Henrik Werdelin

How to give people something to talk about…

A few months ago I wrote a post called Virality is all about making your users look awesome in front of their friends. It was promoting the idea that you need to think about what your users get out of talking to others about your product. What was implied in the post was the concept that you need to create a narrative around your business or product that is easy for your users to articulate to others. You need to hand craft a story that is easy to remember, easy to tell and, importantly, makes the person telling it look good. Lately the importance of this point has been growing on me. What you might call ‘The lacking narrative issue’ seems to be a core problem, not just for creating virality but for many other aspects of your business – such as attracting staff, getting investment, and creating clear design briefs – and simply for making it easy for your mum to tell her friends what you do. :)

So let’s set aside what your users get out of telling others about your product, and just focus on the core narrative of what you do. It’s quite amazing how many founders and company leaders are making amazing new technical solutions or products but seem to have difficulty explaining the core narrative of the product themselves. Now, if the person who built the product has a hard time explaining it, then just imagine how hard it is for others to understand it – let alone promote it. The simple question – what does your company do, and how does it help your users? – is really something you should be able to explain without the use of 25 slides or a fancy flash video. I was reminded of the importance of this when I was reading about an interesting term called ‘The Social Object’. ”The Social Object, in a nutshell . . . . Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if [we] think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that “node” in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.”  (via gapingvoid.com)

Human interaction is widely based on exchanging stories, so if you create a very good narrative of your company or product, it can become just such a social object. A good exercise is to spend some proper time making a good story about your business and try it on a few people. Then wait a few days and ask them to explain to you what your business is doing – and see if you like what you hear. If the story is good, it should become a social object. From there it can be shared easily with everyone from new customers and investors to your mum.

Happy storytelling.

Got married a few weeks ago. My sweet, creative and overall incredible wife Mette made this fantastic animation as her wedding speech to me. I must have seen it 2 million times by now and it makes me so very happy every time I watch it – so I thought I would share.

Better quality link on vimeo:

Although we have been speaking about left–right navigation for a while, it’s now seen to be a direction that is sneaking itself into a vast amount of cool and popular web and mobile apps, and a few websites. I started to notice it when Tweetdeck launched a few years back and introduced that type of navigation to my twitter feeds. Instead of having long lists they used a left-right visual language. However, Tweetdeck is not the only popular app/site that is using it now: from cool websites/blogs like The Horizontal Way and Ross’s Homepage, through nice looking sign-up forms on Jumo and Kontain to apps like Pulse and the stunning Flipboard. I have been speculating why we see an increase in new funky apps/sites that use this type of visual language across not just mobile apps but computer/web apps too.

1. The iPhone/ipad effect. I am pretty sure that the increase in usage of touch screens is in part responsible for this trend. It’s just way more ergonomic to move your hand from side to side than up and down. So while scrolling was made for mouse navigation, horizontal navigation is for sure the preferred form on touch screens. The coolness of these new devices is probably spilling over and inspiring designers to use the same style for web applications where the interface is still mouse based.

2. We used to design for 1024 x 768 screen resolutions; this has now changed. My screen is e.g. 1440 x 900 which means that I get more real-estate horizontally than I do vertically. So the move towards widescreen monitors probably also plays a part.

3. Then I think (and this is totally a wild gut-feeling guess) that our brain is better wired to consume vast quantities of information horizontally. Maybe it’s because our brains have been schooled to do it this way for so many years offline. Books are mainly consumed with a horizontal flip, galleries place paintings alongside each other and most of our world is organized horizontally rather than vertically: our houses are next to each other, our eyes placed likewise and so on.

So I expect that this is just the beginning of more horizontal visual design in web/computer apps – but I’m keen to hear what other people think?

p.s IA.jp has a cool article that touches on the subject:

Why P&G’s slogan ‘Experience Matters’ are relevant for tech companies, how tools can be funny and why no one ever really needs a screwdriver.

Lately I have spent a lot of time thinking about how the 90s were a lot about technical innovation, how the 00s were about social innovation and how the 10s will be focused on innovation in the field of ‘Experience’. I think some of the most amazing companies of the coming few years will be businesses that understand how to wrap technology beautifully around human needs so that it matters to people. In fact these insights are not new and was already well documented in Pine and Gilmore’s ‘The Experience Economy‘ from 1999. Its a bit surprising how few technology products and services actually take this into account. If we believe that the emotions of an online user are similar to how the feel offline, then great technology will, by itself, just not be enough; not even if it’s designed in a clean and functional way – you will need to architect a great emotional experience for your users and then make it fit their daily flow to be a winner of tomorrow.

Here are a few things that I think that Google (and all technology-focused companies) could learn from Apple. That’s not to point a finger at Google; it is clearly an amazing company with great minds that is doing very well. However, at a time when Google is moving into new services in which users have more options and are used to more experienced design, it might want to try to pick up a trick or two about human product experience design from the best in class on this subject: Apple.

1. There is a difference between good usability and a great experience

A traffic light has good usability – but using one isn’t really much of an experience. It’s a utility that allows us to navigate quickly and safely when driving.  Many tech companies thrive on making websites that allow users to figure out easily what to do on a site. It’s a tendency to have a big focus on clean and functional navigation, and, done really well (as on google.com), it also becomes a great experience. However, most often, experience is far broader than just clean usability.  It includes navigation, a visual look, the language used, the movement, the system’s attitude toward users, the flow and so on. It all adds up to the feeling users have when they enter a site or service. What is important is that there is no such thing as a ‘non-branded’ services. A user cannot have a ‘non-experience’. This digital packaging is important, in the same way that a car with an innovative engine needs a great body to match it. What Apple has managed to do is to add a great and, importantly, consistent experience around even their most nerdy innovations and services. Apple has managed to add a strong design attitude and a personality to its product development.

