January 18th, 2010 | Posted in Blog, Design Thinking | No Comments
Tags: Design, Mobile, User Experience
If we ignore accessibility, we’re a thunderstorm away from living like cavemen or at least from flushing the toilet
Fail One: Waving at Ghosts in the Public Restroom
I am a huge fan of automation and personal hygiene, so the fairly recent adoption of hands free toilets and sinks at just about every public restroom I frequent has raised my quality of life tenfold. Where the toilets succeed and a majority of the sinks fail is in their ability (or lack of) to manually override the automation. I have found myself waving furiously at the little red sensor on an automated sink more times than I can count while a simple push of a button can override the most insensitive of toilet sensors. Since accessibility and user experience should be the top priority in any design, how does this get past the prototyping and testing phases and how does it make it to market on such a wide scale? Maybe the better question is, who is going to fix it?
Fail Two: A Small Experience in a Big World
What motivated me to dig in to this subject was a similarly bad experience I recently had that could have been avoided if just for some simple real-world usability testing. I won’t name name’s but as I was attempting to set up an online account for my new in-shoe sensor so that a major athletic brand can track and make available all my running data, I found myself redirected to the mobile version of their website. Alone, this is completely acceptable; I am running a beta version of Firefox and I’m sure they just haven’t updated their sniffers to catch it yet. What isn’t acceptable is there is no way for me to manually navigate to the full desktop version of the site; no way for me to manually flush! With the overwhelming number of mobile devices, browsers and user agents as well as their desktop counterparts, having no way to manually set preferences on your mobile or desktop site will lead to bad user experiences at best and an unusable website at worst.
As I sit at my desk like some sort of caveman, manually typing on a full keyboard, using a mouse and navigating through multiple applications on dual monitors, all I ask is for a big, shiny, hypnotizing, robust and image-packed user experience. When I’m back out in the real world, surfing the web while driving or crossing the street, I’ll take the mobile version. But in any case, if things don’t work out and your sniffer doesn’t work as it should, give me the option of turning off the autopilot and making the choice myself. Give me a handle to flush.
January 8th, 2010 | Posted in Blog | No Comments
Tags: B2B, Email, Mobile, Social Media
Online marketing and communications aren’t what they used to be. By that, I mean yesterday or the day before. Technology and innovation are advancing at a fevered pace and marketing communication is being rebuilt on a foundation of trust – whether we’re on board or not.
The rules of online social interaction have spilled over from our personal lives to define the new economy of trust in marketing and advertising. To reinforce this point, ABI Research reports that 78% of consumers polled trust peer recommendations as opposed to 14% who trust advertisements.
Knowing this, we have to embrace the social media model of opt-in, trust based interactions and drop the hard-sell. If we don’t, we take the risk of quickly becoming irrelevant. We can’t follow our old path of email marketing barely within the constraints of the CAN SPAM Act of 2003. What CAN SPAM was created to enforce is being trumped by the masses who pick and choose what and who they hear, ignoring the rest. CAN SPAM will be rendered moot when email becomes consumers least relevant tool in their arsenal of communication options. Social networking and mobile are the present and the future. We’ve been saying it for years but the coup is coming faster than even the most evangelical of us could have imagined.
ABI Research predicts that, utilizing technology, consumers will be 55 times more mobile in 2014 than they were in 2008. In one year, overall mobile web visits increased by 34%, Social Media sites overtook porn as the #1 destination on the web and Twitter alone grew 1,382%.
How can your organization move toward trust marketing and trust servicing and away from the push and pull of traditional efforts? How can your organization evolve to accommodate for the immanent influx of mobile consumers who will expect a mobile experience from you? Email will not go away any time soon, your website is just as important as ever (even more), and Facebook and Twitter won’t be the last, or the best option, in future years. Innovate with what is available and get your feet wet if you haven’t already. Don’t plan away 2010, do it!
July 4th, 2008 | Posted in Blog | 1 Comment
Tags: Mobile
At this point either you are going to think I’m the biggest nerd on the planet or you’ll be equally floored with some of the recent updates to Google Maps for Mobile.
First a little background: I decided about a year ago that I was sick of paying the ridiculous amount of money it now costs to park in downtown Cleveland. So, I started taking the Rapid (train) in from my neighborhood of Lakewood. After repeatedly (read: daily for the past 6 months) arriving at the station precisely 30 seconds too late for every train I tried to board, I started using Google Maps to pick up my Rapid Schedule. I know they have such things in printed forms but I have an aversion to paper. If I had the time, I’d tell you about a work colleague who finds it necessary to print out emails and attachments and place them on my desk as opposed to forwarding them in email.
Here’s what you do:
- download Google Maps. Go to http://www.google.com/mobile/ and enter your phone number in the form corresponding with your phone model. You’ll get a text message with a link to download and install the app.
- open Google Maps on your phone, or in my case, my Blackberry
- hit “0″ to pick up your current location.
- hit your menu button. On a BB, the BB symbol to the left of the track ball.
- hit search.
- search for whatever your looking for… ad address, coffee shops, etc.
- Choose from the list they give you.
- Under the address tab,choose “Directions to here”.
- You’ll see two tabs, one for driving (or walking, biking, etc.) and one for Transit.
- Select transit, click show trips, and it will give you a list of all upcoming departures from nearby bus stops, subway train stops, etc.
If you’re feeling especially sadistic, you can click on show earlier trips at the bottom of the screen and see what you just missed and by how much!!
Another great new feature, only available on the Blackberry Pearl, is Voice Searching. With it you can just click a button on the side of the BB and speak your search phrase. Another excellent way to aggravate your neighbor on the bus. If you’re feeling especially feisty, alternate your searches for Gun Shops and Adult Theaters the whole way in to work.
