Graeme Wood wrote in 2008 that we are moving from millions of computers connected by the Internet to one huge computer that is the Internet, and I’ve been quoting him ever since. There are so many devices, big and small, now that are all a window to the World Wide Web, and the number and types of those devices are only increasing. It’s a must to create adaptive sites that offer functional, contextually-aware, optimal user experiences for all the different web-enabled devices out there. Now it’s desktop, mobile, and tablet – next year it’ll be also car, smart watch, and fridge that we design for.

Responsive web design – i.e. making sure that a web site can adapt the layout to the viewing environment by using fluid grids and flexible images – is one good thing. But it’s not the only way you can or should create a contextually-aware experience, and the users of the site certainly won’t care if the site is responsive, or a separate mobile site. What they care about is that the site works and they can accomplish what they came to do on the site.

Karri Ojanen

But even if I have my doubts about how I personally would or wouldn’t like to use Path, last week when I set up my Path account I immediately noticed the several subtle but beautiful, charming interaction patterns the app features. They are perfectly suited for the iPhone screen. The interface feels warm and personal. The revelation of the key features in the app is spiced up a bit, not too over the top, but to give the user a reward for his exploration and to add some movement to the peaceful, harmonious general interface of the app. The central call to action is a prominent red plus icon at the bottom left. On touch, it spins out six smaller buttons for e.g. adding a photo or checking in.

It’s interesting to look at the intuitiveness of Path’s design (and all the posts that have been written to praise it) in the light of Nick Bilton’s post in The New York Times about why Google+ hasn’t taken off. Nick argues that Google’s problem is in its design and confusing UI.

I agree that something feels amiss with the Google+ experience. Nick thinks it’s because Google is a company run by engineers. They put code before pixels, and thus Google+ feels undesigned. It’s not beautiful.

But not so fast. While I don’t feel like I disagree with Nick’s thoughts on Google+, it’s good to remember that when the network was launched, there were several elements of the design, most notably the Circles, which were praised for the “un-Google like” design as Rian van der Merwe pointed out in his post in December. Rian sees a big problem with Path as well – he doesn’t understand what he’s supposed to do with it. I think that goes back to what I said about my own feelings toward Path in the very beginning of this post. But even so I think Path has a better chance of taking off than Google+ because by its design it feels more appealing. And when it feels appealing, people will want to play with it. We’ve seen that before. Some may even end up ditching Facebook for it.

Karri Ojanen

I’ve come across quite a handful of pages recently where there is no idea. There is nothing actually engaging about the page, and too much of the action on the pages seems to have come from people who are trying to tout their own work. Are any of the these pages actually working? What purpose do they serve, other than being a cheapo version of the old campaign microsite?

The constant rise of new tools and technologies – be it Facebook brand pages, Twitter, or QR codes – has made people extremely focused on the tools themselves and not the idea. Companies want a Facebook page because their competitors have one; agencies sell their clients the idea of using QR codes because that’s all the rave right now at SXSW. Everyone’s so focused on these technologies they forget that without a real idea for the content the tool is nothing. It’s the same as if a symphony orchestra became focused only on the choice of instruments they use and not the music they play.

I encourage everyone at agencies to take a step back and have a critical look at their own work. Is it idea-based or is it just about the exciting new technologies? Is it engaging or is it gimmicky? Then, in your next brainstorm, try to not bring up any specific tools or technologies for the first two hours but instead focus on finding and developing just the idea. After you feel like you have an idea, then bring it back to the technology, as it is as important to understand digital technologies as it is to develop big ideas.

Karri Ojanen

I’m enjoying, and highly recommend, this post by Rob Le Quesne in the UX Magazine.
Breaking Through the Glass: Designing Digital Experiences Beyond the Screen

A search on the Aeroplan site revealed that while my points would easily be enough for the flight and there are seats available, I’d still have to pay about $650 CAD in fees. I had been prepared to pay around $250 – $350 but having to shell out over $600 AND points doesn’t sound like a deal at all.

