On this page you will find articles on the subject of user interface design, usability, marketing and branding. The articles represent some of the different perspectives and starting positions.
Advertisers were among the first to experiment with virtual reality. Here are 7 brand experiences that define the state of the art... read on
As of April 2016, people that succeed with Virtual Reality (VR) Marketing do two things very well: First, they identify VR Marketing narratives that get them results. Second, they put 100% of their resources into creating the stories that resonate with their audience. But you’re probably wondering: “How do I find VR Marketing strategies that actually work?” Well, today we’re going to make it easy for you. All you need to do is carve out a few minutes of your day and look over the 10 Best Uses Of Virtual Reality In Marketing... read on
Dark Marketing isn't sinister, but it borders on covert. At its core is the alternative reality game (ARG), a complex, creative and purposeful scenario that brings brands to life. ARGs are interactive narratives that comprise fiction and nonfiction, mystery and detection and scripted and unscri... read on
Computer applications are not humans, they are "machines", we all know that. Yet, they have a behavior, not always very human-like but it is a behavior. Applications show me things, they tell me things, they make sounds and they react in a certain way when I try to make them do something. ... read on
[...]One of the most important areas this will happen is in the generation of revenues, what we now typically think of as “sales.” The trends foreshadowing that shift are already apparent as advertising moves from mass to one-to-one, purchase decisions and actual purchases move from the ... read on
Developed along side Microsoft's Windows Vista Ultimate team, UVR allows amateur filmmakers the opportsegment wow fadeInUpy to use their PC's to showcase their work by submitting scripts to be judged by peers for their chance to help complete a short film. The campaign will progress in three acts or relays - ultima... read on
We’ve established that Twitter is a viable place for brands to put up shop, but now that they’re microblogging away, how can they measure their output, customer service endeavors, conversation abilities, and overall ROI? You could try one of these 10 reputation tracking tools,... read on
The iPhone popularized the idea of multitouch displays and Microsoft brought the concept to a larger screen by releasing
Surface, a multitouch table with a with a 'low priced' $10,000 price tag. Building a multitouch table or screen is starting to
become a trend as development teams, companies or in this case Eyebeam, an art and technology center based in New York, have
started to provide scaled-down and open-source versions of the Microsoft Surface. By sharing hardware schematics and software
source code, the cost of owning a multitouch table is significantly reduced. This also fosters innovation by providing an open
platform on which to develop novel multitouch applications. Here are some nice startingpoints:
eyebeam.org/project/cubit
whitenoiseaudio.com/touchlib/
merl.com/projects/DiamondTouch/
technologyreview.com/Infotech/20703/?a=f
lowres.ch/ftir/
tinker.it/now/2007/02/28/multitouch-table-experiment/
cs.nyu.edu/%7Ejhan/
lowres.ch/mts/
Just as it is important to choose the proper knife when slicing-n-dicing vegetables, it is critical to prescribe a suitable user interface to support faceted filtering. Faceted filtering allows you to narrow down a large list of objects to a manageable size by applying flexible combinations of attri... read on
Ever wonder how on Earth Google went from a technology company to one of the world's most recognizable and successful brands? Was it the whimsical brightly colored logo? How about the ads? Wait, Google really doesn't advertise all that much -- do they? Brand Google was... read on
Making your site more usable is really the art of making it easy for visitors to do what you want them to do. Whether that’s coming to grips with what your site is about, commenting, subscribing, contacting you or buying your product, usability gets results. “Usability” can seem li... read on
In a non-digital world, interaction costs were high: You had to purchase products. In the digital world, they're unbelievably low. Nothing is ever more than a click away online. In the offline world you had to get over high interaction costs by creating needs/expectations and you did that mostly ... read on
Let's take something as ubiquitous as Google Maps. You could (nowadays) have a widget that printed off your map in the same style as an A-Z for Black Cabbies, in the style of a Beck Tube Map for Graphic Design Geeks and in the style of the Alliance to Restore the Republic for Sci Fi fans. That is... read on
[...]Last year, however, the arrival of the Nintendo Wii and the Apple iPhone began to break down the logjam in technological innovation for the way humans interact with computers. Both devices extend the idea of directly controlling objects on the screen and blending that ability with visually co... read on
Texte mit den Augen schreiben - Buchseiten umblättern, Texte mit den Augen schreiben: Wissenschaftler zeigen auf der Cebit neue Formen der Interaktion zwischen Mensch und Maschine. Schon bald könnten Tastaturen ihre Bedeutung verlieren - und schwungvolle Gesten den Kontakt zum Rechner h... read on
A Simplified Model of User Experience for Practical Application by Hans-Christian Jetter and Jens Gerken from the Universität
Konstanz. NordiCHI 2006, Oslo: The 2nd COST294-MAUSE International Open Workshop "User eXperience - Towards a unified view".,
p. 106-111, Okt 2006
A simplified model of user experience for practical application.
