24 May
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10 Awesome Things That Happened at the Star Trek Reunion

Posted by Valve Interactive in The Flow

Star-trek-next-generation

It was LeVar Burton’s birthday. Hundreds of Star Trek fans sang to him, and the convention presented him with a cake. Actually, it was chocolate — not Troi-flavored.

Brent Spiner put his children up to asking him about his funniest memory from working on The Next Generation. He told a story about Jonathan Frakes stumbling through the bridge wall and leaving a Road Runner-esque hole in the set.

When asked which Shakespearean role best suited his cast-mates, Sir Patrick Stewart answered that Jonathan Frakes, because of his boisterous personality, would be Nurse from Romeo and Juliet. Gates McFadden would be Hamlet, Burton would be The Duke of Gloucester, Marina Sirtis would play Macbeth, and Michael Dorn would play the fool from King Lear. Brent Spiner (the only Jewish actor in the cast), he said, ought to play Shylock. At this point Spiner launched into the famous “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech from The Merchant of Venice.

When asked whether Star Trek would ever come back to television, Jonathan Frakes answered that he, William Shatner and Bryan Singer had pitched a new Star Trek series to Paramount. They were all turned down. The studio apparently doesn’t want to shift focus away from the current film series—which Frakes loves. It’s disappointing to know that there are virtually no plans in the works to bring Trek back to TV, but it’s good know that these people are still invested in trying to make it happen.

When asked who they would cast in their own role in a J.J. Abrams-style reboot, Marina Sirtis answered Mila Kunis while Jonathan Frakes came up with the best/most obvious answer: Wil Wheaton.

Michael Dorn, a proud vegan, sheepishly confessed to doing a Velveeta commercial a while back wherein he said something to the effect of “Lovers love that liquid gold.”

When asked about playing Locutus, Sir Patrick Stewart jokingly said if he’d had it his way, he would’ve stayed a Borg, taken over the Enterprise, and the rest of the crew would be dead.

Marina Sirtis lambasted Jonathan Frakes for not casting her in any of his many directorial efforts.

The whole cast discussed how Sir Patrick Stewart set the tone for the entire show with his serious demeanor when Brent Spiner belted out an over-the-top reading of Picard’s “I SEE FOUR LIGHTS! I SEE FOUR LIGHTS!” speech from the episode “Chain of Command.”

At the end of the night, Marina Sirtis thanked everyone on behalf of her cast mates. She pointed out how lucky they had all been to be able to do what they love for a living and how their lives, without Star Trek, wouldn’t be as good. It’s something they share with the fans.

In the final episode of The Next Generation, “All Good Things…,” Picard finds himself flashing 25 years into the future. The crew — his crew — has splintered. They’re all living their own lives and their days on the Enterprise are long behind them. Now, a quarter of a century in the actual future from the series premiere, the actors’ lives have changed. They’ve moved on. But, after all this time, like the characters they portrayed, they’re still happy to come back together.

Images courtesy of CBS Entertainment, The Mary Sue

Via Mashable: http://www.mashable.com

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06 May
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Earth’s Smallest Space Telescopes Launching Monday

Posted by Valve Interactive in The Flow

Wow that is small! Hope it works!

Smdc-one

Space-com-4df1ec353a

Two tiny satellites billed as the world’s smallest space telescopes will launch into orbit Monday (Feb. 25) on a mission to study the brightest stars in the night sky.

The Bright Target Explorer (BRITE) nanosatellites look like little cubes and will blast off atop an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) at 7:20 a.m. EST (1220 GMT) on Monday from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India.

While tiny nanosatellites have launched into space before, they have been mainly used to study Earth or test new spaceflight technologies. But the BRITE satellites will be the first spacecraft of their small stature to peer into the cosmos, their builders say.

The diminutive spacecraft are less than 8 inches wide and weigh less than 15.5 pounds.

The diminutive spacecraft are less than 8 inches wide and weigh less than 15.5 pounds. Once in orbit, they are expected to observe the brightest stars (from Earth’s perspective), including those that make up well-known constellations such as Orion, the Hunter.

