My tasks were transmedia identity and visual user experience design. The final outcomes
included number one spots on domestic tablet-app markets (iTunes Store and Android
Market) and an article in Finnish computer magazine Mikrobitti.

The hardware was manufactured by modifying an iPad GUI template. Usage of real estate
for marketing was demonstrated through a large swipeable banner.

The divergences between the two platforms became evident very early; almost every basic
feature required a different, but also same GFX and UX solution.

Cross-platform branding requires unified, solid decisions regarding the first platform.
Three other platforms had been designed before our implementations.

The basic element identity was challenging due to it’s rectangle-alike 90° corner-radios.
It needed a reprofiling where it’s hardness was controlled logically.

Prototyping was made with the newly released Nokia Lumia 800. Placeholders were
used for missing data of i.a. channel logos.

The circular buttons inside the content area was the only note in the otherwise
positive feedback from the Windows design review.

The UI included both vertical scrolling and horizontal
swipes. http://nordkapp.fi/

The September 2011 issue of Computer Arts.

I visualized and prototyped the layouts on my own main phone, an iPhone4.
Do try it out on your own; should run nicely on all platforms.

Fortum, one of Finland’s largest electricity providing corporations, needed an in house
spreadsheet for one of their local energy providers. The new services task was to trans
-form complex information from MS Excel into a platform where changes could be done
simultaneously by users on different locations. It was easy to decide that the main task
was to simplify the users need to move without effort between long lists of
inputfields, just by using he’s tab key.

Above, an element example of a horizontally shortened desktop-version. Vertically the
spreadsheets could be up to 60 rows. Bellow, a fictional iPad mockup with over
72 pixel touch target sizes for inputfields.

The fictive hardware of the Windows Phone 7 guideline templates were replaced by a
more realistic N8-device. At that time, nobody new on which model the release was
going to happen. Nor was it possible to determine exact visual UI measurments;
the outcome reflected a purely visual example of the data-profiling
possibilities of the easy three step Ovi application.

In their workshop at UX London 2011, Stephanie & Bryan Rieger mentioned that brand presence is undergoing a massive transformation. Because of the diversity of new devices and platforms, valuable storytelling in brand strategy doesn’t apply as before. Redesigns and startups are popping up at the same speed as devices are being sold.

A while ago, I came across this A List Apart-article: A Case for Web Storytelling. It says well that web design is in storytelling what TV was in the 50’s. Web agencies nor todays user experience agencies have never realized, that a product needs to be introduced by a story, and after launch fostered as a process. An ability that advertising agencies have always had.

When you combine the Rieger’s statement of brand transformation, the lack of storytelling and redesign, you’ll end up with some quite interesting, although serious observations:

1. Today brands are user interfaces, products just like training shoes or jeans. The first come across with brands is digital.

2. Storytelling is brand building. Every user interface has a story, which can either be affected or ignored.

3. Redesign needs to be dumped. Redesign is a story-killer and therefore a failure regarding consistent brand building.

Every product needs marketing in some form, but a functioning product doesn’t need illusions. Storytelling should be seen as modern post-launch design management. Advertising agencies live in symbiosis with their clients through long-term contracts. Below three basic steps of how user experience agencies could do the same:

1. The user-data of the product needs to be accessed. This shouldn’t be a problem for the clients.

2. The behavioral models of these should be analyzed regularly through a price affordable even to smaller businesses.

3. Improvement’s should be implemented when needed.

User experience agencies might just be in their first evolution-phase. There’s plenty of will to create purpose; either through independent implementation of an idea or just through spreading them. The next phase is to turn redesigns into design management. Overall it’s less expensive, and brands become stronger due to familiar stories.

A Case for Web Storytelling, by Curt Cloninger, Long Live the Redesign, by Francisco Inchoate and The End of Client Services, by Khoi Vinh.

