Nurses are the unsung heroes of the hospital who navigate crappy software on outdated hardware to keep you healthy — and it needs to stop.

Executives from Cedars-Sinai and Kaiser Permanente explained at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference that technology innovators need to start focusing on new, consumer-like user experiences and better end-to-end communications software and hardware. Otherwise, nurses are going to start using their own devices, which creates obvious issues in privacy and data management.

“We’ve done a lot of ethnographic research of our nursing areas. … It’s still amazing when you walk into that environment that there’s still a tremendous amount of inefficiency, redundancy,” said Julie Vilardi, who’s a registered nurse as well as the executive director of Kaiser Permanente’s clinical informatics and strategic projects. “User experience it’s really critically important. Because of the consumer experience now is pretty slick, when you get into the walls of the hospital [consumer-grade experiences are] beginning to be the expectation, and we so don’t deliver it right now.”

She explained how nurses manage everything having to do with your hospital stay: your medical prescriptions, the food you eat, and the baths you take. They typically have four or so patients who may not even be in the same area of the hospital. These nurses often have to tote around workstations on wheels and clunky communications devices that simply aren’t effective. But because of their ability work in a chaotic environment, they’re making due.

Darren Dworking, the chief information officer for Cedar’s Sinai Medical Center, said it had recently deployed 800 iPhones to its staff. He thought clinicians were going to shy away from using texting for communications, but he was wrong.

“A lot of our clinicians are beginning to use technology in other aspects of their life … they want to know how come they can’t have a healthcare version of that,” said Dworking. “Giving them something akin to a cordless phone isn’t going to do it for communications.”

Vilardi says she hopes to see developers create a consumer-grade iPhone experience for patient management and electronic medical records (EMR). She wants to be able to push an icon to get a patient assessment, and she believes we’re very close to that reality. Dworking, however, encourages innovators to look beyond the EMR, which he says the window has closed on. Instead, he hopes that people will find a new way of displaying data and improving communications.

According to Vilardi, iOS phones and tablets really are the devices of choice in hospitals today. This is because vendors in general are taking more advantage of iOS than Android. She explained that Kaiser is looking for ways to integrate Android, however.

Nurses, speak up! We want to hear from you about your experiences with workstations on wheels, apps, and more. Send us an email at tips@venturebeat.com or e-mail me directly at meghan@venturebeat.com.

Image via Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

“Facebook won the MySpace battle because of better and more immediate interaction with people,” Eric Covino says. “The more they get away from that, the bigger the concern.”

Covino is the founder and CEO of CreativeSignals, an online marketing firm that buys Facebook ads, among other things. And he’s not impressed with the new of the impending autoplaying video ads that Facebook is rumored to be adding in the next few months.

Source: John Koetsier

Facebook’s clean, uncluttered new News Feed.

As soon as July, according to some reports, Facebook will be rolling out 15-second video ads right in your news feed. You’ll only see one video ad from one company a day, but the positioning right in your news feed — and the fact that they may be autoplay ads– makes it a risky move. That’s very different than Facebook’s existing video ad proposition, as Wired notes, which is on brands’ own product pages.

The rationale, however, is the pot of goal at the end of the digital rainbow.

“They’re looking to push out millions of dollars of ads,” Covino sayw. “The price per spot is definitely north of a million.”

The challenge, for Covino, boils down to user experience. MySpace bit the dust because of a horrible user experience cluttered with ads. Facebook, which just added retargeted ads in the middle of your news feed, initially had just one ad per page. The social network moved to four in 2011, then to six, and has tested up to 10.

The pressure, especially now that Facebook is a publicly-traded company, is to increase revenue. And there’s also pressure from advertisers, who want new and better ways of splashing their messages in front of social media users.

“With both Facebook and Twitter, you have these tremendously large user groups with advertisers salivating over them,” Covino told me. “I’m worried about the user experience … they keep interrupting people.”

Facebook, of course, is not unaware of these problems, and they test almost everything they do with small groups of Facebook users before migrating the changes slowly to others. So if there is a significant user backlash, Facebook will know, and it will be able to course-correct.

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Mark Zuckerberg announcing the updated News Feed

The question, however, is whether the tension between cash and user experience will be resolved in a way that solves both problems.

Covino’s not so sure.

“The core problem of all this is that you have to overcome the psychology of what your users think your service is,” he says.

In other words, people come to Facebook to connect with friends, not necessarily with brands. That is probably largely true, but people are also connecting strongly with companies on Facebook — especially local community businesses. In fact, Facebook trumpeted just a month ago that its users have made more than two billion connections to local businesses, view their Facebook pages 645 million times a week, and comment on them 13 million times a week.

And Facebook fans have never been more valuable to brands — BMW fans are worth $1,613, Starbucks fans $177, and Coke fans are worth $70 to their respective brands.

The core question, to Covino, is how long they’ll stay that way.

“All these things are great, and they sound great, but can that money overcome psychology?” he wonders. “I’m extremely skeptical.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s one of the biggest headaches for mobile developers and organizations launching mobile initiatives, and one where the most capital can be wasted: mobile testing.

Since testing can amount to as much as 10 percent of a mobile development budget, this headache can quickly avalanche into a disaster without the right direction and tools.

So what options are available to help companies get through this frustrating period before launching a mobile application? It’s easiest if you consider the four types of testing — unit, functional, data, and user experience — as building blocks that can be put together to create more comprehensive testing.

Unit testing: the basics

Put simply, unit testing is about testing individual functions in isolation. By testing each part of an application on its own, developers can detect problems before they reach the tester and ensure that QA and uniformity are part of the process from the beginning.

Functional testing: going through the motions

As a mobile “tester” goes through each motion in a test case, functional testing monitors the behavior of the application by examining the inputs and returns from each action that was called by the user — every swipe, tap, input, and other gesture.

As any developer would tell you, a poorly written defect is frustrating, and understanding what a tester did to produce an error is important. Using a concept we call “restrospection,” you can visually track what testers do and record a complete history of their actions that include lifecycle events.

Data testing: validating and integrating

With data testing, a mobile developer is looking to ensure integration quality and to validate the data before it reaches the application. This is one of the more critical steps for developers, as it can be a major hold up for mobile applications if backend systems are live but not functioning as expected, using a different version of code, or are undergoing development or updates themselves.

