Designer Questions

Here's an interesting read from a large group of designers on their profession and it's perception...

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/09/05/50-designers-x-6-questions/

Is viral marketing dead?

Viral marketing: every creative weeps when client arrives and asks for ideas for a viral campaign, and here's why I think Viral very very rarely works for brands..

Too Rude
The vast majority of mainstream brands will never succeed with traditional* viral marketing because the content and approach needed for a viral campaign is in direct conflict with their image and objectives. Would Coke have distributed One Night in Paris? Would Ford have dared to distribute Star Wars Kid (Imagine being the digital creative selling that into a room of execs?)?

Million to One
Secondly, for every hugely successful viral there’s literally millions of dead ducks lining You Tube servers and inboxes everywhere.

ROI?
As a client the chances of marrying a compelling message, original content and then getting it to ‘go viral’ are so slim the investment can rarely be justified.

Near impossible to commercialise
The best virals are user generated, and that’s intrinsic to the genre. Numa Numa bought a cheap webcam taped it to his pc, did his thing and then uploaded it, no crew, no makeup and not even a Radio Shack logo in sight. Star Wars kid didn’t bother with Nike Dance Training or a special effects team and that’s exactly why it went huge.

Nearly..
When some genius discovered that dropping Mentos into a bottle of Coke resulted in something pretty amazing we had something very interesting on our hands. Coke initially went all corporate on it trying to distance themselves from the explosive fun, but Mentos went for the jugular and embraced the whole thing creating a video upload site. The result: Mentos got a huge amount of coverage and a hugely successful site. Coke on the other hand only got marginal success and only after doing a swift “Me Too” u turn in attitude

Who’s got the time?
We don’t have time for virals unless they truly are the best. We’re spending more of our time than ever online but we’re more task led: connecting with friends on Facebook or buying holidays or browsing the iTunes Store.

Wrong Medium
Email has become a spam infested business tool rather than a social one, people are using other tools for social activities and so the prospect of seeing an exploding whale in your business email account hold even less prospect then it did originally.

It’s just not interesting anymore
Virals were spawned from the idea that the internet was a dark place where you could find pictures and videos of anything if you tried hard enough. Not everyone could find them and when they were found they were likely sexual or offensive. They then got passed round like a dirty little secret. None of those factors exist anymore, everyone can find anything so it’s not exciting to be the one who forwards it on.


* I say traditional because in essence the whole web is viral, it spreads from one user to another. Facebook uptake is viral for instance. But marketing executives generally term viral marketing, email spread videos and associated campaigns.

Why Execs Are Stumbling in a New Media World

Stumbled across this article which paints a realy great picture of the troubles facing content owners and publishers.

Oops we did it again.

So this is how to completely neutralise any consumer benefit from a product innovation.

Did the telcos not learn from the Wap experience that metered web usage results in no usage at all?

From the Register

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/28/o2_unlimited_tariffs/

O2 is launching a flat-rate tariff on 1 October - sort of. Costing £7.50 a month, the bolt-on is being called unlimited, but in fact is capped at just 200MB.

The launch was widely predicted, but the low cap comes as something of a surprise when the competition (3 UK) is offering a 1GB cap for £5 a month, though it is better than Vodafone's limp 120MB cap on its £7.50 a month service.
Click here to find out more!

If you really want more data (O2 reckons only a laptop user would do that), you can get O2's Web Max which caps out at 3GB, but will set you back £30 a month.

Quite how both Bolt Ons can be described as "unlimited" when the only difference between them is their limits and the price, pushes marketing speak to a new low. But O2 points out that the caps are fair-use, and exceeding that will just result in a stern warning from O2.

BlackBerry users get their own "unlimited! special tariff at £10 a month, which includes pushed email and 200MB of web browsing.

Does anyone still use dial up?

The number of homes with internet access has risen by nearly 1m since 2006, according to the latest National Statistics Omnibus Survey. The figures indicate that 15.23m, or 61% of UK households, can now surf the web at home, an increase of 7% over the past year. Broadband is triumphing over dial-up, with 51% of households having broadband access in 2007.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Digital

Go read this over at iain tait | crackunit.com and rember it next time you get asked to build a screensaver.

The Scroll

When designing pages designers very often come up against dealing with the scroll point of the page. That being the flexible point on the page beyond which placing content initiates the browsers inherent page scroll. This point however trivial it may seem initially presents a number of issues with which the design has to grapple. Firstly content placed below this point is never the first thing a user sees, secondly a vast majority of sites require length pages to be able to accommodate their content and thirdly, in user testing it becomes clear that user can sometimes miss any content below the scroll altogether.

Long pages are a fact of life as designer has to understand and accommodate. So how can we make sure these lengthy pages do their content justice? Firstly I’d argue that a lengthy homepage is more problematic than a lengthy content page. Users a generally in a scavenging mode on a homepage and are likely to be less concerned with the whole page than they are about quickly identifying something of relevance to their task and acting upon it. Content pages on the other hand find users in a more stable state and more led by the actually consumption of the content on the page than they are by the need to scavenge another more suitable location. So where the rules about keeping business critical functions above the scroll the importance of this factor is contextual.

So how as a designer to you exploration full exploration of your pages? A news article for instance can cope very well with this exploration. It’s very content is linear, it leads the user from the top to the bottom. If the user comes to the bottom of the screen they are conditioned to scroll the page. This fact becomes obvious when advertising is placed with articles. These provide an experience ‘break’ and publishers find themselves requiring notes on the page to the effect of: ‘Article Continues’. Homepages have less inherent characteristics that promote full exploration. In some cases the actual task of designing for ‘above the scroll’ creates an almost finished page with little visual clue that the page continues below the scroll. This by it’s very nature inhibits exploration: the user has been visually conditioned that the content ends and there is nothing more to see, when in actual fact there could be.

Think about how you could engage users to explore pages below the scroll. Try not to ‘finish’ the top portion of your pages and avoid creating a visual full stop before then end of the content. Provide content leaders that cross the scroll boundary to emphasise that content does indeed exist below the scroll. Users explore pages by seeking out items that hint to their preconceived next destination – make sure you give your users these hints


And here's a link for some more discussion on this...
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/blasting-the-myth-of