You enter the name of the street that you grew up on, and voila. You’re thrust into an immersive experience. With you the star of an Arcade Fire video clip. Here’s a still from my version – you can see birds flying over my house! Then, write a postcard to the person who lives there now. The best ones submitted then get read out at a concert (ok I may have made that last bit up). But brilliant concept all round. A great track too.

Of course, you’re gonna need to download Google Chrome, apparently. But no worry. You’ve been using Firefox, and only Firefox, for years. But there’s no harm in a little “download another browser” action.

And hey, other browsers, like Safari and Chrome are really good. They’re just battling at the shorter end of the market share tail. They need a little help – but they just need a little help getting the word out.

As a marketing ploy, this is a no-brainer for the Arcade fire. They don’t really need to spread the word about this album. But they may as well. Especially if it’s for free. And Google certainly knows how to get the word out, from an advertising perspective.

But the real brilliance here is that Google. They’ve completely pulled off a viral marketing campaign wizardry. That Arcade Fire  eagerly awaited album was every hipster geekster’s top album for 2010, even before its release.  And geekster hipsters love watching film clips in HTML5! And, the best bit – the hipster geeksters are exactly who they need to be marketing to. A large psychographic that are far more likely to use more than one browser.

Genius.

At long last, we have another classic case study on a successful viral marketing campaign. Which is great – that “Will it Blend” example was starting to get tired and lonely.

WHAT’S MINE IS YOURS, via Steve @sammartino of Start Up Blog fame.

Download:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/fmndjtoozzn/38thdayofwinter.zip

Track Listing

Bird Song Intro   ~   Florence And The Machine
Rill Rill       ~   Sleigh Bells
Something Good Can Work   ~   Two Door Cinema Club
Dilly   ~   Band Of Horses
I Left My Love in Nagasaki   ~   Princeton
Conversation 16   ~   The National
Our Younger Noise   ~   Letting Up Despite Great Faults
Lorge   ~   El Ten Eleven
Indian Summer   ~   Riceboy Sleeps
Þau hafa sloppið undan þunga myrkursins   ~   Ólafur Arnalds
Romance to the Grave       ~   Broken Social Scene
Game of Pricks   ~   Guided By Voices

And while I try not to post about the “Next Big Thing” too often, I really do believe that this one is worthy of it’s “Next Big Thing”-ness.

Talk about a Game changer – Flipboard is an iPad app that pulls down your own stream of data from twitter and facebook (and eventually flickr, tumblr and other platforms too) and gives it to you in your own touch-screen magazine.

Check out the intro video here.

Billed as “the world’s first social magazine”, Flipboard removes any doubt of the usefulness of an iPad. Flipboard allows you to create your own magazine ‘homepage’. This can consist of 9 separate content topics – which you can create from your facebook account, or from various twitter lists.

I haven’t used the app myself, but my mind is racing with the applications of this application!

- You can browse images, read articles, even watch videos from your friends and follows.
- You can choose to show hide articles shared by certain users in your stream.
- Flipboard could serve up location relevant information, depending on where you are or want to be.
- You can asic interactions are supported – liking, replying, re-tweeting, etc.
- It even provides a model for publishers to get involved.
- All from within a simple and usable interface.

From what I’m reading, this thing is horrendously buggy right now. But by the time I can afford an iPad, I’m sure they’l have sorted those out. But oh, the possibilities.

It was September 2005 that I read my first RSS feed. It seems impossible to believe how far we’ve come in just five years.

Still reading? If you want to see more about this, check out the interview below between Flipboard’s founder Mike McCue and everyone’s favourite a-list nerd, Robert Scoble. (video via laughing squid)

Luke Wroblewski, via – Master user experience design – .net magazine

Mozilla Explains Why Firefox 4 Has Tabs on Top

Via Mashable

* Interaction design enables people to manipulate and contribute to/create that information.

* Visual design communicates these possibilities to people and creates affinity to them (desirability).

* User experience is the summation of these considerations.

via LukeW | 10 Things I Learned In Web School

It just so happens that there are a lot of similarities in the two.

My perfect role would be entitled User Experience Strategist. Or User Experience Director. Or something similarly titled. If you wanted to describe such a role, and the person required, it would include some of the following:

• Helps to define what the best internet prescence is for a brand, across all digital / mobile touch points.
• Translates a client business objectives into actual functional requirements – ultimately to deliver the best possible user experience.
• Documents website/mobile functionality, using UX deliverables like information architecture, user flows, wireframes (and sketches), functional specs and prototypes.
• Plays the user-advocate role in any project, an promotes user-centred design throughout the organization.
• Contributes as client facing lead on user experience strategy.
• Not a graphic designer per se, but with a love for (and strong understanding of) interface design and development.
• Understands the commercial reality, has project profitability objectives, and uses UX deliverables to manage project scope. Bases success on measurable results, including conversions and other website analytics.
• Working with creative and technology team members, to translate brand expression onto a digital platforms.
• Keeps on top of what interesting things other top-level agencies and design shops and startups are doing in the interactive space.
• Spends his/her waking hours trowling the web, experiencing great user experiences first-hand.

But that all sounds a bit like a job description. So let me summarise with a few online quotes I found, that describe it in ways that a job description can’t:

• “… makes stuff easy and pleasurable to use.”
• “..where timeframes tend to be condensed and RAD is the order of the day.”
• “To really drive a project to successful conclusion is it essential you understand the business, the product nuts and bolts, and be astute technically.”
• “Develop an ear for the little questions that all of your team members constantly ask, but no one ever seems to know how to answer.

For example:

Developer:  Why are we building this feature?  Who’s going to use it?

Project Manager:  I don’t know which fields should go on the page, so just add all of them.  Maybe someone will need them all.

Business Sponsor:  Everyone knows that links ALWAYS have to be underlined.

Marketing:  Can we change the font to 8 pixels?  I need more room for ads.

Architect:  Flex is the only way to implement that design.

User research can help answer all of the above.  You just have to be interested enough to distill each into the appropriate experiment (study, card sort, survey, review, etc) and deliver results to the right people at the right time, in a digestible format.”

(source: this post)

My conclusion? I honestly believe that this is a really important role that should exist in more places than it does at the moment.

Someone who can work between the creatives and the techs. Someone that can help move an offline brand into an online one. Someone who understands a great online user experience someone is being a passionate web user themselves.

Personally, this is where I want my career to head. This is what I’m passionate about. That said – if you think you need someone like this, maybe you should give me a call. I might be able to help out.

]]> http://www.ben-rowe.com/2010/06/16/user-experience-strategist-user-experience-director/feed/ 0 http://www.ben-rowe.com/2010/06/14/getting-started-in-endorse/ http://www.ben-rowe.com/2010/06/14/getting-started-in-endorse/#comments Sun, 13 Jun 2010 14:35:47 +0000 Ben http://www.ben-rowe.com/2010/06/14/getting-started-in-endorse/

Absolutely love the “First Time” UX on http://endor.se.

RAINBOW IN YOUR HAND

This book started as a personal project in summer 2007, and was soon published from a Japanese bookstore “Utrecht”. It’s a flipbook, but rather than seeing animation, it creates a 3D rainbow in your hand. Since being published it has been featured on Japanese TV, Newspapers, major news & blogsites like yahoo news, coolhunting and fffffound. This book won this years NY ADC silver cube.

illustrativo illustration blog, creativeinspiration: bananaramapajamallama: …