(contributed by Pat)

Grant McCracken delves into Ford’s recent social media success in his Harvard Business Review article…

Ford gave 100 consumers a car for six months and asked them to complete a different mission every month. And away they went. At the direction of Ford and their own imagination, “agents” used their Fiestas to deliver Meals On Wheels. They used them to take Harry And David treats to the National Guard. They went looking for adventure, some to wrestle alligators, others actually to elope. All of these stories were then lovingly documented on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.

One of the creators of the campaign, Bud Caddell, describes the central concept as…

The idea was: let’s go find twenty-something YouTube storytellers who’ve learned how to earn a fan community of their own. [People] who can craft a true narrative inside video, and let’s go talk to them. And let’s put them inside situations that they don’t get to normally experience/document. Let’s add value back to their life. They’re always looking, they’re always hungry, they’re always looking for more content to create. I think this gets things exactly right.

This sounds like an innovative, smart and daring (considering the affect the GFC has had on many large corporations particularly in the auto industry) campaign. I love how they had a good think about it, understood their audience and how they might influence that audience, then created a campaign that is far from the usual social media approach. Hat tip to Grant’s blog where he announced the HBR article and also shares an interview he did with Bud Caddell.

5 Steps to Building Social Experiences

(contributed by Chris)

Erin Malone has published a Boxes and Arrows article on building social experiences…

Nowadays everyone wants social in their sites and applications. It’s become a basic requirement in consumer web software and is slowly infiltrating the enterprise as well. So what’s a designer to do when confronted with the requirements to “add social”? Designing social interfaces is more than just slapping on Twitter-like or Facebook-like features onto your site. Not all features are created equal and sometimes a little bit can go a long way. It’s important to consider your audience, your product—what your users will be rallying around and why they would want to become engaged with it and each other, and that you can approach this in a systematic way, a little bit at a time.

It’s a good, step-by-step introduction to getting a social experience up and running. There is a lot more than this to driving a successful social experience (including seeding it etc) but this covers some of the low level hygiene factors.

The Apparatgeist calls

(contributed by Angus)

The Economist examines global cultural differences in the use and understanding of mobile phones and asks whether these differences will disappear as the innate qualities of the technology (the “apparageist” or “spirit of the machine”) becomes apparent. Reminds me of a Marshall Mcluhan line “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

How you use your mobile phone has long reflected where you live. But the spirit of the machines may be wiping away cultural differences

Technologies tend to be global, both by nature and by name. Say “television”, “computer” or “internet” anywhere and chances are you will be understood. But hand-held phones? For this ubiquitous technology, mankind suffers from a Tower of Babel syndrome. Under millions of Christmas trees North and South Americans have been unwrapping cell phones or celulares. Yet to Britons and Spaniards they are mobiles or móviles. Germans and Finns refer to them as Handys and kännykät, respectively, because they fit in your hand. The Chinese, too, make calls on a sho ji, or “hand machine”. And in Japan the term of art is keitai, which roughly means “something you can carry with you”.

Crash course on the history of Interaction Design

(contributed by Angus)

Karen McGrane posts four sets of slides from her course on Interaction Design History…

Practitioners in other design disciplines—architecture, graphic design, fashion—would be expected to have some grounding in historical movements and trends. But most people have no formal education in interaction design, and so they’ve never learned the roots of the discipline.

The third set (Week 3) in particular is full of great quotes and images I hadn’t seen before. As she says in the preface of the post it’s important for people doing interaction design today to have some understanding of the history of the field.

Iteration in the animation process at Pixar

(contributed by Angus)

A great quote about the importance of frequent reviews of creative work as it progresses from Pixar president Ed Catmull, speaking at Stanford’s business school:

In the process of mak­ing the film, we reviewed the mate­r­ial every day. Now, this is counter-intuitive for a lot of people. […]

Sup­pose you come in, and you’ve got to put together ani­ma­tion or draw­ings and show it to a famous, world-class ani­ma­tor. Well, you don’t want to show some­thing which is weak or poor. So you want to hold off until you get it to be right.

The trick is actu­ally to stop that behav­ior. We show it every day—when it’s incom­plete. If every­body does it, every day, then you get over the embar­rass­ment. And when you get over the embar­rass­ment, you’re more creative.

