In this episode I show you how to do very basic photo enhancements. While I’m using Photoshop in the screen-cast, the different methods I use are available in almost any photo editing software. If you’d like to subscribe to this iPhone/Video iPod compatible podcast you can do so at iTunes.
Being familiar with Apple’s history of version 1.0 rollouts across their product line, I resisted the first iPhone for as long as I could. Now I can say without hesitation, however, that the iPhone is a life-changing device. It’s primary significance is its ability to perform so many diverse tasks in such a clean package through both native and third party apps, and to do so in a device that can easily slide into your pocket. A number of these apps help us run a design and technology firm. Here are the most useful.
Read "The best iPhone applications we use to run a design and technology firm"
The European ExpressionEngine CodeIgniter Conference—eeci 2009—took place October 22-23. While we weren't able to fly to The Netherlands to attend, we did follow posts from our peers and are really excited by all the buzz that's been generated about the next version of EE and some of our favorite tools.
The long-awaited, next major version of ExpressionEngine, v2.0, will be officially released on December 1, 2009. This is huge news. EE 2.0 has been in development for a very, very long time. The team resisted rushing against a promised date and focused instead on working toward a thoroughly complete, worthwhile release. We've had access to, and installed, the beta and can say that it shows. The platform has been reworked and built off of EllisLab's CodeIgniter framework, which we've used in the past for custom application development. For our clients & end-users, ExpressionEngine 2.0 means:
We've always touted ExpressionEngine's license fee as quite reasonable for the value it delivers, and that continues to be true. EE 2.0 comes with a modest price bump ($299 vs. $249, $149 vs. $99 for non-profits*) that is fully justifiable.
Your site is probably running ExpressionEngine v1.6.x, which EllisLab will continue to support and release patches and updates for as necessary. If we're building your site with EE 1.6.8 right now, we can upgrade your site down the road for the EE upgrade fee ($50) and time spent. As we've been saying through the EE 2.0 development cycle, ExpressionEngine 1.6.8 is an incredibly solid and robust solution and we're comfortable deploying our clients' sites on it. If your site is about to launch, short of EE 2.0's release, you're still in a great place with a great product.
If you're coming on board with a new site after December 1, we'll be ready to work with you using the latest & greatest ExpressionEngine release.
* Prices are for 1 ExpressionEngine license. Yearly subscriptions are available for access to the latest updates and releases, though we don't always find those necessary. Find out more in the ExpressionEngine Store.
In this episode I continue to talk about the many great failures of the site Pantone.com. I show the benefits of the wireframing process and the downfalls of not investing time in site structure and information architecture. If you’d like to subscribe to this iPhone/Video iPod compatible podcast you can do so at iTunes.
If your company is struggling with a complex design challenge it's probably time to seek input from someone on the outside. Corporate culture too often becomes insular, a team focused on internal objectives becomes self-reinforcing and a multitude of stakeholders with their respective agendas who all need to feel comfortable with the outcome end up with a watered-down, homogenized solution. Rather than looking through the window to get inspiration from the outside world, the team finds themselves looking into a mirror for what's familiar and efficient.
You need outside perspective. That's where an agency like Slim Kiwi comes in.
A Fast Company blog post, Are You Building a Consumer-Facing Company?, addressed this subject last week:
Design agencies, on the other hand, are born to think outside-looking-in. Not only do design agencies bring together radical talent and methodology that's difficult to maintain in a closed corporate environment, they have another advantage that's seldom talked about: Their ability to reflect across industries and companies and to form their opinion based on such experience. They have a role in creating many products, join many different teams, and can reflect, in hindsight, about the success or failure of certain ideas. That agency worldview cannot be counted in sketches, models or dollars--it is an invaluable trove of experience that is underutilized by both the agencies and their clients.
Our job goes beyond just executing a design. We're hired to provide critical insight and to evaluate your business and marketing efforts, provide you feedback, help you incorporate that feedback into your strategy, and then execute based on that strategy.
