Site review
Getting stuck on Pinterest
An invite to the beta of a new site called Pinterest.com landed in my email box about a week ago. I get a lot of these so I generally tend to ignore them but I remembered hearing a few different people recently talk about the site so I thought I would check it out. Like the name implies the site is a virtual bulletin board where you can virtually “pin” images of the things you like as you cruise around the Internet. Those collections of images are put on “boards” that can then be named so the content is made into collections of themed content. Pinterest then add in a Twitter like element to the site where you are then able to follow other people to see all of the content they pin or just follow one of their boards to only get updates on a specific subject matter. The best place to start finding content is by linking to Facebook or Twitter to see how may of your friends are on the site and beyond that I would recommend just searching for specific terms because some of the collection are massive with people who have over 100 different boards and over 10,000 pins.
At first I really didn’t think this was going to be a site that would have much of a lasting appeal and I think a lot of that opinion was based on my friends who were already on the site as their content wasn’t that compelling. I pushed on to explore some more and I started to find things that really did interest me and I’d never seen before. That is a pretty rare occurrence for me and before I knew it I had 13 boards and over 100 pins – I was hooked. So those of you who are already on the site feel free to follow me and my wide but generally design focused collections and if not shoot me an email and I’ll send you an invite to the site so you can check it out for yourself.
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Gojee.com: Building a better cookbook
I came across Gojee.com today which is a new cooking site that just launched. It’s simple design isn’t revolutionary but if you look beneath the deceptively simple design you see it has a powerful and well thought out user experience.
The overall design direction borrows from so many photography sites we have all seen in recent years with full screen images that slowly scroll but almost betray some of innovative thinking hidden under the surface. But the real power of the site is in the main navigation which is simply made up of three fields – ‘I crave’, ‘I have’ and ‘I dislike’. ‘I crave’ which is an open suggestive search field where you can enter what you are in the mood for and it will return corresponding topics the site has content for. ‘I have’ lets your enter ingredients you have in your fridge and ‘I dislike’ lets you add foods you are allergic to or just don’t like to eat. When you look at these three fields individually they don’t seem very remarkable but when you look at them together you see they are really powerful. They combine an open search field that sets direction of the search while the other two fields are used as content filters to refine the search to the most relevant results. So you get a powerful and targeted search that combines search with filtering system all done through three deceptively simple navigation options.
Another really nice feature is hidden in the ‘I have” menu where you can link your grocery store rewards card to the site and it will automatically add your purchases to your “I have” list. Right now you can only do this with a D’Agostino card but since there is one right round the corner from I office I tried it out and it worked perfectly. You can see how more grocery stores will be trying to build this link between their virtual real estate and their brick and mortar store because it makes cooking easier for everyone and they can easily up-sell products and drive suggestive purchasing. Obviously if they could also extend this type of strategy into a mobile app that would completely tie the web site browsing experience with the in-store shopping experience then they would have something really powerful that would had the potential to drive a huge increase in sales.
So while Gojee.com still needs more content and stronger visual design opinion you can see a lot of good thinking here that is probably a good indicator of the digital strategy many grocery stores will be adopting in the near future.
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My thoughts on Google+
So if you have been semi-concious for the past few weeks you have heard of, if you’re not already using Google+. It is Google’s latest move into the social networking space following Google Buzz, Google Wave, Orkut, Google Profile, Jaiku, Google Friend Connect and Dodgeball – all have had variable degrees of success. Google is obviously looking at this as a priority and they are doing it because they are losing their grip on the real-time social Internet and need to become a big player in the social space so they can better target us with ads and search results. The site since it is still in limited Beta and they are still working on it but for those of you who haven’t been able to get an invite in – here are some thoughts on what you are missing. (And I have some invites left if anyone wants them – hit me up on Twitter and I be happy to send them along).
When you start using Google+ you see more than a passing similarity to the Facebook’s layout and functionality though there are a few key differences. The core part of the experience revolves around a Facebook style news feed called the Stream. To get content into your stream you have to add friends which can be organized into Circles which are the biggest point of differentiation and the best idea in Google+ even though it comes with a downside. Circles allows you to group friends into categories like Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Work, etc. and you can then decide when you post something which Circles you want to share it with. This level of curation and content control is something that has always been a huge problem with Facebook and forced user to curate their overall friends list instead of individual content entries. This means that you probably don’t want to be friends with your boss or parents on Facebook because once they are in you can’t control which posts they can and can’t see.
