I don’t really think of myself as a very active writer, as evinced by the general lax publication schedule I am on here. Despite feeling somewhat conscripted into the process, after getting my advanced copy I’m really glad I agreed to do it. The process was actually pretty fun, and reading some of the co-authors material was very eye-opening.

I would really encourage anyone new to the industry be it print, digital, industrial, advertising or any other agency read through this. The chance to gain that much perspective from that many people is amazing. There certainly wasn’t a book like this when I was coming out of school.

I have to give credit to many of my Gorilla mates as I posed this exact question to them and used that exercise as a primer for writing my chapter. Without some of their insights I wouldn’t have come up with half of the points I did.

I was incredibly saddened last week to receive an email from a friend of mine letting me know that Hillman passed away on April 18, 2012.

I hadn’t spoken to Hillman for a few years, so news of his passing came as a shock to me. During key moments in my creative growth I would call him and he was always happy to dispense advice. I was very lucky to be able to count on him for sound guidance.

I came into Hillman’s studio at a turbulent time for him creatively speaking. At the time I didn’t get it, but he was struggling with the design industry ethos, and was looking towards the transition into film. Ten years later I can say that I understand just where he was at. Probably not to the same degree, but it was valuable for me early in my career to see someone grappling with an industry that constantly pulls on creative integrity. It was valuable, especially now, for me to see someone interested in chasing passion, not dollars. Especially in the era we live in today.

Thanks for all you did for me Hillman. Especially all of the doors you kicked open.

Very proud of the work coming out of Gorilla, its great to see all the hard work of the team there coming together.

After content is in better shape I’m going to spend some time on the UI of the home page. Not really satisfied with where that is.

More to come.

As you can tell, I redesigned the site, I took the opportunity to replatform from Textpattern to WordPress. I loved Textpattern when I started using it, and it served me really well. There’s a part of me that will always love it’s spartan approach, something WordPress certainly is not.

That said, I’ve moved away from the technical side of things over the years. I needed a platform that was going to support my needs and not force me to do a lot of what TXP required.

Some Thoughts on the Whole Process

Migration was easy at first, but the finer points of getting all of my legacy content squared away was a real pain considering I don’t post all that much. No surprise there, it was what I expected and I’m sure I’ll be mopping up to that end for weeks.

As a platform, WP has come a long way. It’s far more advanced than what I remember, and not having to do a ton of apache config work was a real plus, I just don’t have the energy for that anymore.

I wanted a platform to showcase the creative work, that was really my impetus for the switch. Posting in TXP was a bit of pain, so I went with Allan Cole’s Autofocus Theme as the backbone for the site. It’s still in need of a fair amount of customization to fit my needs, but it’s a good start. Allan does awesome work and at $25 the pro version is an absolute steal. Every single time I thought of ripping the theme open and customizing the crap out of it Allan had thought of some feature that got the basics in place. Cheers man, if we ever meet, I’m buying some beers.

One thing I will mention, is I will dearly miss the supportive and very resourceful TXP community. Having prowling WP forums for answers for six weeks now I can say I wish the same caliber of people were on WP, just not true. I’ll miss you guys. WP is awesome, I’m happy and super impressed, but I’ll always love the stripped down scrappy nature of TXP.

A Note on SEO

Some of you may be coming to the site via 404 since I relaunched. Yes I realize it’s best practice to have the SEO equity transitioned to the new site. I didn’t have that much anyway, and it’s a pretty small site, didn’t feel it was worth the effort. Google will pick it up in due time. SEO was never the objective anyway.

I’ve been involved in a store launch over the past few weeks with a very brand conscious client, so much so that they’ve gone through at least two brand agencies with top flight client lists.

They are also very plugged in to the power of social media, and use it better than most.

During the creative process as we were putting all of the various social elements in place with the new store – namely our handy like button, we lamented the fact that as great as Facebook is, it’s brand doesn’t really play well with this particular aesthetic.

What do we do? Start diving into Facebook usage standards to see how closely we can mesh to two together without getting in trouble? Or do we let the Facebook bits run roughshod over the interface with a very brand focused group?

The answer is neither. Sort of. As much as the Facebook Like button sticks out, in this case letting it do so is an asset. Facebook functionality and recognition in context of the whole interface works to the advantage of the client. Altering appearances for the sake of brand in this case would take things a step back.