There’s nothing like opening up 50 or 60 tickets from testers when a backend system isn’t working like it should. So the holy grail here is to validate the data before it reaches the application, regardless of whether backend systems are live.

UX testing: getting it right the first time

There are several approaches to user experience testing out there that focus on text overruns/the location of a specific object on the screen including image comparisons using screenshots; but in my opinion the best approach is to do a user interface (UI) testing layout that focuses on the how items are aligned on a page.

When combined with a powerful mobile visualizer, you can truly compare and contrast the changes a developer has made to the layout of a mobile application. Further, user experience done well can help developers eliminate the challenges posed by using human testers.

The multi-channel problem: what’s coming down the road

As businesses start to move towards a multi-channel mobile strategy that aligns everything from a website to mobile apps to kiosks, they’re also going to need a way to test apps for all these channels. But if you thought just building a multi-channel app was hard, try finding a good way to test it.

At my company, one of our clients reported that prior to working with us, they spent a third of their launch timeline on testing. That’s just not going to be feasible as we move into a world where consumers and organizations want updated, fully functional mobile presences at the drop of a hat.

The reality is there are a plethora of products on the market that do portions of testing, but they often require you to buy separate testing suites for each channel — one for web, a bolt-on for mobile, etc. You also have to buy these tools from separate vendors, which adds the complexity of making sure they integrate and communicate well with each other.

What we’re going to see is a radically new and different approach to mobile testing. It’s an area ripe for innovation, where mobile testing will become significantly more automated. This will enable developers to leverage smaller building blocks earlier and give them the ability to build larger, consistent, and repeatable tests that are less costly and catch bugs early.

Raj Koneru is the CEO at mobile and multi-channel application platform provider, Kony Inc. Since founding Kony in 2007, Raj has spearheaded the development and continued innovation of the Kony platform. Raj has also co-founded several other businesses, including Intelligroup (NASDAQ: ITIG), Seranova (NASDAQ: SERA) and iTouchPoint, which was sold in 2005.

Image credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by Xanadu founder and product strategist Mariya Yao

You put in a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to build your app only to launch and discover your product’s not the blockbuster success you fantasized it would be. Sound familiar?

If you’ve built an app people want yet you aren’t retaining users, you may have usability issues that are spoiling long-term engagement.

Luckily the internet has made it much easier to perform methodical studies on how people use and think about your app. We’ll be discussing user experience and more at VentureBeat’s upcoming Mobile Summit.

Meantime, here are some tools and techniques you can use to flush out problems in your mobile app design.

Get a professional evaluation

Non-designers make a lot of rookie mistakes that violate basic design and usability principles. Experience design professionals can flag many of these problems in usability audits of your product. Before you start testing with real users, consider getting an expert evaluation using services like uTest.

Check if people get your value proposition

You may think your landing page perfectly articulates why your app is awesome, but your wording might be unclear or unconvincing to others. Test this by using Clue which lets you quickly create a memory test you can use to see what users actually recall from your product page.

Track the right metrics

You can’t learn if you don’t measure. Flurry and Google both offer free basic app analytics like user session lengths and frequency of use. Advanced mobile analytics platforms like Kontagent, Localytics, and Apsalar offer additional features such as sophisticated user segmentation, detailed usage breakdowns, and flexible tools for measuring retention and conversion.

Record real users as they try your app

Trying to find local testers who match your target user profile and set up in-person usability studies is incredibly time-consuming. If you need user feedback quickly, try remote mobile usability testing services such as User Testing and Userlytics, which offer recorded videos of target users using your app for the first time and vocalizing what they find confusing.

Use heatmaps to track user actions and paths

Users often use your app in all sorts of unintended ways. On mobile, you can use touch-tracking tools like Heatma.ps, to visualize user taps and gestures. Heatma.ps also builds user paths to show you how people navigate your app and where they bounce. Learn if users pay attention to the right things and stick around long enough to take important actions.

Split-test different design assumptions

Split-testing, also known as A/B testing, refers to running multiple different designs in parallel to determine which one performs best. Services like Swrve, LeanPlum, and Arise.io make it easy for non-technical people to design and test multiple alternatives such as different tutorial screens or variable pricing for in-app purchases.

Results from mobile split-testing are often counter-intuitive. For example, Swrve customers discovered that dramatically increasing the cost of top-grossing in-app purchases surprisingly did not result in a decline in sales.

Discuss your design feedback with your team

Once you’ve done all this user testing, where do you keep track of all your design feedback? Notable is a collaboration tool from the creators of Clue that lets you bulk upload and annotate screen shots of your apps in order to share and discuss your feedback notes with your team.

What are your favorite mobile usability testing tools and techniques? Let me know in the comments below or tweet at me at @thinkmariya.

photo credit: premasagar via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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. 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by Andrew Toy, the CEO of Enterproid.

I recently had dinner with four IT security experts from a Fortune 100 conglomerate to discuss BYOD, and I anticipated spending the night talking about security holes and the deep intricacies of securing complex systems. But the conversation took a completely different direction than what I expected.

As we dined, their security architect harped on the importance of user experience. After being burnt by vendors that delivered a stodgy user experience and enduring the consequential employee backlash, those around the table expressed the need for a hybrid IT approach that would delight employees and help drive mobile technology throughout their company. Security remains a staple for these modern IT security directors, but the steady flow of employees’ new technologies has changed their outlook.

Before the mega trend of IT consumerization, consumers were only exposed to the latest and greatest technology at work. There was a level of sophistication that limited the technology conversation to the CTO and IT security director.

Today, consumers have the newest technologies in their back pockets, and the competition for their buying power is propelling technology innovation at a rate that has never before been seen. With innovation happening too fast for businesses to keep up, enterprise IT has reached the tipping point — they must now include employees in their technology discussions and decisions.

With a litany of personal experiences using technology in everyday life, the modern tech-savvy employee already has an idea of how he or she should be able to conduct business at work. People want to use the tools that offer them the best user experience, and they won’t settle for mediocre solutions when they know better technology is available. Executives have begun to see a push back in mobile; employees veto the idea that their entire work device should be managed by the enterprise, and they reject that they must use a device chosen by management with a subpar experience.

