Despite 30 years spent automating financial transactions, financial institutions offer customers no more financial insight than when people used passbooks and accordion files.  The first institution to buck this trend will redefine the industry.  And there is no guarantee that it will be a bank…or credit card company.

Read the full American Banker article here.

From March 9-12 I attended the 2010 Gartner Portal, Content, and Collaboration (PCC) Summit held in Baltimore, MD.  The summit’s keynotes, track sessions, and vendor case studies covered many topics central to Roundarch’s business:  User-experience, Rich Internet Applications, Web 2.0, Service-Oriented Architecture, Social Computing, Mobile Computing, and Cloud Computing.  Veteran Gartner Analysts such as Ray Valdes and David M. Smith offered a cohesive perspective on portal, content, and collaboration technologies, while dazzling the crowd with Gartner’s trademark techno-market-futurism, replete with Magic Quadrants, Hype Cycles, catchy phrases such as the “Consumerization of IT,” “Monday morning action plans” for anxious CIOs, sharp insights into industry giants such as Google and Apple, and bold predictions of what tomorrow has in store for business and consumers.

Since I work at a company immersed in the stream of ideas explored by Gartner, the dialogue at the PCC Summit did not surprise me significantly.  In fact, in most cases it merely re-affirmed observations of trends I’ve experienced in work with commercial and government clients.  I did not depart Baltimore unaffected by the conversation, however.  One concept Gartner mentioned at the PCC Summit managed to invade my brain like a selfish meme, hatching a few thoughts about the significance of Web 2.0 and how we might experience the internet once “the future is evenly distributed”– to paraphrase sci-fi novelist William Gibson.

Gartner Managing VP, Gene Phifer said repeatedly that “Context-Aware Computing” would be a major research thrust for Gartner in the months ahead.   While the format of the PCC Summit, meant treatment of big themes was constrained by time and PowerPoint, Phifer made it clear that “Context-Aware Computing” involved the following:

-          A richer user experience leveraging information about the end user and new context-sensitive human-computer interfaces to improve the quality of the interaction and overall user engagement

-          Context-enriched services that use location, presence, social attributes, and other environmental information to anticipate an end user’s immediate needs, offering more-sophisticated, situation-aware and usable functions

-          Deeper collaboration that integrates identity, location, task, and social relationships

-          Building on previous concepts of personalization and advances in established technologies such as RIA, networks, mobile hardware capabilities, social computing, service-oriented architecture (SOA)

-          Mobile devices and the Cloud that provide the ubiquitous sensors and the network that capture and propagate context exploited by computers to proactively react to user’s needs

-          The emergence of new software, infrastructure and architectural approaches that support “Context-Aware Computing: and “Context-Orientation”

At first I didn’t think much of the outline of “Context-Aware Computing.”  It sounded a lot like pervasive computing meets semantic web, meets One-to-One Marketing. Then I started thinking about it in light of another term with which I have a love-hate relationship: Web 2.0.  In that context, the concept helped me to resolve a pestering problem I’ve had with our industry’s lingo.

Most industry insiders – taking their cue from the seminal article “What is Web 2.0?” by Tim O’Reilly  – likely would accept a definition of Web 2.0 that synthesizes rich user interfaces, mashable software services, and the idea that the Web is a Social/Participatory platform.  Yet, bundling these three distinct concepts together and calling them “Web 2.0” always seemed arbitrary to me.  Since reading O’Reilly’s article, I have been looking for a unifying theme that made these ideas hang together cohesively.  Another way to say this is that I have been seeking a singular foundation that explains the key qualitative difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.  I believe contemplation of Gartner’s material on Context-Aware Computing has allowed me to rest the distinction between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 on the varying primacy of content and context in the two models of the Web.  I now think that the unspoken concept that glues together rich user interfaces, mashable services, and the social web is the increased importance of context over content.  In Web 1.0, content was king.  In Web 2.0 (and beyond?), CONTEXT is king.  Let me explain by posing and attempting to answer three questions…

What’s behind the explosion in RIAs, mobile applications, and other rich user experiences on the web associated with Web 2.0?

Physical and digital context — I believe it is the realization that existing technologies and approaches can be leveraged to keep the user in the context of what he or she is doing physically or digitally and to enhance the experience by adding the context of related information or alternative representations such as visualizations — all with increasingly natural gestures as input.  We want computers to work in a way that is more consistent with the context of our physical reality and technology is allowing us to close that gap.

