Moving Ideas

Yesterday a few of us made the trip to Nottingham to attend New Adventures in Web Design, a conference that tries to appeal to both designers and project managers (a goal I can categorically say they achieved).

Created by Simon Collison, New Adventures offers something new, fresh and unique and affordably priced. It was clear from entering the artistic surroundings of the Albert Hall Conference Centre that this gig is orchestrated by people who really care for their craft.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t recognise some of the speakers in the line-up, but what really impressed me was the breadth and depth of topics up for discussion. From hardcore process, to storytelling; User Experience to the relationships we have with machines.

Dan Mall was first up and gave an energetic talk about process, the need to love clients and collaborate at each milestone along the project journey. An Art Director from Brooklyn’s Big Spaceship, Mall gave a compelling insight into the outputs that go unseen by clients: the little details that make a project come together and the same things that make projects and people work a bit better.

Another standout for me was Robbie Manson — a Scottish-based designer who creates interfaces at Free Agent. Robbie was inspirational in his approach to the creative process, highlighting Seth Godin’s idea that we all need to experience more failures, but make fewer mistakes.

Robbie’s take on making the most of the team around us and opening up the creative process at an early stage is something FRANK has been rebooting of late. Looking hard at process is a topical subject for our own creative team. More on that later.

All in all, New Adventures was very much a flying visit, but extremely insightful and so relevant. Bursting with inspired contributions, it’s must see for anyone with a passing interest in design for the web.

Well worth the price-tag and the early start, if only to hear Dan Mall’s definition of ABY stands for in relation to his work on starwars.com — I guess you had to be there!

A few weeks ago, I was sent a letter from the bank containing the access code I needed to activate my online account. Having loaded the website to set it up, the link I was supposed to click wasn’t there. There were so many other options, and it all looked so complicated, that I klutzed around, tried a few other options and, in the end, did what presumably all of their customers must do: called the helpline.

The whole palaver really brought home that classic brand rhetoric; any effort requiring consumer engagement should either be useful or entertaining. (Preferably both).

Holding this thought as a benchmark against ideas in the brand development process brings real focus. It highlights the fact that we judge brands by how they make us feel, as much as by how they look or what they say. And what I felt about the bank was that they were disorganised, disinterested and frustrating. I was pretty much ready to lay the blame for the global financial crisis at the door of the fool who had designed this.

The notion that customers should have positive experiences when interacting with brands is hardly a new idea, the bank in question have put a lot of time and money into the design of their retail environments and advertising. Yet they, like many others, still neglect what is becoming the principal point of interaction with their customers.

Brands have an opportunity here to meaningfully express their values and reinforce in their customers’ minds what really differentiates them. How a brand behaves in this context is highly effective in building loyalty and generating referrals. And it goes so much deeper than just visual style – all interactions can be refined to build on key messages and support positive interpretations of the brand’s wider communications.

The choice of medium, channel and platform can further underpin brand expression. Credit Suisse, for example, have sponsored digital editions of magazines such as the Economist’s quarterly Intelligent Life, while Volkswagen have sponsored a free version of the iOS driving game Real Racing. These aren’t improving functional interactions between customer and brand, but allow the brands to align themselves with great content and enriched user experiences.

Meanwhile, UK retail trading figures from 2011/12 are reporting growth only in online sales. Media consumption habits are being reshaped by Video On Demand, IPTV and digital publishing. As a result of this rapidly evolving business environment, brands should be prepared to flip their entire marketing model to focus on user experience design. It’s in this avenue that their customers are most engaged and most able to interact.

My experience with the online banking service genuinely knocked my confidence in the bank. No amount of positive marketing can win that back now – only a serious improvement in their system. And I don’t think I’m alone in this. People regularly use social media to share their grievances about brands they feel have let them down and, as savvy tech users, their expectations are high. It’s time for brands to take a hard look at user experience – there is a real opportunity here to secure (or win back) customers’ trust.

Change is the only constant when it comes to user interface design. Platforms, devices and context are always shifting, but some design principles hold true, perhaps having even greater importance in the face of this progress.

Rewind a few years, (more than I’d care to mention) and the potential for innovation in user interface design for the web was exploding. Flash was becoming widely adopted and the web was suddenly freed from the table-hacked layouts of old HTML. This provided an unprecedented opportunity to reimagine how we interact with screen content and designers forged ahead with ever more creative navigation systems and content relationship models. Often taking our cues from sci-fi and gaming culture we built interfaces that moved and spun and clicked and bleeped. We laughed in the face of the nav bar and rigged in vector-based 3D. We built soundscapes for websites and implored users to turn on their speakers. Designers’ toolkits expanded to include multitudes of stock button sounds and looping ambient background audio. This was a golden era for experimentation.

It was also a period of growing confusion, frustration and ultimately rebellion amongst users and developers alike. It turned out that people didn’t want to always have to relearn how to use websites, and that, mostly, interface audio was a distraction. What they really wanted was usable interfaces leading to useful content and, as broadband speeds increased, video content. With emergence of social media, user-generated content and Google’s dominance of search, Web 2.0 brought an emphasis of function over form.

With the arrival of touchscreens and the mobile app, we’ve seen this whole process acted out again, only much faster. Product designers worried that users would need button-like responses to their tapping, so haptics had phones buzzing on every keystroke. Early apps were like old Flash websites with button clicks and screen transition whooshes, and games had virtual joysticks overlaying the screen. But things have moved on. People get it. You tap the screen, the thing works.

