Last Thursday (3.19) at Microsoft MIX09 in Las Vegas, NV Roundarch presented our Interactive Experience Award to Scott Guthrie of Microsoft. We were very excited to present this award to Scott because of his ground-breaking efforts in Web development including the creation of the Microsoft .NET platform, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Microsoft Silverlight. Our team at Roundarch has been extremely impressed with just how far Silverlight has developed in a little over a year. At MIX09 Scott announced some of the exciting new features of Silverlight during his keynote, including support for running Silverlight applications out of the browser, dramatic video performance and quality improvements, and features that radically improve developer productivity. Microsoft is betting that Silverlight 3 combined with the continued innovation in Visual Studio and Expression Blend, empowers .NET developers to create cutting-edge Rich Internet Applications and media experiences. Since Roundarch is always trying to push the boundaries of RIAs in order to deliver exceptional experiences for our clients, it is very encouraging to see Microsoft pursue this technology so aggressively.

It was really a blast to see Scott, “the Gu,” connect with some of his fans. He is clearly respected and admired by his peers and it was great to have the opportunity to spend some time with him in an environment where he was able to interact with them directly. He truly energizes people with his innovative ideas and approachable style.

Jeff Maling, President and Chief Experience Officer of Roundarch, presented the award just prior to a Q&A held by Scott in the 3rd Place lounge. There were about 200 people in attendance and there was a palpable energy in the air when Scott entered the room.

Scott Guthrie and Jeff Maling

“I am honored to accept the Interactive Experience Award from Roundarch, a company that shares Microsoft’s vision for encouraging innovative, dynamic and intuitive digital experiences,” said Guthrie. “Silverlight is changing user experiences on the Web, and when combined with the tooling in Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Studio, Microsoft is making it easier and cheaper than ever to build and deploy interactive and cutting-edge applications. It’s exciting to see that work recognized.”

Scott Guthrie

The Roundarch Interactive Experience Award is given to companies and individuals that best represent the advancement of Web experiences through the integration of user-centric design and advanced technology. Previous award winners include Max Carnecchia, president of Interwoven; Jeremy Geelan, Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media & Events; David Mendels, former Senior Vice President of the Enterprise and Developer Solutions Business Unit at Adobe; David Temkin, Founder of Laszlo Systems; and Coach Wei, Founder of NexaWeb Technologies.

I love websites that really engage you. Kathy Sierra, a SXSWi regular, talks about Creating Passionate Users and how you can do that by making them feel like rockstars. The JAG Black jeans website made me feel like a rockstar photographer for a brief 5 minutes and here’s how they did it.

1.The homepage lets you choose between a male and a female model. I picked Marian.

2. A brief instruction screen kicks off the photo shoot right away. Shooting is as simple as moving the camera with your mouse and clicking.

3. I create a magazine layout based on all the photos I took of Marian.

4. A personalized photo book is created ready to be shared with all my friends. Notice the personalized icon on the top left of the left page. You can flip through the 3D magazine like a real book. The camera is loose and enhances the sense of realism further engaging you. (For you RIA geeks, this was probably done using Papervision or Away3D).

What made this microsite successful was that it made me feel accomplished. In about 3 minutes (which is about all the attention span I have nowadays), I went from picking a model, doing a photo shoot, and creating a magazine layout. I was the decision maker at every key point. And before I even knew what hit me, I had infected all my friends with this viral campaign by sharing my custom photo book with them and repeating the cycle all over again. Check out the website here.

If you haven’t seen Kathy Sierra’s talk “Creating Passionate Users”, you should check it out.

Paul Annett‘s panel “Oooh, That’s Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design)” was one of the few that stood out for me. Not only was his content compelling, but he’s also a great presenter and story teller. His years of experience as an amateur magician no doubt contributed to his skills on stage. The talk was a showcase of websites that are doing some very clever CSS/Flash tricks to create more engaging user experiences.

You might look at some of his examples and go “OK, that’s pretty neat, but this is more like an easter egg and is not really essential to the overall goal of the site.” To put it in terms of ROI and business value that a client can understand, you need only look at what his company ClearLeft has done for their product website Silverback. Back when the site first launched, it was a only splash screen for an upcoming product with very little info about the product itself. However, detail oriented web designers noticed that when you resized the browser on the Silverback website, the vines in the background had a parallax effect creating the feeling of 3D. In a short amount of time, designers were blogging and tweeting about what essentially amounted to nothing more than an easter egg for a website, resulting in tremendous traffic, to the tune of over 100,000 hits. To top that off, a very large percentage of that traffic signed up to hear more about this phantom product without even knowing what the product was about, solely because of this little effect. Several other sites now implement a similar effect hoping for similar results. Small little hooks can have a tremendous amount on the bottom line.

