we are: London

Having just been presented with a brand spanking new Google Nexus One I am beginning a series of blogs about all things Nexus One and Andriod.

Unboxing

As a great lover of Apple products I believe the experience starts with the packaging. So what was it like with the Nexus? The whole thing felt very Apple. A clean white box with just a hint of the Google brand colours. The packing felt like it belonged with a high end product and that is exactly what it contained. The only draw back of shipping a phone across for the US is the need to buy an extra charger for the UK sockets.

The Nexus One and it's simple packaging

The device

The Nexus One is a sexy piece of kit. The phone feels solid and screams quality. I was impressed at how thin and streamlined the phone looked. The touchscreen is crisp, sharp and responsive. The interface runs smooth and fast. This is a definite iPhone rival.

The overall product is thin and sleek.

The set-up

Setting up the device was painless. As you would expect it is integrates well with your google accounts and I had my email, twitter, facebook and various other accounts running in no time. Some nice interface touches such as the “See password” function (makes passwords visible not disguised) definetely help when setting up accounts on a touchscreen.

Watch this space

So keep your eyes on this space for more Nexusness and Andriod mania.

Mobile Design, Google, Mobile

Nexusness

“Wake up, time to die.”

Bladerunner is possibly one of the best films ever made and all of the companies whose neon signs float in the sky during the film have gone bust, or be taken over. Not a good omen for a phone named after one of the main characters.

Is it any good?

And what’s it really like to use one in anger every day? Well I’ve handed over my iPhone to the wife after loving the Apple for 3 years. For the record I usually struggle to keep a phone for more than 6 months.

And the answer is yes, it’s good, in fact it’s really very good.

I had high hopes for other HTC phones and desperately wanted the Palm thingy to be good, but they were all pants compared to the Apple.

What’s hot!

The screen is sharp and clear and the phone is easy to navigate. Setting up email is easy, the app store is much better than I expected; forget Unix geek, think Apple chic.

Email works offline for reading and deleting, unlike the iPhone. Email, address book and social media stuff rocks. I love the widgets for news, twitter and facebook that live on the home screen.

The voice dial and dictate email is not bad either, a long way to go but it’s tempting to start everything by speaking and not navigating.

Oh and it lets you play Spotify in the background which is now the only source of music I have .

What’s not!

The only real hardware bug is the use of the back, menu, home and search  buttons printed on the bottom of the screen. Why bother? you click them by mistake and it’s a real pain.

Software bugs are wider, but with time they will get sorted and remember that Apple have had 3 years to sort out the iPhone.

1. Why does the calendar not sync with MS Exchange when mail and contacts do?

2. The screen redraw speed is slow compared to Apple, but not bad.

3. Cut & paste is not anywhere near as neat or intuitive.

Should I buy one?

Yes - not sure why but yes get one.

Time will tell.

Now that I have committed to use it for work and home life I have no choice but to get on with it, warts and all, and I guess learn to fix the issues and watch as new software updates bring all of my life, blogs, tweets, photos, music, friends, work and life together.

Or I might buy the Apple tablet, nick my iPhone back and delete this post.

Mobile, interface design, user interface Design, future, Mobile, usability

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

Raising the bar?

When first opened the new Greyhound UK site speaks of a slick simplicity. The clean, cool visual design of the site gives a classy feel not normally associated with budget travel. This good first impression also extends into the usability of the site. The booking process is quick and easy and within a few clicks I have chosen my desired journey. With the release of such a seemingly slick site is Greyhound UK raising the bar for competitors such as National Express and Megabus?

Greyhound UK homepage

Visual design

While the visual design of Greyhound’s site seems far more carefully planned and thought out than the design of the Megabus site, there is far more to consider about the situation. Megabus has a developed brand and targets a specific audience. The garish blue and yellow may not be for everyone but it is instantly recognisable as Megabus, a pleasure Greyhound does not yet have in the UK. The audience Megabus targets want the cheap no frills travel that they provide. Their aim is to get from A to B for the lowest possible price, a slick website is not top priority.

Usability

The Greyhound booking process appears quick and easy but when you consider that they only busses from London to Southampton or Portsmouth and back you would expect this to be the case. A company such as National Express who cover almost all of the UK and parts of Europe has a far more complex booking system to create.

Back to the bar

The Greyhound UK site definitely brings a bit of cool competition to the budget travel site market. Users will remember the slick visual design and the ease of use and this may well drive visitors to the site. The questions is will the online experience of Greyhound UK be enough to users to switch from their well established rivals who are by no means performing poorly.

information architecture, interface design, user interface Design, e-commerce, Internet, Travel, usability

Only a week has passed since one of the most significant design faux pars of recent times launched.

In that time a wide range of press and interested parties have slated the website www.bethere.co.uk as an horrendous example of design gone bad.

In our usual pragmatic style we have decided to review it from a customer point of view rather than cast our critical design eye on it.

Q. So what do the general public think?

A. Not good, in fact with the odd exception the site has been universally criticised as being the worst redesign of the year.

Many a true word Twittered in haste.

Our favourite quote on Twitter is:

“If I didn’t know that the new website was for real I’d think it had been hacked to be honest!“

That’s pretty damming and more recent quotes are questioning Be’s ability to provide a good broadband service based on how poor their site is.

So how did the Be brand become such an anchor?

