RIA
Once again, Tanagram is growing. We are looking for a curious individual with a passion for the future of interaction and deep experience working with HTML, AS3, and XAML. Our newest member must also rock. This isn’t a confidence thing for you or us, we aren’t prima donna designers and don’t work well with individuals who can’t collaborate intensively. Rock to us means to be REALLY REALLY good at what you do. It means you understand the implications of aesthetics and beauty on complex functional design. It means you understand and are relevant with the “fashion” of design. It means you wake up in the morning thinking about visual and systemic gorgeousness and strive to create it. You must have a great portfolio that is relevant and shows you are actively pursuing the issues we are passionate about.
Here at Tanagram we actively look for ways to escape the world of WIMP interaction and I’m proud to say we are very very close to realizing it. We design complex interactive experiences, systems that make most designers cringe. Systems that allow users to touch and manipulate data with hands not abstractions. We abhor refresh-encumbered interaction and enjoy individuals who understand that there is a better place.
While we can’t share project specifics, our current assignments include redefining geospatial hyperlocal media planning as a SaaS product*, inventing the the future of Augmented Reality interaction (no it’s not a silly iPhone app, think heads-up display technology and daily wear), and creating / refining online communities that are meaningful and truly help people. Our clients work with us to help them create the future and we are steadfast that our future is a better one.
In our process the UX designer’s role begins at project inception. She participates in client discussions gathering information and providing references to current and leading edge design approaches (visual, haptic, etc) that may benefit the client’s requirements. She references new trends, hot topics, and examples used by like and non-like competitors. Once requirements are gathered, she works with the project team as an artist, innovator, and strategist representing concepts and prototypes that are desired by her target audiences. Design aesthetics are always as important as simplicity and relevance. Our newest member must be a communicator, actively seeking and spreading inspiration. She is constantly challenging herself and the status quo.
Experience working with Industrial Design is a plus.
If you feel like she could be you and have 10+ years of experience please send your resume and portfolio to careers@tanagram.com and we can start the discussion.
We look forward to meeting you.
* apologies for the buzzword attack.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on December 30, 2009
Greetings and Salutations,
Our last post stated that the Nike+ site didn’t have an analytics engine running under the hood and I’m happy to say Heidi MS and the fine folks at R/GA have corrected us. In the process we got our learn on too. I’m going to share the dialog so that all may benefit from our interaction. Thanks again Heidi! We are huge fans!
Here is Heidi’s response:
“Thanks for your reply. I am glad to learn about the plugin since I didn’t know of it. I googled a bit but couldn’t find anything.
Here’s the kicker – The results you are seeing (NO CP) are misleading. Why do I know this? I’ve been tracking websites for over ten years and I happen to be analyst on the Nike account at R/GA. All of Nike’s sites, including the new Nike+ site are tracked with Omniture. All the pages in your post are tagged at this point. We wouldn’t dream of launching a website for a major corporation without tracking.
If you want to see if a website is tracked and the tracking tool used, I recommend you use a sniffer/debugger such as HTTP Watch or Charles. They won’t fail you.
And I agree with everything you had to say about tracking behavior. 
Heidi “
Heidi reminded us that Rich Internet Applications (RIA) do not use the same tracking technology as HTML based applications. RIA can interact with web services without a full page refresh. That’s part of why they are so cool and also don’t require Counter Pixels (CP) for traffic analysis.
I fired up Fiddler2 to confirm this and was interested to see traffic resolving to nike.112.2o7.net. This is a screenshot of Fiddler2 in action:
Launching a browser and opening the 2o7.net URL concludes the expedition as seen here:
So consider this a retraction AND an extra congratulations to the R/GA / Nike+ team for leading the RIA community by example. You all get an A+!
Footnote: Click here to learn more about Omniture’s 2o7.net domain.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on July 9, 2009
Rosenfeld Media (Lou Rosenfeld) is known for their amazing field-manual style UX guides. (Rumor has it that Lou user tests his books!!) Randy Horton, Client Partner at Geneca and joint fan of all things Rosenfeld has drafted a pitch for Lou and his crew. What do you think, will it sell?
