Silberbauer Says:

Søren reminded me that it was about time to make a follow up on my previous posting about digital signage in the Big Apple. Klaus’ Zune posting created a lot of buzz, so we thought it would be appropriate to let it be the topposting for a while.

Right now there’s a lot going on in the field of digital signage and corporate branding. Some companies are leading the way and are using digital signage in their corporate branding and are redesigning their corporate HQ in order to make the ultimate corporate branding experience. They are closing the gap between architecture and communication and creating a more consistent and holistic branding experience than I’ve ever seen before.

One of the best examples is the new Bloomberg Building in New York (created by Cesar Pelli & Associates). When you visit the building it’s obvious that the architecture and digital signage have been merged to create a unique branding experience. The building is absolutely soaked with large digital displays and the architecture is stunning. The visitor leaves the building with the impression of an innovative, creative and open minded organization. I don’t know if this is the true nature of the Bloomberg Corporation, but the building itself gives the visitor this very positive impression.

For instance take a look at this large 3 tier displays which is one of the first large displays that the visitors encounter.

I know, it’s a short clip, but it shows how Bloomberg has made a combination of a large digital display that delivers news content from Bloomberg Media, but at the same time creates an branding experience. It’s not just a news ticker, it’s so much more.

Or have a look at this elevator area. Nice huh?
I can’t describe the entire visitor experience, you have to experience it by yourself – and that is basically my point.

The corporate headquarter is the ultimate place for making a lasting impact on your customers, the press or your stakeholders. You control all the elements and you can create an experience that will be able to push through our personal “ad filtering system”, that most people has developed by watching the estimated 86.500 tv commercials per year (Ries 2002). Instead of having your customer placed in the couch in a familiar environment, you got your customer immersed in a controlled environment, where you can create an experience by making a complete experience for all five senses. As Martin Lindstrom (Danish Branding guru) says in his book “Brand Sense”:

Brand Communication has reached a new frontier. In order to succesfully conquer future horizons, brands will have to find ways to break the 2-D impasse and appeal to the three neglegted senses. Superb picture quality won’t do it. Rather we should look to embrace all five senses in order to create a foundation for future brand strategies.

You cannot send out a press release, make an online ad, create a television commercial or making a blog posting that will be able to make the same impact as the well designed corporate branding experience in your HQ. I know that not all your customers will come and visit you, but you will be able to make a lasting impact on those who does. Bloomberg has definitely showed the way by using digital signage and architecture to communicate corporate values and goals.
Take a look the next time you’re in New York, it’s really really cool.

A newly launched bookshop is made entirely in Flash. And it shows. www.elounge.com is a nightmare – IA-wise, usability-wise and UX-wise it downright sucks.

It performs badly, even on fast machines, and on a Mac your scrollbar simply dissappears if you resize your window.

The good thing is: You probably won’t find the site at all, as it will get really bad page ratings on Google which doesn’t crawl Flash.

Nothing – nothing – on this site couldn’t have been made in dhtml, and that probably faster and less expensive. So why did its agency recommend eLounge to sacrifice the user experience, the SEO, the usability, the legibility to go with a technology that even Gucci won’t use? Or is it that eLounge told the agency to bring out the Flash gimp no matter what? We’ll never know.

Are you about to design a luxury website and have already started up your Flash-editor? Wait a minute and go to www.gucci.com. Flash, right? Nope.

Now, this is a very important step in the right direction: Gucci has relaunched gucci.com without Flash. No Flash whatsoever. JavaScript has replaced that all evil and destructive plugin.

The Gucci designers could have chosen to go with Adobes terrible Flex 2 (see my oppinion on Flex 2 here) or a full blown Flash solution, but they chose to go with reality instead. They opted for usability, search engine optimization and not…. well whatever you opt for when you opt for Flash.

Congratulations, Gucci, for making the sane choice, for gaining a lot of free SEO, for re-enabling my back-button and for using the web for what it was meant for – without sacrificing the fades, scrolls, and zooms that we’ve learned to expect from those prêt a porter-websites

Read more on etre

Our sys adm. just decided that our workstations are to download updates automatically every day 12 o’clock. Great news for IT security – bad news for my blood pressure.

