“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”

Improv is a performance-based art form wherein a show is created spontaneously in front of an audience.

You Are Already an Improviser:

• Your life is unscripted.
• Your choices create your reality.
• Honoring your improv skills = honing your life skills.

Specifically Improv Can Help you…

• Communicate ore effectively
• Make Decisions
• Navigate Change
• Have more fun!

Communicate More Effectively

• Give and take
• Yes, AND…
• Active listening

Make Decisions

• Consider your objective – you can respond much more quickly when you’ve already decided what you want/need.
• Know when to edit. You’re practicing trusting yourself.

Navigate Change

• Still no script – someone else can totally change the scene on the fly.
• Resistance is futile.
• Accept and build ("Yes, AND…")
  You have to take the things coming in… but you can build on top of them.

Have More Fun

• What makes you happy?
• Do it more.

The better you become at improvising, the happier and more effective person you’ll be.

Learning to improvise = learning to live.

There are several policy and legal issues with the convergence of TV and Internet.

ivi TV

Todd Weaver’s ivi is the first online cable provider. They turn your computer into a set top box vs. running coax to your home/tv. They have been fighting for a few years for the right to carry content. They were sent to FCC because they are not governed by the FCC. Sept. 13th, they launched anyway. They got C&D letters from content providers, and counter-sued to try and clear the way. They are paying the same royalties required by law as all the other true cable companies. They are caught between some bad policy that hasn’t been updated for the internet.

At one point ivi had 75 channels pulled from traditional feeds in certain markets. they had to drop many after the lawsuit (preliminary injunction), and now down to 15 channels.

Pricing is $4.99 for just broadcast channels. Broadcast content is the most popular channels out there (sports and news definitely most popular).

Question: Why not go the long-tail route and take the niche channels instead of taking on the broadcasters
A: It’s about growth and trajectory, ESPN brings a lot more people and subscribers. A known brand has a massive audience already, and the long-tail channels get more eyes via discovery.

Question: Is there any presidence for this lawsuit?
A: Satellite had the same arguments and set presidence. ivi is trying to define what a "cable system" is. There is already a royalty system set up for "cable systems" and ivi wants to be part of that. They meet all the required points for this royalty system as a "cable system."

The situation ivi is in is very common in this field. Copyright law is still based on physical media – it has not caught up. We have a content industry is very reluctant to change and update. It is hard to see what is lost here with what ivi is trying to do. The broadcast industry should see these types of new mechanisms as more eyeballs on their content and figure out a way to monetize it instead of trying to block it.

Question: Two front war for ivi –
1. change the definition of the cable system
2. geographic exclusivity (rights are only paid for certain #’s or markets)
Why fight both wars?
A: The battle is copyright law (what ivi is being sued for) retransmission and royalty and FCC (other arm) retransmission consent.  The legal battle is only copyright law, with the FCC deciding on governing the internet.

Google TV

What is the status? The holy grail is TV + Internet experiences. Nobody has really figured out bringing the internet experience to the TV in whole. Google TV brought this closer, and it’s getting better.

The problem is that Google doesn’t have the content and are being blocked by networks. This is short-sighted on the network’s part. They’re basically saying you can’t watch content on a computer connected to a TV, but you CAN watch on a computer connected to a monitor. If you make it easy to access legal content, you remove people going to illegal content.

There is a battle between consumer electronics manufactures and consumers wanting content wherever they are and the content providers blocking content based on the screen they’re watching it on.

Google has teamed up with many other consumer electronics to try for "pro-vid". FCC requires that cable devices be available everywhere. Cable companies want you using their boxes. History: AT&T using only their own phones on their own networks. Similarly the cable box should work the same way (as long as it doesn’t harm the network). You can hook up the devices of your choice. Google TV would like to jump in on this and become a cable box.

Google vs. Viacom – Google was protected by DMCA, but up for appeal. There really is no clear winner in this. Google gets views, and Viacom (content owners) get promotion.

Final Comments

Content providers are concerned with non-authorized content on the Internet. COICA could shut down websites if they are considered as infringing copyright. There is no due-process.

