User Experience
INTERVIEW – with Bernard May, CEO of National Positions
Last modified on 2009-09-09 12:22:26 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
Part 3 of 3 Need an internet marketing strategy that works? National Positions offers some of the best Search Engine Optimization services in the industry. Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Bernard May, CEO of National Positions and got an education on SEO services.
Hans Wendland: When you work with a client who’s interested in actually working as part of the team to achieve the results that they need to as opposed to an organization that says “Here’s the 800 bucks a month, you go for it” when you have an organization that is really willing to invest their own time as well as their money with you guys, what are the first steps that you take?
Bernard May: Most of our clients after speaking to us for a very short period of time realize that outsourcing this work to us is a lot easier especially with our foreign offices, the question really is, can you hire someone in the US or in Europe at $4 an hour? Probably not. That’s what the whole concept of having a flat world is all about now. In our Indian office, many of the people that join there come from IIT, which is the Indian Institute of Technology which is like our MITs really phenomenal. Obviously there are varying levels of expertise that people have, but much of the work that we’re doing is very tedious and very time-consuming. Yes, someone could do the metatags and title tags and write content for their website, but would they like to do that, or would they rather have someone write articles for them in South Africa where they could do it at a third of the price? Many times people do blogging themselves; we have a service where for $250 a month, you can have someone every business day do your blogs. Is it worth the $10 a day to do it, and to remember to do it, and to do it effectively, or to outsource it? We do have a lot of clients that have their website to a particular point: they cannot do the linking portion of it, and they’ll just outsource the linking portion, so we do do that part. And then many people will do their own pay-per-click advertising, for instance, or they may also do their own affiliate marketing.
Hans Wendland: One of the things that you talk about is email marketing, and of course the big row particularly here in Europe and I suspect in the States as well is all about spam. How do you differentiate your email marketing programs with what is typically perceived as spam? And more importantly, how are your clients end users able to make that distinction? One of the things that brought me to you actually was an email that was sent to me. It happened to come just at the right time, at the right place, and it was very well-written and it cost me very little time to follow up and with excellent results, so I commend you for that. How do you make that differentiation, and how do your clients end users make that distinction?
Bernard May: I think the place to start is with the legal definition of spam. We very closely, for all campaigns that we do, follow the federal guidelines of the CAN-SPAM legislation. The way I would define the difference between unsolicited email and spam is that spam you have no way of opting out, no way of asking to be removed from a list. Unsolicited emails, yes, it’s the same as junk mail you never asked for it, but potentially Europe has an interest in it. In our case what were doing is looking for people who aren’t ranked well, that are in specific industries, and so we do do a targeted email campaign to people that we think we can help.
Hans Wendland: What are your response percentages on these email campaigns?
Bernard May: Email has very, very low percentages, so a tenth of 1% would be considered good. Email is a very grey area, and we typically don’t offer that service anymore to many of our clients because it takes a lot of expertise, and a certain amount of endurance as well, to be able to effectively handle it.
Hans Wendland: To get the results that people expect.
Bernard May: Right. Unfortunately it has a bad name, and much of it has to do with people who’ve been spamming people over and over and over, emailing the same people. We try not to email people over and over: one-time email, sometimes we’ll follow up.
Hans Wendland: On your site you speak about offering a brand identity service that focuses on the evolution of value propositions, positioning statements and emotional essence. What is your brand identity offering about, do you work with agencies, and is it something that you do often?
Bernard May: It’s something that we’ve advertised since the inception of our company and we really haven’t had anyone utilize those services, but I do have a lot of comments about branding and positioning. Anybody can be a winner on the Internet. It doesn’t matter how big you are, whether you’re a two-person business working out of your garage or you’ve got 200,000 people working for you worldwide. What you need to do is very specifically know what your unique selling proposition is, what you’re selling. Google, and I’d say all the major search engines, have determined what they consider to be websites that they like. Google likes lots of content; they like a website that has a specific subject area. So say, for instance, you’re selling cars: they prefer to have someone who’s selling a specific brand of cars. If you’re selling luxury cars, they prefer a site that has to do with Porsche to a site for luxury cars or cars in general, so the more specialized you are, the more specific you are in what you’re selling, the better you can do on the web. So much of what we teach people is how to organize their website around subject areas, and trying to build their brand around a particular set of keywords. This is a whole new area that most people don’t understand and haven’t quite fathomed. In fact [many people are] trying to open up a store online that has whatever they were selling offline, and many times it’s much more effective to have subject-specific websites, and then those subjects very, very clearly delineated within the website itself. When you think of branding in the true sense you think of a particular brand name that on the Internet today isn’t as important because people are searching for results. So say, for instance, you’re looking for an SEO company, and you’re typing in the term SEO company, does it matter that the company is called National Positions or NetSuccess or Regional Internet Marketing, which actually all belong to National Positions? It doesn’t really matter. What you’re getting from Google is an implied value of your brand by just coming to the top of the search engines. It’s a very interesting concept.