2. A tool doesn’t have to be boring

Now, some argue that certain services just need to be tools: pure utilities with none of the fluff. While I agree that some cases call for minimal experience design, I can’t really think of any reason why you wouldn’t always try to put a bit of an experience into your product. Even something that needs to be very professional can still have a bit of attitude. Take the example from earlier, about a traffic light: lately, I have seen traffic lights in Denmark appear with nicer iconography, nicer use of the nuances of lights, informative countdowns to when the light will change, and so on. It’s still a great utility, but now also a better experience. The same goes for my funny new South Part voices made for my TOMTOM GPS navigation systems.

Reeves and Nass’ classic book, The Media Equation, demonstrates very nicely that every time a person interacts with anything, emotions are evoked for them. The book claims that people interact with computers as if the computer were a person. In that perspective, when working on a new service, Googlers should perhaps ask themselves, what if our service was a person? What would that person be like? Would it be the nice, all-knowing, friendly guy next to you, helping with an IT problem, or the factual IT manager who solves your problem remotely with no interaction? The solution/utility is the same; the experience is different.

3. No-one needs a screwdriver

Most smart tech entrepreneurs I meet are in the process of making either scalable platforms or generic tools. The thinking is that if you can make a great solution for one problem, you can often make that into a scalable solution for many problems. This makes perfect sense from a business and from an engineering point of view.  The problem here is that people don’t feel they need tools; they need solutions to problems in their life. People never lack a screwdriver; they need to hang a painting on the wall. However, if you focus in on an amazing tool you just created, then you will naturally construct a narrative around the tool’s features. Not only that, you might even stare yourself blind at all the things that the tool could be used for. Need to open a can of beer? No problem, the screwdriver can do that…

What Apple has managed to do is to package their products around the user’s needs, not around all the features of the tool itself. Sometimes they even package the same tool into various products/solutions for their users.

In that respect, it is very interesting to see how differently Apple and Google have presented their phone operating systems. Here are the two links;

video one

video two

I’ll leave it to you to guess who I think focuses on the utility and who focuses on experience. (one of them might even be a bit over the top :)

I am in the process of writing a longer post about the difference between Google’s and Apple’s approach to ‘User Experience’ and stumbled over this wonderful quote from Steve Jobs:

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.

The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

- Steve Jobs

Research project #2. This is part of a series of research projects. See the first project #1 where we tried to make a page rank algoritm for physical locations.

Project: We wanted to create an ultra-localized newspaper with the visual language of print but based only on RSS feeds and with no human intervention. Usage examples: allowing real estate agents to offer a localized newspaper, adding information that is related to a homeowner –  popular venues, local council info, what people on the street tweet about, local news headlines, and so on.

Background: There were two core drivers behind the idea of this research project.

1.Our fascination with just how superior offline print design is compared to digital when it comes to the experience of consuming text. While the internet offers a world of opportunities when it comes to creating engaging storytelling experiences, it seems that the innovations around reading text online has a long way to go. Print papers offers many subtle but powerful properties not yet found online:

• a great way to find out how much content there is still to be read (by gauging how many pages are left)
• added visual clues to enforce the emotional impact of the story
• a structure/format that creates a reading flow and a sense of “freedom from choice” in what to read next
• a  focus point that doesn’t get interrupted with hyperlinks, pop-ups, or ads.

2. Our respect for how Netflix taught us how to introduce new technology when users are ready for it (rather than when it can be done). About 10 years ago I gave a talk at Harvard Business School about digital television. Someone from the audience asked me what I thought about Netflix. My answer was that Netflix was missing the point and that VOD would overtake them shortly. In retrospect, it is clear that Nexflix had actually done something very smart. They met their users with a product (movie rental) that was aligned with their users’ technology comfort level and then established a business relationship with them on the users’ terms. Now as broadband and connected devices are commonly used, they can migrate their business alongside their users into new digital platforms and offer their own VOD offering. I don’t know the Netflix people, but I assume that they are so smart that they had this planned all along. The lesson from Netflix is to keep an eye on where the users are in their adoption of new technology and then think how you can design new products so users don’t have to change their behavior too much in order to start adopting the service. With that in mind, consider this fact: the direct mail business in the US is still several times bigger than all internet advertising.

The Project

Gavin, Stacey, and I were discussing the above and came up with the idea of making an ultra-localized print paper that would utilize all the amazing local content that is available online and create a system that would format the content into a visually pleasing paper design, which would then be printed and delivered to people’s homes.

We started to find great sources of content that could be extracted from the web by only knowing a user’s zip/postcode. The thinking was that real estate agents would sponsor the print of these magazines and target the streets/postcodes they wanted to sell houses in. We found there was a lot of great content out there. Here are a few examples of sources we used:

• Foursquare check-ins to find out what places were hot on your street/block
• Meet-up information about what meetings were going on
• Price information about your street, so you can see if you are making money on your apartment/house
• Free things that people around you are giving away on Craigslist
• The Guardian’s local API for local news
• Local reviews on Yelp
• Local council meetings

Our “hacker in residence” Andras did some research on how to do some formatting and choosing of the content we had taken in and Gavin did some nice designs. We then teamed up to get this printed on real newspaper paper with the awesome guys at Newspaperclub who had already done an interesting and rather similar prototype of a service for people moving into a new area.

Below is the result. A nicely designed ultra-local newspaper based on my postcode. We could now do these week in and week out based on any postcode without having to do much or any work.