According to my employment I got the chance to attend the annual UX London conference with two of my colleagues. As a conference-first timer the happening, presented by some of the industry’s pioneering names, turned out to be a real brainstormer. The opportunity to gain knowledge from practitioners with triple to quadruple times of experience thru three nonstop intensive days, left you with an idea and note-documentation of ridiculous length. Here’s an attempt to summarize the big picture of one day of presentations and two days of workshopping.

Why should corporations liberate creativity?

Alan Cooper. The grandmaster himself Alan Cooper spoke about business-management as todays hurdle for innovation; standpoints that inevitably brought to mind all those unfolding articles of former Nokia-employers. He defined a new era where software and interaction designers work together, creating a transparent agile-ecosystem where in house communication is undisturbed. These post industrial “balanced teams” needs what to know by them self, not by the management. We’re witnessing an inflection point where old “command and control” methods are being dissented thru startups in a will to create real purpose. Money is a far lesser motivator than assumed and the inmates are unchaining themselves (“autonomy, mastery, purpose”). This “responsible craftsmanship” is possible only when designers sees the impact of their work. As follows, “software behave’s well” (i.a. Apple).

Stephen Elop’s Nokia Adventure by Peter Burrows
Nokia: Culture will out by Adam Greenfield
Will Ford learn that software isn’t manufactured? by Alan Cooper

Redesign is a process, not a project!

Louis Rosenfeld. I’ve GFX redesigned several big scale websites during my employments, so the presentation “Redesign Must Die” by L. Rosenfeld felt obvious on a very practical level. The tendency of redesign is a consequent of (surprise) traditional management transacting, where managers “attempt the impossible in no time at great cost”. It all falls down on the process itself: first it’s the managers obligation to provide a long-spanned collaboration with the client, and second it’s the designers responsibility to design sustainable. In other words, it shouldn’t be about projects; a large website should be designed thru a continuos process where data is analyzed to understand the behavioral of it’s users (BBC, Apple, Facebook, etc.). The need of access to metadata is vital in creating good content-paths. Behavioral can’t be forced. Websites should be treated as organisms that evolve thru years without having to be redesigned. Large structural changes requires new experience orientation and accustomization; all-out redesigns easily pisses people of! Ideally adaptations shouldn’t even be noticed thru small continuos changes (Google, Facebook). Emphasis on responsible contextual navigation and search-analysis is still too rare; according to a rumor 90% of Microsoft.com:s content has never even been accessed.

Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign, by Cameron Moll
Long Live the Redesign, by Francisco Inchoate
The End of Client Services, by Khoi Vinh

Complexity requires simplicity

Giles Colborne. Google was really on many speakers lips. In our fast evolving technological environments, simplicity is becoming the ultimate skill to master. Giles Colburne’s “Advanced Simplicity” workshop tackled the issue of complexity of technology; what is simplicity in user experience? Google is simple on the surface, but extremely complexed under. He defined two core-type of users: “experts” and “the mainstream”. The classical TV remote control exercise was a great example: even if the remote control is used by the mainstream, it’s design has for decades been for experts. In a world were mobile is getting more simple than web-interfaces, with no adverts and straight-on activities, designers should design for the mainstream. Meaning, for moms and dads. Users should be able to decide the complexity by them self. The designers task is to provide them with the tools. This isn’t easy and one excellent example was actually the conference wifi-card. The website of the host wasn’t mobile-optimized, and the username and the password-fields were reversed to the one’s on the physical card. From a smartphone you needed to heavily pinch and orient to the logging fields that were placed in a small distant corner. There you usually pasted in the passwords in wrong order because of the reverse alignment on the card. So, on the other hand, simplicity in itself is not the solution. It’s about the experience of it.

The Opposite of Fitts’ Law by Jeff Atwood
Innovative Techniques to Simplify Sign Ups and Logins by Anthony T
Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (book), by Luke Wroblewski

Mobile; the biggest design challenge ever?