“BRITE is expected to demonstrate that nanosatellites are now capable of performance that was once thought impossible for such small spacecraft,” said Cordell Grant, manager of satellite systems for the Space Flight Laboratory at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), where the satellites were designed.

One of the BRITE satellites launching Monday was designed and built at the Space Flight Laboratory. The other was designed by the center, but assembled in Austria, university officials said in a statement. They are two of seven satellites set to blast off with India’s rocket launch on Monday.

The nanosatellites can only fit small telescopes, so they won’t be capturing amazing high-resolution images of the cosmos, Grant explained in the statement. But they will be able to observe and record changes in a star’s brightness over time. Such observations could help scientists find spots on the star, an orbiting planet or secondary star, or “starquakes” caused by oscillations within the star itself.

The nanosatellites can monitor their target stars from any orbit — they just need to be above the atmosphere to avoid the twinkling, or scintillating effect, that overwhelms stars’ relatively small changes in brightness, researchers said.

The two BRITE satellites launching Monday are designed to be the first wave of a planned constellation of six space telescopes to study the brightest stars in the night sky, UTIAS officials said. In all, the six-spacecraft constellation will include two Austrian nanosatellites, a pair from Poland and a pair provided by Canada.

By keeping the satellites small, they can be built faster and at a lower cost than their larger counterparts, and be launched as a piggyback payload on rockets carrying larger spacecraft, UTIAS officials said.

“A nanosatellite can take anywhere from six months to a few years to develop and test, but we typically aim for two years or less,” Grant said.

Photos courtesy Defense Media Network

Space.com is a Mashable publishing partner that is the world’s No. 1 source for news of astronomy, skywatching, space exploration, commercial spaceflight and related technologies. This article is reprinted with the publisher’s permission.

Via Mashable: http://www.mashable.com

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12 February
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In Space First, Curiosity Rover Drills Into Mars Rock and Collects Sample

Posted by Valve Interactive in The Flow

Mars-rover-curiosity-1st-sample-drill-hole

NASA’s Curiosity rover has drilled into a Martian rock and collected samples, marking the first time any robot has ever performed this complicated maneuver on the surface of another planet.

The 1-ton Curiosity rover used its arm-mounted drill to bore a hole 0.63 inches (1.6 centimeters) wide and 2.5 inches (6.4 cm) deep in a section of sedimentary bedrock on Friday (Feb. 8). The activity paves the way for the first-ever analysis of fresh Martian subsurface material and provides the last major checkout of the robot’s gear and instruments, researchers said.

“The most advanced planetary robot ever designed now is a fully operating analytical laboratory on Mars,” John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. “This is the biggest milestone accomplishment for the Curiosity team since the sky-crane landing last August, another proud day for America.”

Curiosity will process the sample over the next few days, researchers said. The rover will use some of the material to scour its sample-handling hardware clean of any residues that may remain from Earth before transferring any powder to the analytical instruments on the rover’s body.

“We’ll take the powder we acquired and swish it around to scrub the internal surfaces of the drill bit assembly,” said Curiosity drill systems engineer Scott McCloskey, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. “Then we’ll use the arm to transfer the powder out of the drill into the scoop, which will be our first chance to see the acquired sample.”

Drilling so deep into a Red Planet rock is a complex and unprecedented maneuver, so the mission team worked its way up to the first effort in a steady, stepwise fashion.

About two weeks ago, Curiosity began assessing the target rock, which is part of an outcrop called “John Klein” that was exposed to liquid water long ago. The rover first pressed down on the rock with its arm-mounted drill in a series of “pre-load” tests. It then used the drill’s percussive action to hammer the outcrop without spinning the drill bit, which cleared the way for a recent “mini-drill” that bored into rock but didn’t collect samples.

Getting Curiosity ready for all these steps — and for yesterday’s successful full-up drilling run — also took a lot of prep work here on Earth, researchers said.

“Building a tool to interact forcefully with unpredictable rocks on Mars required an ambitious development and testing program,” said JPL’s Louise Jandura, chief engineer for Curiosity’s sample system. “To get to the point of making this hole in a rock on Mars, we made eight drills and bored more than 1,200 holes in 20 types of rock on Earth.”

