Facebook really has a hard time finding ways to transfer their vastly ad-based revenue system to the continously growing, and oftentimes exclusive, mobile szenario – which is very clearly reflected in it’s (jaw-)dropping share value. So the problem isn’t that facebook doesn’t work as a business model, or that it doesn’t attract as many users as before (yet, naturally, the network’s growth seems to slow down, too). The problem is that users are highly sensible to ads on mobile devices. Which makes sense: There’s lots of space on a website. Computer screens have grown to vast resolutions and a couple of ads just aren’t annoying anymore. They are an accepted part of any free webservice nowadays. Because while they certainly don’t add to the desktop user experience, they – if done right – also really don’t make it worse.

Switch to your mobile device. Suddenly we’re talking about a personal space that forces utterly different rules on advertisers, that I dare to sum up like this: “If your ad is adding value to my mobile experience, I will gladly invite your brand to advertise to me. If not, you’re out.” And there’s a big problem in this scenario for the social networks: Their added value is the network we’re using on a mobile device in and of itself. While any consumer brand can add value by giving us tools that will make it easier for us to buy things we want, or games that entertain us, the social network doesn’t do advertising for itself. It merely acts as an advertising channel, “sneaking in” ads. It’s very much a permission issue. For example: While I would definitely install a Maserati car configurator, happily inviting Maserati to advertise their brand to me, I would – paradoxically – be annoyed to see a Maserati-ad weaved into my Facebook-newsfeed.

At the same time Facebook is struggling to transfer their revenue system to mobile users, Twitter seems to be having similar trouble. It’s been causing quite some uproar in the developer community by, essentially, closing it’s API, thus making it much, much harder for anyone else to build services, apps, plugins, etc. around the popular short-messaging-network. Simultaneously, they bought the most popular third-party clients – to let them die. Both these measures indicate a clear path: Use twitter on the website. Use it where Twitter wants you to use it, so they can create revenue from their ads. While, of course, this makes sense from a business perspective, it is also a very dangerous maneuver. Because Twitter is pretty much perceived by users as a “free public text messaging service”. And it’s very success is based on mobile usage in the first place.

This ought to make for two very, very interesting case studies.

After some trial & error it seems to me that InDesign treats paragraphs as block elements, similar to HTML. Here’s what’s causing the problem:

In the first case, the image with the text wrap is overlapping the text box edge. Thus the headline’s box seems to be pushed to the left as a whole, resulting in the paragraph rule ending at the edge of the box. In the second case, however, the text wrap is placed within the headline’s box. So it only affects the text within the box, not the box itself – lest the paragraph rule runs to the edge of the parent text box, as intended.

It’s fascinating how in the mind of this 5-year-old boy there were no losers, just consecutive winners. There was no difference for him between being first or last to win, he just had fun playing the game. And, most importantly, it was perfectly honest. He was happy for everyone who won, whenever. And, magically, everyone just had a good time. All through the unbiased way in which our 5-year-old fun-commander led the game.

As puzzling as his concept instinctively seemed, it made more and more sense the longer we played. I will remember, and not get tired, to say this: “Now we have to win”.

It’s magic.

Now the awe-inspiring fact about the pebble is it’s roaring success. The inventors wanted to reach $ 100.000 – not that little money. But their assumptions on how many people would be willing to pay for their product were way off: As of time of writing the project has cracked the $ 4 million mark. It is the single most funded kickstarter project in the website’s history and amazing proof of the power of crowdsourcing. This is a lot of money that would be really hard to get on traditional routes. Try allocating those assets from a VC. It would probably take you years of pitching, refining the product, working on the business plan and general struggling, just to still be left to chance.

Not so via Kickstarter. You don’t have to worry about your business plan.

Which is a problem. Especially this case shows how tricky things can get. The product isn’t 100 % finished by now. It’s in prototyping phase. Yet there’s a 29.000 paying customers. If these guys haven’t done their homework, if their business plan is off even so slightly, it could quite easily explode back into their face. It’s one thing to loose 3 % in a $ 100.000 venture. It’s another to loose those 3 % on a $ 4 million project.

