I won’t beat around the bush. The iPad is the future of computing. And I don’t want it. Well, not yet.

Image credit: www.apple.com

Just Like Any Other Tablet

Many look at the iPad as a wi-fi enabled 10” 1024×768 flatscreen with no USB port, SD card slot, or camera. They look at the iPhone OS and wonder why you’d use something with far less functionality than the hundreds of other tablets that have been on the market since the early 2000’s.

What they’re missing is the potential for the iPad to be the start of something new. Coming in the form of an evolved iPhone, something familiar to most of us, it doesn’t seem all that new or different.

But imagine, for a second, using the iPhone as your main computer. The reason you never have to dig through folders to find what you were working on, deal with software conflicts, or spend time cleaning up the iPhone after removing a piece of software is because the iPhone approaches computing from a different angle than the computers we’re used to dealing with every day. By expanding the iPhone from a small pocket tool to a larger device, Apple is trying to apply the iPhone’s model of computing to the tasks we currently use laptops for.

Yes, It’s Underwhelming

At the iPad’s unveiling I could sense the disappointment in the discussions within my company and across much of the internet. When the iPhone was first introduced, it blew away notions of how a phone worked and what kind of experience a low-powered mobile device was capable of.

People were hoping for a similar sense of disbelief with the iPad. They wanted it to save the publishing industry, they wanted new input methods, they wanted “out of control” multi-touch interactions, and most importantly they wanted it to do things they hadn’t even dreamed of doing yet. In short, they wanted to feel like Apple had developed the future and was showing it to them. That’s what the iPhone introduction felt like.

Instead, what people got was something they’d already seen. And so it was easy to pick out the flaws. No open app distribution model? No camera? No multitasking?

But when you’re looking at the prototype of a new computing platform, those complaints are irrelevant. All of them will be added in time. What cannot be changed are the fundamentals of the software design.

The iPhone got these fundamentals dead right from day one, and the iPad is now inheriting them. Fundamentals like a touch-based interaction model. Fundamentals like an easy to understand way to acquire and run applications. Fundamentals like the complete change of focus from navigating a confusing hierarchical file system to a simpler task-based interaction model.

As Andy Ihnatko says,

“It struck me that Apple was making a clear statement with the iPad: ‘We were right about the iPhone.’ They had a clear and ambitious concept about an entirely new computing platform and an entirely new way that humans would interact with hardware. They were so right about it that when the time came to build a tablet device, changing the UI seemed vulgar at best. […] If the iPhone had never existed, the iPad would still have made sense as a touch-based computer.”

Image credit: Sebastiaan de With, http://blog.cocoia.com

A New Interface

The very things that make the iPad so great are also its biggest weaknesses. By developing a new interaction paradigm — touch-based rather than mouse-based — Apple has rendered all existing desktop software incompatible with the platform. To truly take a step forward, this is necessary.

Starting from zero is a daunting proposition. It is the reason Microsoft has never been able to garner mainstream acceptance from the tablets it promotes, despite grand proclamations about the coming tablet revolution back in 2001. In Microsoft’s universe, compatibility is king, hence the constant attempts to put Windows on a touchscreen. The taskbar, windows, dropdown menus, contextual menus, rollovers, and the rest of today’s pervasive interface elements make for an awkward tablet experience, but one with the advantage of an entire universe of software already built for it. Starting from zero, as Apple is doing, takes guts. The risks are exponentially higher, as are the rewards.

Apple is bootstrapping the process by launching the iPad with enhanced versions of the same applications that have been successful on the iPhone. Watching movies, listening to music, browsing the web, checking email, and more are all designed to be seamless and elegant experiences. With these basics, the iPad is capable of meeting the casual needs of some people. In addition, it features compatibility with the existing library of iPhone apps, although this is of questionable value for many. Even with these boxes checked, it won’t come close to replacing a laptop for most people.

I Still Don’t Want One

For years, the tech industry has chased the dream of the device that fills the space between the mobile device and the computer. The difficulty with this space is that there isn’t obvious demand to fill. Devices have to muscle in and make their own space. The iPad may be one of the best to try, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s not something many people need, myself included. My colleague Ben McNeil summed it up when he said, “This device doesn’t seem to blend everything I need but rather gives me one more gadget I own.”