Bryan & Stephanie Rieger. In a small, filled room, the Yiibu’s of Bryan and Stephanie Rieger held an intensive presentation and workshop called It’s not the device people are after, it is all the things the device enables. The event left no one cold and pretty much highlighted the conference for me personally. I’ve been an admire of their work for a time. Their presentation-technique is unique because of their storytelling knowhow where interpretations are made upon an exceptional stock of facts.

“The present is a world of one line of connectivity”. We don’t need to go to the internet any more. Of 6.8 billion inhabitants 77% has mobile devices (April 2011). 1.3 billion uses the mobile internet, which for many is the only access point! Yup, Explorer sucks, but for 1/3 users in the world, proxy browsers (OperaMini) is the only viewpoint to internet context, ahead or in the absent of PC’s. Surprisingly Blackberry is the most popular smartphone globally but the market is fragmented and therefore wide open for instance Chinese developers (ZTE, Huawei). Mobile context (web and later apps) used to be a very quick experience. Everything else was not mobile. Now mobile is pretty much everything. Even if the physical devices it selves can’t really get any smaller it’s massive context is streaming in space, everywhere. It’s all though still a bit fuzzy: after iOS and Android the rest is a scenery of huge diversity. Furthermore the user interface’s are still manipulated with physical buttons such as e.g. “back” buttons on Android and Windows Phone 7 devices.

From a physical perspective, diverse interaction and design patterns are taking shape as a consequent of new mental models. These new interpretations of user interface’s are the results from a fundamentally new way of communication: gestural-navigation. The main challenge is that we’re the first generation of users of touchscreens; there’s still many discoverability and standard-issues regarding interaction thru gestures.

Further, when thinking beyond the mobile web, any desire of control becomes an illusion. We’ve already set our content free; data wants to move around and we never really know where it’ll end up. Traditional brand presence is undergoing a massive transformation and the question of how native app design could be replaced by one single user experience thru all devices is running hot thru new doctrines like responsible web design. Regardless of some very good principles, there simply isn’t a waterproof method to design for all platforms simultaneously. With new devices popping up like never before, it’s just a shitty fact that client’s doesn’t always understand.

Beyond the mobile web, by Yiibu
Weekend Reading: Responsive Web Design and Mobile Context,
by Jason Grigsby
Responsive Web Design (book), by Ethan Marcotte

A short overview

Except from Oliver Kings’s clarifying presentation of Service Design and Matt Jones hilarious human-robot standup, none of the presentations displayed anything fundamentally new. But they didn’t need to! Some are of precious practical significance, while other are just wonderful, entertaining mindblowers. For the listener, the tendency commonly seems to be to start with four hands-on UX-conferences. Usually one each year. After that you’re done with user experience lectures. The next step is the higher level ubicomb venue’s like e.g. Dconstruct or Lift.

It’s reputed that some speakers lectures the same presentations even three years in a row. Even so, if the subject is familiar, don’t hesitate; long-spanned individual experience is always indispensable. Lay back, enjoy and forget about making notes on an iPad.

This fundamental question has already been answered by many operating system providers. The visual landscape in todays digital interfaces mainly reflects the nature of elements from the physical world. Touchscreen smartphone’s has taken this logical approach even further; the body of a button must visually associate with certain physical values to support the interpretation of it’s function.

But is this approach necessarily the right one? As a visual designer by profession I’ve been using Microsofts Windows Phone 7 now for about two weeks as a try out. As a longtime Apple user It’s been a real eye-opening experience. Why? It’s 2D and the content of the whole interface is all typography, just as you where scrolling a beautiful magazine, not a mobile phone interface. The Metro visual identity may be a product of forced differentiation of the competition, but who really cares. It’s a welcomed fresh counterbalance and a market niche just waiting to be filled. Info graphic’s doesn’t necessarily need to be flashy or chromy, does it? From a designers perspective the elements in iOS sometimes feels a bit exaggerated; does visual elements in touchscreen’s really need such a burly three-dimensionality to be understood as functions?

