Touchpoints in Design

Designing for trust

2011-03-08T04:19:00.000-08:00

Recently I was briefed to develop an entirely new online brand and customer experience that would convey trust. It sounds like a reasonable requirement given that so many websites (particularly eCommerce and social networking sites) rely on the basic premise of trust to engage new users.
However as soon as I started thinking about what trust 'looked like', I began to have a failure of imagination.
I had to break down the concept of trust into what it really meant in the context of an online experience.
Key drivers of trust online include:

Privacy - my personal details and identity are secure and will not be misused
Reliability - the product/service will work the way I intend it, without error (including my own)
Honesty - what I see is what I'll get, no hidden fees or nasty surprises

Sure, there are all types of design devices to reassure customers of the above three attributes. For example:

Privacy - include a privacy statement, include security payment gateway badges, credit card icons
Reliability - ensure the site is usable, thoroughly tested (usability, ethical hacking, load & performance) and conforms to web standards and common browsers/platforms. More than this, provide good online customer support in case anything goes wrong or the customer has questions.
Honesty - transparent product/service descriptions, good photography, customer reviews and ratings, delivery times and return policies.

But only some of these things, through user centred design practices, are in the control of the designer and I still had to create a new brand (including a name, a logo and a tagline) that would stand alone as a symbol that could be trusted. To add to the challenge I had to demonstrate that it was a trust-worthy brand experience through testing it with the various audience segments.
After months of customer research, iterations of design and user testing, we finally had a new online brand and site design that audiences trusted slightly more than either the existing online brands that it was replacing or competing with or any of the alternative designs.
It wasn't my favourite design and it probably won't win any design awards, but audiences felt that it was an honest and accessible brand. From a design perspective, I guess you'd say it was predictable, but that's not such a bad thing when trust is the most important goal.

3 Tips for design block

2011-02-23T15:07:00.000-08:00

Design block sometimes feels that you’ve painted yourself into a corner and there is no where left to go. I find it most typically happens after you’re confidently presented your first design concepts to the client, with a beautifully argued rationale for how you’ve delivered on their brief, and to your great consternation, the client just doesn’t like them. Puzzlement slowly gives way to a gradual erosion of confidence in your own abilities.
I’ve found the following 3 tips help to get the creative juices flowing in the right direction.

1 Start with the problem, not the solution
Designers tend to be most comfortable operating on the visual plane and will often brush over the functional specifications, customer research and business requirement documents and go straight for the crayons. Another pitfall of designers is stalling the design process by spending too long looking at other designs in the market and pouring through design annuals – they are all solutions but not ones that perfectly match your client’s problem. It is a mistake to start visualising a solution before you have all the information. If you can’t answer the following questions, then you’re not ready to start design:

Why is my client doing this and what outcome are they looking for? What does your client want to achieve from the initiative, what are their priorities and constraints, what are their competitors doing in this space and who is doing it best
Who is this design for? Who will be using it, what do they want from it, why would they use it and what are their alternatives – don’t rely on your client to tell you this, get if from the horse’s mouth, whether that be interviews, contextual enquiry, focus groups or online surveys

Once you have a good understanding of the business requirements and customer context, the scope of your design will be well defined and I always find it easier to design within boundaries. Once you feel a constrictive design block, it helps to return to the problem.

2 It takes a lot of ideas to know that you’ve got the one idea
It’s tempting with small budgets to reduce the design effort to one concept. Big mistake – you’ll end up doing the extra concepts anyway – after the first design misses the mark. A basic principle of innovation is that great ideas start with lots of not so great ideas. Here’s how to get the creative juices flowing:

Get more than one designer working on the problem, work in pairs
Start on paper, whiteboards, post-its, make it easy to throw away if it doesn’t work
Get peer review and brainstorm the problem before you narrow down your solutions. It’s also OK to involve the client sometimes in these ideation sessions, their perspective can help focus the solution on the problem and they’ll be more aware of your design rationale
If possible, socialise the designs with real users of the product – this is quite confronting for designers but it almost always leads to some further refinement of the idea

Then when you’ve got two or three winners, you can review them with your client.

