Conference on Building Windows 8 Apps

The Ramp Group, a local digital UX agency, is co-hosting an event on Wednesday with Microsoft you might find interesting. We will be talking about using Windows 8 to extend existing applications into the field via Windows Phone and tablet devices. Along with it being a good introduction into designing for Windows 8, it also should be a great networking opportunity with professionals in the interactive space.

I will be speaking at the event about designing simplified interfaces in the tablet medium, as well as the virtues of branding and usability.

It will be held in the Microsoft Civica Building in downtown Bellevue (108^th Ave and 2^nd Ave).

You can register using the link below:
www.rampgroup.com/register

Agenda brief for Wednesday, 27 February 2013:

8 am Why Windows Phone and Surface make sense for business.
10 am Designing Windows 8 apps for high usability
12 noon Lunch - Sponsored by Ramp Technology Group
1 pm Microsoft Customer Stories and Demos
1:30 pm Interactive Design Session for your business scenarios
3 pm Extend Networking at Sea Star Restaurant

Guest speakers Bill Baxter and Ron Notbohm demonstrating apps they have built at buddy tv and UCIC School and Jason Levine, Creative Director and lecturer at the University of Washington.

Come for any or all of the agenda. Hope to see you there. And if you have some scenarios you’ve envisioned enabling with mobile or tablet solutions bring your ideas and we will see where they can go. Some of the best ideas might be developed as proof of concepts.

You can check out the brochure here:



I hope to see you there!

Sample Class Work

This spring, I began teaching two courses at the University of Washington. The class has been very enjoyable and I have been extremely impressed with the level of talent and creativity my students have demonstrated. Everyone had shown tremendous talent, so I wanted to share some of the work that they had come up with.

 This was a fun car selecting tool that a team of my graduate students came up with:

Here is the same project as an iPhone application that a team of my undergrad students thought of:

 This was a presentation a student did showing how the psychology of patterning propogates addictive behavior when using Instagram:

And here is a sitemap designed by a student showing the inter-relational data of a local music festival's website:

These are just a small sampling of the innovative abilities of these students. If you happen to be looking for interns for the summer for your company, seek me out and I will be happy to provide you some great students who are eager for real-world experience.

Case Study for the Employment Security Department

We were tasked with a complete re-architecture and redesign of the Employment Security Department's employment and economic information website which is set to go live in a few months. The site contains thousands of publications, reports and presentations which required a complete overhaul. The case study below describes how we accomplished this task by focusing on a persona-based, task oriented navigation structure.

Just hit "Play" to hear the accompanying voice over.

Defining Content Categorization for a Website

View another webinar from Jason Levine

CareOregon case study

Last week we launched CareOregon's new website. The process included user surveys, usability tests, creating user personas, brand exploration, editorial, photography selection, sitemap and wireframing, and design. You can view the video below to hear more about the various deliverables.

The design was targeting to improve the level of user engagement and efficiency in users reaching their intended content. The following stats were pulled for CareOregon's new site comparing the month since the launch and the previous year's numbers for the same time period (2/7/10 to 3/5/10 and 2/7/11 to 3/5/11):

• +34.88% improvement in new visits
• -34.44% reduction in bounce rate
• +34.18% improvement in time spent on the site
• +10.46% improvement on the number of pages viewed per user
• +38.36% improvement on visitors sourced by search engines
• +35.77% on new visitors
• .02%of users relied on search (65th most visited page was search results). Previous: 10.1% , the 9th most visited page)

Check out this SlideShare Presentation. You can hit the Play button to hear the voice over:

CareOregon case study

View more presentations from Jason Levine.

Persona Research for Discovering Website Needs

A Masters in Psychology class presentation I had done about discovering the core needs of a website's users in order to better optimize the user interface. Just hit the Play button to hear the audio voice over.

Defining Users for Finding Website Needs

View more presentations from Jason Levine.

Trusted Places : Social Media in Europe

Trusted Places is a community website based in the United Kingdom. It is a forum for user-generated reviews of neighborhood pubs, services, and restaurants. Trusted Places came to Perfect Pixels Media Group because of our expertise in Social Media and Branding in order to help Trusted Places create a better user experience overall.

PPMG first spent time in a discovery phase where we came to understand Trusted Places’ audience, business goals, and the competitive space. From this we were able to work from an informed basis and we were able to effectively evaluate the registration process, create a refined information architecture, recommend A/B testing, and extend the brand.

We first engaged creating in a moodboard. This excellent tool allowed us to show Trusted Places a visual language that would articulate the brand going forward. Trusted Places readily bought into our vision because the Discovery phase allowed us to quickly show Trusted Places’ value through images, iconography and recommended messaging. From the moodboard, we were able to tweak the logo in a way that users would still relate to the old branding, but would emotionally connect with the new direction. This was also a basis for the design, value proposition, and message extensions.

