogs with pretty much everyone saying it’s rubbish. The 400 or so reviews on the Amazon page are largely negative too, this is an interesting point in itself for Amazon.

Here is a video of the out-of-box experience as captured by Robert Scobble:

The packaging looks okay, quite cute for it to come in a ‘book’.

Here is a video of using it and experiencing some issues

I was watching the Amazon demo thinking things like ‘Wouldn’t it be good if you could look-up words as you read. Oh, it does’, ‘Wouldn’t it be good if it wasn’t based on wi-fi hotspots. Oh, it isn’t.’ And so on…

Featurewise, it’s quite nice. It ticks a few boxes and for this reason Amazon will shift a few I’m sure.

Then I thought about the product design and decided that it’s a lame dog. It has some weird, flimsy, asymmetrical form that looks a little like James Bond’s underwater Lotus Esprit.. A little 80s.

Kindle

Lotus Esprit

The interaction looks far too complicated and it smacks of ‘get it to market quick’. It could have been soooooo much better, so much more desirable, so much easier to use. Also it seems that the interaction itself is awkward, scrolling up and down aligning a little cursor with menu commands rather than selecting them.

However I am a fan of the electronic paper screen, it’s just a shame it couldn’t be tough screen, but then that would defeat the point right?

But this isn’t the problem I se with this device.

My main reasons this won’t be the ‘next big thing’

• People love books. A bookshelf says a million things about its owner and people love the tactility of paper, the romance of curling up under a reading lamp in a comfy chair and losing themselves.

  The books we read represent us in some way, they have ‘self-expressive benefits’ to quote ‘Aaker’. To have read, own and display works by Shakespeare, Brontë and Dickens says something about the individual. The collection of books one has says something about the owner. Why else would we all have bookshelves? Okay, so they are practical, but they could easily be hidden.

  The same goes for newspapers. It brands an individual to be seen reading the FT, The Independent, The Guardian, The Sun, The Daily Mirror.

• It has DRM and apparently spies on you . Has Amazon learned nothing? You can’t ‘lend’ books. PEOPLE LOVE LENDING BOOKS!
• The product design sucks and the interaction is a little fussy. Before iPod, listening to music, changing track, albums and artists etc was a little less-than-slick. iPod made it slick. The Kindle flashes as you do things. HOW ANNOYING! This is not slick. It’s slow.

  You have to pay for blogs if you download them but can browse them in the web browser for free. Weird.

• People don’t consume books like they do music. With music you flit between things. The Kindle can’t ‘do an iPod’ which changed the way we listened to music. It broke the CD model. The Kindle has nothing to break, no stranglehold to release.
• People don’t want another device in their bag. “Keys check, wallet check, phone check, blackberry check, laptop check, kindle…? Sod it I have my phone/blackberry/laptop”

The name Kindle is rubbish.

It’s exciting because:

• It’s a very cheap mobile bookshop
• The screen is a great step forward
• It has the potential to change the way [some] people read

Sure some will fly of the shelves, but at $400 it’s simply too much for £50 man. People will offset the amount of books they read and think it’s not worth it.

It appeal to the niche. The tech geeks, the academics but it won’t light the fire for my younger brother. As one reviewers says:

“If you travel a lot, or require rapid and accurate access to references (as I do), the Kindle is definitely soon to be a necessity. I am a medical student, and I loaded an entire medical library onto the one I’ve been beta testing”

Having said all this, I might get one… For research purposes of course.

We have a new shiny iPod in the shape of the 16Gb iPodTouch. Much like an iPhone it uses the multi-touch user interface to engage its user in some beautifully inuiative interaction and employs that fantastic landscape-portrait ability first seen in iPhone.

The new Nano is fat and horrible. I don’t like it one bit so am not going to talk about it. It’s iRubbish.

Watching the guided tour it’s easy to see that it works in just the way that you would expect it to, so be prepared for a fanfare from Apple fans. I’ll give you the feature headlines because there will be plenty of detailed appraisals of iPodTouch’s first day at school all over the web by the time I get into work. Gizmondo’s 5 Things We Love, 5 Things We Hate and Engadget’s Liveblog for starters.

Apart from the fact it’s a multi-touch screen product that allows you access to pictures, videos, music and more the main news is that has wireless capability allowing you to do three main things:

1. Allow you to browse the iTunes music store
2. Allow you to use Safari when browsing the web
3. Allow you access to YouTube videos

What’s really curious is that if you are in Starbucks (only in a select few locations for the coming year all US. 3 this year, 2 more by March ‘08), you can browse and download from the iTunes Store for free. You can use Starbuck’s wireless for free.