What’s behind the excitement about mashups and software services associated with Web 2.0?

Semantic context — I believe it is the realization that technology and evolving approaches for describing our services are enabling every node on the network to create content that can be freed from a contributor’s original intent and used in infinite contexts — as long as we agree on a few core things (i.e. the interface, or service contract).  This leads to efficiencies flowing from re-use (which is just applying a component in a different context), but on a deeper level it creates a fabric for each of us to create meaning out of the digital world with the flexibility we employ in our mental world.  Services and service approaches lay the foundation for enriching semantic context.  This transcends human-authored hyperlinks; as standards and software agents improve, machines will be able to automatically combine information that is increasingly meaningful to humans as well.

What’s behind the buzz surrounding the social applications associated with Web 2.0?

Social context – I believe it is the realization that the Web is the most flexible medium for initiating, facilitating, expanding, and persisting our social interactions that has ever evolved.  Web 2.0 applications such as Facebook capture our species’ most valued form of context: social context.  The content we create, seek, and find is a function of our identity, memberships, and the power of our connections to other members of our species.  Web 1.0 enabled many of us to surf a sea of content and capabilities and then take separate steps to connect and share outside the context of our immediate web experience; content was primary.  Web 2.0 integrates social context seamlessly into the digital experience and allows more of us to participate – multiplying the social value of the web.  This social context will be interwoven to a greater degree in future evolutions of the web.

In my next post I will explore further this concept that “context is king” in Web 2.0.  I will also make some predictions about how Context-Aware Computing will impact the way we design and develop digital experiences at Roundarch.

At Roundarch we often work behind the firewall – which for people not familiar with our terminology, means we work on projects we’re not allowed to discuss, much less show publicly. As designers, not having a public audience/forum for our work can be both liberating and frustrating. So when Sam Lessin and Chad Stoller from drop.io contacted us to assist them in redesigning their simple yet powerful service, our ears perked up. Not only would we have an opportunity to creatively contribute to a product we all believed in, but we could do so publicly without risking the ire of valued but secret clients.

I can’t stress enough how useful their tool really is. I use it all the time. I have used it for an internal Roundarch presentation on Cloud Computing as well as for other personal things like picture drops and quick file transfers (when my IM craps-out). The ways in which to use their service seem to grow with each user’s imagination.

Roundarch and drop.io
Roundarch was brought on board to work with drop.io for a few reasons.  As a company, we are focused exclusively on designing and building leading edge digital experiences.  We are known in the industry for tackling the toughest design challenges and for bringing both breakthrough design and enterprise scale technology.  We are also known for being a leader in the development of Rich Internet Applications.  This is really a long way of saying we understand design, user experience and technology and we know how to bring them all together seamlessly.  We also understood that drop.io has a long-term road map for the services it provides.  The old design was quite a bit confusing and not able to keep up with new technologies and service improvements.  They needed a design that would complement and grow with future services.  We understood this challenge and were able to collaborate on a design solution.

The Challange
Drop.io is “Simple, Private Sharing”, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy service to understand. Simplicity can sometimes be confusing. Retaining simplicity while providing a design that was easy to use and understand from day-1 was our primary focus. The real design challenge is that if a user is new to drop.io, and they’re given a URL to go to from someone, say, at a party who has just taken some photos among friends, when that user arrives at that URL they’re deposited right in the middle of a “drop”. No context. No on-boarding. The user just wakes up in a room and needs to figure out what it all means. So the nature of their service is simple: online storage space where files of any type can be dropped, viewed and shared, but partnering with Roundarch was critical to presenting their service to the novice user in an easy, understandable way.

At the core of the drop.io service is inputs, views and outputs – but their old UI and design strategy didn’t reflect this. Switching views was confusing, output controls and parameters were located in a few different places and their choice of using the color red (to be ironic) was amusing to only a few. Our task was to collectively figure out a UI template that met a few key criteria: input, view and output needed to be clearly defined and the design had to be extensible for co-branding and personalization. We also wanted to target Drop.io For Business (DFB) with a template design and information-page that showed the flexibility of their service for businesses.