Well, it isn’t. Because when I did another search on Expedia for regular fares I found out Jet Airways has direct flights from Toronto to Heathrow for $669 incl. all taxes and fees on the same dates. The conclusion is that for this trip, my pile of Aeroplan points is completely useless. But the real irony of the story? The Jet Airways flights are actually operated by Air Canada, in fact they’re the very same flights that AC would charge me 60,000 points + $650 for, or $1030 in cash if I booked the trip through them. The reason why Air Canada is so expensive isn’t in official airport or government fees. It’s because they include a $350 “fuel surcharge” of their own under the “taxes and fees” section of the bill.

Those of us who are frequent air travelers are used to such anomalies in flight fares. But in this case it makes me doubt if there’s any sense in flying Air Canada to Europe, or even in me collecting Aeroplan points. Frequent flyer programs hardly give customers a really awesome deal ever, and for the most part I can understand it, but for flights to Europe I better start pulling my OneWorld card out more often, as Air Canada’s competitors seem to beat them by hundreds of dollars on flights to Germany and Finland as well.

For Air Canada, putting their own fuel surcharge under taxes and fees is a way to make the initial price of the flight seem eye poppingly low: $199 one way direct to London. But for the customer it’s extremely frustrating and doesn’t lower the real price in the end. In the European Union, regulations have been in place since 2008 to force airlines to always show the full price after all taxes and additional charges in their advertising. In the US, a similar law is going to take effect this year. Luckily, the federal government of Canada says the same will now happen here soon.

Karri Ojanen

It’s great, but there’s one simple yet utterly important feature I see missing on too many mobile site versions: a link to the full site. While it’s right to offer the mobile optimized version as the default front door when the user’s on a mobile device, the user may still want, or need, to access the full site. In the worst case, the limited content on the mobile site hasn’t been updated with the same info as the full site. I recently had to go to a company’s site to check the address of their new office, but the mobile site still had the old address. I had been to the full site before and knew they had the new address there, but as I was using my iPad the code on the site forced me to the mobile version with no access to the full site. And this was the site of a large digital agency. So I had no way to get their new address on the go.

My other recommendations for mobile site design, in a short summary, are these:
2.    Simplicity: single column layouts work best.
3.    Small and targeted: reduce the amount of content.
4.    Functional: present the navigation so it works on a mobile device; touch UI or not.
5.    Easy: minimize text entry and scrolling.
6.    Take advantage of inbuilt functionality: e.g. GPS/location aware, maps, make calls, save contacts.

Karri Ojanen

In this market, companies often compete with each other by adding more and more features into their offerings. This kind of “continuous enhancement” leads to products and services with more capabilities than most customers need. It’s what happened to Nokia, who kept adding new features to the mobile phone concept until Apple seized the opportunity to develop a simplified version of existing offerings and focus on improving the user interface instead of sheer technical capabilities.

In some industries it’s common that the process of adding new features to an existing product is a result of an acquisition – i.e. when company A bought its competitor B, it added some of B’s features to its own product – leading to layers and layers of complexity that don’t connect in the average customer’s mind while the company’s stakeholders who oversaw the process may think of them as logical business decisions. While more and more new features may initially help the company to sell more of their product, the hidden cost of the product’s increasing complexity is in reduced customer satisfaction and, thus, loyalty. Increasing complexity also increases the customers’ need for information, which leads to higher costs in providing adequate customer support.

When companies then market these complex products to consumers they often make the attempt to sell falsehoods with clever word-play. Broken links and barely functioning features are hidden behind superlatives about the product’s value and the real price of using the product is mentioned only in small print or not at all, if the company can legally get away with it. The subprime lending scandal in the global financial crisis is perhaps one of the most significant events of companies trying to compete for more revenue and market share in the midst of market saturation by false promises and fraudulent activity, but there is evidence of this happening every day in other areas of business. We live in a world where we already have everything offered a dozen times by a hundred different providers, and our perception of it appears to be that it’s made things more difficult. Or, everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy, as Louis CK puts it.

