Virreosophy

Social Mania

Google Plus just reached 10 million users in a few weeks. The online socialites were craving for an invite, just not to miss out on a sharing opportunity. And all this while lots of people are still 'afraid of sharing' and privacy is still an issue; even in higher Circles (be sure to check your photo settings when building a G+ profile, or your snapshot might just end up on a postcard stand).

Also it's Yet Another Social Network, where it's easy to setup a profile, harder to continuously share relevant information and tough to get and keep a following. It's a Catch-22: you have to be in to be credible and once you are in, you can only lose credibility by being too involved or not involved enough. And this applies to all the currently 'hot' social networks.

My best advice: stay in motion, like these log-rollers, and outlast the competition (if only for a few moments).

The Human Factor

It has been a while since I've written a post, but that's because there were so many interesting things happening the last months. Among these were the opportunities to present the PeRSoN.NeL project at both the Hybrid City conference in Shanghai and the SATE10 conference in Orlando.

In it's core PeRSoN.NeL is about enhancing human communication and interaction, and it's in the periphery of above mentioned conferences that I found two examples that stressed the human factor.
First there is the Dutch Pavilion at the World Expo 2010. Before going I was a bit weary because of the very playful setup of the building; it's not an architectural feat. However, when we actually walked through(!) the building and saw how it was used as a pass-time by the visitors (see image below), I realized that this building actually best serves the purpose of the Expo: it invites people to participate in, in this case, the Dutch (parks) culture.

The second example is a comparison between some of the attractions at the Universal theme parks in Orlando. After experiencing the Wizarding World of Harry Potter (top of the bill), E.T. Adventure (memory lane; both story and technique), The Simpsons Ride (amazing show), JAWS (an adventure), Twister..ride it out (technical challenge), and the Jurassic Park River Adventure (from wonder to wet), the one we kept remembering was the quite old JAWS ride.
The big difference in this 'ride' is the fact that each tour is accompanied by an actor that plays the roll of captain of the boat (your boat!) that gets attacked by the shark. The 3 minute, completely orchestrated, show, that they put on - over and over again - is just overwhelmingly entertaining.
Part of it might be due to - and at the risk of sounding old - the fact that the newer rides are just too fast and physically challenging to share the experience during the ride. The wait-in-line at the Harry Potter 'flight' and the pre-show that is put on there (you won't believe the beauty and realism of the talking portraits) is, in this respect, much more memorable.

To bring this all back to the virtual world we all live in ;-), the challenge will be to keep building in this human factor. An interesting project is the new NASA Robonaut 2, the robot that next to assisting astronauts can be interacted with on Twitter (@astrorobonaut). The biggest challenge here will be to have it respond with a genuine "LOL".

The Culmination of What I Believe In

As you know, I have the urge to combine function with beauty online. And then it hit me: what we are missing is the online equivalent of a stamp; a way to convey an (additional) message in a artistic package. I put my line of reasoning in a presentation for Reboot11 in Copenhagen.

Back home, the prospect of personal virtual decoration kept lingering in the back of my head. So I started up a service called PeRSoN.NeL, which will provide just this. To find out what it is exactly, you'll have to be a little bit more patient. But I promise to beautify your virtual life soon!

Art curation for the corporate website?

Yesterday I added a digital artwork to my corporate site (see www.virvie.com under 'Destination' and scroll down a little) and actually found it a little hard to do. I see it as decoration of my virtual headquarters, but positioning the piece wasn't all that obvious.
The issue, in comparison, is not the color on the walls or the decorative ornaments on the building, but rather the paintings or sculptures that are added later.
So it's not the 'interior decoration', because that is realized by visual design (determining the colour of the 'curtains and the carpet') and interaction design (positioning the 'table and chairs' so you can sit and walk around comfortably). But, then, what is it? And is it something that can and should be designed for (similar to planning high and wide walls for large paintings in the entrance halls of office buildings)?

Posted via web from VIRVIE's ongoing discussion

Closed source concepts?

It might by a tricky question in the open source era, but is it reasonable to register website concepts? In the TV and movie business they use file-reg.com to register show formats in order to protect and trade them. In case of a TV formats they depict the conception process, the show name, a set sequence of events within the show etc.

In the website business a lot of ideas get 'borrowed', and I wonder if this (still) is the favourable situation...

Posted via web from VIRVIE's ongoing discussion

Pan down, pan right, close up

It has been argued widely that film/photo techniques like panning and close-ups add to the dramatic effect of movies and pictures. In a previous post "Getting out of the way", I already discuss using more of these techniques in website design.