Curiosity landed inside Mars’ huge Gale Crater on the night of Aug. 5 to determine if the area has ever been capable of supporting microbial life. Along with its 10 science instruments and 17 cameras, the rover’s drill is considered key to this quest, for it allows scientists to peer deep into Martian rocks for evidence of past habitability.

Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Space.com is a Mashable publishing partner that is the world’s No. 1 source for news of astronomy, skywatching, space exploration, commercial spaceflight and related technologies. This article is reprinted with the publisher’s permission.

Via Wired Autopia: http://www.wired.com/autopia/

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01 May
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Something Is Rotten In The State Of E-Book Publishing

Posted by Valve Interactive in The Flow

old books

The publishing industry has a problem. The old guard haven’t innovated. And neither their business models nor their products embrace the digital books revolution.

Take the ongoing and complicated spat between Apple and the Justice Department over the agency pricing model and alleged collusion which ended up with consumers being forced to spend more than they needed to. The battle may expand internationally, in fact. Apple tried to expand its 30% revenue share model, which has done very well in the billion-dollar app economy, into books. It also pushed publishers to agree to a very different way of selling their products: Instead of buying books traditionally, at a pre-agreed wholesale price and then pricing them as Apple saw fit in the iBookstore, it would let the publishers set their own price and extract its usual fixed share of the income … as long as the publishers wouldn’t sell e-books elsewhere.

It was a bold move, and one that could and did shake up the industry a bit. Amazon, the publishers contend, had established a monopoly on e-books, and was selling their wares at overly discounted prices. With Apple’s model they could choose to price e-books lower than physical books cost (appeasing consumers who expect to pay less for a non-physical product), and yet extract more money due to the cost-savings of e-publishing.

The DOJ disagreed, and says Apple’s deal meant consumers ended up spending much more than they needed to, hence its action against Apple and a laundry list of the bigger U.S. publishers. Amazon is now free to renegotiate deals with these publishers and push cover prices lower, which will save consumers cash but may both eat into publisher’s profits and, ultimately, author’s payments.

As such, it’s not a wholly well-received decision as Scott Turow, president of the Author’s Guild, recently noted: “Today’s low Kindle book prices will last only as long as it takes Amazon to re-establish its monopoly. It is hard to believe that the Justice Department has somehow persuaded itself that this solution fosters competition or is good for readers in the long run.” Because when Amazon does re-establish its monopoly, and nudges prices upward, it’ll be operating on the wholesale model–with the extra money sunk into its coffers, not the author’s or the publisher’s.

But as novelist Barry Eisler notes in the Guardian newspaper, there is actually a glimmer of hope in the DOJ’s decision. Amazon could, by sheer pressure of business, force a breakup of the old guard of publishers in the U.S., and make them adapt to the new digital realities or face extinction. In short, they’ll have to radically adjust their business models, and also embrace writers who can deliver new rich-media books, if they’re to keep the book-buying public enthralled and thus make money. Amazon’s quick-growing self-publishing enterprise is an example of how the publishing business may evolve without them if they don’t do this.

And what do we, the book-buying public, want? Cheaper prices, as ever, but we’re also all expecting books to move beyond dead text and into something much more dynamic, something loaded with rich media, something that makes use of the color and graphics of our tablet screens, and perhaps the social networking powers they also sport as apps. Because those kinds of books sure as heck aren’t in Amazon’s top-selling Kindle list right now.

Image: Flickr user dno1967b , and Isriya Paireepairit

Via Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com

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30 March
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Layar Wants To Turn Print Pages Into Augmented Reality Gateways

Posted by Valve Interactive in The Flow

Is the augmented reality company’s plan for interactive print an augmented fantasy?

The Dutch national post service posts a magazine called “Er is post!” through every household’s letterbox every quarter but this week’s edition has something extra-dimensional to it–augmented reality via Layar. Think of it as scratch-n-sniff for the Internet era.

