July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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After pivoting away from flash sales and toward its own products, New York City-based Fab has just raised a huge amount of funding to help drive its transformation and support its fast-growing audience.

Fab announced last night that it has raised $150 million in a fourth round of funding led by Chinese company Tencent, who’s also appointing a director to the company’s board. The company’s valuation, excluding the new funding, was $1 billion, a spokesperson told AllThingsD. The funding is only the first tranche of Fab’s fourth round, so expect to see even more money rolling in soon.

Overall, Fab has now raised $310 million. The company has 14 million members signed up who have purchased around 6 million items.

Fab started out as a social network for gay men, but, embracing the power of the pivot, it jumped onto the flash-sale craze to expand its audience. Now Fab is focusing on becoming a design store of its very own — with exclusive products, the purchase of German furniture-maker Massivkonzept, and a physical retail presence.

Fab chief executive officer Jason Goldberg, who’s certainly no stranger to criticism — the company’s identity has shifted dramatically over the years — addressed some of the company’s critics in a blog post last night:

There are some who will call us a success because of this fundraise.

They’ll say we’re worth billions.

And, of course, there are some who will call it a bubble.

We know that the truth is that raising money is not success. Raising money is a responsibility that opens up new opportunities. We take our responsibility at Fab very seriously …

Goldberg notes that Fab’s sales are expected to more than double in 2013. The company’s sales grew by five times in 2012 compared to 2011.

Japan’s Itochu Technology Ventures also participated in the round as well as existing investors Atomico, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, and others.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

And if simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, iOS 7 is very, very sophisticated.

The most powerful man in the room doesn’t need a loud voice. The securely rich don’t need to flaunt their wealth. The cool kids are the ones who aren’t trying to be cool. The truly elegant realize that understatement is the essence of sophistication.

Source: http://www.brianroizen.com/blog/ios-7-beta-screenshots/

iOS 7 camera app

And the ultimate interface is the least obvious to the user.

The latest version of iOS is the culmination of Apple’s six-year journey with iPhone, and that journey mirrors the changes that successfully brought Apple back from the brink of death in the late 1990s. The product that saved Apple was the iMac, and Steve Jobs threw it like a grenade into the the computer industry. Where the industry was grey, iMac was color. Where the industry was separate pieces wired together, iMac was unified and singular. Where the industry was opaque, iMac was translucent.

But the original iMac was also a little childish — a little young — before it became the singular objét d’art that it is today. And like iMac’s 15-year transition from fruity to elegant, iOS has now crossed the user interface Rubicon from Microsoft Bob to the Bauhaus — from decoration to design.

Versions 1 through 6 were Apple’s mobile juvenilia; iOS 7 is Apple at the zenith of its design zen.

Less inter, more face

By definition, an interface is a bridge. A connection. Something that takes one thing and attaches it to another. A user interface takes what we want out of the machine and supplies it to us in a format we can see, understand, and use.

Source: http://www.brianroizen.com/blog/ios-7-beta-screenshots/

Siri in iOS 7

Glancing back at former iOS versions after using iOS 7 is an interesting experiment. As revolutionary, incredible, and praised as it was, old iOS seems obvious, heavy-handed, and almost crude in comparison. Buttons are massive, messy objects that just beg to be interpreted as old-world meatspace buttons that physically depress with a ker-thunk! as you hit them. Borders surround chunks of information like arm-in-arm security staff holding back the outside world from some very exclusive event.

Now, iOS 7 is much more authentically digital and much less representationally physical.

We’ve all grown up, Apple is saying, and we no longer need these real-world touchable referents in order to understand digital information. And, in fact, they’re holding us back, restraining us and surrounding the content we want with gimmick and gewgaw.

Who among us has ever used a rolodex? Do you keep a pad of paper handy at all times to jot down notes with pen and ink? Do we really need green felt, as Apple’s Federighi joked about in the recent WWDC keynote, to make us think of games and fun? And do we all have smoking jackets, cee-gars, and snifters brimming with brandy as we amble back to the snooker table, one hand in our houndstooth jackets?

No, no, and no.

One of the key values in iOS 7, Apple says, is deference. The user interface is there to help users get, understand, and work with the data and information they want, not to compete with it. Interface should be underneath, Apple is saying. It’s kingmaker, not king; servant, not master. Background, not foreground.

Elegant doesn’t mean somber

In spite of its elegance, iOS 7 isn’t standoffish or unapproachable. Not dark and distant.

Rather — and this is why some have likened it to Windows Phone and the new Windows design language — iOS 7 is light, approachable, even colorful in places. In other words, Apple’s not trying for an affect here. It’s not trying so hard to make iOS the nth degree in haute couture so that it becomes elitist or arrogant. Rather, Apple is looking for the best way to present and offer up experiences enabled by the device in your hand — a style so unstyled it’s not really a style but an expression of humility to the text, images, data, voices, and fun that will flow through to the user.

And that’s done in living color.

Minimalism is sometimes very minimal

While I’m happy with Apple’s overall direction, let’s keep in mind that this is a beta operating system and not a universally released, fully available product. And there’s room for improvement.

Which button is pressed? Is there a button? Can you press it?

Minimalism is a language that not everyone speaks, and sometimes less is just … less.

Just one example is in Apple’s phone app, which indicates that yes, you are on speaker mode with a very subtle light effect under the volume icon. It’s not nearly as obvious as iOS 6′s speaker mode — which is the point, after all — but the question is, is it obvious enough?

In other words, can you be so simple, so restrained, and so tentative in what you put into your user interface that you’re actually increasing the cognitive load on your users?

In a word, yes, and I think that there are some in the iPhone user camp who are going to be astonished but not delighted with some elements of the new operating system. Microsoft is going through its own challenges as users are being forced through a massive update in its desktop design language, and I think Apple will see something similar.

 Going somewhere good

That said, I like iOS 7. In fact, I really, really like iOS 7.

Source: http://www.brianroizen.com/blog/ios-7-beta-screenshots/

Photos in iOS 7

I have been using it for the better part of a week now, and despite the bugginess inherent in a beta operating system (sometimes the phone app hangs, sharing photos and videos doesn’t work in all cases, and so on), I would not go back.

We give bright, noisy toys to kids to hold their attention, and juveniles drive loud, flashy cars to reinforce the image of themselves that they desire to project, but we don’t need that.

We’re all grown up — mostly — and we know that simplicity is the core of sophistication.

Apple knew that back in the 1970s, when Steve Jobs adopted that as one of the company’s marketing slogans. Leonardo da Vinci knew it when he first said it.

And, I think, most Apple fans know it, too.

Image credits: Most: Brian Roizen, top, John Koetsier

As in, makes money, baby — buckets of it. From Facebook.

“Our strategy is really to invest in companies most people haven’t heard of yet and make them into household brands,” Case told us this morning on his way to the airport. “We like finding things off the beaten path – that’s what we did with AOL — and we think the category they’re targeting is a $50 billion business that hasn’t really changed much in centuries.”

Source: John Koetsier

Who wouldn’t love this nautical-themed baby dress?

But a company that mostly makes money via its Facebook community? How sustainable is that, many have been wondering, with a Monetate study that essentially said social commerce is like a unicorn: beautiful, alluring, and almost totally imaginary.

How does Lolly Wolly Doodle make it work?

“Most of what happens in social commerce is that the larger companies are looking at social opportunities through the prism of the past,” Case explains. “They have the view that it’s ancillary, a curiosity, an extra.”

For Lolly Wolly Doodle, however, social commerce was not the extra, it was the only. Founder Brandi Temple, a mother of four who started the company to make some extra money when her husband was getting laid off, needed Facebook to get the word out. And the just-in-time clothing manufacturer still uses Facebook — and its 584,000 Facebook fans — as its principle marketing vehicle.

That’s right: just-in-time manufacturing. And design, too.

Most clothing brands, including those for kids, design in New York, manufacture in Bangladesh, ship to America, and sell in the mall. Lolly Wolly Doodle, however, designs in Lexington, shares on Facebook, takes orders via its website, manufactures in North Carolina, and ships cute, funky, unique, and customizable designs of Macy’s quality but Target’s pricing to its customers in about a week, Case said. Today alone it posted about 10 designs to Facebook.

Source: Lolly Wolly Doodle

Lolly Wolly Doodle lunchboxes

And social is the key part.

“It’s the audience of moms and girls, they feel part of the community,” he told me. “It’s like a personal seamstress in North Carolina building clothes to spec.”

The clothing is unique. Designs can sell out, and each can be customized with add-ons and accessories, and that’s part of the social experience, too — customers get to share in something if they jump on a design quickly and get to share in the experience of creativity and exclusivity with other moms around the country.

“Traditional retailers generally do social commerce in an accidental or a fringe way,” Case says. “But their core business really is manufacturing offshore and selling in malls.”

In contrast, Lolly Wolly Doodle was born on the web, and social is fundamental to how the company began, grew, markets, connects, and, frankly, exists. It’s how the company managed to grow without inventory and marketing costs, and how it built a unique mass customization model, Case said. It’s a true social enterprise.

And not just in sales, either.

“Ninety percent of our employees in Lexington,” Case said. “It’s the core of the company. We’ll continue to expand there and will grow to other cities as well. It’s a ‘Made in America’ manufacturing play.”

Image credit: Lolly Wolly Doodle

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Apple unveiled the newest version of its mobile operating system yesterday. While much of the tech world fawned over the new design, I’m not impressed. iOS 7 is a nice refresh of the basic look, but it does nothing to advance the operating system beyond the basic menu of buttons it’s relied on since the iPhone launched in 2007.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook called it “the biggest change to iOS since the introduction of iPhone.”

I’m sorry, but that’s completely wrong.

The biggest change to iOS was the introduction of the App Store, one year after the iPhone’s launch, in 2008. The next-biggest change was when Apple introduced the iPad in 2010, extending iOS to tablet devices as well as smartphones and sketching the outlines of Apple’s future mobile strategy.

“With iOS7, Apple is taking its iPhone operating system a step further,” said longtime Apple analyst Roger Entner. “It is redesigned following the same design philosophy that made Apple’s hardware so elegantly distinct while enhancing usefulness as the spiritual successor of Bauhaus. … The enhancements to Airdrop and iCloud bring these applications and services to the logical next step and close to perfection.”

Effusive praise. But it’s way over the top.

iOS 7 is an almost purely cosmetic upgrade. The people who are calling it a radical new design are misguided. It’s not a redesign — it’s a new coat of paint.

