Silberbauer Says:

The four best presentations I experienced on w2e this year.

Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: Ben Huh, “Becoming One with Internet Culture”
Great talk on the ‘new pop culture’ and subversives vs. hackers.

Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: Tim O’Reilly, “State of the Internet Operating System”
The man himself speaks about the clash between the ‘new’ open Microsoft, Amazon’s cloud and the closed business model of Apple.

Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: June Cohen, “Ideas Worth Spreading: TED’s Transition…”
June shows the new TED translation feature that is truly impressive. And she’s just a great presenter.

Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: Eric Ries, “The Lean Startup: Innovation Through Experimentation. …”
A bit hyped presentation, but still with a lot of good stuff on lean startup tactics.

Note to self: Don’t go down this road… use overlays and popups with extreme caution.

A couple of scenarios where this software from Aimersoft might be useful:

1. You are the (un)lucky owner of an Ipod and at the same time you have more than one computer and you really want to upload and download music to your Ipod from both computers.

2. Your harddisk sudddenly breaks down and leaves you with a lot of music on your Ipod – but no way to get it back onto your new harddrive and with no possibility to upload new music to your Ipod without deleting all of the music.

3. Your best friend has got a lot of cool music that you want to ‘backup’ from his Ipod onto your harddrive (remember to ask your friend if he holds all copyrights to the music before you start to download… ).

If you recognize one or more of these scenarios? Then Aimersoft Ipod Backup Software will definitely be useful.

What does it do?
Well, then name says it all – it simply just copies all you music from the Ipod onto a specified folder on your harddrive.

What does it cost?
This is the best part… IT IS FREE!!

Does Aimersoft Ipod Copy Manager have a lot of hidden spyware and keyloggers?
This is the worst part… I DON’T KNOW!!! (but for what it is worth – I don’t think so

Anyway, it works great and you will enjoy the feeling of once againg taking control of your music and bringing it back from the greedy hands of Apple and Steve Jobs who still is using the positiv ‘Apple Brand’ and great design to harrass their customers with stupid limitations to their product.

One might wonder why Apple has gone through so much trouble to limit their Ipods in this way. It keeps reminding me of Microsoft in the old days and their connection with some kind of bad empire or something… it seems to me like… well, I can’t quite remember…

Take a look at this CNN weatherforecast of hurricane Ike from today. At 1:20 in the clip he uses the 3 dimensional multi touch display. For once it is not only eye candy but has value and gives a good impression of the hurricane. Nice use and integration of Google Maps as well.

If the embedded video doesn’t work then use this link or see the clip on Baekdal’s blog

If the embedded video doesn’t work then use this link:

Viacom vs. Google. I guess you’ve heard about that case: Viacom, in all its stupidity, wants to sift through all of Youtube’s log files to find out who have watched what. And the US courts approved that. So don’t be surprised if one day a slick lawyer turns up on your doorstep asking you to pay $2.000 for having watched excerpts of Friends on Youtube back in 2004.

It’s sick, and Viacom is making a stupid move. You can’t win the media wars by sewing and harassing your own target users. You simply must provide a better product than your competitors. It’s really that simple. But just like most of the record labels, Viacom doesn’t get it and, thus, will fail.

This destructive and pathetic struggle of a dying giant made me think of why the web is so more intriguing than the old telly, and why we choose to watch the pixelated, lagged streams on Youtube instead of buying yet another satellite HD decoder box.

It’s not just because the web is free (it isn’t, you know. Broadband connections do cost money). It’s definately not because the quality is better (HD on cable looks stunning – Youtube videos pretty much look like shit.) It’s because it’s fun! And it’s there when you need it. You don’t have to order a satellite package seven days before the race or the fight that you want to watch. And most of all: You can share the experience with hundreds or thousands of other viewers. Real time. Right when the action is happening. It connects you to the reality. That’s why it rocks: It’s all in the interaction with other individuals of the Homo Sapiens.

A few weeks ago 24 hours of Le mans was on. And Danish driver Tom Kristensen was behind the wheel of no. 2: The Audi diesel R10. Something not to be missed. But none of the two national networks in Denmark chose to transmit the whole 24 hours of Le Mans – or more correctly: None of them could afford to buy the rights.

Being at my weekend cottage (no cable) I had no way of seeing the race on Eurosport. Luckily I have a 2 MBit internet connection, though.

I found a page made by a guy called Crizzzie (yes, three z’s) who has put a tuner card in his pc and somehow manages to make this signal into a Flash Video stream with only 30-something seconds of delay. Normally Crizzzie streams rugby, but this day Le Mans was on for all 24 hours of it. My hero.

Furthermore, and this is where it gets really clever, he had embedded a IRC style chat chat next to the stream. Here, Le Mans aficionados chatted away about the drivers, the cars, the tires, the pitstops – in sync with the stream. And most of the guys on the chat seemed to know more about racing than do the lame commentators on Danish tv. One of the chatters actually has participated in Le mans himself with an American GT1 team).

Now, Crizzzies stream was without commentaries (I guess he somehow has access to the “raw” stream from Le Mans) and I knew that the official Radio Le Mans (broadcast on the track) is supposed to be quite entertaining. So I found the official audio stream of the Radio Le Mans in another browser tab. Real time lap times and the overall standings came from a third site. And voilà: The perfect Le Mans cocktail in three browser tabs: IRC, a video stream, audio from Radio Le Mans and real time updated lap times, pit status and so on. No television network can compete with this no matter how hi def the signal is.

This was the funniest and most intense tv experience I have had in a long time. It was like sitting in the couch with some good (and very race-savvy) friends. People argued about tire choices, Peugeot’s strategy – and we all tried to help poor Dave when his laptop started running out of juice. (Poor Dave didn’t make it, though. He disappeared from the chat 5 minutes before the checkered flag).

A short video grab from a great Le Mans “tv” experience

As long as the web gives you this much added value and as long as pay-per-view networks insist on charging a fortune for a single race, people will stream from the web and thus embedding the content in their own social context. Simply because it’s more fun and more meaningful an experience.

Viacom and other distributors must face that the value of content in itself is falling rapidly – even that of the good stuff. But the number of people that will attend a single event online, like the Le Mans, is on the rise as more and more have access to broadband and as services like Youtube and Google Video matures. The good parts of a race like Le Mans 2008 will circulate the web for years and be watched by millions.

Come on, Viacom and all you other boneheaded media dinosaurs. There must be a clever way to capitalize on these dynamics by acknowledging that it’s not the content in itself that carries the value, but the context in which it is watched. Think advertising, product placement, targeting, measuring, viral, instead of thinking trials and lawyers.

