July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

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

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.”

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

 Charles Huang is the chief executive of Green Throttle Games. He also co-founded Red Octane, creator of Guitar Hero.

Smart phones, tablets, and smart TVs will soon be powered by the same technology stack — ARM processors running iOS or Android along with their respective app stores. That means the key differentiating feature between these devices will be staring you right in the face — screen size.

Screen size matters more than content creators think. For starters, look at this research from Google that shows engagement increases with screen size.

This makes sense, as people consume content differently on different screen sizes. 4-5” phones are great for checking emails, tweets, social networks (especially uploading photos you took on your phone), listening to music, and playing casual games like Angry Birds. Consumers surveys show that email is the #1 activity on smart phones.

7-10” tablets are great for reading books and magazines, surfing the web, watching videos, and playing casual to mid-core game, like Plants vs Zombies or Infinity Blade. Consumer surveys show that gaming is the #1 activity on tablets.

30-50” TVs are great for long session movies, TV shows, and video games. Big screen TVs are usually hooked up to the best speakers in the house, so it’s great for rich audio and video experiences. Perhaps most important, the 30-50” screen is for content you want to share with family and friends. Increasingly, the user experience in front of the TV now includes a 2nd screen in the form of a tablet/phone. This dual screen experience is common enough that the Wii U built an entire controller to facilitate this.

App Annie recently started to track Kindle app performance and their data backs up my thesis on screen size. According to App Annie’s data, all of the current top 10 paid apps on the Kindle store are games.

Meanwhile, on Google Play, seven out of the top 10 paid apps are utility apps. This makes sense as Play enabled devices are predominantly phones, while Kindle is a tablet. This juxtaposition shows that screen size matters for apps when it comes to phones vs tablets.

So what does this mean for developers? Sophisticated iOS and Android game devs need to build games with target screen sizes in mind to deliver an optimal user experience. Better UX is needed to improve monetization. In my field of video games, I’ve always believed that World of Warcraft doesn’t work on mobile and Angry Birds doesn’t work on TVs. It’s also worth pointing out that Guitar Hero (my game) never sold well on PC.

So why did we at Green Throttle Games target Android-based TV games? Because data shows that bigger screen sizes lead to longer engagement sessions. Our thesis is that longer engagement sessions will lead to higher monetization. This is true for video (think YouTube snippets vs. TV shows vs. movies). And of course, this is true for games (think phone vs. tablet vs. PC vs. console).

Galaxy S IV photo by Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

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

Carin van Vuuren is chief marketing officer at Usablenet.

It’s no secret that smartphones are overwhelmingly the most popular and fastest growing mobile access point to the Internet today. Just recently we learned that by the end of this year, mobile devices will outnumber the amount of people on earth, and by 2017, there will be over 10 billion mobile-connected devices. So how does this influence the future of mobile development?

As consumer behavior continues to trend towards mobile as the primary channel for customer engagement, the stakes have clearly been raised for brands. Increasingly, brands need to offer tailored mobile experiences that are relevant, add tangible value, and meet users goals in the journey.

The early evolution of mobile was centered around optimizing a desktop site for mobile, but with rising consumer expectations, a fresh approach is needed.  Here are three ways brands can ensure a compelling mobile experience.

We’ll be diving even deeper into the mobile experience at VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit, an invitation-only conclave of 180 top mobile executives, next month. Request an invitation here!

1. Create a context-rich mobile experience

To drive meaningful engagement, it is essential to create a unique and engaging experience that takes the context of a mobile journey into account. To accomplish this, brands need to incorporate three core elements into the mobile experience: social, local and personalization.

The ability to share content and experiences socially is the bedrock of a thriving mobile experience. To do so effectively, brands must go beyond merely offering access to social networks and instead make social content from platforms like YouTube, Pinterest, and others an integrated part of each mobile experience. Successful mobile experiences must also leverage GPS functionality to deliver location-aware dimensions to mobile. Go beyond the basics of simply finding a nearby store or hotel and instead incorporate deeper location-based features that are triggered when a customer is within the proximity of a specific store, or starts a search on mobile.

