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Sq1 War Room

Ever wonder what’s going on inside our heads? Our blog is a peek into our thought process, an exhibition of work we’re proud of, a celebration of things that impressed us, and a few observations and insights into what makes advertising work.

We’re believers in the Socratic method — if something you see here gets you thinking, tickles your funny bone, or goes against everything you believe in, we want to talk about it! Comment below or contact us here.

Why You Need a Social Media Hub

September 5th, 2010 by Judge

According to Samir Balwani; Why You Need a Social Media Hub

The social media hub centralizes a brand’s digital communications, connecting social media profiles with the business website. As more social media platforms begin to emerge, the need for a central branded social media hub grows.

Bring People to Your Branded Site

Many brands use their individual social media profiles as their central communications hubs. For example, some businesses focus their attention on Facebook and continue to direct their consumers there. Instead of capturing the community on their own brand site, the business is losing potential consumers to Facebook.

Although a Facebook fan is important, it’s more important to immerse the consumer in your brand. Instead of driving visitors to your social media profiles, use the Facebook and Twitter API to allow users to connect with you online without leaving your site.

Make Multiple Connections

Most marketers look at profiles individually when planning their social media presence. Consumers have multiple profiles; a Twitter account and Facebook profile. Why not connect with a consumer on each profile and create multiple connections?

The social media hub creates an area where consumers can flow from one social media profile to another. Make it easy to grow your network and control how consumers navigation across your profiles.

credit

Leverage Different Platforms for Different Things

When building a social media strategy, go beyond the simple idea of creating a community and instead think about actions. What do you want consumers to do on each social media site?

Use the social media hub to outline the action you want consumers to take on each social media profile. Consider it a “call to action“. Explicitly define what they should do (take the quiz, fan us, leave a comment).

Build a Central Distribution Platform

The social media hub ties together a digital presence that would otherwise be fragmented and broken. The hub helps a brand create a cohesive strategy that integrates each social media profile.

Brands with popular hubs are able to tap into the community to help spread published content. Hubs are extremely effective when distributing information, delivering branded media, and new media public relations.

Control and Brand Your Most Valuable Social Platform

BMW has more than 1 million fans on Facebook. That’s 1 million people they convinced to perform an action and subscribe to their page. What if Facebook decided to charge for fan pages? Would BMW walk away? What if they had planned ahead and captured this community on their own site instead?

Your social media hub, your website, is the most valuable social media profile you have. It is the only one that allows you to directly control and own your content. With a branded social media hub, you’re in charge and not at the behest of another company.

Don’t let Facebook own your whole community. Use the tools of sharing they afford, but be sure to be building that community on your site with email newsletters, rss feeds, and a robust networking system.

Collect Consumer Insights

Finally, nothing beats the data collected by a site you fully own. Want to know how many people visited your site? Where they came from? How long they stayed? What they did? It’s all information you can get from Google Analytics or almost any other analytics package once added to your social media hub.

Facebook offers some data but it leaves a lot to ask for. Twitter and most other social media platforms offer nothing.

Analyzing data allows you to better understand your community and optimize your social media strategies. Don’t miss out on an opportunity to collect huge amounts of data by ignoring your brand hub’s analytics.

Where’s Your Hub?

A social media hub is a powerful aspect of an online marketing strategy. In my mind it’s a necessity. Without it, you lose control of your community, create a disoriented digital presence, fragment your content distribution, and lose out on a great deal of data.

Do you have a social media hub? What brand has created a good central hub? How are you connecting your sites? How are you using your social media hub?


  

A Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Insights

September 3rd, 2010 by Judge

According to Mashable; A Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Insights

Facebook ImageEkaterina Walter is a social media strategist at Intel. She is a part of Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence and is responsible for company-wide social media enablement and corporate social networking strategy.

You have created a Facebook Fan Page. Now what? I bet these questions come to mind: “Is my page a success?” “Who is engaging with us?” “Is our engagement effective?” “Does our content strategy work?”

The Facebook Insights dashboard will help you answer some of these questions. As defined by Facebook, “Insights provides Facebook Page owners … with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners … are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook.”

So what’s the best way to use this relatively new tool? We’ve outlined some steps below that should have you measuring Facebook engagement in no time.

Note that only page administrators can view Insights data for the properties they own or administer.