Consumers are not the only ones challenging the traditional approach to enterprise IT. Next-generation IT experts have grown up with technology and they see prescriptive IT as being ill-fitted for today’s modern enterprise. The status quo is crumbling under growing pressure from employees, and observant executives are keenly aware.

But the consumerization of IT and this shift in enterprise IT hasn’t made the CTO position obsolete; the trend has just reinvented it. There are still great stakes in keeping the enterprise and its data secure. Today’s CTO must keep those timeless priorities in mind when selecting technology with high-quality user experiences. Since the quality of UX correlates with a workforce’s productivity, a CTO’s ability to select technology with excellent UX has become a performance indicator; if a CTO chooses a technology that isn’t positively accepted by employees, it is considered a failure.

A successful balance is one that includes input from the workforce but keeps leadership intact; the CTO shouldn’t make decisions in a vacuum, and the employee shouldn’t take over decision-making.

With technology’s exponential rate of development, there will always be new platforms and devices emerging. A successful strategy keeps enterprise IT leaders in touch with the technologies used by their employees and encourages employees to point leadership to vendors that develop agile and secure solutions with great user experiences. Enterprises who succeed in this evolution will see big productivity gains and will be rewarded with a competitive advantage over their peers.

Andrew Toy is the CEO of Enterproid. Before Enterproid, Andrew was VP of Mobile and Syndication Technology at MTV Networks. Prior to joining MTV Networks, Andrew headed mobile application development for Morgan Stanley, specializing in mobile-video delivery as well as fixed-mobile convergent telephony.

Businessman using touch interface via everything possible/Shutterstock

Stored credit card information makes checking out a breeze. Expedited fulfillment like Amazon Prime, which offers free two-day shipping, dramatically reduces the delay in getting products. (In many markets, Amazon can deliver many products overnight.) These changes make brick-and-mortar shopping even less convenient by comparison.

Last week, I had an experience at a large national electronics chain that highlighted some of these important differences.

Some of these can be improved with technology, possibly creating opportunities for startups to plug these holes.

Returns

My first task was to return an iPod Touch. Around 11 a.m. on a Thursday, there were three people in line in front of me and one person working the returns counter. I stood in line stewing about the wait and getting more and more upset at the retailer.

Although returns have long been a hassle for online purchases, that process has gotten much easier. Nordstrom.com includes a prepaid shipping label that you can just stick on the box to send something back. Amazon lets you print out a label from its Web site. If a return was Amazon’s fault, it pays the return shipping. If not, it deducts the cost of return shipping from your refund. Still, that’s a lot more convenient than weighing your return, calculating postage, and going to the post office.

The ideal solution at retail would be to staff the customer service desk appropriately. But I don’t see that happening. A very good solution would be to give customers tickets and let them shop the store while they are waiting to return something or for other customer service. When the staff is available, they would be paged to the desk. This could be done with devices like the pagers that some chain restaurants use. Instead of getting upset with the store, consumers might actually buy something else.

Inadequate/incorrect/misleading signage

After I returned the iPod, I was browsing through the store and found a table with some open-box items. There was a sign that touted 50% off qualifying open-box items. But the sign had no definition of “qualifying”; it said that I had to ask an associate for details. The first associate I found just said it wasn’t his department. (No offer to help me find someone who could answer the question.) After a few minutes, I found an associate from the department who could answer. It turns out the discount applied to everything on the open-box table; if it was on the table, it “qualified”. So why not just say that?

How much does this thing cost?

A frequent frustration with offline retail is that you often don’t know what things cost. With online retailers, the current price is usually displayed right on the product page. In some cases (when there are manufacturer’s restrictions on minimum advertised price), you may have to add the item to your cart before you see the price. But this is just a click away.

I found an Epson projector on that 50%-off table that I wanted to buy. The store’s regular price was $649.99. It had an open box sticker that marked it down to  $585.99. (I did a quick check on Amazon and found that Amazon was charging $600 for a new unit.) But was the price of the open-box unit 50% off $649.99 or $585.99? Unclear.

As it turns out, the projector was still in the store’s system at $649.99. The clerk pulled out his iPhone and manually did the price calculation ($585.99 / 2 = $292.995). He then put that into the register.

If I had gone to the front registers, they would have had no idea about the discount, and this would have resulted in an even more frustrating experience. If the store had decided on a lower price, it should ring up at the lower price automatically, no matter what register I take it to. Target actually does a nice job on this. Each discounted unit is individually labeled. In cases where only a specific unit is discounted (for example, if it is a return), they go the extra mile to cover up the regular bar code so that the cashier can’t incorrectly ring up the higher price.

Manager to home theater

Back to my open-box projector. Because the correct price wasn’t programmed into the point-of-sale system, the clerk had to page a manager to approve the discount. The manager was busy with someone else, so I had to wait on that. Then the manager had to walk across the store to approve the discount.

I can program my TiVo from halfway around the world, but a manager can’t approve a discount from across the store? This seems like an ideal use case for mobile technology. When a price override request is made, the details should pop up on a mobile display so the manager can approve it from wherever she is.

But without that kind of solution on hand, all of the steps I had to go through at the retail store turned what could have been a 10-minute shopping trip into a 45-minute shopping trip. I was relating this story to a friend and his response was that I got a $600 projector for $300, so I should be happy. True. But given finite resources of store personnel, time spent on customers because of inefficient process hurts all customers.

Later in the day, I decided the projector was such a good deal, I should buy another one. There was a new clerk there who didn’t know about the special pricing. I showed him my receipt from earlier in the day and he agreed to match it.

When he ran my credit card, American Express suspected fraud. Apparently, their algorithms think it’s unlikely that I’d shop at the same big-box retailer twice in one day.

Unless big boxes start to close the technology gap, that will become increasingly true.

Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org; and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

[Top image credit: SVLuma/Shutterstock]

I’ve been in three board meetings in the last month where it was painfully apparent that there wasn’t a person in the company who owned the UX philosophy of the product.

I’m explicitly saying “UX” (user experience) rather than “UI” (user interface) as each company had an excellent designer and the application looked great. But the UX broke down quickly, especially as you went from novice first time user to experienced user.