A great example is specialty women’s retailer Caché, who is leveraging push notification technology on mobile to offer targeted, personalized promotions to its customers. Upon downloading the Caché app, users can opt-in to receive push notifications that are periodically sent to inform shoppers of sales and discounts in nearby stores. These notifications are also used to promote new products and special events. To ensure shoppers receive relevant information and offers, these sophisticated notifications can be customer-targeted based on recent shopping activity.

2. Define mobile UX to achieve critical customer journeys

In today’s world, where registration, booking, check-out, and payments present some of the most critical aspects of a customer’s mobile journey, it is essential to understand how mobile impacts every stage of the shopping journey. Mobile experience considerations include how to present large amounts of information on a smaller screen size, device interactions (click versus touch), fluctuating network bandwidth, and limited time to complete actions before a user loses interest.

The key to ensuring effective UX is simplifying the process of any action to make sure a user can complete it in two minutes or less. Keeping this “two-minute use case” rule in mind will significantly help reduce the barriers to task completion via mobile. The check-out process, for example, has the highest drop-off incidence on mobile, which underlines the importance of applying mobile UX to all actions surrounding the cart, payment field, and purchase confirmation.

Amazon is a prime example of a brand that has mastered mobile and set a new standard in customer expectations. Beyond simply optimizing its website, Amazon has created a mobile experience for customers that is streamlined, seamless, and facilitates mobile commerce. To start, Amazon offers keyword search functionality, mobile barcode scanning, even allowing customers to take a photo of a product for the site to match. Amazon’s mobile merchandising is also top notch, making it easy for customers to browse a range of products, curated pages, comparison shopping, and more. Further, the company clearly understands the hassle of entering data via mobile, and keeps form-filling to a minimum while storing all purchase and shipping details securely. The site also offers one-click checkout and free shipping to help further drive repeat purchases and stimulate impulse shopping.

3. Effectively integrate mobile promotions

If implemented correctly, mobile can be both an engagement channel and a central hub for a brand’s marketing strategy. Currently, mobile drives less than 10% of all online revenue, but its impact and influence across every aspect of retail is extensive. For example, more than 40% of all email offers are opened on a smartphone – making mobile an integrated part of the marketing mix. We’re seeing more and more loyalty and email campaigns that offer mobile-only redemptions, coupons and discounts. And innovations like Apple’s Passbook makes it even easier for brands to drive sales and increase mobile engagement through real-time, integrated promotions.

Starbucks stands out as a brand that effectively offers mobile-only promotions. The brand is known for its innovative SMS messaging campaigns, QR code scanning and mobile payment offerings that allow users to check their mobile balance, purchase history, and receive mobile-only offers. Their ability to incorporate mobile directly into the in-store purchasing process and promotions offerings sets Starbucks’ mobile presence apart from many other brands.

It’s not mobile first, it’s users first!

We’re clearly living in a mobile world, and it makes sense that the rallying cry of designing for “mobile first” would resonate. However, this idea should be adjusted to reflect a design approach that start with users’ needs first. The winning approach is one where technology does not impose limitations, and experiences can deliver on business, brand and user goals in every channel and device.

Carin van Vuuren is Chief Marketing Officer at Usablenet, the global leader in mobile and multi-channel technology and a pioneer in mobile usability. She is an experienced marketer with a diverse background and over 15 years experience in brand-building and strategic marketing communications.

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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If you read digital comics, the chances are pretty great that you prefer to do so on a particular device. For me its the iPad, and I rarely bother with anything else, even if I want to. But with the latest update to the ComiXology platform, that may change.

The digital comic book startup is rolling out a new feature, called Continue, that will remember the place you left off when reading a comic, and allow you to pick back up in the same spot on another device. This is probably not too big of a deal for the regular 22-page comic, but it could be very useful for graphic novels.

Personally, the Continue feature would mean I’d actually start reading comics on my iPhone again, because it changes the whole process. To read a comic on my phone that I started on my iPad meant that I had to re-download the book to my device again, and sift through the pages until I found my place. And if I’m reading comics on my phone, it means I have a limited amount of time that I don’t want to spend staring at a download and re-reading pages.