And like a child needing a parent’s steadying hand on the saddle when learning to ride a bike, the iPad needs to be tethered to a real computer for tasks like backing up, downloading photos, and syncing music. Until my files live online, rather than on a hard drive tied to one computer, the iPad won’t seamlessly integrate into my digital life without a lot of awkward shuffling and copying to make things available to the iPad on an as-needed basis. I don’t need to pay for the added complexity of working this device into my life, and my iPhone already does a good job of surfing the web on the sofa.

And Yet

Given the option, the prospect of carrying an iPad around is already so much more enticing than using my laptop. I yearn for the portability, the battery life, and most of all, the efficient and focused interface that my iPhone has given me a taste of.

I want the productivity and joy of using something that sheds the 20+ years of baggage my computer has inherited. The design decisions made in the 1970s that seem unprepared for the scale of my online life today, such that I am constantly having to organize and clean and manage my system.

As Fraser Speirs states,

“The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS. The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.”

I want something that lets me get The Real Work done.

Image credit: www.apple.com

A Whole New World of Apps

Application development on the iPad has the ability to sustain bigger apps than what we’ve seen on the iPhone. The 99 cent app market on the iPhone has exploded because the device lends itself to quick, cheap entertainment. Lots of people will spend a buck for a couple of minutes’ excitement while waiting at the bus stop or standing in line. The iPad won’t be used in those situations, so the demand for those cheap thrill apps won’t be as strong.

Instead, people will start demanding more functional apps. Apple sent a clear signal by showcasing a highly functional and polished office suite in the form of iWork for the iPad. By doing this, they were in effect asking others to follow their lead by developing desktop-class applications. This call is already being answered. The Omni Group, the leading Mac development house responsible for OmniGraffle and OmniPlan, among others, has announced an immediate pause on developing their next generation of desktop software while they port their complete portfolio of applications to the iPad.

Apple also has the advantage of being in a better position than anyone else to cultivate a healthy 3rd party ecosystem of applications. It may be counterintuitive considering the discontent over their tight control of app distribution. But Apple has developed something even more valuable than open application distribution: a cohesive platform. This advantage may diminish in the future, but when launching a new platform it is incredibly important. Software developers will be hesitant to invest significant money developing applications if they are not sure what hardware, and by extension how many users will be able to run them. Android is starting to feel the effects of varying versions of the OS spread across a myriad of hardware configurations. Apple, meanwhile, has shown with the iPhone that it can drive a platform forward while minimizing the expense of dealing with device incompatibility.

What Happens Now

I won’t bother with a prediction about the iPad’s success or failure because they’re a dime a dozen in the wake of its launch. This post isn’t about whether Apple will tumble from its current summit or climb the next peak. This is about understanding why the iPad is more than just another tablet.

For the iPad to succeed, it doesn’t need to be a home run now, it simply needs to stick around and gain a modest number of users who are willing to pay for apps. If that happens, in 5 years time we’ll start to see a healthy ecosystem of applications that begin to turn the iPad into a viable general computer replacement. And in 10 years time we’ll see a new generation of users that have adopted iPads, or whatever Android- or WebOS-based tablets are around at that point, as their main computer. We’ll see existing expert users spending a large portion of their time doing work on tablets.

Of course, even then most of the computing landscape will still revolve around the traditional computers that are deeply entrenched today. But it will also be clear that they are part of a waning era. In 20 years’ time they will have relinquished the spotlight to take the place of the mainframes of yore: running back end services and thousands of custom business applications for years to come, while people use touchscreen devices for their everyday online lives.

And at that point, we’ll look back and realize that this drastic shift from Old World to New World computing, as Steven Frank terms it, began with something that at the time seemed like a boringly predictable, some would even say say lacking, evolution of an iPhone.

Nigel Warren is a UX designer at Roundarch

Coming from a background in branding and marketing, I spend a great deal of my time confusing and conflating the concepts of “user experience” and “usability,” often to the dismay of my more learned colleagues. I probably deserve their contempt — what with my slander of their profession and coral polo shirt — but the physical violence is generally unwarranted.

I am regularly reminded of the importance and inherence of the user’s expectations — the consistency of experience and interactivity — and how it can and should manifest throughout thoughtful application design. Beyond those grand efforts of simplifying features and improving interface design, how can we best communicate that experience just around the bend? How can we best rely on expected interactions and, when it’s necessary, attach overt user cues to unexpected ones? And so the bruises multiply.