Sometimes I have a pretty stressed up day, and now Windows keep nagging me with this every 10 minutes:

No! I don’t wanna save everything, shut down Photoshop, Word, Axure and Dreamweaver and reboot my workstation. I’m busy, you see? I’ve got work to do!

If it was only the Windows Update nag screen, but it’s this one too:

And this one:

And iTunes, and the Adobe CS suite, and Windows Mediaplayer, and several other apps which designers think that they’ve made the one and only single most important piece of software on my workstation. Guess what, guys: I’m an adulterer. I have others apps too.

In fact I’ve got at least 8 different apps that craves my attention every now and then. That means at least 1 update every day – and that’s both on my desktop workstation and my laptop (and then again on my desktop at home). My life is one big update.

Sometimes when I’m doing a presentation for a client, Acrobat pops up “demanding my attention” as it so nicely puts it. If I try to show a piece of video Windows Mediaplayer may start the show by asking for a license update, “uhm sorry guys, I just have to …. click click… there”.

It’s as if the software is more important than the work I do. Remember that Microsoft commercial? “We see Susan dreaming of… blah blah blah”. Well, all I see is a bloody MS nag screen wanting me to reboot, even taking focus. Aaargh – there it goes again! Piss off!

Bill Buxton dreamt this up ages ago – now Jeff Han has built it and demonstrates it live: The multitouch touch sensitive screen. This might be the first glimpse of the greatest HCI revolution since the event-driven graphical interface.

Go see for yourself at YouTube.

(Source: etre)

Don’t forget to register for EUROIA Information Architecture Summit 2006 in Berlin.

Mr. Reiss and his FatDUX has lost the frames. It suits them
…I especially like the X-ray duck, which one is your favorite?

First of all, no one should be in any doubt that I believe that blogging and wikis can be used as an extremely powerful tool for corporate communication, but this demands a RADICAL change in the state of mind of most communication professionals. You cannot just add blogs or wikis to your existing communication platform without taking into account that this is just not another new tool, this is a completely new way of communicating. If you do not realize this difference, then your corporate blogging initiative is not gonna fly. To succeed, you need to rethink your communication/knowledge management strategy and it’s not done by:

“Lets do some corporate blogging – that will definitely put us right up there with the big shots in the Fortune 500 (and if not, we’ll add a Wiki, that’ll definitely do it).

You need to change! By now, devoted bloggers have praised and glorified this new medium for a couple of years and even the most well defended stronghold of corporate communication have sensed that something is happening outside side of the outer defenses. You can no longer attend a serious seminar about corporate communication without stumbling over talks on how corporate blogging will revolutionize business communication and of course the general worshipping of wikis as the greatest thing since Post It Notes.

More and more companies are showing interest in adding blogging and wiki-tools to their ever increasing portfolio of communication tools. And it’s just great? or is it??…

In my opinion, there is still a huge challenge to overcome and we’re not their yet. In fact we’re not even close!

A couple of years ago the “MUST HAVE” of communication professionals and one of the most popular subjects on communication/intranet conferences was portals and personalization. Did that really help us? Did the promised benefits arrive or have we just silently agreed on that we’ll leave the past alone and move on??

Now we have some new exciting “MUST HAVE” tools and that is the problem in a nutshell. Most communication professionals are just not getting it, they are thinking: “Cool, a new cheap digital publication thingy”. They should be thinking: “Amazing, the world of communication has changed, I must change before I’m obsolete”.

The new tools will not help and will not improve the way your business works if you don’t change your mindset. YOU need to understand that if YOU want blogging to create value for your business, YOU need to know how and YOU need to change accordingly.
Blogging is just not a thing you put on a server or get hosted somewhere in India. Blogging is a strategic decision about your corporate culture and it needs to be aligned with your overall corporate strategy and integrated in your company’s knowledge/information management strategy.

And most importantly – If you don’t feel it, if you don’t understand the media and if your not ready to bet your job on your corporate blogging initiative, you’re not ready for it.

Cool my Zune design made The Register. And thanks for all the comments, guys.

Update: Oh my, it’s spreading

Brasil here we come. Update again: …and here goes iPodHacks and macessentials.de
August 4: Articles in Computerworld and ComOn (both in Danish)

Here it is! Microsoft’s iPod-killer – seamlessly integrated with Windows Mediaplayer and as sleak and easy to use as its software counterpart.