Design

Have you ever read something that resonates so loud to your experience that you want to run around and share it with everyone you know? I found such a passage today in Jared M. Spools "UIEtips: 4 Design Lessons from the Flip".

"We want to make designs simple, but we don’t want to make them dumb. There’s a difference. The goal is to simplify the design by keeping only the most valuable bits, eliminating everything else.

This is not easy to do. You really have to know something about the users, what they are trying to do, and how they go about doing it. Just having that information will likely push the team to add more features, not less, so you then need a solid vision of how simplicity will make it better. Finally, you have to be ruthless and stubborn, cutting all the unnecessary bits out and sticking to your guns about keeping to the essentials." -- Jared M. Spool

Honestly, I have nothing really to add... Amen...read more...

"It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement."
- Jackson Pollock

Thought this was relevant to what we've been working on lately. Although we think our latest release (coming soon) looks good, the statement really lies in how much easier it will be for the target audience to use. Stay tuned for the launch...

PhizzPop Design Challenge - Creating a winning application in 3 days

Turning out an application using new software with only three days to do it is quite a challenge, to say the least. But that is precisely what we were challenged to do in the Microsoft sponsored, PhizzPop Design Challenge, Boston.

PhizzPop posed a particularly interesting challenge regarding process. No one builds applications in three days. So the challenge isn't really how do you produce a quality application, but more how do you squeeze weeks/months worth of work into three days to produce a quality application?

To answer this question, I thought it might be interesting to bring folks into our PhizzPop War Room and explain how we did it.

PhizzPop Design Challenge War Room

Brainstorming:

Moments after the challenge was presented, we opted not to go out for Microsoft-sponsored drinks and chose instead to take over a quiet room in the Microsoft offices to brainstorm. We immediately began to review the personas for user tasks and discuss what we believed would be possible with current technologies. Then, prompted by Jon, Outsight's Creative Director, we talked about "If the application was magic... what would we want it to do?"

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Outsight recently participated in a unique interactive design and development challenge - The PhizzPop Design Challenge. Microsoft, looking to stir up interest Silverlight and Expression Blend, approached 6 firms in each of 6 metropolitan areas in the US - New York, Austin, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston. Each firm could send a 2-3 person team for two days of training, a challenge would be issued, and each team would have the remainder of the week to create a solution using Expression Blend.

Outsight was invited, so we went.

Our team was comprised of Jon Reil, Brandon Goldsworthy and me, Denise Preston -- a designer, a developer and an information architect/project manager. We were up against some great folks from Digitas, Molecular, Cramer, RDVO, and PixelMedia.

The challenge? Create the interface for a home automation system. Details can be found here (DOCX).

Outsight architected, branded, designed and developed a system called Varlet (a knight's page, archaic form of Valet) that could be accessed via touch screens mounted within the home, via television screen and via a smart phone interface.

The competition culminated in an event held at the Saint Lounge where each group had to present their solutions to an independent panel of judges. The Boston panel of judges included representatives from Monster.com, Burnt Sand and 3 Comm.

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Outsight Interactive is very pleased to announce that it has been selected as a winner for the 2007 MITX Awards. Outsight was awarded the top prize in the category of Applied Technology for their work on the FootJoy "DryJoys Microsite".

The DryJoys micro-site was created to highlight the latest in FootJoy shoe technology -- the new DryJoy’s Stability Pod™ outsole. The new outsole places each of its seven spikes on a hard plastic “pod” surrounded by soft plastic allowing the pods/spikes to move independently of each other, thus maintaining a better grip on the ground especially over uneven surfaces.

Outsight took a three-fold approach to present this complex technology: Animations were created from details of the shoes to highlight the product features. In addition, a full swing was presented, showing key points of the sequence where the pod technology really comes into play. Lastly, within the swing sequence a “heat map” was shown of the bottoms of the shoe to show how the pressure moves to various parts of the outsole through the swing sequence to further demonstrate how the independently moving pods can help afford greater stability.

But that was not the end of the DryJoys story -- a style carousel was created to present all 11 diverse styles and a Team DryJoys area was created to highlight the product's acceptance and use by PGA tour players.
Finally, a contest was created to create buzz around the new product and site.

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Outsight is pleased to annouce the launch of a new site design for Craft, Inc. In addition to creating a new, clean and elegant look and feel for Craft, Outsight also made their product detail page more robust, assisted in simplifying their product categorization and implemented keyword search functionality. To learn more about this project -- take a look at our portfolio.

Outsight is pleased to announce that the DryJoys Micro-site, developed for FootJoy, has been named a finalist for the 2007 MITX Awards. Thanks go out to the whole team at Jack Richmond for the fabulous Photography and to FootJoy for the opportunity.

A few days ago, Jakob Nielsen posted a summary of some eye tracking studies, verifying or reiterating things we've known or suspected for years. In Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings, Nielsen reminds us that users don't see banners. In fact, his heatmaps below show that users don't even see content that looks like banners.

It turns out there are three things that attract readers' eyes more than anything else when they're reading a page:

• Plain Text
• Faces
• Cleavage

We probably could have guessed as much. There are two lessons here that we already know, but for which we can be thankful to Mr. Nielsen for reminding us.

First, content creators: make your content look like content and not like advertisements. Separate it visually AND spatially; readers are going to breeze right by it if they even suspect it's an ad.

Second, advertisers: make your ads look like cleavage, but you know this already.

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Outsight is pleased to announce the launch of Licensed MyJoys, an extension to the award-winning FootJoy MyJoys application. The application was extended to offer Major League Baseball and Collegiate licensed shoes and gloves.

Outsight is pleased to announce the launch of the FootJoy: DryJoys microsite. Read more about the DryJoys project in our Portfolio or visit the microsite.