But I cut my teeth in the land of sizzle, where the unexpected made the user experience, and the most we needed audiences to “get it” was to laugh at the punchline (right before the logo appeared and right after the duck barked). And though brand experiences and application experiences serve different purposes, I wonder if brand experiences have taught us to expect something from applications — just as application experiences have taught us to expect usability from brands.

Perhaps we have begun to expect pleasant surprises — intermittent bits of entertainment to break the monotony — from even our “function-first” applications.

As UX geeks, we often explore playful design and clever interactions as a way of nudging behaviors and deepening engagement. Even dry content is moistened with a bit of rewarding animation or a vaguely human-like conversational tone (Skype thrives as much on charm as it does technology, and everybody loves a 404 error with a little sympathetic spunk.). Unique interaction metaphors further up the ante. Hell, I recently found myself playing with an iPhone app that does unit conversions. UNIT CONVERSIONS.

But I propose that we are entering a time when engaging user experiences (including RIAs and other interfaces) transcends playfulness and, in select-and-increasing instances, toward a series of deliberate pleasant surprises. These pleasant surprises — scraps of media, public recognition, spontaneous games — enhance engagement, encourage exploration and, when metered out in balance with critical functions, improve productivity. That they come in unanticipated forms and at unexpected times encourages users to spend more time at their workstations (or whatever task acts as the trigger), trying to “crack the code” or simply stumble upon the next payoff.

It’s slot machine psychology for the everyday, really: nobody complains when they’re blindsided by reward. Instead, they sit patiently, work diligently, and look forward to it.

Those in the publishing business have all been aflutter with the official announcement about the joint venture between Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp, and Time Inc.. This story has been relatively well publicized and talked about over the past few months including a few demos of what some of the digital magazines experiences might look like from Conde Nast for Wired Magazine, and Time Inc. for Sports Illustrated. I haven’t seen any concepts for the actual storefront yet but hopefully something will surface soon.

The concepts are similar in that they both replicate the magazine experience to some degree (page based navigation, magazine-like layout) while including the obvious must have features such as rich content (e.g. video, photo streams) and ecommerce (e.g. links to stores for product purchase). However, if this is all there is, I’m not sure it’s enough to get consumers to pony up the cash for subscriptions as well as potentially a new piece of hardware. Remember, much of this content is available online for free so the experience has to be compelling enough to get over this hurdle.

For the time being I’m going to set aside all of the questions I have around the ability of the publishers to work together to agree on a common content format, bandwidth constraints, battery life of devices, etc. and remain hopeful that we’re going to see something very original and compelling. I’m going to tell myself that the features and demos we’ve seen to date are just the tip of the iceberg and that the publishers are holding off from publicizing the new killer features so as not to give up competitive advantage. However, in the event that this is not the case, here are a few suggestions of some things I’d like to see.

First off, resist the urge to try & fit a “magazine” into a digital form. Magazines are great, but the experience created and refined over the 270+ years they have been in existence is based on a print medium. For example, is flipping a virtual page as rewarding as flipping a print page? If not, then how have you improved (or at least maintained) the experience? The answer here is likely that they have not and in most cases the experience is made worse.

Instead, look at the core value propositions of magazines and create an experience that utilizes features in the digital medium to improve upon them. There are lots of things to build on here but one of the first that pops into my head are index pages. Index pages give the reader an overview of what is in the magazine but also offer a reference as to what pages specific articles of interest are on. Why not expand upon this and create an index page that spans all of the publications I own as well as specific issues. Doing this would also enable features such as dynamic grouping of articles by topic, person, or event across all of my digital magazines. Teaser content and thumbnail videos and/or images could be offered on all articles (if available) instead of just featured ones. Finally, making the index searchable and hyperlinked should improve the concept of an index page quite dramatically.

Secondly, we all know that luring advertisers to buy ad space in these new digital magazines is key. So how about offering something more compelling than full page, half page, tower, leader board, or any of the other dozen types of ads that currently dominate the pages of sites and print magazines. Please skip the animated overlays that take over my page. They are annoying on the web but probably even more so on the digital magazine – especially with all of the rich content that will be on it.

The digital format should allow publishers to offer advertisers a device with behaviorally targeting ads, comprehensive reporting and results tracking, and recommendations for how I can improve my media buys for future campaigns. For readers more contextually relevant and less intrusive ads would be my preference. Search advertising is also on the table given the global index. For example, a search for all hotels that have been covered in all of my travel magazines could yield links to those articles, inline booking, and related ads such as car rentals, flights, and restaurant recommendations.