295 Exabytes of data in 2007, amount doubles every 3 years, 4 months. Over 600+ Exabytes now. You want to find the needle in all of this data.

RSS Alone is a start. You can follow the sources you want, but…

• Do you care about everything in each feed?
• What about feeds you aren’t subscribed to?
• Can you keep up with what you have?

Prioritize Your Reader (Google Reader)

• Put thins you care about at the top (yahoo pipes, things you really really like)
• Categorize
• Don’t try to read everything. Get to what you can.

Outsource and Crowd-source New Sources

• Tweeted Times
• Digg
• Reddit
• Techmeme
• Stumbleupon
• Google News

The Real Magic is in Filtering RSS

In Google reader, a yahoo pipe of analyst research blogs mentioning Online Community, a yahooo pipe of analyst research blogs mentioning Meego.
You need to filter out thing you don’t care about.
Another yahoo pipe pulls in favorite blogs using PostRank to find only the ones with a lot of comments or social mentions.

RSS Filtering Tools

• Yahoo Pipes
  You can filter any data found in any field of the RSS feed.
• FeedRinse
• FeedDemon
• Code your own

PostRank

• Takes the best posts in a feed
• Ranks it on engagement (links/sharing/comments/etc.)
• You can get the output as an RSS feed
• Feed includes postrank number in a field which you can filter against.

BackTweets

• Data about links on Twitter
• Finds links regardless of shortening service
• No RSS Feeds (no longer available)
• But… You can use the API = Yahoo Pipes to build one!

Presentations@uie.com to get a copy of slides from this presentation.

How do designers make decisions? Gray’s Anatomy book, 1858 describes the entire human body. This changed medicine by giving everything a word and a name. Anatomy: a study of the structure or internal working of something. We are missing this for design.

New York Times vs. Havenworks.com vs. Etsy
Design decisions went into all of these sites. Many decisions were made – all of the little decisions determine the design. The choices we make take our designs in one directions or another. We never talk about those choices, or the decisions made to go in one way or another.

Jason Fried from 37signals
He makes decisions for him. They only design for themselves. This type of design works.

Self Design
When we design something for our own use

Works great when:
Our users are just like us
We regularly use it just like our users do

Condition: you have to use it every day "dog fooding". If you find something frustrating, you will fix it for you and everyone else.

Unintentional Design
When the design just happens on its own

Works great when:
Our users will put up with whatever we give them
We don’t care about support costs or pain from frustration

Design Decisions Styles

You can move from unintentional design to self design and start using it.

Genius Design
At a certain point you stop getting things out of research and just build based on experience. When we’ve previously learned what users need

Works great when:
We already know their knowledge, previous experiences and contexts
We’re solving the same design problems repeatedly

Activity-Focused Design vs.. Experience-focused Design
List Users and Tasks those users do.

Activity-focused design can only get us so far.

Experienced-based – Six Flags thinks about activities, Disney thinks about the experience.

Design based style guides do not work.
Rule based decisions prevent thinking. They are not informed decisions. Design doesn’t work that way. Design wants/requires thinking.
This FAILS on exception cases. Things fall apart when there are no rules. Teaching a bit of design is actually better.

Pair good design organizations with poor designer organizations to create "The Process" or "Recipe." Sometimes we confuse process with methodology (being able to do something over and over again).
Dogma also plays in and is a faith that certain things just work.

(on the other side of the spectrum…)

Techniques are the building blocks that go into every step of the process (they need to be practiced). There are also tricks, which are techniques not quite used the same way.

The best companies did not have any dogmas or methodologies. The worst had a lot, and when they got stuck, they didn’t know where to go. Best used techniques and tricks, worst used rule and faith-based decision making.

Design Patterns

This is what we’ve done, and what has worked. Educate one pixel at a time. No hard fast "rules" that you must follow.

