Here’s the concept. You are presented with two movies at random, and you are then forced to decide which movie you prefer, no skipping allowed. If you haven’t seen one, or both, of the films, you can skip the film you haven’t seen and update the pairing. Flickchart then updates your list of favorites based upon your choices. Eventually, you’ll begin to build a massive and ranked list of movies you have seen.
If you happen to be presented with a tough matchup, Flickchart provides a forum for discussion on what made you decide between the two movies. Is Back to the Future better than Ghostbusters? Obviously it is, but here…
There's been plenty of iPhone sunshine-blowing, but the introduction of its touch-based UI really was a leap forward. I'm ready to see that kind of thinking applied in more circumstances. I work on, work with, and review a myriad user interfaces every week, and I find myself anxious to see more fresh and exciting approaches. I'm interested in moving beyond the "page." 15+ years into the web, and 5 years into web 2.0 and we're still using a metaphor that's hundreds of years old. We largely think of and experience the web in a linear fashion, even though it is in no way limited to that approach.
My thinking about this was jump-started when I stumbled across the online presentation tool Prezi. The best presentations are rarely linear, and Prezi breaks…
On a recent stock photo scavenger hunt (the bane of many a designer’s existence) I was reminded of the importance of providing feedback to users when they’re interacting with a system. After striking out at my standby sites, I decided to head over to Getty Images. I hadn’t purchased from their site in a while, let alone done any image searching there. I wasn’t surprised to discover that I had totally forgotten my password, or username, or both. I decided that my best option was to create a new account.
The Getty account setup form was short and well designed. What really made the experience for me, though, was that…
At KA+A, we have a saying: "The best way to envision the future, is to see a picture of it." In the UX Design world, this applies primarily to the innovation of products and services. Paragraphs, spreadsheets, napkins, and whiteboards are a good place to start, but they reach the limit of their effectiveness pretty quickly. Not only are the aforementioned mediums less than ideal for communicating with third parties (e.g. investors, upper level management…), they also make it difficult to identify the opportunities and problems that exist below the surface of an idea or concept (no matter how good of an idea or concept it is).
Enter hi-fidelity, immersive prototypes. When utilized early in the design and development cycle, they…
A couple weeks back, Kristian posted about ExactTarget and their continued innovation efforts around 3sixty, their online customer community (the catalyst for his post was actually this one, by Doug Karr). Today, this online community is almost 14,000 members strong and is a major source of education and support for many (if not most) of ExactTarget's users.
If you want to know more about the origins of 3sixty, you're in luck, because today we've added the complete case study to the collection of client success stories available on our website. Be sure and check it out to learn more about the processes that guided the design and development of this unique online community.…
The way consumers are researching and finding products is changing dramatically. We used to think of the consumer decision process as a funnel. First one would start out with a handful of products, and then as she evaluated them, the set increasingly became smaller, until she narrowed it down to the final choice. The folks over at McKinsey have found that with the proliferation of product information available at the tip of our fingers, today's consumers are better informed, causing the path to decision to become "less linear and more complicated." This increased nebulosity, has made it even more important for marketers to "reach consumers at the moments that most influence their decisions." McKinsey refers to this evolved decision process as the Consumer Decision
Having been a graphic designer for 11 years, I've learned almost all I need to know about design for print, as well as various printing processes and techniques, paper stocks, color systems and software applications. My experience with web and User Experience (UX) design is much less extensive. When I first joined Kristian Andersen + Associates in October last year, I realized there would be a steep learning curve. Harder still would be setting aside the majority of my print knowledge and starting afresh, learning what can and can't be done with the myriad of programming languages, development platforms and content management systems, which seem to be constantly updating and evolving.
At their basic level, both print and web design are concerned with the clarity and readability…
Here's an interesting video about the design of Nokia's mobile homescreens. It seems like they're cramming an awful lot of stuff into a really small space, but I think it's a pretty cool idea.
This makes me wonder if my iPhone's big-grid-of-buttons as homescreen is really as useful as it could be. Faux at-a-glance notification screens have been floating around, and apparently even Apple's been thinking about it. Those are great ideas, but there seems to be plenty of opportunity to move beyond mere notifications to something more customizable and dashboard like. However, if history (and OSX) is any indicator, Apple won't easily give over control of UI elements to users.…
Doug Karr wrote a great post on his blog yesterday about the ExactTarget 3sixty Customer Portal. Kristian Andersen + Associates was tasked with the design and development of the user experience (research, strategy, concepting, user-interface, prototyping, etc.) for 3sixty. It was a great project, and by all accounts a quantifiable success. What has been really exciting to see however, is the way that ExactTarget has continued to innovate around the platform since it's launch. Rather than sitting back and resting on their laurels, the ExactTarget 3sixty team has continued to add functionality and content at a breakneck pace. The result is a site that stays fresh and always promises something more to…
OK. I try not to make a habit of just reposting videos... but I thought this one was worth sharing. First because it's so darn true and secondly, because it was produced by Indianapolis's own Scofield Editorial.…