Now, it’s not that the apps sucks. In each case, the apps ranged from good to great. They had huge amount of functionality, did unique things that other apps didn’t do, and solved a clear set of problems in a compelling way. They were fast, pretty, used nice fonts, and had good screen layouts.

But each had a jumble of different ways of doing things. As you went from one set of activities to another, the approach quickly became inconsistent. I kept noticing that when I was doing a different set of things in the app, the user flow would change. Or when I switched modalities, I would have different ways to do things that were dependent on where in the app I was.

Sometimes I’d click on a label to take an action; other times I’d click on a text description of the action. In some places I cared a lot about the Tab key; in others it was the Enter key. In some screens data was automatically saved after I exited a field; in others I had to take an explicit action. In some situations all the actions I could take were exposed; in others I had to search a menu tree for them. Orientation of the iPhone mattered in some cases and didn’t in others. Sometimes the key set of data that I was working on was the focus on the screen; in others it was only part of the screen.

When I start feeling uncomfortable with UX, I start counting extra key and mouse actions. When I think I should be able to do something with one action and it takes three or more, there’s a problem. When I realize in one part of the app that I can do something with one action, but in the other it takes four, there’s a problem.

In each of the companies, there was an excellent VP of engineering. Each one had a strong design/UI person. Two of the three had founder/CTOs. And the CEOs in each are excellent. They are each obsessed about the product, but they are approaching it from an engineering perspective. What are the features the user needs? What is the feedback we are getting about what individuals want to do? Each of these things ends up being a story or a task — a feature — but there is no unifying UX philosophy.

In each case, when asked, no one in the company owned the UX. In one case, no one felt qualified. In one case, no one really knew what I meant and kept conflating UX with UI. And in one case it was a revelation that users were struggling with a chaotic and inconsistent UX.

I’m noticing this more and more in the different apps I use, especially early-stage applications. Some are crafted beautifully from a UI perspective, but once I start using them on a daily basis, I want to scream. Others have acceptable UIs and a layer of UX consistency that breaks down immediately when I become an advanced user. And others are radically different UX experiences across devices.

I’ve come to appreciate the importance of a single person in the company owning the UX with this person being the arbiter of discussion around how to implement the UX. There’s nothing wrong with lots of different perspectives, but a single mind has to own it, synthesize it, and dictate the philosophy. But first, they have to understand the difference between UI and UX, and — more importantly — the product-oriented execs who approach things from an engineering perspective need to understand this.

I’ve decided it times to up our game significantly on this. I’m curious about what resources you rely on, thing are amazing, and would give to an executive team that is struggling with this.

Brad Feld is a managing director at Foundry Group; this post originall appeared on his blog. Feld lives in Boulder, Colo. and invests in software and Internet companies around the United States. In his spare time, he runs marathons and reads a lot.

Image credit: Juriah Mosin/Shuterstock

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

I started my user experience education in a very different way than most.

Long before smartphones, apps, and mobile advertising, I worked for The Walt Disney Company … but not as a technologist. I was a costumed martial arts performer and my manner of ‘user-engagement’ was as Leonardo – the blue bandana-wearing, katana-wielding, pizza-eating member of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – who performed together with his turtle brothers on stage at the Disney MGM Studios in the early 90s.

As strange as it might sound, many of the lessons that I learned about Walt Disney’s philosophy for crafting a deep, engaging guest experience have inspired my core principles around breakthrough mobile user experience.

Now, more than ever, the mobile app landscape is seeing an increased focus on the importance of a deep, engaging user experience.  Not only must the app itself be handcrafted to surprise and delight the user, but integrated advertising units must do the same. Publishers and brands are both starting to appreciate the importance of crafting deep brand experiences, instead of just slapping a banner onto the bottom of the screen.

2012 made a half-step in this direction with the adoption of rich media advertising.  Rich media ad units are still typically screen-edge banners, but they offer more resolution, higher-quality animation, and more varied tap actions.  Although rich media was a much-needed upgrade to previous mobile banners, the next phase will be much more dramatic.

2013 is shaping-up to be the year of native mobile advertising, much to the benefit of publishers, brands, and users.

Native ads are different from conventional ads in three specific ways:

1. They are more organically integrated with the app itself (think beyond the banner)
2. They expose more of the phone’s internal features (photo roll, advanced social media, etc.)
3. They provide for much more engaging ad creatives and branded content

While the shift to create a native ad experience on mobile might seem revolutionary to some in the industry, it’s at the core of what I’ve been working on at Zumobi for years and reflects many of Walt Disney’s principles that I learned from my experiences as a Turtle. With this in mind, here are a few Ninja lessons that I see reflected across the dynamic landscape of mobile advertising and user experience…

We should all strive to surprise, delight and engage our guests

At Disney, you’re not an employee, you’re a Cast Member. You’re not at work, you’re On Stage.

With mobile advertising, we are challenged every day to move beyond the 320 x 50 cage, and truly express a client’s brand in a way that is native to their unique values. While banner advertising is an important aspect of advertising, it is not a style that surprises, delights, and engages the user. Tomorrow’s native app-within-an-app experiences will let users make purchases, share user-generated content photos and media, and engage deeply with social media.

As designers, we should strive to channel Walt’s philosophy to create tomorrow’s breakthrough native mobile experiences.

They can’t see your face; they CAN see your expression

When you’re in costume as a Ninja Turtle, people can’t see your face directly.

However, every emotion, smile, and expression is channeled through the character, and consequently felt by the guests.  I believe that the same metaphor applies to software, apps, and mobile brand experiences. While the user cannot see the designer, they can sense the expression that they wore when they handcrafted a given user experience.

In this way, it is always essential to remember that the passion seeps beyond the confines of an app or campaign, and directly drives engagement.

Zen and the art of mobile advertising

There is a yin and a yang to all things, including mobile advertising.  In the same way that soft-style kung fu blurs the lines between striking and blocking, good native advertising blurs the lines between content and sponsorship.  Have a lifestyle app targeted to mothers? Offer recipe content as part of your campaign. Want to reach potential auto buyers?  Offer compelling automotive content in mobile enthusiast sources.

This is an incredibly exciting time for apps, mobile, and advertising – the most dramatic opportunities are still untapped.