As this was a research project we don’t plan to take the concept further, but we might use it for other projects we are involved in. To test the concept we applied the same solution to myheritage.com (se pictures below) to see if we could apply the same system to another problem. Here we took the data (dummy data was used) that was already available and created a yearly update paper for my family. The thought was that many people would like to get access to online data but would find paper better suited as a medium.

I realize that many will say that (i)Pads can provide the same experience and there is no clear business model for this idea. This is partly true. The iPad has already seen an amazing growth in apps that mirror the visual design of papers and magazines. For us this was not about arguing about whether one business, platform, or process was  better than another, but to experiment on how to use convergence to come up with a completely new experiences. When sat down with a nicely designed magazine about our street – that had been made totally automatically – we felt we somewhat succeeded.

Postcode NewsPaper
Digital version:

The MyHeritage.com proof of concept:

More and more research is popping up pointing to negative effects of being online and available all the time. Most of us are pretty accessible and judging gets slightly restless if we dont get our information fix:

” Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information. These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.”

From todays New York Times; Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price: http://bit.ly/aDLLAW

Its not just the constant need for information, I have also noticed that I increasingly dont remember information that I can easily access by googling my past emails in Gmail.  A trend that is also being researched; An Ugly Toll of Technology: Impatience and Forgetfulness also from todays New York Times http://bit.ly/dhD7Qe

So from today, I’ll try to experience with offline creative hours. The plan is to allocate certain amount of hours every day for creative problems I have to solve. The then force myself to have email/twitter/facebook and messenger platforms closed for those hours and continue working on the problems for the specified time – even if I solve the problems quicker. Its a summer digital detox experiment ;) . Might even try some of all those new tools that are coming out to keep us from our information addiction like Writeroom and other of these tips. I’ll let you know how it goes.

So besides creating a bunch of ultra personalized behavior generated content and the pleasure of playing with data visualization – I am finding easier and more optimal ways to achieve life goals.

I have been working on a small social currency research project with Andras and Simon. The thinking is to make a social page rank for physical locations based on peoples online behavior generated content . In the same way that Google lists websites based on how many other websites are linking to them, our plan was to make a Google’ish algoritm that showed a coffee bar’s ‘Social Value’ based on a number of factors. (Checkings on four square, frequency of check ins on Gowalla, amount of comments on Yelp, mentions on Twitter and so on).

To make the dataset simple we focused on coffee places in London and created an algoritm that looks at multible data sources that we could access via APIs. We then do some black magic where we calculate a social currency value for each place. E.g. a place gets more ‘points’ if people have checked in multiple times on a location rather than just having a lot of checkins.

Next step is to open for our api so you can get social currentcy values for places in your own apps. Anyway, thought I would introduce the concept to get feedback, ideas or comments.

Check it out here; should work in computer and mobile browser:

http://coffeememe.com/

My friend Noah just posted about a new project he is starting called The Gallery Interweb. Its basically a bunch of links to people/sites who have tried to visualize the internet. It got me thinking of this old art piece that I saw and download many years ago. The quality of the video is pretty poor (as I downloaded back when 6MB was a big file :-). While I cant remember where I got it from, I still find it thought-provoking:

First check out venturehacks.com’s fine list on how to pitch your start up to angels or vcs: http://bit.ly/YGqoY . Then jump over to this blog post about how to use social proof to pick up women: http://bit.ly/cFltBc

As you can see, there is a fascinating rhetoric overlap between start-up pitching and pickup social science. Maybe its just because I did my degree in social science – but I feel when speaking about product marketing, we should focus less about technology and specific tricks for e.g twitter and facebook. While we are dealing with new communication technologies – its seems the core principles of human interaction and social needs is more or less the same as it has always been. Concepts like ‘social proof’, the need for ‘social acceptance’ and the ‘strength of the weak ties’ have been around for a while. It’s those core human needs and a deep understanding of that psychology we need to understand and discuss to make better products, marketing-tools and designs.

Or at least it’s a good excuse to read ‘The Game’ and expense the book as ‘social media research’ :)

Have a great weekend.

A national study out of SDSU shows that 57% of young people believe their generation uses social networking sites for self-promotion, narcissism and attention seeking. This is important for you as a product developer/designer because this emotional-need forms the basis for creating virality in your products. People don’t just share messages to be nice to their friends. Take a look at Facebook or Twitter, for instance – often status messages are equally about saying something about the sender, so the important question you should ask yourself is: “How will the message I want spread make my audience look cool or clever to their friends, colleagues or customers?”

A few examples:

1. Make them show they are early adopters. Make users feel important by giving them something to say about themselves, e.g. I am a user of this new cool software – it’s still in closed beta – but I can try to get you an invite.
2. Make them seem funny or interesting. When adding a  ‘tell/invite a friend’ into your sign-up flow be sure to spend extra time making your invite email interesting. You are essentially the ghost-writer for your users. Make them sound funny or interesting – they will want to share your story with more people.
3. Allow people to add their personal touch to your story. Users are more likely to spread stories that have their own personal touch. So leave room for them to add their fingerprint to your narrative easily. I guess my best example is to always allow for a bit of space when you do tweets – so people can add their own comment to your narrative. By doing that, you allow your audience to become co-senders. If that fails, then piggyback your message on to something entertaining, as a last resort, in case there is no other way to make the message itself cool to communicate. Just think of how OfficeMax have made you Elfyourself.com
4. Make people better storytellers by giving them templates or ‘guide them’. Facebook’s initial status update did this delicately by adding the ‘Henrik is…’ to each update. This forced users to write a certain type of update and allowed them to be more creative by working within the template of the ‘Henrik is…’ template. A new trend is to give people personal information about themselves to share via Behaviour Generated Content generation.