Hans Wendland: It really is. I’ve just started to really understand it. I’ve had a great time speaking with you it’s been very, very helpful and the information is extremely valuable. Thank you very much for your time!
Special thanks to Tracy White for editing and transcription.
TECHNOLOGY – NEW Flash Flickr Widget
Last modified on 2009-04-15 02:32:22 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
Roy Tanck’s new Flickr Widget is so cool and so easy to deploy you just have to try it yourself!As I was looking around for a new fandagle way to push my Flickr Photostream to my my web site at www.hanswendland.com, I came across Roy Tanck’s new Flickr Widget. It’s a Flash based widget that lets you display the most recent entries in your Flickr Photostream, and through a very simple interface on www.roytanck.com, and a copy/paste into my HTML pages, I was able to implement the widget in seconds!
I really like Roy’s welcome statement: “Roy Tanck used to conduct secret nuclear experiments for an undisclosed Eastern European government and was on the verge of discovering how to harness nuclear fusion when he decided to focus on WordPress instead.” and when I took the time to read through his blog, I also found a wealth of useful info on WordPress, Flash and web design in general. I found myself referring back to his library of code and tidbits again and again… well worth digging around, and referring back to.
As soon as I get a chance will implement his WordPress WP-Cumulus on this blog and make his tools a permanent feature on my sites.
Thanks Roy! Great stuff – Don’t forget to donate into his Tip Jar.
USER EXPERIENCE – dontclick.it
Last modified on 2008-10-26 02:55:35 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
Recently a colleague of mine showed me Alex Frank‘s dontclick.it and I was immediately captivated by both the design and the interaction.
Alex Frank‘s dontclick.it site demonstrates a clickless user interface. Dontclick.it is the result of the Alex’s diploma studies in communication design at the University of Essen Duisberg, Germany. Alex is responsible for both design and development of this project.
And yes I clicked… not more than once or twice, but we are now “programed” to do that and it’s very difficult to get away from primal instinct of “clicking wildly”. On the other hand I adapted to the new control surprisingly quickly and have gone back to it many times.
I like the monochromatic design, it is very light and and lets you focus on the contextual content. The design is fresh, with the perfect amount of white space. The information architecture is simple and easy to navigate. I had no problem finding what I was looking for or going back to it. The new way to navigate, once I got used to it, did not distract me from the content of the site, and I was pleasantly surprised that most clicking models cold be accounted for by just waiving the mouse around. The “timed” button, the “enter” buttons, the “swished” buttons, the ability to distinguish mouse motion and give it purpose, all make perfect sense.
In some cases I would really like to see the no-click model extended to data entry, where stroke optimization and task timings are critical. I would also be very curious to see alternative information architectures applied to this site, that take advantage of what “really works” in the no-click model to navigate threw the content even faster. For example the navigational model is based on circular patterns instead of the traditional “upside-down L” layout. I can envision the navigational components “sitting” on a 3-dimensional sphere where navigation can happen with minimal motion in every direction… bringing back the concept of independent “navigators”.
USER EXPERIENCE – Corey McPherson Nash, not just design
Last modified on 2008-05-15 23:44:58 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
In the quest to fulfill my creative addiction, very shortly I will have the opportunity to speak to Michael McPherson, one of the partners at Corey McPherson Nash of Watertown, MA, USA. To prepare myself for this call, I tried to become a little more familiar with the agency, their philosophy and experience, and most importantly with their people.
As usual the first stop is the web site www.corey.com, where I started to poke around and very quickly came to the realization that Corey McPherson Nash is not just about design… To start, the website is “different” and once I figured out how to peek under the covers I found a wealth of information that not only indicated that they harbor real talent, but that the talent have some really useful things to say… hmmm, the more I saw the more I liked!