So, while designers need to adapt and innovate, we need to remind ourselves of the  key issues. How is the user accessing the content – what kind of device are they using, what are their expectations? Where are they doing this – at home, on the bus, in the office, how long have they got? Why are they using the interface – for fact checking, because they’re killing time or to communicate?

The near future will bring new challenges for designers as speech and gesture control become more prevalent. But as always, the most successful user interfaces will be almost invisible. Pared back to focused elegance and in tune with the users’ needs, context and interests.

Belfast was once again the venue for Andy McMillan’s Build Conference. Now in its third year, Build brings together some of the web’s brightest minds and nourishes them with thought provoking lectures, workshops and practical events. There was also an opportunity for catching up with friends and making new connections.

In many ways, this year’s conference didn’t have an intrinsic theme, it was more a series of thought threads that bound themselves more tightly as the week progressed, culminating in some of the most powerful and thought provoking conference talks I’ve ever experienced.

Craft and personal enlightenment

The Standardistas, featuring our very own Nicklas Persson, kicked things off in superb style. They perfectly captured the importance of learning one’s craft, seeking mentorship and finding new ways in which an enquiring mind can be fuelled and ultimately satisfied.

This was complimented by Simon Collison‘s reflections on craftsmanship and playing to one’s strengths.  Simon rounded off the day perfectly with his honest and open style and set the tone for reflection on our craft, imploring all web workers to build the best websites they possibly can.

Convention and heritage

Craig Mod spoke extensively about publishing and the lessons we can learn from books and their long established conventions. I was left excited about what is around the corner with epub3 (HTML5 and CSS3) and more capable devices (300ppi e-ink screens).

Our digital heritage was the focus of Jeremy Keith‘s call to arms. The web isn’t known for its longevity, but dead links and lost resources are a blight on the digital landscape. Besides taking more care with our data, we should be self publishing, self hosting and thinking about the future with every project we place online. If history has taught us anything, we can’t rely on third parties to preserve our history.

Stealing the show

Wilson Miner gave a hugely personal account of what shapes us as designers. Everything we choose to surround ourselves with, the vessels we fill with memories.  It’s difficult to explain exactly what happened during Wilson’s talk, it was something that really had to be experienced.  The entire audience was truly transfixed on the message, the tone and the perfect delivery.

“When we build, let us think that we build for ever.” — John Ruskin

All of the conference was recorded, I would urge you to visit Build’s Vimeo page and await their publication.

OpenUlster is an innovative way of offering emerging technologies for licensing to business.  For only £1, the OpenUlster team will arrange an exclusive evaluation with the interested party.

The team at Frank worked closely with Innovation Ulster on producing a strong brand identity for OpenUlster.  Frank’s interactive team crafted an attractive, easy to use content managed solution which facilitates the download of information packs and allows the OpenUlster team to engage with licensees.

Frank is extremely proud to be part of 26 Treasures, launching later today at the Ulster Museum and running until the 29th.

Our brief was to create a response to the figurine piece, Prisoner of Love. The piece reflects huge amounts of skill and craftsmanship by the Belleek potters. It is reported that only three or four of the original pieces were ever manufactured, due to the complexity and work involved in the slip casting process.

The loss of this craftsmanship was at the forefront of Frank’s complimentary piece to Paul Muldoon’s writing.

Our process

To achieve this, our crack team of developers wrote a bespoke piece of software. The program analyses images and mathematically and logically degrades them over time. Each pixel is analysed and compressed before being rendered as a GIF with a suitable colour palette. In total, the process took approximately 380 hours of processing time, split across 4 cores.

The mathematical degradation and systemic destruction of information is something which presents a very real threat to our digital lifestyles.

We need to protect our knowledge. Lets create a high resolution snapshot of life for the future generations.

Visit Prisoner of Love

Last week we found ourselves amidst the good and the great of Belfast business as Frank was named one of the city’s top companies in the aptly named ‘Belfast Top 50 Business Awards’.

Hosted annually by Belfast Media Group and backed by sponsors IBM, Invest NI and United Airlines, the event spotlights the year’s fifty champions of business who are creating jobs and wealth in the city… ‘in the teeth of a crippling recession’

Damian and Stephen attended a formal event at Stormont’s opulent Long Gallery alongside an esteemed list of eminent guests and captains of industry.

With Belfast’s finest showing up on the night to collect their awards and take a bow, Damian ‘took one for the team’ and stepped up on behalf of Frank. Damian commented that the event was; ‘…a proud moment of recognition for growth in our competitive creative sector. As the year closes in, this is a sign pointing to continued success in 2012’.

Read about the Belfast Top 50 here.

With the emergence of the social web, the way we use digital media has really turned a corner. User-generated content is king and geeks everywhere have shifted focus from the static to the plastic, creating spaces that capture and showcase the global conversation we call ‘social media’.

Last week we posted a story about our contribution to Culture Night. You can check it out here.

Another digital conversation doing the rounds is ‘The MAC & Me‘ — an online art experiment created as part of a digital media strategy which Frank delivered for The MAC — the shiny new arts destination due to open in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter in early 2012.

Like CNB11, we visualised an online conversation about The MAC. The MAC & Me homepage displays the latest fifteen tweets that use the hashtag #themacandme. These are then arranged in coloured bars whose heights vary by date and time of day.

We also added an archive page that stores and showcases every tweet captured in the conversation. Like a digital repository, this data can be repurposed for real world artistic projects like an exhibit or projection for the opening of the building itself.

Since launching, The MAC & Me has gathered significant traction offering The MAC a unique opportunity to see and share the palpable excitement that exists for this landmark project.

Visit themacand.me and tell us what you think.