Some other items on the wishlist that I won’t dive into detail on are social media (e.g. comment streams, fantasy sports, recommendations, etc), live event viewing (e.g. VMA’s, Red Sox games), one-click purchase & bookings, and personalized folders to catalog articles of interest for later viewing).

I applaud the experimentation and desire of publishers to create a new product in the digital medium. The demos and PR are great. There is a long way to go though and I haven’t seen anything that leads me to believe that anyone has arrived at “the” killer product yet. However, the payoff of a well thought out, strategically placed product could revive an industry that is in desperate need of it.

A look at the user experience visualizing historical data with varying levels of granularity.

Introduction
In the world of rich internet applications a very common goal is taking not easily accessible or multi-point data and outputting reports and visualizations. One thing that rich internet applications do very well is to display data across a period of time, and allowing the user to select ranges of time. Usually the output consists of a numerical report grid and some accompanying visualization. Most if not all, reporting applications focus around this capability.

Recently I had the opportunity to work on a Search Engine Optimization application that is designed to accept analytical and keyword data, then output reports and visualizations. In addition, the application will guide the user in creating keyword segments, and in turn produce personas. These activities will ease the management of campaign by managing segments and personas rather than the possible tens of thousands of keywords. At this time, let’s focus on the first phase of the reporting business process.

The user will upload data to the application and then the application will output reports and visualizations. As we dove deeper we discovered that the analytical SEO Data could be made available to the user on daily, weekly, or monthly basis depending on the client’s business objectives or processes. Thus, the user could upload daily data or summary data for weeks or months at a time. The Keyword data would remain largely unchanged, unless completely new campaigns were created, or drastic changes were made.
The client’s business requirement for this phase is to have a flexible application to allow the user to upload any range of data, at any time.

Design Approach
Keeping in mind the client’s business requirements for flexible data importing and reporting, our design focused around a date range slider to control this reporting interaction. Sliders are intuitive to use and we have successfully implemented them in many of our solutions. We coupled the slider with a report granularity selector for daily, weekly, and monthly reporting. The image below is an example of date range slider:

At first glance, it seemed like a straightforward objective and we did not see any issues with the process nor our approach, but the following is a narrative of the events that took place during 2 days of working through this business requirement, and the use scenarios that resulted from it.

Discovery
As I began to lay all this out, I started to see that the interaction between the data available and the date range slider would be critical. At first I saw two options:
The first option, the date range slider would drive how the data was to be reported, but the data available would drive what reporting options are available to the user. The user could only select by the period the data is available.
The second option was to have all reporting options available regardless of what data is available and normalize the data when applicable. For example, if the user selected to report by day, but the only data available is by week, the application would average the values by day.
To help us through this exercise, we developed a series of user scenarios to test both approaches and weigh the pros and cons of each.

We used this data import condition for all user scenarios:
The user will import 7 daily files, then 3 weekly files for the next 21 days for the first month, and a monthly file for the next.

Visually represented the data would look like this:

User Scenario 1:
The user wishes to view daily, weekly, and monthly data.
We set up this scenario as starting point based on a fairly complex data import. The objective here was to see how the slider would behave for simple reporting requests.

The Issue(s):
How should weekly and monthly reporting options be displayed, if the user selects report by day? The user knows daily, weekly, and monthly data are available.

Our Response – Limit the Reporting Granularity:
We responded to this issue by limiting the reporting granularity selector with daily, weekly, and monthly options based on the data available. Therefore if the user selected daily data only the purple 7 data points would be available as shown in the image below. The same would apply for weekly and monthly data.

We could play around with some visual elements to either ghost the remaining selections, to show the data’s availability but will not be displayed based on the reporting granularity selected. This corresponds to possibly large amounts of data not being available based on the user’s selection. We felt this was a very limiting experience, and not a viable option.

User Scenario 2:
The user selects a period from the middle of the first of the first week to the middle of the next week. There is a mix of daily and week data.

The Issue:
How does the application visualize data with different levels of data granularity?

Our Response - Normalization:
If the user selected a reporting granularity lower than what is included in the data set, the application will average, where applicable, to normalize the data for the block of less granular data.

The image below shows the normalization for the weekly data based on the selected range for by day reporting. A simplified view is available on the right. If the user selected to report by week, the values would be normalized across the entire reporting period and look like the red block of week data.