Regardless of how my conversations go with the folks at Corey McPherson Nash, I thought I would share two pieces I found very interesting, particularly as I have had to deal with both in the recent past:
1. CMN Podcast: What’s in a name?
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This month, Dave Fish interviews Andrea Naddaff, VP Business Development and Partner with Corey McPherson Nash about naming. Naming can be a fun process, as well as an arduous one. Listen in for tips on how to name products, brands, services and more. Naddaff also provides some insight into the trickiness of naming online entities.
Listen to the Podcast on IMN Read the transcript
2. Michael McPherson speaks: Delivering the Message: How the Pros are Adapting (PDF), presented to the Printing Industries of New England
TECHNOLOGY – Flash, Flex and now Thermo!
Last modified on 2008-05-13 04:20:52 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
WARNING: ONLY FOR SERIOUS USER INTERFACE GEEKS!
A good friend of mine recently told me about a new super cool Adobe product code named Thermo, and pointed me to the YouTube video enclosed in this blog post… I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised when I saw a Adobe Photoshop file converted on-the-fly to a web application!
Thermo will definitely add a new dimension in the capabilities a User Interface developer has to participate in the “build” process of a web application… it is left to be seen however, if the engineering world will allow designers to “build their own apps”
“Thermo” is an upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs. Thermo allows designers to build on familiar workflows to visually create working applications that easily flow into production and development.Features:
- Use drawing tools to create original graphics, wire-frame an application design, or manipulate artwork imported from Adobe Creative Suite tools.
- Turn artwork from Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks directly into functional components that use the original artwork as a “skin”.
- Define and wire up interactive behavior, such as what to do when a user clicks on something, without having to write code.
- Easily design UIs that work with dynamic data, such as a list of contacts or product information, without having access to the actual data source.
More information available at Adobe
Design-time sample data can be used as a realistic placeholder when laying out an application, testing interactivity, and choreographing motion.Applications created in Thermo are Flex applications that can be loaded directly into Flex Builder, providing a great round-trip workflow for designers collaborating with developers. The designer’s work can be incorporated directly into the production application with no loss of fidelity, and designers can continue to refine the design throughout the iterative development process.
TECHNOLOGY – Photo fun at bighugelabs.com
Last modified on 2008-05-13 03:12:39 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
I recently discovered the fun tools at bighugelabs.com!
bighugelabs.com is driven by John Watson who I think is brilliant, he has created a number of very fun tools from creating a puzzle, posters and calenders from the images on your Flickr account to mapping where you have been in the world, to adding some unique special effects to you original photography. All his applications are simple, fun, well though-out and easy to use and play with.
It seems that his business model relies on subscription, for which you get the high-resolution version of your images after processing them with his applications.
Personally I have played with and enjoy Jigsaw, Mapmaker, Badge Maker, Calendar, Gallery, Profile Widget, Flickr DNA, Photo Wall, and Hockneyizer which is how the photos in this blog entry were created!
Another little application I love is called Writer, it’s simple, clean and efficient, no thrills, no unnecessary features, no hype, just write… Eric Franklin blogged about this application and his review reflect my opinion very accurately.
More fun than humans should be allowed to have! I highly recommend bighugelabs.com!
TECHNOLOGY – Goodbye Torrentspy
Last modified on 2008-05-11 20:49:58 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
No comment is needed… not that I ever used Torrentspy.
Last modified on GMT. 0 comments. Top.
TECHNOLOGY – Plaxo: finaly realy usefull
Last modified on 2008-04-15 16:48:44 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
Yesterday I revisited a service I had seen quite some time ago and was astonished at the transformation! Plaxo 3.0 has made radical changes that has turned a so-so service into a must have!
I had seen Plaxo many moons ago and after some initial trials discounted it for a number of practical reasons: it’s dependency on Outlook, the interface, the performance, and so on… The initial concept of a online “contact and calender central” was very appealing but the implementation at the time was less than desirable, and at the end I never used it… Until yesterday!
Yesterday some one sent me an invitation and I took the time to revisit Plaxo. What a difference! Suffice it to say that after re-registering I decided to go all out. I loaded all of my info, I downloaded the synchronization tool for the Mac, I synchronized my Apple address book with my Google address book with my LinkedIn contacts with little effort and NO, yes NO problems or duplicates at all, which is a FIRST ever!