Examine a Wide Range of Data

There are two types of Facebook insights:

The question then becomes: “What do you want to track and measure?” There is a lot of data offered, but you want to sort through it and identify what information is meaningful and will help you make decisions about your engagement and content strategy. If that data is not readily available, you might want to do some manual calculations to derive the numbers you’re looking for.

Below are the insights I recommend you pay attention to and track.

Some of these metrics require constant manual tracking and analysis, which is a big downside. However, the above metrics will help you make decisions about your engagement and content strategy that would allow more effective interactions with your customers.

Square One a Dallas Digital Agency are experts in Social Media Strategy and Marketing

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Content Strategy – Getting to Grips with Content

September 2nd, 2010 by Heather

According to UX Booth; Getting to Grips with Content

Now is the opportune time for us to start taking our content seriously. Over the past few years, there has been a surge in web devices that focus on portability and readability over processing power. With a changing attitude amongst key media players, content must no longer be ignored as a truly marketable asset.

Editor’s Note: Some of you readers out there may find this post familiar; indeed, this post was published July 13th, 2010 under the title “Putting Content Back on Top.” Due to some outcry over the post’s originality and validity, UX Booth removed the article to satisfy concerned parties and to conduct an editorial review. After extensive review and minor editing, we have decided to republish this article in its present form.

In June 2010, The Times newspaper began charging for its online content, with editor James Harding stating that it was “time to stop giving away our journalism.” Whether you agree with this move or not (this has already resulted in a loss of 33% of readers), it is a bold statement, and a stake in the ground for the value of content online.
Framing an understanding

If we are to convince clients and co-workers to promote the importance of content, we need to first do two things:

* Provide a common language for speaking about content
* Provide the tools to initiate change

Content Strategy for the Web book, by Kristina Halvorson

Content Strategy Manifesto

Content strategy fulfills both these objectives as it offers us a framework for understanding our content and a plan accomplish our objectives. Halvorson, in her book Content Strategy for the Web, defines it as:

the practice of planning for the creation, delivery and governance of useful, useable content.

Whilst you may be unfamiliar with the term “Content Strategy,” you are probably familiar with at least one of the disciplines it incorporates:
Brand strategy, Metadata strategy, Messaging strategy, Editorial strategy, SInformation architecturen, Tone and style guides, Taxonomy and categorisation.

The many disciplines of Content Strategy

Content Strategy helps us to understand that these are not separate and distinct disciplines, but are in fact complementary processes that should be bound together within one unifying aim—to produce powerful, relevant content.

So how does this plan play out? Halvorson divides it into 3 phases:

* Audit
* Analysis
* Recommendation (what she calls the ’strategy’ itself)

If we break the strategy down into its component parts, we are less likely to become overwhelmed by the sheer number of areas it covers. It also allows us to take a step back from what is often an emotionally charged topic and adopt a more considered approach.
Audit – Analiysis – Recommendation

The three key stages of Content Strategy

The first stage is where you produce an audit, otherwise known as a content inventory. This is a quantitative process that is a measure of what (all pages and content types) and where (how they fall in relation to each other). It is very similar in format to an IA document, but instead of describing “what should be” it describes “what is.”

This is a valuable process, for it enables the Content Strategist to “not only learn about what content is on an existing site, but also how the site is structured and a lot about the business” (The Web Content Strategist’s Bible, Richard Sheffield)

The second stage is where you gather and analyze all the existing information that prescribes how content gets online (the process) and what you want to achieve with it (your goals). Your content does not exist in a vacuum; you therefore need to observe what policies, procedures, and practices impact upon it. Without thorough observation, you are at risk of making recommendations which fall outside business objectives or are just not feasible given the current structure and practice of the company.

So you’ve done all the hard work; now you’re ready to prepare your recommendations (or Content Strategy document):

The Content Strategy document is a compilation of a number of analysis documents. Exactly which documents to include will vary per project depending on the project’s requirements.

The Web Content Strategist’s Bible, Richard Sheffield

They could be formal documents, guidelines, principles, or even timelines. They should be best suited to the situation at-hand. Don’t deliver a heavy report if you know it will never be used.

Whatever form your recommendations take, they need to address how content changes can be implemented, and include such things as:
Book cover: The Web Content Strategist’s bible

The Web Content Strategist’s Bible provides a useful handbook and reference.

* What content is needed? This is where your audit will come into its own.
* How will content be created? You may need to put in place a schedule to accomplish this.
* How will this content be ordered and structured? You need to consider how content connects to itself within pages and between them.
* How does web content interact with offline communications? As a company you should be delivering one clear message throughout all media avenues.
* How do we decide when content should be retired?

