Adventures In Digital Marketing

FAO Schwarz, the huge US toy shop, has got an excellent online tool on their site for the Xmas period - a microsite which allows you to design and create your own muppet “what not” (the generic muppet/sesame street looking characters like Swedish Chef of Beaker) in The Muppet Show WhatNot Workshop.

It’s kind of like Simpson-ise yourself, but it results in a physical end product delivered to your door for $90

Except, there’s a problem with the web execution - it isn’t excellent at all.

Sure, it works, and it’s easy to use.

But it’s boring. BOOOORING.

It’s a very simple form, nothing happens in real-time, so it’s hard to know what you’re creating as you proceed, and the end result is, well, a little disappointing in as much as it just lumps the assets you’ve chosen, like hair, nose, eyes, etc., onto a default body shape (which you also choose) but in a way with no finesse, no style, and it looks like a 10 year old cut and paste it together in MS Paint.

I’m not kidding - speccing up a new Dell is more fun than this process.

Come on webmaster of FAO Schwarz - you could have made this into on of the holiday seasons must-see web locations.

Instead, you’ve created a functional but decidely average online shopping experience.

User experience isn’t just about making things as simple and easy to use as possible, it’s about providing that as well as an online experience that engages with the audience and makes them realise the experience was fun and worthwhile and sticks in their mind.  If it was all about being easy to use we’d all do plain HTML sites in black text on a while background.

Use your imagination.  You sell toys!  That’s got to be a fun gig.

So why is this microsite so yawn inducing?

Howard

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What do you use to organise your thoughts? MindMapping and MindManager allow you to do some pretty nifty stuff on a PC but there are lots of great tools and resources available. Bootstrapper has a list of 100 tools, resources, blogs, articles and everything else you might need to mind map like a pro.

Jon

OKA Direct, the last site I produced whilst at TEQUILA\ London, just got reviewed in the NMA this week.  It scored a pretty healthy 88% overall.  Congratulations to all the team still at TEQUILA\ as well as those moved on to different strokes.

OKA was actually three sites produced at once, RAPT direct and Cath Collins (although CC appears to be down at the moment for some reason) being the other two, all based on a common architecture. 

NMA particularly liked the idea of being able to buy a whole room at once, rather than selecting items individually.  Good - that was my idea
Well done OKA and TEQUILA\

Howard
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Blogged with Flock

Tags: nma, oka, ecommerce, web site, rapt, cath collins, tequila

In a project born out of boredom an american student, Ethan Garner created CraigStatsSF, a site that visualises Craiglist San Francisco rental listings. He writes:

"As
I started looking for places, I noticed everything that used to be for
rent was now for sale due to the same foreclosure effect that happened
to my landlord.

It also appeared that the rents were going up….. but… were they really? Or am I just paranoid and bitter?

Since I was waiting to get my research published, I figured I could
waste ample amounts of time coding perl scripts and learning google
maps."

This heatmap visualisation is really useful for property rental and property sales information. At a glance the user gets a great overview of all of the available data.

Jonathan

Twitter is taking us all by storm no doubt, but is it just me, or is it’s one of the more complicated simple interfaces we’ve seen yet?

It just has too many potential inputs.  I’ve got it on my phone via text/sms, on IM via Google Talk, and on my Mac via Twitterrific. 

I know I don’t HAVE to have all of those, but I do, and it’s starting to get a touch complicated.

On top of that, how hard is it to use their search tool to find friends/contacts?  They really need to sort that out - the interface is terrible!

Howard
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Probably the web celebrity for the day (sorry Mike), Kevin Rose was truly rock and roll (in a not at all as extreme as Motley Crue kind of way) in as much as he slept in late, turned up a bit scruffy and was drinking wine during his talk.

Taking us through the pros and cons of digg, i have to say he didn’t really, for me at least, go into much detail about what digg could turn into in the future.  I was personally hoping for a little bit of comment about how digg might actually be a new form of internet based communication rather than a site in it’s own right, but that wasn’t really covered.  we saw some graphs which were a little hard to make out.

ok - so i’ve actually not got a lot to say about Kevin’s presentation, but ho hum.  maybe i should delete this post

actually - one thing I heard at the conference about digg was interesting. I happened to overhear a couple of blokes say to each other "do you actually use digg?" "no" replied the other, adding, "no fucker does outside the US".

i don’t use it much I have to say - maybe they were right!

Howard
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What design approach do you use, or does your agency use.

The dominant approach is User Centred Design, but there is also:
Activity-Centred Design
Systems Design
Genius Design - you count on your very own design genius to get it right.

I would be grateful if you could find a minute to fill out this super quick survey below:
Click here to take survey

Many thanks!

I will post the results here in January.

This Flick User Model Diagram is one of my favourite things. It is a little complex but just packed with so much info. There are 3 versions of this diagram created by Bryce Glass - here is the first version and here is Bryce’s blog.

Jon

Google have launched a new tool which aims to help them improve their search listings when it comes to images.

The Google Image Labeller is a web based game, or sorts, which allows an individual user to partner up with another person on the site and suggest keywords, or labels, for images which appear to them on screen at random.

The idea is that your keywords help google identify what the image contains and thus improve the accuracy of their search results.  Keywords are only added to an image if both of the users match the same word, to make sure you’re not doing something stupid and logging the wrong keywords.

I gave this a go just now and it’s actually strangely compelling, and I found myself entering words at a speed of knots to see if I could match my online partners.  Unfortunately my partners didn’t seem quite so fast and I hardly matched any words, except for when an image was really obvious, such as one which showed a footballer.

This is really interesting to me, having previously worked at an image library, as keywording was one of the things we always found hard to do and get right - in fact in the image library world it really is quite a big topic as hard as that might actually be believed.  There are firms that specialise in nothing else but keywording images. 

Opening them up to the users of the site is a really interesting thing, and I am sure the big players in the library world like Corbis and Getty could take a good look at this method for their own libraries.

Howard
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