So while the first part of the process looks and acts like Facebook, following your friends and getting your own followers is much more like Twitter because you can follow anyone and they can follow you without the need for their approval. This clash of two different social media conventions from two different sites creates an interesting and even confusing scenario. Since the site so clearly looks like Facebook I found myself treating the content like Facebook and I was posting vacation photos and other content I would normally put on my Facebook wall. The problem was that I wasn’t paying attention to which Circles I was sharing that content with so things I would normally never put on Twitter because they was personal I was sharing with the whole world and strangers were commenting on my vacation photos. It only had to happen once before I started paying a lot more attention to how I shared content and which Circles were selected when I posted anything. I think this is something that this is going to be a common problem and it is something that Google is going to need to find a way to address so that people understand this new dynamic.
But after spending a lot of time using and looking at how other people are using Google+ I just don’t see what the killer feature that is going to make people want to spend less time on Facebook and Twitter because those sites are such entrenched social routines by now. I just look at the group of friends of I have on Google+ which I think represent a hardcore early adopter community thus the most likely to take up a new site like this but after the buzz of the invite only access and initial exploration time wore off I get one new content post per day from that group. I also checked to see if that was a result of overall social media complacency but found that while they were silent on Google+ they all remained very active on Facebook and Twitter. So if I get nothing but the sound of crickets from a that group then I think that it’s a bellwether that the average person isn’t going to care about Google+ when they see it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. Only time will tell if Google still have an ace up their sleeve and will roll out some feature that will change everything but for now I think once the invite only access to the site expires this site might very well go the way of all of Google’s other social media experiments.
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1 design step forward, 2 social media steps back for Dennys.com
I was surprised to see that Denny’s had launched an interesting Web site re-design recently with a striking new visual design. The content broken into 5 panels and uses html 5 to let you slide between them or use a visual main navigation to more easily jump around. There are some nice touches in the design like the way the menu page puts the most relevant meal at the top of page based on the time of day or the way they use an IP sniffer in the restaurant finder that pre-populates your location. Small touches like this bring some nice substance to a good looking design.
But the nice work that is done on the design is undone by the focus and strategy behind the social media experience. About 60% of the total visual home page real estate is dedicated to social media but it isn’t what you would expect. It takes the form of things like a leader board tracking their total Facebook fans, top cities of customers visiting the site and a pie charts tracking male to female visitor ratio. I could care less about all of this because this information is all self serving to the brand and doesn’t create any connection with me as a consumer.
They also have a large column called ‘Open Forum’ which is pulling content from Twitter which is filled with content but if you look closely you see the content they are pulling has nothing to do with their brand. They are pulling tweets for super generic hash tags like #bacon, #breakfast, and #eggs which all return tons of Tweets but not a single one has anything to do with their brand or food. For example I had a good laugh when I saw that my previous post and corresponding Tweet about the Bacon greeking engine made it to their site since it had the #bacon tag when posted it on Twitter.
When you look deeper into their social media structure on Facebook and Twitter itself you see the lack of focus and content problem extends there as well. Their Facebook page is populated with posts including “”Like” this post if you plan on going to Denny’s this weekend!” or “Only a couple weeks left of Baconalia! “Like” this post if you tried the menu!” . So out of the 250,000 Facebook fans they boast about on their home page I could not find one of those posts that had more than 650 ‘likes’ with most hovering closer to only 100. The numbers bear out this lack of connection with that large number of followers isn’t translating into engaged consumers.
This is a perfect example of what I wrote about in my follow up to the Inverse Facebook Experiment when I said “Any digital community only has real value if the connections created to that community are real and have real value to the people participating in it. If those connections are so thin that they are at best passive participation that go unnoticed when they are broken then no matter how many people are part of that community it is meaningless. It will never have an effect, it will never communicate anything and it will only exist to serve the community creator and not the community itself.”. Denny’s is focused on collecting meaningless followers and data with no plan on how to create a meaningful community or consumer relationship. It is a shame to see such an interesting design with such potential to serve as a platform to build unique consumer engagements let down by lack of a better engagement strategy.
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The good, bad and ugly of recent site re-designs
THE GOOD
I was doing research for some new bookshelves last night and saw that both Crate & Barrel and CB2 have undergone really nice site re-designs since my last visit. Each site takes a slightly different approach but both use really nice large photography and longer than normal pages.