It’s true that the continuous bookmarking may seem like a small feature, but its little elements like this that make ComiXology’s reading experience better than its competitors. (Seriously, reading a comic on iBooks or Kindle feels so rigid by comparison because it lacks things like the panel-by-panel Guided View feature.) Hopefully, we’ll see more little additions in the future, such as annotations, and being able to view comics without having to download them.

The Continue feature is available today across ComiXology app on all platforms (Windows 8, iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, etc.). I’m unsure if it will also be available within comic book publisher apps that are powered by ComiXology, such as Marvel, Image, DC comics, and IDW. The company has also added more social features to its apps that let you share something on Facebook and Twitter in the middle of a book.

And, if I’m not mistaken, Twitter’s guidelines have a lot of do-as-I-say, not as-I-do.

Source: Twitter

The first tweet

On March 21, 2006, Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey posted the first-ever tweet: 24 characters, including spaces. Timestamp, source, and author.

All simple and easy — the marked difference from Facebook or other social networks that offered multiple options, full media, and unlimited status update lengths. And that very difference was a big piece of Twitter’s brand story and attraction to users.

Much of that simplicity has disappeared as Twitter has evolved into a personalized news network — the interest graph rather than the social graph — and incorporated images, video, and short previews of links in expanded tweets for favored partners.

In short, this has happened as Twitter has become more publisher than utility, and as Twitter gets all grown up into a corporation that needs to (shockers) generate revenue.

But with Twitter’s recently announced API changes, developers who integrate with Twitter and incorporate tweets into their apps no longer have display guidelines. They have display rules, and that means that there will soon be at least 32 Laws of the Tweet that developers need to obey … or risk losing their access to the Twitter API and the Twitter ecosystem.

Here they are:

1. Tweeter’s name must be displayed
2. Tweeter’s username must be displayed
3. Tweeter’s avatar must be shown
4. The username must always be displayed with the “@” symbol
5. Tweet text must be shown on a line below the author’s name and username
6. Tweet text must not be altered or modified in any way
7. Any mentions of other Twitter users using “@” must link to those profiles
8. Any hashtags must link to Twitter search for that tag
9. Any links must use the API URL field
10. Any links must use the Twitter shortener t.co
11. Reply …
12. Retweet …
13. and Favorite action icons must be visible for the user …
14. and the relevant actions must be enabled via API or Twitters web intents technology
15. No additional social or third party actions may be attached to a tweet
16. The tweet timestamp must always be visible
17. The tweet timestamp must always be linked to the tweet permalink on Twitter.com
18. The branding must clearly be Twitter’s
19. The Twitter logo or follow button for the tweet author must always be displayed in the top right corner
20. Any pics or images must be displayed as part of the tweet …
21. and link back to the Tweet permalink
22. Images may not be detached from the tweet and displayed separately
23. The user’s name and Twitter username must be displayed on one line
24. The user’s icon must be to the left of the name and tweet text
25. Timestamps should be in the top right corner
26. Use a short-form timestamp in …
27. seconds if the tweet is less than a minute old …
28. minutes if the tweet is less than an hour old …
29. hours if the tweet is less than 24 hours old
30. Use a date and month timestamp if the tweet is more than 24 hours old
31. If the tweet is a retweet, the name of the retweeter and the retweeter icon must be displayed under the tweet
32. No third-party content can be mixed in with Tweet content

This is the example tweet that Twitter included with the list of requirements, which seems to obey them:

Source: Twitter

Twitter example third-party tweet use

Of course, here’s the official Twitter app on iPhone, directly from Twitter. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine whether or not tweets shown in Twitter’s own app follow the rules:

Source: John Koetsier

Twitter app screenshot

There’s a good reason why they don’t: Tweets that include all the voluminous information that Twitter is requiring developers to display will simply not be as simple, as clean, as readable … in short, as user-friendly as the Tweets shown just above in Twitter’s iPhone app.

Ergo: Third-party developer’s apps will not be as good as Twitter’s.

I should be clear: Twitter is under no obligation to make life easy or lucrative for developers. The company can do as it pleases and when it pleases, and it is only accountable to its investors and the law. Specifically, it can require different things from developers than it offers to users via its own apps.

