Applied Design Group

Music to design stuff by …

Posted in Inspiration, Latest - February 8, 2010 - tim

Tinariwen at SFJazz Festival – c u there …

yes, we still do banners …

Posted in Latest, News - February 1, 2010 - tim

… since people keep asking. Amazing that these things still work.

Way back in 1996 Red Sky built what has been called the first interactive banner (the Pong Banner, built in Shockwave, before Flash, brainchild of Joel Hladecek). We thought at the time we were shepherding in the demise of the static banner, but these things refuse to die.

We don’t do any web banners anymore (mainly because we haven’t been asked), these are all mobile. But they’re still for the most part static. And they still, despite our efforts to obsolete them 14 years ago, work.

Humbling.

(More on the Pong banner here.)

iWhat?

Posted in Latest, News - January 27, 2010 - tim

Wow. Don’t get me wrong. I’m one of the biggest Apple fan-boys out there. But this morning’s announcement by Apple took the rug out from under me.

I don’t remember a major Apple announcement that didn’t make me want to go out and buy something that day. My response to the iPad? Meh.

Now, given my high hopes for a new device category (to in-part save the publishing industry which I’m really worried about – really), and my prediction – from 20 years ago – of what this thing should do, I was – to put it lightly – unimpressed today.

First impressions WTF’s:
- no phone?
- multitasking?
- no camera?
- iPhone apps “pixel doubled”?
- can that bezel get any bigger?
- this is what print looks like in the future? (HTML? PDF?)
- next gen print subscription models (I wanted the NYT 2010 reincarnation so bad …)

I can’t even start on the branding. When I hear new product names my test is to walk around the house talking to myself using the name. Walk around saying “Hey Billy, go listen to your iPod, I’m going to curl up here with my iPad” or “Let’s go to Tahoe! Get the iPod’s and the iPad’s!” and variants thereof. Pretty soon you start to sound like an iPutz. (Remember I’m a fanboy in San Francisco so I have a high tolerance for this.) Consolation prize for naming the reader iBooks (or whatever), but that’s what they should have named the product – not a supporting app.

I’ll be interested to see what the rest of the world says about this. I pointedly wrote this before reading any other reviews. And, as my good friend Joel Hladecek said, “I’ve not been impressed before by Apple announcements, until I got it in my hand …”.

iPost.

Allison’s Book

Posted in Featured Projects, Latest, Thoughts, Tim Portfolio - January 19, 2010 - tim

With the impending release of something book or tablet-like from Apple (next week) I thought it would be interesting to pull the following story from the archives.

Allison’s Book was the first story in a trilogy (never completed) describing the use of new consumer electronic devices in the near future (long past now). This was written I think around 1991-92 and describes events in the distant technological wilds of 1998. Suffice to say, it’s now 2010 and we’re still not there. Keep in mind, this was written just shortly after the Apple Newton appeared and long before things like iCal (2002), the consumer Internet, browsers, the iPod, desktop / mobile synchronization, home networks, etc. were in play.

It would be pretty funny if the name I used for Allison’s Book – the iBook – did in fact turn out to be the case. Gruber likes it.

It is the year 1998.

School is starting in another week and Allison has, like the other tenth graders at her school, appeared to collect her textbooks for the year. She’s on her bike. That’s no problem because her textbooks – everything she will need for the year, including all referenced texts, workbooks, and quizzes – are given to her on a small disk that costs her about $20. She fills out the check provided by her mother, drops the disk in her small school bag over her shoulder – where it will be carried with her the entire year – and heads back home to peruse the year’s texts.

Allison’s new school disk can be read by either her desktop computer in her room, or her portable electronic book she was provided with by her school her first year there. The day is nice so she heads for the front porch swing with the portable. This machine can be held in the hand or propped in the lap much like any book. It runs on rechargeable batteries charged by the holder on her desk in her room. The iBook ¹, as the kids so fondly refer to it, has two screens, both color and both as easy to read as the books still on the shelves in her parents house – easier in fact, because the screen adjusts its backlighting automatically for the ambient light, even in a dark room or bright sunlight.
(more…)

Success Breeds Complexity

Posted in Latest, News, Thoughts - - tim

I’m usually not one for predictions, but I’m going to go out on a limb here regarding Apple’s much fretted over announcement next week and make a bet.