Layar’s blog post points out that readers can interact with every page in the magazine that has a Layar logo–Layar has pre-programmed the app to deliver specific extra information that relates to every one of these pages. The user simply has to tap at the augmented pop-over and get taken to websites, Facebook like actions, YouTube videos, apps, and so on.

It’s about making a traditional printed page “pop” more, and it’s about adding a long tail to printed advertising–ensuring that the user remains engaged with the brand for more time, and in more meaningful ways than simply absorbing the static information from fixed words and images.

People have tried this for years. There’s the recent and strange love affair with QR codes, for example. You’ll probably remember when it was cool to have red/green “3-D” adverts in magazines. And if you’ve never heard of CueCat then do yourself a favor and look it up–it’s an example of early “augmented” information related to magazines that relied on barcodes and a computer…and it was such a disastrously failed experiment that there have to be several lessons in here for Layar concerning information sharing and audience engagement.

What’s new is how Layar is not just enhancing pages but using the print pages as a way to reveal new layers–Layars, if you will–of hidden information and experience. “I think augmented print, or as we like to call it, interactive print, is the path to mass usage and adoption. It’s how you will use AR without knowing it but millions of people will do it,” Maarten Lenz-Fitzgerald, founder of Layar, tells Fast Company. “It is new, yet print is in the unique position of explaining it to its large readership and then provide a useful and fun experience. Something the reader will want to do again and what the publisher and advertiser can turn into business. Also readers can enjoy the digital action and content without putting the magazine down.”

“Lots of people read and use print,” Lenz-Fitzgerald adds. “In a sense it’s a great infrastructure. And what we do is connect the dynamics of print to the traditions of paper. To grow the publishers and advertisers business and to provide a better experience for the reader.”

Layar will still have to warm up users to the idea of holding their phones up to a magazine to use AR–not a natural process–there’s a slightly awkward juggling act required to hold the phone in one hand and aim at the page in front of you. Plus there’s that inescapable sensation that what you’re seeing is a 21st century warm-over of an old idea for improving audience engagement.

But you can’t fault Layar for achieving exposure: Six million people learned about Layar and augmented reality in one swoop with this week’s trick. And in a near future where we’re all wearing Google’s “Goggles” or some even better wearable AR/display tech, then this may ultimately be how AR works… Layar’s just showing us a glimpse of it now, very early, which is why it feels odd. Or are we being hopelessly optimistic?

Via Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com

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27 February
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When ROI Represents the Realization of Influence

Posted by Valve Interactive in The Flow

Vincenzo Cosenza is a new media strategist living in Italy who has over the years, designed some of the industry’s most comprehensive infographics on social media’s global footprint. Recently, he asked if I would write the foreword for his new book, Social Media ROI. And, as I’m a fan of his work, it was an easy decision. As usual however, I asked for permission to share it with you here and his publisher agreed. This is the only place where you can read this in English…

For the record, I also wrote the foreword for Olivier Blanchard’s book, Social Media ROI in early 2011.  Yes…same name. I’m not a supporter of the fact that the publisher of this latest book did not take Olivier’s title into account. But for the purpose of this post, I’d like to focus on the evolution off the topic. In Olivier’s book, I concentrated on the disconnect in POVs between executives and social strategies, where ROI for all intents and purposes represents Return on Ignorance. His book makes a compelling case for convincing the c-suite and also empowers social strategists to design meaningful ROI initiatives.

In Vincenzo’s book, I look at ROI through a different lens, exploring its relationship to influence. It’s a complementary approach and here, a bit more theoretical as I try to raise the bar for strategies overall.

In the book Engage, I introduced a metric that tracked Return on Influence. Here, I wanted to expand on the methodology of that metric to better define the relationship between cause and effect and the role you play in it. Thus, ROI in this context becomes the Realization of Influence. The idea was to raise the stakes in the equation, to design desired actions and conversion into our strategies so that ROI measured real change, outcomes, and the progress of transformation. While similar, it’s a subtle nuance that’s powerful.

