Brendan didn’t really have as structured a talk, and one wonders if perhaps he relied more on gimmicks in his slides than the message he was trying to convey. The method he calls ‘Boil, Simmer, Reduce’ is basically his three part plan in creating a product. Frankly it seems a very logical, if not slightly fluffy minded way to work.

Boil
This is basically filling your head with stuff. So it’s just about throwing anything and everything in to the ideas pot. When you embark on a development process you are already indirectly thinking about it all the time, whether you are watching a film, reading a fictional book or just contemplating the meaning of life. The premise is just to be grabbing ideas from all over the place and throwing them all in.

He also pointed out when discussing shots from films he likes that symmetry in itself makes things pretty.

Simmer
This is looking at all considerations of what you want. It is important that you’re not considering technical restrictions, but rather getting down to the nub of what you’d like to do. As with the Boil stage, there are no rules, you can really just do whatever you like.

Around this point Brendan suggested that good design can breed good behaviour. He spoke of work he did for a tourist information office using Microsoft Surface as a map display. There were discs which they would place on the surface which would represent hotels, and by placing that on the map it would create a ring around that item with dots showing where the hotels are in that surrounding area. By turning the disc it would amplify the area of interest. This was in Manchester and it was quite a rough area of the centre of town – “a high proportion of scallies”. The place was concerned that the discs would get stolen. But it was a beautiful space that they created through design, and nothing was stolen. He argued that this proved his belief that “good design can bring good behaviour”.

Reduce
“A design is finished when there is nothing left to take away”. Take the iPhone. It’s such a simple design, one button, an absolute minimum and it’s the sort of thing where anything can be placed on it. It can be anything you want it to be.

You should justify everything shown on a screen. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everything must serve a purposeful action. His favourite thing about the iPhone was that when you scroll up and get to the top, it creates a little bit of space with nothing underneath which simply springs back when you let go. This doesn’t really serve a purpose, bar perhaps a small mental indicator. It is just a little piece of aesthetic satisfaction. It’s just nice. That in itself can justify the feature.

He talked a bit about how he made something for the iPhone which was born out of a need. He wanted to watch a film on a train journey and couldn’t get his iPhone to sit in a good position, so he made a simple piece of cardboard that evening that would just clip onto the side. They thought it was sell-able and went through a few iterations. There was one which was so close to being right but it just wasn’t quite there. They then decided to apply Da Vinci’s Golden Ratio to the position of the cut in the rectangle. That was it. Fixed.

He also mentioned how he thinks the pencil is absolutely wonderful in design. A few of reasons he mentioned were:

1) It has a big arrow pointing to which end you use.
2) Built-in progress bar.
3) You can cut it up, and make many more of the same with it.

New ideas like this still apply to the old and best designed products.

Marty Neumeier – The Designful Company

As I’m sure you can imagine, I only made some quick notes as I was listening to the talk, so what you will find here is an amalgamation of the talk and my own thoughts. Please do not consider this as their words or even mine.

I don’t know much about any of the dConstruct speakers – Marty from first appearance was a middle aged gentleman, smart with suit jacket, jeans and shoes.  This seemed to be a common style amongst the new media gang. Fashion aside, Marty’s talk was a discussion on branding and getting a good product within a brand. To this end he reference many tech business luminaries, though like most people there he was an Apple-afficianado. For example, he was fond of a particular Steve Jobs anecdote. ‘After a marked increase in sales, Jobs was asked “how do you intend to keep this up?” To which he replied: “we intend to keep innovating”’. Marty had a theme which he both uses as his opener and closer, very neatly done too, and it is simply this: “If you wanna innovate, you gotta design”.

Marty’s assertion was that Harvard business school teaches by case study, solving problems by looking how they have been solved previously. This is counter to successful tech businesses and brands, as is testament with Jobs’ statement of the importance of innovation.

So he talked about what really gets a product there is where you need to be designing, on that edge between radical and useful, those differences between what’s good and different. He talks about that traditional style brand-development where to go for something different is a risk, and many a CEO wouldn’t take that risk. The problem is if you don’t take that risk, there is a good chance of the brand dropping into obscurity. Consider the ubiquity of swoosh logos and then globe logos and how their commonness means the brand becomes unmemorable.