This would allow the user to see all data in all granularities over the entire reporting period. If we display the previous slider rule as mentioned in user scenario 1 with the normalization options outlined in user scenario 2, the image below displays all the reporting options with and without normalization, which we may allow the user to toggle on and off. The image below displays the possible options.

As a result some charting would require a good amount of normalization and mislead the user in their evaluation. If we refer back to the supporting image for user scenario 1, days 4 through 7 may not be an accurate representation of that period. We felt normalization is a transformation of data, and does not lend itself to good user experience.  We did not feel comfortable proceeding with this option, and dismissed it.

Final Solution and Lesson Learnt – Trade Flexibility for Data Integrity
We found that to deliver a consistent experience, we need to limit some of the options presented to the user. So much of the UI will be driven by the data, and that any amount of data could be available, at any granularity. The primary issue is not adjusting or implementing new user interactions, we needed to address the primary issue of “garbage in/garbage out”. We saw finally that by allowing the user to import inconsistent data, we were trying to control the user experience, rather than fix the root cause.

The Final Solution
We felt that an adjustment to the data import business rule would get the user in the right direction. We concluded by only allowing the user to import data in one granularity and for one calendar period at a time. This means the user has to find one granularity and stick to that. In addition, the user’s import would have to complete a calendar period. The sweet spot is probably a weekly import, but our user interview also points to monthly uploads being common place. By implementing this rule, we would certainly address all the issues listed above but at the price of flexibility and user experience. Sure our application would not be able to bend over backwards to allow all permutations of data and thus report that back out, but it would be consistent and deliver value.

Author Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge Gaurishankar Krishnanan and the SEO team for the time and effort during this exercise.

At a recent defense industry conference, Roundarch unveiled a prototype designed to help soldiers collaborate to defeat IEDs.  We set out to feature rich web and mobile applications and apply user-centered design methodologies to solve a very real, very large problem.

Considering the goals of the business and needs of its users, we imagined how technology could support both.  The Joint Forces community is building capabilities that integrate multiple services and agencies.  Meanwhile, video games, iPhones, and the Internet have become second nature to soldiers who have come to expect edgy, simple, and sophisticated digital experiences.  These resulting designs work in a service oriented architecture (SOA), accessing and updating data across multiple existing systems while providing a seamless, world-class experience:
A squad on patrol in Iraq comes across a suspicious device.  A mobile application aids them in reporting rich details about the situation while executing quickly and without diverting attention from their surroundings.  The Operations Center, explosives team, and other subject matter experts operate in different contexts.  They are geographically dispersed and have different hardware yet collaborate in real-time.  Tools support situational awareness, decision-making, communication, and task completion.  IED lexicons baked into the system drive classification of data and algorithms for predictive analysis.  Robust visualizations turn data into knowledge for novice users, decision-makers, and technical experts.
Given that the data and technologies driving this vision all exist today, the end result is both forward-thinking and completely realistic.

The goal was not to prove the technologies themselves.  We are already delivering rich Web applications to thousands of Air Force and Army users.  Our goal was to explore new concepts for delivering information to users where and when they need it, showing what is possible with these technologies.  Prototypes are an ideal tool for exploring new concepts.  They can be very practical used early on in a project to drive out requirements, identify issues, adjust course, and iterate quickly. Prototypes can also be visionary, allowing the team to explore the “art of the possible” and releasing us from the constraints of everyday to see what could be.

Most importantly - as we learned with a similar demo based on an Air Force scenario - prototypes facilitate communication.  You can talk on and on about delivering a rich application to a browser or mobile device.  You can wax poetic about the ability of web services to unleash data to do great things, or you can show people what you mean. If a picture is worth a thousand words, an interactive prototype is invaluable.   They inspire discussion and find solutions to real human problems that get lost in information technology rhetoric.

Last month Chicago had our very own gathering of great minds in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space. Riapalooza, as it’s called, is a yearly one day conference meant to foster the RIA community in the midwest region. This year’s event was held Friday, May 8th at the Illinois Technology Association (200 S Wacker Drive 15th Floor Chicago, IL) and is the second one of its kind. Riapalooza aims to be technology agnostic and as such we had representatives from many players in the space including a contingency of Microsoft evangelists and few Adobe evangelists.

Adobe has been in the RIA space a long time with its Flash runtime being ubiquitous in over 98% of all desktops. Flash Lite, Adobe’s mobile Flash runtime is forecasted to be in over 1 BILLION mobile devices by 2009. Adobe’s AIR runtime, a cross platform runtime that brings RIAs to the desktop, already has over 100 million installs.