While the last five years has proven to be thrilling in the landscape of mobile, I foresee the next five years to be even more exciting.

John SanGiovanni is the Co-Founder and Vice President of Product Design at Zumobi where he coordinates the product design strategy and manages Zumobi’s in-house creative studio. A former Microsoft Technical Evangelist, John has more than 13 years of experience as a wireless strategist and mobile user interface designer and has authored or co-authored more than 12 patents in the areas of mobile advertising, hardware interfaces, and interaction techniques for next-generation mobile devices. John recently spoke at the Seattle Interactive Conference where he presented his case for the future of mobile advertising. View his complete session here: or the highlights here

photo credit: Jenn and Tony Bot via photopin cc

It all has to do with skeuomorphic design.

I’m guessing most of us didn’t have a clue what that was yesterday, but very likely many of us have encountered it and wondered about it in Apple products.

Skeuomorphic design is design that connects the new to the old with decorative but unnecessary elements. An example is Apple’s iCal app, which includes a faux-leather header with vestiges of ripped-off paper immediately below, as if we were all ripping paper pages off our computer monitors:

A similar example is Apple’s Notes app, with a little less leather but a little more rip:

One problem with skeuomorphic design is that it doesn’t fit Apple’s design aesthetic in so many other apps. For instance, Safari or Mail don’t have any leather or ripped off pages. For Safari, that could be understood, as there are no pre-technological antecedents: no-one had a web browser before the personal computer became ubiquitous. But mail had been invented … and yet Apple’s Mail app showed no design cues of parchment or inkwells and the like.

The overall experience led to a strange dichotomy of design, where sleek, functional apps such as Safari and QuickTime were matched side-by-side with frankly old-fashioned-looking apps. That was confusing from Apple, supposedly the high priest of design.

iPhoto, for instance, bears no resemblance to a old-fashioned photo album:

The other, more philosophical, and arguably bigger issue is that skeuomorphic design is inherently distasteful to many designers. It is decorative, not functional. It is excess, bigger in size and heavier in cognitive load than a user interface that is slimmed down to its bare essentials. And yes, if that sounds like a certain Apple design guru, Jony Ive hated it.

Of course, Scott Forstall didn’t oversee all design at Apple. However, he was in charge of iOS, and iOS is by far Apple’s most popular operating system, and the operating system of its cash cow (OS X is found in products accounting for under 20 percent of Apple’s revenue). Forstall was a fan of skeuomorphic design — as, it must be admitted, was Steve Jobs to a degree — and the results can be found in Apple apps.

iBooks, Find My Friends, and Newstand are only a few of the examples. Wood and leather show up in copious quantities on the high-res glass screen of one of the most modern digital artifacts ever created:

Again, the effect is inconsistent with other Apple apps such as Mail and is oddly jarring as the user is taken from a super-modern, clean, simple user interface into one with a lot of extra weight, detail, and effect.

To a designer like Jony Ive, who has spent his life and career removing excess, trimming away unneeded detail, and simplifying, there is something inherently dishonest about skeuomorphic design. It’s something of a lie … there is no wood in your iPhone, no dead animal skin, and there’s no paper on your laptop screen to be torn off.

As such, we can expect big visual changes in the next versions of Apple apps in iOS and OS X. And, if all goes well, we can thank Scott Forstall’s departure for the simplification or, perhaps, consolidation of Apple’s design language.

Image credits: Top, Wikipedia, all others, John Koetsier

“We have one of the worst-looking sites on the planet,” Huh admitted.

But, he argued, the best-selling cars are not Ferraris or Bugattis. Instead, the best-selling cars are Ford Focuses (Foci?) and Honda Civics.

And that applies to the web as well, Huh said. Just look at Craigslist, eBay, Amazon, and even early versions of Facebook. Ugly sites, all, but the ugly doesn’t impede the real design goal: converting visitors into users and traffic into money.

“We confuse good design with good product,” says Huh.

But good product isn’t pretty: Good product is product that works for users and works for the company.

When making design changes, Huh said, Cheezburger looks at four things: desired outcome (business outcomes, not warm and fuzzies), intended user, data on the existing condition, and data on the new condition when the company retests for validity.

“What we’ve built at Cheezburger is to create a team of people whose sole focus is to get data,” says Huh. “We’ve built a company that is driven by data.”

And that is why, he says, you don’t need great design to have a successful design.

Image credit: John Koetsier

Launching a new operating system may not require reinventing the wheel, but it could mean reinventing the keyboard.

That’s the conclusion Microsoft reached as it developed Windows 8, an operating system whose reliance on the touchscreen forced the company to reconsider even the tiniest of things about how users input and interact with text.

In a post on the Building Windows 8 blog, Microsoft user experience developer Kip Knox details these painstaking considerations, many of which touch on the most basic facets of tablet use. Microsoft obsessed over every single component of the keyboard: What do we do with the number row? How big should the spacebar be? Do we even need a keyboard at all?

To get the answers to these questions, Microsoft studied things as minor as how long users looked at on-screen objects, which words they typed most often, and how they held tablets in their hands.

Microsoft’s ensuing conclusions about user typing habits should be obvious to anyone who has ever used a touchscreen keyboard. One of the realizations was that the tablet’s lack of physical buttons or haptic feedback often makes typing difficult. To fix this issue, Microsoft added feedback cues like color changes and sounds, both of which are aimed at making the on-screen keyboard as close as possible to an actual keyboard.

And then there was the question of which keys should appear on the keyboard.

This is a big concern. With so little space on a tablet’s screen, every centimeter of real estate is important. While this is true with smartphones, it’s perhaps more true with tablets, which users are likely to be spending far more continuous time with.

So Microsoft did the obvious: It got rid of the keys that people didn’t use. This is the same straightforward line of thinking that allowed designers to get rid of both the start button and desktop widgets. With the ability to start anew, why keep features that got no use?

What emerged from the studies, perhaps disappointingly, is a keyboard that looks a whole lot like the one Apple installed on the iPad. It’s as if Microsoft thought it was the first to climb Mt. Everest only to find Apple’s flag already waving at its peak.