Influence: To cause effect or change behavior

New ROI: Measure caused effect and outcomes and/or the tracked change in behavior over a fixed period of time

In the development of new ROI strategies, the result is a truly a measurement of influence. No, it’s not a score. It’s a metric of cause and effect. As such, you become an architect of influence as you define the change or actions you wish to see. In the strategies that you develop over time as by definition, you introduce initiatives that cause effect or change behavior and you can measure it. While you still calculate return on investment, you are also measuring the realization of influence. And, it’s far more accurate than a traditional influence score.

When ROI Represents the Realization of Influence

In social media, one of the most often asked questions is what’s the ROI? Surprisingly, this question is voiced without an understanding of why it’s asked in the first place. If the answer is “I don’t know,” it makes it a simple and grounded decision to either minimally invest in social media pilot programs or not invest in any new media efforts whatsoever. If the answer is, “this is the ROI we can expect from the following initiatives,” you’ll witness an incredible transformation of doubt or skepticism into curiosity and eagerness.

Indeed, new media represents a necessary change in direction to improve customer relationships and experiences, develop more significant products and services, and increase overall reach and market share. But remember, what you know and what decision makers need to know are on two different sides of the same coin. Both seek relevance and success for the organization. The difference is that only one side will attempt to unite everyone around a common vision for the future. And in this book, Vincenzo Cosenza will help you address one of the most important questions hindering the evolution of modern business, “what’s the ROI?”

The reality is that no matter how creative the idea or however brilliant the strategy, it is the responsibility of decision makers to evaluate proposals based on merit, thoughtfulness and impact to the organization. People, time, capital, technology, are finite resources. It really comes down to opportunity costs. If the organization invests in new media initially, it either must “create” new resources and funds or it must borrow from elsewhere. For you to realize your vision and to bring your plan to life, you must tie everything to Business objectives and priorities or demonstrate how your strategy will push the organization forward.

It comes down to numbers and core values. Will your ideas perform against or exceed existing business metrics and KPIs? And, do they align with or improve the values of the organization and the universal aspiration for building customer relationships. Performance metrics are a key part in measuring progress and communicating whether or not you’re on plan. They also force us to think through strategies at the beginning of the process, so that initiatives unfold as designed or intended.

In many ways, performance metrics are a subset of influence. And, influence is an underestimated or misunderstood business purpose. Influence is the ability to cause effect or change behavior. And as you think about ROI, think beyond numbers. Become an architect of relevance where cause and effect become the foundation for how you build the business of the future. Developing strategies where cause and effect are the catalysts for performance inspires strategies rooted in significance whereas metrics and KPIs document real transformation. I like to think about ROI in this regard as Realization of Influence…tracking the relationship between cause and effect or the change in behavior.

As such, packaging raw numbers requires deeper consideration to demonstrate progress toward business objectives and priorities.

These can include:

- Brand Lift/Awareness
- Brand Resonance
- Advocacy
- Sales/Referrals
- Endorsements
- Sentiment/Perception Shift
- Thought Leadership
- Demand
- Trends
- Audience/Community
- Behavior
- Influence

Via Brian Solis: http://www.briansolis.com

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01 February
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Where Hollywood Should Spend Their Time

Posted by Valve Interactive in The Flow

Stupid Rights Issues

I support the fight against piracy and intellectual property theft. As an author and a creator, I hate when someone nabs my stuff, or doesn’t give me credit for my work, etc. Stealing is a crime. I’m not ever going to say otherwise.

I will, say, however, that I wish Hollywood and other publishers and creators would spend their time facilitating legal transactions, instead of working so hard to fight the bad guys. That above picture is so frustrating. (Can’t see it? Click Click Here).

I had every intention of purchasing an audio version of Eddie Izzard’s “Dress to Kill” concert performance. Only, the rights aren’t licensed for me because I’m in the US, and evidently, this is a UK-only project. Let’s say this again: I am over here with money looking to buy something and the publisher or distributor or some other legal holder of this material’s rights is saying, “Oh, we don’t want your money, Chris. Don’t worry about it.”

Napster Back in the Day

I was a huge Napster user back in the day. I downloaded the hell out of interesting new material, and then, when I found something I liked, I bought the better version of the music. But it was time consuming, as lots of people uploaded junk, poor copies, intentionally deceptive copies (like audio Rick-rolling), and worse.