However, when developers cannot easily and quickly build products of utility, beauty, and simplicity on a software platform, they can and often do choose to abandon that platform. As one developer replied to my initial post about the Twitter development guidelines:

Screw you, Twitter. You just saved me some development time, because I’m not going to suck up to a service that will arbitrarily waste it.

That’s something for Twitter to think hard about as the company continues to monetize. No platform that is not good for developers is likely to succeed in the long term.

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photo pin cc

Note:
The guidelines (they will be rules when the API reaches version 1.1) are not presented as above but grouped for easier reading. I’ve separated some that seem to be different specific actions required by developers, but kept others together that seemed too trivial to separate.

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The challenge is not small: How to fit displays and controls for music, email, apps, timers, rangefinder, clockfaces, and any other apps developers dream up … all into one tiny 144-x-168 pixel black-and-white display.

Pebble’s user interface engineer, Martijn Thé, had a clear goal:

Source: Pebble

Prototyping designs in real time.

“I figured Pebble should be so easy that our grandmothers should be able to pick it up and use it right away.”

The difficult part, however, was how to make it simple enough for granny and also support the needs and desires of power users.

To design the Pebble’s interface efficiently, the team created a tool that allows them to prototype designs while viewing them in real time on a mock up (see image). Pebble will be making the software available for developers to use as they create third-party apps for the device.

In addition, the company created an iPhone app that acts as a Pebble, so that designers can interact with it on their wrists and ensure that the feel of the interface is natural and simple.

See it in action in the video below:

Image credit: Pebble

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Love it or hate it, Apple is about design.

The company’s annual design awards were announced this week at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Calif., showcasing the best the iOS and Mac development communities have produced.

Since it’s better to gaze upon amazing design than to read words about it, here’s a visual treat: a tour through the best design on iPhone, iPad, and Mac for the past year. Scan through and pick up some inspiration!

Here are the winners in each section. Skip down for slideshows and links for each:

• iPhone
  • JetPack Joyride
  • National Parks
  • Where’s My Water?
• iPad
  • Bobo Explores Light
  • DM1 the Drum Machine
  • Paper FiftyThree
• Mac
  • Deus Ex
  • Limbo
  • Sketch
• Student
  • DaWindci
  • Little Star

iPhone

The best iPhone apps are sleek, sexy, and perfect for the task at hand, whether it’s gaming, organization, or education.

Here’s are winners as selected by Apple:

JetPack Joyride by Halfbrick Studios
A video game this successful with only one control? Wow.

Where’s My Water? by Disney
You know you gotta help Swampy find his water!

National Parks by National Geographic
Explore 20 of the United States’ most beautiful national parks on your Phone.

iPad

iPad gives designers a little more room, but the best user interface engineers know to not take that space for granted. Instead, they create user experiences that feel roomy and spacious, with everything just in the right spot, and nothing too closely crowded.

Here are some of the best of 2012 on iPad.

Bobo Explores Light by Game Collage, LLC
Who wouldn’t want a science museum focused on light for kids age 4-12, even if you’re an adult?

DM1 The Drum Machine by Fingerlab
You know it has to be well-designed to beat out Apple’s own GarageBand in this category.

Paper by FiftyThree by FiftyThree, Inc.
Capture all your ideas on paper the old-school way, except a little updated for iPad.

Mac

iPhone and iPad are getting all the glory, but the Mac is still chugging along with new Retina displays, faster processors, and new solid-state drives in Macbook Pros. The group is still growing faster than Windows-based PCs.

Here’s some of the best design on the Mac, where it all started.

Deus Ex Human Revolution Ultimate Edition by Feral Interactive, Inc.
Get augmented in a dystopic, futuristic cyberpunk computer game.

Limbo by Playdead
Dark and atmospheric, this is a creepy but beautiful universe to enter.

Sketch by Bohemian Coding
A professional drawing app, on your Mac, for user interface, icon, and web design.

Student

The best apps that the student community has created.

DaWindci by Reality Twist GmbH
Pilot your hot air balloon on the shifting winds of 45 different expeditions.

Little Star by BiBoBox Studio
A fully interactive book with bonus games

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Image credit: ShutterStock

WalkMe, a startup that provides a step-by-step walk-through service for websites, has nabbed $1 million in funding, the company announced today.

