evolve
March 31, 2010 - Riddell.com launched!
If you have ever watched a NFL broadcast you’ve seen Riddell’s logo on the grill of just about every pro-player’s helmet that screams across the screen. Riddell, a Chicago institution and Easton Bell Sports subsidiary, makes the best helmets in the industry. Their lifesaving concussion-reduction technology is available as an option on helmets for youth players all the way up to their professional models. If you haven’t seen the Revolution Speed Helmet, you should check it out, it’s amazing. My kids will definitely wear Revo Speeds if they choose to play football. They are statistically proven.
Tanagram has been working with Riddell for several years helping them evolve their marketing and sales presence on the web and this launch marks a key point in their evolution roadmap. E-commerce has been implemented using SAP’s shopping cart and while we’re not huge fans of the SAP product, it works pretty darned well. The short story is you can now buy Riddell products online and have them shipped to your home. WOOT!! As the site continues to mature, advanced metrics are being measured and SEO is being implemented. In the near future we will be expanding Riddell’s online community to do some really amazing things that will be meaningful to those who adore football.
We had a blast putting this site together using some cutting edge technologies including Adobe AS3, Papervision, and the not-so-cutting edge WordPress CMS engine.
Tanagram would like to thank the brilliant folks at Riddell for being such great partners. This site reflects the hard work invested by the entire team. You guys rock!
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on March 31, 2010
The dust has settled, we’ve caught up on our sleep (Rudy is a sleep camel), and now we would like to reflect on the Phizzpop competition. We really had a blast “Phizzing” and “Popping” the challenge. While we don’t usually share intimate project details with the public, Phizzpop was purely conceptual work so there are no lawyers to hunt us down. That said, we’re thrilled to share the gory details with you.
Assignment
Our assignment, from a high level, was to engage teens between the ages of 13 to 18 and get them excited about the 2016 Olympic bid. We were to build a system that would empower them to show their support, build a community, and create momentum showing the world that the 2016 Olympics could be held no where else. The result had to include a rich interactive experience using Microsoft Silverlight technology, three days to design and build it and 8 minutes to present it. You can download the full assignment document here. It’s a great read, very well prepared.
Method
Tanagram, with development partner Geneca, responded to the challenge using the same processes we use to develop social architectures for clients like Tribune Interactive.
- Understand target demographic and project goals
- Define quick-convert subset(s), key penetration points and growth/sustain model
- Prototype, test and evolve
With three days to produce results we didn’t explore the situation with our typical rigor and we didn’t have the opportunity to field test prototypes but initial feedback on the results has been very strong and we’re very satisfied.
Understand target demographic and project goals
During our presentation I joked that Rudy spent the weekend hanging out at American Apparel watching teens. Truth be told the internet and some high-level research from our friends at Ogilvy provided us with our pool of insights. Obvious findings included teens are extremely socially motivated. They care a great deal about social status, peer recognition, and to a large extent fame. Interesting findings included 97 percent of today’s teens carry a cell phone and do a great deal of connecting via SMS or text messaging. The phones they carry are not rich media devices like the iPhone but instead hand-me-down Motorola Razors, or cheap carrier-branded phones.
Project goals included:
- Building a large community rapidly (the Olympic bid decision is October 2, 2009)
- Designing a system that would be valuable before, during, and after Olympic events (we added 2012 AND 2016 to our goals)
- We added building a system that would capture and execute upon the goals of WorldSportChicago, an Olympic bid leave behind organization dedicated to encouraging youth to achieve athletic excellence
- We added help change the U.S. perception of exercise and athletics including motivating people to get out and burn a few calories
- We added pushing the social networking domain by exploring real-time connectivity experiences
Define quick-convert subset(s)
The key to rapidly growing a social network is to leverage the power of multiples for expansion. This is done by identifying those members of your demographic set that are most easily captivated and converted to use your system and giving them tools to recruit new members for you. We chose “athletically inclined youth” as our champion subset because we found they were most likely to have knowledge of and be interested in the Olympic institution, they were already participating in an athletic program, and likely had some form of basic support network (meaning potential recruits) already in place.
