More to come!

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.

Sparks is the kind of app where the content travels with you – a kind of perpetually social app. Users can upload pictures and make comments in a social stream – a stream that will always provide content that is nearest to your geo-location – and content (images/messages) that you can also publish to your Facebook social streams. This public content provides a means of discovery that extends beyond most app’s attempts to get you to browse thumbnails with little to no information, as the only means of discovery.

Sparks Discovery Grid

Our unique ‘split-grid’ view with drag-and-drop icons allows our users to decide what content they wish to view in their grids – this is, after all, meant to be their social experience, not specifically ours.

The customisable nature doesn’t end there… the grids themselves are resizable allowing the user to create their own views.

And while authentication at present is only via your Facebook account, not to worry, as you select when you post if you want something to also show up on your Facebook social stream/wall – there is no need to worry you will be posting on Facebook unless you choose to do so.

Sparks has all the other features as well: profiles; nearby, online, like, favourite grid views; notifications; private messaging, galleries & more.

Launched on 8 November and available as Sparks Mobile App on the Apple App Store – we have great plans for the evolution and future of Sparks. There will be more social features, new ways of finding other interesting and compatible people, a more social experience – and new platforms.

If you have an iPhone, please download and try the app. It’s the product of a lot of effort, user-centred design and usability testing. I want to hear your feedback so feel free to get in touch with me. I hope you enjoy the Sparks experience!

Download the Sparks Mobile App here.

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.

The Hospital Club

Extra dry… extra olives

Live in the Apple Store from 8 November, the team wanted to thank those who helped test the app, provided support and input along the way and stuck with us throughout.

It was a great night out and I think that everyone who attended the event at The Hospital Club had a great time.

DPL CEO, Paul Shetler

And as a team we got to celebrate the long journey that got us to the launch of Sparks this week on the Apple App Store.

Please take a moment and celebrate the hard work of the team by downloading the Sparks app on the App Store.

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.

There goes the neighbourhood you originally chose for feeling rural.

You continue walking until you get to the top of the hill and you look down both ways, past your house and into the rolling fields beyond. And then the way you are walking, down towards the beautiful picturesque village that you and your partner first fell in love with when the two of you were looking for a house in which to live.

You remember that it was a house that you wouldn’t have looked at because it wasn’t part of your specific search parameters when you were looking. But a friend had spent time out this way and they’d recommended you might want to have a look anyways.

You continue your walk down into the village, and you purchase your Sunday paper. The walk home is less eventful, but the clear morning air, conversation, and the views have reinvigorated you.

Over 17 years of working in digital, I’ve watched the language of design for the web change from flash interactive, “content is king”, design and functionality-rich experiences, to “efficient user journeys” and targeted search.

I listen to clients talk – as though it’s a badge of honour – about how less than 8% of their “users” come in through the home page, as they are deep-linking to their content from search engines like Google.

In many cases, content has become easier to find, with large e-commerce and content laden sites getting search, filtering and SEO down to a science. Given the mathematics and organisation methodologies involved – it is in fact a science.

It’s great that we can find things so quickly. After all, isn’t it true that we have so little time to do things as it is? Like taking that leisurely walk for the Sunday paper.

But what have we lost in the last 17 years while striving to make everything so easy to find – and so quickly?

While search accuracy has increased, discovery has taken a tumble. It’s often the case that as adults, we don’t set out to discover things. This was something we did as children – what’s behind that hill, how does this work, why is that the case? We don’t have time. We’re too busy. Remember?

As adults we set out to find things. We use search to do this. We jump to a result, and do a rapid assessment. If it meets our needs, we are finished. If not, research shows that we often “pogo” back out to the original search and either select another result, or search again.

Along that journey, where is the opportunity for exposure to new things? Where is the chance to find out about things happening that affect us? Perhaps we could have an app for that.

When do we slow down, just enough, to remind us of why we love or want to know more about the thing we are searching for to begin with… or to discover the unexpected along the way?

There is certainly a place for both search and discoverability in our lives. It’s about remembering to find a degree of balance. And sometimes reminding clients that up-sell and discoverability are not necessarily the same thing.

As always, all comments welcome.

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

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

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.

Most people, if you asked them to draw a picture of a car would do so. And the exercise would result in many different shapes, sizes, features, etc. However, if pressed, most people don’t actually believe they could design a car for production.

So why, then, do so many people believe they can design a website?

When done properly, websites go through a process of understanding requirements (those of the business – and the users), which can mean conducting research and workshops with all constituents to understand needs, desires, etc. All of this informs design and function. We sketch, we wireframe, we prototype, we test, we revise, we design, we build, we test, etc. There is a process that we follow, not because we want to be difficult, but because we are often delivering something, that in todays world, can sit at the core of a business’ strategy.