When iTunes came along, I shook my wallet into that box like everyone else. It was awesome. Except it was fiercely limited in the “discovery” department. I “discovered” much more music via Napster than ever in iTunes. And those discoveries led me to be able to pay artists I otherwise wouldn’t have tried out.

For every pirate you’re keeping out, you’re also not helping someone like me, who wants to legitimately purchase material.

Sorry, Eddie Izzard. I guess I’ll have to wait a while to hand you some money.

Chris Brogan is an eleven year veteran of social media using both web and mobile technologies to build digital relationships for businesses, organizations, and individuals.

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29 November
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6 Must-Have Affordable Web Tools for Non-Profits

Posted by Valve Interactive in The Flow
Causecast is a Mashable publishing partner that provides a cause integration platform for nonprofits and brands. The following article is reprinted with the publisher’s permission.

Trite but true: the best things in life are free (or at least, heavily discounted). For cause-driven companies and non-profits, purchasing corporate technology products — and hiring an IT team to manage them — is often out of reach, if not just unwieldy for an organization that’s big on mission but not bureaucracy. In recent years however, start-ups and tech innovators have stepped up to the development plate, quietly creating the next generation of web- and cloud-based management tools specifically suited for small and mid-sized organizations.

From newsletter-creation to targeted blog tools, running analytics and making donations, almost every useful service a non-profit or cause-based organization could want has received a technologically innovative makeover, complete with options for every set of needs, challenges, and price-points.

These six tools might not save the world on their own, but they can empower and facilitate users to achieve their own goals faster, better and more cheaply than ever before.

1. Wufoo: Need a form — fast, easily, and affordably? Wufoo launched in 2006 to help individuals and businesses handle everything from creating online surveys to event registration, as well as collecting payments and data. Much like iWeb, Microsoft Office, Pages, WordPress and other office suites and content management systems, Wufoo’s cloud-based system offers both templates and personalized forms (that don’t require a tech staff to create). Even better: Wufoo’s many forms are embeddable, brandable and priced between zero dollars and $199.95 per month.

2. iContact: This one-stop shop manages social media campaigns, email contacts, website analytics, and more. iContact’s real gem, however, is its no-brainer newsletter tool. The HTML-free system features drag-and-drop blocks, hundreds of pre-fab templates, and flexible pricing based on the size of the subscriber base. Prefer to try before you buy? iContact offers a free, 30-day trial.

3. Posterous: Wish you could master the social web, but tailor it to the needs of your organization? With the tagline “share smarter,” Posterous has reclaimed the world wide web with circumscribed, user-generated “spaces” that allow businesses and individuals to create and manage permission-based blogs and photo galleries with controlled access (and pleasing to look at formats). For member-based organizations looking to foster community in a walled web-garden, Posterous has your back. The site also makes good on its tagline by offering autopost services for any social-web destination you can think of — and then some.

4. mGive: Specializing in non-profit fundraising, mGive offers a text-to-donate system that simplifies the process for both contributors and organizations. Once non-profits register with mGive, donors can text a unique keyword to a code provided and “send” in a donation. The texted dollar amount appears on their mobile phone bill, and is distributed to the organization.

5. PageLever: Move over, Facebook Insights. There’s a new tool in town, and it’s all about more thoroughly understanding and utilizing the power of everyone’s favorite social network. PageLever allows organizations to move beyond counting “likes” and on to finding out how engaged its audience or constituents is by creating reports on each post, with a detailed and easy-to-understand analysis of each. The tool reveals which posts are the most engaging to fans, why posts are — and aren’t — reaching fans, and how to leverage and enhance fan bases or constituencies. With interactive and easy-to-read charts, graphs, and number comparisons, PageLever is user-friendly and offers tiered pricing packages (not to mention the occasional non-profit discount).