So, finally I had some time to work with Axure 5. And yes: It’s worth it. I don’t have time to do an extensive review, but features like Shared project (yes, with versioning and with no need for server support besides a LAN drive), improved flowcharting and a generally improved interface makes v5 a LOT cooler than v4. Also, the use of variables and the option to move around panels makes for some great effects. If you have the time, that is. Using these features WILL make your prototype pretty complex pretty quick.

Especially I like the palette undock feature. Now you can really use those 3 21″ monitors of yours

I have a few requests, though: Now as the flowchart feature is maturing and finally getting usable, please include support for Jesse James Garrett’s Visual Vocabulary. Only a few more symbols are needed. And, if possible: We need more glue points on the shapes – like in Visio.

Grab your trial here:www.axure.com.

Spend most of my evening going through one of these heavy demand specs that only governmental institutions are able to make. Hundreds of demands, ranging from the very abstract (“The solution should be easy to use”) to the very concrete (“The user presses a button that brings up a preview…”).

Hidden among all the text it states that the vendor must use all the fancy usercentric methods of design and do it all in a very dialogue-based and agile way. … but why? All the design decisions are made (poorly, though) by the specification. To go out and ask the users will result in hundreds of change request for the project managers and laywers to fight over.

Could we please stop making these lame specifications? They’re a bloody waste of time and money. Collect your organization’s needs (that’s needs, not wants), put down a core team in your own organization, call your UX consultants, and together we’ll make it happen.

I have a Garmin Nüvi 660 – a splendid GPS unit. If you are looking for a GPS unit for your car, the Nüvi series is the way to go.

But this is not about GPS units or mapping updates as such – it’s about the hellish user experience that not thought through installation procedures and futile attempts to protect software from piracy can lead to.

For Garmin needs a serious lesson in service design. What ought to be a simple update of the maps inside my Nüvi 660 GPS unit has been made into an hour long waste of time. It all started when I tried to purchase the map update:

1. I week before Easter I got an e-mail from Garmin telling me that the Map update 2008 for Europe has been released. I’m a gadget freak, and firmware and map updates are the salt of my tech life. The mail pointed me to the (very badly designed) Garmin website.

2. At the Garmin website I had to enter the serial # of my GPS unit to find out what update to get. Bad funnel design here – why not just show me a picture of the different units to make it easy for me to spend some dough? Luckily for Garmin, I had the unit with me.

3. I found the right update, and the website told me that it could be purchased directly from Garmin. Nice, I thought, and broke out the Visa card.

4. But alas – after putting the update in the shopping cart and entering all my personal info, I found out that Garmin only ships to the US, UK and Ireland. It took me some browsing to find the Danish dealer of Garmin hardware.

5. Nowhere on the website of the Danish Garmin dealer could I find out how to buy the update. A few products were listed – but not the one I was looking for.

6. I Called Garmin Denmark and after being on hold for 5 minutes a guy told me that Garmin Denmark does not sell map updates. The update must be bought in one of the physical dealerships. I apologize to the support guy for being a bit angry at this point – but for Pete’s sake: Why don’t you just write on your web site that you’re your not selling to private customers? Why don’t you compile a list of online shops that sell your stuff?

7. Refusing to waste my time going to a Fona or Merlin store (the Danish equivalents to Radio Shack: They mostly don’t have what you need, and they mostly don’t know anything about what the do have) I managed to find the update on a webshop and ordered it.

8. A DVD sized package should be perfectly able to fit through the letter opening in my front door, but to my surprise the Garmin DVD didn’t arrive. Instead a note from the post office told me that I had to get the package at the local post office. But I have left for Easter holiday and the package had to wait for a week. Those of you that like software updates as much as I do will know that a week is a very long wait.

9. Today – picking up the package – I realized why the postman hadn’t been able to get it through the letter opening: Garmin has for some spaced out reason chosen to wrap the DVD with an A4 sized clam shell (you know: the environment damaging PVC packaging that’s impossible to open without shredding your fingers to pieces). So, absolutely unnecessary packaging delayed the DVD a week.

10. After using a pair of heavy duty scissors I got the DVD out from its casing without blood shed and booted it up. It immediately halted with an error message saying that the setup program couldn’t detect an active internet connection (and such is needed). All I could do was to cancel the setup. Now, all other programs had no problem finding the internet connection – the pc was as online as ever. After 30 minutes of trial and error and searching the internet for help (using my supposedly non-existing internet connection), I found out that some setting deep inside Internet Explorer had to be changed for the Garmin update DVD to see the connection.

Now: The only reason that this connection had to be available was for the DVD to check my Garmin registration number with Garmin’s servers. So 30 minutes of my time was wasted because a product WHICH I LEGALLY BOUGHT needs validation. Arrgh. Of course the problem with the missing internet connection isn’t mentioned on Garmin’s support pages although more than one GPS forum mentions it. I guess Garmin’s employees doesn’t read the forums in which their loyal customers discuss Garmin products. Why should they…

11. Finally – after me tweaking Internet Explorer, the setup program continued – just to grind to a halt again when the DVD suddenly couldn’t find my Garmin unit. Strange, because the unit was perfectly connected to the pc, though, and the screen of the Nüvi shows the “connected to a pc” picture. The Garmin website suggests that I try another USB port – I do. No go. I try another USB cable. No go.

It turned out that the unit conflicted with a network drive letter on my pc. Thank god I’m not a pc novice – a lot of users wouldn’t have been able to locate this error (when did YOU last check your locigal disk setup using the Disk Manager inside Computer Management inside the Control Panel?). Of course: It’s not Garmin’s fault that I have a network drive called G:, but again: This must be a very common problem and Garmin does not mention it on the support pages on its website. And the moronic setup program does not suggest any way of solving the problem – all I can do is to press “Exit”.

12. Finally: The GPS is connected, its firmware updated and the unit restarted. I entered the validation code for the map (located on the jewel case of the DVD), and … the updater halted again. The server which was to validate my validation vode is down. “Please try again later” it says. All I can do is press Exit. I’ll just have to wait until some geek in the US gets the server up and running again.

13. By now, I was pissed. I bought this product (although it was hard to find) and now it seems that I’m not allowed to use it. So I wan’t to write to the Garmin support and tell them that their software sucks. But fortunately for the poor supporters, the support site crashes when I try to access the mail form…

Dear Garmin. This is not the way to do it. It’s not OK to be more concerned with copyright laws and data safety than to the user’s experience. An update procedure for an expensive product must be tested over and over again to make sure that the user (all users – not just a geek like me) can complete the procedure.