Gartner says that downloads (not sales) of iPhone apps topped 3 billion recently. I’d like to know the distribution curve of active apps per phone (net of apps tried and then deleted) because if others out there are like me the original methods for managing apps have not kept up with the complexity of now having dozens of current apps.

The last major iPhone OS upgrade brought us the ability to search and shuffle apps around screens via the iTunes interface, but both seem like a patch and far short of Apple’s usual attention to detail. Given that new rumors have significant upgrades to iLife as well as a potential OS 4 for the phone, my bet is (I hope) that they have put some serious effort against application management both on the phone and via iTunes.

I don’t have a jailbroken phone, but there are a number of third party hacks which play with concepts of folders and other forms of familiar organization. The phone obviously has a file system hierarchy (it is OS X at heart) but it is not exposed. Just as OS X finder windows have four modes for viewing the file system (icons – basically the iPhone interface – list, columns and coverflow) then it seems like Apple could devise selectable alternate views of the file system and allow users to organize not only their application content but even their data content a little more flexibly. If the default view remained as it is now, and the ability to switch to more flexible modes was subtle, then I don’t think this would freak out those who don’t want complexity surfaced too much.

Apple has obviously noticed this issue, and they certainly don’t want to be the bottleneck in their own app sales / distribution ecosystem, so I’m betting we see changes here, and I hope they’re fairly dramatic, but with a simple opt-in for those with dozens – or soon hundreds – of apps.

Ideapaint

Posted in Inspiration - January 16, 2010 - tim

Being a bit of a type-A, first born, Virgo, ADD (touch of Asberger’s) kind of guy, this very much appeals to me.

The studio currently has a full wall of whiteboard, but I think I’ll be painting the entire thing with this stuff soon. Brilliant.

Ideapaint.

The Coke Machine Network

Posted in Latest, Thoughts - - tim

I travel to the South a couple of times a year and since there seem to be far more McDonald’s than Starbucks out in the wilds of Tennessee and Mississippi I have often pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot for their $2.95 / 2 hours Wifi deal – to reconnect to civilization.

Now, McDonald’s is opening up their network – and rapidly – as a free service.

Which is great, and reminded me of the following:

Back in the late nineties I got to know Jeff Dunn, then President of Coca-Cola NA when we were pitching them. We had a couple of discussions about the interactive landscape and at one point he asked me a really great question.

“How many Coca-Cola machines do you think there are in North America?”

“No idea,” I said. (It’s still a hard number to pin down and I still don’t have a good answer.)

“I’m not going to tell you,” Jeff said, “but here’s my question: what would you do with them?”.

And he basically escorted me out with that.

I mulled this over a while. Asked a few other people. No brilliant ideas. So I came up with a simple list of “facts”:

1. There are a lot.
2. They have a “density” that is probably proportionate to population.
3. They are located in a lot of interesting places – including businesses, schools, colleges, public spaces, gas stations.
4. They function as both a vending mechanism, and a branding / advertising mechanism.
5. They occupy physical space – about a meter square footprint, and in many cases the airspace above.
6. They are powered.

About two weeks after I met with Jeff I wrote him a letter with my answer:

Create the Coke Network.

Basically, the idea was this: use the physical container of the basic Coke machine (either retrofit existing machines or proactively fit new machines) to include a Wifi hotspot. For some machines you’d have to hardwire to the net. For others – given the density of Coke machines especially in urban areas – they might be able to wirelessly connect and extend each other.

I still don’t have any idea how many Coke machines there are in North America, or what technical limitations you’d hit to implement something like this, but from a marketing / branding perspective it’s a very tantalizing concept for me. And similar to what Starbucks and McDonald’s have done – but potentially much, much more interesting.