Excuse me, but how is that a good thing? Why is that worth a few minutes of the Guided Tour? Not only that I find it a rather odd decision by Starbuck’s given that they are trying to turn themselves into a record-come-bookshop anyhow? Just check here and here (this link via Barbd).

The iTunes Music store isn’t the full blown offering available online which to me seems a bit pointless. Do people who buy via wireless in Starbucks buy a certain type of music..? I guess they do.

Following hot on the heels of the acclaimed iPhone this product feels very much like an, errrrm, iPhone. Just without the phone. It looks so much like it and at only 8mm think I hope there aren’t cases of people rushing out the door thinking they’ve grabbed their phone when all they’ve got is their iPodTouch. Which could have a phone, looks like it has a phone. But doesn’t.

I guess they need to cater for those who aren’t going to buy the iPhone, but couldn’t it have been a little more different? I need to check the disk sizes that will be available, but I personally need a helluva lot space than that, so I’d be definite iPod/iPhone fodder. But with only 16Gb and everything so much like its cousin, I won’t be spending those hard earned pounds.

But then I guess I’m not the target market. I’m iPod Classic target market. Damn you Apple! You just made me spend more money. in no more than 3 lines of blog!

The new iPod will bring a new audience to the church of Apple, no doubt about it. They have met and exceeded expectations with this iPod line-up I have to concede.

Interaction-wise, of course it ’sings’ the way you’d want it to. During the demo, the rather irritating speaker explains how you can customise the primary buttons at the foot of your iPod menu allowing you to access you library ion your terms. Easy, obvious but nice and something ‘other’ companies would miss.

It’s fantastically realised and the interaction, they way you skip through photos, music etc is reason to buy it in my book. I’ve had the privilege of using an iPhone (not lyet launched here in the UK) and oh my, it’s good. It’s oh-so-very-multi-touch-good. With an Apple on top.

From a personal standpoint my iPod 3G has finally died a death. It still works, but it’ll only last 45 seconds unless it’s connected to a power source. It lasted better than most as I’ve squeezed 3.5 years out of it. However, the criticisms I had of that product was that Apple had designed a computer peripheral and not a mobile product. I haven’t heard many stories of iPhone screens scratching but I hope they’ve cracked the mobile product aspect of the design.

I can just see the horror on people’s faces when they first drop their iDevice. You know the feeling. Brand new shiny mobile phone leaves your hands only to skip across the tarmac picking up it’s first ‘customised-by-you’ touches. Back to my iPod I’m still freaking annoyed that a £300 product has been designed to fail in this way. iRubbish.

Also, is it me or is everyone else getting just a little bit iBored of the iBrand?

So, I need a new phone, I need a new iPod. Choices, choices. Space or whizzy stuff?

Link: Apple Keynote,

Day 2 and the viriol is still rolling concernig the new London 2012 identity and brand system.

I’ve seen coverage of the new Olympic London 2012 identity blazed across front pages, on the news and on the radio. Everyone is talking about it. So is this a bad thing? Is all PR ‘good’ PR?

I certainly think so.

It takes a while for the supporters to emerge and I’m starting to see supporting signs here, here, here and here signs that this identity will gain traction. I said yesterday that dissatisfaction and resentment always air more readily than satisfaction and support and this has been very apparent.

Comments include:

• “Of all the cities that are “would-be” hosts of the Olympics, only London have the balls to pull something like that off, and they have.”
• Like a lot of people, I didn’t like this when I first saw it; I thought about posting but I didn’t. But I kept thinking about it today, and the more I thought about it, the more it grew on me.
• I love how it works as a system. I love that its brash and crazy and risk-taking and young. And maybe its those qualities - which are often just as much a part of the Olympics as good sportmanship and acheivement - that speaks to my own favorite Olympic “moments…” The Jamaican bobsled team (I was a kid and I loved them that year and cried when they crashed), the first time snowboarding came to the Olympics… And I do think as time goes on it will take on the other, time-honored qualities of The Olympic Spirit.

Of course there are a myriad of detractors, but John Snow (a very credible news reader here in the UK) has warned us though‘Be careful, it will grow on you’.

He’s right. Or at least for my experience of the brand he’s right.