Note: If you are interested in the outputs of Content Strategy, Sheffield’s The Web Content Strategist’s Bible provides a great handbook for use in-the-field and includes a number of templates for key strategy documents.
Standing on your soapbox

There was a time when you could get away with writing websites that weren’t standards-compliant. However, that is no longer the case. If you’re at all serious about your website, you know the importance of building to web standards. The same is the case for usability, social media, and SEO. What were in the past thought of as nice-to-have elements are fast becoming a fundamental part of the web development process. So the next avenue for revolution is content; experts have been talking about it for years, and the industry is finally ready to listen. The first Content Strategy Consortium was held in 2009, and in recent months the blogosphere has been awash with articles (like this one) about how we need to start taking content more seriously.

The great thing about the web is that everything is new, whether it’s 20 years old or 20 minutes, it’s still a very “new media.” This has two big implications for anyone working as a web practitioner:

* We’re all still learning.
Working in digital arena there is never a point where we can become complacent
* You don’t have to be an expert to be an expert.
When it comes to “online,” experience is just as valuable (if not more so) than formal qualifications. Observations made in-the-field can be far more enlightening than anything gleaned from a book.

So what does this mean for you and your content? If you recognize the missed opportunities in regards to your content, don’t let lack of qualifications or seniority get in your way. If the saying is true, that content is king, you need to become the king of your content.
Content Strategy on a post-it note
post-it note with Halvorson’s tips

3 principles to apply now

It may be at this stage that you are convinced you need to elevate the importance of your content—however you may lack the time and resources to implement a full content strategy. Fear not! Here are some things you can do now to improve your content.

1. Prune it
2. Put it in front of users
3. Give it purpose

Prune it

There is no innate value to content; it’s not a case of the bigger the better. In fact, quite the opposite is true: one of the biggest problems we face with our content is that of bloat. Content provides value only when it communicates a message or assists a user in completing a task—anything else is just dead wood. So go on, get your shears out: prune content that is distracting, out of date, or irrelevant and you’ll expose your hardworking, valuable content to the user.
Put it in front of users

In many cases, you may be too close to the content to really assess it. Without putting your content in front of your end users, any changes or improvements you make will always only ever be a best guess. Formal user testing can be intimidating, but that’s not what is required here. All we need to do is test drive your content, which means coming up with some basic tasks, laying out content as it will appear on the final site, and asking users to step through the process. Obviously the closer your test drive is to the final site, the more accurate your results will be, but even a very stripped down example is going to beat your best guess any day!
Give it purpose

Before you work out what you write, you need to establish what you want to achieve. Try to articulate your key messages and objectives for the website. Then break down these high-level messages and objectives into sub-messages and tasks. These will form the building blocks for your website’s content, and provide a measure against which to assess your existing content.
A vision for the future

Imagine a future with web sites full of relevant, hard-working content that makes understanding clearer and supports users in completing their goals. Is this enough to convince you (or your organization) to redress the balance and promote the importance of content in your web processes? Or perhaps you’re just content to stick with the status quo, but be warned if we continue to neglect our content, this will be the result:

we’ll continue to churn out worthless content in reaction to unmeasured requests. We’ll keep trying to fit words, audio, graphics, and video into page templates that weren’t truly designed with our business’s real-world content requirements in mind. Our customers still won’t find what they’re looking for. And we’ll keep failing to publish useful, usable content that people actually care about.

  

UX Design – How Choices Impairs Your Visitors

September 2nd, 2010 by Judge

According to UX Booth; How Choices Impairs Your Visitors

Many sites provide an array of methods to interact with their offerings, but excesses in decision-making pressure can render less empowered visitors into a cyclone of stress from the barrage of questions being asked. As an industry, we place a great deal of emphasis on getting visitors to make decisions, but are we turning a straightforward path into a labyrinth with our need to know?

A fear of the unknown

Despite our best wishes, we often provide a maintained level of choice and interaction that places unnecessary pressures and burdens on the end user. The most common reason that issuing choices fails to balance the need for maintaining control and highlighting flexibility comes from the lack of education as to the result such choices will incur. As such, a fear of the unknown arises where end users feel that whilst they are responsible for their actions, they don’t feel in a position to make important decisions (which results in a breakdown of function).

Facebook's privacy panelFacebook’s privacy choice selection is quite comprehensive.

