Making air safety information palatable

Virgin America's recently released air safety video is getting a bit of press at the moment. Fun on first viewing but even then, too long. Thomson's approach (as a holiday company, aimed at a different audience) is probably equally grating after too much exposure but, at least, is shorter.

I can imagine they both hold the viewers' attention longer than a flight attendant miming to a voice over, but wonder if anyone has tested information retention as a result.

If you're tired of TED...

...you may be right. Excellent review of TED, the phenomenon, suggesting that possibly the idea has spread a little too thin.

[via NotExactlyRocketScience]

Innovative uses of Google

I spotted this on Facebook
xxx: Every few weeks I speak to my aunt in Auckland on Skype and use its screen sharing feature to show her recent photos and talk through them. Yesterday we even used Google Earth to 'fly' over the Auckland suburb from which she recently moved, and where some of my family on my other side still live. To think that a generation ago contact with relatives abroad was limited to expensive phone calls and Aerograms. Thank you Skype creators.
yyy: have you ever played Google Streetview "This is your Life"? It's when you sit down with a friend or relative and have them "walk" you around the neighbourhood where they grew up. I did it with my parents recently. We flew around the Bronx (mum) and the Upper West Side (dad). Much had changed, but as it it with great cities, most places looked familiar. It was emotional.

Google are producing a quarterly glossy, thinkwithGoogle. Some nice articles but when they can generate spontaneous interactions like these one wonders why they need it.

The environmental impact of junk mail

This morning's Today trailed a Panorama programme to go out this evening on the impact of junk mail. Rarely considered alongside junk mail's reputation for deception and scams it transpires that the environmental impact of junk mail is huge: in Cornwall alone the annual cost of landfilling it amounts to £700k. Unfortunately junk mail also keeps the Royal Mail viable. Colleague, Karen Stanbridge, has a very detailed perspective on junk mail from her diary study of what people notice about documents. Participants in her study had finely-tuned filters and low tolerance for junk mail, particularly for cross-selling from existing suppliers.

Perceptions of consumer brand simplicity

From Siegel and Gale's Simplicity Index, an annual survey of international perceptions of the complexity or simplicity of global brands. The brands above are those with the highest simplicity indices in the UK...

...and below are the brands with the highest indices in the US

Well, at least some regional variation in our attachment to global brands.

Across the seven countries surveyed, retail, restaurant (or should we say fast food) and retail brands tended to have the highest simplicity indices; utilities, banks, insurance and credit card brands the lowest. What surprised me was that technology/electronics brands (but not telecoms) were only a little way behind retail and fast food in public perception.

On web openness and net neutrality

Tim Berners-Lee makes the case eloquently. Somewhat related, Steven Johnson argues at Web 2.0 summit for 'web redundancy', the mirror indexing of the pages of e-books (and possibly some apps) on the web, even if behind a copyright wall of some sort, so that they could be accessible to and citable and linkable. Without this access route, the scholarly traditions of referencing and citation, which have stood for centuries (starting with the indexing of the earliest printed books which, Johnson claims, underpinned the development of ideas in the enlightenment) lie at risk with the rise of 'stand-alone' e-books.

Berners-Lee makes specific mention of the stranglehold iTunes now has on music distribution. The final capitulation of Apple (records) to Apple (iTunes) last week is lamented by Christopher Caldwell in the FT. I would probably disagree with Caldwell about most things but understand why he finds this business so dispiriting.

Web design genres

Design Meltdown 2010 is an interesting, growing resource. It collects example web sites under categories (e.g. churches and coffee shops, to name but two) and, at a finer level, lists examples of web site elements (e.g. breadcrumbs, contact forms etc.). Scanning through the category examples reveals some interesting genre characteristics (the archetypical coffee image, above, from 1369 Coffee House, still works).

[via Louise Hewitt, on BrightonNewMedia list]

The colour of web logos

Intriguing visualisation by colourlovers.com. Apparently the most influential brands on the web cluster in the red and blue areas of the spectrum (although one might argue that covers most options), and competing brands tend to share similar colours. (Have never seen the BBC in red, though that may be as a UK user.) 

Alas, BP.

