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!

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.

Left to right: John Peebles of Avis Budget Group, Aman Datta of Roundarch, Ray Picard, Jeff Westover and Ben Kiker of Interwoven.

Aman Data, Vice President of Roundarch, and John Peebles, Vice President Online Marketing at Avis Budget Group, presented Roundarch‘s upcoming redesign of AVIS.com to a group of industry and financial analysts at Interwoven‘s analyst day today in New York.  Avis and Roundarch discussed the Q1 upcoming relaunch of AVIS.com as well as several innovative changes that are being advanced in the market today.  One of the key innovations is the development of an “extra” site experience.  Customers can now perform a full reservation process in a single rich widget.  This widget is currently featured on www.rentacar.com and will be used on many Avis partner sites in the future.  The widget, developed in Adobe Flex, is one of many innovations that Roundarch and Avis are bringing to the travel market.

In our crusade for the grail of design innovation, nature’s 4.6 billion years of (re) evolutionary design supplies us with the perfect template.

Design innovation isn’t just about having the “big idea” (more about that and the role of research in my next post) – it’s a process, a funnel that produces success equal only to the cumulative failure required to achieve it. Not clear on that? Let mother earth and arguably the most successful innovation of all time, you and me, bring it into focus. You’ll notice there seem to be rules, patterns actually, to producing innovation, and massively successful designs (like homo sapiens and the ubiquitous iPod) have harnessed that power.

Looking at the geological time line starting with the Hadeon Eon (when earth’s crust took form) to the modern day, cycles of creation exemplified by the Cambrian and Permian eras have ushered new life forms into existence only to be followed by periods of mass extinction that have wiped most of them from the face of the planet. Nature has provided us with a compelling template for distilling successful design practices that produce innovation – a powerful suggestion of patterns that make up what we can call the universes’ law of design. It reveals a design funnel and a set of basic guidelines that innovative organizations, like Apple, have embraced as their own.

Bill Buxton’s “Sketching User Experiences” provided a first look at a design funnel. The design funnel that overlays earth’s geological timeline and the creation of man, is essentially an extension of this and surfaces key insights into repeatable innovation design:
1.    Innovation is the product of a refinement funnel – And that funnel starts wide and long, with and explosion of options that flow through cycles of reduction ultimately producing a single point of desirability and viability – the design solution. In a presentation at SXSW, Apple’s chief engineer Michael Lopp, explained how design flows through this funnel (that maps to Apple’s 10 to 3 to 1 design approach). As intense as it my seem, every Apple system feature is born in a set of 10 different detailed designs, all of which are genuinely valid options – not just those mock alternatives design firms typically push out to clients as a smoke screen to show “a lot of work and hard thinking”.
2.    Each cycle is marked by detailed design – This may shock a community that is fully bought into a notion of high level or “conceptual design” where low fidelity sketches/wireframes are the prevailing means of vetting the desired direction. I’m not suggesting here that we get rid of them, only that detailed design is an essential ingredient of the conceptual stage. Very much the same way thousands of actual living organisms, and not just sketches of potential organisms, were needed to make effective evolutionary decisions.
3.    Invest time up front – The era of modern man is only a spec on the grand scale of creation. Nature has clearly spent much more time and resources on the initial stages of design choosing to privileged detail and diversity over efficiency. This is clearly a tension for traditional design work. More often than not we find ourselves rushing through low fidelity conceptual designs to hone in on that one solution we push through to detailed design. Nature’s advice? Always give yourself more time for conceptual design and make sure you get the right amount of detail to support reductive decisions.
4.    The coin for innovation is failure (read: learning) – The same way that explosion of life on earth was followed by extinction (by the end of the Permian era over 50% of all land creatures and 95% of all sea creatures had been wiped out), innovative design is also marked by creative spurts and a selection process that pushes aside the undesirable and unviable. Successful shortcuts are as rare as they are likely to succeed. That means you need to bank on going through the motions – if failing is not an option then you can’t be serious about innovating.
5.    Innovation is expensive – Running the numbers on the resources required to generate thousands of life forms, most of which ultimately discarded by evolution, will show that true innovation has a price tag. The funnel can be long and mistakes need to be made. There is no way to sugar coat it, the bottom line is that real innovation requires resources and commitment. If it’s any solace though, the silver lining is the upside for return on innovative designs is tremendous.

Most user experience professionals learn early on that user centered design (UCD), or some variation thereof, is the go-to approach in the effort to generate usable, useful and joyful designs. I obviously don’t challenge the importance of the user and the need to make sure they are represented through out the design process (although I do admit an over zealous obsession with the end user has the potential to produce myopic design).

But we should consider evolving that approach to one that assumes user representation as a given, and more importantly, borrows from earth’s evolutionary heritage to articulate the design dynamics for achieving repeatable innovation. Call it Innovation Centered Design (ICD) – driving success for both you and your customers.

First, a disclaimer. I’m by no means a political junkie. While I’ve been as captivated by this recent election as anyone, I don’t intend to spark any political debates. When challenged with a political argument, my most likely response is something like “Yeah, maybe, but isn’t Desperate Housewives about to start?”