Any other examples?

@werdelin

Having been involved in the venture world for a few years now, I have noticed that boring startups can suddenly become wild success stories, not through any fault of their own, but because there is a major external change in the marketplace. Sometimes, a company that didn’t seem likely to be a homerun becomes one overnight because a new technology or product is being launched by a major player. A good example is Admob which was really a small player until the iPhone came out – and everyone needed a way to monetize their apps. A similar thing could occur with the launch of the iPad. Here are a few quick ideas on what changes the iPad might lead to:

• HTML5. Since there is no flash on the device I think many will use HTML5 to make app-like sites and use the HTML5-based video streaming format to get video on it. Currently HTML5 is supported on Safari (both computer and iPhone) and Firefox. The ‘non IE support’ of HTML5 has slowed the usage of that format, but what you can do is quite impressive. So expect to see much more advanced sites built with HTML5 – aimed at the tablet.

• Touch. I think a major trend will be ‘non keyboard ways of interacting with the net’. We have already seen eyescanners in airports, Wii-controllers and early voice to text (actually working: e.g. it works really well on the Google phone). When people try navigating the web with their fingers, I think it will be a ‘magical’ moment for them. This will lead to the user demand for (and acceptance of) more touch devices. From laptops over mobiles to kiosks. I think you will even start to see websites who will think of designing for hand navigation.

• User centric design product development. This is maybe not a crystal behavior change – but still a trend I think is very important (and will write about this later). If you watch the Apple video about the iPad you will notice how often they use touchy-feely words “it just feels right”, “the device changes to your needs” and so on. I think this is leading to a new direction in product development, where user centric design, user flow and visual feel will be considered much more important that it has been before (where design was a distant third consideration after tech and the business model).

• E-books.  I guess I think that the Kindle will still be my preferred choice for e-reading for now. There are really three reasons: 1. I am already set up with Amazon and many of the books I read are industry-specific so won’t be available on the iPad.  2. Battery time is really important for me, so the Kindle’s two weeks of battery is key. I really like that I don’t have to remember to charge the Kindle and don’t have to bring a power supply for it (think it might be a nicer way to read long texts too). 3. Kind of an odd one, but the reason I use the Kindle is because it’s not a computer. When I am on my laptop there are so many things that want to grab my attention that I very seldom get to read stuff. The Kindle allows me to focus on reading – without getting distracted by instant messengers, emails, links I want to check and so on. So while it might not be a Kindle Killer,  I think that the launch of the iPad will focus more attention on e-books and the digital distribution of books and mags in general. Thus, it will likely change the industry by educating the publishers, pushing the features and usability of other e-book readers and making books and mags a must-have-feature for other tablets..

Any other areas it might affect?

The attached graph from Alexa is really interesting on many levels. It shows twitter.com traffic for the past few years. Twitter started in March 2006 and although the graph only starts in 2008, it’s fair to assume that the traffic was flat from 2006-2008. So what can we learn from this?

1. There are two ways to get market-fit – both require lean companies.

a) you can either keep on innovating your product until you nail a set of features that users like today, or

b) you can keep your product alive for long enough for the market to change û making your product relevant.

Lesson learned: Keep it lean.

If you look at the graph it’s clear that that from 2006 to 2009 Twitter was a pretty crappy company by all traditional measurements. The service had very little market traction/traffic and people didn’t really seem understand what to use the platform for. They could have led the company along either of two paths. Had Jack Dorsey read Steven Gary Blank‘s book he might have attempted to change the product into something that had more ‘market-fit’ by using customer development . This is the idea that you keep your company lean and continuously iterating your product until you find something that your users really like and this results in great market traction. Jack didn’t do that. He kept the product pretty much as is. So if the product didn’t change it seems the market changed around it  – resulting in dramatic growth in the start of 2009. The secret to this change is probably found in various places: from Facebook teaching the mainstream audience about the power of status updates, via Twitter’s role on CNN during the Iran election conflict, to increasingly developers understanding the use of apps making Twitter available on mobiles, desktops and websites. What’s key however, is that Jack and his team kept the service alive long enough for the market to adapt to their vision. This could only be achieved with endurance and some kind of secondary revenue stream for the team who worked on Twitter.  So if you are doing your own new innovative start up, make sure you keep the cost LOW û it’s the only way for you to have time to change your product if it doesn’t work right away,  or for you to keep working on it for the market to change so your vision is aligned with the users.

2. “Invest (your time/money) in products that you enjoy , and with people you like to hang with”. (quote Martin Varsavsky at SeedSummit)

Lesson learned: Build cool stuff with awesome people (both staff and investors) because you are likely to be stuck with them for a while.

It’s very seldom that projects are successful from the start. If you look at most companies that today are considered hits, they all had long initial periods where people didn’t ’get’ what they were trying to do and more often than not ran for years with little traction. It’s stressful and emotional building a company, especially in those period, where your company narrative and product is not locked down. As an entrepreneur, you often fear that you will run out of money and lose respect from your peers/friends if you can’t make your start up successful. The truth is that your start up is more likely to fail than it is to succeed. So make sure you enjoy the journey. This is very much easier if you are around nice, funny, intelligent people with passion and empathy. Find those and the journey, no matter if it leads you to success or not, is better. Think of that, when you’re hiring/partnering, or choosing people to finance you. I don’t know the Twitter team and have only met Jack once. However, from what I read and hear from friends who know them, they seem to have gathered a fine selection of staff and investors that are likely to build a solid company as well as being nice to hang with. This is most likely part of the story that kept them going during the 3 years where few thought highly of Twitter.