[via DesignLessBetter]

Wahaca customer experience: nice after-taste

Thought these match books presented with the bill at Wahaca (sic) were a bit retro.


But they're not matches. They're packs of chilli seeds ready to plant.

Going global without air travel

Heart warming article by Richard Leyland, founder of Worksnug (which locates places for mobile workers to work), on the challenges of building an international business while remaining consistent with his company's commitment not to travel by air (one of 10 founding principles of the company).

Innocent branding

Spotted today in central London. Innocent's green (but not quite so innocent, with 58% stake from Coca Cola) branding. Just about the only green grass in sight, following the rocketing temperatures of the past few days.

Cory Doctorow's technology

I love this post by Cory Doctorow, detailing his current technology suite. Why? I suppose the user researcher in me is always going to be intrigued by people's choices, their work processes, the person behind the public persona etc., but it's probably more neurosis about the decisions I've made.

I'll take some tips, and also some reassurance on a couple of things e.g. my attachment (still) to email. Regarding the blog trawling I currently do by cycling through a series of tabs (which I think is really inefficient), Cory does it too. Erm, but with a slight difference in quantity (and, not suprisingly, quality of results):

"I have a couple hundred sites in a folder that I open as a series of tabs a couple times a day, quickly zipping through them after they’ve loaded to see if anything new has been posted."

Wow.

[via BoingBoing]

The freedoms and motivations of personal projects

Engaging presentation by Ji Lee, now of Google creative labs, on how his frustration with the constraints of working in a corporate environment propelled him into his own personal project, The Bubble Project, which spread virally, so launching (or re-launching) his career.

Ji Lee: The Transformative Power of Personal Projects from 99% on Vimeo.

On a related theme but perhaps less engaging, one of many presentations by Daniel Pink, based largely on the work of Daniel Ariely and other social and behavioural economists on what motivates performance in complex, cognitive tasks. The critical word here is 'performance'. Money incentives tend to motivate effort, but not necessarily resultant performance. They can, in fact, 'choke' performance, as can other pressures.



(Have enclosed this particular version, from an RSA conference, just to irritate myself a little as the talk is accompanied by real-time scribing which, imo, and remembering a research review I carried out many years ago for Independent Television Commission, detracts from the content more than it adds to the story.)

Pink's bottom line for gaining commitment to complex, creative tasks is to give enough financial incentive to take money away as an issue, then give autonomy, mastery and purpose. There is I'm sure much in what he says (as evidence he cites examples such as the success of 'unmanaged' and unincentivised Wikipedia compared to Microsoft's managed and incentivised Encarta) but I worry about too direct an extrapolation from social science studies and the reduction of managing complex social settings to a mantra-like prescription. The companies that foster autonomy, mastery and purpose give so much besides in terms of intrinsically interesting tasks, working environments, recognition of individuals etc. etc. All that said, they don't seem a bad starting point for developing employees.

[Both via Ben Ackles]

Making choice visible

Engadget published an interesting snippet today, reporting on the impact of European anti-trust laws on uptake of Internet Explorer. Since 1 March, Microsoft have been obliged to offer European customers the option of selecting their browser, rather than defaulting to IE, when they set up a new Windows 7 computer. And this has already had an (albeit small) impact on uptake of IE.

Of course the choice has always been there, but never made quite so explicit. A nice lesson on how a little handholding can help typically cautious users personalise their system. One wouldn't want to make this choice for every application at set up, or it would become tedious. But you could see the point of a general 'show me alternatives' option for any application. A bit like uSwitch for your desktop.