Key penetration points
Key penetration points are valuable offerings that enhance the lifestyle of the champion subset. Key penetration points for our system included:
- A place to record and publish athletic achievement
- A place to voice opinions and build integrity among a community of peers
- A platform that provides easy addition and presentation of text, audio, photos, and video streams
- A mobile component that leverages available technology in ways currently unavailable to our champion subset
- A system that encourages real-time participation and interaction multiple times daily
- A brand association that improves the desired perception of the athlete
Growth/sustain model
We found that one of the keys to the degree of success of an athlete was a strong support network. Friends, family, peers, and even competitors connected to give support and guidance for the athlete in training. We designed our system to enable athletes to recruit a support network by adding fans to their distribution list for their training blog. With a meager goal of converting 1 million athletically inclined youth each recruiting an average of 10 fans we were satisfied that we had a model that would expand appropriate to our needs.
We built a ranking competition / reward system into our model to help motivate the recruiting process. The athlete’s ranking in our system would be determined by the number of fans in their network, the amount of interaction with the system, and donated calories provided by exercising fans.
Fans, once signed up, would receive both blog and statistics (i.e. new best time) updates from the athlete and could respond with messages of encouragement (improving ranking). Fans could also “donate” calories burned doing basic exercises to athletes to further add to the athletes ranking score. It was critical that all of these activities be tied to the Olympic bid. At the very start, sign up as an athlete or a fan includes a digital petition showing support for the 2016 bid. Athletes could also flag themselves as Olympic potentials in the system and in doing so gain additional ranking points and benchmarking capabilities.
Athletic training requires dedication and daily commitment. Our system was designed to be a key component in the training process and because of that it would be very relevant to our champion subset’s daily needs. We designed our system so that athletically inclined youth could capture/monitor their training progress, share it with their supporters and even benchmark it against peers and Olympians. Our system would provide connections between athletes at various levels of training; novice athletes could connect with Olympians for inspiration and guidance, expert athletes could connect with others for support and to share best practices. To maximize the value of the interactive system we built a rich-media blogging platform that enabled athletes to post (in addition to text) audio, image and video streams of meets and other events. The video blogging system was enabled by Microsoft’s Silverlight Streaming cloud service, a system that allows simple upload, conversion, and hosting of video files (up to 10GB for free). Our goal was to develop a system that enabled athletes to build a digital record of their career, a monument of their effort.
Finally and perhaps most exciting to us, we built our system to be fully enabled through SMS. For the demonstration we used a 3G GSM modem connected to an ActiveSMS server to show a small scale version of what our system was capable of. For purposes of the presentation we did not expose the full feature set (even though we sent and received ~300 SMS messages in a period of 8 minutes) but our system was designed to enable subscription, bi-directional communication to multiple subscribed circles (perhaps by sport) for both athletes and fans, performance statistics entry by the athlete on the field, and the ability to send cheers to athletes as they compete. We thought it would be cool if athletes carrying a cellphone on silent could get occasional nudges (vibrates) from fans wishing them well. Testing would determine if this was annoying or distracting. We were on the fence.
Why Big Shoulders?
Carl Sandburg has had his poem “Chicago” associated with far too many initiatives but for us we referencing it allowed us to talk about Chicago without making our concept about Chicago (the Olympic bid is a U.S. initiative) and it also allowed us to talk about a support network in an interesting manner. Big support comes from big shoulders.
A note about athletics in the U.S.
It will probably not come as a shock that athletics in the U.S. are in decline. We found one study tying the decline in athletics to the tripling of obesity in teenagers since 1974. Another study found that today’s teens are less able to get and hold jobs because of lacking athletic experiences. Obviously studies all have their slants, but it’s clear to us that athletics in America need our help. We built our system to allow fans to donate calories with the hopes that if one person did 10 push ups and it wasn’t that hard and did it again, perhaps they might consider a regular exercise routine, maybe even develop over the years to have Olympic aspirations of their own. Physical fitness is a key health issue in the U.S. increasing fitness will reduce health care costs, improve stamina and positive attitudes in practitioners and even teach values like honor and commitment. The value of hard work is a lesson being lost on today’s teens and America will benefit if we can find a way to teach it.
Big Shoulders screen shots
Big Shoulders home screen pristine
Big Shoulders home screen with SMS text flowing in background
[caption id="attachment_439" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Big Shoulders home screen with Rudy hot state"]
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Big Shoulders home screen with Rudy Details open
[caption id="attachment_441" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Big Shoulders home screen with Rudy Stats screen open"]
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Big Thanks!
Special thanks to the folks at Microsoft (Chris, Bob, Josh, Brian, Sara) for inviting and supporting us. Thanks to our team-mates at Geneca for their support. Supreme thanks to Rudy Chou and Matthew T. Boeke for staying awake for three days to develop this awesome concept. You guys rock!