Granted the like button footprint is pretty small, if it were larger it might be a bigger issue. But even if it were a much bigger piece I’d still make the same argument.

It’s a great company that knows how to build and knows how to use technology. They’ve got a top notch design team there, but really what set them apart in my mind was the ability to design smart and build smart. The world already has enough agencies that design well and don’t have a clue about technology. I wasn’t about to join one of them.

On top of all that, it’s an e-commerce focused company. There aren’t many shops out there really qualified to do that type of work. Check them out at Gorilla Chicago

I’m an Apple user, but the closed nature of their philosophy detracts from the experience. That’s precisely the reason that the much hyped Droid launch has me pretty excited. I’m not huge on Motorola, they’ve done well enough in the past, my real excitement is centered around devices deployed with Google Android. Sure there have been others, but this is easily the most hyped to date.

The community based development of Android is really going to put the heat on Apple to keep up eventually. I was a Safari evangelist when it first came out of Beta, but frankly, with the extensions Firefox offers Safari is weak by comparison.

Who knows how this will all shake out, but the handheld wars are here for sure. Things are going to get very competitive in a hurry, and for those crafting mobile experiences, it’s going to get a little crazy.

The competition will be a great thing, although there will no doubt be some growing pains. We were all using Razrs a scant five years ago. In another five everything on the market today will look foolish.

To credit Apple, they’re still way ahead, and no doubt have some very slick moves on the way. I’m just glad to see some viable competitors rising to the challenge, it’s good for everyone.

I recently received an email from Washington Mutual about the upcoming rollout of their services on Chase.com. And from what I read, I’m not very happy. The email I received was pretty unclear, will I still have the same capabilities? Do I need to gather all of my payee accounts? Are you keeping the same servers and just switching a logo and dns entry? (Normal people don’t ask that question.)

Why I Chose WaMu in the First Place

I’ve been a pretty loyal customer of Washington Mutual for about seven years. I first began banking with them while I was an intern prowling the streets of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. WaMu won my substantial ($200) account balance based on the following:

• They had a branch right by the train station on Canal and Broadway. I could get cash pretty easily to pay my rent. My landlord wanted cash.
• They weren’t going to fee me to death. They acknowledged they made no money on my checking account. They relied on the hope that I might apply for a mortgage or deposit account in the future.

Why I Stayed With WaMu

At the time I signed up, the online banking UI for WaMu was good enough, not great, but I wasn’t paying many bills (that weren’t in cash) those days. So I wasn’t that concerned. Fast-forward a couple of years, and I was paying a lot of bills, and WaMu had changed their online banking experience – a lot.

The UI took a little exploration to get used to, but after a while I was very satisfied. Someone had obviously put a lot of thought into my needs before wireframing this whole thing out. Again, not perfect, nothing ever is, but I can safely say that my confidence in their online banking experience as a best in class experience was what kept me there so long.

Enter the Chase Acquisition

Discussions about shareholders and taxpayer dollars aside, I was not happy about the Chase acquisition of WaMu. Not because I felt I would get an inferior product, but because I was that attached to the WaMu conception of online banking. As long as my experience was as good or better, I could have cared less what logo was on it.

All WaMu online account holders just received notice that as of 07.17.2009 all WaMu online accounts will be rolled into Chase.com. While it was probably naive to think anything otherwise would happen, I’m curious to see how this all plays out.

People are resistant to change. Anyone who has spent time creating for any interactive medium knows how true that really is. Once people have an experience they are satisfied with, they’ll do anything to protect it.

I’m hopeful that the UX people involved in Chase.com operations did as good as the people at WaMu. If anything this is first hand evidence of an occasion where a solid experience defines more of the brand than any kind of marketing.

My wife and I found navigating the ancient streets of Barri Gotic and El Raval challenging but fun. It was really great time using some of the wayfinding methods mentioned in the book, and being self aware of when I was using a particular method. Not to mention pestering my wife about it. She was sure glad I read that book.