6. SendGrid: This customizable, cloud-based infrastructure is the tool of choice for non-profits with complex newsletter and outreach needs, as well as a little more web-development savvy on their side. No matter your skill-level in writing code, SendGrid handles a lot of the boring nitty-gritty (like monitoring ISPs and creating real-time analytics) of creating and managing custom email systems. The company’s secret weapon, in fact, is its superior customer service: according to one satisfied non-profit client, someone at SendGrid “always picks up the phone.”

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, manley099

Via Mashable: http://www.mashable.com

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26 November
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4 Strategies for Working With Designers Without Killing Each Other

Posted by Valve Interactive in The Flow
UX Magazine is a Mashable publishing partner that offers instruction, opinion and analysis on the field of user experience. The following article is reprinted with the publisher’s permission.

Fourteen years ago, in my first job where my title was “Information Architect,” I clashed with a designer. We were working at a large advertising agency that was known for stunning design work. The art directors wielded a level of power at the agency that I have never seen anywhere else, and the result over the decades was a portfolio of gorgeous print and TV ads. The design-first method had worked well for this agency, winning them awards and a long roster of Fortune 500 clients, so they naturally decided to use this approach in their newly launched web department, too.

Things went well for a while, until I attended a kickoff meeting for a new website project. The designer came to the meeting with an already completed graphic design, before any information had been provided about who the site was for or what it would do. This designer had been at the company longer than me, and she had been happily designing sites without an information architect for several months. As far as she was concerned, this was a process that worked well for her, and why shouldn’t it? She had complete control of the site, her designs looked lovely, and they were not in any way influenced by user needs, site goals, or reality.

What followed was a long, drawn-out battle for control of the site between me and the designer. This battle usually sounded something like this, played out again and again:

Me: And when you click on this button where does it take you?

Designer: I haven’t worked that out yet, but it’ll be fine.

At the time, I thought I had encountered a particularly obstinate designer, but in fact I had just bulldozed my way into the biggest challenge in information architecture (IA): navigating the line between beautiful design and usable IA. Because this was early in the web world, the agency had yet to learn about this balance between usability and design, and I hadn’t either. And in the intervening years, things haven’t changed much. Designers still want to make things beautiful, UXers still want to make things usable, and those two goals are frequently at odds. What has changed for me, though, is the approach I now take to working with designers.

1. Get the Right Designer on the Project

We don’t always have the luxury of selecting the designer who will bring our wireframes and prototypes to life, but on occasion this happens. All UXers should have a roster of designers who are UX-friendly who they can call when the opportunity arises. More and more frequently, I have clients who either ask us to handle design or ask for designer referrals. When this happens I always feel like I’ve won the lottery. I have a collection of designers I’ve met over the years who are great at working with highly functional sites; if you have the opportunity to influence the designer selection, you need to be ready to jump in with names and portfolios.

2. Don’t Just Throw Wireframes Over the Fence

Last year, I worked on an unusual project where the timeframe was so compressed that there was no time for wireframes. Instead I spent many, many hours each day on the phone with the designer discussing the interface, working out where each element should go and exactly how it should function. While I wouldn’t recommend this process as a rule, the end result was a beautiful working relationship and an interface that we were both thrilled with.

Many agencies are structured such that designers are just handed a stack of wireframes and told to execute on them. The end result tends to be either a site that looks like a very pretty version of the wireframes, or one that is only very loosely based on the UX design. To strike the right balance that prevents designers from either taking an overly literal interpretation of wireframes or from developing their own new interaction models, designers need to be involved early and often. As soon as you’ve got a few wireframes done, pull your designer in to start mocking up a visual design so you can work together through anything that needs to be rethought.

3. Give Designers Space to Do Their Thing

 

 

People go into design because they want to express their creativity, to play with shapes and color, and to have fun doing it. In some ways, information architects just come in and rain on designers’ parades by imposing structure and preferring the obvious over the unique. But there are designers out there — more and more all the time — who look forward to working with information architects because working off of wireframes makes their jobs easier. These designers still want to play and have fun, and (in the right place and time) new and interesting designs and interactions can make people happy, so it’s a good idea to include a design-centric section on sites that warrant it, where the information architecture takes a back seat to the design. This works for areas of a site that needs to provide a visceral feel for a brand, or portfolio sections of sites that need to showcase work or case studies. If you respect the designers’ need to create something beautiful, they are more likely to respect your need to create something usable.