“Installing iOS 7 on to your phone is like getting an entirely new phone … but one you already know how to use,” said Apple exec Craig Federighi, in yesterday’s WWDC keynote. His comment illustrates Apple’s true goal, which is to make the OS look fresh but not actually change things up so much that people get confused or alarmed.

Pretty, shiny things

Now, don’t get me wrong. This paint job has some nice colors. The new icons have a flatter, less “realistic” look. Instead of a screen full of shiny plastic lozenges, you’re now looking at a screen full of flat little rounded squares. Fans of faux-leather and fake green felt will have to look elsewhere for their dose of skeuomorphism, which seems to have been kicked out the door along with former executive Scott Forstall.

iOS 7 does transparency nicely, too. The new icons float over pale backgrounds like panes of plastic or glass. It’s very reminiscent of Apple’s desktop OS, except with a nifty bit of interactivity: As you tilt the phone, the boxes in “front” float over the background as if in 3D.

The calendar app has a nice, clean, flat look, with less real estate devoted to the boxes containing your appointments and more space for the appointments themselves.

And certain apps, like the new Control Center, have a new, clean, text-centric layout with fonts and spacing that seem reminiscent of Windows Phone 8.

Windows what now?

The echoes of Windows are especially ironic. After decades of making some of the ugliest software on the planet, Microsoft has actually been leading the pack in mobile design. Its home screen presents a collection of flat, information-rich tiles that dynamically update with the information that’s most important to you. The edges of the screen hint what content lies on the next screen over, giving you subtle guidance about what you get if you swipe left or right. The color schemes and fonts are consistent, fresh-looking, and readable.

When Windows Phone 7 came out in 2010, I was struck with how dated iPhone and Android looked by comparison. Microsoft had finally leapfrogged the competition, after lagging behind them for years. Later, Android caught up, to a certain extent, with Ice Cream Sandwich and now Jelly Bean, which have gradually stripped out extraneous UI elements and imposed a cleaner, more consistent, more readable look to the interface.

Even Facebook got on board with the idea of pushing relevant information to the home screen through Facebook Home. Now, it hasn’t been the best-received app, and I think that Facebook’s approach is a little aggressive by essentially taking over your mobile device and turning it into a Facebook phone (or tablet). But it shows that Zuckerberg and company are paying attention to useful ways of utilizing the home screen space.

Stuck in 2007

Apple, by contrast, has preferred to stick with its familiar array of buttons and folders. It has focused all the operating system’s communication functions into its Notification Center, an increasingly complicated stack of badges, alerts, and banners. The apps themselves remain siloed within themselves, gaining a few features (the capability to run in the background, for instance) but not gaining significant integration into the overall user interface.

What’s more, Apple’s new design language seems a little half-baked. I’m not the only one who feels that way: App designer Tim Green posted a complaint last night taking Apple to task for the little details (like yellow text on a white background) that just don’t seem right. Plus, he says, many of the design cues that use to indicate, say, a clickable button are now gone — and app designers will need to work with a more limited palette.

“As a UI designer, I feel like I’ve had my design vocabularly forcibly shrunk down to 100 words,” Green wrote. “It feels a bit like I’ve been strong-armed into a style I don’t think is particularly intuitive or a great direction for UX.”

In short, it’s a nice update. I like the way it looks. But it’s not a major redesign of the user interface, no matter what Apple says.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Last night Apple announced the 2013 winners of its annual design awards: the best apps of the year. Ten out of 11 were mobile apps, with one desktop-only.

The winners, as you would expect, featured gorgeous design, innovative uses of Apple technologies, and some of the best-imagined apps on the app store. There are also two student-built apps that are simply amazing examples of the creativity of young developers.

Here are the winners:

WWF Together

Created by the World Wildlife Fund, WWF Together is a window into the lives of the world’s most interesting and beautiful endangered animals.

“With its outstanding attention to detail, beautiful aesthetic, wonderful sound design and music score, engaging writing, high resolution photography, rich typography, and inventive interactions, WWF Together sets the bar higher for iPad app design.”

For iPad

Procreate

Procreate, by Savage Interactive, is an art studio for your iPad.

“It’s packed with features that artists love — from true-to-life sets of pencils, inks, and brushes, to advanced layer compositing, to unique digital tools. Procreate is a powerhouse of iOS technologies like ARC, Grand Central Dispatch, and OpenGL ES which deliver state-of-the-art performance and responsiveness, 64-bit precision, and smooth 60 fps rendering of canvas sizes up to 4K x 4K.”

For iPad

Badland

Badland is an action adventure side-scroller for iPad by Frogmind.

“Badland’s intuitive one-touch controls and immersive sound design complement the balanced, physics-based gameplay as players discover imaginative traps and overcome endless obstacles. In either single- or multi-player mode, the excellent production values and brilliant execution leverage OpenGL ES, Game Center, iCloud, and Retina display.”

Apparently it’s big in China, too — it’s one of the featured games on an entire pirated Chinese app store.

iPhone, iPad, iPod touch

Yahoo Weather

One of the apps on the original iPhone, Yahoo Weather, was beautifully re-imagined this past year with gorgeous imagery and simple, clear data presentation.

“Yahoo! Weather has great layout and typography, compelling animations, fast image processing, and clear iconography. This attention to detail means that in a saturated category, an app can rise above the crowd.”

iPhone, iPad, iPod touch

Letterpress

Letterpress is a word game by Atebits that, Apple says, is a perfect blend of fun and strategy.

“It illustrates masterful asynchronous gameplay using Game Center and stands out for its beautifully understated game interface, simple gestures, subtle animations, and restrained sound design.”

Ridiculous Fishing

If you’ve never fished with chainsaws, toasters, and other weapons, you’ve never fished. Or, at least, never fished with Ridiculous Fishing, by Vlambeer.

“It delivers hours of unique entertainment in an expertly-crafted, lo-fi, retro video game style. With engaging physics-based gameplay mixed with humor, players follow the main character in his search for redemption.”

iPhone, iPad

Sky Gamblers: Storm Raiders

By Atypical Games, Sky Gamblers is an arcade-style WWII aerial combat game with non-arcade style verisimilitude and accuracy, including real historical locations.

“Amazing OpenGL based visuals and special effects including specular masks, bump mapping, atmospheric scattering, volumetric clouds, sun glare, day & night transitions, HDR rendering, radial blur, heat haze, refractive raindrops, and much more, with accurately recreated locations, realistic weather, and interactive cockpits.”

iPhone, iPad, Mac

Coda 2

You may not be as wowed by the design in this code editor, but apparently the Coda web development environment, by Panic, makes the task of web coding “enjoyable.”

“It supports development in Action Script, ASP, CFML, CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Smarty, and SQL. Written entirely in Cocoa and deeply integrated with OS X, Coda 2 uses AppKit, Core Animation, iCloud, Notification Center, QuickLook, AirPlay, and much more.”

Mac

Evernote

Remember-everything app Evernote keeps getting better — and bigger.

“Evernote truly excels on OS X with a redesigned, Retina-optimized, modern, single-window UI, which also syncs notes between your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and web. Evernote 5 for Mac uses every relevant OS X technology, including iCloud, Notification Center, Reminders, QuickLook, Secure Keychain, Disk encryption, Core Location, Full-screen, Accessibility, and In App Purchase.”

iPhone, iPad, Mac

Finish (student winner)

Finish is a task manager that is designed to help you get ‘er dun … or Finish stuff.

“Inspired by procrastinating students during finals week, the pair developed Finish., a streamlined task manager which uses gestures to help people organize their to-do’s into short, mid, and long-term tasks quickly and easily.”

Students: Ryan Orbuch and Michael Hansen

iPhone

Mosaic.io (student winner)

As the name suggests, Mosaic allows you to build a seamless panorama of images across multiple iOS devices, such as iPads and iPhones, allowing you to use your phones or iPads as one big screen.

“Self-taught iOS developers, the team created mosaic.io as a way to connect two or more iOS devices around a single image, and built the prototype in a weekend. mosaic.io supports Retina Display and magically creates a gorgeous photo mosaic across two or more iOS device screens with a simple swipe of a finger.”

Students: Ishaan Gulrajani, Alex List, and Zain Shah

iPhone, iPad

Image credits: Apple

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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We’re counting down the hours until Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote today, but as usual, details are beginning to leak out.

UPDATE 11:45 a.m. Pacific: Here’s what iOS 7 really looks like, based on screenshots from Apple’s WWDC conference.

Apple’s next mobile operating system, iOS 7, is expected to be the highlight of the conference, and now we have a look at its revamped design. 9to5Mac’s Seth Weintraub has had a look at iOS 7, and while he couldn’t nab a screenshot (for security reasons), the site has mocked up some of the new icons and design elements based on his description.

At first glance, it looks like all of those rumors of Apple’s Jony Ive pushing a flat design for iOS 7 were accurate. The new icons are cleaner and aim for minimalism, compared to the detailed and colorful icons we’ve seen on the OS so far. As for other key differences, cellular reception is now indicated by five dots instead of bars, and the dock icons are separated by a simple transparent line.

Additionally, Weintraub notes that there are light and dark color schemes for the icons and the iOS keyboard. It’s unclear if this is a slight variation for different colored iPhones, or if the icons will change color depending on something like the time of day or ambient lighting. (Darkening the color scheme would be a great way to make iOS more usable in low-light environments, on top of the iPhone’s existing automatic screen brightness setting.)

While the new icons look nice, hopefully Apple managed to bring in some killer new features in iOS 7 as well. Check back at 10 a.m. Pacific today for our WWDC live blog.

iOS 7 mockups: 9to5Mac

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Joe Griffin has served as the co-founder and CEO at iAcquire, a digital marketing firm, since 2008.

Re-launching a website is a massive, multi-layered task for any business.

You have make decisions not only about design and branding — a re-launch requires a seemingly endless checklist of tasks: benchmarking, content strategy, audience research, SEO, back-end hosting … the list goes on. Plus, as a business every decision is hinged on ROI: What impact will the remodeled website have on your business’ traffic, engagement, and conversion?

Your business’s flaws and weak links are often exposed when it comes time to reinvigorate your web presence.

Whether this comes in tandem with an organizational restructure, a change in services or products, a reinvigorated brand strategy, or simply after realizing that your current website is not converting customers at the level you’d like, every business should re-convene on their web strategy at least every few years.

I co-founded iAcquire, a NYC and Phoenix-based digital marketing agency, and recently re-launched our agency site to reflect our evolution as an industry and as an agency. As a 15-year veteran of the digital marketing world and a captain of our agency’s recent remodel, I have gathered years of insight into necessities of a website relaunch.