I also uploaded 8 iCal calenders and synchronized them with my Google calendar and created a shared calendar which is accessible by all of my contacts.
In less than a 20 minutes I combined and synchronized all my info into one place, where the data is secure, accessible and BACKED UP! By the end of the process I was so exited I could barely sit in my chair, and invited all my contacts, over 300, to join the service.
Today I was even more surprised when I discovered that over 80% of the contacts I invited to Plaxo accepted my invitation and joined the service!
But thats not the best part… The best part is what Plaxo did with Pulse.
Pulse is the first “mash-up” that really works! With Pulse I can see not only what my contacts are doing in Plaxo but I have the ability to gather and manage all the information I have spread over the internet in ONE SINGLE PLACE! and with the Plaxo widget I can extend that perspective to my website www.hanswendland.com and my 3 blogs… I am in heaven!
But don’t just take my word for it, here are some links to other opinions which merit mention!
Plaxo 3.0, the new “Switzerland” of social networks, but …
I really want to love the new Plaxo. The 18-minute demo I got last week is awesome — see it embedded above. They’ve completely rebuilt the system from …
Plaxo – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Plaxo is an online address book service founded by Napster co-founder Sean Parker, Minh Nguyen and two Stanford engineering students, Todd Masonis and …
Are You Paying Attention?: Individuals from Plaxo, Google and …
8 Jan 2008 … We are proud to announce the inclusion of Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), Brad Fitzpatrick (Google) and Benjamin Ling (Facebook) to the …
Plaxo Flubs It
3 Jan 2008 … News leaked prematurely today about a new Plaxo Pulse feature that allows users to match Facebook contacts to Pulse contacts, …
And a final bit of propaganda on YouTube… note: this guy drinks way, way, way to much coffee!
TECHNOLOGY – What is Web 2.0?
Last modified on 2008-04-01 11:32:54 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
There is lot to be said about Web 2.0, and still most people don’t really know what it is. In this post you will find some references and videos I have assembled to help understand the concepts around Web 2.0
Wikipedia defines Web 2.0: Web 2.0 is a trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to facilitate creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of a second generation of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. The term became notable after the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004.[2][3] Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use webs. According to Tim O’Reilly:
“ Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.[4] ”Some technology experts, notably Tim Berners-Lee, have questioned whether one can use the term in a meaningful way, since many of the technology components of “Web 2.0″ have existed since the early days of the Web.[5][6]
Contents
This is a very good article written by Tim O’Reilley:
What Is Web 2.0
Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software
by Tim O’Reilly
09/30/2005
I found the following videos to be helpful when explaining Web 2.0:
Web 2.0
Power of Web 2.0
Eric Schmidt at the Web 2.0 Expo
Eric Schmidt, Web 2.0 vs. Web 3.0
Future of Web2.0 3 of 9 Keynote~Lawrence Lessig~
Davos Annual Meeting 2007 – The Impact of Web 2.0
TECHNOLOGY – Announcing www.tech-hotel.com
Last modified on 2008-03-21 23:43:56 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
Announcing www.tech-hotel.com a new blog focused on technology from the user perspective.
A number of months ago I launched www.canvas2screen.com, a blog focused on my 3 passions: painting, photography and technology. My intention was simply to 1) build a WordPress blog from scratch and get an introduction to the Blogsphere, and 2) start publishing and writing about some of my work. The site has been a continuous source of discovery, in technology, in publishing and in myself. It has helped me frame and focus my work and given me a focal point of reference… and I’ve had a lot fun doing it!
www.canvas2screen.com has been a great success! I did not expect many people to be interested in my opinion and work in technology, and even less interested in my abstract photography and in my paintings… but I was surprised to see the general response and support I have received from the visitors of my blog. The response has been so overwhelming that I am now ready to push the limit of my “luck” and expand my blog world.
I have decided to focus on each of my three passions by publishing three individual blogs:
www.canvas2screen.com – will focus on my abstract photography
www.crack-hotel.com – will feature my paintings
www.tech-hotel.com – will focus on technology from the user perspective
All three blogs share the same look-and-feel, which will make it easy for users to navigate and feel comfortable on each site, and all three blogs are tied together by the main menu, which lets the users jump from one to the other effortlessly (as a matter of fact I am now playing with “iFrames” which lets users navigate in a site from inside another site, so you never have to leave your favorite).