Multiple pieces of software, services, support functions and content has to play together to ensure a nice user experience. The service has to be designed all the way for the user to be satisfied. If that is impossible (and it seems that it is to Garmin) then at least let go of the paranoia and all the safety measures and focus on providing decent support all the way through the update. In that way the installation procedure will be simple and less prone to errors. All you do is irritating legit customers. The pirates will find a way through anyhow.
Now – after spending almost two hours and waiting for that quirky validation server to wake up – the setup procedure finally runs and is updating my GPS unit. Meanwhile it shows me ads for motorcycle GPS units (Why? I have a GPS unit – that’s why I’m updating it – morons!) and reminding me, that the little blob on the GPS screen that indicates my whereabouts can be changed to another kind of 3D vehicle. Gosh.

If all that energy had just been used on testing and improving the setup procedure and updating the support pages.

A while ago, Jeff Han demonstrated the multitouch screen at TED. Now it’s ready for the consumer in a less impressive, but more usable trackpad version. It’s definitely the way to go! It seems to be very intuitive and suddenly the trackpad becomes more than just a ‘mouse-wannabee’. Now we just need a bigger trackpad and more actions than just manipulating the size of a picture
And we need some really clever people to create generic trackpad-language so Mac and Microsoft and other will use the same ‘language’.

Jeff Han’s presentation at TED

Finally, after months of preparation, we have launched the digital signage system in DR’s new headquarter in Copenhagen… and it went well

From a workplace to a place to create.
That was the headline of the project from day one. DR Byen has been built by four different architects who has made four very different buildings.
Pictures from one of the four buildings in DR Byen

Our project was meant to deliver an integrated communication platform and to ‘bring the media’ inside these buildings.
As you can see on this images the last part in the project (the Concert Hall) is still more or less a construction sites (see the official site here). About three quarters of the building is finished and the digital signage project has been launch in three of the four parts of the building.

Number one: To connect the architecture with our corporate identity:
First of all, we needed to make a tighter connection between the architecture and the corporate identity.
Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) is, as the name implies, a media corporation. And although it’s an amazing piece of architecture made by 4 different companies, it is not immediately obvious that it was the home of the largest Danish media corporation, that we are delivering high quality public service content, and that we are the de facto keepers of the Danish cultural media heritage.

Number two
Second, we are experiencing an increasing competition in the media business, and the most important competitive advantage is creativity. Therefore I believe that it is absolutely vital to create a pleasant and inspiring environment for creativity to happen. Of course we can’t do an ROI calculation on how much creativity this project will generate, but I believe that we are creating the ground upon which creativity may grow more easily than usual. And that’s why we have been focusing on the integration of different kinds of visual art in the project and creating an experience instead of just an information screen.

Number 3
Finally, our customers have ever changing needs, and therefore we must able to communicate very fast inside the organization and also be able to change our communication procedures very quickly, if needed. A fully automated digital platform, as the one we have created, is a big asset in this race. In the web-2.0-user-has-the-power communication world of today it’s very important to have non-intrusive way of pushing important communication to your stakeholders, employees and customers.

First of all, the Entrance.
When you step into DR at groundlevel, this is what you see. Three large video projections (one is hidden in this image) on the white and grey concrete walls.

We’ve been working closely together with the architects to create a coherent experience of the room. The content is very abstract and meant to supplement the room with depth, dynamic and a creative atmosphere.

I think it’s important, to be very courageous and to use an abstract and symbolic content that will activate the viewer instead of communicating in the usual corp-speak discourse. We should stimulate experiences with the use of symbols and montage-effects and not with the use the very powerful media to promote corporate taglines. See for instance how Jason Eppink is transforming standard commercials to street art.

The entrance from another angle:

The foyer from one of the side entrances. Four 19″ monitors placed on a white concrete wall.

The ‘Main Street’ on the 2nd floor:
The connection between the four buildings in the ‘DR City’ is a giant glass-covered street (12*18 meters) with a bridge crossing the water channel going through the area called ‘Ørestaden’.

In this part of the building we have placed 6 46″ screens. The content consists of news from our own news-channel and news from the department of corporate communicate. Besides that, there are breakers made by young visual artists. They we’re given access to our media archives and used some of the old material to make new artistic expressions.

The ‘Main Street’ viewed from the bridge on the fourth floor.
Every screen has it’s own unique flow of information configured to the specific physical context and user behaviour.

The Meeting Center:
In our Meeting Center we’ve made an integration to MS Exchange Server. In this way our meeting booking system is automatically updated on the screens next to each meeting room. The interface is based on Flash using xml-data from Exchange generated by AgendaX.

What’s next??

Well, this is just phase one of the project. In the next 1-3 month we will be creating a lot more content to the system, for instance the weather forecast, trailers, traffic information and of course more visuals. In february we’re having the first art exhibition with the project ‘Runner’ in collaboration with Illumenart and EPI. Hopefully, we be able to extend the system to the other parts of DR in Jutland and on Bornholm and most importantly we’re learning a lot about what it takes to maintain and use this kind of communication platform.

Besides this, we’re of course looking forward to completion of the concert hall and to the exciting task of creating the digital projections in and outside the concert hall See the pictures. That’s gonna be amazing!!

I will hopefully be able to upload some video soon. It gives a better sense of the look and feel of the displays.
Please comment if you have any good ideas or experiences with digital signage solutions.

/Lars Silberbauer

Just before Christmas I got to test a HTC Touch Dual with Windows Mobile 6 at work. It was partly my own idea to introduce HTC Touch or Touch Dual as a possible alternative to our mainstream Nokias. That’s why I chose to ignore my mobile-savvy colleague as he offered his condolences when he saw the black HTC box on my desk. He was right, though. Windows Mobile and mobile phones don’t mix.

This was my first hands-on experience with a Windows Mobile phone as I’ve always used Nokia. I have used Windows Mobile devices before, though, as I’ve owned several WM based PDAs. They weren’t perfect but I could live with them. But, as I was to find out, the usage of a PDA differs a lot from that of a phone.

I was looking forward to the WM6 Exchange server integration (“push mail”) and to have an always updated calendar with me. And these features did work fine-ish. Except for the crummy calendar design that forces you to use the stylus constantly, that is. But even so: After five days I gave up the fight with Windows Mobile 6: What a genuinely stupid OS for a phone. Bad, bad UI design.

I think Microsoft has made a huge mistake to try to move an OS from a pc to a phone. Already after a few hours I got very tired indeed from having to get out the stylus just to close a window or to cancel an error message on the ridiculously tiny close-box in the corner of the dialogs. I don’t care if it looks like the GUI on my Windows pc – it just doesn’t work on that little screen. On a device that tiny you do one thing at the time – you don’t need the windows metaphore to allow for multitasking (it hardly works on the pc anyhow).