Only Be’s marketing team can answer that one and I guess the agency who created the site, which offers a number of very similar designs for other clients, only not quite so 80’s.

Pointless dynamic help

However all of these negative, and no doubt expensive, reactions and customer feedback could have been spotted, corrected and mitigated by simply asking their customers during the design phase.

Customer’s views count, get them before they get you!

As a user centred design champion, we are always looking for good and bad examples of sites that either choose to embrace or reject their customer’s views during the initial design phases.

Again I can not know if the site was tested prior to launch, but I have a hunch that it wasn’t otherwise it would not end up looking like this.

Brand and usability go hand in hand

Finally, an even bigger problem is that the site just does not work very well. There are prompts in forms that aren’t needed, readability is a strain thanks to over saturated colours and the accessibility is so bad I don’t know where to start.

The bottom line makes good reading for agencies like us, who are here to help businesses meet their customers needs, whilst working with big, brash design companies, creating brilliantly branded, usable and accessible websites, first time, every time.

If you want to Be better than your competition and avoid upsetting your customers then contact us to see how our research and user centred design services can work for you.

Be*en There Before, in the 80's

accessibility, information architecture, interface design, market research, usability design, user centred design, user interface Design, Internet, research, Twitter, usability

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

Woolworths is back and it’s gone all modern: it’s an online only experience.

First impressions are very American. The homepage has three choices: ‘Main shop’, ‘Entertainment’ and ‘Pic n’ Mix’. The main shop has a distracting carousel and would benefit from some targeted products based on season, popularity or promotion line, as their main competitor Argos does. The overall look and feel is rather cheap, which does not match up with Shop Direct boss Mark Newton-Jones’ statement that, “The site is about quality, value for money and great service”.

A bit of a pic n' mix

Navigation

The navigation and search are generally pretty good especially the mega drop-down menus on the top, but the left navigation is a bit too much. Moving between shops is easy, unless you have something in a basket and you move to a new store, as they don’t share a common e-commerce platform so you get an annoying message and have to buy before moving on. Not having a combined basket cuts down on impulse buying.

Buying

Shopping and buying are pretty easy, with a nice, simple to follow registration process for first time users. Choosing colours and sizes gets a bit more complicated as the flow of interaction is fairly unintuitive so you generally see lots of pop-up errors. Delivery options could be better displayed such as, leave behind shed, etc and from this point on the e-commerce platform, shared with Littlewoods, feels very cheap and off the shelf, ironic really given Mark’s statement about quality.

Lowdown

This is a brave and bold effort to bring back to life a much loved, chaotic brand and in many ways it is not dissimilar from the past high street experience. You’ll have to judge for yourself if that is a good or a bad thing. It’s meant to be kid friendly, but most kids know more about online than most adults and they are far more scathing in their views, so a site aimed at kids could fall flat on it’s face when it is judged by the hardest audience of all.

Check out the blog site, woolieshq.co.uk, this looks great and from a brand view seems to be much more interesting, engaging and polished. In the end this site has been designed and launched in super quick time, which seems to be the norm these days, and having worked on similarly tight deadlines I am very impressed.

(Written by Chris Averill for Revolution.co.uk)

user interface Design, e-commerce

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

After: Drink Coke. Any questions?

Before: typographic mayhem.

We are:london are keen observers of the nuances of design and love a good design debate. ‘Helvetica’ – a documentary on the classic typeface from Gary Huswit provides both. The main theme of the documentary is that the ubiquity of the typeface may be its downfall.

The documentary presents a history of the typeface, creators, context and dissenters. Most interesting is the debate of Helvetica as the typeface of modernism and a backlash postmodernist movement who explore typography for artistic expression or just to say more than the words.

In the documentary, graphic designer Michael Bierut contrasts the directness of Helvetica in a coke advert - “Drink Coke. Period! Any questions? No!” with the ideologyless no-man’s lands of postwar advertising. David Carson displays his 4AD album sleeves and a Bryan Ferry interview set in webdings, a non-alphabetic character set and basically unreadable.

It’s an indulgently narrow subject matter. Watch the film and then marvel at how often you see Helvetica in use.

Gary Huswits new film ‘Objectified’ is a documentary about “our complex relationship with manufactured objects” shows at the Barbican from the 22rd May.

Blog, Uncategorized, interface design Design, typography

02 Joggler touch screen

Touch-screen interactive interface developed by we are:london.

Coming soon to the UK market is the amazing 02 Joggler

Basically the Joggler allows a family or group of friends to share and sync their online calendars, keeping your mobile, web and Joggler dates synced.

Post-it notes are so 1980’s

The shared calendar function is aimed at replacing post-it notes on your fridge and paper calendars on your wall at home.

Now we all know when and where we will be; no more rushed baby sitter calls, missed dinners or forgotten school trips.

Great features and more coming soon

You can also receive text and picture messages, watch videos, view your holiday snaps and play music.

Up to date news, sports, weather and traffic info are available straight to the screen.

Future services could see digital radio, more games and an endless amount of applications that will automatically update.

What we did

Our role saw us working with 02 and their marketing agency to crate a set of interactive prototypes that were then turned into custom applications.

We utilised out very successful, rapid-prototype IA service and created a functional model that replicated the majority service features from calendar changes to credit updates.

usability design, user centred design, user interface Design, Mobile, usability