On www.tech-hotel.com I will focus on the technology work I produce and on new technology seen from the user perspective. I will try to expose technology with simple easy to understand language so that anyone can comprehend the use and benefits of new technology or new concepts that are evolving around us. My focus will be in the areas of user-experience, graphic user interfaces, web, mobile, social networking and user-generated content.
On www.tech-hotel.com I will launch a series of interviews with CEOs, technologists, and innovators where through 10 simple questions, I will try to expose new companies, new services and new technologies. My first interview with the CEO of NationalPositions, Bernard May, will be published very soon, the interview focuses on their offering in the space of Search Engine & Content Optimization Services.
USER EXPERIENCE – Bluehost.com a great user experience
Last modified on 2008-03-10 08:08:54 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
A number of months ago I started a major upgrade and redesign of www.hanswendland.com including the design and implementation of 3 WeordPress blogs (2 are running and one is still under construction).
When I am between projects I usually dedicate my time to improving my technical or analytical skills and hopefully learning some new ones, and this time I really bit-off a large chunk… I decided to learn the world of PHP/CSS so I could rebuild my main web site from scratch (as the earlier version was entirely produced in Macromedia Flash) and additionally I wanted to throw myself into the blog-sphere, with both feet.
However this entry is not about my project… I will blog on that later perhaps, this blog entry is about my Hosting Partner – BlueHost.com
I chose to blog about them as I have been a customer of theirs for a number years, and in the past, as in my recent project they have been a really fantastic service provider – all the way!
If you are not familiar with BlueHost.com I recently found 2 blog entries which reviewed their services very accurately and fairly:
1. Bluehost – Bluehost review. Is Bluehost a Good host or a Bad host? Bluehost Sucks? Bluehost Scam? – by www.squidoo.com
2. BlueHost Review - Douglas Hanna
So what made BlueHost.com such a great partner on this project? Their SERVICE, their FEATURE SET and their CUSTOMER SUPPORT!
From the start, this was trial-by-fire project, as ALL the technology I wanted to use was fairly new to me, which meant, I made all of the usual mistakes and had to ask all the usual “stupid questions”, and in this discovery process BlueHost.com and their Support team, were very helpful and I was always able to get the help I needed to move my project forward.
At BlueHost I spoke (and tortured) the Sales department, Customer Support – 1st and 2nd level, their WordPress gurus and their PHP/CSS experts that had the patience of God.
I worked with BlueHost on the following project components :
- Secured a local user “back-up and restore” of all my files on the BlueHost.com servers (all my PHP databases, thousands of docs, pages and images I have collected in the last 15 years) and migrated my files to new servers
- Updated my KnowledgeTree DMS
- Moved and updated my Mambo open-source experimental web site
- Added two domain names and moved a third
- Created a test and development environment
- Implemented a CSS template based web site structure
- Added the necessary back-end functionality for accepting PayPal payments and credit cards online. (will be announced in 2 weeks)
- Tyed together my social networks to a manageable control panel
- Implemented 3 WordPress blogs with individual domains, tying all three blogs together
- Implemented Postini (eMail filtering service)
- Implemented DaDa Mail on the BlueHost.com servers (mailing list manager)
- Upgraded all of my eMail services and created 16 new eMail addresses across all domains
- Implemented Google Ads, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools for all 4 websites
All with help from BlueHost.com Customer Support people, which after many years in this industry, I am still very impressed and please at how great the quality of their service really is, and how professional, knowledgeable and resourceful the people are answering the phone! Particularly the night shift, as I am in Switzerland and when I call the BlueHost Customer Support team its usually in the very small hours of the morning in the US, and Customer Support guys are always there, wise, well, and awake.
It also helps a great deal that when I call Customer Support’s main number with Skype their system is smart enough to recognize I am on VOIP and switches me transparently so that all my transatlantic calls in the last three months to BlueHosts Customer Support have added up to a grand total of $ 0.00!