PPMG is always cognizant of our clients’ budgets. In the spirit of offering the most value for the least amount of money to our customers, we suggested a short User Experience Definition phase. This high level study, through simple user flows, allowed us to confirm Trutsted Places core strategic user scenarios. These were based on existing pathways and the desired traffic flow per each business objective. PPMG helped Trusted Places create a larger, strategic view of their key user activities and we were able to propose enhanced user engagement. This exercise saved Trusted Places money because we had a solid base from which to work on the tactical user experience change requests. With a deeper understanding of the site and its users, we were able to make cogent, educated solution suggestions as we continued to work with the Trusted Places stakeholders. Changes during the design phase can be very costly; however, these sorts of targeted deep dives can provide rich information in a short period of time that can then be extended to the remaining phases of the project.

Trusted Places came to PPMG with a myriad of requests. Through the above, PPMG was able to identify that many of the ancillary requests looped back to the registration process. PPMG reviewed this and we were able to recommend email improvements, a more user-friendly and efficient registration flow -- which included the gateways to the registration page, follow-up emails, and the confirmation pages on the site. Our recommendations drove people to register while creating a better experience while doing so. Upon implementation of our recommendations, Trusted Places’ registration numbers went up, and there was higher user engagement and retention. Our research and recommendations also created a roadmap for PPMG to solve the ancillary requests of Trusted Places more efficiently.

The groundwork had been laid for an efficient re-architecting and redesign of the Home Page, the My Trusted Places page, and the Place Page. We worked to up the conversion opportunities, clarify the value proposition while driving registration and user-engagement. We also created a virtual “black book” experience for the registered Member. Users became much more aware of existing features and our changes drove usage, engagement, and stickiness.



PPMG is known for its holistic approach in helping its clients solve their new-media issues. We work closely with all of our clients to ensure their best interests are at the forefront. The layman may not initially understand the value of high-level studies and deep dives, but they ultimately pay for themselves in cost savings. PPMG works to base all of our recommendations and designs on the client’s strategy, business goals, and user profiles. Making something pretty has no value if it is not driving the significance of the brand while presenting information in a consumable manner.

Earthly Inspiration

We are regularly asked where we get inspired for creativity. For us, it can come from anything. A painting, an innovative design, architecture, or just a stunning view. A latest source of inspiration has come from some satellite photos we came across of the locations across the earth. They are magnificent pieces of art in their own right. The color combinations, textures and negative space are all elements to draw upon in design. You can view the entire set of photos here at Environmental Graffiti. Here are four favorites that represent their beauty from space of the terrain, as they are completely different perspective and experience from the ground eye view of those same locations. Feel free to click on them for hi-res versions.

Shifting Sand of the Terkezi Oasis, Chad
Kalahari Desert, Namibia
Under Water Ocean Sands, Bahamas

Farms in Garden City, Kansas, USA

Jewish Family Service Website Launches

Jewish Family Service (JFS) of Seattle has deep roots in the Puget Sound area with over 117 years of commitment to the community in the North West. JFS has grown from an agency that provided support to Jewish immigrants to a non-profit organization that services many diverse populations in the Seattle area.

JFS’ website was not adequately presenting the mission, scope, and strategy of JFS. Many of their users couldn’t effectively find the information and support they needed with the old design. JFS came to PPMG with these concerns and we worked very closely with them to solve for their complex situation.

PPMG embarked on two parallel tracks to meet the needs of JFS and its constituents. We entered into a Mood Board process to define the visual language of the site, as well as an Information Architecture phase where we defined the site structure and document taxonomy.

For the Mood Board, PPMG chose images and colors that would represent the various populations that JFS serves, as well as photographs of the founding mothers and shots of the Seattle area. This did several things. It gave JFS the opportunity to discuss and define the high level value of JFS and choose a library of images that would evoke appropriate emotional responses from their users. PPMG worked with JFS to create a visual language that would provoke a feeling trust, community, safety, and show concern. Our goal was to connect viscerally to the needs of the site user.

View the Mood Board here >

The IA phase was challenging because of the complexity of JFS’ offerings. We concluded that the best way to meet all site-interaction scenarios was to have navigation by both persona and by service. This created a difficult puzzle to solve, but we were able to effectively create a structure and navigational system that provided easy, intuitive access to all of JFS’s services in a manner that was easy to use and understand. JFS had ample content per page, so PPMG was able to easily flow the existing information into the new design.

The Mood Board and IA phases worked together to create a cost-efficient design process because all of the elements had been defined at a higher level. Repeated touches to the pages during the design phase was not necessary because consensus had been achieved before that phase started.