It’s not obvi­ous to peo­ple, but start­ing down that path helped every­thing that we did. Show it in its incom­plete form. There’s another advan­tage to that. When you’re done… you’re done.

According to Ed while showing incomplete work is scary and potentially embarrassing it has two very important benefits, it results in better “more creative” work and it means that when the animator/designer thinks they’re finished they really are finished as stakeholders have participated in the process.

Watch the video

Lorum Ipsum is Killing your designs / In defence of Lorum Ipsum

(contributed by Angus)

Two lengthy posts for and against the use of Lorum Ipsum in wireframes and mockups. Personally I side with Karen McGrane as she argues that Lorum Ipsum is not the problem but a symptom of the problem:

The real problem is an overall process that treats design and content as separate tracks without appropriate communication, collaboration, and checkpoints along the way.

Sketch templates

(contributed by Angus)

Ivana Jurčić shares A Collection of Printable Sketch Templates and Sketch Books for Wireframing and Todd Warfel has made available his templates used for his “rapid sketching and peer review/critique” process.

Control Panels!

(contributed by Angus)

Thousands and thousands of beautiful dials and banks of red lights on Flickr – Interaction designer porn?

Market for mobile internet will be huge

Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb provides a great summary of a report released by Morgan Stanley that says the mobile internet market will be twice the size of desktop internet…

Perhaps the most remarkable statement in the report is that the Mobile Internet market will be “at least 2x size of Desktop Internet,” which Morgan Stanley bases on analysis comparing Internet users with mobile subscribers.

The report starts out by saying that Apple’s iPhone/iTouch/iTunes ecosystem “may prove to be the fastest ramping and most disruptive technology product / service launch the world has ever seen.” It goes on to state that “a handful of incumbents (like Apple, Google, Amazon.com and Skype) appear especially well positioned for mobile changes.”

This is a very interesting for the UX and media communities, since it means there will be many opportunities for mobile work in the future.
(forwarded by Sophie)

Digital magazine prototype

Bonnier have released a video showing off their concept for how digital magazines might look and work…

The concept aims to capture the essence of magazine reading, which people have been enjoying for decades: an engaging and unique reading experience in which high-quality writing and stunning imagery build up immersive stories.

If this is what magazines will be like in the future, it’s very exciting! The production and polish of the video itself is fascinating too; makes for a very convincing and understandable deliverable/marketing tool.
(forwarded by Angus)

You don’t have the power

Seth Godin talks about getting past the old school thinking that you can control users/customers…

You don’t have the power. Maybe if every person who has ever published a book or is ever considering publishing a book got together and made a pact, then they’d have enough power to fight the market. But solo? Exhort all you want, it’s not going to do anything but make you hoarse.

Movie execs thought they had the power to fight TV. Record execs thought they had the power to fight iTunes. Magazine execs thought they had the power to fight the web. Newspaper execs thought they had the power to fight Craigslist.

This is why we must understand what our audience wants and work with that, instead of fabricating an “opportunity” in our own minds and trying—or should that be hoping?—to get people to come and use it.
(forwarded by Pat)

Twitter and the media (2009 wrap-up)

Ross Dawson picks his top blog posts for the year on the topic of Twitter and the media…

1. Twitter on ABC TV – the impact on politics, media and socializing
2. How Twitter impacts media and journalism: Five Fundamental Factors
3. Event review: Twitter’s Impact on Media & Journalism
4. Twitter and the ever-faster moving news landscape
5. Who will provide the credibility ratings for the journalists of the planet?
6. Twitter’s impact on the news and media cycle

Some really great commentary on ‘new media’ meets ‘old media’.
(forwarded by Pat)

As part of the study, more than 75 participants were asked to find an entertainment news story, read it, and search for a story on another specific top and then send that story to a friend. Keynote found that even big Internet brands, which have invested a lot in mobile development did not score exceedingly well in terms of satisfaction. In fact rates were low for both Yahoo, which only scored 51 percent satisfaction, and Fox News, which scored 64 percent satisfaction for their mobile Web sites.

That said, Fox News users were more likely to find the mobile experience to be better than a computer experience.

It would be interesting to run a similar study on some local m-sites to see if they perform any better. In particular to see how the local News sites compare to our Fox cousins.

In lieu of that, anyone have any feedback on the usability of the mobile versions of Australian news websites?