A really good example of what this could look like is shown by Prezi.com (a zooming web-presentation tool) in their Prezi Tips and Tricks presentation. Prezi of course uses a dedicated technique, but simply breaking the standard up-down flow on a website already has a positive effect. See for example the App Store on the iPhone:

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When viewing the information on a particular application you first scroll down the text, but arriving at the screenshots the scroll becomes horizontal (and vertical again if you continue beyond the screenshots).

The zooming doesn't necessarily have to be literal, but could be like a peek under the hood: showing the actual realtime dataflow on a website (as opposed to visualizing the output data) in a corner of the screen. This is similar to zooming in on the moving parts of an engine, clarifying the mechanics, next to oozing the power potential.

100% read/write?

When I finally got round to taking a closer look at Google Wave, I was very pleased with the potential that is created by rethinking a common thing like e-mail. I was struck though by the following comment in the presentation (at 11m48s): ".. with Google Wave you spend 100% of your time either reading or writing". Because messages are instantly posted by the system you no longer have to wait for the other person to finish, which is good, but this opposite doesn't sound quite right either. I don't mind being 100% online, and I can't wait to exploit the potential of Google Wave (and a definite farewell to MS Office?), but I would like to see some kind of pleasurable 'idle'-mode built in. Is it possible to have an in-between state of reflection next to reading an writing online?

Posted via web from VIRVIE's ongoing discussion

Room for the non-functional?

I like to incorporate non-functional elements to my webpresence concepts. And by non-functional I mean functionality (not just graphical design) that has no immediate purpose, other than to inspire or provide diversion. I see it like art on a wall and therefore essential. There is a lot of digital art out there already, but hardly ever part of a mainstream (corporate) website. Do you feel there is or should be room for that?

Posted via web from VIRVIE's ongoing discussion

Context variations

Through feeding and embedding, the same information now becomes available in different contexts. For those of you who reading this post from (a link on) Twitter it is different from those reading it on LinkedIn (where it appears as a feed on my profile).

The point is that the context influences the appreciation of the content by the reader. This is not new of course, but it does deserve attention. Especially when you accept that the user more and more designs his/her own experience of your content (e.g. by grabbing your feed and reading it from a personal portal site) or even reorganizes it (e.g. by using GreaseMonkey).

Also, browsers aren't a constant factor anymore. Especially (mobile) browsers in dedicated applications affect the context. For example, the iPhone Twitter app 'Tweetie' has its own browser with its own preferred functions like 'Add to Instapaper' (which is a quite different context in itself).

Since there are many variables in designing your content and its context - many of which turn out to be outside of your control - my advice would be to make it 'snack-size' with markers that allow the user to consume it bit by bit, eventually leading them to the place you want them to be.

Getting Out of the Way

Even though more and more effort is put into customer centric webdesign, and some companies seem to become less egocentric (Skittles.com even went to the other extreme), the majority of corporations still put themselves first on their sites. Especially when they 'need' your information.
The forms get thrown in your face; literally, when it's a pop-up.

I actually don't mind giving out information, but I do like to know if I'm nearing the end. And more importantly I want to see if the end result is worth going further: show me the light at the end of the tunnel!

I nice example of how it could be done is the Skitch screencapture application (see image below), that literally moves out of the way (but 'hangs around') when you start moving the file.

I can imagine the pop-up window for a form increasing and decreasing depending on where you are in the process flow.

It's actually using techniques developed in film that can and should be applied here. The landmark article by Dan Willis 'Everything you know about webdesign is wrong' proves this point very clearly. An excerpt; "When we see a character from high over head, we sense their insigniﬁcance; when one scene dissolves into the next, we assume a passage of time; when shots of a character in motion are intercut with the object toward which she approaches, we feel the impending dread and danger."

Can you imagine the experience on a website when these techniques are used?! Could a designer make you dread pushing a button because of flashes of images of what's behind when you move your mouse closer?

Of course, it could go in a different direction. For example, the one Brendan Dawes suggested: "[..] great idea for an itv3 show: "i'm a celebrity - resize my browser window"

The Effort in Experience

Experiences can be good or bad, but the ones we value and remember are the ones that involve profound impact or effort. So making an experience easier isn't necessarily making it better. Likewise, requiring an effort from a user in an interaction doesn't have to be a bad thing, i.e. something you should avoid.

In her book "Neuro Web Design", Susan Weinschenk argues that going through a difficult experience actually makes people more committed. This because we want to think we are consistent. This behaviour is also the main rationale behind the 'Scent methodology' which I referenced to in the earlier 'Pacman navigation'-post. (N.B. I now purposefully do not link to the information about 'Scent' directly, because I think the experience is better if you read my other post before that).

