Designing sites is a great opportunity, especially when you are lucky enough to be surrounded by clever and experienced people. When you can combine extremely talented people at all the different levels you require to build a website the results can be amazing. Although traditional advertising agencies are starting to learn that they need to further integrate the technical implications of the production of a website into projects, user experience is just as important and often overlooked by so many agencies. Design is considered the Holy Grail but this can hide some ugly surprises when the user experience aspect of the website is overlooked. Experience architecture when used in a rigorous way can really help to understand what will help the end-users of a site will be looking for, how and where to include it in your website.
While reading an article on SearchEngineLand I was happy to see that the experience architecture aspect of a site build was nicely touched upon. First impressions count. It really does give you an extra insight into the way the site can be successful when you try to understand how people will react to a site, what they are looking for and how designing it differently can help you help them find what they are looking for quickly without compromising the design.
The gut feeling is an important factor with today’s fast moving generation Z, the same gut feeling can be tested with various personas you have identified as your key target population to make sure that you don’t alienate your other personas from previous generations.
Quick note to say that there seems to be a twitter security issue based upon cross site scripting. Initially it was thought to be a virus but this post on NetworkWorld seems to indicate that it is in effect a cross site scripting hack . This basically means that should it be an XSS hack, Twitter are not high up there with their security standards. It won’t look good if what seems to be a phishing hack is possible on their site!
Update: the script used to infect all the Twitter users was crafted by a 17 year old from Brooklyn who claims to have been bored and was highlighting the vulnerability while promoting his own site! Twitter have “closed the hole” as per Geoff’s comment below.
So Google was one of the first large companies to actually use cloud computing extensively and now, as usual in the English language, there is a move to talk about ‘the cloud’, dropping the more geeky ‘computing’ part! Like other buzzwords, take web 2.0 or SaaS (Software as a Service) not everybody has the same definition. It is highly likely that some people will say that ‘could computing’ and ‘the cloud’ are two different things.
Seamless access to hardware and software: the Supercomputer
The main idea with ‘the cloud’, from an IT perspective, is to seamlessly supply extra resources to providers of IT services and by ricochet to end users of these services. Even though it is not a behemoth word like sustainability that continues to suck in so many different meanings, cloud computing is likely to evolve and cover more and more services. Hey it could even end up being synonymous with the Matrix type concept from the film!
In the case of IT infrastructure, people are interested in outsourcing their hardware needs which can be covered by what is called HaaS (Hardware as a Service). One of the most well known services of this type is Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud or EC2.
Does this remind you of passive terminals that connect to supercomputer?! It is not a coincidence that equipment like Netbooks are so successful in the current context of more and more key services, instantly available on the internet. Cloud Computing can help provide further such important services to people. The Cloud services currently available and Netbooks are however far more complex than the mainframe and passive terminal model.
HaaS and SaaS
The Cloud services provided can be viewed as building blocks. Both HaaS (Amazon’s and Google’s server farms) and SaaS type applications (like Google Docs, Salesforce.com and Sliderocket) are purchased without needing to worry about the risks involved in evaluating growing usage. In this sense cloud computing is also referred to as “on demand computing” where you just purchase the system and someone else worries about your evolving needs.
Utility Computing & Server Virtualization
If you are aware of solutions like VMWare that allow you to run several virtual instances of a server on a physical server, then you will quickly see the similarity with cloud computing whereby clusters of servers can provide hundreds of instances of virtual servers. Google’s need to ‘crunch’ huge quantities of data, which requires highly knowledgeable people in cloud computing or grid computing. Like Amazon, Google is now offering the public some of the cloud computing services that used to be restricted to their own projects and internal service requirements.
The ability for companies to tap in to this cloud of both services and hardware (data centers) in the same way you would just turn on the tap or the light, provides powerful and efficient “on demand” services and resources a bit like a utility grid hence the idea of utility computing.
The Cloud is in its infancy but is already proving to be an extremely efficient solution for small to large companies and even the general public though services like Google Aps etc. Could computing is also likely to take on many new meanings along the way
Take a look at the following video where numerous tech celebs explain what Cloud Computing is (audio is a bit shoddy though):
Tim O’Reilly, Dan Farber, Matt Mullenweg, Jay Cross, Brian Solis, Kevin Marks, Steve Gillmor, Jeremy Tanner, Maggie Fox, Tom McGovern, Sam Lawrence, Stowe Boyd, David Tebbutt, Dave McClure, Chris Carfi, Vamshi Krishna and Rod Boothby are asked “what is Could Computing?”.
I was just flicking through “The Economist” (An old edition from May 10th Edition 2008) and got stuck on the adverts. Well I work in an interactive Ad agency so I suppose that it’s a professional misfortune to make this type of comment. Even though this is from a year ago it still happens that you see ads like this with no URL or at the best a URL that is for the company and not the product. I can’t understand why, on so many adverts, which will have cost the companies advertising a fair amount of money, there is no continuity or synergy with the online, no link to a website. I checked 2 consecutive adverts with no URLs, (no links to websites). I then looked through several pages and many had URLs but these two were for HSBC and Chevron had nothing and I can’t understand why there would be an advert created for a magazine that could not/would not be relayed on line.
When I was working on an automobile account in a web agency recently I found out that less than 5% of the ad budget was spent for online advertising, the majority being spent for TV then outdoors with online getting below 5%. I know many people still spend a lot of time in front of the TV but is 5% a real fit for the Internet currently ? Can you really create an effective online campaign to reach the numbers that are currently spending a large amount of their time online with such a small amount of the overall Ad budget ?
