So this brings me to the point: is social media not a numbers game at all? Meaning, should our targets never be simply to increase our Facebook fans or achieve a certain amount of views of a video, or gain a greater following on Twitter? Even those that make this argument use audience engagement statistics (which are themselves numbers) to validate the success of a brand or campaign.

Read the rest at Carousel30.com »

For me, it was an interesting experience that melded the academic research fields with what those of us in the agency world do (what I call the “practical application” of research). Hearing many brilliant people present their research papers yielded a lot of insight into what I do on a daily basis, and I was impressed that many of the researchers were just as interested to hear what is going on with agencies. We certainly have a lot to offer each other.

Read the rest at Carousel30.com »

Take, for instance, the current state of mobile operating systems. With Android, Blackberry, iOS and even Symbian all above 14% market share (as of June 2011, according to IDC Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker), it can make things challenging for a company wishing to develop a mobile app that its entire base can use. And don’t discount Windows Phone, either, as it has been making some major strides in gaining market share as of late.

What about the challenge of keeping your web interface clean when you need a Facebook ‘Like,’ Twiiter ‘Follow’ and now a Google ‘+1′ button in your design? Good thing we can at least leave MySpace out now.

And how about the way that Google Chrome has leapt over Internet Explorer in usage in the web browser market, and is on its way to equaling Firefox in market share? Plus, we can’t discount Safari, as it is used on all iOS devices.

Read the rest at Carousel30.com »

I head up the marketing and advertising department at my agency, Carousel30 (in addition to heading the creative team) and I see the importance of this for several reasons:

If you are, like my initial example, looking for a job somewhere, I will tell you that my agency DOES look at the social media presences of our job applicants to see if they practice what they preach. Having a good, engaged following, even if your primary topic of interest has nothing to do with social media, technology or design says something about your ability to create and sustain conversations.

But, even if you are not looking for a new job, any good employer will appreciate the initiative it takes to build a personal brand. I would recommend that if you’re working at an advertising agency, it might be better to focus some of your conversations more towards industry topics than more personal interests, but as you probably already know, doing a little of each helps humanize your brand. But being known as an expert in your field or a niche within it in the twittersphere can give a huge boost to your organization and make you look like a champ to your employer.

Finally, if nothing else, your personal profiles can be a sandbox to try new things out with little risk. If you make a Twitter faux pas on your personal account it probably won’t land you in as much hot water as if you did the same for your Fortune 100 client at your day job. (Disclaimer: A Twitter faux pas has nothing to do with what a certain congressperson decided to do with their Twitter account. That is outside the realm of ‘a violation of etiquette.’ )

So get going on your own brand – there really is no downside to it.

But as interaction designers, user experience experts, and so on, let’s remember what we supposedly learned from Flash.

Let’s go down a brief tangent first. Remember when DVDs came out? How many seriously BAD interfaces did you have to click through for the first several years before you started to realize that it’s as if DVD authors completely threw out any sense of what we all learned from making usable websites? I went through a few myself. I often wondered why DVD Studio Pro’s authoring interface seemed like it came out of left field entirely. I don’t even think it’s Apple’s fault – they did a decent job with constraints, but whoever came up with requirements for authoring DVDs should have paid attention to what was happening in other (or ANY for that matter) disciplines of interaction design.

So back to Flash and HTML5. What we should have learned from Flash is that, even though you can do something, doesn’t mean you necessarily should do it. For instance, many of us out there thought we could make Flash intro pages to websites 12-15 years ago. And we did it. But that doesn’t make it right. I think Flash still serves a good purpose on some sites – there are simply times when a static graphic does not suffice, and no other technology exists that has such a high adoption rate across browsers and platforms as Flash continues to have. But we’ve learned a lot in 12-15 years, Search Engines have grown and continued to shape our online behaviors (thus creating a challenge for text in Flash-only sites), and mobile devices such as the iPad don’t even support Flash.

So here is my challenge:
By all mean, let’s have fun with HTML5. Let’s push the limits of what can be done, and tell stories in ways that they have never been told. But at the same time, let’s not undo all of the good work, research and progress we’ve made in making intuitive, beautiful websites and interactive experiences.

I look forward to seeing what we all come up with.