This whole notion is common sense of course in game design; the games that do not involve too much effort become dull very quickly and get discarded.

But how to incorporate this in user experience design for the web. On the one hand you can go very literal like I suggested in 'Subsize it'. On the other hand you can add layers of experience like Brendan Dawes does in his projects (e.g. Doodlebuzz and Play-doh as interface) as described in his book 'Analog in, Digital out'. In his words " [some acts should be] a lot less trivial [... because then] the whole experience actually means something, and the person on the other end knows it."

Also, in his projects, he crosses the real/virtual boundary all the time, which in itself significantly increases the experience through triggering many more senses, much more profoundly.

Virtual Character

Through the writers and creators of (comic)books, cartoons, animations and games, imaginary figures have been able to develop very real characters. They come alive and especially in electronic games you can interact with them. New communication tools on the Internet, especially Twitter, now seem to bring alive "the biologically challenged"; objects.

The best known is the Phoenix Mars lander currently exploring the surface of the planet Mars and sharing its acts and thoughts. It's bio says it all "I dig Mars!". According to animator Lee Lefever "[..] they gave that little machine a personality on Twitter". It even won three "Twitties" (awards for Twitter messages).
I started a similar blogfeed for VIRVIE's animation's lead figure Virrt. And the latest example is Air Force One (yes, Obama's new ride). Although that one will probably be tweeting "no comment" quite often.

I think the whole thing best resembles a 'Punch and Judy show', but in this case grown-ups are the enthusiast spectators, shouting to the stage.

It does apparently fill a need. People look for human traits in objects, see for example the discussion on 'software with an attitude' on the weblog Signal vs. Noise.
All of the above examples have humans behind them of course, but even that might change in the future. This evolution is already in progress judging from the BIOMODD installation by Angelo Vermeulen. So watch out ;-)

Extending the Senses

The web is still mostly a visual experience although sound (especially through video) is catching up. The intentional use of sound (apart from the supporting soundtrack in video's) is however still rare. There are experts around that make a strong case for the use of sound; see for example SonicID's weblog. Note how they 'Explore[..] branding and identity with music, sound, voice and silence'. The latter is only possible of course when you use sound in the first place; you need the contrast. And this is exactly why triggering different senses should be considered more often.

Also (3D) movement and touch are increasingly getting a virtual extension. The first is most evident in the Nintendo Wii game console, but also in the ear-movements of the Nabaztag (which respond to electronic messages). Touch is in a basic form coming online through 'tag-readers' like (again) the Nabaztag and Tikitag. Another example of virtually connecting through (spatial) movement is the forthcoming 'Sekai Camera'; it will allow you the access an added reality in the space you are in.

The senses 'smell' and 'taste' are probably still further away, although research in 'olfactory displays' is well underway.
The breakthroughs will probably come from playfull applications like the RJDJ games are for sound and movement on the iPod/iPhone.

Google ranking: your space in the parking lot

Classic Modern Architecture prescribed designing from the inside out, without actively considering the context. But according to that school the context is always the ideal park, never a parking lot. Google is like the online equivalent of a parking lot, and yes the boss gets the best spot.

Webdesign is still mostly inside out (although the 'widgetization' is a positive development). But outside, in the Google search results, you're just another 'car in the lot'. Also, when parked a Ferrari (or the fancy website) is a lot more equal to the Fiat (the middle of the road website) next to it.
The question now is how to stand out in the parking lot. Should Search Engine Optimization also get a visual component? What is actually going to show up in the search results?

Website souvenirs

A souvenir is something you get to keep the experience alive after visiting a place or an event. Photo's and before that postcards are the most common souvenirs. In the book Experience Economy online strategist Bruno Guissani is quoted saying "Souvenirs are the means for experiences to 'socialize', to share them with others".

If visiting a certain website gives you a memorable experience, you might want to get a souvenir as well. This already happens in a way by the means of 'Pages' in Facebook, where celebrities, places, events or products can be befriended or sites like "HOT or NOT" hotlists. Although most of these refer to 'real' artefacts, not virtual ones like websites. Also they usually refer to the continuing phenomenon and not a particular event.

For the souvenir to be valuable it has to be unique and specific. So what you need is a date stamp and/or a screenshot of the site as it was when you visited it. It will allow you to 'go back memory lane' and relive the experience.
For those of you that have used the Netvibes website for a while, the recent 'launch' of their Vintage site, supports this experience. For others it's a good reference point to appreciate the current experience:

All in all, it is already possible to create your own souvenirs of virtual experiences by taking screenshots (see also "Taking pictures of the web") and maintaining a lifestream (see also "Street credits"). But I think there is an opportunity for businesses to support this process, like they do so amply in the real world.