Two different faces of Apple

Neil Curtis' condensed compilation of the hype at iPad's launch last week. [via John Naughton]

In contrast, Jonathan Ive quietly considering the design obsessiveness that makes the hype possible. [via Nordkapp]

The myth of mobile apps

Frustrated by repeated news stories about the growth of mobile apps Tomi T. Ahonen has a wonderful rant about their actual significance as a source of revenue in the mobile comms industry. A small extract here:

Yankee Group measured in 2009 that the total value of all apps sold in all Apps Stores, not just the Apple iPhone App Store was worth 343 million dollars. I do not mean to belittle some number that is hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide, and yes, its a very attractive opportunity for any application developer. But applications are a small part of the software and services income of the computer industry. And software is only a part of the global computer industry. And the global computer industry is far smaller than the total telecoms industry. Now you get the picture? That 343 million total value of all apps store sales globally in 2009, compares to 5 BILLION dollars of annual income for one category of downloaded content of paid mobile service worldwide - get this - the ringing tone (says Juniper Research). I do not mean full track downloads to phones, not 'real tones' type of better quality ringing tones and am not talking about 'ringback tones' - each of which is also worth over a billlion dollars for mobile content by the way. No, basic ringing tones are worth 5 Billion dollars all by themselves. Just one 'moronic' type of ultra-simplistic cellphone content type, the basic 'ploink-ploink' style ringing tone, that is downloaded roughly speaking by about ten percent of global cellphone owners, earns 14 times more than ALL app stores worldwide, not just Apple's. (and yes, you read it right, basic dumb ringing tones sell more than 2.5X more than all iTunes music sales worldwide annually). All of ringing tones are 'downloaded' content to phones. You don't need a smartphone for ringing tones (oh, silly iPhone, early iPhones didin't even accept ringing tones). And yeah, while most Apple App Store downloads are free, all ringing tones are paid content. Which is the better more economically viable story? The magnitude in just one category is so enormous as setting up a zoo and then celebrating the goat and ignoring the elephant at the zoo. Do you now understand, why I am so insistent, that this is a freak side-show of totally disproportionate attention, this silly obsession with App Stores and counting how many thousand apps exist and how many billion free app downloads happened to some smartphone? Let me show you the real economics.

He then sets apps (in his view, a geek preoccupation, irrelevant to most phone users) into perspective against the mobile comms industry as a whole. In his words: apps are as irrelevant to mobile comms as the Segway is to cars.

He is very persuasive. And yet, regardless of the revenue they earn, there is something about the rhetoric of apps that, I suspect, does influence buying decisions. They're like the features of a washing machine a user never needs but, at the point of purchase, is persuaded they shouldn't be without. And they have a social element too; far more visible and demonstrable than a super-turbo-drying feature in your laundry room. They're a promise that a sales person can easily use to draw in an impressionable customer (I've seen it done). So you can understand why Apple exploits the opportunity, and others try to follow suit.

Carping about Google doodles

Google celebrates the (somewhat random) 368th anniversary of Sir Isaac Newton's birth with this lovely animated doodle, prompting some vitriol and counter vitriol at Guardian technology on whether Google's doodles should be celebrated.

Controversial green concept car

I suppose Renault and cosmetics manufacturer, Biotherm, could count the launch of their concept electric city car, Spa Car, a success. It creates a spa in the interior, with skin hydrating temperature and humidity, and the addition of a diffuser to emit essential oils to calm or stimulate the driver, according to preference. Sparked some enraged comments on the Wired write up. PR profession, dix points; environment, nul.

Brands and outsourcing

At Futurelab Jonathon Salem Baskin asks why consumers don't bother (much) about where what they buy is made. He cites the downsides of outsourced manufacture: from quality of product to environmental impacts. He thinks country of manufacture will, in the future, be associated with brands and influence people's purchasing decisions.

Maybe. But, for most people, desirability and price are far more salient at the time of purchase than other attributes. The UK's M&S had a 'made in the UK' policy for many years, but dropped it in the last few years, presumably because of the pressure of undercutting by other retailers. If there are concerns about the impact of outsourcing, there's plenty of reassurance about companies' ethical policies and not much discussion about long term consequences. On the other hand, there would also be significant impacts for local economies in reducing outsourcing (read Adiga's The White Tiger for how bleak it might be.)

Smartphone web access

Good round up of data from The Guardian on which phones are being used most for mobile web access. Apparently Android phones are overtaking Blackberries and Windows Mobile phones (in the UK), with iPhones still significantly in the lead, and Symbian phones a strong second.

Interesting aside that paid-for apps sell poorly on Android phones compared to iPhones. Somehow this doesn't seem surprising (may be a bit more going on than the Guardian's tentative explanation: iPhone owners have more money).