Most sites have to deal with choice in some form, and it’s important that when we offer such variety, we ensure it is done tastefully without overloading or confusing the end user. With the rise of social networks and interactivity (where anything from friendship to money could be on the line), we need to begin evolving our models of how we help users decide what’s right for them. This is not only because many users don’t understand what the choices will result in, but also because constant questioning can highlight flaws regarding how people scan content.

When sociological breakdowns occur between the visitor who uses the service and those who are responsible for maintaining it, the dangers of why such issues have come into being need to be investigated carefully. Offering choices (of varying levels of complexity) can be a good thing for those who understand the consequences for which making decisions will entail, but every so often we ask our end users to decide on how events should play out when they are either uneducated (and susceptible to poor choice) or reduced to calling for support.

Consequences of choice

While how many choices to give the end user is something that can’t be fully answered unless the relevant variables relating to the audience (such as technical levels) are known, the respected methodology of only providing (or asking for) details when they are required becomes apparent as an obvious solution. Choice is not something to be taken lightly and the consequences of poor choice can be detrimental to not only your business but also to the level of trust maintained between you and your end users. Therefore, a balance needs to be drawn.

A very nosey formSimplifying information requests can improve usability.

Many services place a lot of demands on the end user (to the extent of filling out a survey) in requiring decisions to be made—decisions that could otherwise be left until the need arises. Such a need to express freedom and the ability to maintain your information often gives end users a psychological feeling of control and empowerment, but as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. This is a worry as many sites request details in a manner which demands “on the spot” choices that result in unenlightened decision making, false responses, or guesswork.

We can establish that too many choices (in a time-frame or session) will confuse end users, resulting in negativity toward participation, and that a fear of unforeseen consequences can be counter-productive, making future decision making more difficult. This highlights that whatever you use to try and encourage the freedom of choice (and how you present those choices), it needs to be done with some level of restraint. This way, you ensure that such decisions are made only when the end user understands and approves of the action occurring.

Subconscious subjectivity

Try to think back at decisions you have made. Some decisions have more weight and importance than others, and those should reflect identically when being implemented online. A fault that seems to go unnoticed by many professionals is that when the need for decisions is established, little thought goes into the importance of that request, not to mention how it should reflect upon the barriers in place to ensure the decision is not made lightly (by just clicking a single button). The context of how the decision is being made should be important.

Potential search queriesGoogle makes search recommendations to reduce complexity.

Decisions that require complex answers should not be restricted to single entry (otherwise lost) fields without having a save progress function in place to allow the end user to reflect upon his answers carefully. This is especially important if the information is of such complexity that he requires to outsource his request for information to gain what he needs to complete the steps. Unless there is a very good reason (such as the need to complete payment before accessing the goods), it’s also not a good idea to restrict user navigation until demands on their time are met.

We all subconsciously make split-second decisions as to how we shall respond, such as which links we navigate too, which files we download, or which privacy settings we use on social networking sites. It’s important that zombie browsing be addressed in respect to how those actions are automated. While complexity may be a cause for concern in usability, the need to ensure that empowered choices are made appropriately requires a greater level of instruction on behalf of those who offer such choices (with concern as to how their implemented).

The nature of the beast

If there’s one thing we have learned from the rise in privacy related issues, the need to sanction and relate choice appropriately is of great importance to the user experience. It’s quite easy to blame end user decisions upon the person who instigates the action (by clicking a button they shouldn’t or agreeing to a contract without reading it), but the truth of the matter is that we as experts need to hold more responsibility in underlining the importance of good decision making, if only to ensure that the users of our services remain in safe hands.

We cannot control the end user (as much as we’d like too), and it goes without saying that trying to manipulate our consumers unfairly can result in a breakdown of trust. But ensuring that you document choices properly (by providing education), only offer choices when they’re necessary (by providing simplicity), highlight the results of choices made (providing understanding), and don’t punish end-users for mistakes (by allowing bad choices or errors to be resolved), you’ll have an equilibrium which will better streamline the flow of user interaction.

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The Top 10 Viral Ads of All Time

September 2nd, 2010 by Judge

According to AdAge; The Top 10 Viral Ads of All Time

A little over five years ago, YouTube ushered in a new genre of video advertising, one that succeeded on its ability to rise above a world of pet tricks and backyard stunts, to entertain and to be passed around. Call them “viral” videos, super-sized TV ads, branded videos or just plain commercials, a few of them have crossed a significant psychic milestone: 100 million views and counting.