Through our collaborative efforts, JFS’s understanding of their audience, and PPMG’s expertise, within the first month of the newly designed site launch:
• Average user time spent on the site increased 81%
• The bounce rate decreased 22%
• Page views increased 54%

JFS had a limited budget, complex needs, and a short time frame. PPMG worked closely with the stakeholders through work sessions and presentations to provide a robust website, as well as a meaningful experience for both the JFS staff and the community that they serve.

View the live site here >

Best iPhone Apps

The iPhone has thousands of apps and hundreds added every week. The iPhone is unique in not just its breadth, but also the variety in which a user interacts with the device. The API allows you to use standard controls or create custom controls including its ability to detect movement and position. This has created unprecedented freedom for a mobile device developer. Here is a list of the must-haves for any iPhone user.

Vlingo
The best app you can possibly have for the iPhone and is astounding this did not ship standard with the iPhone. You can use voice command for twitter updates, web searches, phone calls and mapping. The importance of an app of this nature since it is converting voice to text is the flexibility to allow the user to make corrections, which this allows you to do by editing the text.

Keynote Remote
One of the great capabilities of the iPhone is its seamlessness to the Mac. This is a must have for any presenter using Keynote as you have control of not only moving the slides, but you can look at slide notes or preview what the following slide will be. I happen to be a wanderer when I present, so an app like this is a life saver.

iTunes Remote
Another Apple provided app that seems almost ridiculous that it doesn't ship with your iPhone. This one allows you to commandeer your computer's iTunes, including volume control.

New York Times
The secret for reading on a handheld device is readability. The New York Times is probably the best paper in the country and having it available and legible while on the go in your hand is worth putting up with the quirks that still need to be worked out with it.

Pandora
As long as you have the 3G version, this is a great utility for music listening. It behaves just like the web app, just a little simpler. The draw back like most iPhone apps is that you cannot have this run in the background.

Classics
Great classics with chapter jumping, bookmarking where you left off, original illustrations and a nifty page turning animation. The cream with brown text makes it easy on your eyes to continue reading on a flight or train ride for long periods of time. They also continue to add to the 18-book library with its free updates.

Yelp
Tell it to locate you and what kind of food you are looking for it will give you all the functionality of the website with a hook into your dialer and the map finder.

i.TV
This app is quite easy to use, especially considering how comprehensive it is. You can view not only what the television schedule is for your particular cable or dish network, but you can also find out movie listings for your area. Using the same panel slide metaphor as the Mac Finder, you can easily select by a genre, location or specific movie to find listings - including booking through the app itself for participating theaters. You can also view previews, view reviews and Tivo shows.

iDicto Recorder
Record notes to yourself and mark them. You can also append to a audio note. The only thing you wish it could do is convert into a text note, but sometimes a dictation tool is just handy enough. The UI has a big fat button to start and stop making it nice and easy.

Wunder Radio
I haven't lived in LA for seven years but aside from friends and sunshine, I miss most KCRW. I can grab it while attached to my computer but having it now available through my iPhone means I can plug into it as well as hundreds of other stations while in my car or on the train. The 3G network is dodgy, so its not reliable to hear for long periods of time while moving, but at least with this app, I can catch Metropolis while driving home. Another great feature it has is a recommender for similar stations.

Easy Writer
For us fat fingered folks, the fact that you can only have a landscape keyboard when in the browser but not in email is maddening. Easy Writer fixes this obvious oversight, but only for new messages rather then also for replies. But at least I can type faster and more reliable when I have the opportunity to start a message screen using this app.

Around Me
The Swiss Army knife of what's around me. Pretty good to have handy when needing a quick idea where to park or the closest pharmacy.

Easy Wi-Fi
Get hooked for free to the wi-fi the next time you are at a Starbucks. Not sure how it does it without the payment normally required, but no UI knowledge necessary. You open it, and it lets you know when you are on.

6 Sites Proving Color Is Not Dead

Color usage on the web is commonly compromised and subdued. Using vibrancy and high-contrast in a site design are usually difficult for many clients to be willing to take as risks. Here are six sites which stand out as exceptional examples of the chromatic making a bold and strong statement about their brands. 

Radu Ceuca

Refresh the Triangle

WebbliWorld

Breeze
Alisa MTV Russia

Matt Mullenweg

The Two Biggest Pitfalls of Startups

We seem to find that our start-up clients are made up of two sorts. One where the business’ genesis was from a passion for a concept and a clear idea of what the product will be. The other is made up of those that find a hole in the marketplace or a window of opportunity but no real sense of the business itself. Either approach has advantages and disadvantages for creating a web-based business.

Startup Type One: Driven by a passion
Companies founded on passion and clear concept have most of their strategy laid out as a factor of the thought they have already put into the product and how deeply they understand their audience. The problem being is that those that have the passion, but possibly not the business acumen have trouble finding ways to monetize their business.