These tips can serve as a blueprint, checklist, and guide for your enterprise’s future website remodeling plans.

1. Get everyone on the same page

Talk to each and every stakeholder about the impending re-launch. Meet with colleagues (within your department and cross-functionally), shareholders, clients, board members, industry mentors, and other key parties as you embark on your re-launch planning.

Ask each group similar questions:

• What is missing?
• What do you like about the current site?
• Do you think it’s the right time to re-launch?
• Do we have the capacity to do this as a company?
• Do you think we will come out better afterwards?
• Do we want a re-skin, which impacts the overall design aesthetic of the website, or a re-launch, a total overhaul?

Answering these questions early on – and getting buy in and feedback from all parties — will help you in the long run. When relaunching iAcquire.com, for example, multiple departments within our agency combined forces to create a vision for the website. Doing this helped us define scope, high-level direction, budget, requirements, and most importantly goals — all essential for the beginning strategy documents of a website redesign.

2. Allocate a budget and bandwidth

Your overall budget for your website redesign will frame your bandwidth. If your budget is in the tens of thousands of dollars, you have the budget to utilize a big agency to create a new website for your enterprise. If your budget is smaller ($7,500-$15,000) you may be able to utilize outside help on a consulting basis.

Either way, a large chunk of change will be needed for a website redesign. Hosting isn’t free either, so even if you do everything in-house you’ll need a budget.

Also, consider the project scope and if your in-house team has the capacity to complete such a large-scale project. Creative, content, promotion, SEO, and developers will all need to commit a large part of their workload to the project. For example, our marketing and strategy team dedicated a good solid three month to the project.

CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, and legal need to be engaged from the beginning as well. And project status should be communicated at least one time per week to high-level stakeholders.

3. Ensure benchmarks are in place

Create benchmarking documents to track the current website’s design and content, layout, as well as audience targeting and current website analytics (visitor interaction and conversion) so you can accurately measure success after the new site launches. Define your current and future KPIs and keep track of them. Keep in mind that these may change as your organization grows, so be inclusive and collect as much as you can.

For iAcquire, we use the following key performance indicators:

• Leads
• Time on site
• Share of voice
• Number of links
• Organic search rankings
• Impressions
• Traffic

4. Define or redefine your key audience personas

Consumers are getting savvier and savvier by the minute and modern technology allows users to tune out various messages. With that being said, it is crucial to craft your remodeled website around your converting, engaged personas.

Once you define audience personas, you can better direct:

• The tone of the copy
• The website’s overall design/look
• What type of content (images, copy, videos) resonates best
• Calls to action – where the are placed, what copy to use, user path

Creating audience personas helps all creative, content, and allows marketing stakeholders to maintain uniformity. Leverage audience market data, survey results, and need states to create personas and user stories. Use this template and create your own three to five personas. Utilize market research tools like Experian, Nielsen, Facebook data, and even Google Analytics to get to the core of your visitor base.

5. Plan as much as you execute

Draft a creative brief that includes all project requirements – from copy and SEO to technical hosting and color scheme requirements. This brief will serve as the blueprint for all parties working on the redesign.  The plan can be as long as 30 pages, though the length is not important; the content is the important part. If it helps you, then delegate specific sections to different leaders within your team. Come together and review the plan, and then from there start executing your strategy.

6. Consider your copy

A shiny, well-designed site is great, but like your looks it’s the first thing to go with age. If your content isn’t great, neither is your site. And it’s not just about well-written prose; it all has to be planned out, persona-driven content, created by understanding your key audiences and how they behave online. Develop a roadmap for content strategy and your copy will fall into place.

Within iAcquire, we know that governance and establishing an editorial calendar is just as important as setting up the content framework. Without structural guidance organizations can fall into content paralysis. These processes defines the players, topics, and requirements necessary to curate and publish content.

7. Keep the bot in mind

Within your re-launch two key “audiences” need to be kept in mind: your visitors and the search engine spiders. Search engines have a very detailed algorithm for ranking pages, and with your re-launch you want to make sure that you stay even or above in your rankings. Here are three key considerations you should have for SEO:

• Redirects
  If specific URLs are no longer active, or you are changing the site architecture, make sure 301s redirects are in place. Non-existent redirects can lead to a “docked” search position.
• Conversion end-points
  Your re-designed website will probably not have the same conversion funnel or path as your last site, so make sure someone is dedicated to checking the conversion points on your redesigned sites to make sure they are a) working, b) properly migrated, and c) tracked.
• On-page keyword analysis
  Target two to three keywords per page and intertwine them organically throughout the copy and metadata. If your organization previously targeted a list of keywords, look at them again as competition and volume changes from year to year and even month to month.

8. Who’s your host?

Consider where you are going to host your site.

Is it going to sit on a server that your enterprise owns and maintains, or will it live with a hosting company? Is your hosting bandwidth enough? Consider what frameworks you will use on the front end, and what Javascript libraries you will use, such as MooTools or jQuery. PHP, .Net, or Rails? WordPress or Drupal?

All of these decisions need to be made early on.

9. Utilize Google Webmaster Tools

Once your website is in development, have your organization set up a Google account (if you don’t already have one) and get acquainted with Google Webmaster Tools. This free Google tool can tell you any problems with site/page indexing and even click-through rates. If the content is being rearranged on your new site, it could be buried deeper, making it harder for search engines to crawl, which leads to a non-indexed area.

10. Strategize a post-launch plan

Your job isn’t over when your redesigned site launches. Create a plan to promote the new site on social media, PR outreach, and blog announcements. Plan on pushing marketing messages through these channels for at least two weeks past the launch. Connect with key influencers on social who can push your message further.

Then create a plan to organize, develop, curate, and publish new content so you keep luring new visitors in: inbound marketing at its finest. On an internal communications front, make sure that your organization is kept in the loop as well. Inform all departments of the re-launch. Be clear on what has changed and how they can utilize your “2.0” or “3.0″ website to optimally conduct their respective jobs.

While every organization has needs, adopting a process is a crucial element. Use this list as a guide, and customize it to meet your organization’s unique challenges, and develop a website that reflects your company in a way that is beneficial to you and your customer.

Joe Griffin has served as the co-founder and CEO at iAcquire, a digital marketing firm, since 2008. Prior to founding iAcquire, Joe co-founded SubmitAWebsite.com, which was acquired by Web.com, and before that he spent three years with iCrossing, where he led business development and later their paid search division. Joe writes at joegriffin.me and the iAcquire blog, tweets at @joegriffin, and lives on Google+.

photo credit: baldiri via photopin cc

Yahoo has unveiled a refresh of its web search look and feel today.

As is the wont of consumer applications in our media-saturated day and age, pictures take a prominent role in making the experience feel richer and even more tactile.

Here’s a quick before/after:

And here’s a Yahoo/Google comparison, for good measure:

The new UI is available in the U.S. only for now. It’s a slight change from other interfaces, but it’s just a bit prettier — and when dealing with millions of users, incremental change can be a good thing.

This interface includes a new top navigation bar and was designed to be more consistent with the new Yahoo homepage.

“Over the coming months, you’ll see more from Yahoo! as we work to deliver a search experience that combines utility with beauty and gets you to your results faster,” writes Yahoo search SVP Laurie Mann today on the company blog.

“Today’s news is just our first step.”

As per usual, there’s nothing new under the hood. Yahoo search is, as per a longstanding agreement, powered by Microsoft/Bing.

But the new focus on experience and interface is consistent with the company’s other recent moves. Lately, Yahoo has been focusing on mobile with an emphasis on great design, a promise that’s playing out in Yahoo’s reimagined Flickr UI and its apps for Yahoo Mail and Weather for iOS.

July 9-10, 2013
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Getting out of bed in the morning can be painful and Sunrise is trying to improve that experience with good design.  Today the startup that delivers a ‘smart’ and beautiful’ digest of your day announced closing a $2.2 million round of funding.

The founders of Sunrise are ex-Foursquare designers Jeremy Le Van and Pierre Valade. They were disappointed with the available calendar options and decided to create a better designed alternative that focuses on user experience. The platform connects APIs from sources where you might have events saved, such as Facebook, Google Calendar, and Eventbrite, and assembles all of that information into one digestible email.

“Calendars is one space that hasn’t really evolved in the past years, and it’s time to connect all the information together in a smart way,” Valade said. “When users wake up, it’s already their routine to check their emails, so we are in the natural flow they’re used to. It is both simple and powerful. We designed at least 25 different variations before finding the right one that will work both on mobile and desktop. I think we’ve designed the best email ever.”

Sunrise goes beyond scheduling and also pulls in information relevant to your agenda. It is integrated with LinkedIn so you can see profiles of people you are scheduled to meet with, and also provides directions to appointments through Google Maps, weather reports, and even tidbits about sunrise and sunset times, and birthdays.

Sunrise launched in November 2012. At the time, 50 percent of early adopters were opening their Sunrise emails everyday which Valade said is high compared to traditional emails. Resolute and NextView Ventures co-led the round, with participation from Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, Adam Rothenberg and David Tisch at BoxGroup, 500 Startups, and Terrapin Bail. Angel investors include Dave Morin of Path, Andrew Kortina of Venmo, Adam Nash and Elliot Shmukler of LinkedIn, Hunter Walk of YouTube, Gustar Alstromer from AirBnB, Adam Mosseri from Facebook and others.

Sunrise is free and available on the App Store. A digital calendar isn’t exactly a new idea and in addition to Google Calendar and iCal, Tempo, Calengoo, Fantastical, GoCal (and more) want to help you organize your schedule. It’s a crowded space and Sunrise hopes to win it with design. The startup is based on New York City.

Photo Credit: Lars Plougmann/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
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Design tech company Adobe has acquired San Francisco-based creative consulting firm Ideacodes, the company announced today.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the purchase does seem to be mostly motivated by gaining the firm’s employees. Ideacodes describes itself as an agency that specializes in the design and user experience of smart applications, digital products, and network communities.

As such, Adobe is placing Ideacode cofounders Emily Chang and Max Kielser will join the company as the new creative directors of Creative Cloud, Adobe’s new cloud-based design software service that’s intended to replace the Creative Suite software bundle.

“For the last nine years we’ve worked to re-envision the design of digital products and create the ultimate user experience for their customers,” said Chang and Kiesler in a joint statement. “We’re thrilled to join Adobe at a time when Creative Cloud is beginning to take form, the potential to harness the power of connected networks is being realized, and the influence of good design on experience is being appreciated and expected from people worldwide.”

