Imitation: Sincerest Form of Flattery or Bad Move? (Adopting Web 2.0 Patterns)

Editor's Notes

1. Offices in Chicago, New York, Boston, and Denver. And we’re hiring. Founded in 2000.
2. This is the “shock and awe” slide where we show you all our impressive clients.
3. Business goals are represented by people. They have their own ideas of what makes a good site from the sites they use on a daily basis.
4. Sometimes these ideas fit the project, and sometimes they don’t.
5. So my goal for this talk is to give you some examples and lessons learned when we’ve tried to approach these kids of ideas.
6. This example is from a large financial institution. In an effort to be “cutting edge,” the client wanted to use a “coverflow” style navigation rather than the usual tree navigation or list of files. This wireframe represents several levels of folders or directories – different from the typical tree structure.
7. Then this wireframe show how once you get down to the document level, you can flip through them to quickly pick out the right one. Anyone starting to notice a potential problem?
8. Here’s the actual visual comp, where it should be even more obvious. All of these documents look exactly the same – except for the title! This defeats the whole purpose of this browsing method.
9. Contrast it to this, where the model works very well. [Go to site, the-affair.com]
10. This actually turns out to be a pretty popular idea. This example is from a large insurance company. In this case, they wanted to use a cover-flow structure to browse some of the applications that are available to their clients. They all look the same too, which we pointed out. But no problem…
11. Our designers just made up visuals to go with each one. They look nice, but don’t have any meaning to the users.
12. Here’s an example where this approach make a little more sense. For each of the past two holiday seasons, we did a lot of work for Sears – Part of which is their Heroes at Home program, which supports the families of active duty military.
13. Part of that is the “Wish Registry,” where military families can register to receive holiday gifts from the general public. We wanted to develop a way that users could quickly browse through the families’ stories. This is an early wireframe that shows the concept of these “cards” featuring each person.
14. In this comp, which shows an evolution of the interface, you can see how a lot of information can be condensed visually into the card. This was actually driven by research. We found out that when users were deciding which family to donate to, They cared about the size of the family, the branch of the military, and how many wishes had been fulfilled so far.
15. Social media is everywhere. Here’s one of my favorite examples.
16. The parking garage has more followers than I do.
17. Obviously there are thousands of social networks out there, and everyone uses them in their own way. There’s also a lot of crossover among them.
18. Facebook tends to get the most attention with the clients we talk to.
19. Folks like a lot of things about Facebook that they want to incorporate into their applications. There are many examples of failures in this area, but I wanted to talk a little about an interesting project we worked on.
20. For many years Roundarch has built and managed the U.S. Air Force portal. It provides all of these services; each week about 400k unique logins occur.
21. We wanted to push toward a more “2.0” approach—integrating social media.
22. At the same time, the Air Force had banned social media for a few reasons. So we went about what could be described as a replacement Facebook, tailored to the Air Force.
23. Search aided by user-defined tags
24. You can see many of the familiar concepts to Facebook here.
25. And you can see how it fits into the “Personal Space” that each Airman has on the portal.
26. In true military fashion…. Isn’t that what we really all want—knowledge dominance and information superiority?
27. So there’s one wrinkle to tell you about. And this actually potentially changed the way the portal is perceived. We talked about parts of the Portal being kind of a Facebook replacement – But now we don’t need to replace it. It’s too early to tell exactly what will happen, but it really make the work related stuff more important.
28. Just a quick example from the same large insurance company we were talking about before. This shows a fairly simple, but useful social media tool within the corporation. It starts with a search.
29. … and ends with a profile. Again you can see a lot of the same constructs from Facebook, but some of them are very specific to the organization. The “Expertise” area shows employees who have been tagged as experts in a field. The “Reporting Structure” area gives some key organizational info.
30. This was the very loose outline of the original idea. Since Sears ultimately wants to sell things, the angle was that the information in the videos would be useful for finding gifts. What could go wrong?
31. The video part of it was inspired by all the great video content we see on the Web – both professional and not-so-much.
32. They had also seen some success in the previous holiday campaign with these celebrity vignettes about Christmas, but the budget wasn’t there this year.
33. And there were a number of other social media constructs thrown into the social media soup. Recommendations are particularly tricky.
34. Amazon really perfected this idea…but they screw it up sometimes too.
35. And Facebook picked up on it. Just because you CAN do it, doesn’t mean you SHOULD.
36. So we took all those challenges head on and designed a solution. We used a Google maps interface to place all the videos. We decided that there would be three questions that people could answer. We put in some filters for browsing the videos. We added a contest to encourage people to submit.
37. This is what the search interface looked like. This is the Wizard of Oz moment where black and white turns to color.
38. Then we attacked the browsing. You can see some constructs from YouTube.
39. And then finally the actual video. We have rating and commenting. Recommendations for similar videos. And the holy grail, gift ideas.
40. The way we decided to handle the gift ideas was to manually pull out any categories of gifts that were mentioned in the video, and match them up behind the scenes with actual merchandise. You can see that terms like “Bicycles” and “Games” also made it up into the recommended videos. So we felt like we kind of had it licked.
41. Let’s take a look at the site for a moment. Everything worked, it looked good. But there was one major problem. [Go to demo site – not available publicly]
42. Only 13 videos!
43. Not only did having only a few videos make it uninteresting, it also didn’t give us enough data to make the filters, tages, gift recommendations etc. work.