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on December 2, 2008
Last week I attended a conference at the University of the Andes in Merida, Venezuela. The International Congress of Aesthetics (Simposio Internacional de Estetica – Arte, Ciencia es Technologia) brought together philosophers, writers, scientists and others together to discuss the role of written text, ideas and their ability to create aesthetic experiences through semiotic analysis.
Professor Edgar Yanez Zapata invited Aleksandra Giza, a professor of design from Northern Illinois University and myself to give several lectures to faculty and students of the School of Art and Design as well as present at the international congress.
Merida is a town nestled at the beginning of the Andean mountain range and runs along a ridge that is overseen by Pico Bolivar, over two miles above the city. For over 450 years the town evolved into a small city of about 20 square kilometers. The University of the Andes is the main function of the town and its impact is felt at all levels of life and activity.
There were four presentations given:
1) Introduction to Design Methods focusing on a contemporary perspective of design methods building on the original discussions in the early 1960’s and the publication of John Chris Jones seminal 1970 book “Design Methods.” Misunderstood and often maligned as a concept, design methods began as a way to question purely scientific post-war advancements and proposed a more integrated, multi-disciplinary perspective to integrate logic and intuition into a stronger approach to identify and solve problems. The presentation will focus on what design methods means in 2008, and how to structure and apply concepts to both problem solving and problem seeking.
2) Managing Ambiguities : The Role of Decision Modeling and Visualization focused on the development of diagrams and maps that described statistical and geographical relationships and the advancements of cognitive theories of how humans make decisions. The premise of the presentation focused on how the visualization of data through different content lenses can provide humans the needed cognitive and workload assist to provide options when faced with making decisions.
3) Urban Design Assistance Teams : A Different Approach
A Regional Urban Design Assistance Team (R-UDAT) is learning by doing, a type of accelerated practicum/charette to help towns and municipalities in distress. Teams interact with a variety of local stakeholders as well as to regional legislators in hopes of securing resources to implement UDAT recommendations. Randallstown, Maryland, a town of 30,000 residents in northeast Baltimore County was the backdrop where landscape architects, design architects and architects with experience in public policy, a traffic engineer, and a graphic designer mobilized to help Randallstown seek its potential.
4) Chicago : Innovation of the Past, Present and Future focused on the history of Chicago and innovations in architecture and engineering such as the modern development of the steel i-beam skyscraper and the load bearing cassion foundation which transformed a marshy prairie into one of the 25 largest cities in the world. The presentation highlighted the Village of Oak Park, 14 kilometers west of Chicago and home to Frank Lloyd Wright’s early architectural career as well as on key Chicago architectural icons that are not usually highlighted with a short discussion on the city’s bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics.
The presentation for the congress was attended by about 150 people as there were concurrent presentation sessions. Most of the attendees were focused on written language that describes the world and can generate aesthetic experiences using Sassurian frameworks and models. My presentations focused on Percian semiotics which extended linguistic semiotics into any form of thinking (metacognition, visual and written).
The second presentation to the congress was part of a panel that Edgar Yanez Zapata put together that addressed the role of digital technologies in aesthetic thought. From my observations, most conference participants would read short papers to the audience. A few had electronic presentations that endeavored to share richer stories.
The last night of the conference there was a small dinner at a wonderful bar called Mogambo (Chama Hotel). We had the opportunity to sit next to three philosophers from the University of Venezuela at Caracas. As you may surmise we ended discussing issues of reality, meaning and how subjective or objective reality is (or is not). Over beer and wine (a necessary ingredient) we did not come to any firm conclusions, but it did raise some interesting ideas.
Over the weekend, Aleksandra and I were invited to an evening with faculty from the Art and Design department at the house of Argentinian architect Carlos Caminos and his wife Donna. Their home is nestled on the side of a hill designed by Simon, a Rhode Island School of Design graduate. The simple home is beautifully appointed with artwork, functional objects and the history of this interesting collaborative couple.
We talked late into the evening about design, culture and other topics as Aleksandra and I moved around the house. I would like to thank Leo Chacon, John Villarroel, Carmen Grisolia, Eduardo Araujo, and Julie Colasante for making time out of their hectic schedules to share cultural ideas. We also had a wonderful dinner with Nory Pereira Colls, Dean of the Art and Design school at ULA.
I would like to thank Edgar Yanez Zapata, Director of the School of Art and Design for suggesting the visit, coordinating all activities and making Alexandra and I feel at home in Venezuela.