3 Refine and iterate
Complex design problems often take you repeatedly back to the drawing board. When designing large scale interactive systems like transactional websites and online applications, often there will be many interconnected design problems to solve. Sometimes it’s hard to keep the creative mojo throughout the design and development of the product. The principles of iterative design will help ensure that you stick to good design practices:

Start with a master set of design principles for use across the project. This helps to ensure a consistent and efficient approach to solving the composite parts of the design and allows a design team to work in concert
Break down the project into individual design problems and do just enough design to have something to test, review and refine
Follow the same process of brainstorming and exploring multiple options and involve your client and their customers in the process

I’ve found that following these basic principles really help to keep the design team engaged and motivated by the problem. Design fatigue can be a problem on really large projects but an iterative approach helps to break things down into manageable and solvable challenges.

What's next with Mobile CRM?

2010-04-24T21:26:00.000-07:00

Remember that scene in 'The Devil Wears Prada" where Andy rescues Miranda from a networking catastrophe by remembering the name of the wife of an important guest at Paris Fashion Week? Wouldn't it be useful if your CRM system was able to leverage customers' digital ID via mobile? Imagine a world where the opt-in options for your customers include allowing you to recognise their digital ID or URI via their mobile when they attend your event. The moment they walk in the door to the conference / art opening / product launch / auction, they are located by GPS and their customer details appear on the mobile device of the event hosts.
Does this represent an erosion of an individual's privacy? Not when your customer has agreed up front and understood the terms by which you can use their digital ID.
The potential extends beyond mobile ticketing and checkin as we use it today for paid events, to more diverse possibilities whereby customers can choose to be recognised when they visit the types of venues, stores or travel destinations where their VIP or loyalty status can be recognised immediately. How much more valuable would your customers feel when they are greeted by name when they enter the room and when you can remind them of the last time that you had the pleasure of their company. And if this customer courtesy is not enough value on its own to incentivise people to allow their digial ID to be read, then you probably need to rethink how you present the value and incentives for your loyalty program.
To date, most of the attention around mobile identification tracking seems to be polarised around two ends of the privacy spectrum - on surveillance and use by police at the 'big brother' end and purely social use for sharing your location with friends using mobile apps like FourSquare. Somewhere in the middle, is a valuable B2C opportunity that could deliver greater engagement between businesses and their customers.

Adobe Refresh Sydney

2010-02-24T00:18:00.000-08:00

Having missed the keynote address, I wasn't really sure what Adobe had planned for this year's Refresh. Paul Burnett's first session on Extending PDFs with Flash was way more interesting than it sounded. Basically anything you can create in Flash can be embedded in a PDF assuming that you don't require a backend database for the flash to work. There are heaps of existing flash widgets including RSS feeds, calculators, date pickers and other goodies that can extend your PDF into something really useful, collaborative and interactive. Integration of video, google maps and external files present endless possibilities for what can be shared online.

However, the edge-of-the-seat goodness came with the CS5 sneak peaks. Due for release later this year (the actual date is still a hot topic of debate in the forums) the big ticket item is likely to be the Flash iPhone capability. With a flexible compiler that understands ActionScript 3 and can publish native iPhone applications and loads of iPhone plugins for FireWorks, creating apps looked pretty easy to this designer. Flash is shaping up to be the jewel in Adobe's crown, and with support from Device Central for testing all your multi device projects, the iPad will also be a logical channel.

We finished up with a tantalising look at the mysterious Adobe Rome, written in Flex and delivering a strange mashup of photo editing, animation and web editing delivered via a beautiful and innovative user interface - the audience was left wondering whether the program would ever get commercial release. You won't find out a thing about it on Adobe's official site and we were warned to put away our phones and cameras before they unveiled it. Hopefully it won't end up on the R&D scrap heap.