Discoveries about Design Decision Styles

• There is a place for every style of design – every one has its purpose.
• Great designers know which style they are using.
• Great designers use the same style for the entire project.
• Great teams ensure everyone uses the same style.
• The more advanced the style, the more expensive it gets.
  Agencies can’t go beyond Genius Design
  Activity-focused and experienced focused must be done in-house
• The more advanced the style, the better the design.

What kind of designer do you aspire to be?

Click here to view the embedded video.

A couple years ago a microformat was started for recipes on the web, it was picked up by several recipe sites. Google recently added recipes search to their site hitting against the microformat.

The first microformat was proposed at the first SXSW on a session on the future of blogging. That kicked off the idea and a community formed around it. There were some simple ones at first. As more were added, a process started to form for creating future microformats.

There have been some issues with microformats internationally and with accessibility.

Creating a new microformat:

Draft (community agrees on the right way to move forward – stable)
Specification (a stable and mature draft)
Standard (market acceptance)

What does proactive support mean to you?

Companies need to use new technologies to reach out to customers as never before. Build channels for customers to come to YOU. Proactive support is about breaking down the walls of the store and letting you out to help people where they are.

Frontier airlines went out of their way to help a complaint. The customer went from complaining to praising the company.

Social Schizophrenia
Putting another face on social media that is different than the normal face. Comcast helps the high level people to spin their support. They’re not using social media correctly to the core. They’re putting frosting on a really disgusting cake. What do you do to consistently solve problems, not what do you do to appear like you are on social media.

Do some of these companies that get into social media know what they’re getting into? This can easily blow up in their face, and maybe they shouldn’t be there to begin with. In many cases, they don’t have the scale to keep up with it.

An organization shouldn’t depend on heros. Heros don’t scale – you can’t have people breaking rules all the time. It means that the rules aren’t right.

Twitter:
Only about 3.5% mention their experience on Twitter. It is a pretty small segment of people who talk about their experience on Twitter.

You need to make sure you have the resources to escalate the issues to the appropriate places.

Tidbit of information: Brits do not care about the royal wedding!

A Case Study:

Headscape increased ecommerce for a company over 10k% in 5 years – from a reasonable base. Where is the catch?

The company sells frozen meals to elderly people (average age in 80′s). The average cost of a meal is $5-8. Wiltshire Farms

Two Lesson Areas

Business & Design

A successful ecommerce site is based on great business and great design. You have to have a great client and a great designer (you need both). They must work together.

Business (why the client is crucial in the process) @mattycurry

You are unique if you are involved in an ecommerce site. You are NOT Amazon. Even if Amazon is doing it all right, they are doing it right for them and not for you. You can’t just copy other people (even people in your own sector).

Why are you unique in frozen food industry? The age of the audience. What makes your target audience unique? The problem with Wiltshire Farms had was their audience kept dying on them.

New Users: Getting started guide shows up very large on the home page for new users (only the first time they visit the website).

Care Workers: There is a section explaining things to people buying meals for someone else.

A Franchise Model: There was no consistent pricing. You had to put in your postal code to enter the site.

Don’t be seduced by sexy
Don’t test out new stuff on your audience. Sexy isn’t always right for your website. Are you going to generate the return to make it worthwhile?

Visit Users in their Homes:
Usability testing – they realized that their audience never used a mouse before. They found out that everyone used laptops. Go into their homes and find out how they live and get a sense of their character.

Test & Iterate

A small ongoing investment on a regular basis is better than one big investment in many cases. Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug, talks about monthly usability testing.

Multi-variance Testing: You discover things that work and don’t work very quickly. (Google Website Optomizer)

A Right Relationship

You have to have a good relationship with your client. Take them out and get them drunk. You need to be able to argue and be comfortable.

Remove Clutter

Again, you are NOT Amazon. The list of meals to choose from and cut it down (added a "see more options"). If you can remove it, do it. If you can’t remove it, hide it. If you can’t hide it, shrink it. Ask yourself what you can remove, what you can hide and what you can shrink.

Product Shots

Product shots are everything. Add great shots to sell your product.