Apparently not. This may sound deep, but iOS is the first mainstream touchscreen mobile interface and just as the dawn of internet, everything first out logically functions thru very basic assumptions. Just because we touch functions with fingers instead of thru a mouse or a keyboard, doesn’t mean that these actions needs clarification thru physical reminders. Yes, it helps and perhaps it’s a logical first step for us, the first generation of touchscreen users.

But WinP7 isn’t only an example of a bureaucratic agile environment producing something totally new by creating an in house independent waterfall-unit. It’s the first mobile interface that looks like the modern web. And it’s all getting integrated, isn’t it! WinP7 may not only be a counterbalance, but also a possible first glimpse at some vital standards of visualization for a more mature next generation of users.

Does user interfaces in science fiction-films remind you of todays mobile experience with rounded 3D buttons? Probably not. Futuristical interfaces are designed for fictional society’s, already assumed to have grown into a touchscreen environment thru several generations.

Windows Phone 7 is one of the first user interfaces for everyday users, not reflecting elements from our physical world. Regardless of it’s success, it might induce implications which are not yet thoroughly understood.

Mike Kruzeniski: Personal, Relevant. Connected: Designing Integrated Mobile
Experiences for Apps and Web

The entry of networked information into society has introduced new values of necessities. Due to continuos acceleration of technological transformation, it’s the individual who’s determines the value of a creation. Since versatility and it’s pace is far to complex for marketing forces, we’re less affected of it’s impulses.

This pretty much turns the conventional marketing industry upside down. It’s a huge twist in it’s core functionality, since the targeted message isn’t always cutting it anymore.

So why the awkwardness among traditional content management in approving why open source and versatility is an inescapable permanent factor? Adopting it is a different tremendous task that likely results in vast segmentations or strict specializations. But the first phase of ousting the difficulties in approving the current could be explained by the industry’s rather introverted character; a heritage of the genesis of advertising industry that reflects it’s rather egocentric, realism-twisted nature. Real value outcomes dressed up and replaced by revenues that’s furthermore divided into success-measurements such as awards and employee-volume’s.

What is a real value outcome? Due to complex inner bureaucracy of corporation enterprises, many R&D laboratory projects pop out as startups. These startups are about the excitement of invention, which again is a result of the opportunities provided by the evolution. The progression pushing the throttle of entrepreneurs and vice versa. Profit keeps the boat floating, but due to consequences above the targeted outcome is redefined. The emphasis has shifted from consumers to users.

This switch is the cause of marketers misinterpretation of the landscape; conventional principles, where the objectives are targets groups instead of individuals, don’t really apply anymore. Combined with a atemporal time format it introduces new forms of trade models with quite unconventional possibilities. Startups and design consultancies that, regarding to their size, are being able to generate global impact. Quantity is not necessarily measured by revenue’s or employee-volume anymore. That is, today’s businesses can be both small and big at the same time.

Naturally, open source can still be reclaimed by applications and history repeat itself in marketing terms. Though many doubt it; the diversity is far to developed and spread already. The playground is now open for everyone. In some cases, such as general bureaucracy-models of large organizations, change will require a whole new generation. For many it’s a persistent, often reluctant road to insight met with fear of old patterns, too anchored in habits and in a life’s worth of work.

A metaphorical prediction. Commercialism will logically continue to cram in wherever it reinvents itself in new disguised shapes, but marketing-knowledge with understanding of the ongoing scenery is an unavoidable necessity; times of recession functioning as convincing evidence of the industry’s incapability for transformation.

This situation is like a snowfall that’s just started; the old landscape still being somewhat identifiable. Evolution is usually inflexible and the aggravation will reduce, ploughing way for acceptation and adaption of a current of constant change. Those being able to adjust will succeed, mostly because of pure enthusiasm. Observing these possible futures is actually quite compelling and engaging.

Written by somebody enjoying a striving practice of sense making.

Read more about design as a definition.

The identity unit in which I worked, won several awards for
the re-profiling of the brand.