Also, several times when I was trying to phone someone, WM6 – being absolutely clueless about my priorities – would pop up with some reminder or other alert that really shouldn’t popup at all while I’m dialing. Just like Windows XP does, WM6 made me feel that the system comes first and the user second.

I soon started feeling that I was spending time fighting the system instead of using it. Exactly as I feel when trying to get Outlook 2007 to start in less than 15 minutes or that thrre to four hours every month I spend massaging my Windows XP into working without too many alerts or errors. Yep, Microsoft surely has succeeded moving the Windows experience to a handset. And that’s a pitty.

Three times a call simply didn’t come through (it’s a phone for crying out loud!) and four times I dialed my fathers number by mistake because of a design flaw in HTC’s TouchFLO interface (which has been added to patch some of the even bigger flaws in WM). The device insisted on merging all my Live! Messenger contacts with my professional contacts making tons of duplicates and adding a lot of contacts without phone numbers to my phone book, making finding the right version of the contact  (the one with the phone number) annoyingly difficult.

I have the feeling that Microsoft’s brand managers have had too much influence on the design. A lot of stupid compromises have been made to make the phone interface look like Windows, instead of genuinely making the OS work on a tiny screen and in a mobile user context. The design flaws combined with the Touch’ sluggish response and not always too precise touch screen makes this gadget a big no-go to me. WM6 doesn’t seem mature and personally I think it’s fundamentally flawed. I think it’ll need a complete rewrite.

One thing is spending time in front of the pc tweaking and tuning. But to have to combat your mobile phone just to get it to work the right way – that’s not OK.

I felt that I could not trust this piece of hardware to work when I needed it to – and as I rely heavily on my mobile phone I’m now back on my trusty old Nokia 6230i. No push mail – but no wasted time, missed calls or hypertension either.

Check out the interactive installation at Union Square in New York. It’s really amazing and hasm a lot of ‘wow-effect’. But I would love to play with the equipment for a couple of days and try to combine the astonishing visuals with for instance live video/data or live data from a RFID chip

In today’s alert box Jakob Nielsen gets angry on Adobe for forgetting the OK button on a preference dialog.

And yes, of course Adobe should have added an OK button to the Windows version of the dialog, but for Mac folks, this is how dialogs have been for ages – that is without an OK button when it wasn’t needed.

So – in this case Nielsen is right (it’s always easy to be right about obvious stuff). But with his “33 years of experience using computers” Nielsen could have at least mentioned that to exclude the OK button used to be a very common design standard for Mac applications.

Also, it seems to me that with users getting used to Ajax-style “on the fly saving” of data, the missing OK button is getting more and more normal.

In the late nineties the University of Copenhagen shut down the department of Humanistic Computation. Scholars and IT didn’t mix, the vice deane apparently thought. IT was about programming, scholars were all about poetry and fluffy stuff. Stupid thinking – bad, bad move. Luckily in 1999 the IT University of Copenhagen stepped in and took over the market for well trained usability specialists and designers.

The idea that IT was all about numbers and algorithms also reflected onto the IT industry. Usability, interaction design and visual design were something fluffy that you applied to the web site like icing to a cake. Systems were programmed without knowledge of the user or of the user’s context and needs, and they more often than not suffered from so many conceptual mistakes that a simple revamp of the user interface just wouldn’t do the trick. To stick with the cake metaphor: It may look nice, but if the cake is genuinely bad, the icing won’t help much. The trouble was twofold: The programmers and the management didn’t understand what design was all about and we, the designers, were really bad explaining it to them. We appeared like grumpy geeks that always talked about the users and seldom about the business. No wonder: Designers were not considered a part of the business – just a part of the cost. We didn’t earn any money from the hours we spent consulting on design and concept. The projects didn’t really start, budget-wise, until the programming began.

This was of course bad for business for the web bureaus: All of the earnings had to come from a very short visual design phase and from a large, high risk, programming phase. That the conceptual design was almost non existing made the programming even more risky, as conceptual mistakes or interaction flaws would be discovered much too late in the process. This meant that quite often interaction errors were considered bugs and that we were taking immense losses trying to fix stupid design flaws that should never have been made. Just because we didn’t design before we built.

Nowadays demands are high for well educated scholars with communication skills, technical understanding, design skills, and a ‘soft’ approach to IT. Too many large scale IT projects have suffered badly from the lack of design to ignore the need for these kinds of experts. We know that the business wil suffer from bad design and profit from great design. The clients (the smart ones) are willing to pay for great design (both interaction design and visual design) and thus to bring down the risk of the programming phases.

Although a few (often large) companies still haven’t got it (they will get it, eventually, or they will suffer a slow death), most have realized that design and design consultancy are valuable business areas of their own. Furthermore, they have found out that strengthening the quality of the design and thereby the quality of the product itself may (surprise, surprise) eventually lead to bigger market shares and that branding is also a about usability, web design and the right feature set. Who would’ve known, huh?

Now we need to take the next step: We need to realize that analysis, concept and strategy must be discussed before design starts. That great design comes from a well defined strategy and clear goals.

Both the consultants and the clients must realize that it’s impossible to design – and build – anything if the strategy and business models are not there. …and that “just make it user friendly” is not a strategic goal in itself.

Too much money is still being put into platforms and websites without a well thought through branding and communication strategy. So to further bring down risk and to make each € spent on web count: Think strategic. Define your digital strategy and make sure that every website, subsite, microsite, e-mail marketing system etc. fit neatly into it. Spend the time and money needed to make sure that your consultants and designers understand what your strategy is about – or get them to help you define your digital strategy if you haven’t got one.

Microsoft has launched their Project ‘Milan’, which is basically a large touchscreen with a new multitouch manipulation software.

I tried a similar product in New York last year (based a projector instead of a touch screen) and based om my experience it makes a big difference when you’re using a multitouch display instead of a keyboard.

If you’re using a multitouch display on a horizontal surface it’s often becomming a social experience in contrast to using a keyboard where you’re mostly interacting in a individual manipulation and interaction mode. So give me a couple of those, thanks … but could someone at Microsoft please make sure that the blue screen of death is not all over my coffee table?
It would ruin my creative mood, I’m sure.

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Accidentally moving my mouse cursor over the bottom of the MSN Messenger Window I triggered a hidden, brain dead happy-go-lucky video ad from McDonald’s. Suddenly the loud and annoying sound of the ad was screaming out of my earphones making my ears ring.

Do not auto start sound in any way. Not in banners, on web pages or any where else. Let the user choose when to use sound or not. You do not know how the volume levels of the user’s computer has been set, and no ad – no matter how cleverly produced – will work when blown into your head at 120dB.

Also, while the customer might be able to handle ads when surfing the web, it is very intimidating to be confronted with popup video ads and sounds in what you regard as a desktop application.