WalkMe’s service helps users navigate a site by placing pop-up bubbles in certain locations to lead the user through each logical step. For instance, a banking website’s sign-up/login field might have a pop-up, followed by a bubble over a button that leads to that person’s checking account activity page. It’s more or less a GPS for websites that requires no integration or modification to the site itself.

For companies that have a website with bad user-interface design and no budget to create a new site from scratch, WalkMe could definitely help out.

WalkMe said it plans to use the new funding to broaden its marketing efforts and accelerate growth.

The Tel Aviv-based startup, which publicly launched earlier this month, has attracted more than 1,000 registered users. The new investment comes from Mangrove Capital Partners.

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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Seeing Framework’s magic in action is, well, a bit magical. As the screen resolution (or browser window size) changes, links become buttons. Images automatically resize. Layouts morph.

Try it out yourself; go to one of the many sites built on Foundation, then manipulate the size of the browser window. Take it down to a tablet size, then a smartphone size, and watch the site change fluidly along with you.

The benefit of Foundation is that you, the designer, don’t have to customize each layout on a device-by-device basis.

“The framework does all the work,” said Dmitry Dragilev, lead marketer at design shop Zurb, which created Foundation. “People don’t need to worry about this stuff anymore.”

User experience these days lives on mobile as much as on the web. That’s why Foundation, a new building and prototyping framework for front ends, works across all platforms. Better still, it’s open source software; you can check it out on Github.

In some ways, the framework is a lot like Twitter’s open-source front-end framework, Bootstrap.

But Zurb representative Dmitry Dragilev says Zurb’s framework is superior because of its emphasis on multi-device scaling. “Bootstrap just works for desktop apps. The one we’re releasing is designed to work on any kind of device, mobile or not, and that’s crucial now that mobile web use has started to overtake desktop use.”

The basis of Foundation is the Grid, a layout framework that seamlessly scales your content across all form factors, including mobile devices, small screens, large desktops and even huge screens, such as Internet-connected TVs. The Grid is a twelve-column, semi-liquid “grid of awesomeness that you’re gonna love,” Zurb claims.

In addition to the Grid, Foundation includes a slew of tools for rapid web and mobile prototyping, including typography, tabs, buttons, image grids, pagination, forms and more. “We also included some of our most popular JavaScript plugins, Orbit and Reveal, so you can handle image and content sliders and modals,” stated Zurb in a company blog post.

Finally, Foundation prototypes can be built into full sites for maximum developer/designer efficiency.

Dragilev said Dictionary.com already uses Foundation (check it out on their Word Dynamo app), as do a number of other sites and apps. Also, Zurb is presenting today at Mozilla’s WebFWD initiative for open web solutions.

Next, Zurb will be further refining the framework (squashing bugs and fixing edge cases), as well as adding templates, site generation, more common elements and even better mobile support.

Image courtesy of Juri Pozzi.

Check out DevBeat, VentureBeat’s brand new channel specifically for developers. The channel will break relevant news and provide insightful commentary aimed to assist developers. DevBeat is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program.

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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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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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Here’s our roundup of the week’s top tech business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

New iPhone 5 images based on leaked design specs — A new set of iPhone 5 device mockups making the rounds could be giving consumers a glimpse of what’s to come on launch day.

Hacking water meters is easier than it should be — The smarter water meters become, the easier they’re getting to hack.

Hacker group Anonymous threatens to destroy Facebook Nov. 5 — Notorious hacker collective Anonymous on Tuesday threatened to “kill” Facebook on Nov. 5.

Nokia exec: Android and iPhone focus on the app is “outdated” — The reliance by Apple and Android phones on the “app” as the central metaphor is “outdated,” said Nokia exec Chris Weber.

Photos show the cultural difference between Black Hat and Defcon hacker events — Thousands of security professionals, hackers, federal agents and media descended on Las Vegas this week to attend the Black Hat and Defcon conferences.

And here are five more posts we think are important, thought-provoking, fun, or all of the above:

Yelp has a new CFO. An IPO can’t be far off — Popular local search and reviews site Yelp is getting closer to a possible public stock offering.

