Web Design has matured over the last 10 years and has foregone a lot of the whizzy coolness of the early web to pursue a more practical approach to designing websites. This has been through embracing ‘user experience’ as the central tenet of web design. It is a pity then, that user experience is now becoming overlooked in other areas of design.
Over the last weekend I went out a couple of times to enjoy the lovely spring sunshine and was crossing the main road through Shoreham By Sea, the small coastal town where I live. The crossing here is governed by a set of pedestrian traffic lights which were replaced last year with a new type that has merged the button pressing module with the screen showing the green or red man indicating whether it is safe to cross or not. This means that the visual indication of whether it is safe to cross is now on the pavement, next to me, facing away from the road. All well and good except that now when crossing I no longer have a visual indication showing me it is safe to cross. Not a big deal to most, perhaps, but these visual cues add to our user experience and would make me feel a little safer, even if that safety is illusory.
I also went on a bike ride over the weekend and experienced two incidents where I felt that the experience of a user had not been fully thought through.
Firstly we decided to go get a new bracket for my wife’s bike to allow her to use the bike seat we have for our daughter on her bike as well as mine. I had my daughter on the back of my bike on the way there and managed to ride over a drain cover that I had not looked at carefully enough. This drain cover had holes the width of my wheel and the length of the hole allowed about a third of my wheel to disappear down it. The hole went with the flow of the traffic and so I managed to put my wheel down it, luckily I was going very slowly so no harm was done except for me hitting the crossbar in a painful place.
Had the orientation of the drain cover been the other way it would have been no problem. This is not strictly ‘user experience’ as I am not the intended user of a drain cover but I feel it is related. The fact that the drain cover was just outside Halfords which was the bike store we were heading for, seems to be good enough reason to me to consider that cyclists may be using that stretch of road so it should be safe for them.
We managed to get to Halfords with no further mishap and looked for somewhere to tie up the bikes but there is no bike parking facilities at Halfords. Now, I estimate that the bike department of that particular Halfords store is about a quarter to a third of the store’s floor space, so not having bike parking facilities seems to me to be bizarre to say the least.
And there you have it, a small illustration of how designing for user experience could have made my weekend just that little bit better and less painful. It certainly gave me a timely reminder that user experience is of paramount importance to all design work and should be at the core of everything we do. At Juretic we have design processes in place that mean we start out with ‘UX’ (as it has become known), as the first consideration of the design process allowing us to ensure that this is at the forefront of our design work and throughout the project cycle.
Unless you have been hibernating for the last 4 months you will invariably be sick to death of the constant references to Twitter in the media. It is infuriating when there is a lot of media hype about a technology without anyone taking the time to explain how it might benefit you.
Firstly, Twitter is a microblogging tool that allows you to send 140 character messages to all those that are following your missives. This may seem rather restrictive when you can post much longer messages including images and multiple links to various references on the company blog. But the beauty of a short message is that it can focus you in to getting the succinct message out to the masses. This is a good thing as it helps us to think a little more creatively about what we are trying to say. But another great aspect to all of this is that it is the start of a two way conversation with your customers or clients, as you can follow them in return.
Do I need to start a conversation with my customers? I hear you ask. And I reply YES! The benefits are amazing as you can hear what is being said about you, your company, your products or your services. However, my favourite benefit is that it can help revolutionise the way companies evolve their products and services. Most of creativity in business is informed by the systems we use everyday to make our day to day work much easier. This can be restrictive as we often rely on these systems and find it hard to break outside of them to innovate. However, our customers and clients are not inside these systems and can easily point out ways to improve our service or product or even new services or products that may complement our existing ones. This is where Twitter is going to help those companies who use it well, by allowing us to converse with the end user in a more direct and instant way. The further benefit being that you can prove to the user that you listen and care about their needs.
I hope this provides some good reasoning to rolling Twitter into your PR and Communications channels for the future. I look forward to your thoughts and comments because I am all about the conversation.
Follow Juretic on Twitter at twitter.com/juretic and see what we have to say.
Social Media has been amazing at helping global communities form and develop over the last decade and I would include forums and messageboards in social media as it helps build a social community. But what about on a local scale? Could social media help a local, physical, community? We, at Juretic Media, believe that social media can enhance a local community in many ways.
Let us take as an example a typical local community in the form of a church. Churches are a great example as there are churches of one religion or another in virtually every part of the world and they form a central part of the community for many people.
So how can Social Media help build a church community? Well, it might not build the community but it could definitely enhance it. For example a social blog could help facilitate discussion in the community, a shared calendar such as upcoming could help the community plan events and a shared flickr account could allow the community to share photos of those events. This a very inclusive approach to the community and allows the community members to participate in generating the content of the community network.
And, inclusivity could be seen as a watchword for how social media can help communities. For example, many churches have members who may, for one reason or another, be housebound and unable to attend church services. Including these members of the church can be made easier by providing access to podcasts of sermons via huffduffer or video of ceremonies via sites such as vimeo or youtube.
This all outlines a few ways in which a planned social media network can build and facilitate your community.
The latest of our projects for O’Neill, in partnership with the good people at Ever Creative, has launched at www.bigmountainpro.com.
The website promotes Swatch O’Neill invitational event where 12 of the world’s best freeriders, from skiing and snowboarding will compete in some of the most challenging and varied backcountry terrain that the Alps can offer. The mobile event ensures that the riders are able to roam the alps in search of the best rides conditions allow so check the videos to see the action from various locations across the alps.
The tournament is co-produced by Swatch. If you are pining for the slopes then the BigMountainPro website is going to get you up close and personal with the riders by giving you the opportunity to see some amazing video footage, photography and news.
The event starts on February 3rd 2009 and runs until the 10th when the judging will take place. The unique point for the event is that the voting is by all the riders who will judge all the video of the runs before deciding the overall winner and the top 3 for the separate disciplines.
Website: www.bigmountainpro.com
I have been working on a site build that required a PNG to sit over the background to provide a nice fade into the footer of the site. A PNG graphic seemed to be ideal for this until I encountered a problem. This problem manifests itself in a colour discrepancy between the background colour set via the CSS and the saved PNG. All other graphics saved from the PSD as a jpeg or gif using the colour seemed to match the CSS colour correctly, it was only the PNG that was causing a problem.
I have had this problem before but have always skirted around tackling it directly and always found a different solution, but this time I wanted to tackle the problem head on. I knew from previous investigation regarding PNGs (trying to get them to achieve transparency in IE6 most probably) that there was something that PNGs did to offset their Gamma so as to achieve the same degree of brightness in the image as was perceived on the creating monitor. This is not a bad thing in itself but does cause problems when matching these colours up to CSS background colours. However, there is a way of stripping out this extraneous information to leave the image with the intended colours. There is an application named TweakPNG that allows you to play with the meta data that gets saved out with a PNG including the offending Gamma offset.
The highlighted row above shows the file gamma offset to 0.55000 which when set to 0 provides the correct colours for my purposes. And gives the desired result.
Following hot on the heels of Burn Zombie Burn, our latest collaboration with Ever Creative and Pinnacle Software, comes the site for Peppa Pig The Game. Providing fun for all the family, Peppa Pig The Game looks set to be the hit on the Nintendo DS for Christmas 2008.The site allows players to get a good overview of the game and introduces Peppa Pig, her brother George and their world where you can jump in muddy puddles, fly kites, flip pancakes and engage in all manner of fun things.The Game premieres on Nintendo DS™ on 28th November 2008 and the Wii™ game will follow early 2009.
Website: www.peppagame.comIf you are looking for a website with the ‘wow’ factor, then get in touch with us here or call 0845 838 7435.
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