If this is the new way of presenting ads in MSN Messenger (or Live! Messenger or what ever the name is this week) I’m shifting to another IM that will leave me alone.

[UPDATE: Jacob Hage has the solution! - in Danish. It's all about getting this patch]

A McDonald’s video ad just waiting, ready to jump up and scare the minced beef out me.

Whammo – I’m not loving it.

I got this message from the CEO at eLounge - the e-book store entirely made in Flash that I posted about some time ago.

Now the site has been rewritten in good old html. I’m sure that eLounge will experience an increase in revenue almost immediately as the search engines are now able to see the site.

I still feel that the visual design is a bit confusing with too many details, but that’s beside the point. Now eLounge is a real website that may be accessed from search engines, bookmarked and deeplinked into, and we like that! Welcome to the web, eLounge.

- and a brand is not a style guide.

To most professionals these are obvious statements. But definitely not for a lot of website owners who still think that online branding is all about Flash and nice graphics, and forget that branding is in every aspect of the site: The choice of features, the tone of voice, the response time, the ease of navigation (or lack thereof), the feeling of real value. And, of course, the looks.

I’ve even heard the top 120 pixels of a web page declared as “the branding area”. BS! Online branding is about using the web medium the right way – it’s not just about putting the right logo and the right colors on some out-of-the-box web solution.

You can’t limit your branding effort to a isolated part of the page – it’s an ongoing process. Your website oozes branding from every pixel, so you better in control of what kind of branding it’s oozing…

Your brand strategy must govern your web strategy and affect all important decisions in the design process – but on all levels, not just on the visual one: A website which doesn’t provide the user with any real value but only wastes the user’s time (or downright annoys the user by being stupidly designed or coded) is bad branding – no matter how beautiful and by-the-styleguide it is.

Now grab 10 minutes of nice, visual branding fundamentals and remember that they all apply to the web too.

Source: http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap

It’s common knowledge: If you want to get your message out there your site must be accessible to search engines, especially Google. That’s why I normally tell my clients not to use Flash for the entire site. Yes, Flash can access databases and XML, Flash makes all that nifty effects possible and Flash will show in the same way in all browsers (if it shows at all, of course).

But in the end: Content inside the Flash file will not be indexed by Google. Unless you spend a lot of time and money on shadowing your pages in html and in other ways tricking Google to index your site, your content is nonexistent as far Google is concerned as long as it’s wrapped in Flash.

So, in my – and most other web professionals’ – opinion, Flash is great for doing the icing, not for making the cake itself.

That’s why I’m so happy to find out that the NRA (National Rifle Association) website is almost pure Flash. If you google NRA member and gun rights wacko Wayne LaPierre, or the title of some of his articles on nra.org, you won’t find the NRA website at all. Fantastic. In that way children won’t accidentally stumble upon NRA’s unhealthy message: That guns are great toys and that we are safe as long as we have the option to gun down each other.

Now, if only the large tobacco companies, arms manufacturers and religious fundamentalist organisations would be so kind as to hide their content behind a Flash plugin too, the web would be a much healthier place to be.

Two days ago I made Axure aware of a bug in Axure RP Pro 4.4.0.471 that made special characters, like the Danish æ, ø and å, render badly in Firefox.

Today the new release 4.4.1.745 is ready

Check out MoMA’s site about Doug Aitken’s ‘Sleepwalkers’. I wish I’ve seen it live in NY, but the site gives you a good impression of the video-installation.

By the way, one of the ultimate highlights of the excellent ‘Sip My Ocean’ videoexhibition at Louisiana (in Denmark) was definitely ‘Can’t Stop’ by Aitken. It’s a definitely ‘must see’ piece of videoart!

Enjoy!
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2007/aitken/

Axure RP Pro 4.4 is out and features a few long awaited improvements: Now you can

• use “onchange” in dropdowns
• communicate with dynamic layers across masters
• use a placeholder widget instead of the ugly image widget

And is it me – or has the app become a bit faster?

Anyway: Axure stays in the lead as the best tool for rapid web prototyping.

Designing rich newsletters for Notes has always been a pain. The Notes html rendering engine pretty much sucks. But as not many consumers use Notes it didn’t really matter. Also, webmail services like Hotmail and Gmail has been difficult to negotiate CSS wise. But you could always trust the good old Outlook to render your html e-mail in the right way.

Until now, that is.

February Microsoft launches Outlook 2007 featuring that old buggy Word rendering engine with extremely limited support for CSS. Yes: The one you know from MS Word that has the same html rendering power as did Netscape 2 – that is: Very limited indeed.

It’s nothing short of a disaster. Html formatted e-mail newsletters drive a lot of our clients’ online business, and we know for a fact that rich formatted newsletters work well: Nice design makes people buy stuff. Now some of our clients must either redesign their newsletters or fall back to text e-mail to be sure their customers can read their messages in Outlook (which most people use).

Why Microsoft has chosen to use the crippled Word rendering engine for displaying the html formatting of the brand new Outlook 2007 is a mystery.

My best guess, though, is that some fool in Microsoft has decided that to “integrate” e-mail more into the Office suite the stupid Word engine must be used all over the place. And it’s probably the same lame guy that years ago decided that Word should be the default e-mail editor for Outlook.

Source: Campaign Monitor

This week we’re testing large videoprojections in our new HQ in Ørestaden (Copenhagen).
The headline of the project is: “From a Place to Work to a Place to Create” and we’re trying to create an ambience of innovation, creativity and communication.

If you’re in the neighborhood drop by this week an enjoy the impressive prototype, else check out the videoclip.

What do you think?

In this video, captured on our trip to New York last year, a well known architect (no need to mention his name is showing off his new accomplishment of building the new World Trade Center number 7.
But the usability of the very fancy big screen display lets him down…
I guess the mouse will remain the preferred pointing device for most users anyway and that they’ll include a usability expert next time…

“Dansk IT’s” Usability Days 2006 are over. A two day seminar on usability – and not a bad one either. Last year the same event ended up in nothing but sales pitches from different CMS vendors (yawn), but this year focus was in fact on usability/user centered design. The 2005 catastrophe meant that only about 80 people showed up this year and that makes me wonder if there’s going to be Usability Days 2007.

Among the best speakers this year was Klaus Kaasgaard (VP of Yahoo! User Experience Research) who talked about web trends for the years to come (and just in case you’ve been living in a cave the last year: The keywords are social, participation, community, sharing). Quite inspiring.

Also, Eric Reiss gave a good performance on user experience in general.

Several cases on usability and user centric design were presented: TopDanmark (insurance company), VELUX (the ones with the roof windows and one of our clients), and The Ministry of Finance (hey – also one of our clients . All of them very well presented cases.