3. Your timing is as important as your product - and people really dont know what will work a few years in the future.

Lesson learned: Don’t worry that much about what the blogs say about your newly launched product - they are probably wrong and things online can change very rapidly.

The web is really a great place on many levels. Small things change and suddenly a bad idea/company becomes a great idea/company. Admob.com was not really that big a hit – until the iPhone came around; many felt that Playfish could never build a real business as a ‘plugin’ to a site like Facebook – until they did; and Twitter was widely considered a silly idea when it came out – until 2009 when it really kicked off. Changes in the internet ecosphere create disruptions all the time – and companies become big on the back of those. So when people doom your product/business to success or failure, take it with a grain of salt. The web changes all the time and what was a silly idea one day can very easily be a great idea the next.

Any other lessons ?

@werdelin

1. install ‘read later’ (instapaper.com) in your browser. Its great for catching up on stuff you want later. Even better. Connect your profile on instapaper to your kindle – and get the stuff you wanna read packaged and send to you for days on the road when you are bored. (note that the new kindle works in most countries. sweeet)

2. buy this new device called WakeMate and start twittering or blogging about/in your sleep :) Yes I have already pre-ordered.  http://www.wakemate.com/. Curious to see if it works and how  my sleep pattens are. Its your first step towards making your own Felton report .

3. connect to your slingbox via their iPhone app. I know its expensive but watching  sling tv in your bathtub is so worth it. The app on iPhone works like a charm.

4. Read cartoons. My favorite these days are Danish friends of mine: wulffmorgenthaler. – they are kind of like Family Guy meets The Far Side.

5. Consider buying someone you know a SmartPen – and while you at it – come up with something to launch on their livescribe app platform.  http://www.livescribe.com/

Where is the innovation in online visual languages?

Was sitting playing around with Google’s new flip the other day when it struck me how little innovation we see in visual languages online. While the tech community have made great new tools and frameworks (Ruby, Django, AJax), we really have done very little when it comes to new ways to display text, images and video together in a compelling way online (this blog being a great example). It seems that in our move towards extreme syndication we have reduced content consumption to RSS feeds and a few embeds. This is really ashamed. Take a look at Google’s Flip and notice how all these intereting articles are displayed with out any soul or passion. Especially if you compare it to all the magazines on e.g. issuu.com. It seems clear that while we now have effective distribution of stories via rss, blogs and websites, we still lack lots on the design/creative side. Better visual formats. Web-designers and product managers still have lots to learn from quality magasin art direction. A few examples:

• Creating increased emotional impact with clever layouts. Take a magazine like Wired and compare it to wired.com. The magazine manage to create an experience where each article becomes more than just the text. The awesome design and illustrations- write blog post (Where is the innovation in online visual languages?
• Easy content discovery. Magazines managed to create a notion of flow much better than most sites/blogs. Allowing users to enjoy content that the DIDNT know they wanted.
• Make content consumption easier. Reading endless list of text is hard for the eyes and the brain. Magazine design breaks up the design and clever editing allow the user to consume tons of content with out getting tired.

Google Flip = Webdesign vs. Issuu = Magazine design

So here is a new years resolution for product developers and web designers. lets man up, learn/steal/inspire from the magazine guys and create some more compelling and entertaining online experiences and formats.

I think that building a new web based product is very much like making a nightclub. Its no longer enough (if it ever was) just to have a great sound system or a cool bar concept. Its about having the right name, at the right place, with the right doorman, serving the right drinks, with the right promotor and DJs. You need the right people to stay for the right time – and you need the right things to go wrong. In short you have 100s of small things that make up an awesome experience / night out. Building a web product is the same. Its not the name, nor the concept or the design. Its the 100s of things that combined make up an awesome web product. The concept, making the right flow, understanding how to attract the users and keeping them, making the site spin fast and in tune with the user ect.. For both product and brands the devil is in the details – and success is formed out of 1000s small great ideas.

As wikipedia was being build, ‘crowd sourcing’ became a buzz word and the worlds entrepreneurs started to dream up ideas where the work of a thousand small participations could out-compete major companies.  While this method for sure has been helpful for some projects (e.g. wiki, digg, openstreetmap) other projects like ‘user reviews sites’ (yelp, amazon reviews) are now getting to a point where obvious disadvantages are becoming clear. This is especially the case when used for review of restaurants, gadgets, hotels and so on. My three main concerns with user submitted content are:

1. One mans cool is another mans stuffy. Reviews work when there are clear and shared criteria for what ‘quality’ is – but that is often not the case. More often that not, I’ll check out a place online which will have e.g. 25 ’5-stars’ and then 10 ’1-star’.  So what does that mean? That the place is an medium place? Probably not. Its most likely the case that people like different things. e.g. some like posh up-market places where others find them stuffy.

2. Secondly I’ll find that peoples willingness to express themselves when they have experienced something negative far outweighs people with good things to say. So I tend more for ‘neutral data’ rather than getting concerned if a place have a few ‘bad experiences’. For example, a good indications of a good youtube clip is often more ‘most viewed’ than ‘most popular’. (especially if most viewed include a qualifier like ‘most viewed with more than 75% of the show completed’)

3. Cheating. Multiple examples have been publicized where a company hire a group of freelancers to trawl around the web and writing positive reviews of their products or places. Making, at least I, pretty skeptical about the validity of user reviews.

For these three reasons, which in my view will only become worse, I think that user reviews needs new development. This can either be with the introduction of the social graph (e.g. only read reviews from people you know), using more passive data collection with qualifies (see post about behavior generated content) to make the data more objective or we invent new methods to highly reviews form people who are more like yourselves.

