Just launched the new Marco + Bee website. As always, my user experience consultancy site will be an ongoing experiment. Expect the services text to change over the next week. Just ran out of steam on it and put up the old site text for that area.
More to come!
For some time now, one of the projects I’ve been engaged with through my association with Digital Proximates, has been working towards creating a fully ‘social’ app called Sparks!
With the proliferation of ‘social networking’ apps on the marketplace many claim to be social, but in fact present you a tiled selection of menu choices with no real flavour.
On Friday, 9 November the Digital Proximates team held a private launch party at The Hospital Club in Covent Garden for the new iPhone app – Sparks!
It was a fun and festive evening!
For those who know me, my drink of choice is the martini – most often the gin/extra dry/extra olives kind – though I’ve been known to drink Bond, watermelon, vodka, espresso and chocolate ones on occasion.
It’s a cool, sunny late Autumn Sunday morning. You live in the countryside; the nearest village is a mile away. It’s been a while since you bought a Sunday paper. But for some reason, you want one.
Instead of getting in your car, as you normally might to do to drive the mile to the village to buy milk or go to the pub, you decide to walk. There are paths through the fields behind your house that take you to the top of a hill and then down to the village – which is actually less than a mile to walk.
You pull on some wellies and a jacket to keep warm and you set out. Along the journey you encounter several people out walking – some walking their dogs. One of them is a neighbour you haven’t seen or said hello to in over a year. You stop and talk, and find out that there is a developer planning to build several houses on a strip of land just down the road from you. Thirty houses.
A couple of weeks ago I ran a panel at the Mobile Cloud Summit on Evolution of the Mobile Cloud, which looked at the impact of Mobile Cloud on User Experience. I really enjoyed the panel and its participants, which included Windahl Finnigan from Cap Gemini, James Clarke of Thin Martian, and Jules Ehrhardt of ustwo.
Apart from the fact I quite obviously need to go on a diet and get to the gym, the panel was engaging and the participants engaged and quite obviously experienced.
And now I see what people mean about my accent. Doesn’t sound quite American… oh well.
I hope you enjoy watching the panel: http://vimeopro.com/quadriga/mobile-cloud-summit-in-tech-city/video/30120511
On Tuesday, 4 October I’ll be on a Mobile Surgery panel at the UserZoom UX Seminar Series: The Evolution of Mobile from a User Perspective. Other speakers at the event include: Carina Hoogeveen, Account Director, UserZoom, Arthur Moan, Country Manager UK Ireland, UserZoom, Anders Rosenquist, the ZAAZ Head of Mobile, David Murphy, Editor, Mobile Marketing Magazine.
The event takes place at one of my favourite haunts, The Hospital Club, located at 24 Endell Steet, London WC2H 9HQ, from 2pm to 6pm.
To book the event go to: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2139617654
When car manufacturers design a new automobile, they develop requirements, conduct research, draw designs, make scale models, test scale models in wind tunnels, computer model their ideas, build full-scale prototypes, test them, and iterate the designs – all of this before putting them into production.
What they don’t do is go right from drawing them on a piece of paper or having some ideas to putting them into production.
So they don’t base their decisions on a paper prototype or a list of words. Why? Because a car is a 3 dimensional experience. It is an experience of the senses. It is an interactive experience. You really need to understand it before you put it into production. Mistakes would be costly.
As individuals, we have many user experiences over the course of a day. Certainly over the course of a week, month, year… indeed a lifetime. In a sense, we become experienced users over time of many things, and remain inexperienced users of many other things. In some instances we feel we can extrapolate the experience by comparing it to ‘like’ experiences.
When it comes to designing apps for use on the internet, software, or web, everyone is an experienced user. At least that’s the impression I’ve gotten over the years in dealing with clients and colleagues.
Let’s take clients. They are often made up of many constituents: a business owner, stakeholders, marketers, project managers, IT geeks, editors, business analysts, and possibly even cobbled together components of a web team. Each of them has an opinion. Each of them view digital projects in terms of their own interests, experience, discipline and exposure (or lack thereof) to similar types of projects. They also have their own agendas – which are a double edged sword – that guide their actions.
So, I feel caught in a language loop recently. I talk about (and practice) User Experience. I do these things in the digital/mobile space. And really, I’m mostly focusing on good, strategic paths to design.
But all of it is an illusion.
User experience is pervasive. It is ubiquitous. Like air. And I don’t design air… I breathe it, I need it to live, I experience it, it’s all around me. It’s ubiquitous too.
User experience is about more than just digital experiences. If we accept that it is pervasive, ubiquitous, we have to accept that it extends well beyond our digital boundaries. But we most often hear about “UX” in relation to developing digital experiences.