But the success of the Windows 8 keyboard depends less on how it looks and more on how it functions. While Microsoft isn’t first to consider these things, it’s still a good sign for Windows 8 users that the company’s spending so much time sweating the small stuff.

In November 2010 Skype updated its Mac client and Skype went from a messaging tool that took up a corner of your screen to a communications juggernaut that demanded virtually your entire monitor. To be sure, I was not just feeling sentimental, I recently re-downloaded Skype 2.8 from Old Apps. Installing this two-year old software was a liberating experience.

Here was Skype 2.8 for Mac

Notice how slim the Skype window was when the user was not actively Skyping? Having Skype active and visible on the desktop was not a hardship — in fact, it was common. And when you were actively Skyping, the drawer at right kept all your chats well organized and accessible. If you only had one chat going, you could hide the drawer.

The point? Skype 2.8 was a very Mac-like application that respected your screenspace.

Skype 5 changed all of that.

In January of 2011, Skype released a new version that was intended to bring the Mac client into feature parity with the Windows version. One of the causalities in that endeavour was any semblance of sensibility with reference to software version numbers. The other was the user’s desktop real estate.

Here was Skype 5 for Mac

Godzilla on an LCD screen it may not have been, but it was LARGE. And suddenly, everything was joined together in one big window that could not be resized.

Mac users who tried the beta versions told the company about the problems, but when the final 5.o version was actually released and had no significant size reductions, they went ballistic. Almost 400 people commented on the Skype blog post announcing the new version, and they were not gentle:

The GUI is completely unusable

…

So great, instead of 500% now the window and contacts are just 450% too large.

…

I’m staying with 2.8, thank you very much …

…

The interface is still hideously bloated and unusable.

…

The smallest window size takes up more than 33% of my screen real estate. Version 2.8 takes up a fraction of the screen and is much more intuitive to use.

Through a few more minor updates the user interface remained largely unchanged. Until Skype 5.8, released yesterday, which the company’s blog post indicates was aimed at these very complaints, saying “your contact list just got slimmer,” and “you’ve been very vocal about the revamped full-screen user interface which we introduced in Skype 5.0.”

Well, 5.8 brings back a few things that Mac users have been longing for two long years.

Here’s Skype 5.8 for Mac

Two things are immediately apparent.

One, you can separate the contacts monitor from the main Skype window, and two, you can make the main Skype window considerably smaller than in the previous version. Both are major steps back towards the user interface that Mac Skype users knew and loved in version 2.8.

Some might argue (OK, I would argue) that the Skype user interface circa 2012 still doesn’t come close to approximating the elegance and simplicity of a two-year-old version. But there’s no denying that it’s gotten better. And, that the people have won.

All hail democracy.

Image credits: Disruptive Telephony, ShutterStock

The most successful designs are the ones that make the intermediary disappear, or be so unobtrusive or intuitive that we completely fail to notice it.

Think about the brilliance of the hammer as that “bridge” — when you want to hang a picture on the wall, there is no doubt in your mind which tool to use, which side to hold, and how to apply it. The hammer is so easy to use, not only because it is well designed, but because of our cumulative experience with hammers, which creates such a familiarity that the tool is almost universal.

But what about the new technology products that pop up daily, such as mobile devices and apps, for which we have no frame of reference?

Building a bridge in a labyrinth of outcomes (or avoiding UX of a PacMan)

When it comes to software creating an unobtrusive path for the user to realize her intent gets a little more complicated, even the simplest task tend to have many steps.

Imagine that you want to share a photograph with a friend through email. The main means available to user experience designers in order to create this intermediary are visual displays, buttons, and sound. The intent of sharing that photo needs to be translated in a series of button clicks with labels that hopefully align to what the user is currently thinking about.

From finding the picture to selecting it, choosing to share it via email, providing the email address, and sending it out, these steps are not straightforward; rather, they create a labyrinth of multiple paths with different outcomes. And if our goal as designers is to build an unobtrusive bridge between intent and outcome, we must really know every turn and dead end of the labyrinth.

There are many examples of technology products that delivered the same outcome, yet some failed while others were embraced by consumers because the experience was more intuitive. Examples are so numerous that no one questions any more the role of the user experience design to the success of the product.

Understanding intent based only on a succession of clicks is not easy. It works well in situations where it is very clear what you want to do.

For example, when you type and the text editor auto-corrects your typos, very often the right outcome is achieved. In other, more ambiguous scenarios, it is a complex process and science. Furthermore, as consumers raise their expectations about what a product experience should be, the science of intent becomes key to the success of UX designers. Luckily, we have more tools than ever before to study it.

The digitalization of our daily lives and the proliferation of mobile devices give us an unprecedented amount of insight into the context of many scenarios and situations. We are used to GPS devices that sense we are driving and provide us with the exact location, but this type of experience was impossible a few years back.

The second factor is that as we use more natural user interfaces, such as speech or gestures, where much of the tangible interface might not even be present, intent might be clearer because the user literally states it.

Finally, recent advances in neuroscience, behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, and anthropology allow us to understand how our brains work and how we make decisions.

As our understanding of intent deepens, UX designers will be able to do more things automatically on the user’s behalf. For UX designers that means that a major aspect of the design becomes the definition of the rules that get activated based on the current context and input, rather than the visual aspects of the user interface.

Apple’s Siri functionality is a good example of this. It derives intent from the user’s natural language and can string together a series of tasks that normally might have taken many steps from the user. Suddenly, creating a calendar appointment with someone at a certain time takes a single Siri command rather than a long sequence of taps.

Finally, as UX design becomes driven by intent and context, we have to come to terms with the fact that we as UX designers will inevitably lose some of the control of the overall experience.

The set of rules will not just be defined by the people creating the device or application, but also by the people providing the context. The same way that a designer at Starbucks aims to design the experience within the store, she will want some control over what happens on peoples devices when they enter the store. For example, will your presence there immediately order your regular drink? Will the payment UI on your phone automatically launch so you can easily confirm it?

On the practical level, design becomes a lot more integrated into the actual code, requiring the developer to understand human behavior better than ever and requiring the designer to understand the code that executes these rules. As a result the designer and developer need to work even closer together. We see this at Artefact all the time — our most successful team members are the ones that design with the developer’s perspective in mind or develop with the designer’s sensibility to the experience of the product.

