You'd think this wouldn't be the case, but it's an awkward truth about SXSWi that darn near all of the interactive materials designed for it are pretty bad. They don't look good, and they usually don't work very well.
Case in point: The SXSW iPhone app. I guess it's supposed to serve as my SXSW HQ while I'm in Austin. It's a modest little app, comprised of a scheduler, GPS map, newsreader, electronic business card, and micro-messaging app rolled up into one neat little cluster of a package. Oh, and it's really slow. And I'm in Indy right now. I can't imagine how it's going to perform when the geek-horde invades Austin.
But don't worry, there's a web app to save you from that app! It's called…
Rapportive is a new Gmail plug-in that replaces ads in messages with information about the sender, or anyone else who was copied on the message. Rapportive pulls information from RapLeaf, a company that scours the social web for open information and builds products and analytics on the data it finds.
Sources include Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, MySpace, and more. The Twitter piece will even show you a list of recent Tweets. Very cool. If you're a Gmail user, check it out.
"Customers, although they might be able to articulate the problems with an interaction, are not often capable of visualizing the solutions to those problems. Design is a specialized skill, just like programming. Programmers would never ask users to help them code; design problems should be treated no differently."
Alan Cooper
About Face 3, The Essentials of Interaction Design
Longtime KA+A client ExactTarget announced in December that they had been named a leader in email marketing in Forrester's 2009 Email Marketing Service Providers Wave report. They were called a "leader of the pack," and received perfect scores in six categories, including: Strength of Management Team, Executive Vision, Product Roadmap, Total Employees, Vertical Strategy, and Customers
Most notably, ExactTarget was the only ESP to achieve a perfect score in the Customers category. According to the report, "with high satisfaction scores and online community, ExactTarget can successfully meet marketers' complex business needs." That's particularly exciting for the KA+A team, since we had the opportunity to work with ExactTarget on the creation of their user community, 3Sixty. With over 16,000 members, 3Sixty has become a model of what an…
thesixtyone, a Y-Combinator funded music exploration community, launched in early 2008. The service began life as a pretty typical web-based social networking site. Over the last couple of years, it has gone through some interface updates and improvements, but for the most part it seemed to toe the social network line with its user interface.
The image below shows the service immediately before the latest redesign. It was definitely clean, well organized, and functional. There are even some sweet keyboard shortcuts to make controlling the music easier!
Last week thesixtyone distinguished itself from the web's pile of music recommendation sites by completely redesigning their service. The new design is bold and immersive. While a song plays, the…
A few months back I revisited a favorite game of mine — Portal. Portal is an extension of Valve's Half-Life series. In it, the player controls the protagonist from a first person perspective (you know, a first person shooter…). You begin your adventure locked in a cell in some kind of testing environment/laboratory. After being released from the cell, you're directed through a series of increasingly complex puzzle situations in which your goal is to progress through one test chamber and move to the next. Here's where the "portal" comes in. The solutions to these puzzles require the use of a portal gun, which creates two interconnected portal ends. Here's Wikipedia's description of…
As UX continues to establish itself as an integral player in business, there is an unquestionable need for methods, frameworks, and other repeatable/scientific processes. But what do you do when the science isn't working? Or when the rules run out, and there's no clear next step?
Too Much Science in Business?
In a recent interview, Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management, argues that "corporations are pushing analytical thinking so far that it's become unproductive." An over-reliance on science puts businesses in a position where they try and prove ideas through reasoning. This approach leaves very little room for intuition and leaps of faith, which is why, according to Martin, American innovation has become increasingly…
Even though it aired about 12 times too many, I found myself enjoying the Don't Take Chances American Express commercial this weekend:
I love how even the "happy faces" have a air of melancholy about them. Almost as if they realize that even though Amex will fix or replace them, they're still just inanimate objects. The bittersweet mood of the piece seems to affirm the fact that no matter how much stuff you own, or how sweet your credit card company is, it's still just stuff. And it won't make you happy, at least not for long.
I wonder if the anti-consumption mood is accidental, or if some advertising mastermind has deftly implanted an emotional connection to Amex deep within my limbic cortex. Whatever…
A recent BusinessWeek podcast featured an interview with Fahrenheit 212 founder and CEO Geoff Vuleta. Fahrenheit 212 is an innovation consultancy that engages their clients in a unique way by subjecting two thirds of their fees to agreed upon commercial milestones. If they don’t meet those milestones, they lose those fees. As a result the consultancy has a tangible interest in whether or not an initiative succeeds.
KA+A’s VentureSpring program produces similar results. When commercial interests are aligned a truer partnership, with all the honesty and transparency that necessarily goes along with it, is created.
The BusinessWeek interview with Vuleta provided some cool insight into how they work, but I don’t think it did justice…
The visual display of data and information is about to explode — or maybe it already has. It's been an area of design expertise for many years, but we're now faced with more mountains of data than ever before, and they're staggeringly high.
The image above, a visualization of 50 years of space exploration, is one example how data visualizations have risen in popularity. They've gained an aura of coolness, kind of like rock posters (in some circles anyway). Firms such as Visual Complexity focus exclusively on this design niche. And we've seen more and more data visualization websites like We Feel Fine and DAYTUM pop up over the last couple of years and…