Here are some of the examples that stood out:

The dConstruct User Experience Conference website has a secret navigation up top that lets you see the progression of the site from sketches to final product through clever use of CSS.

Kyan, a web design and development agency, has a small worm on the bottom of their website. Clicking on it reveals a previously hidden underground secret Kyan labs.

I thought these next two examples did a really good job of tying together the cleverness with the core experience of the product.

The Wario Land Youtube page slowly collapses as Wario causes more and more damage. This is a very ingenous use of overlaying Flash. You think you’ve landed on an ordinary Youtube page, but as the video plays, elements of the Youtube page start to crumble and fall until all you are left with is a large pile of HTML debris at the bottom of your page.

The iPod touch ad on the Yahoo Games page gets clever by tilting the elements on the website as if they were affected by the iPod touch.

Engaging users doesn’t have to be big and flashy. A little hidden gem can go a long way drawing in people. Often times, you just need people to step through the door.

If you consider yourself a Twitter-addict or happen to visit new media blogs regularly you’re probably aware of the buzz that was generated the relaunch of the Skittles.com corporate website a few weeks back.  If you haven’t heard about it or haven’t yet seen what all the talk is about you should take a look for yourself at www.skittles.com.

The site has generated a lot of discussion within the interactive community, and this includes the folks here at Roundarch.  The opinions expressed have been strong and varied, ranging from those who think this is the beginning of the end to those who think this is a publicity coup and harbinger of a very different web.

Given the level of discourse around the “Skittles Gambit” we decided to take a moment to discuss the topic and walk through some of the aspects we think are the most interesting.

What am I seeing?
In keeping with Skittles’ irreverent and somewhat quirky brand identity, their updated site blurs (some might say erases) the boundaries between brand and customer identity.  It does this through the wholesale integration of social media services and content.

Of course we’ve all seen social media incorporated into websites before, however, the difference here is that Skittles has replaced four out of six site areas with external social media pages; Wikipedia (Home), Facebook (Friends), Twitter (Chatter), and YouTube (Media/Video), Flickr (Photos).  To summarize, Skittles has virtually reduced their site to a navigational aid/overlay.

The concept is pretty simple; create an in-page frame that automatically resizes to fit the content, load a specific location on the social media site inside it, and position a transparent overlay with your “global navigation” on the page to tie it all together.  While Skittles technically owns or manages the look of some pages on those third-party sites, the nature of social media content means the messaging itself comes from customers.

Why is this important?
The idea of leveraging social media sources is nothing new; many brands monitor chatter to understand how their brand is perceived, and the last few years has seen a growing trend towards integrating third-party services and content into brand sites (e.g., Digg, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc.).  At the same time the basic interface concept behind the idea (using a global navigation element to unify disparate sites together under a common identity) is well established; major media companies like Lycos have been doing this since the ‘90s.

What’s different here is the degree to which Skittles has decided to decentralize and deregulate their brand.   Skittles has transformed their web site from an arm of their marketing group to a window on their market, nearly replacing “managed” brand messaging (most of the pages still belong to Skittles) with user generated content from third-party sources.  This has wide range of implications that are worth paying attention to.

What are some of these “implications”?
There are a lot of ideas to digest here, maybe more than you initially considered.  How do you manage content generated by customers on third party sites?  What’s your liability for comments on “your pages”?  How do you facilitate experiential continuity when using the disparate websites and applications?  What do you do if a critical third-party service is unavailable (e.g., Twitter.com’s problematic uptime numbers)?

All important questions that should be answered as part of an initial strategy.  However, aside from the operational concerns, a few of the more interesting implications involve strategic concepts around Brand Strategy and Cloud computing.  Yes, THAT Cloud computing… hang tight, we’ll come back to that in a minute.

Brand as a Mirror, or Is That a Window?
The feedback in the community and within our company has been fairly divided around the topic of brand strategy.  Some people feel that Skittles.com is a good example of everything not to do when managing your online brand identity.  Others feel that Skittles campaign has been effective in the near term and could be substantially so in the long term.  Who’s right?

Among the former group the feeling is that true brand strategy engages customers, keeps them involved, and provides compelling content and services to reinforce the identity the brand has fostered and marketed.  For this group a decentralized and laissez faire approach to content leads to a stale and uninspiring experience, subsequently undermining the brand’s effectiveness and inspirational capabilities.

On the other side of the aisle we have a slightly larger group who believe that the Skittles.com redesign, while poor in certain respects, hits or comes very close to the mark.   For this group the site is at least an effective viral campaign (look at the press), and at most the introduction of a nimble brand platform.

