The breathless announcement of the iPad and its revolutionary promise were a bit at odds with the accompanying demonstrations. Interestingly, Apple chose to communicate the iPad’s abilities by showcasing just how closely the experience aligns with what is already familiar to us, leaning heavily on the iPhone experience and introducing new concepts by using very literal visual metaphors. The ibook app, for example, was presented as a bookshelf, and turning pages in a book was invoked by a swipe that curled and turned the page. In my mind, this announced the tablet as a device aimed squarely at casual computer users, and suggested that the innovation was actually in successfully porting familiar “analogue” experiences into a digital space. It also brought to light a tried and true method for addressing an audience: using metaphor as a way to communicate utility in an interactive experience.
There is certainly nothing new in this, as the very foundations of our computing experience are built on the metaphors of a desktop, folders, files, etc., but the passage of time and the inevitable bloat of features abstracted the experience to a point where the core metaphor became only loosely applicable. However, a quick survey of recent mass-market innovations in UI reveals an emergent trend: Guitar Hero, the Wii, and multitouch interfaces all rely on easy metaphors (some more literal than others) and return the user to a more familiar place.
The lesson to be learned from this is to understand that effectively engaging an audience may be accomplished by choosing the right metaphorical experience. This can only be a productive strategy if the core metaphor is respected throughout the development of an idea. It’s helpful to remember that the way that an idea is sold to the client is probably a good way to sell it to the audience. It is also important to know when to innovate, but understand when innovation abstracts the experience from the metaphor. Maybe “keep it real” is meaningful advice after all.
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parkour motion reel from saggyarmpit on Vimeo.
In light of all the gadget euphoria oozing out of CES and onto the internet, the best thing I’ve seen this week is totally analog. You have to love what a little free time, creative thinking and talent can pull off in this day and age.[No Responses] | Submit a Comment
Ok, 3D is cool, Google phone cooler but the tablets seem to a very interesting opportunity for us as interactive designers. It is kind of like a laptop you can snuggle with. Take the ease of use of an iPhone, the power of you’re your lapto and through it into a Promethean monitor small enough to haul around in a man purse, and you have something. CES was swimming with these low cost digital Frisbees. Oddly when I looked at the Apple tablet mock up I flashbacked to myself at 10 sitting on the couch with a TV dinner watching the Tribble episode of Star Terk
ces 2010 the year of the tablet-pc/
The Sports Illustrated Prototype kind of says it all
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The battle that brands wage for the attention of users is often writ large with big production budgets and multi-million dollar media buys. For the interactive industry, this means an experiential website heavy on Flash and video, a Facebook fan page, a MySpace buy, assorted mobile apps that tie into the campaign, and a banner campaign that drives to the campaign site. This is all executed in the name of more click-throughs, more page views, and longer site visits. What gets lost in the metrics frenzy is meaningful engagement.
A simple Twitter campaign that United Airlines is currently running offers insight into how a small experience can reap much larger rewards. Every day, a single tweet is sent out that asks a United Airlines specific question. The first person to correctly answer back via Twitter wins a very modest prize. Simple.
The expense of running such a campaign is extremely low -- minimal administrative costs and the value of the prize. Fulfillment can be in the form of a coupon code. For the user, while the value of the prize itself is nominal, the barriers to entry for the contest are extremely low and the act of winning is a prize in itself. This is the digital form of the radio call-in contest (remember those?). To this day, my wife still talks about when she won an album from a random band by being the 8th caller to a local radio station. The salient fact is that she won, nevermind what the prize was.
The company running such a campaign creates an audience that becomes very receptive to the company’s marketing messages. As well, the messages are inadvertently echoed by the audience in the form of contest participation, and so what began as a single text-based message quickly ripples out to become thousands of very lightweight but high-value engagements. Easy peasy, right?