The age of responsible UX design

Understanding context and behavior are factors for successful UX, but with that, as with any piece of knowledge, comes the responsibility of how to apply it. And the impact of UX design on product adoption, lifestyle, and behavior is so significant that in addition to striving to achieve a certain outcome, we also need to evaluate the impact of the outcome.

It is a sign of our profession’s significance that we need to be thinking ahead about the implications of our efforts. The time has come for us to think about an ethical framework to guide us as we shape the user experience in 2012 and beyond.

Martijn Van Tilburg is Senior Design Director at Artefact, the innovative technology product design firm, whose mission is to utilize the power of design to improve people’s lives.

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Chuck Longanecker of Digital Telepathy is one of our go-to experts when it comes to design and user experience, and today, we invited him into the VentureBeat studio to talk about how web design is evolving.

Longanecker had a lot to say about the principles of objective-based design. When his firm developed the digital concept and website for The Lean Startup, Longanecker said these principles got put to good use in creating a “minimal viable product” and iterating it over time.

We also chatted about some off-the-record intelligence from Facebook. That company has been scooping up pure designers from companies such as Apple, and we’ve been told that they’re getting ready to rethink Facebook profiles accordingly. Longanecker talks about what a well-designed profile might look like and what it should do.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Scott Croyle only just took over as the new design head at mobile device company HTC, but the former vice president of design already has big plans.

In the near future, the smartphone and tablet maker will “concentrate on delivering more content and services into our products, focusing on the user experience,” Croyle said in an interview with VentureBeat. “For example, larger screens for streaming video and enhancing the entertainment experience, and front and rear cameras to take advantage of real-time face chatting with friends and family.”

When HTC chief innovation officer Horace Luke left the company for personal reasons last month, the company’s vice president of design, Croyle, took over Luke’s duties. We asked a Croyle a few pointed questions about whether and how HTC’s remarkable and distinctive mobile products might change.

“Horace led HTC through a transition, creating a culture that puts a major emphasis design,” Croyle told VentureBeat of his predecessor. “That culture continues to thrive today… [HTC CEO] Peter Chou’s attention to detail forces us to keep designing products that give people the opportunity to create their own memorable experiences.

“In this sense, my day-to-day won’t change, given that our ‘consumer first’ focus is core to our DNA.”

Luke was a strong guiding force within the HTC after he joined the company in 2006. During his time there, HTC transitioned from an obscure Asian contract manufacturer to a smartphone brand known for its glossy, elegantly designed handsets. To help meet the company’s burgeoning industrial design needs, HTC acquired One & Co. in 2008. The then ten-year-old San Francisco design firm was owned and operated by Croyle, who worked closely with Luke on some of HTC’s most innovative design work.

In hearing from Croyle, it’s clear that HTC’s design team places a huge emphasis on meeting the needs and desires of consumers. In fact, creating customizable, relevant user experiences for every kind of smartphone user is a key piece of Croyle’s philosophy — and something he thinks other manufacturers and handset designers get wrong.

“We focus on the experiences people have while using our products rather than focusing solely on the technology behind it,” he said. “We observe people in their daily lives to have a pulse on what they expect from their mobile devices, which allows us to design a product that is more personalized and can be tailored to a person’s expectations.

“For example, if someone uses their phone to send email and relies on just two or three applications, their experience with their phone is largely different than a person who uses their phone in more complex ways. We give them features to support that. This consumer-centric approach to design stems from the idea that it should be easy for consumers to get the experience that they want from their devices versus assuming everyone will use a device in the same way.”

In addition to zeroing in on how consumers interact with the software, Croyle is also continuing what he called Luke’s palpable passion for continuity in design — design that permeated every aspect of a product launch. “We both believed that a carefully designed product could come from any place, and we believed deeply in a holistic design approach. For example, the HTC Diamond was the first project where HTC made a foray with this approach [in] packaging, marketing and sales. It was not just hardware- or software-focused.”

Although Croyle stated that design is and will always be a focus at HTC, he also said, “We’re always questioning how we approach design, even if we’re not necessarily making a radical change.” In other words, especially since Luke and Croyle have similar philosophies and inspirations, we can expect incremental shifts in how HTC handsets look and feel; but don’t hold your breath for any seismic activity.

“Inspiration can come from anyone, anywhere,” said Croyle. “Inspiration may come from one of our carrier partners or a designer or from observing consumer behavior with a device. It can also come from the design of everyday goods (Shoes! Chairs!) which is why the collaboration with the One & Co. team has always been so effective for HTC.”

Croyle ended the interview by saying that he and his team are “constantly looking for new sources of inspiration, which is why we encourage designers to identify how consumers are using their phones. The focus on user experience aligns with our idea that one size does not fit all, and people should have choices.”

He gave the recently launched HTC Flyer as an example. The tablet-cum-stylus combo was first sketched out at the company’s Taiwan headquarters. After executives hammered out a product-specific design language, the Flyer project was shipped off to the company’s Seattle-based user experience team. The Seatte team’s goal was to make user experience suggestions based on how consumers interacted with HTC product. “Our goal is twofold,” Croyle concluded, “to provide a product that is deeply and holistically driven by design, and to create an unforgettable user experience.”

This infographic breaks down the most useful information about user experience careers to help hiring managers, as well as creative professionals of all levels, successfully navigate this rapidly evolving industry. It’s a visual introduction to the job descriptions, requisite skill sets, salary averages and top hiring spots for UX professionals around the country.

Brian Wallace is the President of NowSourcing, a premier social media firm specializing in infographic design, development and content marketing promotion. The company is based in Louisville, Ky. and works with companies that range from small business to Fortune 500.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Verify helps website designers determine which parts of their sites are the most eye-catching by, well, asking users what they are. It’s a suite of eight “tests” that ask users to click on interesting parts of the site or write down a few keywords based on what they remember about the site.

Verify first popped up at DEMO Spring 2010 as a private beta, and since then has gone through some pretty significant changes. They added additional tests to the Verify suite — like the multi-click test, which asks users to click on what they think are interesting elements of a website.

Verify also introduced paid plans for accessing the analytics — $9 a month to review the results of a test and $29 a month to find out what the demographics for the results are.