The Process
We began by taking their existing logo and “growing it up” a bit. We chose a beautiful and clean typeface (Archer) and chose a simple typeset execution.

Our next task was to nail the header. This was critical because the header is really where the concept of the service is expressed in the navigation of the site. Input, view, output became Add, View & Share. By keeping that functionality hidden but handy we eliminated the need for users to hunt around the site to trigger functionality. The trick was that when the user is browsing their drop, we wanted to keep the maximum possible vertical space for their content. It’s only when the user wants to do something with the drop that we wanted to surface UI controls (while retaining the statefulness of the page).

From there we chose to execute the body elements, the actual content of the drop, in a clean and simple way that clearly separated drop-content from any customization the user might choose to perform and future-proofed the content-display area from any other view paradigms drop.io might choose to implement moving forward. At the forefront of our minds was scanability. We needed the user to quickly scan the page and understand where their drop content was located. Through the use of iconography and a change in type size we were able to accomplish this while adding to the aesthetics of the experience. Lastly, we addressed the home page. Like most of the rest of the strategic planning for this site, the home page had a trick to it we needed to get just right. Unlike most homepages, the drop.io home page was most likely not the first page a user new to the experience would see. This is because users most likely would encounter drop.io in the context of viewing someone else’s drop. And in that scenario, the user would be deposited in the middle of a drop as explained above. So their drop page is really their homepage and their homepage is really their drop-provisioning page. It was in this light that we wanted to streamline the process of beginning to use their service as much as possible. 4 steps vs. 3 steps is a big deal in the web 2.0 world of zero patience. We solved this by defaulting certain settings in a collapsed menu and brought the number of steps a user had to do in order to create a drop down to two. Name it and put files in it. Done.

The Results
Needless to say the project was a success and all sides were thrilled with the results. I encourage you to check out drop.io for yourself.  As I mentioned earlier, this is really an outstanding service that will continue to push the limits of what can be done with file sharing and beyond (geotagging, freedom to upload from many sources, collaborative sharing options, etc.).  Sam Lessin sums it up thusly, “Roundarch did a very nice job learning about our product and our future feature roadmap and then helping us conceptualize some of the design vocabulary necessary to meet our immediate users needs, while still leaving us open to future growth and extensibility.” Agreed.

Roundarch continues to revolutionize solutions for their clients by leveraging and extending Web 2.0.  Site Extensions, a concept created by Roundarch, packages key elements of a company’s web functionality into a joy-to-use user experience and a simple technology integration.  This “package” can then be seamlessly distributed by the client to their partners, affiliates, or other sites while maintaining the integrity and security of the client’s brand.  Unlike interactive banner Ads or similar advertising media, these packages extend a site’s reach and allow the clients customers to fully transact with the client.

As an example, Roundarch has developed the first of its kind car reservation Site Extension for Avis.  The main goal of Avis.com is to allow their customers to easily add or modify car reservations.  Building upon existing web services from Avis, Roundarch was able to quickly design the interaction model and develop the code to allow a user to complete all steps necessary to book a reservation within a single screen. Secondly, the use of Adobe FLEX allowed the code to be distributed with ease – Avis’ partners would need only a small snippet of HTML code to have a fully functioning transactional reservation extension on their site. Furthermore, Roundarch also created an admin module to allow partners or individuals to change the look & feel of the reservation extension (within Avis brand guidelines).
Finally, not only can Avis distribute the reservation extension but partners and individuals can “share” their version of the extension with other partners and individuals; increasing the reach of Avis.

The premise for Avis was simple but powerful: the partner keeps the user traffic while Avis gets the transaction and extended reach. The reception has been tremendous.

Within just a few months of our initial launch on www.rentacar.com, the potential was further realized when Avis Australia/NZ positioned the site extension on Air New Zealand’s own website as a central negotiating point of a multi-year partnership between the brands. For Air New Zealand, they were able to further their own travel offering with the inclusion of discounted rates with Avis (and Budget) cars. For Avis, it represents millions of dollars in expected revenue over the next few years – they now have the ability to grow their customer base with the inclusion of Air New Zealand customers. Roundarch customized the existing USA version, which is now live for Air New Zealand.

Site Extensions are the natural evolution of Web 2.0; allowing companies to extend their reach with targeted functionality and interacting with customers at the time and place most convenient to the customer.