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I was recently speaking with Mark FelcanSmith, who is a UX manager at Sears.com, about Rosenfeld Media. Our conversation inspired me to realize that there is actually a book that I actually qualified to write for RM. Here is my pitch:
One of the key activities for anyone who moves into a UX leadership role is to assume responsibility for ordering dinner for the team on late nights at the office. To date, every UX leader has had to re-invent the wheel on learning this highly-intricate and crucial task. That is, until now. For the first time ever, UX leaders will have a definitive reference guide to go to get practical guidance on best practices and approaches to this challenging task.
Rosenfeld Media is proud to announce the acquisition of its newest title: Ordering Dinner for the Team: Challenges and Approaches.
This book will address a range of relevant topics including:
- Buffet-style vs. individual orders – Weighing the relative benefits
- Do you call a special meeting to take orders or interrupt each person while they are hard at work at their desk – Minimizing productivity loss
- Handling special dietary needs (vegetarian, vegan, kosher/halal, gluten-free, food allergies)
- Making sure you have enough napkins, and not the thin little restaurant ones that don’t do any good
- What to do about the really lame plastic forks that break apart in your food when you use them
- Where to dispose of all of the containers if the cleaning staff has already come by for the evening?
- Do you offer any food to the security guard at the front desk who eyes the great looking food as it is delivered?
- And many, many more topics.
I see some really good marketing tie-ins with restaurant delivery websites.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on April 11, 2009
If this isn’t a testament to the future of Rich Internet Applications (RIA), then we don’t know what is. Sumo Paint is a robust, feature rich, easy to use (relatively), illustration tool created using Adobe Flex technology. It runs exactly the same in Windows as it does on the Mac. We haven’t heard of anyone using it as a production tool yet but it’s not beyond the realm of possibilities. It is FREE after all. Given Google’s full-court-press in the RIA document space we don’t think it will be too long (minutes?) before they are acquired. We’re taking bets… share yours.
P.S. The picture above was created in 5 clicks. We know you’re impressed.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on February 4, 2009
How many times have you mentioned Facebook, Twitter, or Boxee (shout out to Avner and crew!) and gotten the an eye-roll? There seems to be a stigma developing in the industry because everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) is attempting to build community components into their application offerings. The bad news is it’s not going to stop anytime soon. The good news is that providers are getting better at implementing these systems and consumers are starting to experience real value.
So, why is the online community not a fad and/or evil? At its core, the online community is designed to build closer relationships between the consumers and the product/service provider. It’s important to distinguish that online community does NOT always have to build relationships between consumers and other consumers. Social networking focuses on connecting people in online communities. Online community is a higher level concept that is simply about the building of a body of active and engaged individuals.
Why do providers need to build customer relationships? In the early 1900′s it was common to buy soap directly from a human being that ran a local soap store. Customers would go to this person’s store and buy soap, share feedback, make feature requests, and hopefully deliver praise for the proprietor’s products. The proprietor would in turn make products that the customers desired. Today’s consumer packaged goods (CPG) giant Proctor & Gamble needed to reinvent this system because they could not afford to place an individual in every town they wanted to serve and they could not afford to manufacture an infinite number of variations on their product. Instead they created the first Brand and marketed their products (a small subset) using their brand promises to replace the direct connection that existed prior. As America endured it’s industrialization more and more companies chose to use brand instead the more costly direct representative approach to representing their products and today product sales reps don’t really exist except for big-ticket items like cars (oh and we all love car salesmen!). What companies like P&G failed to see was that the cost saving brand approach was also stripping them of their consumer feedback. They, like most other businesses following their model, became disconnected from their consumers who in turn became less excited about their products. They also found that they had to use manipulative marketing messages to persuade customers to buy their products. They had to lie.
Today the world is changing, or in a small way reverting back, to the direct connection model. People are media-saavy and see right through manipulative marketing/advertising attempts to persuade their purchases. To overcome this, smart providers are using online community to reverse the system. Instead of convincing consumers to buy their products they are letting consumers tell them what products to make. Providers are finding that watching customers using their products gives them incredible insights. Listening to them talk about their products does as well. Building systems that facilitate these observations and discussions is what online community is all about.
Google is a perfect example of well implemented online communities. While no one really thinks of Google as a community platform, their free applications connect us (search, email, document sharing, maps, etc) and in turn inform them about our desires, needs, and behaviors. They use this information to make their products better and sell other products to us. In return we love them.