We have found that many of these businesses will have a great concept with a clear decision process but end up retooling when the customer growth doesn’t come. Another issue that they face is that they are too close to the concept and see themselves as the customer, sometimes missing important opportunities.

Startup Type Two: Driven by dollars
On the other hand, those who have a get-rich idea usually have the income side figured out but not necessarily a viable product. A website alone -- no matter how great the idea is -- will not make a difference to your bottom line unless it is created based on a thought-through product strategy and a significant brand promise (with supporting elements) to which customers can react.

We find that these kinds of startups can spend months moving boxes around without the intuition for which are the best ways forward, since they have no real sense of what the desired user interaction by the target audience actually is.

Getting the best of both worlds
The answer is to meld both. If you are missing a subject matter expert, hire one and make them consult throughout the branding and product development exercises. If you are missing the business acumen, hire someone that can find opportunities to monetize and grow your market. No matter the amount of fiddling, you can’t get there without both.

Ensure you have a solid base to which you can refer when there are business decisions to be made. Companies who have skipped this step always come back to it (if there is any money left) because making decisions on the basis of “that sounds like a good idea” or “people will like that” (without testing) invariably cost a lot of money to develop. This is because multiple iterations are needed to get it right or the mark is missed entirely with one big, expensive push. When there is no core strategy or focus upon which decisions are made, money is burned.

It is imperative that a start-up develop appropriate strategies that involve understanding who the target audience is and what they are all about, as well as how the company is differentiated in the competitive space. This will fuel the Brand strategy and enable the company to present the right face to the customer from the start. The brand can then be fleshed out and a visual language can be created that speaks viscerally to the customer. From the brand identity, messaging can be created to communicate the product benefit, the company ethos, and to connect deeply with the customer. The best money-making idea in the world won’t be worth a dime if your site doesn’t speak to your user. She must know what it’s about, how to use it, and want to come back.

An example of these pitfalls (but made it through the other side) was a recent client of ours, HomeSavvi. When we began working with them, they saw an opportunity to create a market for advertisers who wanted access to people looking to remodel. They had a vague sense of the tools the user would need, but not the actual decision points for what a user would require in order to use their service. The original result before they came to us was a site called Alphabet Lane with a muddled navigation and a disconnected user experience.

We worked with them to help them find the core value of their brand and to create a feature-rich user experience that could grow with their user base. The painful part was that the process to get there because they had to rename, rebrand, rearchitect, and rebuild from scratch- throwing away a very large majority of their original product. To see examples of the process HomeSavvi undertook, you can view it here:

Using an Online Experience to Simplify the Offline One

Pathable is a new startup that helps to organize and create networking opportunities for conferences and social events. The idea is that a conference or network event organizer uses Pathable for attendees to register.

The attendees can then find people with similar interests by information that appears on the person’s badge as well as browsing on the website and receiving updates on their phone while attending the event. Another feature they are now introducing is to allow organizers to post the event agenda allowing attendees to select which talks to join.

So they came to us with an interesting issue. How do you make an online experience ease the offline one? The answer is to mimic as much as possible how the offline experience works.

As research, I took pictures while attending a conference and what the current experience is. What I noticed was that it’s a very lonely experience. People naturally wanted to find people they already know to network with. They also have a crumpled piece of paper with checkmarks on it for the talks they intended to attend, normally leaving part-way through to see if they were missing something better. When you introduce yourself to someone, they immediately stare at your badge trying to assess and size you up on who you might be and what benefit you may provide.

Pathable can definitely ease these pain points, but the key being that the offline experience overlapped the online one. First, we tried to make the attendee user profile page match the style, colors and layout of the actual badge that one wears at the event. We made mini color-coded versions that were used when listing attendees on other pages to make the color system be uniform through the user experience.

The other key solution was to simplify the process of selecting which talks to attend. Conferences have them organized in different taxonomy structures- by location (room number), by subject matter (Design, Development, Marketing, etc.) or by chronological order (day and time).

It also needs to provide a significant amount of information regarding each talk aside from just the topic and room number- the bio of the speaker, who is attending, the tags associated with the specific talk as well as the subject matter category.

Our solution was to have the summary of information be available at the top level with the room number called out for easier reference when glancing at where to go next with everything else available via rollover. When you click anywhere on a listing, it will mark it for you as attended in a bold red so you can quickly see which ones you flagged. You can also filter your list to eliminate subjects that don’t apply to your interests, making the list more digestible.

The design system then had an additional hurdle- generic but identifiable branding. Sounds strange, I know. The idea was that Pathable wanted the user experience to be branded but can be white labeled for any event without conflicting with the events brand. The solution was to have the style be light on design cues (buttons, boxes, color treatments) but have a stylization that could be recognizable and ownable as Pathable’s.

Check out the comps here