Interesting presentation by Stephen Anderson about the inter-twined relationship between usability and visual design. I’ve always agreed with this. Usability and user experience is about people and how they use the site, and whether it’s enjoyable. Most users comprehend and interpret a site through their eyes. Visual design. That’s before anything gets clicked, pulled, or dragged. You can have the best information architecture sitting behind, but any flaws in the visual design can blow the IA to pieces.

Working in the digital sphere and working with / pushing the boundaries of web technologies, one thing we often forget is that there are limits to what people can do on your website, for many particular types of sites. For these types of sites, you can’t expect your site to replace all other touchpoints with your users, but merely complement and enhance them. My wife, flicking through her IKEA catalogue mentioned “now I can see things more clearly”. What she meant was although the website’s great at helping her find products (good site navigational / organisational / labelling systems are in place) and inspire her by presenting different room styles, her experience then needs to go to the next stage further with offline interactions with the company.

To see products in more detail users will need to go in-store or at least pick up a catalogue. Catalogues are a different type of beast to websites. Websites are limited by a certain screen size / real estate and location-based restrictions whereas a catalogue, designed well, can be a leisurely browse over a cup of tea, or on a train-journey. And as more and more of what we do is online, from work to home-management, then I find that there’s more and more that I want to do offline. This particularly includes reading of articles or sanity checking my own work.

It’s so much harder to concentrate on something when staring at a screen. When it’s printed out, you can conveniently read it where you like, at your own pace, hold it at a comfortable height, you can mark it up and you can write all over it. These tasks are still, to some extent, not being adequately replaced by computers – though they may try. The more and more we do online, the more enjoyable things we do offline have become, and companies have to remember not to neglect this space but to take advantage of it and continue the experience through.

Particularly true to shopping for furniture and cars, to name but two.

How on earth do you teach your dog to do this?

Creating a bit of a splash in the digital world recently is a YouTube movie made to publicise Microsoft Office Project 2007 (according to the destination landing page). Posted on YouTube, it’s amassed almost 1.5 million views in a few short days.

The video is of a guy going down a giant slide, flying through the air (quite a distance) and landing in small paddling pool across the valley. There’s no question it’s fake. But the clever bit is how well it’s produced. Only those in the industry would be able to pick out how it was put together. It’s been done so well, that to many / the majority it looks unbelievably real (viral ingrediant #1). Even the debate in the comments between those who truly think it’s real and those dissing it as a fake is fascinating. Nice work …

Lots of factors contribute to a successful online presence for a brand in today’s clued-up consumer world. No longer can you say something on a tv ad (through a celebrity or half-naked model) and we’ll buy it – both what you say and you product. These days people – experienced, slightly-cynical, digitally-networked, and information-rich consumers – will do alot more research to buy most things. Probably the item’s value corresponding to the amount of research done. And researching is so easy. Thanks to the continual advancement of search engines, and the web as a whole, 10 minutes in front of a PC is enough to unearth all the bad things people have ever said about your product, brand, CEO, website, or service. That’s right, once it’s out there it’s there to stay. But it’s not just the access to more information, demos, (price) comparisons, professional reviews, images, and so on. It’s the increased access to people, those we know and those we don’t.

People have always asked for the opinions of their friends and family when researching purchases but the proliferation of instant messenger (MSN), internet telephony (Skype), forums, social networking (twitter, facebook), and articles and user comments mean real opinions are never hard to find. Even online playback of tv shows like iPlayer or on YouTube mean tv shows you miss can be re-watched on the web. In this type of consumer world the brands are faced with potential time bombs in every thing they do, customer-facing or not. Do something fishy and there’s always someone on hand with a camera phone and a one-click-publishing button just waiting to post it online and be the creator of the next big brand-bashing viral piece. It’s like David slaying (or slightly embarrassing) Goliath. There’s only one way brands can win. It’s ground-breaking and possibly controversial but they’ll just have to be nice to their customers …