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The shift in news gathering and distribution that has taken place over the past few years has taken another turn with the introduction of Twitter Lists. Users are allowed to personalize the way they digest news and events by filtering them through the multiple lenses of the people they follow on Twitter. Curiously, there are quite a few parallels to the structure that Twitter Lists are taking to the traditional breakdown of news, and so users will find lists of current events, politics, sports, local news, etc., and probably organize their own lists along these somewhat familiar lines. The big difference is that because Twitter is so heavily focused on the personal ("What are you doing?"), the feeds from lists are peppered with personal opinion, random happenings, and decidedly off-topic musings.
Things will get quite interesting as more and more people begin to use Twitter as their initial entry into finding and digesting news. Rather than beginning the day by hitting a cycle of major news sites and blogs, users will simply check their lists. However, while Twitter is organized synchronously according to the latest tweets, the tweets themselves may contain asynchronous content. This makes discovery much more serendipitous than browsing the front page of the Times, for example.
It will be interesting to watch how traditional media outlets adapt to this change. An unspoken side of this is that lists will offer Twitter an obvious way to monetize their service, serving up ads that are topically related to lists. I can only imagine that this will further impact the ad revenue that primary news sources can generate. Thankfully, Twitter’s 140 character limit restricts a tweet to a link and a pithy remark, and so primary sources are still necessary. For now.
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One way to view methods of driving and sustaining online engagement is through the lens of education reform. Interestingly, many current theories on education revolve around emulating models of online engagement, mimicking successful virtual communities, particularly gaming communities, in order to structure better classroom behavior and performance. But perhaps we should flip the script and try to understand what we, as developers of online communities, can learn from successful educational models.
A recent article in Wired provides (loose) analogues in promoting online engagement. In it, the author notes how traditional barriers to educational success can be overcome through policies of inclusiveness and mandatory participation, leveling cliques and inverting schoolyard power structures. What is left is a world in which geeks rule the classroom and achievement is cool. The general method is to force students into the same constituency regardless of socio-economic standing or past achievement (and including the teachers in the flattening of the power structure), thus creating a single, all encompassing clique in which being smart is equated to being cool, and who doesn’t want to be cool?
Online communities rise and fall with breathtaking speed, oftentimes largely based on how "cool" they are, and the exercise of keeping a brand relevant can really be equated to keeping a brand cool. The precipitous decline of MySpace is instructive on so many levels, but one of the more underexposed reasons is that the community was structured in a manner that reinforced a schoolyard hierarchy that extended to every member of MySpace. Not cool. However, while the relative “coolness” of Facebook is highly debatable, the hierarchy within Facebook is much more localized and flat, and constituencies on Facebook are closed and consist of equivalents. Thus, Facebook may not be cool, but a circle of Facebook friends is -- and always will be -- cool to each other because they are not stacked up against the impossibly large pool of all Facebook users.
This would indicate that the idea of social capital can be counterproductive in maintaining online communities, especially when those communities achieve a terminal size. Social capital relies on a vertical hierarchy, and brands that constantly pursue the affections of "tastemakers" inevitably exhaust what they can offer this constituency. Instead, communities (or sub-communities) that are localized and small enough to avoid the formation of cliques operate through much more organic interactions that speak to basic human impulses of communication and connection. As well, flatter social structures keep barriers to participation lower, and rather than maintaining engagement by feeding the beast of novelty and exclusiveness, users stick with an online community through comfort and habit. Call me lazy, but that sounds pretty good to me.
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Art meets Robot meets Minimal meets A Child Like Curiosity. Arthur Ganson's kinetic metal sculptures mix high art with gearhead humor.
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What is the size of this browser window? I think a cylinder might be better....maybe. It is kind of interesting to imagine where this is headed from a gaming aspect. I think I would want to start with Mario Galaxy!
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Long time friend of JUXT Mugen is putting together a great show at the Seventh-Degree Gallery in Laguna Beach on June 12th. Cute and Dangerous is an esteemed art event, a global collaboration of sixteen artists who have come together to showcase their own adaptation of edgy, modern art.
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This touches the designer, architect, information architect, technologist, developer and geek in us. You have to love how simple something like looking at data can become so visually beautiful when creative people get involved.
visualcomplexity.com
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