I was in a meeting the other day where we spoke about brand loyalty. It got my thinking of which brands I really like and why. I thought it would be an interesting analysis of which core components was making me become a fan rather than a user of a company/brand/product. How do you build a company that people really care about. Here are the companies that came to mind, some that is fading and some that I use but don’t care about: (in no specific order)

Companies I love and why

- Amazon
because it works like clockwork
because they take difficult fresh concepts and make them happen (mechanical turks, ebook wireless devices and delivery, cloud computing)
because they are the real backbone of all the wonderful new 2.0 services
because they just keep growing and seems very focused on building a company that will be around for a long time
because they have so far never let me down

- Virgin America
for their amazing safety video with attitude
for their internet and awesome in-flight entertainment system
because their pilots often welcomes you outside the departure gate
because their staff actually seem to enjoy themselves

- Virgin Atlantic
because lets face it, Branson is just amazing (and from the looks of the documentary about him on the virgin altantic inflight system – his wife and two kids seems pretty cool too)
because the staff smile to you – even in economy (BA and AA take notes please)
because the virgin atlantic lounge in Heathrow is worth the hassle of getting a gold card (or getting someone to fly you on upper class)
because they have allowed me into the closed stewardess facebook group :)

- HSBC premiere
because their premiere service really works. I walked into a US branch and they hooked me up with a US account right away as they had all my data from the UK
because their private bankers respond quickly and seem they care
because their advertising in airports is clever and entertaining

- Zipcar
because they managed to make an complex sign up process and booking system very easy
because they noticed a twitter I wrote about them and reached out for a dialog
because the concept is good for the environment
because their iPhone app (while still not out) looks cool
because their attitude is cool. (their naming of their cars, the copy on the website)

- Vodafone
because you quickly get to a person on the phone when you need help
because their free summer roaming is actually super useful and not just a gimmick
because their logo and visual identity is amazing

Balsamiq Mockups
I love the home grown style of the company and its communication
I like the analog nature of their branding – it feels very honest to me

Now there are loads of other brands and products that I use every day but I don’t have the same emotional connection to. Lets take Facebook as an example. I really like using it, but I dont feel that loyal to the brand. If my friends moved to another network, I would probably not argue too much before following them. Same thing is happening with my iPhone, love it – but all the restrictions and stories about apple not approving stuff is making me less loyal – and thus considering trying out e.g. the HTC Hero android phone.

So what is it that creates this extra emotional connection? Think that the above highlights some of these shared components:
- Their products just works! (dont think you can brand yourself out of a shitty product)
- The companies seem to care about ME – as in Henrik not a user
- I get emotional connection to the look and the feel (or ‘attitude’) either in their product or their marketing material. (maybe brand marketing is not so dead…)
- I have a direct and instant dialog with them and they seem to listen
- They offer me an experience besides a service

Many years ago when I was doing product development at MTV, I got obsessed with the idea of allowing users to create their own interactive tv applications in flash and get them on our channels. The idea was to allow the best apps to be overlayed on top of the MTV channel and in a sense make MTVs graphical layer open source (with added SMS functionality). I think Nick Rockwell, being the upper smart tech dude he is, actually managed to get MTVs broadcast system to accept flash files – but at that time I had left.

Its therefore great to witness an slightly different execution of that project. This time, its the Allan and the player boys at Joost who have made it happen. The concept basically the same,  to allow any users to create any cool interactive active tv application on top of any of the shows on Joost via flash and an API.*

While the current twitter test app is pretty basic, its really only developers fantasy that is the limit of what can be done. I have worked on all sorts of interactive tv platforms from open tv, over liberate to MPH and it has always been the technology that was the limitation of that could be done. Now is our creativity.

Have a look at Joost Labs.

* Clarification: Interactive tv applications are in their core form all created with a mixture of a number of tech features; text/graphic overlays and animations, the ability to stop, start, forward, jump to, pause, change audio/volume track and the option for integration/mash up with other services.  On traditional TV, MTV and BBC seems to have been the ones who have managed to create to most advanced and innovative applications on e.g. Sky’s digital platform in the UK. However, no one has until now been able to create a smash hit interactive format – so its intriguing to see if making these interactive tv formats easier to do (by allowing developers to do them in flash) will spark some new thinking is this area. That said, maybe TV is just a passive storytelling method by nature – and all the interactivity and innovation will be around making communication and social interaction around the video more seamless.

I was reading Fred Wilsons blog the other day where he argued that twitter and facebook traffic would surpass google referral traffic in the future. The interesting part of that discussion is for me less about which of these companies that will win or loose out. The core question is really about how people will discover stuff in the future. How will people find stuff online.
The very first method of discovery was editorial. The web only had a few websites where people went to find ‘good stuff’. The web have since been very much centered about using search as its primary discovery methods. The web has essentially been spinning around Mother Google making business that was well disposed for this kind of discovery the first to prosper. We are now moving towards a time where new social discovery tools are being created. The initial wave of these tools were around one to one sharing, (e.g. send this to a friend) but are now becoming more sophisticated (e.g behavior generated content). Together the three ways of discovery matches the ones we have offline:

- editorial. you are browsing around in a magazine or a site and someone suggest you to read/try/do something
- search. you are looking for something in a shop or you ask google to find it for you
- social. you get a ping from a friend, a social trigger, that prompts you to do something.

These three categories can be divided into sub categories. For example, editorial can be either be done by a blogger or by a computer (like amazon) – but at the end of the day its a form of expert who recommend something. So while social discovery online is growing, its hardly a new concept and we can probably expect the split between them to follow the offline world – which is probably editorial 30%, search 35%, social 35%.