That might be a lot to sign onto. In the coming weeks, we'll be announcing a new service that will allow you to get an idea of what steps you should take and where we can contribute: Usability & Marketing Analysis Reports. You point us to your web site, pick a level of review to engage us on, and we provide you a report on what's working, what isn't, and what it would take for us to get you where you should be. Our goal is to give you a taste of our value, shake things up a bit and empower you to make an informed decision on the direction of your efforts without the big upfront commitment.
Outside looking in. Whether you're the corporate team that needs reinvigoration or just looking for expertise that isn't practical to maintain in-house, we're at our best when we're charged with bringing our outside perspective and our unique blend of expertise across industries, from consumer to business-to-business channels, for companies large and small, to the table to provide you fresh ideas. With this new offering, our goal is to let you opt for a first date rather than jumping into a relationship, while identifying where your organization can grow and optimize your efforts.
IE6 (Version 6.x of Internet Explorer) is the web browser folks like us love to hate. If you haven’t gotten wind of that already, we expect you will.
What does dropping IE6 support even mean? Well, it means that they’ll stop checking their web sites in IE6 to make sure they look good. When we launch a web site, we check it in a broad sampling of browsers: Safari 3, Safari 4, Firefox 3 and up, IE7, IE8 and, to our frequent dismay, IE6. Each of those browsers interpret how HTML should display in subtly different ways, and we need to adjust your web site’s code so that pages match the designs you approve in all those browsers. You’re paying for your designs and content to reach users regardless of their choice of platform and we support that.
But IE6? Well, two versions and ages old in internet years, it’s broken. To some extent, Microsoft ignored important trends and standards when building IE6, that the web development community and other browsers adopted, so it requires extra elbow grease to make sites work the same there as they do everywhere else. In the majority of cases, IE6 users are fringe users, less than 5%, and the costs of accommodating them outweigh the benefits, leading large web sites to announce they’re dropping support, in part to encourage users to upgrade, move on and get on the same page as everyone else. Web design firms announce new policies that they will no longer support IE6, or that doing so will incur an additional fee.
There are a few reasons IE6 hasn’t withered and vanished yet. The predominant reason is corporate IT departments. Some of them insist upon users staying with IE6 because years ago they built very expensive internal web sites that only work in that browser. Upgrading the browser on everyone’s computer would incur costs in redeveloping those sites. Others, like a financial services client we work for, stick with a specific IE6 release because a significant portion of their corporate security policy is based upon it.
Another client will soon be launching a site that may be accessed in Internet cafes anywhere in the world. We’re not entirely sure what browser might be installed there, so it’s a good idea to stick with supporting IE6 until we see some stats come in.
For now, we won’t be dropping IE6 support. We would certainly, for the sake of the web, appreciate it if you would drop IE6. We will continue to assume that we’re supporting IE6 in our work, but for those clients who feel it’s not worth the effort, we’ll discount the project commensurately and include a message on your site letting IE6 users know that a better experience awaits them in another browser. For the most part, those sites will work fine for those users and they’ll still get to the content. The design might come through a little rough, but we’ll collectively be doing our part for a better web by kindly requesting those users join us in the future.
We’ve always sought to be more than an agency that just gets the job done. That should be expected of every agency you hire. Instead, we’re succeeding at showing clients that we have a genuine heartfelt interest in helping them succeed spectacularly. For this reason we get really excited when we see a client like Zeo, and others, get national attention with featured articles in the Wall Street Journal and making the front page of the business section of the New York Times. Zeo approached Slim Kiwi for online brand consulting, messaging and design after investing a lot of time, money, research and talent into building a consumer product that tracks and transmits brain waves wirelessly to a bedside clock while the user is sleeping and then charts and coaches that user on how to accomplish better nightly sleep.
We had many animated discussions with Zeo about their online strategy and design at myZeo.com. It was clear to us that they were carefully contemplating our advice and we made it clear to them (we hope) that we had a great amount of respect for the work they had done up to this point. We love the type of client relationships that we have with Zeo, where even amongst different opinions about strategy they can see we are more interested in their long-term success than their immediate happiness. We think the end result accomplished our task and plays a part in Zeo’s ongoing success, delivering a site that serves as their single largest point of sale for a new product that has achieved national attention.