Crate & Barrel starts with a visual and scrolling home page dotted with photography and promo blocks. I think the real stand out of the home page is the navigation that is a long white rectangle that spans that entire top of the page. As you rollover the navigation each new tier expands across the open rectangle in a simple but fluid experience. This is made possible by the fact that there is a deliberate design decision to not have the site design bound by the traditional screen fold and to let the content run down the length of the page. It is a design direction you have only seen emerge more recently with the introduction of devices like the iPad but it makes this type of navigation possible. I think it’s successful because the void in that empty white rectangle has power and draws you in. Once you roll over the main menu you want to explore more to see how far the menu will expand and to explore all of the possibilities. Moving from the home page you will find the main category pages have an almost editorial feel with large photos and typography that scrolls down the page in a really nice design. Each successive sub-category page breaks the photo sizes down to smaller and smaller blocks until the bottom category pages become a more standard product listing. Those product listing pages are also very well thought out with a clear investment in their photography as it gives you the option for large or full screen photography. The rest of the site is also smartly laid out with multiple up-sells through coordinating items, what other consumer have purchased with that item, user reviews, credit card applications and an array of social media outlets. I have designed a lot of e-commerce sites and the progressive visual style and smart user experience make this site a real stand out in the category.
The re-design for CB2, which is also owned by Crate and Barrel, is very nice as well but is a stripped down version of what the new Crate & Barrel site offers. In this case the home page and main category pages are simplified to just a single hero image and the main or sub navigation. The resulting simplified and bold look is a nice balance of usability and product focused design. Category and product pages lack the bells and whistles of Crate and Barrel but are still clean and easy to use.
If anyone knows who did these re-designs I would really like to know because the work is exceptional because it is able to take such a complicated user experience and makes it easy to use without losing any of the brands design style.
THE BAD AND UGLY
Last week Marc Jacobs launched a re-design of his web site and I was honestly shocked and disappointed when I saw the results that have an almost complete lack of style and digital design sophistication. From the moment the moment the home page loads through the rest of the site the experience it feels dated, heavy handed and clumsy for no reason. We start with the return of the long dead intro screen that only houses two videos that are too small to let me see the collection so you are left to click ‘enter’ to get by this roadblock. The interior of the site is populated by people that look like the result of cross breeding between Oddcast and Color Forms characters. It’s an aesthetic that doesn’t do any favors to the user experience or the presentation of his products. The clumsy user experience and design choices extend even to foundational site elements like the main navigation which uses a drop down menu that runs the entire width of the site creating tons of dead space and the longer menus obscure almost the entire site. Once you get past the menu and select a category like ‘Marc by Marc Jacobs > Ready To Wear > Mens‘ you are presented with only three results. You have to realize that if you want to see all the clothes you need to rollover one of the shirts, say the Polo shirt, and click on ‘view all’ to get the 8 possible polo shirts. Even more frustrating is that once you have found your way through this maze to hidden navigation they give you no way to get back to Men’s Ready to Wear except by going back through the main navigation. I don’t know why you would create this series of dead ends that force the consumer through such a frustrating back and forth experience and leaves them wondering if they really saw all the clothes or if there was another button hidden somewhere they missed. It’s sad to see a brand like this have site that is so ill art directed and conceived. It feels to me like one of those projects where the site looked and sounded like a good idea when it was presented as storyboards but the it never evolved beyond that state. As a result we are left with an experience that feels like you are moving from one flat experience to another without the benefit of a larger vision of the site that ties everything together and makes it an easier and better experience.
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A Dribbble of creative
I found Dribbble.com today which is an interesting spin on the creative portal where artists can show off their work. The difference here is that you only share a sneak peeks of your work as small screenshots of the designs and applications you’re working on. Membership in the site is entirely driven by our users so all members of Dribbble have been drafted (invited) by other members.
The screenshots or “shots” are organized by tags but there is no real cohesive navigation to help you sort through all the work. Once you find a piece that looks interesting you can click on it for a slight larger version that you can like, Tweet or Rebound which is a shot in reply to another shot. But for me this site has a huge miss in that there is no way to get real feedback on such a small screenshot and I couldn’t find any way to track the progress of the work. How do I know when it is done? Where can I see it? How is this site anything but a tease for small windows of partial inspiration? Maybe all of this is hidden away only for members but it felt me scratching my head. I found a few artists who were smart to see this problem and posted links to the final work in the comments but this seemed to be rare. I am working to get an invitation to try out everything on the site but check it out and see if these little glimpses do anything for you.
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MapQuest finally gets some direction
Mapquest was one of the early originators of online mapping but the brand and it’s site have been dormant for a very long time. They are trying to change all of that and close the gap on Google by making a comeback with a new site and some new branding.
New branding – It’s a logo, it’s an equation, it’s a character?
