Archive for the 'experience design' Category
OK so the topic of whether or not to move away from micro-sites is a perennial one, and I’ve just been asked to comment on the topic, so here you go. They are often viewed as being expensive, a pain to manage, transient and sometimes a waste of money. To an extent these points can be true, however micro-sites still have their place and value.
Anonymity
Building buzz around something can require a degree of anonymity. Take the Film and TV industries for example. Films and TV shows are frequently launched with extended teaser campaigns, sometimes along with a complex ‘game’ to reinforce the mystery or history surrounding the concept. The TV Series Lost launched with a plethora of web sites, OceanicAir, The DHARAMA Initiative, The Hanso Foundation as well as the official web site hosted on ABC.com. The point is, placing all these websites on ABC.com would have watered down the experience. Secondly, placing these ‘out there’ on the Internet can even re-inforce the anonymity. If the site is entirely unbranded, one way to find out if it ‘belongs to anyone’ is to do a simple ‘Who Is’ look-up of the domain name and hey presto you have to owner… ABC.com. But if the site is hosted on a URL who’s DNS entry is registered anonymously, the mystery can be retained. This you cant do if it’s sat on the parent companies web server.
Unconstrained Creativity
Agree with this or not, micro-sites hosted outside the confines of a core web site can allow for greater freedom of expression of the brand. Why? Simple, most major web sites these days are hosted of templated content management systems. Frequently, these don’t offer blank canvas that is required to deliver a highly interactive, immersive experience. Yes, this can be done to a degree within a templated site, but not to the same degree as outside. There is an argument to say that the kind of experience as offered via micro-sites should be constrained within a core or master site, but more often than not the freedom simply isn’t there.
Segment Specific
Campaigns, of which micro-sites are generally a manifestation, tend to be targeted at very specific customer segments. Engaging with these segments can be far easier, and less tonally awkward, outside the confines of a ‘master branded’ web site. Even though a brand may have a large teen audience for example, the master brand as reflected on the core web site, may not talk to the audience on their ground. A micro-site therefore may be the best place to do this, where the tone can be altered, without making the bran look like your Dad at a rave.
Another approach, as best demonstrated by Nike, is to make your entire ‘web site’ a collection of what are essentially micro sites: Nike Golf, Football, Nike+, Woman, NikeLab and so on. The master site simply becomes a pointer to a series of highly segment specific, targeted product sites. And lets face it, very few people say Nike.com is a bad thing…
Currently I’m faced with the challenge of answering the questions ‘What is a Brand’ and ‘What what will Branding be?’ both big questions. Branding has moved on a lot in the last ten years as a result of ‘digital’ (though I am fed up with that term so for a change may start using the Welsh: Digidol). Defining what actually constitutes a Brand these days is quite difficult: do for example the manifestations of a ‘Brand’ found online that are not originated by the Brand itself, but by it’s customers or community, actually count as part of the Master Brand or overall Identity? Something we need to answer. Initially I’d say yes, the challenge there is how the Brand influences this.
Anyway, a post on Forrester blogs, slightly un-relatedly, talks about how ‘digital thinking’ should span into other areas of corporate communication such as media relations and investor relations. Though I’m slightly stumped by the overall tone of the article which implies that digital or interactive thinking in these areas would be new. Uh, what do you think we’ve been doing for the last ten years Sherlock, pretty banners and ‘wizzy micro sites’? Anyway, back to Brands and Branding…
I guess the point is that, and sorry to state the obvious, that digital is now so critically important in practically every aspect of doing business and communications, that the art of Branding needs to move bloody quickly to re-define what we mean by ‘a Brand’, and how we articulate it across these channels. This is especially critical as to a large degree the deliverables of Branding exercises are still largely focussed on the non digital, in a visual rather than behavioral way. Branding agencies need to re define their deliverables away from what a Brand looks like, and spend a greater time focusing on how the brand behaves, the challenge with that, is how we articulate to our clients what behaviour actually means.
Potentially nice wire framing / sketching tool that runs off Mozilla. Incredibly limited functionality at the moment but promising. Huge way to go though before it’s at a point where you could actually use it to do work.
I mean seriously…. who the hell writes “Memo’s” these days. Though is does make me feel like I’m working in Sterling Cooper which is a bonus I guess.
I’ve never actually had to use Notes before, apart from trying how to work out how to do web sites using Lotus Domino back in the day. The great thing about Notes is that it really does live up to it’s reputation, whenever it comes up in conversation people wince, groan and swear. Well I can confirm the rumours are indeed true, it really is fucking awful. Sigh.
So lets face it, I guess 90% of people who call themselves a User Experience Architect, except some really old, beardy types, grew up and gained all their experience in and around the Internet. The thing is that can leave your experience or designing experiences a little narrow. My tips:
1. Go get yourself a job in one of the large integrated networks for a few years, such as McCann or Ogilvy and gain an appreciation of what Media Planning, Advertising, Branding, Experiential and PR are and how they can all work together (despite what you think you wont gain this sat in a pure Web Shop even if you do have the odd meeting with your sister agencies).
2. Get a job in an Agency that does little or no web at all…. i.e. right outside your comfort zone. This can realy help re-set your perspective on what experience design is, having to frame it around other mediums that aren’t screen based.
Go on, it will make you a better person.
LBI Is now publishing a ‘magazine’ and on first glance it looks quite interesting: LBIQ. “We’re not experiencing a ‘digital revolution’ and this isn’t a ‘digital age’ any more than the 50s were the ‘atomic age’ or the 60s the ‘space age’. We simply live, as we always have done, in fast-changing times. LBiQ is a response to this frantic pace of change, and it’s one that responds from an attitude and point of view that we’ve shamelessly stolen from Ferris Bueller: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
This is a photo of The Library in Koh Samui, or rather it’s bookshop / media store (you can’t see the bank of iMacs and iPod accessories just off the photo to the right). It’s a nice place, really, though in an utterly bizarre location in the middle of Chaweng. But when I went there for dinner it was utterly empty. I couldn’t help but think that the type of clientele it is hoping to attract i.e. ‘designer’ types, i.e. me, that last thing they / I want is a bloody busmans holiday. Honestly guys, your hotel is like a bloody Apple store, enough!
If all buildings that served a particular purpose were shaped like the things they contained or represented? It would make things really easy to find and towns easy to navigate, while having the added bonus of making the urban landscape look really silly.
Uhhh, Natalie ordered some stuff from iwantoneofthose.com. You can see from the picture that the actual contents on the floor (photo wall hanger and a box of gonks or something) didn’t warrant the box or the packing material inside it (about 20ft of inflated polythene pockets). This has happened before. Not good.
It’s chat with pictures. It has a currency. OK IRC doesn’t have currencey. Apart from that, how is it different to IRC and a good imagination?
In-Browser Wireframe Prototyping with Frametastic a nice start to what could be a very useful tool.
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