I and a colleague did a two hour hands-on workshop on personas. Two hours aren’t much for a workshop, but we managed to have people put together their own “tween”-personas for a fictitious e-commerce case. I think it went ok – but who am I to judge. I’m eagerly awaiting the feedback forms.

So, that concludes two weeks of me talking. Last thursday I gave a presentation on tools for user centred design at Creuna’s own usability seminar and friday I did the same presentation for most of my colleagues. This week I did a presentation on Web 2.0-trends as a part of another Creuna event for our clients. These things are fun to do but they sure take up a lot of time, so I’m looking forward to getting some work done the next couple of weeks – the kind of work that out clients pay us to do.

Yet another client wants a splash screen on his new, expensive and very beautiful web shop.

Why, you ask, put up a splash screen in front of a web shop? Why try to block your clients from your shop? Why spoil your conversion rate just to show a picture?

“Branding”, they say. “We want to show our brand before the customer is allowed into the shop”. End of discussion. Gaaah.

But please understand: A beautifully designed shop is GOOD branding. Easy access to buy your goods is GREAT branding. A flawless and nice shopping experience is EXCELLENT branding.

A 760×400 pixels jpg blocking the entrance to your shop is NOT great branding. It’s just plain stupid.

NO MORE SPLASH SCREENS! Have a nice weekend.

EUROIA2006

In my eyes Day Two had more substance than had day one.

The first panel, Pros and Cons of Different Wireframing Techniques (Marion Böing, David Carruthers, Rob Goris, Jacco Nieuwland, Filip Borloo), dealt with different types of wireframes and prototyping techniques. It was quite interesting to hear pro- and contra-Visio panellist discuss how they worked. I was glad that one of the panellist proudly stated that she soon would be doing her prototyping in Axure RP Pro. We have used Axure for more than 1½ years and I it’s a great tool. I’d never use Visio again for this kind of work.

One panellist told that he is using a combination of Photoshop and InDesign to generate and maintain extremely high fidelity graphical “wireframes” and flowcharts. I was impressed by his method as it was a brilliant approach if you need to do a lot of key page designs, but the time one will have to spend maintaining this kind of prototype… man. That method seemed incredibly laborious.

Next up was Jared Volkmann to present his Customer Experience Framework. An excellent and fast paced presentation that took us through the three main stages in defining the customers’ behavior. It’s all about Who’s visiting? Why are they visiting? and What are they doing? Well – I guess we all know that these questions are important, but Volkmann’s framework makes it easy to communicate to the client why the work must be done. Volkmann stressed that a combination of thourough log analysis and surveys is important to understand how how the users are behaving and why they are behaving the way they are.

The second panel of the day was about IA Education In Europe. It was lead by the very engaged but also quite talkative Dr. Heiko Haubitz who teaches IA at the University of Dublin. Unfortunately his own presentation stole some of the very precious time from the panel. IA education is an important topic but I don’t feel the panel got the room it needed. Dr. Heiko, Dr. Madsen and especially Dr. Thull all deserved more time to present their views. Also I would’ve liked to hear much more from Boris Mueller who very briefly (due to a constantly crashing Adobe Reader (that’s one-nill to Powerpoint)) showed us some very exciting designs made by his students. More of that next year, please: Examples of concrete work.

Bogo Vatovec delivered one of the great presentation of the EUROIA 2006. He talked about Content Adaptation to Mobile Devices – how well does different systems adapt browser-targeted content to mobile devices? Not well at all, Vatovec revealed. None of the tested CA systems managed to transform the test sites into anything usable. Vatovecs research was thorough and his presentation downright funny. The big question in my mind is, though: Is automatic content adaptation the way to go? Is it possible to design for both pc browsers and small mobile units? I’m not sure about that.

Jason Mesut and Warren Hutchinson from Framfab UK demonstrated their concept of The Wicked Workshop. Nothing new under the sun here, but nevertheless an ok presentation on how to make a workshop a workshop and not just yet another boting meeting.

The closing keynote was made by the eccentrically dressed but brilliant Dr. Steven Pemperton of the CWI. Dr. Pemperton is chairman of the W3C html and Xforms working group and told us about xhtml2 and how it will take html to the next level by allowing for sematic markup – microformats done the right way, as Dr. Pemperton called it.

Thanks to EUROIA, ASIS&T and the comittee for putting this great event together.

Just a couple of books that I would recommend on branding, design and innovation.

Tom Kelley: Ten Faces of Innovation.
A very inspiring book on how to beat the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization.

• Good:
  - All in all, it’s a very good book for anyone with an interest in generating creativity and innovation in their own company.
  - Kelley makes an very important distinction with his focus on faces and not phases. It’s people that drives innovation, not Gant diagrams and Project Management phases and schedules.
• Bad
  The next time Kelley writes about innovation, he should make up his mind whether he wants to promote Ideo or write a serious book about innovation. He knows a lot about innovation, no question about it!, but to much cheering about the wonderful successes of Ideo does not make him or his argumentation any more credible or convincing.

Tom Peters: Design

Tom Peters has the ability to get you pumped up with enthusiasm just by the way he writes and in this book the content is just as inspiring as well. This is a book with a message and you feel the commitment throughout the book.

• Good:
  What I like the most about this book is the radical all-or-nothing message that it sends out, for example this passage from the first chapter:

The harsh news: THIS IS NOT OPTIONAL. The microchip will colonize all rote activities. And we will have to scramble to reinvent ourselves – as we did when we came off the farm and went into the factory, and then as we were ejected from the factory and delivered to the white collars towers.
The exciting news: THIS IS NOT OPTIONAL. The reinvented you and the reinvented me will have no choice but to scramble and add value in some meaningful way.

• Bad:
  If you’re reading the book because you want to know more about design, you’re going to be disappointed, it’s not about design, it’s all about business and not about new colour schemes and design trends.

Martin Lindstrom: Brand Sense

The Danish Brand Guru Numero Uno has created a follow up to his previous bestseller Brandchild.

• Good:
  Basically, he’s making a point with his concept of branding for all five senses. It’s obvious that there’s room for improvement and that we need to consider all elements of human cognitivity when we are trying to make an impact on customers. But the way he’s trying to measure human senses is not convincing. It seems to me, that he’s got a point and he knows it, but in his ambition to prove his idea, he is crossing the line from giving proffessional advice and doing academic research. And there’s a very big difference!
• Bad:
  As in Tom Kelley’s book about innovation it seems to me that Lindstrom sometimes doesn’t know which one of his two objectives that’s most important. Is it to contribute to the shared pool of knowledge about branding? or is it to use his own branding abilities and tools to strengthen his own brand “Martin Lindstrom”? It’s not clear to me, but I would prefer a honest personal branding exercise without the want-to-make-ground-breaking-academic-research stuff.