SP'09

2009-04-04T18:57:00.000-07:00

Getting creative types to orate for an hour about their work must be hard given that the creative industries are largely visual and sensory and often defy our attempts at verbal explanation. So congratulations are due once again to the Design is Kinky crew for assembling yet another breathtaking array of talent who mostly spoke quite well, at this year's Semi Permanent conference. The success of previous years' line-ups has been patchy with speakers such as last year's wunderkind Anthony Lister, who after a dramatic entrance shootout, appeared to soon grow bored of his audience.
Part of the success of this year's assortment was perhaps due to the fact that most of these artists and creative professionals have been forced to verbally sell their own work from an early age and have maintained a single minded focus on defending their unique ideas to clients, agents and agencies.
Daniela Federici, who got her extraordinary break after graduating photography at RMIT, was invited to photograph the iconic Guess campaign by Paul Marciano, featuring another new discovery, Anna Nicole Smith. She was a hugely rewarding speaker whose funny insider celebrity anecdotes and generous advice and technical asides were both entertaining and valuable.
Vernon Wilbert from Digital Domain told the absorbing story of the creation of the Gears of War campaign for xbox, the first campaign animation to use the actual games engine, resulting in an ad that was not only true to the game, but wildly successful with its intended audience. The larger than life enthusiasm of the Californian kept the entire auditorium on the edge of its seat.
Other speakers used different techniques to win their audience. Tim Kentley from XYZ Studios turned the lights low and presented by candlelight whilst stretched out on the floor. Kate Gibb confided her white-knuckle terror at public speaking from the outset and proceeded to read from her tightly clutched A4 notes. Whilst this breaks all the rules, the audience loved her nevertheless and were able to focus on her images and her insider stories of the UK band scene.
Overall, this is possibly the best Semi Permanent yet. Watch out for the first SPMelbourne later this year.

Are you tuned to your customers’ channel?

2008-11-22T19:59:00.000-08:00

Sometimes there are advantages to being late adopters of technology. Wait 6 months and you’ll get a new and improved model cheaper, faster and tinier/bigger/better and you’ll also have the benefit of those 6 months of research and user reviews to help you make your purchasing decision.
Applying this to the world of online retail in Australia, we are years behind the US, but we have the benefit of learning from the successes and failures of American online retail models. We also have access to a wealth of research and statistics relating to the American retail market which can help support our local business-cases and strategies for online retailing.
Unfortunately there is a dearth of research on Australian consumer habits, although we can draw on the findings of the 2007 census and ABS data to answer some questions.
Recently Deloitte decided to survey our own people across Australia to bring to light our online shopping habits. Two of the questions that we asked related to how our people research and purchase products. The tables below illustrate their preferences for using purely online versus other channels (word of mouth, print and in-store).

The survey results demonstrated a very strong preference for conducting research online, regardless of whether the purchase was made on-line or in-store. An average of 93% of respondents said they researched online across all categories. Whilst the typical Deloittian is not necessarily representative of the wider community (higher broadband access and income), there is a lesson here that can be applied to Australian retail models and that lesson is that Australians use more than one channel across the customer lifecycle. We may purchase instore but there is a high likelihood that the purchase was researched online or using a different channel to in-store. The inverse is also true, people regularly research in-store but then purchase online to get the best price or simply for the convenience. Retailers like IKEA have learnt this lesson and assist their customers across all channels with such tools as an online kitchen modelling application that allows you to print out your list of components to present in-store. They also provide an online assistant that will answer all your questions in real time using live chat.
The important thing to remember is that even if you don’t have an online shopping cart and payment gateway, you should still treat your online channel as an online store by providing:

Accurate and detailed product information and imagery
Helpful online assistance that doesn’t first require your customers to register their details
A consistent experience to your ‘bricks & mortar’ shop front.

If your customers aren’t actually transacting with you online, they may still be doing their research online and so encouraging online membership in return to exclusive online offers that can be redeemed in-store is just one way to keep them engaged with your brand and product offering. Providing them with in-store product availability via your website is also extremely useful to customers. Pre-ordering and booking online can also support the sales pathway without the necessity of an online shop. And increasingly, we are seeing the online channel being the source of independent consumer ratings, with online retailers like Target, Amazon and Best Buy actively encouraging their customers to provide ratings of their products on their site.
Remember, no every ‘call-to-action’ is a transaction. Your online channel can be supporting your customers across the entire customer life-cycle.