4. Don’t Discount the Importance of Design

It’s important to remember, as Don Norman has famously said and Dana Chisnell recently reiterated, that beautiful design makes people happy. Good UX design is the backbone of good visual design, and one cannot exist without the other. Back when I was engaging the designer at my first IA job in thermonuclear warfare, I did it because I only barely registered design as something that mattered to the user experience. But the joy inherent in beautiful design is important as well, so sometimes when a designer overrides your UX design on aesthetic grounds, the designer is right. UXers need to weigh the pros and cons of all design decisions very carefully in order to determine where visual design should triumph over UX design, and vice versa.

There are still struggles, of course, and there are projects where designers want to go one direction and the UX team wants to go another. But I do seem to encounter fewer and fewer all-out wars between design and UX teams. When designers and UXers work well together, the ultimate winners are the users, who get a product that is not only easy to use but lovely to interact with.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, JamesBrey, and Flickr, Phil Roeder

This article originally published at UX Magazine here.

Via Mashable: http://www.mashable.com

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22 October
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A Social News App That Exposes Everything You Read

Posted by Valve Interactive in The Flow

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Hearsay.it

Quick Pitch: Hearsay is a social news reader where you share everything you read with anyone who follows you.

Genius Idea: An unfiltered, social reading exchange.

What we read says a lot about us. That’s why most of us selectively share the stories we think will reflect positively on us with our friends on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and so forth.

New startup Hearsay.it challenges us to stop this calculated sharing behavior, and instead start sharing everything we read in order to make the world of news reading all the more enjoyable.

“We think we can create a more interesting news ecosystem if we can convince users to share everything they read in exchange for being able to see what everyone else is reading,” Hearsay co-founder John Duncan, a veteran of the news media business, asserts.

Duncan and his two co-founders have assembled San Francisco-based team to encourage online readers to open up and share everything — it’s an almost identical mission to the one Facebook put forth with ticker and the new Open Graph.

Think of the Hearsay experience as the RSS reader reinvented, but masterfully designed so that it works for folks who don’t know what RSS is. It’s capable of satisfying even the most voyeuristic tendencies of online denizens. You sign up, start following other users, topics and news sources, and your news stream becomes filled with the stories your friends are reading. Everything you read, in turn, is exposed to your followers.

“What we’re saying is: Don’t worry about approving of what you read when you share it. Just read it and let everyone see what you read, and leave it at that,” explains Duncan. “Let the hard work be done by the consumer rather than the producer.”

Hearsay’s interface is fresh and visually stimulating. The web application highlights user avatars and news sources in the left-most column, with a feed of stories appearing in the center. Your stories are sourced from the items your friends are reading or pulled from one of the outlets you follow. You can click around to view different perspectives on the news of the day and select the grid icon to turn the single column setup into a more meaty three-column news adventure.

In some respects, Hearsay is bit like iPad app News.me for the web, except with a predilection for only showing stories that the people you follow have actually read. And Duncan even likens it to Flipboard, albeit with a focus on the desktop over mobile. The desktop, he argues, is where a majority of folks are consuming their news.

Unfortunately (for the reader, but not the publisher), Hearsay only pulls in article summaries, so if you want to read an entire story, you’ll have to click through to the source.

Where Hearsay struggles most is in the people discovery department. A user who signs up will likely find none of her Facebook friends to follow, and that means a lonely experience and a bad first impression.

Should you stick with the social news reader a bit longer and poke around the “Global” tab or check out the communities however, you might find people, topics and sources to follow. Following just a few active readers or your favorite publications will add a spectrum of color to the overall experience and the startup’s automatic-sharing hook will start to make sense.

Our verdict on Hearsay: Give it a day or two. You might feel liberated and find your news reading habits change for the better.

Hearsay has raised $100,000 in angel funding.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, kyoshino

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Via Mashable: http://www.mashable.com

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Valve Interactive
An online marketing and design agency in Portland Oregon