Anyway, all three books are worth reading. Enjoy!

Over the last two weeks me and a colleague have executed four workshops with a client who is building a complex B2B portal. The client has for some time been working on the concept and business model but as the process needed to move forward into design we were called in to take the process to the next level – and to do this quickly as deadline was approaching mightily fast.

As the concept was not entirely documented but mostly existed inside the project team members’ minds, our design process had to be very flexible to allow for sudden changes in scope and strategy.

We soon realized that we needed to get very visual indeed to shift the team members from strategic thinking into design mode (from the “what and why”-mode to the “how”-mode), and that we also needed a lot of face time with the client to understand the complex organisational needs without doing a some thorough analysis first. So we simply brought a laptop with Axure RP 4.2, a projector and a Wacom digitizer and did 4 x 5 hours of intense rapid prototyping with the client.

We were 2 of us, 3 of them and, very importantly, the head of the company that eventually will implement the system: A skilled system architect with a great understanding of the need for IA and interaction design. We’ve worked with him before and it’s always a pleasure (I can’t mention names here, but he’ll know who he is

He and I lead the discussion while my colleague prototyped like mad in Axure, constantly reflecting the team’s decisions on the screen (he’ pretty fast in Axure – and one needs to be to keep up with 5 team members constantly changing their minds).

The first couple of hours of workshop one went by without much progress but suddenly the site started to emerge on the screen. Today we concluded the fourth and final workshop and I must say that this approach really has moved the project forward.

Live prototyping with a team of 6 is not the cheapest way to do it, but there no question that both the project and the quality of the IA and the design have benefitted from this approach.

Anyway: Tomorrow I leave for Berlin to attend the second European Information Architecture Summit. Two days of fun and educating stuff, I hope. And the IA happy hour friday evening. What’s a summit without hang overs?

I’ll blog about this event when I’ll get back, but please be patient – the next week is screwed up schedule-wise so we might reach the weekend before any posts appear.

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)

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

Adobe has released Flex 2, the app that’ll make doing rich internet applications a breeze.

It lets enterprises create personalized, multimedia-rich, Ajax-style applications that can reach virtually anyone on any platform.

…as Adobe says. Not Ajax-applications but Ajax-style applications. Because there certainly is a catch.

I was eager to see a demo on this revolution so I went to the Flex Store demo that is supposed to show how cool a web shop can be when made with Flex.

I was not impressed: In fact the shop (after loading for hours!) didn’t initialize. Just a empty window – both in IE and FF…

Oh my: I need Flash 9 to use an RIA produced in Flex 2. That kind of makes Flex a big no-no in my book. I could never recommend a client to build anything that requires his customers to install a proprietary plugin.

Seems to me that Flex 2 is Adobes way to try to take over the web by requiring everybody to install Flash 9.

Building your website in a tool that requires the user to install plugins at all is absolutely sheer madness. Just don’t do it.

In my last post I wanted to link to Eric Reiss’ Web Dogma ’06 on http://www.fatdux.com. But the site uses frames making deep linking impossible. Dudes?

Yesterday we pitched on a redesign proces on a large e-gov site (I can’t tell you exactly which site, of course) as one of three contestants. We came in second (the first of the loosers, as they say).

Win some, loose some – that’s ok, I can live with that. What annoys me in this case is that this not-to-be client told us we lost because we focused on issues with the website’s structure, navigation and usability problems in our quest to come up with a process that would make more citizens use the site.

The user’s flow through the site is so obviously screwed up by bad communication, bad usability and a non-functional navigation – all issues that desperately need fixing, and we felt we needed to address that. Some relatively easy, but subtle, fixes could be applied that would improve the UX a great deal, making the site more usable to the citizens who are paying for its maintenance through taxes.

But the politician that controls the site (new in office) needed something else: Visible features that can be shown on the front page for the press and other politicians to see. Quickly. So the bureau with the easy-to-implement, flashy ideas won. “Let’s add some more features”, they said.

I’m not blaming the project manager that had to make that choice. I’m blaming the politician that asks for that kind of solution while down-prioritizing the process that would make the site usable for the citizens.

Of course that kind of real IA-work will have to be done sooner or later, we were told. But right now it’s time for some really visible features.

But I fear that when it’s time for the important changes, the ones that make a difference for the citizens, some other politician has taken office and then SHE needs some really visible quick fixes, and so on…

It’s no wonder that so many e-gov solutions suck so bad. Politics and personal preferences mess up the process even before it begins. Let’s all recite Reiss’ Dogma No. 1 in a mantra-like way:

1. Anything that exists only to satisfy the internal politics of the site owner must be eliminated.

This is an interesting interview with Eric Reiss on his 10 dogmas on web design.

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/dogmas_are_mean

I’m cited in Berlingske Tidende – one of Denmark’s largest newspapers. I commented on the miserable user experience Danish citizens meet when trying to obtain a “Digital Signatur” – a personal certificate nessecary for access to the Danish e-gov solutions.

“[...]Men det hjælper ikke, at der er flere ting at bruge signaturen til, hvis folk som udgangspunkt ikke en gang kan finde ud af at hente og anvende signaturen, mener brugervenlighedsekspert, Klaus Silberbauer fra internetkonsulenthuset Creuna Danmark.- Der er tilsyneladende ikke tænkt på, at alle danskere skal kunne finde ud af at installere en digital signatur, før succesen er hjemme. Som det er nu skal en borger, der ønsker en digital signatur, igennem en veritabel jungle af fagudtryk og meget dårlig brugervenlighed, siger han.

Han mener, at det er det offentlige Danmark, der fejler ved ikke at støtte nok op omkring indsatsen med at sælge digital signatur til danskerne: – Langt de fleste kommunale og statslige websider henviser blot til TDC’s website og håber så på, at borgeren vender tilbage med en digital signatur. Men det sker ikke altid. Ofte vil borgeren få en dårlig oplevelse og måske helt opgive at hente en digital signatur, og det kan øge distancen mellem det offentlige og borgeren. Det er ærgerligt. TV-spots er ikke nok – indsatsen skal arbejdes helt ned i de enkelte websites design, lyder rådet fra Klaus Silberbauer. [...]“

http://www.berlingske.dk/business/artikel:aid=758434/

Just got home from an exquisite holiday in Italy. The food, the wine, the beaches of Liguria, the coffee… yummy.