I remember seeing it for the first time and thinking “Oh. Okay. Urmmm. Wow. That’s different”. But it has grown on me. Now I really like it. I’m sticking up for it. I’m sticking my head up and saying “I support it”.

Personally I’m a little takenaback by the lack of support from the design community who usually berate everything for playing to the status quo. This identity certainly doesn’t do that. SO I expect some more emerging and high-profile supporters soon.

My favorite comment concerns the perceived ease at which these things are created; “MY kid could have done that” has chimed out on radio programs, television news and in the papers.

Well, great.

If your “kid could have done that” then that means it’s simple. It’s uncomplicated.

And simplicity is one of the most complicated things to achieve in design particularly in a spac where the identity has to work on tickets, billboards, clothing, signage etc etc. Also, it has to work with various sponsors on the side of cups, in newspaper adverts and so on.

This site provides 10 reasons for loving the new Olympic identity and adds that if your “kid could have done that, then get them to send in their resume”. They go on to point out that some of the best brand lock-ups are simple such as the Christian Cross (two lines) and the Mercedes badger (three lines and a circle).

This prompted me to think about the comments that criticise the logo for not being literal enough. Comments such as:

• “It doesn’t represent London”
• “It doesn’t represent sport”
• “It doesn’t contain red, white and blue”

I’d bet my house that if the logo was any combination of those things, a London landmark with some sporting gesture woven in, rendered in our national colours then we’d hear comments of “Try harder”, “Unoriginal”, “London is more unique than this” etc.

This brand system has to be reognisable at 10×10 pixels and at 100×100 ft. This is a brand system that provides a massive amount of scope for ‘play’. Expect to see bright coloured, angular forms across everything.

Love it or hate it. It will be plastered across London in various forms and I’m sure you will recognise it when you see it.

John Maeda @ Design Museum, London

Originally uploaded by Snowbadger.

I’ve just been to his talk at the Design Museum with some colleagues and came away feeling nostalgic, a little sad and a bit inspired.

Nostalgic because Maeda ‘plays’, he makes stuff, he doozers away and this reminds me of my first years studying product design when we were encouraged to do that; making furniture in workshops and mechatronic robots in the labs.

I hope we get to a point where the culture of what we do at LBi has this level of experimentation. That would be cool, we’ve started at least.

I’m a little sad because I’m no longer making stuff like that. I use excuses like time, responsibility and whatnot but that’s no good. Maeda has 6 children, and I only have 2!

I want my job to provision me this as his does.

I’m inspired because he’s pointed out that we let ourslves become defined and that we shouldn’t. Hence the usual questions of “is it art or design?” That he refuses to answer - “I don’t care” he says.

Pigeon holes have gotten in the way.

What is an Experience Architect? What is a designer? Etc etc. Does it matter? Aren’t we all interaction designers? Experience designers? Why label at all? Can’t our brand be an indicator of what we might offer?

I don’t want to be a pigeon. They’re skyrats.

I’m inspired by Maeda’s rules of simplicity (though a little too simple!) and observations of complexity and reflecting on our internal discussions about ’simplicity being very hard’.

I’ll be going to the riflemaker to see his 16 ipod fish. It didn’t look that good, but the other stuff did.

Have you seen the new AOL homepage? It look svery similar to the Yahoo! one.

One wonders how they can get away with this sort of thing. i mean there are design patterns and there is 100% rip-off. It even looks as if the grids are pixel perfect.

Wow.

Any interaction designer worth their salt spends a few Post-it notes during the design process, but I gotta say I love this idea: A wall of them as a permanent, considered inteior feature.

From the site:

“A wallpaper consisting of four layers of varying grey tones on a bright primary backing. Each layer is perforated in a grid format and backed with a tacky adhesive similar to ‘post-it’ notes. Pixelnotes is inspired by the way we work within a space. The walls become functional, an integrated noticeboard that documents our activity within the room. Pixelated formations and shapes develop according to our patterns of use”

During my day I stray upon, or I am sent lots of links to cool and interesting things. So I thought that I’d start posting the good ones here.

I’ll try to do this on a weekly basis to keep the interest up for you and promise to cover interesting products, websites, business initiatives, technology and whatever else comes my way.

I apologise not, for the odd breakdancing clip. None today though I’m afraid.

Nominees for the 2006 weblog award - Not this year methinks.

So, my post outlining my thoughts on the Euro IA generated some interest.