Last week, the roller-skating babies of Evian’s “Live Young” campaign reached the mark after a little more than a year on the web. This, without any significant TV exposure in the U.S. and very little overseas. It’s advertising that entertains. And it got us thinking: What are the most-watched viral ads of all time?

We put the question to our friends at Visible Measures, and the answer surprised us. It turned out the No. 1 viral campaign of all time is a consistent sleeper hit, not often among the weekly top 10 on Ad Age’s Viral Chart, and not connected to a big, well-heeled brand or fancy creative agency. Rather, it’s a cool gimmick that consistently delivers laughs along with cringe-inducing voyeuristic destruction.

The No. 1 video advertiser of all time is Blendtec, whose “Will It Blend” series has been around in the same form for four years, accumulating 134.2 million views. The key? The brand found what works and stuck with it. Each of the more than 120 original clips has the same kitschy music, the same tagline, variations on the same stunt and the same host, Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson.

While brilliant, Mr. Dickson has to thank Steve Jobs for Blendtec’s biggest hits, including laying waste to an iPhone in 2007 and an iPad in April.

What’s remarkable about the top 10 is that viewers would voluntarily watch an ad 100 million times, let alone 23 million times. Not surprisingly, given the recent growth of web video, most of the entrants are recent campaigns, launched within the last year or two. All but one, Pepsi’s “Gladiator,” came after the launch of YouTube in 2005. (The ad, starring Britney, Beyonce and Pink, appeared on TV in 2004.)

In addition to Blendtec, Evian and Pepsi, the list includes two Old Spice campaigns (including the newly famous “Your Man” Isaiah Mustafa), Microsoft’s Xbox Project Natal, Dove’s “Evolution,” DC Shoes’ “Gymhana Two,” and “T-Mobile Dance.” While the chart stops at No. 10, special honorable mention goes to Nike, which holds the No. 11 spot for its “Write the Future” campaign, as well as the Nos. 12 and 13 spots for early viral efforts starring Kobe Bryant and Ronaldinho.

While great creative is the key to keeping interest and generating pass-along, time also helps. It took Evian and Blendtec more than a year to get to 100 million views. The next campaign to do it will probably feature Old Spice’s Isaiah Mustafa, not for the original “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” TV ad, but the “Responses” campaign, where Mustafa recorded customized replies to folks like Kevin Rose, George Stephanolopous, Gizmodo and Biz Stone.
Brand Campaign Agency Current Week Views* Launch Date Watch the Spot
1 Blendtec Will It Blend? In-house 134,256,499 10/30/06 Blendtec: Will it Blend?
2 Evian Live Young BETC Euro RSCG 103,867,704 6/4/09 Evian: Live Young
3 Old Spice Responses Wieden & Kennedy 57,132,669 7/12/10 Old Spice: Responses
4 Pepsi Gladiator AMV BBDO 46,742,892 1/1/04 Pepsi: Gladiator
5 Microsoft Xbox Project Natal World Famous 42,698,599 6/1/09 Microsoft: Xbox Project Natal
6 Dove Evolution Ogilvy & Mather 41,100,418 10/1/06 Dove: Evolution
7 T-Mobile T-Mobile Dance Saatchi & Saatchi 35,487,575 1/15/09 T-Mobile Dance
8 Doritos Crash The Super Bowl 2010 Goodby Silverstein & Partners 34,168,845 1/5/10 Doritos: Crash the Super Bowl 2010
9 Old Spice Odor Blocker Wieden & Kennedy 33,986,750 3/31/10 Old Spice: Odor Blocker
10 DC Shoes Gymkhana Two Mad Media 32,872,531 9/3/09 DC Shoes: Ken Block's Gymkhana Two Project
Source: Visible Measures

*The Visible Measures Top 10 Viral Video Ad Campaigns Chart focuses on brand-driven viral video ads that appear on online-video-sharing destinations. Each campaign is measured on a True Reach basis, which includes viewership of both brand-syndicated video clips and viewer-driven social video placements. The data are compiled using the Visible Measures Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing repository of analytic data on more than 100 million internet videos across more than 150 video-sharing destinations.

Note: This analysis does not include Visible Measures’ paid-placement (i.e., overlays, pre-/mid-/post-roll) performance data or video views on private sites. This chart does not include movie trailers, video-game campaigns, TV show or media network promotions, or public service announcements. View-count results are incremental by week.

To notify Visible Measures of an upcoming video ad campaign, or for an end-to-end assessment of your campaign’s overall performance, please contact Visible Measures directly.