The Ideacode acquisition comes just days after Adobe’s purchase of Thumb Labs, a mobile dev/design shop and maker of the Behance iOS application.

Over the past week or so, I’ve found myself revisiting the new Flickr and trying to figure out just why it feels like the product release falls short. A lot has changed, including what Flickr, at its core, is. A few particular pieces stand out, however, that should be discussed. Not so much as a critique of Flickr, but rather as lessons we can all benefit from as we think about our own products. In no particular order:

User experience is about the tech, too

While I don’t particularly love the new profile design (the list of photos lacks hierarchy, focus, and context), its biggest problem is a technical one: speed. It doesn’t matter if people enjoy the new layout if the photos don’t load smoothly and quickly. It appears the new design required more photos per page than before in order to feel rich and full. But that meant implementing some lazy-loading that really gets crushed as the user scrolls. Tons of blank spaces and many seconds before the photos pop in.

We’re all responsible for the user experience (not just designers). Does the page respond quickly? What happens when it doesn’t? At Etsy, we have a special admin toolbar that measures page load times and lets us know when a page is above the acceptable load time (and we’re constantly working to shave milliseconds off load times). The most beautiful design in the world doesn’t matter if the person exits/bounces before it shows up.

Focus on your customer

Until recently, Flickr was very much geared for pro users. With a limit of 200 photos before hitting a paywall, there wasn’t much reason for those of us who shoot exclusively with our mobile phones to leave the warm embrace of Facebook or Instagram. Sure, there were definitely casual photographers on Flickr, but the old single-photo view was packed with data (such as the EXIF info) that no one but seasoned photogs cared about or even understood. For that reason (along with the yearly subscription fee), most characterizations I’ve heard of Flickr in the past few years centered around pro usage and being popular amongst that demographic.

With this release, it’s as if Flickr couldn’t decide who their customer is. It’s totally within their rights to shift their strategy to go after the casual market (it may be the right move for them), but some of their design changes fight against each other:

• Increasing the amount of storage, but calling it out as a terabyte (understood only by the tech savvy and pro photographers).
• Promoting that free terabyte of storage, but removing the useful EXIF data from the single photo view.
• A Pinterest-esque photo gallery design, but no sense of social activity on the page.

Who is the product for? Who is the customer? If you don’t know that, your design will similarly contradict itself, failing to feel like a cohesive experience.

If you’re doing an overhaul, do an overhaul

As I browse the site, I keep having this internal monologue:

“Oh, this view is lovely.”

[scroll]

“What the — old Flickr?”

It’s apparent from some of the Flickr designers’ tweets that the timeline for this project was pretty condensed. But man, what a bummer to halfway design a beautiful baseline for future iterations and have the other half of the page look and feel like you forgot to touch it up. I mean, yeah, that takes more time, but if you’re doing a design overhaul, do an overhaul. Or at least bring the rest of the content enough in line with the new parts that it doesn’t feel so disjointed. Personally, I wouldn’t advocate for total product revamps like this (too many variables make it hard to understand the results). But if you’re going to do one, go all the way.

As I said before, I don’t mean this so much as a critique of Flickr (I’m not a member). Who knows what the internal process looked like? Having worked at a similarly large company, I could venture a guess, but the fact remains that overhauling and changing the model for such an established and beloved brand is a herculean task no matter where you’re working.

While the changes may not mesh entirely with their past, it’s heartening that the Flickr folks are now empowered to develop and build their product again. And, regardless of where they end up, the journey promises to be an interesting one.

Cap Watkins is a New York City-dwelling interface designer, currently design lead at Etsy, formerly at Formspring, Amazon, and Zoosk. This post originally appeared on his personal blog. While he is not currently exploring other job opportunities, he’d love to talk about your next big idea at [cwatkins at gmail dot com].

Image credit: gregsphoto/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
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Apple is widely expected to reveal a new iOS7 on June 10 at its Worldwide Developer Conference. And there are some big changes in store.

Scott Forstall and his love of user interface elements that mimic the “real world” is long gone. Jony Ive, the design genius behind the iMac, iPhone, iPad, and pretty much everything Apple in the last decade, was appointed to overhaul and comprehensively redo Apple’s most important crown jewel in October of last year.

Now, it appears, he’s close to complete.

Ive has been leading a thorough revamp of the iPhone UI in preparation for the upcoming iOS 7 release, and according to 9to5 Mac, he’s also most done. The changes are significant, described as “black, white, and flat all over.”

That’s a massive change from the original colorful, shiny, semi-transparent iOS development language, which tries hard to make virtual controls and objects look and feel and act like real controls and objects. You see that today in the drop shadows behind icons, the compass interface of Find My iPhone, and the physical button-like Apple toggle controls:

Source: John Koetsier

iPhone UI design

Forstall, the former iPhone chief who was cut from the Apple team after refusing to apologize for the Apple Maps disaster, was a big fan of skeuomorphic design: design that connects the new to the old with decorative but — some might say — unnecessary elements.

Those “some” would include Ive.

Apple’s Notes app is an example of skeuomorphic design, with faux leather at the top and the virtual remnants of virtual torn-off pages at the top. On iPhone, iBooks, Find My Friends, and Newstand are examples, with with fake bookshelves, fake stitching, fake leather, and fake shadows.

For a designer like Jony Ive, who has spent his life stripping away excess, simplifying relentlessly, there is something inherently dishonest about skeuomorphic design. It’s something of a lie … because there is no wood in your iPhone, no dead animal skin on the screen, and no paper to be torn off. And, he’s been quoted as saying that software designs built with physical metaphors do not stand the test of time.

There are design elements in the iPhone’s user interface language that are already trending away from the original color and connection to material controls.

Safari and Mail, for instance, have no parchment, no leather, no torn-off page remnants:

There are no images yet of iOS7, which will be one of Apple’s most closely-guarded secrets up to WWDC. Changes reportedly include dropping the textured, cloth-like background of Notifications Center in favor of a flat grey, and the shiny, transparent lock screen will lose its luster for a flatter, less evocative interface. You would have to think that a detail-oriented design-obsessed Ive will have comprehensively altered the appearance of almost everything in the iOS design language, but we’ll know more on June 10 when Apple reveals it.

In all this rush to get rid of skeuomorphic design, there’s one thing to remember.

Perhaps the iPhone was so transformative, so new, and so different, that skeuomorphism was a necessary first step in the evolution of its design language. And perhaps the virtual has now become so real … that now we don’t need it anymore.

photo credit: marcopako  via photopin cc

Adobe has just bought up Thumb Labs, mobile dev/design shop and maker of the Behance iOS application.

Behance, another recent Adobe acquisition, lets users (read: designers and other digitally/visually oriented creatives) make online portfolios, show off their work, and do a bit of social-professional online networking.

Behance features were a big part of Adobe’s recent Creative Cloud string of announcements. The design software company is making big bets on cloud-based software paradigms, trading in its decades of cereal-box software expertise to keep pace with the changing times.

In a nutshell, Adobe killed off its Creative Suite product line and branding, reimagining the flagship brand (and Adobe’s revenue model) under the subscription service known as Creative Cloud.

Behance (and Thumb Labs) represent Adobe’s best attempt to be social and give designers and developers more and better tools for showcasing their work.

Thumb Labs was founded in 2010 in New York City.

“It is clear that this is an exciting time at the company,” said Thumb Labs co-founders Rich Kern and Jared Verdi in a joint statement on the startup’s website.

“We are looking forward to contributing to these efforts, as Behance’s vibrant community becomes more deeply integrated into Adobe’s tools.”

Adobe also recently started integrating other Behance features into its products, including portfolio sites and community features.

July 9-10, 2013
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Google has gone from a company that approached design through cold, hard data to one that’s employing gorgeous, user-centric interfaces.

Design was a big theme at this year’s Google I/O developer conference, with over a dozen sessions exploring design in some fashion. And you can see Google’s new aesthetic focus in plenty of its products — like Gmail’s slight redesign and the upcoming Google Maps refresh — but Android serves as the fastest example of Google’s design turnaround.

Perhaps it’s because design matters all the more on a small smartphone screen. With Android, Google also had to do something about Apple’s head start with iOS. To get Android to look as good at the iPhone, Google had to radically reshape how it thought of design, and fast. Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich,” released in 2011, was Google’s first attempt to emphasize design in its mobile OS. Its aesthetic has only become more refined since then.

Google being Google, it’s also obsessively focused on the function of its design. Unlike of the old days, where Google went with the design most people liked through rigorous testing, usability is front and center now, with a new focus on cognitive science and user empathy.

Designing to delight on Android

Users brought up a slew of design issues in Android’s first few versions, and Google saw the need for a new direction. Enter Android’s new design principles, co-authored by Google’s Rachel Garb, head of interaction design for Android apps, and Helena Roeber, who previously headed up Android’s user experience research team.

“We thought, what if we turned this long list of shortcomings that bum us out into something that actually inspires us to create beautiful and usable designs,” Garb said during a Google I/O panel yesterday.

Enchant. Simplify. Amaze. With Android 4.0 two years ago, those three seemingly simple principles became the cornerstone of Android’s design.

“We all respond emotionally to every moment we experience, and we experience around 20,000 of these moments every waking day,” Garb said. Negative emotions are so powerful they have the ability to shorten your lifespan, while positive emotions are essential for daily life.

Garb’s goal: to make sure Android serves as a fount of positive experiences. That was a big departure from Android’s earlier days, when it was complicated, technical, and far from user friendly.

As one example, Google developed a subtle animation in the Android home screen to tell users when they’ve reached the end of their available screens. If there was no indication, users could get frustrated. The new animation delighted users so much that they ended up playing around with it just for fun.

“Not only did it tell them they did everything right, it also kind of helped establish the virtual spaces and provided the feedback in an elegant, subtle, and non-disruptive way,” Roeber said.

Google also added a full-time writer to the design team to take charge of all of the user-viewable text in Android. With short words, active verbs, and common nouns, the writer helped transform Android into an environment more suited for typical, non-technical users.

For example, a setting that used to read “Use tactile feedback” was changed to the more human-readable “Vibrate on touch.” Similarly, a warning that used to read “You didn’t insert a SIM card” now simply prompts “Insert SIM card now.”

You can see all the new design principles at work in Google Now, Android’s predictive search virtual assistant. Enabling it simply takes one click on your Android phone (Simplify), and afterwards it simply presents relevant information when you need it (Enchant). Its interface is sparse, consisting of only the cards you need to see at any particular time. Google Now also learns from your behavior to get better over time (Amaze).