The public eye and Bill Henson

2008-05-24T22:34:00.000-07:00

Bill Henson's dark dream-world images of adolescents do not stand up to the cold light of public scrutiny, it would appear. For years he has been capturing young people in strange and surreal tableaux. Chiaroscuro lighting and soft blurred images serve to make his subjects both ambiguous and fantastic.
I've always found his imagery both captivating and disturbing but there is no doubt in my mind that his intentions are to produce extraordinary artworks, not pornography.
But the hysterical public reaction to his current exhibition at Roslyn Oxley Gallery indicates that certain moral campaigners are a little behind the times when it comes to their knowledge of local art - there is nothing new in this exhibition, Bill Henson has been creating these images for years without causing undue offence.
So why has it only become a problem now? Is it because society's moral compass has narrowed with our outrage at internet child pornography as exposed in the media? Or is it simply that Bill Henson's fame has spread and he's suddenly been noticed and scrutinised by the mainstream? Whatever the reason, the recent censorship of his exhibition follows on the heals of other recent cases of art censorship in Melbourne - Hazel Dooney's sexually explicit works were covered up at last year's Melbourne Art Fair and Cherry Hood also had an exhibition closed down when she created naked images of young boys.
When it comes to the law, it will be very hard to prove that Henson has been creating pornography when this has clearly never been his intention.

Alt text standards slide

2008-05-06T03:12:00.000-07:00

The last week has seen much debate on whether images should require the alt text attribute in HTML 5. Currently in HTML 4, for code to be valid, all images must include alt text so that assistive technology such as screen readers or site users who are unable to view the images can instead use the alt text to derive meaning.
But with the advent of user generated content on sites such as Flickr, the requirement to have meaningful alt text on all images creates problems for the site because the onus is then upon the user to enter a meaningful label, or alternatively the site needs to auto-generate a meaningful alt tag such as "image uploaded by user" when no alt text has been entered.
It seems a massive concession for sites with user generated content. It would not be unreasonable to maintain the alt tag as a requirement for valid code because sites such as Flickr could simply make the alt text a mandatory requirement when uploading images - it doesn't seem like a difficult work-around when the alternative is such a backward step for accessibility.
The real problem in allowing no alt tags on images which are also links is that text to voice readers will read out the entire URL in the absence of a meaningful alt tag. This is really annoying for a visually impaired site user.
The important thing to remember here is that if the requirement for alt text on images is removed, then sites can still pass the AA accessibility test and yet fail the users that these standards are intended to protect - visually impaired users who rely on alt text to understand images on a site.
> More about HTML 5

Is social networking time-wasting?

2007-10-20T00:32:00.001-07:00

The frenzied reaction in the media this week to some spurious claims by SurfControl in relation to the use of FaceBook in the office raises the question is online networking simply time wasting and a drain on business profitability?
It is clearly in the interest of SurfControl to inflate the negative impact of online social networking sites such as FaceBook. They sell software filters to businesses to block the access to inappropriate websites. Their estimate that business is losing up to $5 billion a year in wasted time is based upon the ridiculous and unsupportable premise that every worker spends an hour on a site such as FaceBook during working hours, every working day in every business across Australia.
Whilst this premise seems to be erring on the 'worst case scenario' end of the spectrum, the more interesting question is whether the use of social networking sites is all bad for business.
In the case of organisations such as Deloitte and other professional services firms, networking is considered an essential skill of successful consultants and a business advantage.
Within Deloitte we spend money on training our staff to network - using whatever methods are appropriate. In the case of LinkedIn and Plaxo, increasingly these social networking sites are being used to connect people within business - whether that be for introductions, or to collaborate online. In many ways they present a more efficient and effective avenue for social and business contact than the more traditional channels of face to face or phone.