In this episode I continue to talk about the many great failures of the site Pantone.com. I point out the confusion caused by and inconsistencies in the visual language of their navigation. If you’d like to subscribe to this iPhone/Video iPod compatible podcast you can do so at iTunes.
In this episode I start a series where I talk about the many great failures of the site Pantone.com. I start by pointing out Pantone.com’s failure to acknowledge a potential customer and losing out on the opportunity to create a broader base for sales. If you’d like to subscribe to this iPhone/Video iPod compatible podcast you can do so at iTunes.
In this episode I show and talk about GOOD examples of image navigation online. If you’d like to subscribe to this iPhone/Video iPod compatible podcast you can do so at iTunes.
In this episode I show and talk about a bad example of image navigation online - the moving navigation example. If you’d like to subscribe to this iPhone/Video iPod compatible podcast you can do so at iTunes.
In this episode I show and talk about a bad example of image navigation online - the hidden navigation example. If you’d like to subscribe to this iPhone/Video iPod compatible podcast you can do so at iTunes.
In this episode I show and talk about a bad example of image navigation online - the slideshow example. If you’d like to subscribe to this iPhone/Video iPod compatible podcast you can do so at iTunes.
Some things are better shown than written about. We've started a video podcast for that reason. I'll be walking through different basic concepts in design and usability in my ultimate goal to rid the world of bad design and make basic tasks simpler for the end user.
You can find the podcast via Apple iTunes with this link, or you can link directly to the feed by copying and pasting this url into your preferred feed reader. We will also integrate the videos into our blog once we find a movie wrapper that is acceptable to us for showing the details necessary of an online screencast. The podcast looks great on your computer, but is also optimized for your iPhone or video-enabled iPod. If there are concepts, questions, or even sites that you'd like reviewed in a future episode you are welcome to shoot them over to me (Alastair) at "podcast at SlimKiwi.com".
Context is key for good usability. It's important for users to know where they have come from, where they are, and where they can go intuitively. Unfortunately too many sites neglect this with poor design, user flow, and ultimately a lack of understanding of a user's behavior. It's easy for designers who have been working extremely closely with their client's content and understand exactly how the pages relate to one another to forget to take a few steps back. It often helps to look at the larger picture from the perspective of a user who has just arrived at your site through a direct link or who has landed INSIDE your site through a google search.
But the importance of context isn't limited to site design. The more time you start thinking about the end user the more likely you will see examples of directions or navigation in the real world that hasn't taken context and the end user into consideration well enough. One such instance struck me when Mark and I were in NYC for a meeting with one of our clients. It's a pretty quick day trip for us to take the Acela Express from Boston/Providence to NYC and then to hop onto the subway where the goal is to emerge somewhere close to our final destination. I take a certain pride in my ability to be able to intuitively navigate through unfamiliar places, but there is something about emerging from a subway or mall where my internal compass goes polar on me. In this instance, we emerged from the subway to find ourselves staring at a piece of real world navigation that was placed there without considering context. It was a numbered street sign. What's so bad about a numbered street sign? You have NO idea which direction to walk in order for the numbers to increase or decrease. That's a pain when you emerge from the subway onto 57th wanting to head in the direction of Columbus Circle, walk a block south to the 56th which is JUST far enough to be annoyed that you now need to walk BACK another block in the opposite direction. "That's not so bad," some people might say. Well, what if you are on 9th and have to walk the long side of a NYC block to 8th, only to find that you have actually been walking in the direction of 7th? Still no big deal? Well, I disagree. I'm sure some designers argue it's no big deal for an end user to find themselves three levels down in a navigation on a site and not clear on how to get back a level or two, but if there is a simple solution, it should be used. In the case of a web site the solution may be a bit more complex because the overall structure of a site needs to be planned out to accommodate ease of use.
For NYC, a simply smaller hierarchically designed number could be placed to the right and to the left of the current street number you are on. That would make the sign behave a bit more like a "you are here" dot on a mall directory...but don't get me started on the poor usability in contextual navigation and design that takes place in a mall.