Even if it is an appropriate reflection of how people spend their time, I still deplore the lack of synergy that occurs between TV and outdoor ads versus online. Triggering people’s appetite to engage and continue the experience of a well thought through campaign online is so easy and yet so few companies actually do it. How many full blown campaigns that really use the potential for intelligently using TV, outdoors, radio etc. and online come to mind. Very few for most people because that type of synergy between Medias is very rare. Search Engine Optimisation may be a buzz word at the moment as it provides increased numbers of visitors when done properly but synergies the 360° type synergies between offline and online are way more effective in immersing people in your message!
If you can think of some cool synergies in your country please let me know and share the examples !
Just came across an interesting article that provides some good tips for people looking a simple checklist of the key areas to review with regards to SEO. The main parts are:
1. URL canonicalization and 301 re-directions.
2. Unique Title Tags and Meta Data.
3. Search Engine Friendly.
4. Has the site been submitted to Google Webmaster Central?
5. Check for Duplicate Content.
There are also details for each section that are in this article called “5 Minute SEO Site Audit“.
Also there is a tendancy to see SEO as the “be all and end all” solution when behavioural targeting versus SEO is a subject I would recommend you look into
If you have ever thought about hiding your identity in order to view sites in the US that just display a message saying you aren’t allowed to see it this may be for you. There are technically complicated ways of doing it that are not for the faint of heart and there are solutions like HotSpot Shield that is nicely explained on the below video:
So open the doors to TV sites in the states, that allow you to see the last episode of your favourite series and whether you are from France, Germany, Spain , Italy, UK etc., Enjoy !
So I was reading an article on the BBC about Google StreetView, how people had been ‘caught’ by the Google van. I remembered when I was working at LBi in London, I was not far from Brick Lane, on the phone and saw a Google car with the multiple cameras on top. I was on the phone for about 10 minutes and the car came past twice. So a few days ago I decided to check out where I was standing to see if I could see myself. When using Streetview to turn around the corner from Commercial Street I couldn’t see myself but going down the road the other way there I was, as seen below. My face has been blurred even though I didn’t even ask them to do so…
So you have heard about pop-up blockers, what about overlay site blockers ?
While reading an article about how behavioural marketing is placed just below SEO in terms of efficiency I wanted to check out the report from MarketingSherpa.
To set the scene, I have very large screen with a smaller screen to the right and had IE in the left screen at this point.
Suffice to say as you can see below the scroll bar only had an effect on the page behind and I could not even close the window to get to the page. The page greyed out behind the overlay would move up and down but the overlay itself didn’t budge an inch. So, no way to get to the close link on the overlay, and nothing else to do either. Only choices left: press the back button or close the browser. Wonderful user experience, not!
Let’s all shout loud and clear that we have had enough of having to cater for Internet Explorer 6, the quirks, the endless limitations and overall reduced user experience. Found this on Bowman‘s site. It is a link to a manifesto / petition to encourage people to move away from IE6, get a life and make the life of people creating HTML just that much easier and interesting for end users. IE6 does not comply with any standards other than those of Microsoft and now more than ever just hinders user experience in general. So please spread the word about the issues that IE is creating.
Do check out the site. It looks great and has a wonderful quote from Jeffrey Zeldman, (I translated his witty article Web 3.0 a while back):
“IE6 is the new Netscape 4. The hacks needed to support IE6 are increasingly viewed as excess freight. Like Netscape 4 in 2000, IE6 is perceived to be holding back the web.â€
There is no doubt that Google has changed the way people use the Internet; it’s search tool and to a certain extent other great services like GoogleMaps and GMail. I was surprised by learning however about the relationship that Google seems to have with design. Douglas Bowman has just left Google and explains his decision, albeit the reasons behind it in a really interesting article about his experience there. There is an underlying theme of how Google relies too much on data to decide how design decisions should be settled.
I found it fascinating, having worked in the same type of situation and also the opposite, where design is not tested and relies on the gut feeling of the creative people rather than user experience testing. The success of this approach is the luck of the draw though. And even with world class creatives, nobody is perfect and your gut feeling isn’t always going to be the right decision, even if you can convince your entourage it is. Bowman seems to be really good and you can feel the frustration of his creativity being put into question by other aspects or realities of the Google business:
Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions. [...] Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.
The article Bowman links to on NY Times actually describes the issue and the role that Marissa Mayer had in this story (on page 3):
A designer, Jamie Divine, had picked out a blue that everyone on his team liked. But a product manager tested a different color with users and found they were more likely to click on the toolbar if it was painted a greener shade.
As trivial as color choices might seem, clicks are a key part of Google’s revenue stream, and anything that enhances clicks means more money. Mr. Divine’s team resisted the greener hue, so Ms. Mayer split the difference by choosing a shade halfway between those of the two camps.
You feel you’re getting a peak view and understanding of an event, like watching the intrigue of you favourite TV show unfold. In this case though the importance of the debate and the impact that each party could have, can affect the crucial services that Google offer. On the one hand you can say that Google have an impressive track record, on the other, you wonder whether innovative and creative solutions aren’t stifled in the process. Too much creative lead ‘can’ damage the best overall user experience without proper testing. But never taking a chance with a different creative approach can result in uniformity / dullness. I do feel that design, when applied to services and products that thousands or millions of people will use, should be tested by people from different backgrounds to see how well they interact with it. This may again be considered data, but real live people testing your work is going to happen sooner or later, hopefully…
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