Better design through science

“All of our evolution has been optimized for the types of things we’re likely to see,” said Alex Faaborg, a Google designer with a background in cognitive science and machine learning. Speaking at an I/O panel focused on cognitive science and design, he discussed a few examples of how tiny decisions take advantage of human perception to create a better user experience.

Gestalt psychology principles play a significant role in Google’s designs. For example, Google is using white space more liberally across its products to group items (consider that bit of space between Google search results). In Android, it’s taking advantage of our ability to automatically complete shapes for things like form entries (boring rectangular boxes are out, now you just see the bottom portion of a text entry line). Similar objects, like the stars and check boxes in Gmail, are grouped together to make them easier for us to scan.

Even those small notifications you get in Google Docs along the side of the edges of your screen are backed by cognitive science. Faaborg pointed out that we see peripheral motion faster than what we’re looking at directly, so it makes sense to keep your notifications along the edges of the screen.

About half of Faaborg’s talk focused on vision, while the other half focused on attention, focus, and memory. Google learned that repetition may be a better way to teach simple concepts to users, instead of just offering a single tutorial up front. For example, a repeated alert in new Android phones tells users where they can find all of their apps. Previously, users would skip through the short introductory screen.

“Consistency is not critical — you don’t need to build products identical to what’s on the marketplace,” Faaborg noted at the end of his chat, in a takeaway that also tells us a lot about how Google views design now. He urged developers to build innovative designs and trust that their audiences will be able to understand them. “People are smart,” he said.

Is it enough?

While Google’s design breakthroughs have led to some major changes internally, its competition hasn’t been sitting still.

Apple, a company practically synonymous with excellent product design, will likely see a major style evolution now that Jony Ive is in charge of design company-wide. According to rumors, this year’s iOS 7 could be a major overhaul more in line with Ive’s aesthetic (a love of simple and flat designs).

With Windows 8, Microsoft made a radical design shift as well, bringing elements from its slick Windows Phone operating system to the desktop. Microsoft just announced that it sold 100 million Windows 8 licenses in its first six months on the market, which is in line with Windows 7 sales. With its support for tablets and traditional computers, Windows 8′s design could continue to pay off for Microsoft as personal computing trends change over the next few years.

No matter what Google does, it can’t please everyone. But now, at least, Google is trying.

Photos: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat: Top image: Google

July 9-10, 2013
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ShopSavvy’s new look is paying off in a big way.

The company officially launched a redesigned version of its mobile shopping app for iOS today, which also incorporates new product discovery features for the first time (previously, you’d have to know exactly what you’re looking for in its apps). The new app not only looks better — it’s also led to a significant increase in user engagement among early testers, ShopSavvy revealed to us.

The amount of lists people created within ShopSavvy increased by 291 percent, while the products added to those lists grew by 555 percent. Additionally, the company said that daily sessions increased by 26 percent, and acccount creation has jumped by 44 percent.

“We have a lot of users who really wanted a discovery experience as well,” said ShopSavvy cofounder and CEO John Boyd. “The challenge was coming up with an experience that works for discovery as well as direct search.”

Previously, ShopSavvy looked like a typical price comparison application. Now it’s an intriguing blend of comparison and product browsing. There’s a new menu on the left that suggests products that you may like, and you can easily drag products into your lists and bookmarks. Doing just about anything in the new app feels effortless — so those new engagement figures make sense.

ShopSavvy first dabbled in product discovery when it launched an iPad app last December. Clearly, the company’s experience building that app has informed the redesigned iPhone experience.

Another big addition to the new ShopSavvy app is the ability to list products that don’t have UPC tags. This will allow the company to offer price comparison for a wider variety of products, and it could also be useful for local merchants, Boyd tells me.

ShopSavvy has offices in San Francisco and Dallas and has thus far raised a total of $11.5 million.

Now more than ever, normal people are aware of and attracted to good design. And no one knows that better than author/designer David Kadavy, who recently gave a fascinating TED talk on the topic.

“People are already learning about design,” said Kadavy via email. “You can talk about Times New Roman versus Helvetica at a cocktail party these days — and that wouldn’t have happened 20 years ago.”

In this 17-minute talk, he goes into the niceties and not-so-niceties of our cultural conversations around design and how design as a basic life skill is becoming mainstream.

Image credit: sima/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
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We’re loving the latest Google Doodle, a celebration of the 93rd birthday (and life’s work) of the legendary Saul Bass.

Check it out:

Bass was a truly great designer. In the golden age of cinema, he became famous for his title sequences. The first few minutes of classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo or The Man With the Golden Arm owe all their magic to Bass and his expert handling of shape, color, and motion.

In fact, we’d probably consider Bass the founding father of modern kinetic typography, which has all but taken over cheaply produced video marketing these days (just do a YouTube search for “kinetic typography,” you’ll see what we mean.)

“My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film’s story, to express the story in some metaphorical way,” Bass once said.

“I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it.”

Image credit: Harrie Verstappen via Wikipedia

July 9-10, 2013
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Ever wanted to watch people as they browse your website to figure out what’s working for them — and what’s not?

YouEye does just that, and today it closed $3 million for its unique approach to usability testing it describes as “UX in the cloud.” Angel investors include Saba Software CEO Bobby Yazdani, software engineer Brian McClendon, and Iranian engineer Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi.

The startup claims that customers such as Airbnb, Microsoft, and Eventbrite use its service. Customers are using the technology to watch testers browsing their websites through webcam, and they can listen in to any feedback.

CEO Kyle Henderson got the idea when he listened in to a presentation from a company that had started using eye-tracking technology to study onsite behavior. The results were extremely helpful, but the the price was well over $40,000 for several months. Henderson was determined to create a cheaper version of this technology for companies of all sizes to use.

YouEye’s secret is its “emotion recognition” functionality — the engineering team has compiled a dataset of 50,000 microexpressions and can pinpoint when visitors to your site are happy, surprised, confused, sad, or disgusted.

Got a target market in mind? Customers can request a specific type of tester by demographic factors like age range, gender, education level or income. Another option is to Insite, a new feature released today. By incorporating a line of code, customers can ask any visitor to their site to participate in a usability study, and then capture the full video and audio if they opt in.

Prices start at $39 per participant, and customers can expect to get a full run-down of usability results within 48 hours.

July 9-10, 2013
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Fjord, the high-end design firm, has been scooped up by Accenture for an undisclosed sum.

The news was announced today on the company blog. CEO Olof Schybergson writes that the team is excited by the opportunity to work at one of the largest global consulting firms. “It’s almost like graduation day: proud of what I’d achieved, emotional about the past, and facing a new world of possibilities.”

Fjord counts Nokia, Citibank, Harvard Medical School, and PayPal among its clients (the firm was responsible for the redesign of Nokia.com).

The firm’s chief client officer Mark Curtis once remarked that design is sparking a similar revolution to marketing just a few decades ago. “We’re beginning to see the very best products marketing themselves through design,” he said on stage at VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit in April.

Fjord’s 200 or so employees will make the jump, and will join Accenture Interactive, the consulting giant’s design and marketing wing.

This is the latest in a series of acquisitions of design studios: Jawbone has added design talent to its team by acquiring Visere, and Google bought husband-and-wife creative studio Mike & Maaike last year.

Top image from a Fjord company retreat via the Fjord blog

Today, Adobe’s creative software for development and design is getting 15 full-version upgrades to its apps, a total rebranding with a new versioning system, and a payment plan and future upgrade path overhaul.

The most important thing for you to know is that Creative Suite is gone. In its place is Creative Cloud. That means no matter what you use, you’ll have to pay a monthly subscription fee to use it; it also means you’ll never again have to wait two years for a bug fix or a crucial feature you need to keep up with others in your industry.

As for the new features and news apps, we’ve got a full rundown, and they’re pretty exciting.

“They’re lightweight, task-specific tools to get the job done,” Adobe marketing director Scott Morris told VentureBeat in a phone call last week. “We have a beautiful vision of where creative workflows are going.”

A lot of what you’ll see in Creative Cloud is fuller integration between desktop and cloud; for example, you will be able to sync fonts, colors, and assets between all your devices.

You’ll be able to create Behance posts directly from Photoshop to show off what you’re working on.

Also, Adobe is killing off the Adobe Application Manager. Instead, a Creative Cloud app will automatically install on the desktop along with any CC software. The Creative Cloud app will also send you notifications on software updates and Behance activities in an activity stream and will help you keep assets, fonts, and style synced.

The 15 new apps and new app versions come with hundreds of new features and revamped features, which we’re highlighting below in painstaking detail for every kind of developer and designer.

New for Photoshop

One of Adobe’s most popular pieces of software is getting a thoroughly modern overhaul. It has new features here that everyone — web designers, pro photographers, photo-happy grandmas — is going to love.

• The new Smart Sharpen feature minimizes noise and haloing while leaving your pics supercrisp.
• Intelligent upsampling makes your images larger without all that sloppy-looking noise and blurring.
• Photoshop CC includes the video and 3D editing features in Photoshop Extended, too.
• Photoshop CC supports Camera Raw edits for any Photoshop layer or file, which permits for better heal edits and vignettes.
• Adobe is giving Photoshop users editable rounded rectangles and multishape and path selection so you can select more than one path, mask, layer, or shape at a time.
• Conditional Actions use if/then statements to automatically choose between different actions based on rules you set up.
• Photoshop is also getting expanded support for Smart Objects, so you can blur and liquefy in a nondestructive way, even after you save the file.
• For 3D painting, live previews have gotten a lot faster — up to 100x faster, the company says.

New for designers

Here are all the new Adobe software features you’ll want to know about before you decide whether your CS package needs an immediate upgrade.

• Adobe Ideas is a new, free iOS app that creates freeform vector illustrations on Apple touchscreen devices.
• Kuler is a new mobile app that takes a photo and creates a color palette that can be synced across your whole system.
• Touch Type is a feature that manipulates individual letters via multitouch, stylus, or mouse. You can also instantly switch between area and point type.
• Images can be turned into brushes, and pattern brushes have auto corners.
• Font search in Illustrator and InDesign, and font preview, and font favorites in InDesign.
• Syncing for fonts, styles, preferences, you name it, across your whole system.
• Multi-file place in Illustrator.
• For InDesign, the new version is faster; has a new, dark UI; supports HiDPI and Retina displays.
• An InDesign QR code creator.
• Parallax scrolling and in-browser editing in Muse.
• InCopy comes to Creative Cloud with HiDPI/Retina support, font search, and a dark UI.