So where does this leave us.  Any decentralized model that leverages customer content to the degree that Skittles.com does runs the risk of become an outdated novelty.  However, this is as true of an owned corporate site as it is a fully deregulated one, perhaps even more so.  The main success of either approach lies in the brand’s ability to selectively introduce the content necessary to support and incite their community.

If we accept this commonality the big difference becomes one of reach; an owned corporate site relies on pulled traffic and unique visits, while a decentralized site pushes content into ancillary networks that can propagate and disseminate the material faster and more widely than virtually any corporate campaign.

Cloud Computing, The Early Years…
At the same time, the Skittles strategy provides a great example of something much larger than brand perception and marketing.  That is Cloud computing, a term you’ve probably heard bandied around by media pundits and technology gurus, but which you likely only have a fuzzy and general perception on.  Yeah, we know, wha?!?

Cloud computing is a lot like Web 2.0; the exact definition you get depends on who you ask.  For some folks Cloud computing conjures up ideas of dynamic data repositories accessible to an assortment of different applications across a variety of devices and mediums.  For others the “Cloud” is about bringing disparate services and applications together to form a larger experience.

The short answer is that both of these descriptions are correct.  The web as we know it is migrating towards a paradigm where content and services are decoupled and decentralized.  In this “web of the future,” online services will likely be both intelligent and portable, with content from one site sourceable to an application on another that is then integrated into a larger suite of services somewhere else.

Of course this isn’t going to happen overnight… not only does the technology and infrastructure not exist, but the basic interaction and behavioral patterns needed to support these kinds of services haven’t been adopted yet.  Instead it’s going to involve a progressive evolution, with a variety of different solutions appearing along the way.

Enter Skittles.com, which as lowly as it is, provides a protozoan example of this new paradigm in action.  Yes, it’s kind of ugly, and yes, it’s a little raw.  However, Skittles.com is forcibly assembling third party applications into a self-serving agglomeration, the site becoming a thin skin on a much broader set of distributed services.  The power of Skittles.com is thus its ability to provide a digestible “Cloud” example to people who have difficulty conceptualizing this far reaching future.

Bringing It Full Circle
So where does that leave us… Skittles.com, a canary of danger or a beacon of a compelling future?  The truth is that it’s probably too early to make a definitive call either way, and the success of the approach – both as a brand venue and as a harbinger of Web 3.0 – will depend in large part on how Skittles manages and uses their new toy.

However, what we can say is that this example is symptomatic of an accelerating trend towards an interactive medium in which there are fewer and less distinct boundaries between discreet digital applications and services.  Previously formal distinctions between brands and their customers are becoming increasingly less relevant, with companies looking to leverage the viral and associative aspects of social media networks to extend their message and increase the granularity of their touch points.

Scary and exciting all at the same time… now to wrap up and take a look at status alert I just received from my close friend, Jif.  Maybe you know him?

This talk given by Leah Buley from Adaptive Path was by far the best talk I’ve attended at SXSW this year. I felt that after her talk, I left with tools and ideas I could implement to practice good solid user experience design whether I am in a team of one or 30. That’s how she thought you ought to be doing UX – that her lessons applied to all team sizes. Indeed, I felt they did. Here are her slides from slideshare:

Here’s a link of the same talk presented at the 2008 IA Summit, with audio!

Subtitled: “How we messed up so you don’t have to.”

The speakers in this session included: Sandy Jen from Meebo, an online chat room, Kyle Vogt from Justin.tv, a community driven live video site, Jason Kincaid from TechCrunch, and Serkan Piantino from Facebook. All of these sites are huge in their own right and have had to deal with scaling issues. I thought it would be interesting to learn from their experience.

Don’t get married to any one technology, but don’t flirt too much.

Lessons learned:

• Don’t think ahead too much. You don’t really know what’s going to happen. A better approach is to release early and often and see what happens.
• Release incrementally. Test out new releases with small groups of users and slowly roll out. This way, you have a better idea of the load without taking everything down.
• It’s almost always cheaper to throw hardware at the problem than to have engineers spend their time squeezing out 5% more performance/optimization.
• Automate as much as possible.
• Ask users what they want. Users might not even care for a really complex feature you are about to implement. They might just want something as simple as bigger more legible fonts. – hint hint Impost blog.
• Tell your users your problem. Be transparent. If you are having outage problems, posting it on your blog and letting your users know what’s going on is better than not telling them. This makes them feel included and goes a long way towards creating a rapport with the users.
• A simple solution is almost always better than a more complicated solution.

Stop by the booth and come see me and Paul Buranosky.  We’re here telling folks about the work we do at Roundarch and giving some demos.