Companies would do much better by embracing two simple values – sincerity and simplicity. Strip away features to better meet the needs of customers. People are attracted to larger assortments, because everyone likes a little variety, but they’re happier with their purchases when they buy from smaller selections. Less is more. Truly great and innovative products do one thing really well instead of doing a million different things poorly. Customers don’t like paying for extra features they don’t ever end up using.

Marketing should stay away from false promises, unnecessary complexity and word-play. In this age of skepticism, increased connectivity and education, the attempt to fool consumers doesn’t get anyone far. People will not buy at all if they don’t believe the ads, and if they do and they are disappointed, they will blog, tweet and talk about their bad experiences, spreading their message to millions of others, sometimes causing entire brands to be rejected.

While earlier in this post I salute Apple for their vision in the mobile space, it has started to seem like the terms “magical” and “revolutionary” have become slightly overused in their advertising and product launches. And I despise the way how some companies try to hide the simpler, cheaper option that they legally or otherwise have to provide under several layers of disinformation about the more complex and pricier alternative. Savvy consumers will go the extra mile to get the service they need and in the process end up hating the company for its marketing tactics. The key to getting people to believe in your product is in believing in it yourself. If you think your message truly is sincere, chances are much better that the people who see and hear it think so too.

Karri Ojanen

Download and Installation

Having connected my iPhone to my laptop and launched iTunes sharp at 1pm EST, or when the clock hit ten in the morning in Cupertino, the first message that appeared on the screen told me that iOS 4.3.5 is the current version and there’s no update available. After I clicked again, I rubbed my hands together as iTunes informed me that iOS5 has become available.

The first attempt to download failed, but after that I experienced no major issues. The download took only about 30 minutes or less, while tweets started coming in from others experiencing longer wait times.

That was just the first part of the process, however. Next iTunes wanted to back up all content on my phone (as is standard with iOS updates), then restore it on the phone. This is where lots of people have reported having problems, as these articles show, and some have been left with temporarily bricked devices or data loss. I, however, had a relatively smooth ride again and another 20-30 minutes later, after a few set up steps on the phone itself, I was ready to start exploring the new and improved operating system.

Notification Center

At the very first glance before I began to specifically look for the new features I knew of I felt like not much has changed. The new, Android-like Notification Center doesn’t show at all until you swipe your finger down the screen. It feels very responsive and I like how Apple has added weather updates to it even if it feels a bit like they just had to do something different than Google. By default the Stock Widget has a place in Notifications as well but I went to settings to remove it right away as I don’t feel like following the stock market every time I check my phone especially at times like this. The new setting options for notifications are quite robust – you can choose one of three different alert styles for each application, how many items to show, etc.

Camera

My phone needs to use a pass code so I don’t get to access the Camera from the lock screen. There is now an option to turn grid lines in Camera, which can be helpful, and pinch-to-zoom gestures work as well. The biggest improvement in my opinion is that photos can be now snapped by pressing the volume up button instead of having to try to touch the virtual button on the screen.

iCloud

To have iCloud properly working requires you to not only have iOS5 on your mobile device, but update iTunes to 10.5, which I had already done on the day before, and make sure your computer’s running the latest version of OS X. That is if you want to have all your Apple devices sync with the cloud, and it obviously means even more time spent waiting for those updates to download and install. The OS X update took 2.5h to download on my Macbook and my otherwise speedy home Internet connection. Then, to use Photo Stream on your computer, you need the latest version of either Aperture, which is what I use, or iPhoto.

After everything’s set up, I’ve been happy with iCloud so far. Contrary to initial reports that the music part of the cloud service wouldn’t be coming to Canada, I was happy to discover that iCloud works for music on both my iPad, which I updated to iOS5 later at night, and my phone here in Canuckia. However iTunes Match service, which is what this article in Toronto Star pointed out as the problem piece for Canadian users, doesn’t seem to be offered.

iMessaging

While major attention understandably is on RIM’s BlackBerry server failures this week, Apple’s answer to BBM hasn’t seem to have launched completely without glitches. I’ve experienced that some iMessages are sent twice while others “fail to send” when they in fact do go through to the recipient.