New for developers

Adobe has been placing a ton of emphasis on web design and responsive mobile design lately. Here’s what the company has planned for the more technical side of creative teams.

• Flash has been reengineered for performance with 64-bit architecture.
• Flash now has hi-def export options, better HTML publishing, and a simpler UI.
• The new Flash brings a powerful code editor and comes with Adobe Scout, which detects potential problems in your code.
• With USB connections, you can now do real-time mobile testing in FLash with iOS and Android devices.
• Edge Animate now has motion paths, templates, and support for swipe gestures, as well as an Akamai-hosted content delivery network for your runtime files.
• Edge Reflow is getting an Assets panel and Typekit integration.
• Dreamweaver has a new CSS Designer, a Typekit-powered font library, and a simpler UI.
• You can also author new Dreamweaver projects in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, and you also get a jQuery widget.
• Dreamweaver has PhoneGap integration and an upgraded Fluid Grid layout for doing responsive design.
• As with all the other new CC products, Dreamweaver supports syncing of files, preferences, and settings across your whole system.

New for video

Video pros and special effects folks will also see a lot of the syncing, collaboration features popping up elsewhere in the Creative Cloud family. But Adobe’s video apps are also getting their own special dose of refreshed magic.

• Premier is getting a redesigned Timeline to make editing more efficient.
• Link and locate in Premier will help you keep track of the thousands of clips in a big project.
• Collaborative editing in Premier and After Effects is easier with new sync options. You can also use Anywhere features to edit on the go from a shared server without running into versioning issues.
• Premier Pro now supports closed captioning.
• A few Premier features focus on more precise audio control, including a clip mixer and new plugins.
• In After Effects, you can use tools like Refine Edge, Warp Stabilizer, and Pixel Motion Blur to up your creative game and create higher-quality visual effects.
• After Effects has new tools for 3D video with Cinema 4D support.
• Audition is getting new features for sound removal, previewing tracks, and multitrack editing.
• Adobe is also announcing minor feature upgrades for Prelude, SpeedGrade, and Story Plus.

Image credit: Adobe

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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We may not have flying cars yet, but one thing is certain: We now expect a great Mobile Experience.

We expect it in almost every aspect of our daily lives: At home, parents are video chatting from their phones with their teenagers, who know better than using SMS for texting. At work, we’re using well-designed consumer apps on our tablets. While shopping, we expect quick and seamless browsing and payment options. I’m not even talking about how you’ll soon pay for that latte while scanning news with your Google Glasses.

Mobile Experience is the sum of all this. It is how content, mobile site design and development, advertising, commerce features, hardware — and even your surroundings — are all converging together more seamlessly in your mobile life than they have before. And that’s what we’re debating at our upcoming MobileBeat 2013 conference in San Francisco on July 9th and 10th (get your early bird tickets here; we sell out every year, so move quickly).

The Mobile Experience is not optional, it is mandatory. If your company isn’t serving its content or services with a great experience, the odds are you’re probably going to go down.

What’s more, inherent technical constraints are combining with merciless competition in the mobile space to drive a continual process of natural selection. This allows only the cream of the crop of services to rise to the top. Thousands of developers are releasing new apps every day. Legacy providers who aren’t moving quickly enough are getting left by the wayside.

Who is claiming the eyeballs and wallets by providing the best Mobile Experience? What are the top brands in the world doing to keep up with this shift, and who are they working with? Which upcoming releases will help you make your design even sleeker, your technology stacks even faster, your revenue streams even safer? Those are some of the topics we’ll be discussing at MobileBeat.

This is an expansion of last year’s MobileBeat theme, which was about the emergence of the superiority of design. This year, design is still extremely important, but we’re seeing that other functionality — whether it is commerce, payments, advertising or other technology — is being built into that design in a more integrated way.

That’s why we’ve widened our focus, and are going with the tagline: “How to build the Winning Mobile Experience.” The Mobile Experience refers to the overall mobile experience — and it also nods to the need for business models and other functionality to be incorporated into pretty design. How to build that winning Mobile Experience is what every company needs to know.

This year, we invite you to discover best examples of companies that know how to craft a great Mobile Experience. We’re on the prowl right now to invite them all at MobileBeat 2013. We will focus on the recipes for success. Come hear from top brands what they see their customers wanting, and meet the leaders from technology companies large and small that help redefine what you expect from a smartphone. Oh by the way, you may not think “phones” for much longer either when talking about mobile.

Tailored for business executives and technology decision-makers to stay on top of news in this fast-changing industry, the event will address all the topics that are impacted by mobile, from brand engagement and advertising, to user acquisition and monetization, consumerization of IT in the enterprise, and technology and infrastructure. Find the complete list on MobileBeat’s website.

Look forward to seeing you there!

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Even Samsung admits that the Galaxy S4 isn’t a “radical difference” from the Galaxy S III.

Instead, the phone is “more of an evolution,” a Samsung employee says in a new video detailing the Galaxy S4′s design story.

The video offers an intriguing glimpse into how Samsung’s designers think — though it all sounds very similar to what we heard around last year’s Galaxy S III. Once again, Samsung was inspired by many design aspects found in nature, and it attempted to figure out the perfect way to make the phone your ideal “life companion.”

In my review, I found the Galaxy S4 to be a solid crowd-pleaser. For its next phone, though, I hope Samsung focuses more on good taste and better build quality rather than cramming in every feature under the sun.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Look up. Those are upcoming Microsoft logos — as strange as it may seem.

They’re new designs for Bing (left) and another Microsoft product (either Yammer or Skype), part of Microsoft’s overall effort to re-imagine itself, reports the Verge.

Clearly, Microsoft is aiming for the same flat design we see in its new Windows and Office logos — and that’s a good thing. The new logos feel cleaner and more modern than Microsoft’s previous designs, and the change shows the software giant isn’t afraid to try something different.

The new designs were a part of a presentation by Windows Phone design student manager Albert Shum and Todd Simmons, who’s the creative director at Wolff Olins, for a recent Design Day event in Norway. The pair discussed Microsoft’s efforts to revamp its design identity. Simmons also points out that Xbox, Bing, and Skype will see new logos soon.

According to the Verge, the pair discussed how Microsoft paid particular attention to certain brands like Nike when considering the company’s own redesign efforts.

“When you experience the Nike brand in whatever form you may experience it, there’s always a ‘Nikeness’ right … you can certainly see it without the logo,” Simmons said. That seems to be the goal of Microsoft’s new logos — they’ll still be distinct, but on a certain level you’ll be able to tell they’re Microsoft products.

A video of the presentation was initially put online at Vimeo, but unfortunately it looks like it’s been made private.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Forget about the cloud storage wars; competition is fiercer than ever in the cloud collaboration space.

Today, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Moxie Software announced it is offering Collaboration Spaces, its business-focused social networking software for free. ”General purpose collaboration, what Jive and Yammer do, we now deliver better and for free,” said Moxie Software CEO Tom Kelly (pictured, above) by phone.

With this release, Moxie is taking a clear swipe at the competition. “I can’t imagine why someone would write a cheque to Jive without trying this,” Kelly explained.

Business software has been accused of being poorly-designed, and rich with unused features. So to ensure the collaboration product is “eye candy for the enterprise,” Kelly enlisted the help of storied design firm IDEO. Cloud startups like Box and Evernote have made similar claims that they intend to make user experience design a priority.

Why would the company offer one of its most popular products for free? Kelly believes the  general purpose collaboration space will be commoditized in a few years. To get ahead of the curve, Moxie hopes its free product will attract customers to try its other services.

Moxie is positioning itself as the “customer communication” expert; according to Kelly, it’s the only vendor that can “turn your company into an answer machine.”

Jive Software’s chief communications officer Amanda Pires responded that Jive isn’t threatened. Pires said, “People pay for what they value which is why Jive has more than 800 large enterprise customers across the world and continues to lead the industry.”

After a year of promises and hints, Yahoo is finally giving consumers a glimpse of its future: beautiful apps, modern design, and full participation in the future of mobile computers.

Today, the company launched two new apps, a tablet experience for the ever-popular Yahoo Mail and an iOS stunner for Weather. Both applications show a night-and-day shift in how Yahoo works. Information is pared down to the essentials. Each page is perfectly suited to the screen size and use case at hand.

And, as we learned in a call with Yahoo mobile and emerging products director Marco Wirasinghe and senior director Lee Parry this morning, both apps are a great indicator of where Yahoo is headed: into a much cooler future where it makes gorgeous apps instead of cluttered homepages.

“You’re gonna see us do a lot more things that are visual, rich, and have engagement that’s absolutely delightful,” said Wirasinghe.

‘You don’t need a weatherman …’

Visually rich is a great way to describe the new Yahoo Weather app for the iPhone. It uses Flickr community images to illustrate the weather in glorious, full-screen color rather than a boring table of temperatures with some tired pop-meteorology icons.

“It’s more than charts and numbers; it’s about places you’ve been, places where you have family. It’s connected to emotion, and visually, we can get to that connection faster than any other format,” said Wirasinghe.

“The idea [for using Flickr photos] came from internal meetings,” Wirasinghe said. “We were looking for something to do with Weather. It’s the most profound daily activity on a smartphone, but we didn’t have an experience that made it really shine. We asked what would be delightful and what do people really want.”

Also, getting the development team working on the app to work in a new way — a more collaborative way — was instrumental in making the app better.

“What you’re seeing now is the combined efforts of design and engineering and product all sitting within ten feet of each other and working in a very agile and dedicated way,” Wirasinghe said.

Leaning back into Mail

Today’s other launch was Yahoo Mail for iPad and Android tablets. One of the company’s most-used apps, Yahoo Mail has been getting facelifts for its other incarnations lately. But the tablet app took that redesign a step farther.

“We wanted to start by looking at how users use tablets,” Parry said. “Our competitors were shoehorning the same interfaces into a tablet screen. They weren’t making the most of the larger interfaces.”

Internally, the Mail team talked about their own tablet email use. They were checking in on their inboxes over the weekend; they were reading a ton of messages but not writing many. As it turned out, their users were doing pretty much the same thing, the data would show.

“We wanted to make that better for them,” Parry continued. “On the fullscreen stuff, we looked at how people read on tablets — browsers, news readers, photo apps. There’s a pattern of swiping through pages. And in fullscreen mode, we wanted to re-create that light, airy experience.”