To be fair, not everything always worked the first time, on occasion I lost my site for a small periods of time, minutes, the technical suggestions were sometimes contradictory to other sources on the web, but nothing that a little patience and some legwork did not resolve quickly. Overall the Bluehost.com sweet of services are a real value for the money, and the Customer Support team is an exemplary partner you can really count on in an implementation project.
Having completed the project, I am very happy with the support I received from Bluehost.com. I highly recommend their service, applaud their Customer Support and will use them as a hosting partnered on all my future project.
By the way… in several days I will announce a new Interview Series at www.tech-hotel.com and soon I hope to interview BlueHost.com’s CEO Matt Heaton who has a great blog at mattheaton.com
USER EXPERIENCE – Designing web pages just for fun
Last modified on 2008-03-09 21:56:25 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
In the last 15 years I rarely had the opportunity to design interfaces just for fun, however recently I took the opportunity to do just that… and I had a blast!
While working on a recent project building a Web2Mobile company offering free casual games for the mobile phone focused on a social networking platform where user-generated content was king, I had the opportunity to go back in time and be a pixel-princess for a day, just for fun!
It’s been quite a while (with the exception of www.canvas2screen.com and www.hanswendland.com) since I had the opportunity to play around with some of the new graphic tools, methods and techniques, particularly since the Web 2.0 fad. So when the engineers worked out the doable, the information architects defined the structure of the content and the usability experts finished messing about with their white paper prototypes, I went back to my comfortable office at home, opend a lovely bottle of red wine, turned on the jazz, connected my Apple PowerBook to a majestic 30″ Cinema HD Display and started to imagine a completely different world.
I imagined a world where the focus were the people, where the pages were not cluttered with text no one would read, where white-space ruled, where buttons were large enough my grandmother could see them. I imagined a world where you only needed to do two or three things to be satisfied, where I intuitively knew where everything was and where I was able to know exactly where I was all the time.
No tag-lines, no-buzz-words, no complicated forms, no push, no pull, no jerking around. A world that was not cluttered with messages I had to know, sponsored by every household product you can think of. I imagined that the primary concern was that the users had fun, all the time, every time.
I imagined seeing a smile on every page and when I went back the smiles would be different, and where sometimes I would go back to a page just to see a new smile. I imagined a world where when I wanted something I would just click once and get it and where it would know what I really wanted before I did.
I have to admit, the more wine I drank, the easier it was to imagine, however in this case having left all of my past design conditions, habits and pretensions outside the office door, and focusing on this new world disregarding all the old rules, the easier it was to come up with a variety of design motives very quickly and with some of the new tools it was also a breese to assemble all thge components necessary to elaborate a specific direction.
After some time of having more fun than anyone should be alowed to have, I sat back and looked at the results of my work… and I started to remember that in the late 80′s a number of very crazy friends of mine and I spoke and fantasized about just such a world with just as much passion and conviction, elaborating on the impossible, dreaming of three dimensional worlds where people could socialize and discover each other, where everybody shared and contributed to the content, where space and time had no limits as they traveled from one computer to the next circling the world…
hmmm… I then started to wonder, in almost 20 years, how far we have really come… I decided it was not far enough, drank the last sip of my wine, shut down the PowerBook, turned off the light and went to bed.
USER EXPERIENCE – SC ’08 a fantastic user experience
Last modified on 2008-02-25 12:23:38 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
Great graphics, ease of use, seamless Descktop2Web integration and un-intrusive in-game advertising in this FREE game delivers a fantastic user experience.
A number of months ago while watching the local news (in Lugano, Switzerland) I happened to catch a short report about a free downloadable game for Windows (uuug!) that let the user ski down the actual downhill tracks of this years alpine skiing World Cup. The game is called Ski Challenge ’08.
I am not a big gamer, I don’t own any gaming platforms, we are a Mac family and my son has been playing “edumacational” Flash games from the likes of Nick Jr. and Playhouse Disney since he was 2. I have several Mac Intel machines running Windows, and so we were able to easily download the game and install it on my Macs.
I am a big ski fan, and being in the middle of the Alps, skiing here is a big deal (like football is in the US and soccer is in the UK), so much so that in winter we call Swiss TV “All skiing, all the time”. Couple this with the fact that my son just started to ski, resulted in instant ski-fever.