Photo courtesy of Scout J

That said, there are a few lessons from Barack Obama’s campaign that apply to our world of user experience consulting.

Those of us on Obama’s email list were barraged with messages. One thing every email had in common was a specific mission: get you to do something. It was often to make a donation, but not always. There were invitations to local gatherings, encouragement to contact voters in neighboring swing states, etc. Regardless, it was always obvious and easy to take the next step.

It’s a good strategy to keep in mind in our design work. In any given Web page, email, advertisement, whatever—make it clear what the user is supposed to do next.  If there are too many competing messages, or the call-to-action is somehow camouflaged, we’re making the user work too hard.

There’s no substitute for good graphic design. All of the Obama materials were consistently beautiful throughout the campaign. From the website, to the signage, to the downloadable desktop wallpapers—it all looked great and portrayed a distinctive brand.

I would argue that if you took the names off of almost any other candidate’s collateral, they would be very hard to tell apart. Not so with Obama. They managed to make it feel fresh and contemporary, but still retain the expected “patriotic” color palette. The attention to detail was impressive, down to the electronic tickets emailed to attendees of the Grant Park rally.

The lesson here is clear: work with smart, talented creatives. Involve them from the beginning, and encourage them to be the stewards of the brand throughout the process. This is our approach at Roundarch.

As interesting as the ubiquity of Obama branding was throughout the campaign, was its absence at the election night rally. While Obama supporters had plenty of swag on hand, the stage was devoid of it. The only decoration was a row of American flags. The message to me was, “The sales job is over. Now it’s time to do some work.”

Back to the emails for a minute. When I received an email, it was from “Barack Obama.” The same thing was true with campaign posts on Twitter–they had his name on them. I even got a couple emails from “Michelle Obama.” Now, I’m not naïve enough to think that she sat down and

tapped out an email to me while Malia and Sasha’s chicken nuggets were cooking. However, a communication from a “person” always feels better than one from a vague entity, such as, say “RNC email subscription service.” (OK, I made that up.)

Similar efforts to connect personally with constituents can be found on the Obama website. One of the main navigation items is “People,” which features dedicated content sections for specific audiences, e.g., “Small Business” and “African Americans.” Each group even gets its own clever version of the Obama logo.

In addition, there’s a prominent banner addressing “Hillary Supporters”–clearly reaching out to an audience that needed to be embraced.

How can we emulate this approach? Remember that’s it’s all about people. Be sure to know your audience. It’s impossible to develop a good solution if you don’t know the motivations and context of your site’s users. But it also means that you should get to know your clients. Communication will be smoother and more productive if you understand each others’ perspectives.

Finally, back up your work by “signing” it. Put your name on your documentation. Here’s a free tip–maybe a custom footer that says something like “I’m (insert name) and I approve of this wireframe.”

Throughout the campaign, I was impressed by Barack Obama’s composure. When personal attacks or outlandish statements came his way, he never seemed to get off track. He took a breath, smiled, and responded in a thoughtful manner. It left me with a feeling of trust.

At Roundarch, we value “soft skills” in our consultants as much as hands-on design skills. That means strategizing with a client, building consensus within a group, communicating the pros and cons of multiple options, and in general making smart, confident recommendations. Being able to explain and defend your thought process is critical. You may not always win over the audience, but if you demonstrate preparedness and passion, at the very least you will win respect.

Did you see the election night rally? Chicago is a great city. It has all the big city attractions–business, culture, recreation, physical beauty–and as a bonus the people are generally pretty nice and normal. I’m somewhat biased because I’ve lived here for 35 years, but visitors and transplants I speak with echo the same opinion. Sure, some people complain about the weather. But hey, it was 72 degrees on November 4.

The instructions for this are a little more complicated, so I’ll save it for a future blog post. Oh, make sure your family is awesome too, just in case someone starts poking around.

I recently had the chance to present at two different user experience conferences. While the venues were different, the subject matter was the same—user experience documentation for rich interfaces.

First was the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, back in September. I had a packed house for a three-hour workshop. Then just a few weeks ago, I covered the same topic for a smaller crowd, in a one-hour presentation at Web Builder 2.0 in Las Vegas.

Why this topic? As the work we do at Roundarch moves away from the “page” metaphor and toward richer, more interactive experiences, we designers are faced with moving beyond the site map and static wireframe. We need to be able to communicate more fluid interfaces and interactions.

Sometimes this means documenting very detailed functionality and almost infinite “states,” or representing motion in a static medium. But it can also mean stepping back to paint a broader picture—establishing and communicating the fundamental approach for a site’s interactions – to build consensus before the detailed work begins.

My presentation covered several highly-visual documentation techniques, which attempt to communicate the exact right amount of information—to the right stakeholders—at the right points in the project. From presenting a high-level concept map or user experience brief to an executive, to producing a usable functional spec for visual designers and developers, to building a proof-of-concept prototype, we touched on a wide range of deliverables. Supporting each example were tips on when and why to use a particular documentation method, best practices for design, limitations and challenges, and special considerations for rich Internet applications.

Links:
Web 2.0 Expo
Web Builder 2.0

For an outside perspective on the New York workshop, take a look at this attendee’s blog entry.