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User Experience Design – Shades of Grey “Thoughts on Sketching”

September 2nd, 2010 by Ryan

According to UX MAGAZINE; Shades of Grey “Thoughts on Sketching”

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
- D.H. Lawrence

In designing mostly interactive systems (spaces, processes, and artifacts for people to use), I must increasingly stretch the limits of communication tools to explore and document what it will be like to interact with the things I create. Artifacts used in communicating design create an inherent frame of experience between the subjective response of the person for whom I design, and my expectations of their response. There is a divergence of meaning in that the audience can only experience the communications artifact, not the object being communicated.

Will Evans sketching

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.
- Kahlil Gibran

I have described wireframing in a previous article as a form of design communication that enables stakeholders, team members, users, and clients to gain firsthand appreciation of existing or future problem spaces and solutions. Wireframing adds several facets to the value to communication: the wireframe itself acts as a cognitive artifact; the process of creating wireframes is a mode of conversational exploration; and the process of envisioning, external actualization, and reflection is a task-artifact cycle (depicted below). This cycle represents a continuous, mutually dependant evolution towards a hopefully positive solution.

Task artifact cycle

Wireframes are representations of a design made before final specifications exist, which is problematic because in comparison to sketches they are higher fidelity representations of design. Unfortunately, although wireframes are meant to inform design processes and design decisions, they often can be viewed as more concrete than sketches, and therefore considered more final.

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.
- D.r Edwin Land

I have often thought that the activities of both sketching and wireframing can best be described as modalities of decision analysis. With each new design decision explored, new constraints are introduced as new opportunities arise. At an abstract level, a particular problem space is framed by the tools we feel most comfortable with: problem space, domain, expertise, theme, context of problem, bias towards types of design tools and documents, and timeliness of artifacts created. In reflecting on the way many user experience designers actually work and reading the comments on my article describing the wireframing process, Shades of Gray: Wireframes as Thinking Device, it seemed necessary to discuss the role and philosophy of sketching in my personal process.

UXD sketches

I see sketching as an important pre-wireframing technique for doing divergent and transformative design, something that fundamentally differentiates what has been called “big D,” and “small d” design. Not to put too fine a point on it—it is what separates the user experience designers from the wireframe monkeys. This is the argument that I have made, and base it in part on how Buxton defines design in Sketching User Experiences, when he writes:

What I mean by the term “design” is what someone who went to art college and studied industrial design would recognize as design. At least this vague characterization helps narrow our interpretation of the term somewhat. Some recent work in cognitive science (Goel 1995, Gedenryd 1998) helps distinguish it further. It suggests that a designer’s approach to creative problem solving is very different from how computer scientists, for example, solve puzzles. That is, design can be distinguished by a particular cognitive style. Gendenryd, in particular, makes clear that sketching is fundamental to the design process. Furthermore, related work by Suwa and Tversky (2002) and Tcerksy (2002) shows that besides the ability to make sketches, a designer’s use of them is a distinct skill that develops with practice, and is fundamental to their cognitive style.

Amen. I think as designers we must go out of our way to avoid purely abstract thinking and instead use sketches to restore presence to our work by interactively seeing and doing in the iterative task-artifact cycle that sketching affords, as opposed to going from abstraction to wireframing. As I wrote previously in Shades of Gray: Wireframes as Thinking Device:

I think of “D”esign as an exploration of the conceivable futures. I use my sketches and wireframes as means to make explorative moves and assess the consequences of those moves. As I explore the problem space, I could relatively easily keep the design models in my head, but I would fail in my primary objective to create a framework for a conversation among the stakeholders, the intended audience, and me.

Will Evans sketching

Sketches are a modeling process I employ to be able to conceive and predict the consequences of certain design arguments within an unresolved problem space whose borders have not been fully defined. When we sketch an interaction, we are making an argument—even if it is one that will be tossed away. Representational artifacts such as sketches, wireflows or physical models like paper prototypes are important tools for design since they help in assessing and reflecting on the details of a solution in relation to the whole problematic context in which it is situated. Using pencil and paper speeds up my doing-seeing loop of creation, judgment and reformulation. Few other tools are as fast as pencil and paper in this respect. As a designer, I can draw a line and immediately evaluate it. This conversational process between myself and visualization of the design situation enables the generation of new ideas.