I believe this is the second edition of this game, and I can’t praise the development effort enough. The game is simple, the controls are very easy, there are a limited set of features that are not very complicated and the graphics are great, but most of all they are true and realistic to 4 actual tracks of the World Cup, which meant that my son (with ZERO investment – skiing is an expensive sport) was able to see the various tracks and experience going down each one, over and over and over again! Great fun!
Ski Challenge is the most successful product of its kind worldwide, offered free of charge to end users and financed exclusively via in-game advertising. Last year there were 3 million game downloads and a total of 230 million online races run.
This year 
was able to acquire even more licensing partners for Ski Challenge and they expect that these additions, as well as the continued popularity of Ski Challenge in the participating countries, will ensure a steadily rising number of downloads and participating players. (Not to mention revenue potential)
A total of 4 to 5 million players are expected for this season. And that’s not bad.
So whats makes this a great user experience? Well for starters my 5 year old boy was able to download, install the application and play the game without a single instruction. All the technology works (even though its running in Windows), the recreation of gravity is almost perfect. The advertising is not intrusive and very realistic, you can race against your own ghost, you can make a video of your descent, but the coolest feature which really works seamlessly, is the ability to qualify for a race every week and ski against millions of other skiers on-line!
Now, all they need to consider for ’09 is a Mobile version!
USER EXPERIENCE – The Playyoo logo
Last modified on 2008-02-25 12:24:27 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
The hardest exercise in the world, and the most rewarding!
As much as I adore good design, I am not the world’s best designer, by far… I have been producing multimedia for quite some time for a variety of channels, and I have had the pleasure of working with absolutely fantastic designers for Web, UI and branding. These experiences have taught me a great deal about good design, but most of all they have taught me how to get good work out of designers.
I have seen every kind of multimedia project you can think of—with the best and worst talent available—take the most unprecedented turns ever, and I have learned how to avoid making the same mistakes twice… which usually means I can make the best happen with the resources and talent at hand, and that’s a good start!
If you are interested in learning about good design there are many great resources, such as the site published by Matt Webb at Scratchmedia specifically focusing on Web 2.0 design www.webdesignfromscratch.com . And there are great articles and blogs that give straight-forward, factual insights on how to build and migrate brands, develop a good User Experience, and design User Interfaces that really work. Some of my favorites lately are:
Building a web brand — Prescient Digital Media – strategic eHealth …, YOUmoz | Brand Building and Web 2.0, MultiMediator – Digital Brand Building, » Building for web 2.0 part 2: Brand Design and Designers | Web …, The FASTForward Blog » Building Brand With Web 2.0 Tools ….
For Playyoo the “brand challenge” was typical of any technology start-up in the Web2Mobile world. We had a very small budget, tight deadlines, and the world as the target audience. We had a technology platform that evolved daily, user requirements that would change endlessly over time, form and format requirements that would change faster than the technology hosting them, and a unproven business model.
The first step I took was to engage Donal Fean, one of the most experienced brand designers I knew and with whom I had worked in the past. His experience, coupled with our having worked together before, made a huge difference in the time it took for us to understand each other and focus on the requirements and deliverables.
The second step we took was to limit brand development to its simplest form, drastically limiting the components and making them as transportable as possible.
We defined 1) The Brand Soul, 2) The Brand positioning and 3) Donal created a Brand Essence Pyramid:
These three components gave us enough insight to focus on 4) the logo, which had to work on the web site, on mobile phones, in print and on gadgets. This was a real challenge, as over 100 new mobile phone models are released daily!
After many iterations, the final logo we delivered is what is pictured at the top of this page. We created several variations for portability, and made sure it worked well on existing Flash Lite enabled mobile phones:
Finally we defined the 5) Primary and Alternative Color Selections, and Donal then created a 6) Brand Color Wheel and a 7) Main Color Scheme with Supporting and Mood Palettes:
These components were then shipped to the Web development team who implemented them on the Playyoo web site. These basic guidelines were also applied to the first gadgets that were created for traditional marketing give-away programs.
This exercise had to take into account so many variables that at first glance it was truly a daunting task, and on more than one occasion we came to the frustrating conclusion that “anything” we did would be absolutely right or hideously wrong. In this case the experience and approach of the design team, the implementation team, and the method of work we adopted gave us a very satisfactory result.
In no shape or form is the development of a logo, a palette and some guidelines a complete branding exercise. The really important effort is now left to the Playyoo marketing team, so we can only wait and see…