Imagine traveling and sniffing for hotspots on the go. Odds are you would pick up a Coke machine – or a dozen – damn near everywhere. The sign in page would be one big Coke ad / brand impression, and the deals you could cook up (like the Starbucks card) would be endless. Buy a Coke, get 15 minutes of Wifi. Or, to take it way out there, buy a Coke from your web interface and it pops out of the machine. Or, to go crazy / social / wacky, buy a Coke on a random machine and have it pop out (what was the old campaign? “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.”)

A pipe-dream obviously. But this is the kind of technology-meets-branding/advertising that really turns me on. Not more bullshit product placement, or Flash campaigns, or any other old media translated to online nonsense.

Lots of corporations – especially consumer goods – should consider how they could create a “platform” of sorts. But most don’t have a clue, or it’s just too much of a stretch for the product or category. But Coke and the Coke Network? Coke actually has this amazing physical “footprint” that makes even pervasive retailers (like Starbucks) look sparse. If they did something like that I for one would be damned seriously impressed.

Amsterdam Talk

Posted in Latest, Thoughts, Tim Portfolio, Work - January 14, 2010 - tim

A few people have requested copies of the talk I gave last year in Amsterdam, so here it is:

Flush

Posted in Latest, Thoughts - January 13, 2010 - tim

I’m not a big fan of Flash.

One day when I have the time I’ll try to write down all the reasons why. Dispassionately.

In the meantime I was pleased to see my old business partner Joel Hladecek write a veritable tome on a simple app I turned him on to that disabled Flash on websites – and the psychological impact thereof. On him at least (but I agree).

His, as usual, impeccable analysis can be found here.

The app I recommended (which is brilliant) can be found here.

How Hard?

Posted in Latest, Thoughts - - tim

My 8 year old son, for some strange reason, has taken up massage, and practicing on his parents. This is often to try to mollify us for some reason, but it’s not a bad strategy. And his Mom is a complete sucker.

He’s strong for his age (thanks in part to constant sports) and so he’s developed a curious technique that I’ve never seen before but I think it’s interesting. And simple.

Before he does anything he holds out his hand and says “how hard?”.

You, the massagee, then squeeze his hand to indicate the intensity you’d like – hard, or soft.

Almost everything, for me, being a metaphor for design it strikes me what a simple up-front context-setting mechanism this is. I’ve written before about the brilliance of the ATM language selection trick (i.e. “Enter PIN and press enter” in multiple languages – by selecting one, you also select your language without even really knowing it) and this is in that vein – not only does the masseuse get a key instruction from the subject, but there is also an initial contact – a handshake. Subtle but elegant. It also sends a signal to the recipient that they are basically in charge right up front.

How many applications – web, desktop, mobile, etc. – start with any sort of context-setting, power-acknowledging, insta-win like this? That’s the interesting question my kid’s technique raised. In strategy sessions with clients I have often tried to pitch up-front context setting mechanisms, but have often (most of the time in fact) been hit with the “we have to set our context first – who we are, what we do, why they should, etc. This feels a bit like the old broadcast one-way mass messaging mentality we still, as a society increasingly surrounded by peer-to-peer interactive media, lead with. More and more, when a client asks for an interesting messaging approach for a new web site or application or tool, I think first about how we could turn the tables and give the user not so much a first impression, but a first action.

How hard?

My son’s technique is elegant because it accomplishes a couple of things at the same time. And it’s simple. The trick in translating this to a consumer site or app is how to keep it simple (without feeling invasive from a privacy perspective) yet effective (from a response perspective). The best example I can think of in contemporary apps is the common location bug on GPS enabled devices like the iPhone. Touch the icon, set the context. Yeah, you’re giving up your location, but the app (if it’s worth a damn) returns something much more powerful than before.

I haven’t given a talk in 5-6 years that wasn’t at least in part about the power shift from “broadcaster” to “user” (to whit) so the concept of leading an interaction with a context-setting opportunity for the user – before or at least simultaneous with the chest-beating part – is one I like.

I’d be interested to hear about radical examples of this out there. Besides Google