Can Google+ circles stand the test of time? A look inside Google’s user experience — No one can doubt that Google+ circles are fun, easy to set up and innovative.

Nokia gives up on (weak) North America Symbian business, no N9 either — Really, that’s like saying Nokia has decided to stop stabbing itself in the eye.

Zynga revises its IPO filing with the SEC — a signal that it still plans to go public — Zynga’s filing suggests that it is still considering an IPO despite the topsy-turvy nature of the stock market.

Intel to invest $300M in “Ultrabook” computers — Intel has created a $300 million fund to invest in “ultrabook” computers, which it considers to be the next revolution in personal computers.

Touch-friendly and playful, circles bring something new and exciting to the stale fare at the social media table. But what remains to be seen is if circles will work for users in the long term. Will they be as easy to maintain as they are to set up? Or will they fade in usage just as other grouping features, such as Facebook Lists, have done?

To answer these questions and more, VentureBeat turned to Google+ engineer and former Plaxo CTO Joseph Smarr and Kik CEO Ted Livingston, who has spent a significant amount of time and funding on the idea of sharing with specific groups.

Designing circles: User experience and interface

First, we asked Smarr where the idea for circles came from. He told us, “The inspiration for the conceptual model came from a mix of realizing that people have distinct social circles in the real world, and that when users can control who they share with, they respond by sharing more.”

In other words, circles were created to mirror the sociology of the physical world and to strip some of the artifice out of typical online interactions.

“Instead of treating everyone like a ‘friend’ or a ‘follower,’ in real life you engage with your family in a certain way and with your college buddies in a completely different way. Circles reflects that and allow you to be authentic, so you can share your bar-hopping photos with your college friends and share the latest Alzheimer’s research that would impact Aunt May with close family,” said Smarr.

Getting users to adopt the tool and set up new social networks was the first challenge the team needed to address. “The trick was to make it primary enough and fun and easy enough that people would be willing and able to set up their circles,” said Smarr. “We made it primary with the ‘add to circle’ button and the sharing UI in the share box where you choose explicitly who to share each post with.

“And we made it fun and easy with Andy Hertzfeld’s work on the circle editor, which sprung out of some creative prototypes Andy had been working on before Google+ started.”

Hertzfeld, along with former Google designer Shaun Modi, current Googler Jonathan Terleski and Smarr, are the four designers most responsible for the user experience and user interface of Google+ circles, one of the least Google-typical features the company has ever produced. As Hertzfeld told Wired during the Google+ launch, “I’ve heard in the past that Larry Page he didn’t like animations, but that didn’t stop me from putting in a lot of animations in, and Larry told me he loves it.”

Awkwardness, narcissism & laziness: Catering to user behavior

We asked Smarr to contrast circles with existing social features, especially Facebook’s Groups and Lists, which directly compete with circles. He tells us, “Selecting the groups of people you share with is not an afterthought” in Google+; rather, it’s part of the architecture and was from the beginning.

“We built Google+ by putting sharing front and center, so you share what you want with the people you want,” he said.

Smarr also mentioned the problem of “social awkwardness,” which he said is exacerbated by other networks’ methods of grouping. Although Smarr didn’t mention Facebook Groups directly, his argument is certainly applicable to that feature.

“Shared groups still have this problem that everyone has to agree on who’s in and who’s out, and everyone sees the label of the group. This is fine for some cases (e.g. a well-defined group like a soccer team or book club), but it’s not ideal for more subjective groups like ‘Family’ or ‘Best friends’ (where everyone draws the line in a slightly different place and it’s socially sensitive to declare who you consider to be in or out)… Circles eliminate social awkwardness by giving each user control over exactly who is in which circle, and by making the circle labels private.”

However, Kik CEO Livingston said that the failure of Facebook’s grouping tools is part of the social network’s success, and one reason he believes Google+ circles won’t be as successful as the search company hopes. In a word, Livingston points out that in web-based interactions, we share because we are narcissists, and many of the best web apps cater to and capitalize on this behavior.

“If Google could personally train every person in the world, would people find value in Google+? To me, the fact that on Facebook you’re sharing with all your friends and not specific groups, that’s an advantage. It very much revolves around the social dynamics of real life. It gives people not an excuse, but an opportunity to share all kinds of content about themselves that make them look good.”