As I draw sketches, I see the problem in another way, perhaps because a line came out slightly wrong on the paper. Taking a step back or looking at a sketch from a different angle leads to new ideas and thoughts. New ideas are then nothing but old ideas in new combinations or old ideas looked upon or interpreted from a new perspective—sketching then becomes what Erving Goffman called “framing.” This is also what Paul Laseau calls “a conversation with ourselves in which we communicate with sketches.” This idea is also related to Donald Schön’s concept of a reflective conversation with the materials of a design, because as designers we shape the situation mentally, in an implicit way, and then explicitly respond through sketching. Schön writes:

In a good process of design, this conversation is reflective. In answer to the situation’s back-talk, the designer reflects-in-action on the construction of the problem, the strategies of action, or the model of the phenomena, which have been implicit in his moves.

The sketches also form a documentation of the design process without adding any administrative overhead. I can learn a lot by browsing back through old sketches; watching the evolution of an idea as my understanding of the problem space is explored, and refined, and this documentation can tell a narrative of design decisions to be shared with direct and indirect stakeholders who can then see why certain choices were embraced, and others discarded. Externalizations of different kinds (sketches, wireframes, prototypes) are especially useful for communication purposes where I want to present ideas to another member of the design team, to the client, or to a user. The presentation sketches are usually not as rough as working sketches are and their purpose is not only to communicate an idea, but also to persuade the other parties that a particular design is better than other alternatives.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
- Isaac Bashevis Singer (צחק באַשעװיס זינגער)

UXD sketches

As noted above, the sketch can be rapid and spontaneous, but it leaves stable traces in contrast to conversation, which is evanescent. Conversation is important for the argumentative assessment and communication of design alternatives, which, I think, is at the core of design activities (sketch, present, critique, refine). Designers employ a language of talking and sketching in parallel. Schön describes the work of an architectural design professor named Wim Quist in a session with a student:

In the media of sketch and spatial-action language, he represents buildings on the site through moves which are also experiments. Each move has consequences described and evaluated in terms drawn from one or more design domains. Each has implications binding on later moves. And each creates new problems to be described and solved. Quist designs by spinning out a web of moves, consequences, implications, appreciations, and further moves.

The quote above is a clear statement of what much of design work is about. In terms of distributed cognition, it describes design work as spread over both designers and their representational artifacts (e.g., sketches). The representational artifacts are, in turn, physical embodiments of the culture and context in which they have evolved through the lifecycle of a project. I think the cultural practices of designers, including spatial-action language, provide a solid process for performing experimental design exploration. It is part of this knowing-through-action, that design knowledge is revealed in spontaneous and skillfully performed actions. This language is also constitutive of our practicing user experience community in the ways in which we communicate both with ourselves, with our teams, clients, and to our designs themselves.

Will Evans sketching

Because sketches are faster, require less overhead, and by their nature are perceived to be less “done,” they are better suited to the task-artifact cycle of design exploration. They should be considered an effective modeling process for designers to be able to conceive and predict the consequences of certain design arguments during the design ideation phase and subsequently leading to better design.

Photos (on Flickr) by Michael Leis

  

Dallas Digital Agency Square One – Launches New SAPPORO USA Website!

September 2nd, 2010 by Judge

Dallas Digital Agency Square One – Launches New SAPPORO USA Website!

Click Here to see the new site!!!!




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Social Media – Target to Sell Facebook Credits as Gift Cards in Stores

September 1st, 2010 by Ernie

According to Mashable; Target to Sell Facebook Credits as Gift Cards in Stores

Target will be the first retailer to sell Facebook Credits in its stores come Sunday. The Facebook Credits gift cards will be available in $15, $25 and $50 denominations at all 1,750 Target locations and at Target.com.

The cards will soon make their way to two or three additional national retailers, according to USA Today.

Facebook Credits is a virtual currency redeemable for primarily in-game Facebook purchases. In Farmville, for instance, gamers can use Facebook Credits as a currency, in lieu of credit cards, to purchase additional items for their farms. 7-11 also sells gift cards specifically for FarmVille.

Facebook Credits gift cards package the virtual currency in consumer-friendly entities, which Facebook hopes will appeal to holiday shoppers. The gift cards are visually no different than the variety sold in stores today, and were produced by GMG Entertainment, the same company that makes Apple’s iTunes cards.

Social gaming is a relatively new industry with huge potential. More than 56 million Americans are now playing social games. By 2013, annual sales from virtual goods are expected to reach $6 billion. Facebook’s foray into brick-and-mortar retail stores is a significant move that will help the company capitalize on social gaming.