A few days later my wife and I packed up our bags for home and hopped onto our flight that would take us to a connection at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport. From a findability perspective this was a total disaster. We had limited time to make our connection, and no experience whatsoever with these surroundings. We taxied very close to our connecting gate, so I figured it was not an issue. When we landed we were immediately shuttled by bus all the way to the other side of the airport, unloaded, and left to hope for the best. At every turn we were confronted with duplicate, inconsistent and contradictory signage. We were far from our gate with little time to spare, and quite frankly guessing where to go as we sprinted to our flight.

I would say this was due to our fatigue at the time, but the fact that crowds of travelers were scratching their heads in confusion at every turn, doorway and staircase tells me we weren’t alone. Going through both customs and security we were told to get in a line contrary to what the signs led us to believe.

In the end, we made the flight back to Chicago, but just barely. I can’t say I was very impressed with the gauntlet we had to run under pressure. These days missing any flight usually means a huge helping of misery. They didn’t do things this way at Heathrow.

Granted, the airport as it was conceived and designed probably could never have anticipated the stringent security the French have in place today, and it was pretty obvious that some of the discomfort in this process was a necessity. I’ll give the security folks their due, they are pretty thorough. It’s much easier to overhaul a website or piece of software than it is a massive building complex that sees 60 million physical visitors a year. There is no development environment for something on that scale. All of that aside, I think there is a handful of things that could be done to make the process a lot smoother.

• Travelers coming in on our flight were left with little to no instruction. We were just told “You are being transferred by bus.” Transferred where? A little context would have gone a long way. “All passengers will be transferred by bus to terminal 2D so they can go through French customs and airport security before going to your connecting flight.” would have helped. It’s not hard, print it on an index card so the flight staff can get that correct.
• The terminal and gate numbering in CDG is so odd as to be deliberately confusing. Like any major airport it’s going to expand. The system needs to be scalable. Splitting a terminal into two buildings with a backwards network of buses is going to confuse people.
• Consistent signage in the right place. Almost every turn forced me to ask – is this right? I shouldn’t have had to ask this question even once. Buildings take some time, signs don’t.

When I can’t find what I want on a shopping site, I just shop somewhere else. When I can’t find what I want in an airport I might get stranded. When I can’t find what I need in a emergency I might get hurt or worse. The only wayfinding method we used in Paris was exhausted guessing, panic and instinct. Morville forgot those in his book.

I’ll be doing what I can to avoid CDG from here on out.

Every once in while, the cheap route does just fine. I’m not one to accept parity, but sometimes you have to embrace the path of least resistance.

I just finished up a very short task with a non-profit client who was interested in some type of city/state/zipcode locator. Orgs in the non-profit sector are always concerned with the bottom line, and although that can be frustrating at times, in this case it seemed to have worked out.

Here are the issues we had to overcome:

• Providing a list of locations was literally going to involve tens of thousands of records. There’s anywhere from two to fifty in every town in the U.S. It’s doubtful the client could have delivered their end of that in a reasonable time frame.
• There just wasn’t room in the budget to get into complicated server apps and development APIs that would produce a “self-hosted” solution.
• User experience for this client has been a real struggle. If we couldn’t lead them to water very quickly the process would get out of control in a hurry.

Now I am never one for the bootstrapping methods. I hate them and I think they are the cheap way out. You risk diluting your brand and simultaneously gum up the user experience. But I also had previous experience implementing this type of task with the Google Maps API. I thought it was great in the end, but there was a much larger budget and even a fully customized implementation was filled with compromise.

The business goal of the site was to get people out to their locations, not overwhelm with a rich experience. Why not embrace that fact that Google services will provide a very quick solution if we stop the brand whoring for a second and just get out of the way. Google in the end will probably do more to get people mobilized anyway. A second break comes in the fact that it’s not a really competitive space in a traditional business sense, the client was interested in usefulness, not micromanaging search results.

So – a few hours later (mostly in testing) and 20 lines of code later, we have a simple simple simple locator for use with Google Maps. It could be used for any site as long as you don’t mind trusting your search results to the brains at Google, and you don’t mind linking offsite. If you wanted to get into manipulating search you could use this as a springboard for doing so. The URL parameters in Google Maps are pretty damn cool.

Get a copy of the source code, and do what you want with it. I’m letting the world have it under the GNU license.

Certainly not groundbreaking. But if this saves anyone out there even a minute of time – it’s worth it.

Users will give you more credit for knowing when to get out of the way, rather than trying to manage everything they interact with.