Posted by akallish on November 21, 2008
As reported by Kiplinger.com [UPDATE - Here's a NYTimes article as the Kiplinger article is offline] and many other sources, Target has settled with NFB on the class-action lawsuit that has started a shift in the thinking with regards to web accessibility. This settlement will put a lot of pressure on e-tailers throughout the United States and while that seems like a good thing, we are not satisfied with the likely result. 508 compliance must evolve, the blind and visually impaired deserve better than digital hand-rails and ramps. You’ve heard our rants before. Just like Oscar Pistorius used technology to turn his disability into an advantage, we believe the man / machine dyad can be optimized for anyone. Here’s a question to Target and the other e-Tailers out there: If product color descriptions and product images (i.e. a photo illustrating the cut, shape, fit, and color of a pair of pants) aren’t helpful to the blind, what good does it do to make sure they can access them?
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on August 28, 2008
Nate Burgos sent me a link about a new institute that is being created between Stanford University and the Hasso-Plattner-Institute to investigate design thinking. They defined it as a methodology that “melds an end-user focus with multidisciplinary collaboration and iterative improvement to produce products, services or experiences.” Their theme is – innovation – which is no surprise.
This got me to think about how this term has fluctuated since I heard it twenty years ago. My approach to the topic was around several attributes:
Wicked Problems
A Focus on Customers/Users
Finding Alternatives
Ideation and Prototyping
Qualitative Performance
The question is how is design thinking different from other types of thinking? If we take a Western European approach to thought, then critical thinking models revolve around observation, asking questions, research, making new connections and creating a model that integrates new insights.
If you agree with this foundation, then there would be little differentiation between design thinking and other forms of thinking. Can non-designers do design thinking? What is the role of the designer if design thinking is practiced by a wide variety of disciplines and professions?
What has remained constant about design thinking is linked to an improved future. Victor Margolin, in his book The Politics of the Artificial stated “Design is continuously inventing its subject matter, so it is not limited by outworn categories of products. The world expects new things from designers, that is the nature of design”
I used to have conversations with fairly progressive designers twenty years ago about design thinking and that design was as much about frameworks, strategies and approaches as about media artifacts. At the time, they were not ready to embrace this idea and only wanted cursory approaches that could add more legitimacy to the making. Contemporary designers have finally embraced in enough of a critical mass that design is as much about thinking as making.
A few years ago John Thackara proposed to the London Design Council the Project Red Initiative which would have the UK design community address specific social, political and economic issues facing the United Kingdom. The backlash from the design community that the initiative was not in the bounds of design.
The good news is that design thinking, design methods, and design management are all coalescing to create new opportunities for designers to collaborate effectively with other professions around wider areas of interest that are not discipline specific.
Designers have an ability to interact with the the unknown, and the shifting relationships between the meaning of things. This new type of designer is linking design (as a plan) to outcomes that are not necessarily objects. It is here that methodology can help and this is where design thinking comes into play.
Maybe there is hope after all.
Posted by akallish on August 22, 2008
Maybe I’ve been thinking about this topic because of the recent arrival of my twin sons Pascal and Thibault, but it seems to me we are about to take the next evolutionary step in the digital world with regards to replication. Digital replication, creation, or programming, has traditionally had a steep entry curve, requiring very smart people with very specific skills to create anything of value. Today games like Spore™ and LittleBigPlanet™ are replacing yesterday’s object oriented programming languages and are making online content creation accessible to a much larger audience. Virtual worlds like World of Warcraft™, Second Life™, and even the upcoming Diablo III MMORPG offer trading and even sale of your creations for fun or profit. Inworld artifact and content creation doesn’t represent the end, the next-generation replicator will allow users to create self-sustaining, independent objects that can exist outside (outworld) the domain of their originating world. These objects will be able to easily travel between devices (including mobile platforms) in ways that are relevant to their creator. Perhaps these objects themselves will contain within themselves the ability to replicate, perhaps even evolve?
Post back if you’ve already seen this in the wild and have a great weekend!
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on August 8, 2008
In the virtual world everything must be intentional. This video makes an excellent example (thanks Travis) of this as the story and the conflict between cultures evolves. Watch the metaphors stack up on each side and then explode into reality as they drink their tasty beverages. A LOT of work went into this.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on July 25, 2008
Pilots are interesting creatures that offer us a lot of opportunities to learn if we observe them in their natural habitat. I recently spent several weeks locked in a bunker covered in camouflage observing their ritual behaviors. Ok… not really, but I have been working closely with Naval pilot Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and during a recent user testing exercise I was faced with an interesting discovery. Boy I should have seen this one coming.