Facebook (Facebook) also has a deal in place with MOL, an online micropayment company, to sell Facebook Credits at retail stores in Asia and Australia (Australia).

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Dallas Agency Square One – Scores 100% on Twitter!!!!!

September 1st, 2010 by Judge

Dallas Advertising Agency Square One – Scores 100% on Twitter!!!!!

How Does Twitter Grader Calculate Twitter Ranking?

The most common question I get at grader.com is about how the Twitter Grader algorithm (and associated rankings) works.  Before we dig a bit into the details, it will help to understand the what before the how.  What Twitter Grader is trying to measure is the power, reach and authority of a twitter account.  In other words, when you tweet, what kind of an impact does it have?

Normally, we don’t like talking about the details of the Twitter Grader algorithm.  This is for the same reason that Google doesn’t like to talk about its algorithm: revealing details increases the degree to which people try to game the system.  So, lets approach the question from a different way.  If one were to look at data for a given user available in twitter, what kinds of things would one look at to determine whether that user had power, reach and authority?  Also, when looking at these various factors, it’s helpful to think about each of these in the “all other things being equal, what’s better” context.  Otherwise, it’s easy to get caught up into non-productive arguments on why a certain factor is or isn’t important, because there are so many cases that “prove” that it doesn’t matter.  Let me explain.  One of the factors that goes into measuring your Twitter Grade is the number of followers you have.  Many of you will argue that the number of followers is completely irrelevant because it’s so easy to game.  There are automated tools to do nothing but acquire followers by following a bunch of people.  That’s true.  It is easy to spike up your follower count.  However,  I would counter with this:  If we were looking at two different twitter users, all other things being equal (and I do mean all other things), the one with more followers is likely more powerful and deserves a higher twitter grade.  Of course, all other things are usually not equal and that’s why the Twitter Grade is interesting.

So, let’s go into the factors.  Note:  These are NOT in order of priority or weight (and they’re not all weighted equally — not by a long shot).

Algorithm Factors

1.  Number of Followers: More followers leads to a higher Twitter Grade (all other things being equal).  Yes, I agree that it’s easy to game this number, but we are looking at measuring reach and I did say all other things being equal.

2.  Power of Followers: If you have people with a high Twitter Grade following you, it counts more than those with a low Twitter Grade following you.  It’s a bit recursive, and we don’t get carried away with it, but it helps.

3.  Updates: More updates generally leads to a higher grade — within reason.  This does not mean you should be tweeting like a manic squirrel cranked up on caffeine and sugar.  It won’t help either your Twitter Grade or your overall happiness in life.

4.  Update Recency: Users that are more current (i.e. time elapsed since last tweet is low) generally get higher grades.

5.  Follower/Following Ratio: The higher the ratio, the better.  However, the weight of this particular factor decreases as the user accrues points for other factors (so, once a user gets to a high level of followers or a high level of engagement, the Follower/Following ratio counts less).

6.  Engagement: The more a given user’s tweets are being retweeted, the more times the user is being referenced or cited, the higher the twitter grade.  Further, the value of the engagement is higher based on who is being engaged.  If a user with a very high Twitter Grade retweets, it counts more than if a spammy account with a very low grade retweets.

The Grade Calculation: So, those are the factors that go into the calculation of a score.  This score is then used to compare a user against all other users that also have a score.  The grade is calculated as the approximate percentage of other users that have an equal or lower score.  So, a Twitter Grade of 80 means that about 80% of the other users got a lower score.  At the time this article is being written, over 2.1 million users have been graded.

The Ranking: The absolute ranking is exactly what it sounds like.  Based on all other users scored, what’s your “position” in that list.  A ranking of 5,000 means that only 4,999 other people had a higher score than you (at that point in time).

Elite List: The elite list is simply an ordered list of the top users (based on ranking) at a given point in time.  This list is updated several times a day.  We also maintain lists of the top ranking users based on a narrower set of users (like those in a specific geography, those that match a specific keyword, etc.).

That’s all I’ve got for now.  Hopefully, this answers some of your questions.  What are other factors you think we should be looking at to compute the Twitter Grade?  Would love to hear your thoughts and ideas in the comments.

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The state of Mobile Communications

September 1st, 2010 by Judge

The state of Mobile Communications

Burson-Marsteller and Proof Integrated Communications report: The State of Mobile Communications
View more presentations from B.L. Ochman.

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