Stay tuned… BT2 is coming next week. We’ll be talking about the “R” word, relevance.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on February 3, 2009
Japanese fashion clothing manufacturer UNIQLO, like most in the industry, is interested in learning more about their consumers. What makes them different is they have published results from their surveys as an interactive campaign that is visualized using Papervision3D. UNIQLO TRY is an interesting study of information visualization. The information moves fast and is hard to digest (for me) but the visualization is beautiful and the interactivity compelling. The filter tools made me feel a little uncomfortable as the filter criteria is mostly physical attributes of the subjects. Try it for yourself!
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on December 12, 2008
I may have had a drink or two or perhaps the interviewer was particularly charming. Either way I opened up for the folks at Level 3 and shared our dreams and visions for where Digital is going to take us in the coming years. I wish you could have seen the interviewer’s face. These were not answers he was prepared to address. Tell me the truth… Do I sound like a nut? Check out the other interviewees here. Great thinking and commentary from all.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on December 9, 2008
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
I was listening to NPR and they had another story about crowd sourcing and a gym shoe company in Seattle that was using these communities to develop surface design on standardized gym shoes. This got me thinking about the role of people in designing products and services directly vs. trained designers facilitating observations and discussions with users to gain insights in both articulated and unarticulated needs.
Crowd sourcing was recently discussed by Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine in June 2006 with his article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing“. This concept is not necessarily new. I read a few years ago “Murder, Insanity, and the Writing of the Oxford English Dictionary” and there was a global call to contribute to the first modern dictionary.
However, the deep spread of the internet has allowed people to directly interact with companies to provide feedback and help design existing products and services. Focusing communities of interest around their knowledge and expertise and iterating variations with standardized components (like surface design on t-shirts and gym shoes) and having online voting or based on purchasing behaviors, have the “better” strains rise to the top is an intriguing trend:
Threadless, a Chicago-based T-shirt maker whose design process consists entirely of an online contest is a good example of this trend.
DaWanda‘s Style Lab section, consumers can create products with their own individual style and have them made to order. (from www.springwise.com)
Crowd sourcing does need to be managed, and is not as ad-hoc as it may sound. Companies manage these communities for maximum impact of user-centered innovation. There are more sophisticated strains of focused crowd sourcing around more complex opportunities:
RedesignMe is a great Dutch website that is now engaging with product manufacturers to establish “RDM Challenges,” through which a new product concept is presented and the site’s 1,000 or so active members are asked to react to it. In exchange, they are rewarded with RDMs—RedesignMe’s online currency, which is convertible into products in the online RDM Shop such as mp3-players, game consoles and gift cards. (from www.springwise.com)
Elements, an eatery being planned to open next year in Washington. Crafted by a “beta community” of some 400 participants, Elements will serve raw and organic locally grown vegetarian food in an environmentally sustainable way. (from www.springwise.com)
What does this mean for designers? Precedent had positioned the designer as the arbiter of function and form. Rehabilitated or new products were completed by designers and brought to market. Crowd sourcing is in certain ways disintermediating the role of designer by going direct to customers to have them create new or revised design strains.
An interesting company that is taking crowd sourcing to another level is Kluster. They have created Private Klusters designed to enable collaborative brainstorming on myriad different questions by allowing invited participants to share their opinions on a relevant, customized set of criteria. (from www.springwise.com)
Spot.us a nonprofit that lets any individual or journalist post an idea for an untold story in the local community. Professional journalists then write pitches based on those ideas and place them in the site’s wiki, where members of the community can view them and vote—via micro-pledge—on the stories that are most important to them. (from www.springwise.com).
Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community using the wisdom of crowds based approach to discover new business and technology ideas.
Designers have embraced ethnographic and observational research to create new objective skills to experience what is and look for pattern and opportunity. With crowd sourcing, the role of the designer will need to be delineated as a type of reasoned broker to sort and prioritize a community’s ideas.
Are the aggregated power of crowds a wise resource for companies? For simple solutions, creating different variations can provide needed diversity for products where customers want many alternatives. For more complex problems and ideas where there are many variables, I believe that this model can easily fall apart. There are too many levels and ways to interpret and approach something to bring desired value.
I have not really heard the design community address the effect and challenges of crowd sourcing. When Larry Keeley edited a Society of Typographic journal named “People, Not Markets”, he emphasized that designers need to address the real needs of people not the marketing needs of companies.
Twenty years later, we are moving in the right direction. The question is in what direction?
Posted by akallish on August 28, 2008
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