Verify is Zurb’s second website consulting application. Notable, its first app, lets members of a project team point out problem areas on an interface, and annotate them with comments. The Notable app aggregates all of these suggestions and packages them for management teams. It’s a more bottom-up approach to interface improvement than Verify, which is more top-down.

The Campbell, Calif.-based firm Zurb has been around for more than 12 years. Jonathan Smiley, a “huge geek for as long as he can remember,” is the lead designer for Verify and comes from a financial services software company in Alabama.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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News of Ollila’s eventual departure was balanced with a notable new hire: Palm Pre designer Peter Skillman has joined the company as head of user experience and services for its new MeeGo mobile operating system, according to Engadget.

The news comes a few days after Microsoft’s Stephen Elop joined Nokia as its new CEO and after its head of Mobile Solutions Anssi Vanjoki announced his resignation just yesterday.

Olilla served as Nokia’s CEO for 14 years and was largely responsible for making the company the world’s largest handset maker. He stepped down as CEO in 2006 but remained involved with the company as Chairman. Just as with the company’s recent CEO shift, Olilla’s eventual departure is a clear indication that Nokia is intent on revitalizing itself with new blood and that it wants to move away from its old guard of management — though probably not as quickly as it needs to.

The company revealed details of its new E7, C7, E6, and N8 handsets at its Nokia World event in London, England today. It also had choice words for its detractors. “We’re not going to apologize for the fact that we’re not Apple or Google or anybody else — we’re Nokia and we’re unique,” said executive vice president, Niklas Savander, MocoNews reports.

We reported on Skillman leaving HP/Palm in early August. He’s no stranger to product design and was part of the “dream team” brought together to develop the Palm Pre by former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein. The company didn’t have much to say on his hiring, but we can expect him to bring a new level of polish to its MeeGo OS.

The first thing striking about Twitter’s iPad app is its friendliness to first-time users — whether they’re just new to the app or to Twitter itself. Instead of being hit with a login box upon initial startup as with a lot of Twitter apps, it shows you categories like Art & Design, Science and Travel on the left, and trending topics on the right, along with Sign Up, Sign In, and search boxes. Tapping any of the categories, trending topics, or making a search reveal tweets in the right panel. If your use only extends to occasionally lurking through categories and trending topics to see what’s being talked about, you might not even see the need to sign up.

Unlike other apps which use panes only in landscape mode, Twitter’s makes no fuss about its pane-oriented design. Once logged in, the left pane lists the usual suspects: Timeline, Mentions, Lists, Messages, Profile, and Search, and the right shows the tweets. Tapping on a tweet brings up another pane on the right, with the tweet at the top, and any link included in the tweet opened usefully below it. If a tweet is a reply to another, the entire reply thread is shown below instead.

This is where the app begins to set itself apart from any iPad or Twitter app that we’ve seen before — at least, in terms of user-interface. Fairly intuitively, you can drag each pane into, out of, and “almost” out of view, using quick swipes. A couple of use-cases: you tap on a tweet, read it, and slide it out of view. Or, you slide it slightly to the right so that it is just out of view as it loads the embedded link — most useful for videos — while you continue scrolling through your timeline and slide back to it when it finishes.

Another neat innovation is the use of gestures. Pinching outward on a tweet brings up a popup box that gives you a quick overview of a Twitter user, including their bio, location, follow counts, and links to jump to their tweets and mentions.

And finally, as if all the panes weren’t already enough, pressing the Compose Tweet button in the bottom left brings up a yet another pane at the top, while the keyboard slides up from the bottom. Everything in between the keyboard and tweet compose box stays in the middle, making it somewhat useful for you to be able to read and browse tweets even while you think of what to type in those 140 characters.

There are a couple peeves worth mentioning. First, the app doesn’t seem to make full use of its landscape mode — every screen is just a horizontally expanded version of the portrait mode. The extra space on the side on some of the panels could be used better. Second, as intuitive as it is, there is a slight learning curve to all the sliding and swiping and pinching. Some users may initially get confused when things start to slide in and out of view.

With that said, it’s a solid effort by Twitter. The company could have easily played it safe and given users something tried and tested, but there seems to have been an attempt to raise the bar in terms of user experience and the product in general. It’s going to undoubtedly make a dent in some of the other Twitter apps, most of which are paid. Why pay $5 for unknown app X when Twitter has quite an impressive offering of its own for free?

Back in April, the company acquired Tweetie, the maker of the popular desktop and iPhone Twitter app. While this app isn’t based on previous work by the developers at Tweetie, the influence on the product is clearly visible.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

One of the most glaring omissions from Apple’s upcoming iOS 4 mobile operating system is an improved notification system. While the iPhone will finally be getting multitasking, along with a wealth of other features, it’s still encumbered with an annoying pop-up notification system that never fails to disrupt your work flow.

But now, it appears there’s some hope: Rich Dellinger, who developed Palm’s “non-intrusive banner notification system” for its new WebOS devices, is returning to his former employer Apple as a senior user interface designer, PreCentral reports. Dellinger started out as a Senior Technical Support Engineer at Apple, but eventually moved on to Web design and user interface design before heading to Palm in 2006.

His other accomplishments at Palm (culled from his LinkedIn profile) include:

Co-developed the Application Framework used by webOS. Created the CSS structure and defined HTML layout and structure conventions in Mojo Application Framework, and for core Palm applications.

Co-invented software and hardware interaction models for a new generation of Linux-based, Palm-branded mobile devices.

Created the interaction and visual design for a suite of media applications for Palm OS 5, combining media browsing, content sharing and video/image capture into a integrated user experience.

Clearly, he’s going to bring more to Apple than just a shiny new notification system (although I hope that’s his current priority).

In April, Palm lost Michael Abbot — its senior vice president of software and services — to Twitter, and offered stay packages to other key employees to keep them from straying. Shortly after that, HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion. More recently, WebOS user interface designer Matias Duarte left Palm to work on Android at Google.

The brain drain isn’t all that surprising given Palm’s lackluster sales since the launch of its Pre smartphone. And in a way, it’s a good thing; now some of the creative minds who made webOS such a breath of fresh air will be able to bring their insight to other mobile platforms.

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