Minority Report User Interface
When you think of Minority Report most people think of that scene where Tom Cruise manipulates a large projection with a unique user interface using gloves with LEDs. That scene takes up less than 5 minutes of the movie yet it is so powerful that people who see any large touch screen or gesture interface invariably liken it to the Minority Report interface. This talk was about how science has influenced film in the realm of next generation interfaces and vice versa.

Incidentally when I was at the Ohare international airport, I walked by the Accenture Interactive Network (Wall) which was a project by my former coworkers at the Accenture Technology Labs. This project by researchers Kelly Dempski and Brandon Harvey was a giant high resolution multitouch projector screen. I won’t go into it since that isn’t really about the panel but you can read up on it some more here.

This talk covered user interfaces in films like Star Wars, Minority Report, Iron Man, Eagle Eye (which I now need to check out), The Matrix, as well as real research such as Johnny Chung Lee’s Wiimote hacking escapades, MIT’s Sixth Sense wearable tech, OpenCV, and g-speak (the real research that the Minority Report interface was based on). Microsoft technologies such as the Surface and and their vision of the future were also shown. The CNN hologram, which was new to me, made an appearance.

I thought they picked great examples of vision and scifi stuff, but IMHO, the presentation was very thin on actual research. I was hoping that there would be a 50/50 split between scifi film vision stuff and current research being done and what the state of the art was. It’s easy to understand why that was though. Most of the speakers came from film. Jeroen Lapre, one of the presenters had 12 years under his belt at Industrial Light and Magic.

Check out my Flickr feed from the talk.

Here’s a great example of great usability in real life at the Roundarch office. It’s a very simple yet elegant solution to an annoying problem. What happens when you run out of paper towels at the office? Do most employees know where they are stored? People rummage through different drawers to find more. This little PostIt note provides contextual relevancy. It’s visible when you need more paper towels and it tells you exactly where to get it. When the towel rack has paper, you can’t see it so you don’t develop “blindness” towards the message.

Hats off to the person who came up with this.

South by Southwest 2009 (SXSW) is right around the corner.  Several folks from Roundarch are heading down for the interactive portion of the show (March 13-17).  We are all getting excited to interact with some great minds in the design and emerging technologies space.  There is always such buzz around SXSW because there are so many opportunities to share innovative ideas, learn about really amazing new technologies, get a feel for the next trends in the industry and have a great time in the process.  I am especially excited Roundarch will have a booth this year because it will give us an opportunity to share some of the really impressive projects we have had the opportunity to work on recently.

The great thing about the interactive portion of the conference is that it covers everything from web design and usability to innovative technology business models and digital creativity.  SWSW is such a popular event because it is a five day festival of panels and conversations/discussions that trends away from the standard lecture circuit, making it much more interactive, and generally a great time.  As passé as it is to say, it’s truly an out-of-the-box thought process, limit-pushing environment.  And because of that, it makes for a very electric and exciting time.

There will be a whole crew from Roundarch at the event: Dave Meeker, Adam Flater, Pek Pongpaet, Saurab Bhargava, Mark Ferry, Paul Buranosky and myself.

Dave Meeker is one of our foremost thought leaders in the User Experience space; he knows more about the UX world than anyone I know.  He always has great ideas and can keep you entertained and excited even with a topic you may not have been interested in before (yes, his passion is that high).  He and Adam Flater will be showing some demos of Merapi.  Also, Adam Flater will be speaking on a panel with Chuck Freedman of Ribbit to demo the use of Merapi to capture audio in Flex.Check it out…very cool stuff and really impressive live demos.

Pek Pongpaet is one or our interactive developer/UX guys and has a few projects in the works he is planning on unveiling at SXSW.  I haven’t even seen them yet, but they are guaranteed to impress, I can’t wait.

Saurab Bhargava will be showcasing our innovative work with Avis.  There are many aspects to the project including an iPhone app, but this site shows a whole new way to think about car rental online, and is really improving their business and marketing strategies.

Mark Ferry will demo an app we did for a major mobile device manufacturer that is just in the process of being deployed.  This new system will diagnose and repair phones from any windows-based computer with an internet connection.  The solution is expected to save the company a fortune on administrative costs while also improving overall customer service. He will be at the Roundarch booth throughout the event and the Microsoft Silverlight booth at the following times:
Sunday, March 15th 2-4pm
Monday, March 16th 2-4pm

We also will be showing a few interactive timelines we did for The History Channel and some of our work we did for the USAF, both of which have amazing visuals and UX.  These have really redefined what a timeline can be, and have a nicely integrated CMS system to support it.

Please hit up Paul Buranosky if you want to plan a visit during the event or just stop by our booth (#611).  A group of us will be blogging throughout the event too, so be sure to check back for updates.