Microsoft on the other hand is a relative new player in the RIA space. Although they’ve been on the web with their .NET platform for a while, it wasn’t as rich an experience as some of the stuff people are used to seeing today. Even though Microsoft was a pioneer in the RIA space with their XmlHttpRequest, a cornerstone in rich AJAX enabled websites today, their early RIA offerings were met with limited success. Lately Microsoft has been pushing Silverlight, a cross platform RIA runtime meant to compete head on with Flash.

The event itself had a very good turnout. The conference room was packed with developers in the industry. The sessions covered a variety of topics from real world RIA problems, consuming 3rd party APIs in Flex, case studies, to RIAs controlled by alternative user interfaces. The six sessions were jam packed with material. I really enjoyed Corey Miller’s Building Interactive Applications Using UX Principles. His presentation can be found on his blog.

The “unconference” also had panel discussions during lunch which was great because it really engaged the audience through participation. Larry Clarkin did a great job of moderating and seeding questions and getting the conversation going. Topics included RIAs and the emerging mobile platform, the definition of RIA, what an evangelist is and what do they do, to how the various companies are approaching RIAs as well. It was great to see Adobe and Microsoft representatives butt heads in a friendly rivalry. What was also great was that user experience (UX) with respect to RIAs was probably given as much face time as RIA technologies. There were discussions of emerging computing areas that will be affected by RIAs such as mobile and touch screens.

Riapalooza is a definite must for developers in the industry interested in learning more about RIAs, meeting new people, connecting with experts and thought leaders in the industry, and keeping up with RIA news and technology. And at $20 a pop, $10 for early registration, it’s a no brainer.

A recap of the talk that Adam Flater and I gave on RIAs beyond the Mouse and Keyboard can be found here.

Follow the speakers and Riapalooza orgainizers on Twitter

• Michael Schaffner, Adobe Certified Instructor http://twitter.com/schaffner
• Anthony Handley, Microsoft Expression MVP http://twitter.com/anthony808
• Kevin Hoyt, Adobe Sr Product Specialist http://twitter.com/parkerkrhoyt
• Steve Holstad, Development Consultant @ Clarity Consulting http://twitter.com/steveholstad
• Josh Holmes, Microsoft UX Architect Evangelist http://twitter.com/joshholmes
• Mike Labriola, Adobe Community Expert at Digital Primates http://twitter.com/mlabriola
• Corey Miller, Magenicon & Microsoft MVP http://twitter.com/xamlmammal
• Chad Udell, Designer/Developer http://twitter.com/visualrinse
• Adam Flater, Technical Architect and Evangelist @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/adamflater
• Dave Meeker, Director of Emerging Technologies @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/dmeeker
• Pek Pongpaet, Lead Interactive Developer @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/pekpongpaet

I love websites that really engage you. Kathy Sierra, a SXSWi regular, talks about Creating Passionate Users and how you can do that by making them feel like rockstars. The JAG Black jeans website made me feel like a rockstar photographer for a brief 5 minutes and here’s how they did it.

1.The homepage lets you choose between a male and a female model. I picked Marian.

2. A brief instruction screen kicks off the photo shoot right away. Shooting is as simple as moving the camera with your mouse and clicking.

3. I create a magazine layout based on all the photos I took of Marian.

4. A personalized photo book is created ready to be shared with all my friends. Notice the personalized icon on the top left of the left page. You can flip through the 3D magazine like a real book. The camera is loose and enhances the sense of realism further engaging you. (For you RIA geeks, this was probably done using Papervision or Away3D).

What made this microsite successful was that it made me feel accomplished. In about 3 minutes (which is about all the attention span I have nowadays), I went from picking a model, doing a photo shoot, and creating a magazine layout. I was the decision maker at every key point. And before I even knew what hit me, I had infected all my friends with this viral campaign by sharing my custom photo book with them and repeating the cycle all over again. Check out the website here.

If you haven’t seen Kathy Sierra’s talk “Creating Passionate Users”, you should check it out.

Paul Annett’s panel “Oooh, That’s Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design)” was one of the few that stood out for me. Not only was his content compelling, but he’s also a great presenter and story teller. His years of experience as an amateur magician no doubt contributed to his skills on stage. The talk was a showcase of websites that are doing some very clever CSS/Flash tricks to create more engaging user experiences.

