Archive for May, 2008
It’s not new that Twitter has scalability problems, one simple look at their numbers and it’s more than reasonable, yesterday however things seemed a little less under control with the site/api being quite some time unavailable! don’t exactly know if that’s the reason, but my Jaiku contact list just got a daily increase of 6%!
It’s still hard to figure out if people are just registering for the service because they’ve found it or if we’re witnessing a Twitter Stampede?
May 29th, 2008
It’s all set, I’ll take part once again in Reboot, which is probably one of the very best conferences in Europe. It’s going to be my 4th Reboot, and if all goes as it did the last 3 times, I’m going to come back once again filled with ‘mind and body breaking ideas‘. This year’s theme is FREE, as in free culture, free access, free living!
It’s probably going to be the year with most portuguese, which probably leaves me and André a whole lot more happier than ever, seems like after 4 years somethings have finally changed.
Reboot has been the definitely mother of SHiFT just in case people haven’t noticed, this very special conference was the call to action that we needed and it has been such ever since! So if you’re undecided follow us and join us in the beautiful city of copenhagen!
May 27th, 2008
A few days back I arranged a collective viewing back at the office for the latest Jared Spool virtual seminar’s: “Strike Up the Brand: How Smart Design Can Strengthen Your Brand“. I can’t say I wasn’t a bit disappointed in terms of content, but could simply be because it was the very first one I’ve assisted, or for all the reverence I have for his work or even more simply to the fact that we were watching it live in late afternoon here.
Still I took down some notes for personal reference, but I’ve decided to share them as well for those colleagues and friends who couldn’t be there…
One Key Question:
How to Know if the design is actually helping your brand?
What’s Branding?
Branding is normally associated with
COLORS +
SYMBOLS +
PHRASES and as to do with a lot of EMOTIONS.
Branding from the business perspective is often limited to the increase of long-term sales at the lowest possible cost! A whole lot of word-of-mouth, etc.
From the Customer perspective things are somewhat different: as a customer:
- I choose a particular product/service because of the relationship I might have or wanna have with the brand
- because I’m willing to tolerate small issues
- I believe that the brand is working on my behalf
- Or simply for Pride, or because I’m passionate about it.
Goals of Branding
We can clearly identify two major classes of goals for branding:
- AFFINITY: making people aware of brand elements
- DISPOSITIONAL: ensuring pre-disposal to initially select a product
Homepage’s aren’t about brand, their about CONTENT!
User Expectations
How do we build expectations?
People expect us to be great because we’ve been great in the past (as the other way around, if you sucked sometime, you’ll suck again)
Service vs Product Brand’s
There are two very distinctive ways of branding:
- Message Branding: indirect approached, based on brand elements, with a repetitive deployment and normally easy to design and implement.
- Experience Branding: often based on much more direct approach, with a conditioning process first before anyone actually experiences anything, normally much more effective but much harder to get
Measuring User Engagment
When trying to measure the level of user engagement, one has to consider the following user factors:
- Loyalty
- Confidence
- Integrity
- Pride
- Passion
Key Rules for enhancing the Brand Experience
- Remove Frustration Points
- Add delight
- Avoid Brand Conflicts
in a sentence learn and work for maximizing your user’s positive experience with your products/services.
May 23rd, 2008
Still recovery from a tremendous (and the funniest possible) fall down the stairs at SAPO Unplugged 08! To anyone attending (me included) it was one of those memorable moments that it will be hard to forget! Thankfully all I got was some bruises and some pain (which hasn’t yet entirely gone), but other than that I’m ok!
I think it was a nice opportunity to talk about Usability. Some trends, applications and side-effects of it’s use in the development process. Something we don’t get to talk about enough!
SAPO unplugged was an opportunity to see the work in progress of Pedro Branco from the Minho University about facial expression usage as a form of human-machine interaction.
Óscar Mealha and Florim from the hosting University of Aveiro presented their work in progress for a software application aiming to help measure and analyze the underlining structure of websites, a powerful tool i’d say to help correct and perfect user navigation across websites, minimizing critical paths while optimizing the overall user experience with less clicks and choices!
Henning Fischer from Adaptive Path was in charge with the keynote and we give an inspiring presentation entitled “Stop Designing Products” which wasn’t entirely about usability but an important call for action in achieving better and more engaging user experiences with the products and systems we design and develop!
Last but not least! Bruno Figueiredo and Ivo Gomes completed the program and delivered two very interesting presentations, Bruno presented and explained some of the decisions behind the project that produced the latest SAPO Homepage. Ivo showed up the power and easiness of paper prototyping and how easy and power it is for software and products development.
I talked briefly about the undergoing quality and usability project at SAPO for which I’m currently responsible, about it’s goals and how it’s being applied.
I hope those who managed to attend it liked it as much as I did, and might have taken something back to their works other than a good laugh about the falling “star” 
May 22nd, 2008
É já na próxima 2ª feira às 14 horas no Salão Nobre da Faculdade de Motricidade Humana que terá lugar o ‘Ergonomics in Design“:
O programa está disponível aqui. Estava a pensar dar lá um salto para assistir à apresentação do Prof. M.S. Wogalter sobre “O futuro dos avisos: activados pela tecnologia“, um problema bastante actual e pertinente como vem descrito no último livro do D. Norman: “Design of future things“.
Pode ser que nos encontremos por lá.
May 22nd, 2008
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