I still love Kickstarter, I just think it can also be dangerous. Just because it’s an alternative to traditional funding methods, it doesn’t mean that you can neglect the – still underlying – traditional business rules.

These numbers are mindblowing. I would probably kill* to see the spreading visualized by Jer Thorp, in Cascade maybe? Asides from the fascinating statistics around it, the video itself just deserves all that attention. It does everything right.

• The idea is beautifully simple: We bring you action.
• The implementation is spot-on: It conveys the concept of TNT and delivers on the promise.
• The execution is, once again, quite simple – not really more than a ~30 second theatre play with a couple actors and actually quite few utilities.
• And, finally, the online presentation, the youtube video, is so well-done that one doesn’t even realize that there’s only a couple people out on this square.

In my opinion the video is so successful because it does many things differently than usual advertising:

• It is honest
• It is down-to-earth
• It is relatable
• It’s equal parts funny and cool

There’s one very important factor contributing to the huge success that is not to be missed: The button. The whole thing would loose enormously if the play “just started” randomly. Only by adding the button (and staging that part right in the video) does the video build up all the tension, as it is often done in music, that is required to span the dramatic curve.
 
It makes me wish I would’ve been there.
It makes me wish I would’ve pushed that button.

After all, everything is done just right here, and that’s why it takes the internet like a wildfire. No social media strategy, no online marketing plan, no viral concept. If I were able to only take one lesson away from all of this it would be:

“Stick to the essentials: Amazing content. It works.”

* Or probably not. Come to think about it, I’m really not the killing kind of guy.

1. a lie
2. a burden

It’s a lie to call software “management” …

… because it doesn’t manage. It merely assists in managing, but that’s about it. There’s countless prime examples of “project management software” out there, each of whom unloads onto their user the same burdens to enter every action as an item for a project assigned to a client and team members who then bill their hours to a specific task so whoever is in charge can react (read: manage) if things steer off course. What these tools do is reporting. They don’t figure out how to rearrange the project to keep it on schedule, or on budget. They don’t call your client to get feedback on the latest iteration. They just don’t manage.

It’s a burden to make software assist in “management” …

… because, most of the time, the need to manage emerges from the software itself. I really don’t want to manage my e-mail attachments. I really don’t want to manage my downloads. My purchased software, serial numbers, authentication credentials. I have to do these things because the software doesn’t do it for me. What I want is to access the data when I need it.

As so often …

… the problem contains the solution: Instead of “giving me more options to manage” stuff, manage it for me. Take the burden off of me. Reassure me that my data is safe, accessible and reusable by other software (as in: “for further processing” and ”switching to your competitor”).

The art of management is to steer things so that on the inside everything is working smoothly and on the outside no one realizes that any management actually occured.

The solution …

… unfortunately, I also do not have. But I’m pretty sure that whoever figures this “management problem” out will jumpstart us into a new age of digital living. An age with more “getting things done” and less “managing them”.

In impressive self-critisizm they also reported their failure to turn the stunt into profit – a mere € 600 came in through ads.

Due to the rigorous reactions of prospecting customers the team actually tried to get the table manufactured, but couldn’t find a hardware manufacturer to offer a fair deal.

They remain as a sympathetic, clever and ambitious group of designers and are left with a nice christmas party off the returns and many valuable lessons learned.

Of course, you say. And I agree. Yes, touch requires a different approach to interface design. It requires new doors to be opened for us people to interact with our data. And that’s just as awesome as the touchy-thingy itself.

But there’s a fine line. A line that should not be crossed. And that line is my non-touch-desktop-computer. GMail finally launched it’s Offline Google Mail Chrome Extension. And it’s great to be able to go through my E-Mail offline. To write up a draft I want to send later. To have offline access to important information. And I bet every tablet user loves the interface. Because it’s really touchy-friendly. The exact same thing goes for the new Chrome Home Screen. It’s been revamped, and I get how the new design and behavior is just awesome on any touch device.

But my desktop computer, and my laptop for that matter, do not respond much to the touchy-thingy. And so I am left with interfaces that actually slow down and complicate my workflow. Granted, the GMail web interface isn’t the most beautiful in the world (I most certainly hope the Google UI revolution spreads over to it soon), but it offers lots of powerful ways to interact with. It makes it easy to work fast. Which the offline GMail app does not. Quite the opposite, it sacrifices efficiency for touchy-thingy-compatibility-ness.