You might look at some of his examples and go “OK, that’s pretty neat, but this is more like an easter egg and is not really essential to the overall goal of the site.” To put it in terms of ROI and business value that a client can understand, you need only look at what his company ClearLeft has done for their product website Silverback. Back when the site first launched, it was a only splash screen for an upcoming product with very little info about the product itself. However, detail oriented web designers noticed that when you resized the browser on the Silverback website, the vines in the background had a parallax effect creating the feeling of 3D. In a short amount of time, designers were blogging and tweeting about what essentially amounted to nothing more than an easter egg for a website, resulting in tremendous traffic, to the tune of over 100,000 hits. To top that off, a very large percentage of that traffic signed up to hear more about this phantom product without even knowing what the product was about, solely because of this little effect. Several other sites now implement a similar effect hoping for similar results. Small little hooks can have a tremendous amount on the bottom line.

Here are some of the examples that stood out:

The dConstruct User Experience Conference website has a secret navigation up top that lets you see the progression of the site from sketches to final product through clever use of CSS.

Kyan, a web design and development agency, has a small worm on the bottom of their website. Clicking on it reveals a previously hidden underground secret Kyan labs.

I thought these next two examples did a really good job of tying together the cleverness with the core experience of the product.

The Wario Land Youtube page slowly collapses as Wario causes more and more damage. This is a very ingenous use of overlaying Flash. You think you’ve landed on an ordinary Youtube page, but as the video plays, elements of the Youtube page start to crumble and fall until all you are left with is a large pile of HTML debris at the bottom of your page.

The iPod touch ad on the Yahoo Games page gets clever by tilting the elements on the website as if they were affected by the iPod touch.

Engaging users doesn’t have to be big and flashy. A little hidden gem can go a long way drawing in people. Often times, you just need people to step through the door.

If you consider yourself a Twitter-addict or happen to visit new media blogs regularly you’re probably aware of the buzz that was generated the relaunch of the Skittles.com corporate website a few weeks back.  If you haven’t heard about it or haven’t yet seen what all the talk is about you should take a look for yourself at www.skittles.com.

The site has generated a lot of discussion within the interactive community, and this includes the folks here at Roundarch.  The opinions expressed have been strong and varied, ranging from those who think this is the beginning of the end to those who think this is a publicity coup and harbinger of a very different web.

Given the level of discourse around the “Skittles Gambit” we decided to take a moment to discuss the topic and walk through some of the aspects we think are the most interesting.

What am I seeing?
In keeping with Skittles’ irreverent and somewhat quirky brand identity, their updated site blurs (some might say erases) the boundaries between brand and customer identity.  It does this through the wholesale integration of social media services and content.

Of course we’ve all seen social media incorporated into websites before, however, the difference here is that Skittles has replaced four out of six site areas with external social media pages; Wikipedia (Home), Facebook (Friends), Twitter (Chatter), and YouTube (Media/Video), Flickr (Photos).  To summarize, Skittles has virtually reduced their site to a navigational aid/overlay.

The concept is pretty simple; create an in-page frame that automatically resizes to fit the content, load a specific location on the social media site inside it, and position a transparent overlay with your “global navigation” on the page to tie it all together.  While Skittles technically owns or manages the look of some pages on those third-party sites, the nature of social media content means the messaging itself comes from customers.

Why is this important?
The idea of leveraging social media sources is nothing new; many brands monitor chatter to understand how their brand is perceived, and the last few years has seen a growing trend towards integrating third-party services and content into brand sites (e.g., Digg, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc.).  At the same time the basic interface concept behind the idea (using a global navigation element to unify disparate sites together under a common identity) is well established; major media companies like Lycos have been doing this since the ‘90s.

What’s different here is the degree to which Skittles has decided to decentralize and deregulate their brand.   Skittles has transformed their web site from an arm of their marketing group to a window on their market, nearly replacing “managed” brand messaging (most of the pages still belong to Skittles) with user generated content from third-party sources.  This has wide range of implications that are worth paying attention to.

What are some of these “implications”?
There are a lot of ideas to digest here, maybe more than you initially considered.  How do you manage content generated by customers on third party sites?  What’s your liability for comments on “your pages”?  How do you facilitate experiential continuity when using the disparate websites and applications?  What do you do if a critical third-party service is unavailable (e.g., Twitter.com’s problematic uptime numbers)?