So, what are some of the most successful brands and how does one get there? Marty presents a path to follow in brand development where you have the vision at one end of the scale, and the product at the other end of the scale. He suggests that to be successful you’ve got to get from one end of that scale to the other. The path to follow has three stages: knowing, making and doing. It is to this end that you need a clear visionary that can manage these stages. One needs a leader who can picture the goal, has the resources available to build the product and impetus to actually put this together without diluting the vision or compromising on the product development.

Marty also talked about how business is speeding up…  I’ll be honest, I’m doubtful, I feel this is a cliche statement that many people make based on regurgitation. Still, he made a fair point and one that is difficult to dispute, but it could do with some kind of citation. “There are now more financial transactions in one day than the whole of 1965″.

So, what do consumers want? Well, we’ve always said these things: Pick two; good, cheap or fast. What he pointed out though, is that consumers have a new demand, they want free, perfect, now. So if you want your product to be successful you’ve got to give it everything. Let’s be honest, this is something we expect when one considers products like Google docs.  He then pointed out that just to be free, perfect and now isn’t necessarily enough! In an ever-cluttered market place you have to be really different, not just a little bit different, but really different. He talked about how we organise information in our mind using categories and compartmentalisation. So what you’re ideally looking for in a product is to get it in one of those compartments by itself.  So take the example of a smart phone – you want to have your product there by itself, like the iPhone, which for some time everyone thought of as the only smart phone. A successful brand is a walled category.

Historically, to make your product a successful one you would have started with factories. By having factories you can product more than anyone else, you can supply for the demand, you’d be at an advantage. When others realised this and everyone built factories, the next step was to get the most capital, allowing you to buy out the competition. After capital was patents. Patents were a means of securing your market. Of course they can only work for so long. So the final stage is where we are at now, brands. This saves a certain amount of process because in people’s own minds they will compartmentalise and protect your brand for you as a consumer. So, to summarise, we are talking about how in the past it was very much physical – factories and a physical present which keeps your product dominant in the market, whereas now it’s a mental thing within the mind of the consumer.

If a brand is good and different, it’s a gut feeling. Your brand is what the consumer says it is and for you to stand out, that’s where you have to be really different. Example – if we have Nike, do we need Reebok? Do we need Wimpy if we have McDonald’s?  A brand has to be truly radical and good, which is indeed a big risk.

I think in all the Apple-loving I heard on this day there is a tech brand that is more ubiquitous than iProducts will ever be: Linux. How different is that? Totally radical, and it’s everywhere. Just my 2p.

Marty presented a scale with which to measure brand success using the variables of good versus different on the z and y axes. He believed a brand generally fell into one of four sectors:

1) good, not different – common, does well in tests, and at first sales, but never really dominates its market.
2) good and different – this is the sweet spot. Often does poorly in tests, which means if often won’t get to market, slow in market, but customers will in time equate the weirdness to good : and eventually it will take a dominant position in the market. Example: Aeron chairs. (btw, I love Aeron chairs
3) not good and different – won’t do well in tests, and won’t be successful, people will equate weird to bad.
4) not good and not different – you just don’t want to be here, do you? But, this one often does well in tests because it’s not different, so it’s familiar to people. But it doesn’t challenge.  A surprising amount of products sit here, like Gillette fusion razors. Five blades. Five. Whoop-de-doop. Not exactly going to dominate the market.

As your brand visionary leader man, there are four key things you need:
1) empathy
2) intuition
3) experience
4) judgement

Let’s finish how Marty did. If you wanna innovate, you gotta design.

First thing that’s worth noting, users rarely spend time looking where you want them to. They tend to follow common patterns, the most notable being the F pattern (a couple of quick horizontal scans of the page as we head down it). This means it is for us, the designer, to be aware of this and place our most important content in these areas. One might argue that a regular visitor would know where the most important information on a site is held, yet anyone with any sense knows that we want to make a site clear for everyone.

Now for banners and adverts/promotions. I’m not going to say how to get people to read them (in fact, I’d recommend getting AdBlock Plus to just cleans the web of them!), but if you want to ensure people read all information on your page then make sure that it doesn’t look like an advert. Users have an automatic tendency to ignore anything that looks like a promotion.

Next up I’ll point to Nielson’s study on how pages are read. The key point is that people don’t read, they scan. If you want to make life easy then you could put important anchor words in bold to aids the reader down the route you’d like them to take. When you’re marking this up in HMTL consider whether you should use the ‘b’ or the ‘strong’ tags. Are you merely creating a visual guide (b/i) or do you want to emphasise a word (strong/em)?