It’s a lean-back way of reading email that works for a larger form-factor in a more casual, living-room-couch use case. But it’s also indicative of Yahoo’s future plans for its other apps.

The right design for the right device

“I’m really loving what we released today,” Parry said with more than a hint of smile in his voice. ”Mail definitely aligns to our priorities, the user experience on performance and on design. If we can focus on those to each of the daily habits Yahoo has a strong presence in, we can really improve the lives of our users.”

Mobile design, Wirasinghe said, “is an evolving exercise for us. When it comes to design, we have to look at the medium, the device. We have the content, which varies from each daily habit, and we have to think about the user experience. behind all of it. … It really comes down to taking full advantage of the really great screens [on mobile devices].”

Parry and Wirasinghe also talked about Yahoo’s tentative, hypothetical plans for newer devices and prototypes, suggesting that a Flickr or Weather app for Google Glass or Apple’s iWatch might be in the works, as well. Read the rest of our interview on VentureBeat.

Image credit: yodelanecdotal/Flickr, acme/Flickr, and Yahoo

Facebook Home isn’t a mobile operating system. But normal users who buy or download the Home experience won’t know or care. They’ll suddenly have Facebook phones that look, feel, and behave totally different from Android phones.

And the answer to the question “What kind of phone do you have?” will be “Facebook.”

“In a lot of ways, this is a totally new type of phone,” said Facebook product designer Justin Stahl via email.

“Traditionally, phones and operating systems were designed with apps and tasks in mind. With this, we wanted to recreate the most social device you have around people.”

In a roundabout way, Facebook has gotten into the mobile OS game without actually building a mobile OS.

It’s kind of like what Google did with Chrome OS. They took a browser — a downloadable piece of software — and stuck it on top of an open-source operating system (Linux). They then distributed it on hardware, making it difficult for normal folks to see or use the core OS underneath their own software.

Now, Home doesn’t block a user from getting to the parts of Android they’re expecting to use. It just makes it a little bit more difficult. But the extra layer of software between the user and Android is significant enough to make it, in the eyes of the non-technical beholder, an entirely different animal.

In a recent interview with VentureBeat, Facebook product director Adam Mosseri said most users will think of Home as an OS, but this doesn’t matter too much (as it shouldn’t).

“It’s important that people understand it’s software, and they’ll understand because they can download it,” he said.

Here’s what Facebook home will look like on tablets.

“We didn’t think of it as being in the mobile OS game. People and content should be first, and we thought that needed to happen at a really deep level. Apps get in the way.”

So rather than a UI/UX paradigm that’s all about opening and closing apps, Facebook is serving something totally different. “If we can be a homescreen, we can get all that content and bubble up what’s most important to you,” said Mosseri. “It’s a new way to organize the information on your phone.”

And from the user side, all that new, beautiful organization, while it’s not technologically divorced from its less-organized roots, counts as a new operating system, if only from a look-and-feel perspective.

“Phones and computers have been designed for tasks and apps for decades, so we were thrilled to have the rare opportunity to shake things up, to build something personal and fun,” Stahl said.

Notifications appear in the center of the home screen on Facebook Home.

An OS for normalcy

When designing Home, Facebook’s designers, developers, and product team took the product into the real world for massive amounts of testing, making sure the interfaces and navigation controls would hold up under pressure.

“We looked at a million different use cases and tried to figure out the best way to solve each,” said Stahl. “What if you had only a few minutes while standing in line somewhere? What if you needed to quickly launch an app?”

While Stahl said that a lot of Home will be familiar enough, close enough to traditional mobile design, other elements will require users to abandon their comfort zones — row of tiny app icons, complicated widgets.

To compensate for Home’s departures from typical Android UIs, Stahl said, “We’ve tried to fill Home with moments of delight. The navigation is streamlined and intuitive, people get it right away. Immersive photos of you and your friends fill the screen. Objects move naturally and organically.”

And Stahl and Mosseri both pointed out how intentionally playful the interface and all its little details can be.

“We wanted to add an element of whimsy in there,” said Stahl. “Take Chat Heads, for instance. It allows you to keep conversations with your friends close at hand, but it’s also kind of delightful to move them around or fling them across the screen. We want this product to be as fun as it is useful.”

And for those moments when you encounter something too new, there’s Blues Clues, an internal name for coaching prompts that help new users find their way around the UI.

“They’re little tips to show you what you want to do,” said Mosseri. “This is something that grows on you, the more you use it the more you like it. We call it contextual help.” And, he said, the more features Home gets, the more clues you’ll see to guide you along.

Getting out of the way

The most interesting thing about Home is that it’s not, as others have called it, a lock screen. The phone it unlocked the minute you tap its button, and you’re immediately swimming around in your Facebook News Feed — but it’s bigger, brighter, prettier, and better than ever before.

There is no OS, there is no menu, no navigation. Just you and your friends and family, sharing jokes, pictures from the day, funny links, important moments.

“I love the moment you turn on your phone because it lights up with something amazing,” said Mosseri. “Having something meaningful show up the second I turn on my phone is by far my favorite part of the experience.”

Mosseri continued that since he started working at Facebook six years ago, minimalism has always been a guiding design philosophy: to get out of the way and let users find and enjoy their stuff.

“Now, back then, that meant small type, small icons, thin blue bars, and the content was a larger percentage of the page, but it wasn’t big,” he said. “Then our interfaces got more and more complicated. Now, we want to go back to those roots, to make content big and beautiful.

“And we want to take care of content better, to respect that content. Poeple care about people, not about Facebook. It’s an aesthetic but it’s also a design value.”

As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said over and over through the past few years, Facebook’s core goal is to connect the world, to make it more open to connections.

“That means pushing ourselves to design the best mobile experience across all platforms, to everyone on every phone,” said Stahl. “We’ll continue to innovate and create immersive products that speak to our core value of putting people first.”

Home isn’t just for phones

For our interview with Mosseri, we were sitting in a small room at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. The announcement of Home had been made some seven hours before. He was slated to do mini-chats with press and bloggers all day in a junket format and had been talking and talking, answering the same slew of questions over and over for hours on end.

But even that natural fatigue didn’t dim his obvious enthusiasm for the product he’d put so much time and effort into. In fact, he said, he is looking forward to seeing elements of Home popping up on non-mobile screens soon, as well.

“It’s a new step, a step forward, and you’ll see us move our other products forward as well.” He thinks of Facebook’s mobile side, which updates its apps every month or so, kind of like Facebook’s iTunes. “Every time Apple releases a new version of iTunes, that will influence the design of their other desktop apps,” said Mosseri. “There’s a lot of value there.”

So, what Homey touches can we expect to see in other Facebook experiences?

“Chat heads would be awesome in the Facebook app,” Mosseri said. “A lot of the design values — less chrome, better physics, bigger images, the way everything moves and feels natural — everything should feel this fast and fluid and simple, really. And so we’ll do it more and more.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Igor Faletski is CEO of Mobify.

Until recently, almost everyone who accessed the web used the same device: a desktop computer. In 2006, just two screen sizes accounted for 77% of all web usage. If designers were building bridges instead of web sites, in 2006 they only had to plan for Ford Model T’s.

As you know, this paradigm has completely shifted. Our research found that today, eight screen sizes—various laptops, smartphones, tablets, monitors, web-enabled TVs, and netbooks—account for 77% of web usage. What’s more, no one screen size has more than 20% of the market share. Today, we must plan for all sorts of vehicles crossing bridges, from the slowest scooter to speedy Ferraris to enormous Mac trucks.

The fix for today’s multi-screen world where smartphone and tablet users expect as rich and graceful a web experience as desktop users is responsive design. Responsive has become the darling of web designers and developers, and is fast becoming the dominant approach to building new websites. With good reason, too. A responsive design workflow is one of the most effective ways to build tailored web experiences for different screen sizes.

But responsive isn’t a magic bullet. It may solve the problem of screen size layout, but there are inherent problems with the responsive approach that many developers gloss over. Here are four common mistakes that could plague your responsive project.

Mistake #1: Your responsive site is over resourced

At Mobify, we analysed responsive websites for 15 top e-commerce vendors. The data revealed that the average homepage uses 87.2 resources, consisting of 1.9 MB of data. The reason those numbers are so high is because together they dictate how web pages must render on a whole range of different devices and screen sizes. What happens when your responsive site needs to load 87 resources before your site renders? It slows down.

It goes without saying, we all hate waiting for websites to load. When smartphone customers are forced to wait an extra second, conversion rates drop by an additional 3.5%. By the three second mark, 57% of users will have left your site.

To improve responsive website performance, make sure only necessary resources are sent to customers’ smartphones, tablets and desktops. You can compress and concatenate JavaScript and CSS resources with tools like SASS for CSS compression and Uglify for JavaScript compression, or with Mobify’s automated JavaScript and CSS acceleration tool.

Mistake #2: Your images are bloated

Images pose a major responsive design problem. Since a responsive website uses a single markup across devices, how do you make sure that only big, beautiful images are served to Retina iPad displays, while old smartphones get smaller low-resolution images that will load quickly?

For image-rich websites, page performance on mobile can tank along with conversion rates. Plus, the wasted bandwidth costs of sending weighty images to the wrong devices is practically throwing money away.

The good news is that several solutions exist for dynamically optimizing your images for all screen sizes and resolutions, including an automated tool we created. This means you can always send the right images to the right devices.

Mistake #3: Mobile doesn’t mean “lite”

When it comes to content, responsive designers currently have two choices. They can choose to load all the existing desktop content, or load specific content for small, mobile screens. We used to think that accessing the web via a small screen meant that users wanted a “lite” experience. Not true. According to Google, 90% of web users move between devices to accomplish a goal. That means someone accessing your website from a smartphone likely wants to perform the same actions—like buying your product—as someone from the desktop.

Truly sophisticated websites will need to move past responsive layout and take content—not just context—into account. That could mean more thoughtfully creating additional content, structure and metadata that works across all screens.

Mistake #4: You broke the bank

Shoehorning an existing website design into a responsive framework that works on every browser and will degrade gracefully in older, legacy browsers is complicated and expensive. Try rebuilding a site from the ground up instead of manipulating existing design—it’s generally cheaper and easier.

Another option is to use adaptive templates rather than a single responsive design. Adaptive templating lets you break up the design into multiple responsive templates that are targeted to different device screen sizes and resolutions. This solution lets you test and launch iteratively, bringing down the time, development and quality assurance costs of going responsive.