All important questions that should be answered as part of an initial strategy.  However, aside from the operational concerns, a few of the more interesting implications involve strategic concepts around Brand Strategy and Cloud computing.  Yes, THAT Cloud computing… hang tight, we’ll come back to that in a minute.

Brand as a Mirror, or Is That a Window?
The feedback in the community and within our company has been fairly divided around the topic of brand strategy.  Some people feel that Skittles.com is a good example of everything not to do when managing your online brand identity.  Others feel that Skittles campaign has been effective in the near term and could be substantially so in the long term.  Who’s right?

Among the former group the feeling is that true brand strategy engages customers, keeps them involved, and provides compelling content and services to reinforce the identity the brand has fostered and marketed.  For this group a decentralized and laissez faire approach to content leads to a stale and uninspiring experience, subsequently undermining the brand’s effectiveness and inspirational capabilities.

On the other side of the aisle we have a slightly larger group who believe that the Skittles.com redesign, while poor in certain respects, hits or comes very close to the mark.   For this group the site is at least an effective viral campaign (look at the press), and at most the introduction of a nimble brand platform.

So where does this leave us.  Any decentralized model that leverages customer content to the degree that Skittles.com does runs the risk of become an outdated novelty.  However, this is as true of an owned corporate site as it is a fully deregulated one, perhaps even more so.  The main success of either approach lies in the brand’s ability to selectively introduce the content necessary to support and incite their community.

If we accept this commonality the big difference becomes one of reach; an owned corporate site relies on pulled traffic and unique visits, while a decentralized site pushes content into ancillary networks that can propagate and disseminate the material faster and more widely than virtually any corporate campaign.

Cloud Computing, The Early Years…
At the same time, the Skittles strategy provides a great example of something much larger than brand perception and marketing.  That is Cloud computing, a term you’ve probably heard bandied around by media pundits and technology gurus, but which you likely only have a fuzzy and general perception on.  Yeah, we know, wha?!?

Cloud computing is a lot like Web 2.0; the exact definition you get depends on who you ask.  For some folks Cloud computing conjures up ideas of dynamic data repositories accessible to an assortment of different applications across a variety of devices and mediums.  For others the “Cloud” is about bringing disparate services and applications together to form a larger experience.

The short answer is that both of these descriptions are correct.  The web as we know it is migrating towards a paradigm where content and services are decoupled and decentralized.  In this “web of the future,” online services will likely be both intelligent and portable, with content from one site sourceable to an application on another that is then integrated into a larger suite of services somewhere else.

Of course this isn’t going to happen overnight… not only does the technology and infrastructure not exist, but the basic interaction and behavioral patterns needed to support these kinds of services haven’t been adopted yet.  Instead it’s going to involve a progressive evolution, with a variety of different solutions appearing along the way.

Enter Skittles.com, which as lowly as it is, provides a protozoan example of this new paradigm in action.  Yes, it’s kind of ugly, and yes, it’s a little raw.  However, Skittles.com is forcibly assembling third party applications into a self-serving agglomeration, the site becoming a thin skin on a much broader set of distributed services.  The power of Skittles.com is thus its ability to provide a digestible “Cloud” example to people who have difficulty conceptualizing this far reaching future.

Bringing It Full Circle
So where does that leave us… Skittles.com, a canary of danger or a beacon of a compelling future?  The truth is that it’s probably too early to make a definitive call either way, and the success of the approach - both as a brand venue and as a harbinger of Web 3.0 - will depend in large part on how Skittles manages and uses their new toy.

However, what we can say is that this example is symptomatic of an accelerating trend towards an interactive medium in which there are fewer and less distinct boundaries between discreet digital applications and services.  Previously formal distinctions between brands and their customers are becoming increasingly less relevant, with companies looking to leverage the viral and associative aspects of social media networks to extend their message and increase the granularity of their touch points.

Scary and exciting all at the same time… now to wrap up and take a look at status alert I just received from my close friend, Jif.  Maybe you know him?

This talk given by Leah Buley from Adaptive Path was by far the best talk I’ve attended at SXSW this year. I felt that after her talk, I left with tools and ideas I could implement to practice good solid user experience design whether I am in a team of one or 30. That’s how she thought you ought to be doing UX - that her lessons applied to all team sizes. Indeed, I felt they did. Here are her slides from slideshare:

Here’s a link of the same talk presented at the 2008 IA Summit, with audio!