There is seemingly a “technological revolution” released every second day in the digital industry, however every now and again something pops up which really makes people take note.
With the release of Facebook Places last night, it seems we are really entering the next phase of social media, a more diverse level of real-world interaction, as well as a completely new level of targeted marketing.
Places takes the existing concept of applications such as FourSquare and takes it to where people already are, Facebook.
While primarily aimed at iPhone users for now (Android and Blackberry versions are planned), Places introduces location-based services to the world’s most popular social network.
Places enables users to share their current location with friends, find out where their friends are, and discover new places of interest. Users can also add their own places of interest to the platform, whether it be a business or a residential address.
fflick is a movie review site that uses your Twitter account to show you just what your friends think of the latest films. You can either read a friends review or share your own opinions, it has a great design and integrates seamlessly with your twitter account.
I love digital. Its what makes me tick. The ability to extend a brand online through interaction and engaging content. The ability to touch your audience in ways which were unthought of just 10 years ago.
And lets face it it is still the early years for digital. We are still stumbling around in the dark making sense of technology and behaviours that are entirely new to us complex and unique bipeds.
However, there is one thing that humans have being doing for a long long time… and that is story telling. We love a good yarn, be it to pass down life’s learnings to our offspring or to just entertain. So to celebrate here are some brands that ‘do story telling’ really very well.
We have already established communication, problem solving, understanding code, attention to detail, time management and human behaviours as core attributes of a designer (see Part 1 and Part 2) and in this article we continue to delve into what makes a successful designer.
Look at websites and analyse WHY the designer has utilised certain elements
It is one thing to look at a design and like it, however it is only when you make the effort to understand the reasons why you like it, that you can actually learn from the design.
When analysing a successful, or just as importantly, an unsuccessful design, it is important to consider why the designer has placed particular elements in certain positions, what they are aiming to achieve through their design, and what message they are trying to get across to the viewer. It is often an interesting exercise to consider how the message of the design could be totally changed by altering a particular aspect of the design.
Another point to consider is that you should always look at other designs subjectively. Whether you like the design or not is almost irrelevant. The more important question is whether or not the design is successful in meeting its objectives by effectively communicating to the target audience. As an aside, an unsuccessful design is not always a reflection of the designer’s ability but is quite often a product of the restrictions, or requirements imposed by the client.
Make the user happy
Some of the most successful web and mobile designs in the past twelve months can credit their success not to their innovative services or offerings, but simply to their execution. As designers we should aim to be making the users’ experience as simple and as enjoyable as possible, regardless of how menial or basic the task may seem to be.
As designers, we should always strive to deliver an “experience”. Users want to be able to connect to the designs in their day-to-day lives, and we should respond to this by offering design in which they not only feel comfortable using, but also actually enjoy using. We should appeal to people’s emotions. Make them smile, make them laugh, make them happy but most importantly make them forget that they are actually having to complete the task at hand. A user may not always recognise a “good” user experience, however you can guarantee that they will notice, and be turned off, by a bad user experience.
A great example of social media and how it can bring people together.
Orange have teamed up with Poke London, to try and set a Guinness World Record for the most tagged photo ever on Facebook with GlastoTag. The site features a massive photo of this year’s crowd at Glastonbury, shot from The Pyramid Stage during half time of the World Cup match between England and Slovenia. People who were there can connect to the photo through Facebook, zoom in and tag themselves and their friends in the 70,000 crowd.
You can even filter the tags to show just your tagged Facebook friends and feel a sense of pride that you were all involved in the event. You might even see friends that you didn’t know were there.
How was it done? The 1,300-megapixel panoramic image was taken in just under a minute using a whopping two Hasselblad H4D-50 cameras mounted one on top of the other and rotated at 10 degree increments, going back 350 metres – to take in the whole crowd. The 36 images were then stitched together – making a pixel perfect memory of Glastonbury.
There are currently 4,200 tags on the photo and over 4,870 Facebook ‘likes’ for the page. With over 180,000 people at Glastonbury, and an estimated 70,000 people in this image, this can only keep increasing, making a huge impact across people’s home pages and conversations of memories on Facebook… as well as creating an association of the event with Orange.
The internet has evolved. No longer are there a few ‘big boys’ doing all the cool stuff you like to play/purchase online, the new development tools are now cheaper and give you an opportunity to build sites that were too expensive 5 years ago. The growing concern is that the data you create and input into a website is now so easily moved around the web via API’s/RSS. What rights do you and the website have on this data? The DataPortability is one project that is trying to bridge that gap.
This has been pinging round the web for just a week… and already has over 7 million views…
Why… because this is completely brilliant piece of film. So hats off to Nike Football for commissioning it, Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam for conceptualising it, and Alejandro G Inarritu for directing it and making the beautiful game a little more beautiful…