Make Buttons & Links Obvious

Make links look like links and buttons look like buttons. The links are bright blue with big underlines, and the buttons look like they are buttons. Make it obvious and bold. It’s not about design, it’s about increasing sales. On pop-up dialogs describe what the buttons are going to do.

Always Provide Help

Find out what the major questions are and float them to the top of the help. FAQ’s suck, prioritize the questions.

Handle Errors Gracefully

"Oh dear, we have a problem. Let’s fix it together." Be nice with your error messages. Give them real practical advice.

Communicate the Value Added

Show and demonstrate the added value that you provide over your competitors. A large part of the home page is dedicated to value added. Why are you different? Why are you unique. Take some space on the homepage to add that – not just products, products, products.

Presentation Video:
http://boagworld.com/talks/unbelievable-ecommerce/

Presenters

More Information: http://j.mp/fontcure

There are hundreds of thousands of fonts available and grows every year. It gets difficult to choose types so we many times just rely on the ones we always use.

Typography Basics

Methods for Typography:
How vs. Why, practical execution in addition to theory and rationale.

Arranging the Furniture
Does the furniture fit who it’s for? – don’t put chairy in a modern room
Does the arrangement make sense? – don’t just throw a bunch of pillows in the room
Is there room to get around?

Choose a good typeface:
Good meaning high-quality and proper. Proper for the format, for the content, for the reader. You can set the tone with the word “party” and let the font tell you want type of party it’s going to be. Typopedia

Don’t use too many:
It’s a juggling act. The fewer typefaces one uses the less likely they are to drop the balls. Use faces in the right order – certain typefaces work in body and certain ones work larger.

Have a clear hierarchy:
Make more important things bigger, and less important things smaller. You’re already doing this in markup (H1, H2, H3, etc.).

If in doubt, read it:
Excellent type comes form empathy for the reader. Huffington Post doesn’t pass the read test. It is very hard to read a full article.

How to Evaluate the Quality of a Font

Are there too many choices? Not all fonts are created equal.

Does the font have a minimum character set?
Is it all uppercase? Does it include all punctuation?

Does the font have extended Latin or non-Latin?
Will you need to do anything internationally to support other languages? Find a family that includes all of it.

Does the font have siblings and cousins?
Make sure you’ve got italics and bold in your font. Do you also need condensed or something else?

Is the font well-spaced?
Don’t confuse tracking with kerning. Even well-spaced fonts need some kerning. Look for letters that depend on kerning.

Does the font look good across browsers and platforms?
Look at as many applications of the font as possible. Make sure the fonts are well-hinted.

What makes a good text face?

Pretty much all the web is text. You want people to actually read your content, and connect with it.

When we read:
Take a chunk of text and block out the bottom of it, it’s still legible. If you block the top, it becomes hard to read. Most of the font information is in the top. Find a text face that is easily discernable.

Display Faces:

• Bauer Bodoni
• Myriad Condensed
• Bello

Look for good x-height.
Look for definition in the letter forms (Verdana). Look at #1 Capitol I and lower-case L (1Il).
Don’t hinder reading in any way if you can help it.
Look for workhorse typefaces that can stand up. Bodini looks good large and shrinks down to nothing when small. Meta looks good large and small. When you have a flexible typeface you can use fewer faces.
Get dirty – take a bunch of text from a project and just see what it feels like to read. See how things look at size.

1. Versatile
2. Sturdy
3. Recognizable

Helvetica

It looks good in interface design. It looks good really big. Calvetica calendar lists it as a feature. It’s a versatile font, but not in branding.

Too many people use Helvetica for branding. It doesn’t set you apart. Try and do something different to make yourself stand out. 15 of the top 20 retailers use Helvetica in their campaigns.

There are other fonts that are different (newer). You don’t always have to stick to the tried and true.

Times New Roman
Alternate: Le Monde (more modern for newspapers and better for screen.