Swap Meat

2007-10-20T00:31:00.000-07:00

Coudal Partners Swap Meat is getting some beautifully designed ephemera sent in, utterly swapable, highly desirable, it's really all the inspiration you need to exercise the creative juices and produce something unique and well designed to send to this Chicago based design firm. At their discretion, they will send you back something of equivalent value produced by someone else.
It requires a leap of faith but your inspiration may return equally creative dividends.

Building a cubist cathedral

2007-10-20T00:30:00.000-07:00

David Hockney eat your heart out!

Photosynth - whilst still a beta application produced by Microsoft Live Labs in collaboration with some other brainy people, this amazing software promises to provide a 3 dimensional photo album that you can zoom into and explore using a very intuitive interface.

All you need is a bunch of photos that overlap - the David Hockney approach to photography. The software does the rest - once you've uploaded the images - the software stiches them together and recreates the 3 dimensions that the images were captured from (unlike VRML, this software will take you inside/out and upside/down). But even more amazing is the ability of the software to deliver high resolution through progressive loading of the visual data as the user zooms in to the images.

Apart from the collaborative applications - imagine sharing shots in Flickr to rebuild entire cities - there have got to be some interesting commercial applications:

virtual retail showrooms that are constantly updated by a live webfeed
virtual travel - view Times Square in real time, or close to real time
events like concerts or sports matches - see the action from any angle

Whilst still a preview product, I can see this changing conventional online media - the possibilities are endless!

Silverlight on the horizon

2007-10-20T00:29:00.000-07:00

Eclipse had a visit this week from Michael Kordahi - developer evangelist for Microsoft.

We invited him because the hot topic around our office at the moment is Silverlight. The ubiquitous hype has been hard to avoid - about how this plug-in could deliver fast rich media across browsers and platforms in a seamless, showy, full screen and totally interactive way. The tools you need to create these fabulous interfaces are MS Visual Studio for developers and MS Expression Studio - or specifically Expression Blend for designers.

But it's still early days:

Silverlight 1.0 is still in Beta and is a little buggy, but 1.1 Alpha is also available now
No one really has the plug-in yet but it is only around 2mg to download and surprisingly, MS will not be packaging it with IE for anti-competitive reasons
So far there is only a small developer community but it will grow

So how does Silverlight compare with Flash, AJAX and Flex for offering rich media and applications online?

AJAX doesn't require a plug in but it's complicated to code with lots of custom javascript
Flex requires the Flash plugin (which most users have), it's well supported by code libraries and a good development environment - it's easier to develop in than AJAX
And then, there is Adobe's Apollo for building rich desktop applications using flash, flex, HTML and AJAX - still in development but available now for download (check out the eBay demo)
Flash is dominant in delivering video over the web

We're impatient to try it our for ourselves, either for the Eclipse site or Deloitte Digital. If Michael's promises about the product prove to be true - it will give both designers and developers an opportunity to work together in parallel, seamlessly developing on the one platform.

Sydney Motorways goes live

2007-10-20T00:24:00.000-07:00

Sydney Motorways site is now officially live!

Eclipse have been working on this for a few months now for our client the RTA. It's a first for Australian Roads, an interactive map developed in flash that allows motorists to plan their trip using the Sydney orbital network. All you need to do is select the entry and exit interchanges and the application will automatically calculate the toll for that stretch of motorway.

It features live traffic feeds also - just click on a camera icon to view the traffic conditions before you head off. There is also a full traffic incidents section and heaps of other features.

This was an interesting project to work on, just the sheer complexity of the interchange options was enough to do our heads in at the design stage. You see, not all interchanges are the same - some can only be entered from a particular direction, so we had to provide users with all of the information they needed to select the correct interchange for the direction that they wanted to take. It sounds simple enough but it's hard to provide visual guidelines and onscreen instructions that are succinct and intuitive and don't require the user to read too much. In the end, we developed an animated red trip route line that helps inform the user of the direction that they can take from any interchange.