Pilots don’t like innovation.
When we started our charter to evolve the pilot cockpit interface I had heard the infamous stories of the unanimous rejection of life-saving technologies based simply on the fact that they didn’t look cool. I can’t say why I didn’t pay more attention to these stories except that I thought they were talking about electrodes on the skull and giant diaper shaped gravity suits. Surely a pilot would eagerly accept a new and better way to read the information his cockpit was providing him. I am here to say this is not the case. Pilots are the quintessential expert user. They spend no less than 2000 hours of training to become experts of an information system that is a metaphorical nightmare. It follows logically that they are a little apprehensive to reinvest their time in a new, albeit seemingly simpler, set of informational metaphors. During our first concept reviews for our Ev1 prototype we presented the “Combined Metaphor,” an interface that took all of the various information displays in the pilot cockpit and combined them into a single congruent presentation. Simply put, we removed gauges that tipped opposite directions to illustrate the same event and placed them all into a single top-down display of the craft in its environment surrounded with performance statistics and trend indications. What could be better, right? I knew I was in trouble when a pilot asked me if I had my instrument rating (I don’t yet, but am more than half-way finished with the training). He went on to tell me that the gauges we combined were showing completely different things and that they were fine the way they were.
I was dumbfounded… How could he not see that this system was better by far than the hundred year old aggregate in production today?
It was simple really, he couldn’t see it because he had spent 2000 hours learning to love the old interface. He, like every other expert user we encounter, has made an investment in learning the vocabulary of the system we hope to evolve. The difficulty by which his learning came is directly proportional to the resistance he has for its change. Believe me, there aren’t a lot of users that have a larger investment than pilots.
But I wasn’t ready to give up. I had to figure out what our new interface could offer pilots that they truly desired. A little ethnography and a whole lot of interviewing later I had my answer.
Pilots Love Workload Reduction.
Don’t get me wrong, pilots aren’t lazy but sometimes they have to do a lot of work to get something done. A perfect example is the process of entering waypoint coordinates into a flight plan. You’d be surprised how many attributes are used to describe a waypoint in a flight plan and entering or editing them can be tedious even when you’re not being fired upon. When we showed that our combined metaphor could facilitate single touch flight plan correction we got their attention. Even more exciting to them were our cognitive assistance features. When we discovered that pilots were often tasked with being at a specific location at an extremely precise period of time and were tasked with repeatedly calculating their performance to meet that objective, it was easy for us to design a system that did the same calculations dynamically. User testing recently proved that pilots showed a significant improvement in acquisition of Time On Target (ToT) when using our Ev2 interface. We had pilots laughing with joy as they executed their scenarios because it was so easy to monitor their performance. Best of all, once they saw how the new Ev2 interface could make their life easier they very quickly got over the metaphor shifts. Several of our recent flight testers would pout (in a tough and cool way of course) when they had to execute a mission on the “old” interface.
Mission successful, users engaged.
So what can we learn from this? You don’t need to be a pilot to make an investment in an interactive system and see that investment as valuable. As we architect we must always consider the costs of adoption and make sure we involve the user in helping us find their solutions. In doing so we’ll make some friends and maybe even fans.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on September 4, 2007
Usability News from the Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State University recently revisited an online shopping cart survey in “Top Ten Mistakes of Shopping Cart Design Revisited: A Survey of 500 Top E-Commerce Websites.” This new survey revisits a similar survey conducted in 2002 and focused on determining which of the top 10 mistakes made in shopping cart design in 2002 were still prevalent today. While it is interesting to note that many of the same problems that plagued shopping carts in 2002 are still problems in 2007, this survey is perhaps most interesting as a set of guidelines for designing new shopping carts.
The 12 issues identified by Naidu and Chapparo represent the best practices of shopping cart design. Designing your shopping cart to meet these best practices will not automatically catapult your online store to a position overtaking Amazon, but it will help you avoid many costly mistakes that Amazon and other online retailers have made in years past.
We’re no stranger to shopping carts. We’ve helped a number of large online retailers evolve their eCommerce experience but we’re currently putting these best practices and more (always pushing the bar!) to use in a new shopping cart design for an exciting, potentially far-reaching site that launches early next year. I can’t really talk about the project right now, but a number of us here are excited to use it ourselves.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on August 15, 2007
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