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[pdf]
Die MCI im Wandel by Hans-Christian Jetter from the Universität Konstanz: User Experience als
zentrale Herausforderung? Mensch & Computer 2006: Mensch und Computer im StrukturWandel., in: Heinecke, A.M.; Paul,
H., Oldenbourg Verlag, p. 65-72, Sep 2006
Die MCI im Wandel.
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[...] Since 1969, I have been trying to raise interactivity to the level of an art form as opposed to making art work that
happened to be interactive. Although 30 years have passed, interactivity is still beginning. Many of the preliminary
ideas I started out with are still unrealized, and more advanced concepts are waiting to be invented...
read on
[...]Virtual reality is incomplete. It is true that today's virtual reality provides very limited tactile feedback,
almost no proprioceptive feedback (as would be provided by walking on a sandy beach or on rough terrain), rare opportunities
to smell,
and little mobility. However, it is just getting started. Criticizing a new idea because it is not yet fully realized seems
unreasonably impatient. On that basis, the caves at Lascaux would never have been painted because we did not have a full
palette and could not animate in three dimensions. Give us a few centuries and then revisit this complaint...
read on
[...] The Internet provides a wonderful platform for consumers to connect with a brand, and an increasing number of marketers’ sites allow consumers to do just that. Instead of recycled brochures, marketers are now building sites that allow consumers to learn, interact with tools and entert... read on
[...] Branding is an experience, according to AIGA. Brand experience is defined as “all the interactions people have with a product, service, or organization; the raw material of a brand.” There’s that word: interactions. Even this magazine is a brand. So where does b... read on
Two long lists of interaction design patterns compiled by welie.com and ui-patterns.com focusing on webdevelopment. It is a
common practice to use recurring solutions to solve common problems. Such solutions are called design patterns. Collections of
design patterns are a great reference point when looking at different possible solutions.
Welle offers quite a large
collection of different meaningfully grouped and sorted design patterns.
http://www.welie.com/patterns/index.php
Ui-Patterns
provides code examples as to how the different patterns can be
implemented.
http://ui-patterns.com/
You've got plenty of traffic, but you're not able to persuade visitors to take action. It's a common and aching issue for many online businesses. Too often, business owners impulsively throw more money into existing marketing campaigns, believing it's merely a numbers game ... read on
A brand means much more than its product and service features. Brands are built from nothing less than the sum of a customer's experiences with a product, service or company. Customers' total brand experience will determine whether they will buy anything more from the company and, just as importa... read on
Most companies realize that customer experience is critical to their success. Many have done a good job of theoretically defining a branded customer experience for their organization. However, in Accenture's experience, many companies run into trouble putting the branded customer experience into ... read on
It’s not new to say that we now live in an age in which survival in business depends on your ability to communicate effectively through the internet. What is new is the realization that just having any old website isn’t enough. The quality of your site and the n... read on
Much has been written in the past decade about the importance of usability and the user experience to customers’ perception of an organization’s brand. Jared Spool’s 1996 article “Branding and Usability” correctly identifies the importance of Web site usability to br... read on
What use is a high volume of traffic if nobody wants or buys anything from the producer? If there is a total of 5 customers in the shop and all 5 can be moved to buy something, then that is good. But what use are 10,000 if they just take a quick look in and go back out? Above all, why do we not use interactivity in a medium which is called the interactive medium par excellence – namely the web? We tend to concentrate on making the Interface visually as attractive as possible, then concentrating on search engine marketing to increase the visitor numbers. This often enough results in high visitor numbers, but mainly one time visitors. Since IB involves both areas, interaction with the medium itself and human interaction are both improved. Ranging from navigation, links, buttons etc. to contact forms and newsletters. If a salesperson only managed to get 5% of the potential customers to make a purchase, the company would soon be out of business. So why do we put up with this on the Web?
Everywhere around us, the expanding digital universe is rapidly transforming the world of brands, with new digital tools pushing aside yesterday’s symbols, slogans and “timeless” icons. In place of conventional top-down “branding” campaigns we’re seeing breakth... read on
Many web sites exist primarily to create or strengthen the brand for a product or service. We're finding that a site's usability can dramatically affect branding. And the graphical aspects of the site — such as logos or evocative pictures — have much less effect on branding than we expec... read on
Interactivity has more impact: While the beginning years of modern branding were about products and communication (Olins brand experience model), with the new way of branding, the behaviour and environment elements are addressed more often. Besides indirect messaging, there is also a branding techni... read on