Other, and Summary

Music, aka iPod, has a new icon and videos have been separated into a new Videos app. While it makes sense it’s annoying to have yet another icon on the home screen. The new Twitter integration doesn’t work perfectly with my contacts, as it was able to pull pictures for only three of my friends even though I have many more people in my contacts that I (and they) also follow on Twitter.

I haven’t really tried Reminders yet and I don’t know if I end up using Newsstand much. All in all, my phone and my iPad both feel snappy after the update and Notification Center alone made this update worth it.

Have you updated to iOS5 yet? What are your experiences so far, and what do you like the most? Have you experienced any problems? Please write your comments below.

Karri Ojanen

Jonathan Kochis and the rest of the great folks at Resolution will have me there to give a presentation on Village Life, an engaging online fundraising site I helped to design and build several years ago. And through that project I will also talk a bit about gamification, the process of interaction design in general, platforms, and social interaction.

The night is open to students, entrepreneurs, digital/creative industry colleagues, and anyone interested in exploring digital media from business and technology perspectives or looking for an inspirational space to work on a project. Doors open at 6pm and I will start my presentation at 7. Welcome!

The news about this magical panda bear started an interesting conversation in the office. Seeing how Google has, for most part, had a much stronger emphasis on engineering than design in the past, building services that are highly functional without polished design, Cosmic Panda and the recent Google Apps redesign party seem like an afterthought. So does design matter? What role does it play?

Engineering drives technology. We are living through another revolution much like the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries that will have and already has had a tremendous effect on not just a few products, services, or an area of products and services, but our whole society and economic system.

The Watt steam engine which propelled the Industrial Revolution in the UK and the world wasn’t necessarily so beautiful to look at and it wasn’t built by a designer, but a Scottish mechanical engineer, James Watt. Similarly, the key functionality of Google’s products wouldn’t have been built without engineers.

However, after the first wave of new innovation (in terms of technology), companies must look for something else to differentiate their products and to keep them competitive. I’m sure Google recognizes that polished, slick interfaces and overall design weren’t a big part of their work initially, but that they’re giving it a bigger role now.

James Watt didn’t build his steam engine out of scratch, either. Rather, he came up with significant design enhancements to the Newcomen steam engine which was invented 50 years earlier. So he was a designer, too, and not just an engineer.

In the computer world, I think many would argue that Microsoft’s products and the whole PC “model” have been based on a more engineering-minded model than Apple. Apple’s now more desirable because of the design they apply. Both a PC and a Mac do the same things, essentially, like the iRiver e100 and the iPod Classic are both portable media players, but Apple’s products are (starting to) sell more because of the difference in design. Because people find them more desirable, simply better looking, or because they’re, arguably, more usable.

It’s probably this chain where technology and engineering always seem to come first and then design, which leads companies and individuals think that design can be applied after. That it’s possible to create a technologically advanced product and apply great usability to it later. But as we know, it doesn’t work – engineering and design are inseparable and you need both to make a good product truly great.

The fact that Google’s done so well with technological innovation, with engineering alone (if you believe in that thought) so far doesn’t mean that they’re the best, that they couldn’t be beaten by someone else who gets design better than they do. At its peak in 2008, Nokia dominated over 40% of the global cell phone market. And Nokia were, in many ways, a very engineering-minded, engineer-led company, with their 150 year history deeply rooted in technological innovation and engineering. At the time, their products were ahead of everyone else. Their enormous success was built on the introduction of new technology, adding one feature after another, and the highly efficient global distribution chain they had.

When Apple came along, they didn’t invent the cell phone, they didn’t invent the MP3 player, they didn’t even coin the term ‘smartphone’. They weren’t the first to introduce the use of touch screens in cell phones. But they brought in new design, and… We know the story. The smartphone became much more desirable, thanks to the new thinking, some technological but mostly design, that Apple brought to the market.

While design alone doesn’t make the wheels turn at first, it does always play a role in the success of any product, together with technology.

Karri Ojanen