we are: London

Love him or hate him.

It all comes down to one single, tangible factor, which marks out the good from the bad; soul.

The reason for the Clarkson tribute on the left is this weeks Sunday Times Motoring article on an Aston Martin which sees Clarkson pitting it against design perfection in the shape of an Audi R8 V10.

And to save you the read, the Audi is just too perfect, where as the Aston has soul, something that can’t be created by following set rules, but comes from the heart of those involved and is a direct result of the creator’s passion.

All of which brings us nicely to the argument that has raged on since the start of website design; who is best placed to create the perfect site?

The Good, the bad and the ugly.

Let’s go back to basics and look at who the usual suspects are, in the red corner we have “visual designers” (brand and marketing) and in the blue corner we have “interaction designers” (user centred).

Whilst visual designers have a wealth of ability and passion, it is often focused to heavily on making something look good and the risk of making the same, beautiful creation completely unusable.

Now wheel in the interaction designers, who’s passions lie in the creation of the perfect experience, through usability testing, prototyping and more testing. However, there is a strong argument against all of this testing and refining as it can just blunt a sharp, creative idea, making the end result more function than form.

Experience is all, or read Experiential

For years I thought experiential was about experiencing a design, but it’s not it’s about experience, and this where soul comes from.

An experienced designer is passionate about the look and the effectiveness of a design and ensures their soul is applied to everything they do.

An excellent example of what not to do is a site we reviewed a while back that seemingly missed both design and ease of use steps during it’s development and almost certainly skipped public testing.

Help me help you

If you want to avoid the common pitfalls of digital procurement, ensuring your acgency has suol, then follow these easy steps:

• Check potential agencies have a proven user centred design methodology as well as a creative portfolio
• Ask for CVs of key staff and make sure they are guaranteed to be on the project
• Meet the team and chat to them about what they think is good and bad
• Don’t ever feel that it’s not your right to ask questions
• Ask for clarification on every point until it’s clear
• Remember you’re the client and paying the bills

If you would like to know more then give me a call or drop me a note and we’ll take you through our experiences and see how we can help.

global usability testing, information architecture, interface design, internet research, market research, usability design, user centred design, user interface Design, e-commerce, Internet, Mobile, research, usability

BBC iPlayer infographic

Uncategorized Interactive TV, Internet

We have two exciting new roles available for a promising candidate to join our fast growing usability research and insight team.

Head of research

This is a unique opportunity to shape the direction of the research department of our extremely successful and very exciting digital consultancy.

Full job description

Head of interaction design

A great opportunity to develop our department of brilliant information architects and interaction designers, leading the way in bespoke usable interface design.

Full job description

Uncategorized

Another day another mission to make forms simple.

As if by magic I have uncovered a very good example of the type of recommendations we have been making for some recent clients when it comes to helping users fill in forms by improving basic usability design.

Simply easy

It’s the way you do it

Yahoo has a great little sign up form that mixes hand-holding and error messaging brilliantly. There are nice confirmation checks for each field, simple explanations for the more complex entries, which fade in and out unobtrusively, excellent error handling, all of which leaves you feeling satisfied and ready to start using Yahoo.

One major failure

However even the great and the good have an Achilles heal and Yahoo’s is it’s capture anti-bot thing. Most of us hate these stupid little form fields where you have to squint at a bunch of unreadable text and type it in to prove you are not a machine.

Yahoo’s is particularly hard to read, there is no audio version and quite frankly it lets down an otherwise brilliant form.

See for yourself

So rather than doing it yourself, we have created a short video of the form, and if you want to know more about form design best practice then drop us an email hello@WeAreLondon.com

New user registration

usability design, user centred design, user interface Design, Internet, usability

In January I made a few predictions about what the year had in store for the digital world. One that I did not put in but have talked about for ages is the end of free online services.

Basically as ad spend decreases and take up of online services increases, something has to give. A recent story on the BBC website shows BT’s new aggressive stance on asking iPlayer to pay for bandwidth.

More of the same will come as people watch more video, save more photos and re-post more content via social networks. Add to this the cut throat pricing of broadband, reduced advertising revenues and suddenly you are looking at an unsustainable business model.

So, a quick review of my predictions from January:

1. Video on Demand finally gets in to peoples homes for real (iPlayer) √
   
2. Video on Demand gets a new name (iPlayer) √
3. Interactive TV advertising (Sky green button) √
4. BT Vision moves from Microsoft to open platforms (Or Sky goes onto xbox 360) √
5. DRM free VOD (can’t win them all!) x
6. Mobile web (go go iPhone, Nokia and Andriod) √
7. Nokia Tube turns out not to be an iPhone beater (yep I own one, it’s pants) √
8. iPhone Nano (By Autumn, I promise) x
   
9. Mac tablet (See above) x
   
10. No one buys Twitter (still) √

So 7 out of ten is not bad considering we are only at the start of June. And whilst you may or may not agree with all of these it’s pretty interesting to see how fast things change.

Another foot note from January was my prediction that Apple would start to slip form wonder kid to main stream business and given the recent launch of new iPhone, this seems to be happening.

Although I would hate to see Apple done anything than succeed as I love how Steve has turned a business round by giving customers what they want! And that’s where we are, helping you give your customers what they want, although I am no Steve Jobs, I know we can help you make a big difference.

Let’s see where we are in another 6 months:

1. Windows 7 is just as rubbish as Vista?

customer insight Design, future, Interactive TV, Microsoft, Mobile, Predictive, Twitter

The missing link in the connected home!

02 Joggler touch screen

Never to do things by half, we are the proud owners of two O2 Jogglers. Three days in and I am loving them and actually using them all the time! You can follow life in detail on Twitter.com/02JogglerAddict

Part of the new  O2 family pack, Joggler replaces post-it notes and calendars at home, or as O2 like to say, “it’s your new fridge door”; really?

Is it worth it?

Well, if a decent wifi digital picture frame costs £100+, and O2 will not be happy with the comparison I am sure, then £150 to get a device that organises your life, is a networked home media player and looks so good is a bargain. Add to this the 1Gb of internal memory, USB connection for external drives and a never ending line up of applications to download in the future, and you would be mad not to get one.

Set up

The box and presentation are very Apple, simple, no wrapping, just a shiny new Joggler sitting there ready for use.

• Plug in to power and it switches itself on, say hi, plays a cute tune, and then takes you through a simple set up process.
• You’ll need to know your wifi password, etc, or you can plug it straight in to your router.
• Once online, it will automatically download and install a software update, restart and you’re off.

Features

• The main selling point is the shared calendar that you can add lots of people to and sync with the online calendar on O2.
• The calendar will send SMS alerts to O2 phones if you set a reminder on an calendar entry.
• Screen wise this is better than my top of the range Sony digital picture frame and plays back movies and photos in loads of formats amazingly well.
• Audio playback is not bad, you can stream AV from your PC too over the network, and once the digital radio is switched on, you’ll have a great little home media player in your kitchen.
• There are neat little news, weather, sport and traffic feeds, although I am not sure what the traffic one is telling me.

Other nice features are coming such as the ability to send and receive text and picture messages, turning this, already amazing device, into an electronic post-it note.

What’s missing?

Key features missing are web browsing, YouTube playback, Twitter client, ability to basically edit photos such as rotate and crop and an app store.

I really think that this device could the piece of tech that finally connects the digital home.  Can you imagine how cool it would be to browse recipes on it whilst watching demo videos of how to cook and even being able to order your shopping by clicking on pictures and ordering direct.

Watch the O2 Family advert

interface design, usability design, user interface future, Mobile