USiT blog

How Ford got social media right – the Fiesta Movement

(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?

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 New book: Digital Experience Design: Ideas, Industries, Interaction

Way over a year ago I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in a project initiated by my friend and former colleague Dr Linda Leung from the Institute for Interactive Multimedia, University of Technology, Sydney. Linda is the a Senior Lecturer, course coordinator and one of the founders of the Masters of Interactive Multimedia offered by the Institute and I used to teach with her in the subject Digital Information and Interaction Design. The subject

encourages students to critically engage with interdisciplinary approaches to information and interaction design

and to apply their own interpretation of these theories

to real-world design project in which students work with a client, with advice and input from industry professionals.

Typically the real world project was developed for iTV and that in itself required students to translate the principles of web design and information architecture to the development of interactive television (iTV) interfaces.

I was one of those industry professionals involved with teaching the subject (during the time I was also working at Information Architect for the Institute). One of the challenges Linda identified when teaching aspiring experience designers is (in her own words)…

the awkward rise of a discourse and discipline finding its feet and which still needs to grow with the support from its older cousins. Indeed, the necessity of turning to other design disciplines is acknowledged by Shedroff (2001:2 in Leung, 2008): simultaneously having no history (since it is a discipline only recently defined), and the longest history (since it is the culmination of many ancient disciplines), Experience Design has become newly recognised and named.'

So that is where I came in. I was one of ten industry professionals working in digital media who came from backgrounds diverse as education, feminism, fashion design, architecture, cultural theory, film-making who had moved into experience design. Linda recognised that these backgrounds had significant impact on the approach we as experience designers had towards the work we now did and provide a framework for understanding our discipline in a multidisciplinary way and so she set out to write a co-written book with the nine of us.

My own background is in fine art and although I don’t often make the connection consciously, my early training in fine art (I now recognise) has helped me along the way in understanding users particularly in relation to how they interact with the visual and aesthetic properties of digital media. It’s also helped me understand and work with visual designers. My contribution to the book can be found in chapter ten entitled Art and Articulation: The Finer Points of engaging the User in Abstract Concepts and Lateral Thinking. To give you a taste…

Fine art challenges its audience to engage with abstract concepts that may not be easily articulated and require introspective reflection. The art gallery offers a rich metaphor for conceptualising digital experiences: just as the gallery is the space where the spectator engages with works of art, digital worlds represent the interface between users and content. Furthermore, the art world creates experiences that enable uses to tackle challenging content, and elevates content to the level of the sacred. This can be applied in digital design to contexts where ideas take primacy. However, conceptualising an online environment as a gallery and its content as “art’ can mean contravening web usability principles which assume task-orientated, utilitarian and time-constrained online interactions.

This chapter examines the ways in which art is presented, and the design of experiences of art. The instruments which ‘frame’ an artwork and scaffold the experience for the spectator are discussed in relation to how such techniques can be translated for digital contexts.

I’m excited to announce that tonight Digital Experience Design: Ideas, Industries, Interaction (Edited by Linda Leung) is being launched by Dr Elaine Lally, Senior Research Fellow and Assistant Director Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney and  is available from Intellect Books and Amazon.

It’s been an amazingly insightful experience for me to work with Linda and gain some knowledge into what it takes to turn an idea into a book. I have utmost respect for her determination and academic resilience to the writing, editing and review process and thank her immensely for the opportunity it has given me. It’s exciting also that the book will be utilised as the set text for two subjects: Digital Information and Interaction design and Digital Sound and the Moving Image in the Graduate programs for Interactive Multimedia at UTS. I’m dying to read all the chapters as collection and ponder the mulit-disciplinary realm of our practice myself. If you are reading this an happen to go on to the read the book I’d love to know what you think, maybe post a comment here on our blog. In the meantime I’ll leave you with Linda’s summary from the back of the jacket.

Digital Experience Design chronicles the diverse histories and perspectives of people working in the dot.com world, with contributors from a wide range of different backgrounds offering autobiographical accounts of their careers in the digital experience design and interactive media industry. This is a book of ideas about digital experience design expressed through the voices of practitioners and seen through the lenses of the disciplines in which they originally trained. From the perspective of older disciplines such as education, fine art, and cinema, this volume investigates how dot.com practitioners balance the 'science' of usability with the 'art' of experience design and  the more abstract, emotional and atmospheric elements of users’ digital interactions. Digital Experience Design seeks to borrow from alternative fields that have richer traditions and longer histories in experience design to assist current online designers and practitioners. Covering  a range of forms of digital experience design, be it computer games, DVDs, touchscreen kiosks or mobile phones , this edited volume is a valuable resource for industry practitioners and students and teachers of interactive media.

Over at Molt:n Blog, Cheryl's been writing about her recent experience with carsguide and Ads that take over! http://www.moltn.com/blog/2008/09/28/when-marketing-take-over-interaction-design/