So what does this mean for advertisers? And what does it mean for Flash? To me, it means that, as cool as some HTML5 features are, the advertising industry is still choosing the Flash platform for creating immersive user experiences.  And as much as that might frustrate the anti-Flash crowd, it’s perfectly understandable: there’s currently no other way to create fully interactive websites the way you can do them in Flash.

HTML5 can do many things, and do them well, but take a look at HTML5test.com’s browser compatibility scores — we’re quite a ways off from seeing across-the-board support for it.  Microsoft Silverlight can do some cool things too, but, being plugin-based it suffers from the same issues that Flash Player does, plus according to ScottLogic’s Silverlight Adoption statistics, it’s nowhere near Flash’s adoption rate.

All that being said, I am really looking forward to the day when we aren’t relying on plug-in based tools like Flash or Silverlight to allow us to create engaging user experiences.  For me, it definitely feels inevitable, but it’s just apparent that we’re not quite there yet.

But are they always the right fit, or even implemented in the best manner? Of course not. Carousels can run into the same problem of ‘mystery meat’ navigation that plagued early websites that chose to use icons, metaphors or other such vague representations, to serve as primary nav on a site.

By numbering the content in a carousel, instead of offering a brief description, we run the risk of having the user miss it. We cannot assume a user will stay on a page for the duration of the entire carousel’s rotation.

Even putting thumbnails of what to expect would be an improvement here.

Certainly, replacing Flash animation with a CMS-controllable set of text/images that the image carousel allows is a great improvement, but I do get the feeling that this website convention has jumped the shark as far as innovation is concerned.

Here’s to the next big thing

One of the things I love most about Motion Graphics is the way that seemingly disparate elements blend together to form new compositions over time.  It also allows us to give new meanings to these elements over time as well. It’s what makes great cinematography as well (2 perfect examples are the closing scenes of Michaelangelo Antonioni’s “The Passenger” and “Zabriskie Point” – both very different yet drawing upon the same ideas that repetition and juxtaposition gives new meanings to symbols, even over a short period of time).

A recent project I did at Carousel30 Interactive was our annual Holiday card.  I usually take these on as a personal challenge, doing them in a combination of Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Final Cut Pro (and usually producing the music myself) and they always start with a basic concept and take on a life of their own. It’s a nice break from the much more structured approach we take as a company when taking on an interactive project.

What I am always most fascinated by is the unexpected things that happen – shapes, compositions, juxtapositions that happen as objects interact over time and those that I did not intentionally place there.

So a new topic for me to explore here is how to approach an interactive project in the same way — Allowing the user to interact and have a unique experience while maintaining the brand experience that is consistent with the project’s goals.  Looking forward to some fun times…

It’s hard to believe a decade has gone by since IAB last blessed us with a banner ad size as part of its ‘standard’ set, but here we are with IAB’s new official “Rising Stars” set of guidelines. And for more information on the exact sizes, dimensions, and interactions, Econsultancy has a great blog post that details them.

But what I’d like to talk about is what it means for advertisers. While some of these formats have been around for a while in one shape or another, what we’re seeing with this new batch is several new sizes that offer advertisers a lot more space to play with. The IAB Filmstrip, for instance, offers advertisers a 3000-pixel tall (by 300-pixel wide) canvas.  What I’m seeing most here is that these ad formats allow ads to expand dynamically and let the user control if they are displayed at full size or not.

Read the rest on the Carousel30 Blog »

We've come a long way since the days of 640x480... but still have a ways to go.

People are scrolling these days.  Even Jakob Nielsen retracted his guideline to avoid scrolling web pages many years ago.  But statistics still show that they spend 80% of their time above the fold.

But I’m noticing an even worse trend these days when it comes to the size and usability of interactive graphics and elements on pages.  Some times the graphics are so large that a user can’t even interact with the elements unless they’re on a 23-in monitor. For instance, even something so simple as a photo gallery from the Geneva Auto show on Wired’s Auto Blog requires scrolling (on my 15-inch, 1440×900 MacBook Pro) to see the thumbnail images.  Then each time a new image loads, I need to scroll down again. Kind of annoying, and I’m not even on a 1024×768 screen.

Read my full post here on the Carousel30 Interactive blog »