Responsive design is indeed a big step forward in solving the multi-screen conundrum. But it’s still a nascent approach and requires thoughtful implementation to deliver top-notch customer experiences in today’s post-PC world where 31% of all traffic to US e-commerce sites already comes from smartphones and tablets.

Mobile design image via Shutterstock

Igor Faletski is CEO of Mobify.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Mark Curtis starts by telling a story. The Egyptian king Thamus is visited by the God Theuth, who offers a gift to the people of Egypt, the gift of writing. To the God’s surprise, the king refuses the gift, saying that his people would lose the ability to remember if everything were written down. “For every step forward in technology,“ says Curtis, “you lose something and you gain something.”

Curtis is the co-founder of service design agency Fjord, which works with large companies like banks and mobile operators — the kind of companies we all love to hate but whose services we rely on every day.

Driven to distraction 

Curtis is also the author of “Distraction: Being human in the Digital age.” Distraction was published in 2005, but its concerns — how technology is changing our notion of space and time and making us prefer the distant to the close at hand — are even more relevant in the age of the smartphone.

“Technology distracts us from the here and now by opening up avenues of possibility to the rest of the world all the time. Those avenues are deeply distracting because what could be over there appears to be more exciting than what is in front of us right now,” explains Curtis. In the same way that it was 80 years after the invention of the automobile before countries started to make seatbelts compulsory, Curtis contends that we haven’t yet defined ways of counteracting the negative effects of technology.

“Technology has created a permanent fifth dimension in our lives – virtual space. Every time human beings have perceived a new dimension, it’s led to seismic changes in society. We moved from thinking in two dimensions in Medieval art to three dimensions in the Renaissance. In Dante, Heaven and Hell were in a direct line up and down. At the same time Copernicus and Galileo started to realize there was something called space, which completely undermined the whole notion of Heaven, because if space is infinite then where is Heaven? That fundamentally changed the way we see everything.”

Keep it simple, stupid 

That fifth dimension also creates a challenging design problem that Fjord is tackling by reducing the amount of cognitive effort required to absorb information. “One of my colleagues calls it ‘design for the glance’,” says Curtis. The device best designed for the glance is the wristwatch, and Curtis expects to see plenty of products for the wrist following the flawed but groundbreaking Nike+ Fuelband.

Curtis points to David Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow, in which he explains that the brain works in two ways. “System 1 is where I say to you ‘What’s 2+ 2?’ You know the answer immediately without having to think about it. System 2 is where I say ‘What’s 24 x 17?’ Your brain then goes into lockdown because of the cognitive effort.” Fjord is trying to design nudge services into the realm of system 1 rather than system 2.

Last year Fjord created a new mobile app for the Swedish mobile phone operator 3, which displays all the information about a customer’s bill and usage using simple data visualizations. “If I want to know my own data usage, my carrier says ‘You have used 320 MB out of 1,024 MB and it’s now Feb 25′. What do I do with that information? I immediately have to go into system 2 to figure it out.” 3 itself offered over 200 different subscription models. My3 displays a visual snapshot of usage and trends over the past six months as well as showing how the bill compares to that of a typical customer. Hundreds of thousands of customers now rely on the service.

Banks and payment companies are also starting to think simple. “Paypal and Square have been brilliant at simplifying, although largely for merchants rather than customers.” Fjord itself produced a new set of mobile applications for the Spanish bank BBVA that now have 1.2 million users. Recent usage statistics show that customers log in 21 times a month on the mobile apps versus three times a month on the web site.

Experience design is dead

The next frontier in service design is what Fjord calls living services, where the same service is delivered via a whole plethora of interfaces and becomes ever more atomized. “We are already seeing financial services clients saying how can we break up what they do into little chunks which other people can use in discrete ways. Spotify, for example, will deliver the service in my car, through my phone, through my PC, through my Sonos system at home mediated by Ford or Apple or Android or Sonos.”

This complexity means that designers can no longer entirely control the  user experience. “What designers can do is set the stage and assemble the props, and the customer will design the experience.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This is a guest post by mobile design consultant Mariya Yao

People downloaded over 30 billion apps in 2012, yet the average smartphone owner only uses about 15 of them every week. Even worse, a study by Localytics estimated that 22 percent of apps are only opened once.

With all the money and effort being poured into mobile right now, why is engagement so low?

While the answer to that question is certainly complicated, a number of common mistakes companies are repeatedly made in the app on-boarding process. We’ll be discussing user experience and more at VentureBeat’s upcoming Mobile Summit.

Can you guess what any of these apps actually do?

Mistake 1: Forcing registration before demonstrating value

When you demand that users go through a sign-up process or hand over their social credentials before you’ve offered them any clear benefit, you risk losing them right off the bat.

Pheed (left) and Tumblr. Both apps require you to register before you use them.

Consider two apps: Pheed and Tumblr. Both are popular social media platforms that allow users to broadcast photos, videos, and other content to their friends and followers.

While Pheed forces you to signup before you can see anything, Tumblr immediately displays new trending content you can interact with as an unregistered user.

Mistake 2: Overly detailed tutorials

Tutorials are quite common in mobile apps. Sometimes you do need to guide a person along with a timely explanation, but unfortunately, most mobile tutorials inundate them with too much early information.

If you require a ton of labels to clarify your app’s functionality, you are basically admitting that your U.I. is a failure.

The new Flickr app gets it right

Your aim should be to design user interfaces that are clear and intuitive for your intended audience and require minimal coaching to navigate.

Another error I commonly see in tutorials is a focus on explaining U.I. details rather than communicating the app’s overall value. In studies that I’ve done, potential customers typically miss those details because they blast through the tutorial, preferring to play with the app directly.

Mistake 3: Unusual interface elements or gesture controls

A key part of designing an intuitive mobile U.I. is knowing when to apply standard design patterns to make it easier for users to get to know your app. For example, swiping between pages and pinching to zoom on photos is ingrained in the habits of smartphone users. Additionally, Android and iOS both offer detailed human-interface guidelines that are adopted in most of their apps.

Often, my clients “overdesign” their apps by ignoring standards and choosing to apply unfamiliar gesture controls, vanishing or hidden menus, and flashy visual elements without context and purpose. In testing, most people typically find these unexpected elements confusing and frustrating.

Even apps that are beautifully crafted and win design awards are not necessarily usable for mass-market consumers. Take Clear, a to-do list app that garnered acclaim for replacing standard visual controls with just physical gestures.

The Clear app: Six walkthrough screens for a to-do list. Is that good mobile design?

The Clear app has to use six walkthrough screens and interactive coaching to teach users how to use the app.

In studies I conducted, smartphone users couldn’t remember more than 10 percent of the tutorial content, even if they were smartphone savvy. They frequently got lost and couldn’t remember how to perform basic functions like create a new list or delete a task.

If you want to maximize usability and reduce friction, stick to designs that users already know how to use. Don’t deviate from familiar patterns unless you have compelling reasons to do so, and be sure to test unconventional designs thoroughly.

Mistake 4: Make customers fill out lengthy mobile forms

Your new customer has downloaded your app, made it through your tutorial, maybe even played around with some basic functionality. It’s time to register.

You want to learn the most you can about each user, so you ask for a few more pieces of information in the signup form than you really need. No biggie, right?

Wrong. While you may think that a few extra little questions are harmless, major companies like Expedia and Best Buy have lost millions in sales from drop-offs due to unnecessary form fields.

Uber breaks up its registration form into manageable chunks.

In general, for every additional field you add to a form, your completion rate will take a hit. This dropoff rate is exacerbated on small mobile touch screens where typing is frustrating and error-prone. Additionally, users are far more time-pressed and distracted on mobile than they are on desktops at home and the office.

What’s the takeaway?

Keep in mind that no design works 100 percent of the time for 100 percent of products. For instance, you may find that your brand is so well known that you can get away with a mysterious start screen, or that your customers are a particularly patient bunch who relish reading through complicated tutorials (good luck finding them).

The important takeaways are to be mindful of best practices and to test, test, test your mobile designs with the people who use them in order to catch possible mistakes early.

Mariya Yao is a mobile product designer and the founder of Xanadu, a mobile strategy consultancy. She partners with companies to ideate, prototype, launch, and iterate on their mobile experiences.

Follow her on twitter @thinkmariya. 

The  team has decided to ‘kill our accelerator program completely’ and become a venture firm with a built-in design studio. This significant pivot is in an effort to nurture the portfolio companies during their entire lifecycle, rather than just during the nascent stages, and provide more meaningful support.

“We’ve found that a three-month program simply isn’t enough. Our startups told us they wanted more- a lifetime partner who will roll up their sleeves and help push their business forward for years to come,” the company said in a statement.

Instead of the common three-months-of-guidance-to-demo-day model, Greenstart has created a ‘build-and-deliver’ design studio. The 10 person team will focus on user experience, building sustainable business models, and brand design.

“The breakout success of companies like Nest, AirBnB, Uber, and of course Apple, in increasingly being recognized as driven by their design,” Greenstart said.  “Not skin-deep, visual design like a logo and website, but a deep systematic approach to user experience (UX) for their products and services. But the problem for startups is that this kind of design is expensive and hard to access.”

Strong design can make-or-break a company, but good designers are difficult to find, hard to nail down, and expensive. The five pillars of Greenstart’s approach are business design, design research, interaction design, graphic design, and storytelling. The lifetime commitment means that Greenstart goes “all-in” with its startups, funneling all its resources into a smaller pool of companies working to addressing climate change.

Greenstart officially opened its doors in San Francisco in 2011. It hosted clean tech startups that were ‘fast,’ meaning they could generate real revenue in a year and either reduce reliance on fossil fuels or improve existing clean technology. Greenstart currently has 13 portfolio companies including RidePal, a private commuter bus system; Root3, predictive analytics for on-site energy plant operations; and Watt, which visualizes and gamifies a company’s energy usage.

In the past few years, scores of accelerator and incubator programs have cropped up around the world and it seems like they are a dime a dozen. Some, like Greenstart, health IT accelerator Rock Health, and ed-tech accelerator K-12 are dedicated to a specific topic, while others focus on growing the startup ecosystem in a particular region. Others, like Y Combinator and 500 Startups, invest across the board and are primarily valuable for putting entrepreneurs in front of investors.

Clean tech is a difficult space. Venture capital funding for this sector is struggling and many investors shy away from these types of investments. However, with advances in hardware development, the success of companies like Nest, and the ever-present need for greener technologies, businesses, and lifestyles, Greenstart’s new approach could make clean tech startups into more desirable (and sexy) investment opportunities.