With circles, however, he said, “Because you’re explicitly sharing with specific people every time, you don’t have that justification.”

But Smarr added that while circles represent a break from how information is usually shared online, the experience lines up better with how people interact in real life.

“A common problem with online sharing today is that the audience is too wide, so people either overshare or undershare,” he said. “We want to better reflect users’ offline relationships by respecting the real social circles they have in their life. We believe this will make online interactions much more authentic and meaningful.”

Then, there’s the problem of maintaining groups. While the initial circle editing process is game-like and fun, keeping groups up-to-date, pruning them when necessary and even remembering who’s in which circle will become a hassle, Livingston argues.

“Semi-permanent or permanent groups just don’t work,” he said. “They become irrelevant or annoying one-on-one conversations, and it’s impossible to simply kick people out.”

Currently, the process of maintaining circles is something Google has tried to make as simple as possible. You can change someone’s circle by hovering over his name, and you can tweak who is in a circle on the fly while viewing that circle. Google also provides circle-related suggestions that are informed by your interactions within the product.

All this, said Livingston, is far too complex and time-consuming for the average user who doesn’t spend his life chained to a computer. “It would be better to create a group from scratch every time and let it be transient.”

“There’s no doubt we’ll need to do even more over time to help people curate their circles over the long term,” Smarr responds. “We want people to invest in building a great set of circles over years and hopefully even decades… We do think there’s opportunity to make maintaining your circles more of a fun game-like experience.”

In the end, Smarr points out, “We’ve got a number of ideas we’re exploring. Google+ is a project, and this is just the beginning. We’re excited for what’s to come.”

Will Google+ work in the long term?

Google itself is banking heavily on Google+ being the company’s lasting and successful entry into social media, a cutthroat landscape where the monetary value lies not in selling products to consumers, but in selling consumers (and their demographic information, social graph, preferences and more) to brands. Google already does a pretty good job of that with its ad products served around search and online content, but it’s beginning to feel a pinch from Facebook, a company with arguably much more specific data for targeting users.

To win here, Google+ will eventually have to pull ahead of Facebook, the leading contender du jour in the social space. And to win the crown from Facebook, Google will have to capture Facebook’s audience: Normal, average, non-tech-fixated people.

“I think these people will get the concept of adding people to a Circle; that’s fun and makes sense,” said Livingston. “But the underlying dynamics the service is based on — that you would take the people you know and carve them into groups that you explicitly share with — removes the vanity advantage of Facebook and makes it complicated to maintain in the long term…

“At the end of the day, what is it good at?”

Finally, Livingston asks the money question, the question that every Googler working on Google+ probably has to ask himself on a daily basis: “If Google+ doesn’t succeed, what happens? If Google loses to Facebook, where do they go from there?”

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Comcast released a video on its blog Thursday showing the Skype app in action. The video, which features an interview with Jamie Hall and Susan Oppelt of Comcast Interactive Media, discusses the thought process behind building a Skype app for couch potatoes instead of tech geeks and professionals.

The Skype Xfinity TV service offers a stripped down version of the popular voice, video and instant messaging application used on a desktop computer. The service will run through HDTV set-top boxes and require a special remote control provided to subscribers for free. It’s unknown if/how much Comcast will charge to add access to Skype.

As shown in the video clip (embedded below), the TV-version of Skype has a clean, minimalistic design. Graphical elements and animated effects are noticeably absent, which helps new users focus on the functions of accessing contacts and conducting video chats, according to Hall.

“We didn’t want to decorate the screen with elements that weren’t relevant,” Oppelt said.

The partnership between Comcast and Skype, which the cable giant announced last month at a trade show event, benefits both companies.

Since most current Skype users likely prefer using desktop and mobile versions by default, it makes sense for Comcast to concentrate on building an application for a new market of television watchers. If its current subscribers find the addition of Skype useful, it enhances Comcast’s overall value.

For Skype, a TV app allows the company’s over 600 million current users to access the broad demographic of people already subscribing to Comcast’s services. And the more people Skype’s users have access to, the greater its chance of becoming a more dominant communication service.

Via Gigaom

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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