The new questions then become – how will the online tools look like that make people explore ‘stuff they didnt know they were looking for’ and what new formats will be effective in influencing those three discovery methods. In a video world, social discovery mean new content discovery methods like; personalized subscriptions, facebook connected notifications, auto twitter viewing reports, co-watching in realtime (join what your friends are watching), content exploration via friends viewing data visulazations – but all that is probably a worth a post of its own :)

A friend of mine just converted from PC to a Mac and asked me what  smart programs he should install. As I was writing the list, I thought, I might as well share it here on the blog. So here goes in no specific order:

• Numbu – for a simple twitter client
• Evernote – for taking notes and have a backup of them online and on my iphone
• Cocktail – for cleaning of the mac on a weekly basis
• FormulatePro – to sign pdf files with my scanned signature
• Freemind – for making quick mindmaps
• Skitch – for taking screen shots and sharing them quickly
• Firefox – for browsing
• Firefox plugins:
  • - Drop.io – for quick big file sharing
  • - GreaseMonkey – for installing all sort of geeky scripts
  • - FireBug – for doing quick changes to websites to explain changes or see how cool stuff is done
  • - Delicious – for quick bookmapping
  • - FireFtp – for easy and quick ftp tasks inside firefox
  • - Google Redesigned – for a nicer design of gmail and google apps
• Skype – for video and video calls
• Adium – for being online with msn/aim/jabber/gchat
• Google Quick Search Box – for general quick search across my computers and the web
• Dropbox – for quick/easy file sharing with girlfriend and freelancers
• Logmein – for quick remote controlling my mac when I am away from it
• TimeMachine – for doing local backups of my pc
• JungleDisk for remote backup of my archive and my weekly backup
• MobileMe – for sync of my settings across multiple macs and calendar sync to Iphone
• CardScan – for keeping digital copies of all the business cards I get and having an online backup of them
• 1Password – for keeping track of all my passwords (and sync’ing it with my Iphone)
• Iphoto – for general handling of my pictures
• Imovie – for editing of my videos
• ITunes – to listen to call podcasts and buy tvshows for long haul travel (as well as music of cause)
• Smultron – for the few times where I wanna read code – or hack up some html/css
• Balsamiq Mockups – for doing quick prototypes and mockups
• FacebookSync – for getting my friends pictures into “Address Book”
• GrandPerspective – for cleaning up my harddrive and figure out where all the harddisk went
• Opera 10 - for when I am on a super flacky wifi or gprs connection and still want to browse
• Seashore – for free very basic picture editing
• VLC – for when people send me a odd video format that nothing else will play
• ScreenFlow – for when I need to do screencapture to explain something. (think there is a cheaper version out there)
• Ical connected to Google Calendar – for getting a calendar for work, private and a shared one with my GF

Online services (I use many online services almost like apps, so they are included here)

• Gmail – for all my emails
• MotionBox – for cloud storage of all my videos
• Picassa – for cloud storage of all my pictures
• Facebook – for getting in touch with friends
• Twitter – for getting in touch with friends I dont know yet
• Delicious – for getting track of all the websites I find and like
• WordPress – for writing random thoughts and keeping some info about myself online
• Google reader - for reading RSS feeds and subscribing to blogs
• Last.fm - for listening to music I didnt know I would like
• Jigsaw – for when I want an 1-click music video channel
• Joost – for when I watch great TV

Think thats about it.

First and foremost congratulation to Dave Morin from Facebook. His place on Fast Company’ss Top 100 Most Creative list is totally desevered. Creativity is in my world way more than just design – and I salute Fast Company for celebrating that. Also a big thanks to the mag for including me on the list. While I am not so sure I deserve being listed along so many of the people I idolize – I am non the less incredible proud and thankful for being on it too.

Top 100 most creative in business: http://origin-www.fastcompany.com/100/

The last year or so, I have been obsessing over what I call ‘flow over feature’. Its is the maybe somewhat obvious idea, that you can not think of individual features or products in isolation, you have to think about how you solve problems in the context of the users ‘flow’. Now while that thinking is somewhat already embedded into the notion of user cases, I find that use cases themselves are often too specific and overlook emotional flow-based-insights that are important. We focus too much about solving the specific problem, rather than understand the mental space the user is in – and thus we might solve the problem but the experience is not fluid. Let me give you an example. The other day, I stayed at the W hotel in San Francisco. As I was stepping into the shower I noticed that the bath mat towel used when stepping out on the floor after showing was rolled instead of folded. This meant that I could tap it with my foot just before stepping into the shower instead of bending down and un-folding it. I then turned on the shower and noticed that the shower head had been pointed towards the wall, making the first bit of cold water that is always in the pipes go onto the wall instead of me. Finally, as I went out of the shower, I found the bathrobe next to the shower with the string tied in a way so I could just pull the string and the bathrobe would open instead of having to untie the knot. Future more the string was secured to the side of the bathrobe so it didnt fall down on the floor. Overall the W hotel had managed to identify my user flow and optimize each elements of the features instead of just seeing them as independent ones. The W have realized that a user is in a flow when using the bathroom features – making my experience much better as the features was adaptive to the flow.

I think when we develop sites and products, we often forget to fully understand the physical or mental flow properly of a user, e.g. where was the mouse pointed at last, what are a user  thinking about as they use a feature  or do they hit a page from the side door (e.g. google) or our frontdoor of our site. In order to make successful products, we need to increase this understanding – so we can wrap our technology more invisible around human behavior.

Made this twitter the other day in celebration of an excellent experience with ZipCar.  “Really impressed by zipcar. Their signup process is really slick – and its perfect for ‘living in a big city like london’ usage.” Now today, I recieved the email below thanking for that twit. Now, in a world where there are many options for consumers, I really love the way that ZipCar make me feel special.