Gill Sans
Has very inconsistent width and weight (letter A)

Trade Gothic
It has inconsistent widths and weights

Helvetica
Alternate: FF Dagny – has a cleaner design, less formal
Alternate: Museo Sans

Georgia
It’s been the serif for the web forever – it was designed for the screen.
Alternate: BentonModernRE – less contrast, a bit wider
Alternate: FF Meta Serif – more contemporary serif, more condensed
Alternate: Minion – bets neutral typeface, like you’d see in a book

Frutiger
Great font for wayfinding – used in London airport and many many others.

Questions & Tools

• Readability Bookmarklet is a handy tool to put sites into a different style.
• Books:
  Elements of Typographic Style
  Thinking with Type
  Detailed in Typography
  Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out how Type Works

Is the web dead? Should people be building apps? Should we be using HTML5? Wired Magazine printed an article, "The Web is Dead,"

Is the web dead or was the story sensationalized?

Rick: It depends on what part of the internet you’re interacting with or what device you’re using and figuring out what is the best technology to do that interaction.

Brandon: You can start with the web as a base layer and determine what to put on top of it. HTML5 provides more interactive experiences (canvas, SVG, etc.). Those will take you a little ways, but not all the way. If fundamentally building an app, maybe web technology isn’t the best place for that.

Erik: Thinking about apps, and what they do, they deliver very specific currated pieces very quickly. You have a toaster in your house to make toast, and a coffee maker to make coffee, but you don’t have a coffee making toaster. Apps have their place and don’t need to be do-all things.

How do you describe HTML5 to customers?

Emily: From the front end, there are more elements to work with the achieve visual and usability pieces. It’s not about calling it HTML5, but it’s about finding out what clients need to achieve their business goals. It’s just a label and doesn’t really matter.

Branden: It’s really just more tags to do more with content.

Rick: CSS to CSS3 was evolutionary. With canvas and SVG, it’s disruptive. It breaks the paradigm of what hypertext markup language is in your head. The best HTML5 experience can now rival the pretty typical plugin experience.

What are scenarios where using HTML5 make sense?

Erik: Jitterbug game in HTML5 that rivals flash is a pretty great thing. Tweetdeck is built in HTML5… better than the version in Adobe Air.

Branden: It didn’t feel right when you had to use flash in the past. It’s great that you can now do this in the web, and it feels right. Canvas has many of the same problems that flash does/did. It’s just a block in the browsers where you put stuff. Things don’t feel native and it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

What about the things you don’t have in an app (right-click, copy/paste etc.)? What about the web makes it the web?

Emily: The world of the web exists in information browsing, not in apps. The power of HTML5 is twofold. It lets you create more application-like experiences without the use of plugins. By using more symantic markup, we’re creating the foundation for more search and assistive technologies that can ultimately make the information more useful for us.

What specifically in HTML5 helps to solve these problems?

Branden: A lot of the web is built on hacks, like jquery. Stuff like that shouldn’t exist – it’s tools on top of tools on top of tools. You have a new set of tools in HTML5 to do things without it being a hack. Example: divs – it’s not markup – a box in a box in a box doesn’t really help segment the content. HTML5 codifies and makes a lot of old hacks simple without throwing hacks at it.

Rick: The web is like a big flea market. The plugins are the high end of it. HTML5 brings it more to a walmart and brings up the level of quality. Asking if the web is like telling us that we will only shop at one store for the rest of our lives. It depends on what we want to buy. Some things you want an app – in and out very quickly, and sometimes you want an elegant experience.

Branden: The tools are still very rough… it’s new. Some things haven’t been made clear. Javascript is still javascript. We’re still stuck with that.

Erik: Much of the HTML5 information out there is from Webkit/Google, and you start to assume that Webkit is the best out there when it’s not.

Branden: Every browser does it different. There is stuff that is broken in every browser.

Erik: We’re getting to a place where you can’t tell the difference between a website and an app. Sometime Apple and Microsoft etc. will just integrate javascript into the OS.

Emily: W3C is highly political, and they don’t care what we want. It’s just about the biggest guerilla in the room.

Branden: Flash got as far as it did (and quickly) because the standards are always going to move slow. Where we push the web is where standards go next.