Kars Alrink an attendee at Euro IA and author of Leapfrogblog seemed to think that I was ‘Euro IA Bashing’, getting on my pedestal and berating my European colleagues for being 3 years behind the US equivalent.

yes, I think that the content on offer at 2006s Euro IA conference was a little safe for my liking, and debate wasn’t particularly rife during sessions, but I’m not sitting here looking down on people, far from it.

I’ve been working with the Web since 1993 and my educational background is in Product Design, I don’t consider my self an IA. I consider it part of my role, but not how I’d describe it.

In the teams which I work at within LBi, we believe in a philosophy called Experience Design. It’s fundamental basis is that brands are built through experience and that developing digital experience is a composite effort between Experience Architects and Designers and where possible (not all our clients buy build work from us) Interface Developers.

In essence THREE are three layers to realising a brand in a digital capacity:

• Visual Principles - This describes the presentation layer, the personalities illustrated, typographic hierarchy, photographic style etc and it is the domain of the ‘Designer’.

• Architectural Principles - This describes the fundamental engineering oif the site, how it works, where pages/states live within a system and where modules or interactive touch-points live with pages/views. Essentially the underlying core usability and ease of use is the domain of the Experience Architect.

We’ll come to the third in a minute.

This is where a lot of our competitors stop. They have Information Architects working through a information classification and hierarchy, which is them expressed in wireframe format, with sitemaps, process flows etc and is then handed to a Designer to ‘brand’.

FUNDAMENTAL ERROR.

Branding is about experience. Branding 101. Anyone who thinks that the person responsible for the functional integrity of a system isn’t a brand engineer, then they may as well go home now.

In Experience Design we have a third layer that sits between the visual and the architectural. Its called the Behavioural and its where differentiators are realised and branding comes to life.

• Behavioural Principles - This describes the attitude of the site, and is where through tight collaboration across EA and Design, we can contrive the behaviour to be appropriate to the brand we are working for. it’s the layer where its possible to realise brand attributes such as FRIENDLY, TRUSTWORTHY, HONEST, DYNAMIC, STRAIGHTFORWARD etc etc.

To illustrate my example I’ll use the design of a mobile phone application.

Imagine you are in the middle of writing a text message to your wife or girlfriend and during composition she calls you.

This is what I’d call an ‘interrupt’ and can be handled in many ways, but some more appropriate to the brand than others.

OPTION ONE

1. In text composition mode, call displayed
2. Call answered by clicking soft-key ‘Answer’
3. Message saved to drafts
4. Call taken
5. Call terminated

Makes sense right. Feels okay?

You could even return the user to what they were doing when the call came in eh?

Sure, but either way as our user has spoken to the person that they are sending a text to, they now want to delete the text and will have to:

1. click menu
2. click messages
3. click drafts
4. select message
5. delete

Right, now if one of the brand values or principles of the brand is to fundamentally make things easier and to be effort free, maybe this works better.

OPTION TWO

1. In text composition mode, call displayed
2. Call answered by clicking soft-key ‘Answer’
3. Call taken
4. Call terminated
5. User shown option screen offering:

• Continue writing text message
• Delete text message
• Save to drafts folder

Both options are usable and schematically okay, but one is fundamentally about attitude and behaviour. It’s a subtle brand inflexion realised within the bounds of interactive space. It’s an example of something that ‘just works’.

When you have Designers and EAs overlapping their respective disciplines in the way I described above you will realise a better product.

There will be a natural tension that exists in the product development that should exist in all great product be they physical or virtual.

So, briefly coming back to the IA Vs EA thing, sure it’s a label but its also a philosophy and outlook. I believe being an EA is about saying ‘Hey, I’m responsible for brand too’.

I propose that the IA discipline will always be there, but its as a subset of a wider more strategic approach. This was mentioned at Euro IA when Olly Clark started to talk about the ‘Strategic IA’ - someone who gets further into the business to influence design, brand and product strategy.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

I just prefer the idea of Experience Architecture as it’s provides remit for holistic user experience design across a range of platforms and services. My my language is wrong and the idea of Strategic IA is easier to swallow than Experience Architect?

Just a quick note to let you all know that my company has changed its name from Framfab to LBi following the merger between the two companies. We now size-up at about 1500 across the globe and in London alone we have 50 User Experience Architects and 40 Designers, giving us the largest group of Experience Design professionals in Europe.

Yadda yadda - there you go.

The small privately owned company I joined has become massive.