We wouldn’t want to take our responsibility lightly, because to do so could be catastrophic for the companies for whom we work.

So if we take our responsibility seriously, why don’t our clients? Why do they so often try to cut corners, cut out research and prototyping, shudder at the idea of iteration (which will equal cost now but provide potential benefit later), and railroad us down an agile path that promises iteration, but so often delivers linear, scaled-back development with no opportunity to evolve already built functionality?

Prototyping and testing gives you a real opportunity to test, iterate and re-test. It allows teams to incorporate learnings (other than their own) so that the end results more closely resemble the type of result that users might actually find useful.

If I could I would present a counter argument to this process to try and give some sense of perspective, but through all of the prototyping and testing I’ve been a part of throughout my career, there have always been a set of beneficial learnings that have come out the other end, and a set of clients (marketers, tech teams, stakeholders) who sit back and think ‘we didn’t know that before’.

I’d love to see more time built into projects for prototyping and testing because I enjoy it when projects are given a chance to be successful and clients are given a chance to shine when their results bear fruit.

And isn’t it better when we share our work while it has a chance of being improved than after when it is too late?

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.

I could almost forgive them, as they try hard, they all want to succeed for different reasons, and if their business does well, they will all look good. Unfortunately, just because 8 people are rowing in a boat doesn’t mean they are all rowing together – that takes time, collaboration, recognition that they are all working towards the same goals and objectives, and an honesty about their capabilities.

I could almost forgive them. But I won’t. They should know better by now.

But it’s not the clients that worry me most.

It’s people I’ve worked with over the years – and will work with in the future. The ones for whom the phrase ‘you represent the user on this project’ applies. The people who say it often have no clue what they are talking about. Of course, the only people who can represent the user on the project are, well, the users. And the Information (or Experience) Architect, who gets used to being beaten down when talking about inclusion of the user, after a time begins to believe that the only way to include the user is to ‘be’ the user. This is the one that really frightens me.

No Virginia… you are NOT the user.

The Information Architect brings a bag of skills and tools, a degree of experience, and the capability to open the doors to engaging with users on a project. The user should be the first port of call. Who are they? What do they want? How do they live? Why would they use or want a client’s products or services? When is the best time to engage them? Quantitative statistics that can only answer, to some degree, some of the questions above can only provide pathways to partially thought out designs.

The IA is often left to sort out the rest. And the worst part of this is that the more it happens, the more confident they become in their own capabilities – those of actually representing the user on projects.

Where UX represents a world of ubiquitous experiences for users (also see my blog posts on UX and the Art of Digital Appropriation and Pervasive UX – Who is Responsible?), more Information Architects, with their own values, interests, varied experiences and goals provide a dangerously seductive (and less costly) alternative to representing user experiences on projects.

I think this is something that everyone needs to be aware of and consider when they limit the potential of a project from the beginning by assuming the inclusion of Information Architects solves the issue of user engagement in the process. You cannot say you practice user-centred design when you do not engage users in the process.

No Virginia… you are NOT the user. The user is the user. Someday, you may have the opportunity to be a user on a project – where you are not doing the design. But until that day, please, everyone involved in projects, work harder to get to know who your users are, and please, do involve them in the process. It can be really quite rewarding!

Update 6 September 2011:
A good example of why this is important can be found on @pubstrat‘s latest blog post, ‘Cleaning up the user interface‘.

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.

User experience has always existed. It’s just that we only really thought about it in terms of something that we create in the last half century. Product design is about creating user experiences. It pre-exists digital.

I think the discourse around User Experience needs to change. We need to move away from the tactical side of the now, ‘nameless’ profession, where practitioners argue over whether they are Information Architects, Experience Architects, Interaction Designers, etc. As long as we stay anchored to the pedantic, we’ll never aspire to the greater good.

I repeat, User experience is pervasive. It is ubiquitous. Companies and agencies need to step back and realise that the concept of user experience will mean change in the way their businesses operate. It’s too big to be owned by any one team, shoved down any one silo. It is too fundamentally important to leave to any one concept, methodology or team. To understand user experience is to create a fundamentally open and collaborative environment with a healthy exchange between and amongst users, businesses, agencies.

And we need to get away from it being a digital construction. It isn’t just about digital. Customers have more than just digital experiences. And as much as Martha Lane Fox and the current Government work to shove everyone down the digital path, if it is really about user experiences (ubiquitous, remember?) then it is about understanding people first and then creating products and services that meet their needs.

Digital has appropriated a universal experience. Digital is not ubiquitous… not yet, even though it’s easy to believe, living in London, that the entire world must be digital.

We’re at a pivotal point where organisations have the opportunity to become horizontally integrated extending all the way out into their communities – and with their communities invited into their organisations.

It’s time to be disruptive, silo-breaking collaborative horizontally-integrated experimentalists. Or whatever we want to be called.