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Author Archive

Mar
16
General
Nuts or Nougat? The candy bar you choose may indicate what UX you crave.
by Gordon Robertson, Vice President, Creative Director

A spirited discussion with my newest, bestest friend Ernie Mosteller the other evening found itself on the subject of favorite candy bars. I am a Snickers guy. Ernie, without hesitation, claimed Milky Way as his bar.

I prefer the snaps, the crunch, the bumpy complexity of sweet and salty in confectionaries like Snickers, Twix and Payday. Ernie seeks the smooth indulgence and consistent mouth feel without complications and distractions.

So what does any of this have to do with the emerging interactive world? Well, as we’ve learned here at SXSW this week, just about all our human emotions and impulses can inform how we create digital experiences for our clients.

Just as some people liked their candy bars packed with nuts, cookies and crispy goodness, they have certain unspoken expectations of how they want to be engaged. I personally like visceral feedback. When I hear the “whoosh” after I hit send on my email machine, it brings a smile to my face. Or the shudder of the Wii paddle in my hand after I smash back the virtual tennis ball. The feeling of a keyboard under my fingers or at least under thumbs give me confirmation that my actions matters.  Designers have discovered that giving some users even small feedback in terms of points, strength, completion rate, or a clever warning message acknowledges users efforts.

At a seminar the other day on interacting beyond the touch, the head of touch technology of Microsoft (big brain, nice guy) espoused the mantra of “No touch left unrewarded.” The theory goes that people (not all, but many) need that feedback response to acknowledge their existance.  It’s not just that the gun blasts or the cursor moves or an image rolls over. But it’s a myriad of subtle cues that gives the user a sense that he/she matters and is part of the process.

Do you have your droid or iphone set to vibrate? It matters. What kind of User experience do you choose, and, more importantly, what kind of experience are we creating for our clients?

Ponder that the next time you’re walking down the path feeling the leaves crunch under your feet and shoveling in a handful of Peanut M&Ms.  Or if you’re like Ernie, relaxing in your sensory deprevation tank listening to Enya sinking your teeth into a Milky Way mini.

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Mar
13
General, Integration, South by Southwest 2010, Usability, business intelligence
Screenshots: Battle over the future of your TV
by Gordon Robertson, Vice President, Creative Director

Consider that $899 flatscreen on your living room wall. In a few years will it still be a television, or will it merely be a screen hooked up exclusively to the internet where you can access your stored media (housed locally or somewhere in the cloud)?

For some of the attendees at SXSW, it’s a perplexing question, one of thousands being debated here at the interactive festival. But for Mark Cuban (he of Broadcast.net, Dallas Maverics, Magnolia Pictures and HDNET) and Boxee’s CEO Avner Ronen, those are fighting words. The two media heavyweights went nearly toe-to-toe at one of Friday closing the day’s sessions to the delight of 500 fans and the cyberazzi clicking away from the first few rows.

The staged tête-à-tête was actually a re-match, if you will, a resumption of hostilities between Cuban and Ronen late last year on a chat room debating cable TV’s dominance despite its shrinking penetration.

The jabfest Friday was part AV Geek Debate, part professional wrestling weigh-in and part “you’re mama’s so ugly …” smackdown. Except in place of “your mama,” insert “your business model is so screwed, I’ve lost more money in a day than you could hope to make in a whole quarter.”

The argument comes down to a few salient points, one of which was made repeatedly my Mr. Cuban: “In an a ‘la carte world, the cost to create, produce, distribute and market content via internet is unsustainable under any business model.” Coming from a person who made his first billion selling off Broadcast.net to Yahoo, that doesn’t make Cuban a hypocrite as it does make Yahoo a patzee.

Ronen of Boxee on the other hand blames greedy content providers and their billionaire enablers like Cuban and Comcast that perpetuate the strangelhold on household penetration and true net neutrality that will allow all of us more freedom and lower costs in selecting video entertainment content through the web. His company Boxee, which is commonly lumped together with HULU in articles, develops cross-platform freeware with a 10 foot user interface and built-in goodies like social networking tools that have to this point around 1 million subscribers.

Watch the video. It’s not pay-per-view, but it could’ve been. Cuban is always a delight to everyone not wearing a referee’s uniform

My highlight was going up to him during an unexpected building evacuation break. Mark’s a jeans and t-shirt guy who actually went to the high school where I live (Mt. Lebanon). We reminisced about the town and he was aware of the recent high school renovation, as well as the proposed pricetag.

“What, is it something like $113 million?”

“No, Mark. It’s exactly #113 million.”

“Wow, that’s a lot.”

“You know you could do a lot for my taxes and get a the Mark Cuban gymnasium and media center named after you. What do you say?

“No, I don’t do that.”

“Save me taxes?”

“No, put my name on anything.”

He missed the point, or at least avoided it. The same bobbing and weaving he continued the next 60 minutes with his worthy, but overmatched adversary.Mark Cuban and Avner Ronen

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