I relelize that there are compeditors out there (even some that are cheaper I think), but its really consumer dialog like the email below that creates loyalty and, not to forget, vocal viral promoters. Even renting a car, is for me not only about getting some wheels in a given time period – its about the totally end to end experience; From booking easy online, to getting a nice working car, to feeling some what part of a cool brand. So again and for the last time (otherwise people will think I work for them ;-). Well done ZipCar.

————-

Hi Henrik,

Laura from Zipcar UK here. I noticed your enthusiastic post on Twitter/May 3^rd about your Zipcar drive in Mini Minaret. Hope it did the biz for you!  As a little gesture of thanks I am adding £15 in free driving credit to your account today, lasting for 30 days (we love our happy Zipsters!)  Hope you enjoy it however you choose to use it.

And yes, to your post point, we think we are helping people to overcome traditional private car usage and reduce car usage making London a better place to live and travel in.

Just to add: if you’re in Hammersmith, Southwark or in Tower Hamlets watch out for a slew of new Zipcars coming your way this spring/summer, making Zipcar an even more simple personal and business lifestyle choice.

Thanks again, and happy Zipping.

Kind regards,

Laura

Communications manager

Its really fascinating how the ‘real’ world and the virtual world is mashing more and more. Wrote earlier this year about how we are interfacing increasing with non keyboard interfaces and how I see that as a step towards the singularity. However, when I saw this trick the other day I realized that its the second cool augmented reality project I have seen recently and properly a sign of more to come. Marco is for sure always a step a head of everyone (and for that I salute you) but check his latest magic trick out in the video below, and I am sure you will agree that its really fascinating.

The second project I saw recently was from GE. You can find the project here and a nice video demonstration below:

There are two online movements that are really get me excited these days (especially when they are used together). The first thing is ‘behavior generated content’ – the art of making personalized content based not on a users active creativity  but on logging a users behavior and create a structured format.  Wrote a blog post about it some time ago – check it here (personal note: it needs updating…).  The second thing is data visualization. The art of taking data and structuring it in a way that makes the data entertaining or informational. There are an increasing amount of sites, shows and companies that make excellent use of this.  Here are a few:

• Mint.com (amazing company that slurps the data from your bank transactions and make interesting and informative graphs for you to enjoy – or improve your financial decision making with.
• CNN (cant help put think they made great use of their electoral board. They managed to take boring election data interesting and informative – see picture here:
• 
• Jonathan Harris. (Visualization artist. Amazing guy who did some really cool data visuals for the Moma Exhibition Creativity and the elastic mind. His talks on Ted are also really cool. Watch them here.
• Mashable’s cool collection of datavisual projects: http://mashable.com/2008/11/24/data-visualizations/
• Doplr did an super cool behavior generated content meets data visuals project at the end of the year. They are slupring my travel data from my google calender and send me this rapport. Note that I had not done anything else than giving them access to my travels. A great example of things to go. Click here for full image
• My two favorite blogs about the subject is infosthetics.com and visualcomplexity.com
• And…. since everyone seems to be heading to South by SouthWest.. Here is a cool twitter data visualization project – much respect to slash7.com who did this:  http://pepsicozeitgeist.com/

Expect to see great things in this field – I for one is looking forward.

I read the Singularity is near a few years ago and thought it was really mind provoking. In this book Kurzweil argues two main things (or at least mine major takeways):

a) development of tech is exponential and thus we cant really imagine what is just around the corner

b) the natural next step of human development is the convergence between man and machine.

Now, most people I speak to about this subject are pretty skeptical. Either they dont believe that the technology will develop that quickly – or they dont believe that people will adapt and feel confetable with such a close relationship with non organic enhancements to the body. What I dont think they notice is how quickly this new form of interaction between man and computer is happing. Just over the last two years a few core product developments has made me think that Kurzweil vision will happen.

It started with the fingerprint scanner on laptops. Little notice did it get, but it was really the first step in reinventing interfacing with computers for the mass market. Via the fingerprint, a user could  communicate their identity quicker than via keyboard and mouse. It was easy and convenient and most users found it quite intuitive. Since then several of the airports I fly to now offers eye scans as a quick way to make sure that you are allowed in the country. It makes my life easier and so I and many others do it. Next step in the consumer segment was the iPhone, that educated the mass market that touching your phone, tapping pictures and turning it around to see a picture differnetly format was really much more intuative. What is really happening is that the computer is adapting to humas. Its the art of warpping technology around human behavior and interaction.

In the meantime the military is already flying planes and doing operations with robotic arms 1000s of miles away from where the human are controlling these. Security companies are operating ‘biochips‘ into the body of their employees and the always clever people at MIT are taking mobile computing and user interfaces to the next level. (this video of what MIT is up to is a must see: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/481 )

So, for me at least, its clear that the path to a much closer relationship between technology and users have already begun. While I understand that people get concerned about the concept, I think steps mentioned above shows that its actually not that scary and makes our life easier, safer and more enjoyable.

1. Virgin America is an amazing company. Not only is flying with them a pretty unique experience – but one cant help loving the way they use technology to create a dialog with their (potential) users. Just noticed that they have a dedicated Twitter team. Impressive.

http://twitter.com/virginamerica

2. Balsamiq is another cool company. Besides being a really nice small software company and I love how a 2 man company mashed with all the latest web 2.0 support services can run a healthy business.  On their blog Peldi explains how he cleverly uses Twitter search as a lead generation tool. In short, he monitors any reference to what his product does – and then sends a twitter with an introduction to his product. Clever – and a sign of things to come.

Link to blog post