And speaking of coffee: On our way home we visited our good friends in Switzerland. After the delicious lamb chops (brilliant!) Marianne and Søren served a very nice cup of espresso and to my surprise it was made on a Nestlé invention: The Nespresso machine. Small coffee capsules (sold on the net) go into a machine manufactured on license by Siemens, Jura, Köenig or some other espresso machine manufacturer and out comes pretty good espresso indeed. The capsules are of course of proprietary design and the concept is a bit too… conceptish – but the coffee is good and that’s what counts. So I’m considering buying such a Nespresso thingy.

As soon as I got home I started my Firefox browser and went to www.nespresso.com to check out the availability for Denmark. This is what met me:

Yes – an almost empty page. It was supposed to be a large Flash animation, but for some odd reason the Flash object didn’t work. It may be my browser, it may be the page, I don’t know – and I don’t care. Why on earth does Nestlé risk loosing the customer on the frontpage just to make the page flashy? My guess: Some jerkoff executive at Nestlé said: Make it flashy, make it noisy – and the designers went ahead, blew their brains out and did this site. It’s not great- have a look for yourself. I think I’ll do a more thorough review of it later on, but right now I need sleep – I’m still seeing fast approaching Audis for my eyes after 12 hours on the Autobahn.

I tried signing up for Adwords to check out the new Google Analytics using Firefox (as always). I was somewhat surprised to find that Google has chosen not to support Firefox in the Sign Up flow. The wizard simply breaks – the “Next button” on the Set Up Account page just doesn’t show. I had to start over in IE to complete my sign up.

So, I wanted to send a notice to Google nicely asking if they’ve struck a deal with Bill Gates to support IE only – but guess what: In Firefox the submit button on the contact form doesn’t show!

I know that Google’s stuff are mostly free and in beta only. But this perpetual beta nonsense has gone to far if Google’s frontend programmers feel that they need not test in Firefox.

UPDATE

Got a nice answer from Google. They cannot replicate the error. Guess it comes down to some strange flaw in that particular version of FF.

Cologne Bonn Airport’s tagline is “So Simple”. Its web site is anything but. The extreme abuse of icons and the total absence of photos and decent labelling makes the site a nightmare to use. This is reeaal bad communication.

Example: This icon means “Flights Today” when on the frontpage, but on the page Transport Info it means Aviation Businesses. When you move your mouse over it it turns into a house…?

Have a look at Transport Info yourself and try to guess what the icons mean. Now move your mouse over the icons (annoying dhtml popups aren’t they?) Do the icons make sense? Absolutely not. It’s like the designer ran out of clipart on the frontpage and simply decided to use the same icons over and over again.Furthermore, none of the icons are explained by text labels making the whole site a guessing game. And why on earth does the plane turn into a house on mouseover?

This means “Baggage Retrieval”, right? No – on the Transport Info page this means “Late Night Check In”, but on the frontpage the Late Night Check In icon is a crescent moon.

How about this “menu” – So simple, is it?

Stupid icons combined into retro-hieroglyphs: Car + Key = Rental Car. Car + house = Road Routes … ? God. Someone get an ancient Egyptian to translate.

I see three lessons to be learned from this site:

1. Kill your darlings. The retro-icons-galore idea might have seemed nice at the start but it doesn’t stand the distance.
2. Icons need text labels.
3. A website needs to connect to reality somehow. Photos of places and human beings do that. This particular website is about an airport – the airport is the product. Show us the freakin’ airport then, don’t hide it behind icons.

Thursday I went to Oslo to give a short talk on e-commerce at Creuna Norway’s brunch seminar at the SAS Radisson Scandinavia Hotel. Great event featuring the true Gentleman of Statistics, Edward O’Hara from JupiterResearch, and several of my colleagues from Creuna Norway. And with 22°C and blue skies it was a real nice day in Oslo.

Anyway, what I wanted to tell is that the “Flytoget” – the (cool looking) rapid train from Oslo Central Station to Gardermoen Airport – has launched a new and really user friendly e-ticket system: Swipe your credit card through a reader and board the train. That’s all: No buttons to press, no ticket to wait for – just one swipe. Later you may download your receipt from the web.

It’s so simple that I almost doubted it would work – but it did. When you exit the train – swipe again to check out from the station. I love such simplicity. It’s not like the stupidly designed ticket machines in the Copenhagen Metro – but I’ll bitch about them some other time.

The last few months I’ve been working on a wireframe prototype on a pretty complex webshop for a large international corporation. It’s about 200 or so screens. The first 2 major iterations were done in various versions 3.something of AxureRP Pro. As the prototype grew large, AxureRP 3 wasn’t up for it.

We’ve reached 3rd iteration and now I’m doing all 200 screens all over again in v 4.0.3, and I’ts a thrill.

These are some of the major improvements in v4.:

1. You can now duplicate pages or entire branches. And If you duplicate a branch all internal links in that branch are updated to match the new branch. Great for doing different versions of the same flow.
2. Organize your templates and references. Template and references (which are now the same thing and called Masters) can be organized in folders.
3. Masters can be nested and layered. Yes! Nesting in nesting in nesting And you can apply several masters to the same page. You can now do a master with your basic grid, sub masters with left or right nav, with or without top nav etc.
4. DHTML emulation. It’s not AJAX, but you can do some AJAX-like stuff if you’re creative.
5. Much Better HTML rendering

…and so on. AxureRP is the best software thing that’s happened to the interaction designer in a very long time.

I’d love to see some of this in V.5:

• List-view. To quickly add some page items before starting to design.
• Site mapping and flow charting.
  
• Multiple versions of the same page. Some way to do several versions of one page.
• Global Variables. Some way to send values between pages to emulate “logged in” and “non logged in scenarios”.
• Placeholders in masters. A way to do placeholders in masters so that when I moved a placeholder in the master, the element placed in the placeholder on the pages that were generated from that master would move to. A bit like Dreamweavers editable fields.
• More generators. E.g. a generator that lets me do a Word doc with all specifications overlayed on the screen shot instead of placed in a table below the screenshot. Or HTML-version with alpha-blended spcifications. You know: Make it look good
• MouseOver and MouseOut on all types of widgets
• Automation of the navigation. Emulating a functioning navigational system is still hard work. Some sort of navigation generator would be nice.
• If / Then / Else-scripting of some sort. “IF this radiobutton is selected THEN this button should send the user to Page A ELSE send him to Page B.

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The BBC has launched a new site to help the ignorant masses use RSS (BBC Feed Factory).
That’s great – nice work guys, but are your graphic designers and information architect on crack?
What have you done with the icons and your labeling?
I won’t comment on the graphics, you’ve probably been forced by a branding guide, but it is obvious that you don’t practice the ancient art of labeling. You’ve made a category called “Talk and Interact” and one called “Knowledge”. How can that describe a collection of RSS feeds???
Please, come on guys – you can do better than that!
If you want to help people find RSS feeds, make a labeling that makes sense!