Now, just to make this clear: I’m not against touch-optimized UIs. Not at all. I think they are necessary and important and sooner than later any software will need to offer a solid and efficient touch-interface. But it cannot replace the classic mouse & keyboard oriented UI. That’s just stupid. A touch device doesn’t have no keyboard because it’s more efficient. It has no keyboard because it needs to be small and portable. It doesn’t have no mouse because that makes working so much more convenient, it has no mouse because dragging along a mouse at all times would just not be very practical. And also make you look like a serious geek.

And I’m not even saying that there cannot be a middle ground. While maybe some applications can make it and have the “one interface that does it all” (whis is much, much harder to do as one might think, because it forces lots of compromises on the UI and it’s functionality while also adding a lot of complexity to the app itself), I think in the meanwhile there should be some kind of a choice beyond “Will I further use this software or not?”. So if you optimize for touch, please, do not automatically disregard the rest of us. There might not be a mouseover state on tablets, but that doesn’t mean that a mouseover state hurts for us mousey-people. Popups may make a lot of sense on a touch device, but just scrolling around with my mousewheel or keyboard makes me giggle in joy and, more often than not, shed the one or other tear of efficiency-induced bliss.

So bring on your touch-UIs, I will embrace them wherever touching I am. But, for the sake of my workflow and speed, do not castrate my mouse & keyboard input devices.

Please?

The point of no return

I mean, come on, that thingy didn’t even have copy & paste. Plus, this maddox-blogpost read like a warm and comforting voice of reason above all the “I need an iPhone – it’s so new, and shiny, and it’s an iPhone, so I need one!”-craze that was going on. So there I was, in the midst of an intrapersonal struggle: The graphics designer in me went full-on iPhone-crazy. He liked the shinyness. The buttonlessness. The being-an-apple-device-ness.

But he was not alone to decide. Opposing his hypish enthusiasm was my inner geek, who loathed all things shiny. Who dismissed all things buttonless. Who questioned all things apple-ish. It was a long, exhausting fight. The Nokia N95 also looked great. And it had, definitely, tons of features rendering the first iPhone a laughable toy for people naive enough to be paying test subjects in the introduction of an untested technology. So, naturally, my geekish side had the upper hand, and I got myself a glorious Nokia N95 8GB.

Hello, my new friend

And, boy, did it serve me well. For the past three years I didn’t miss a feature. For three years my “clumsy” Nokia could do everything any other, revolutionary, new, shiny smart phone could do. The iPhone 3G added GPS – my Nokia already had that. iPhones went all crazy for their accelerometer, I never even used the one my Nokia – naturally – also had. People started to mock my Nokia beauty, but they couldn’t get to me. The last laugh was on me, for the N95 was a workhorse and it did whatever I would tell it to do. Plus, it was indestructible.

I dropped it from various heights, exposed it to rain and humidity and sunlight and winterish freeziness and what-have-you. The N95 was totally unimpressed with every danger I exposed it to, while smartphones left and right had all kinds of firmware problems, update trouble, connectivity issues, broken screens and general “of course it breaks easily, it’s supposed to be new and shiny, not robust”-nessish glitches. Plus, the Nokia actually had that much overrated thing formerly known as battery life, which for modern day smartphones translates to battery countdown, and is nothing but embarassing. Of course one could deactivate GPS, Bluetooth and WiFi, turn the brightness way down and thus extend the battery life to up to a whole day – while her fancy new device was stripped of all the features she had bought it for in the first place.

The way of life, plus your appearance in front of clients

But things have changed. Now, I am a self-employed graphics designer specializing in user experience design and, amidst other funky machines, mobile devices. While that certainly didn’t lessen my trust in, and happyiness with, the N95, it did become kind of an image-issue. At customer meetings it just felt weird to be talking about usage paradigms and usability patterns for those high-tech-devices, and in the next second throw clumsy N95 on the table. It kind of like felt as if I were a Maserati dealer driving a ’98 Volvo.