The final point I’ll pick up from Nielson is his discussion on screen sizes. Nothing surprising here, most people use 1024×768, that’s a laptop widescreen. One thing I’d like to add to is the misconception that laying out a web page is like laying out for a newspaper or a magazine. Screen sizes and resolutions are not fixed, there is no ‘above the fold’, like we find in newspapers. Even different choices of preferred system fonts or different browsers have an impact on where the cut-off will be on different machines. Interestingly, Neilson does point towards making site layouts fluid for different. Though I don’t consider this such a hard n’ fast rule, I’d like to point you CSS monkey’s 456 Berea St’s article on elastic layouts.

That’s it for this week folks. Happy building.

Some further linkage:

* A wordpress clickmap: http://www.rogerstringer.com/projects/wpclickmap

* A more general use clickmap using PHP and JQuery: http://css-tricks.com/tracking-clicks-building-a-clickmap-with-php-and-jquery/

* Strong or Bold? http://www.think-ink.net/html/bold.htm

The Wire is at it’s most simplistic level a cops and criminals affair. Set in Baltimore, each season follows an ever expanding ensemble cast through different themes; drugs, the docks, politics, education and the media. The most striking aspect though is that a balanced amount of time is spent on each side of the different groups and equal measures of justice and injustice are received by both. Watching it you find yourself rolling through empathy, admiration and revulsion at both the prominent as well as the more obscure characters. You also find subtle points of interest are dropped in which later allow for little in-jokes for the more observant viewers. The Wire is a rich tapestry which doesn’t beg for your attention with tacky ploys like explosions or excessive violence. To the contrary, it is often quiet, considered and will punish you if you were not paying enough attention before. There are no neat, self-contained episodes like CSI or NYPD Blue, you need to watch it as a whole. Don’t let that put you off though, it pays back your efforts ten fold. If you only watch one TV show this year, watch The Wire.

Still not convinced? See what Charlie Brooker thinks of The Wire

This has caused me a problem though. I was fussy with my TV before, now my standard is going to be unbearably high. I hope that the next show made by The Wire’s creators, Generation Kill, will meet these expectations.

Though of course flash isn’t homespun in itself, it is cross platform compatible and so both myself and all those other ‘nix and Mac users out there can watch the last seven days of BBC content without the need for any of that Windows tosh! Not a Vista in sight! I need never miss another episode of Cash In The Attic again. Hurrah!

Interestingly enough the developers pointed out that it is only a very small piece of the whole delivery system that was written in a proprietary format, namely the bit that goes on your computer. Over 90% of the system is running on Solaris with many of the developers using Debian based systems.

Ok Tony, off you go….

I like to think of myself as an early adopter. I certainly try to be, signing up to many new social webservices before anyone else has signed up and as such unlikely there being any point in being there. With Facebook I’d tried to sign up a couple of years ago but you needed a uni email so I couldn’t. When I came to Oxford though it was just at the start of the Facebook wave so naturally I signed my name on the dotted line.

I’d spent some time in the garish environment of MySpace for a few years (the de facto social site of Thanet rock) and so enjoyed the simplicity of Facebook. It had plain white pages, minimally organised small photos, a wall, some groups and the occasional poke. It was simple and I thanked it for that.

Then at the same time as the wave of new uni kids they opened up registration to the site to anyone with an email address. Now we get all the guys who are using it at uni telling their friends back home to come join and things started to snowball. As of today Facebook is now in the top ten global Alexa ranked sites. Its still not caught Myspace but its not got much further to go and if the rate that my new friend requests come in I doubt it will be much longer.

So here is where I think the problem lies. Facebook was successful because it differed from Myspace. It did offer a more peaceful approach to social networking but now they have opened up the site to third party applications, the likes of Zombie Biters, Booze Mailers, Super Pokers and any other stupid thing you can think of. Here is where the problem of being open to anyone with an email comes in. These applications are further propagated by people who are wasting away their work day. Now when I go to a users page I struggle to find their wall for all the other trash that’s littered over it. Infact, I can’t even use my own inbox without having to spend half an hour clearing it of stupid invites.

Facebook may not yet have reached user saturation, but it is certainly reaching the end of its usability. It makes me wonder what site will be the next big thing, its certainly time to start looking out for it. Hopefuly people will come back to blogs and forums, at least they have some substance and in many cases proved sustainabilty.