So something had to change. And after much consideration and opinion-switching and comparing and those thingies I decided to get the iPhone 4. And I would love to tell you that I have never looked back. But, as a matter of fact, I already miss the clumsiness of my beloved Nokia.

Do as we demand or, you know, screw you!

At least the N95 required nothing but a SIM card to be inserted and boom – one was able to use the phone he bought. Well, of course, you may think. Not so much with the iPhone. Please insert a SIM card. Now, please connect to iTunes. What the hell? Why do I have to connect my phone to iTunes? I kind of understand the link between iTunes and the music on the iPhone. It inter-promotes both technologies and makes things much easier to handle for apple. But why, in the frickin’ name of whatever-god-you-pray-to, can’t I even make a call without linking a device to a completely unrelated software on some other device that has got nothing to do with making phone calls whatsoever?

That’s stupid.

It’s brand attention, and we will make you have it

A couple days ago, when I would be walking around Vienna with my good old Nokia, I would be able to walk, watch traffic and write texts at the same time. It was easy, because I knew where those keys were and how often I had to press them to get whatever character I wanted. Damn, sometimes I could write a text without ever looking at the device. Which is a great advantage in a lot of situations, like walking around town, or subtle note taking in a meeting, or what-have-you-kind-of-situation where it would be helpful if one could pay attention to something else than only the device in their hand.

Which is quite simply straightforward impossible with the iPhone. Not only does one need to switch to different keyboard views, but there’s about absolutely no realistic chance to ever get the muscle memory required to type a message without watching your every single step.

That’s annoying.

Please do not leave home without some cable

Plus, a subtitle: Because cables are totally cool accessories to carry around.

Sometimes I visit my parents in the countryside over the weekend. I used to charge my phone prior to leaving. Then, when I got back three days later, I would charge it again, and life was good. Now, whenever I leave my apartment, I have to make sure that the iPhone is somewhat charged. I can, literally, watch the battery status go down percent by percent when I’m actually using the device for anything else but showing off how beautiful it is (which, and that’s not up for discussion, it absolutely is). Battery life is non existant, and I don’t care if your damn battery life expectation tables claim differently, Steve. Your tables lie.

That’s really annoying.

Your technology is useless to us, even in our own device

I am a picture-taker. I like to snap photos. And it’s great when the phone can do that, because one doesn’t need to carry around a camera. With my N95 I used to make a quick snapshot and then grab it from my Mac via Bluetooth. That process of transferring any file on the phone to wherever I wish on my laptop, or vice versa, took a total of about 0.3 seconds. It was seamless and worked every single time. No extra equipment was necessary and I could do that even in the deepest cave with no reception whatsoever. As long as both devices had battery life left I would be able to toss files around between them like school children are throwing stones at each other.

Now, the iPhone has bluetooth, too. Of course it does, it’s fancy and new and so very shiny. Just there’s a difference to every other bluetooth-device on earth: Apple doesn’t allow data to be sent to, or retrieved from, an iDevice via bluetooth – which renders the battery-sucking technology utterly and completely frickin’ useless, save for the connection of a wireless headset, which makes you look like an idiot (bluetooth-headset-idiot-lookingalike-ness totally iPhone-unrelated, just sayin’). The only way to get a file to the iPhone is through a network connection.

Isn’t that great? I have two devices, placed right frickin’ next to each other. There’s a file on device a, and I would very much enjoy to transfer said file to device b. Naturally, I prefer to use the most low-profile connection mode, which happens to be bluetooth in this case (I’m ignoring infrared out of sheer disgust). But we’re living in the 21st century. And 21st century people are all fancy and stuff. So how do we go about that file transfer thingy? We establish a network connection on device a. Then we establish a network connection on device b. Next thing we use some kind of software on device a to get the file out, and another piece of software on device b to get the file.

It’s like living next door to your girlfriend, but her father Steve demands you take the bus to town and then get back with the train every time you want to visit her – because, fuck you!

That’s just impolite.

The outlook – my dark, sheepish future

Of course, now there is no way back. I will not give up. I will not be defeated by some piece of technological apple thing. My will is strong, and so are my nerves. Bring it on iPhone!