Let’s start by taking a look at their new logo / icon which is a departure from the old color palette and design with the addition to a new logo mark. When I saw the new logo for the first time I honestly thought it looked like M to the power of Q. I know other people either simply see the letters M and Q or get far more creative and see the letters forming a dog or elephant like character with the Q as the head of the animal. I can see how you could all of those interpretations but I keep debating with myself how I feel about the logo. On the one hand it is unique and I can’t think of another logo where you are able to see it so many different ways but I’m not convinced all that interpretation leads to a lasting or positive brand impression. MapQuest is trying to embrace all as these different forms as they acknowledge and explain them all in their new brand video but I think their explanations go too far into overreaching marketing speak trying to give every form meaning that relates to the site. If the three it would seem that the brand may be favoring the creature interpretation because on the new site the logo can be seen tapping its feet while content loads.
MapQuest.com – Differentiated or redecorated?
Google Maps
For me a new logo is nice but the real question is what are they doing on the new MapQuest.com that is going to differentiate the site and pull it ahead of Google Maps? I started in the obvious place by pulling up both sites and searching for the same address to do a side-by-side comparison. It was a bit of a disappointment when after all the build up I couldn’t really find any significant differences. I went down the list of features on both sites. Zoomable map – check. Street views – check. Live traffic – check. Search nearby – check. While MapQuest had a slightly cleaner design with more modern interface buttons the only real difference I could find took a page from a few popular iPhone apps and added an icon bar where you can quickly display restaurants, parks, movie theaters, etc. near your chosen location. They have also gone those basic markers to ass time sensitive content like ‘July 4th events’ and paid branded content from companies like Holiday Inn so you can find the nearest hotel.
It was only after I did some digging that I did find one interesting feature on the site. You can plan your trip online and save the results to the My Maps section and then either customize the map with your own information or pull up the route you want to take on your iPhone through their application. It’s a useful feature I would probably use when I travel because I don’t always 100% trust my car’s navigation system. The problem is that I NEVER saw one mention of this feature anywhere on the site outside of an extremely short mention of it in their new brand video. This is a huge miss for a brand trying to create some differentiation from a competitors who has a huge market share over them.
So when I look at this re-launch as whole I don’t see how they are going to gain any ground on Google. Using language like ‘started designing with a blank canvas’ sound promising but then you need to deliver something that is truly breakthrough and takes advantage of an opportunity like that and doesn’t have that canvas look more like a xerox than an a new original work of art.
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Salt 101 with Alton Brown
Because of it’s ability to seamlessly combine Mr. Wizard, The Muppets and Julia Child in one package, Good Eats with host Alton Brown has been my favorite cooking show for years. Recently Alton has taken to advertising pitchman for brand like Welches Juices and now Salt. This is part of a recent trend where many different vilified ingredients like high fructose corn syrup and salt have turned to advertising to try and salvage their image.
In this case Diamond Crystal Salt has launched a new site called Salt101.com which is a modern homage to a 1960′s educational film. You start off in the lobby of the Diamond Crystal Salt Education and Experimentation Center for the Betterment of Flavor Enhancement where Alton directs you to the two halves of the site – the kitchen and the lab. In the kitchen where you can learn how use salt properly and the lab where you learn how Diamond Salt is different from convention table salt. Both areas are a mix of large, high quality video done with a nice infusion of Good Eat’s style props and humor. Both areas of the site also feature interactive games that do a nice job of turning the passive viewing experience into a fun, interactive learning experience. So while it doesn’t make me want to run out and hike up my blood pressure it is by far the best food site I have seen in a long time.
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Skittles.com Ends Social Media Experiment
Less than a year after Skittles launched their social media centric clone of Modernista.com they have re-designed the site yet again. This new version again looks to go against traditional conventions by foregoing navigation in favor of a long scrolling web page. I found it surprising that in spite of the page length there is very little content and even less interaction available. There are some photos include a clown in an astronaut suite, links to their Twiiter accounts and a YouTube video but that is pretty much it. Wrigley’s also launched a new microsite called ShareSkittles.com where you can upload video to a randomly paired interactive montage of two people sharing Skittles.
Though the content is light it looks to create a strong interactive platform for the brand that looks to make much better use of the medium than what we saw with the previous generation of work. It is also worth noting that this work is the first to come out of Wrigley’s new roster of digital agencies after they replaced Tribal DDB, Agency.com and Digitas with Firstborn, Big Spaceship and EVB. The three agencies collaborated on the Skittles work, with Big Spaceship handling Skittles.com, Firstborn building ShareSkittles.com and EVB doing their soon to be launched Facebook campaign.
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Use Facebook to tune your hetero-dar
It’s said that to find out who someone really is you should look at their friends. Stockholm Pride used that thought as the foundation for their new site that focuses on heterosexual norms affect the everyday lives of homosexuals, bisexuals and transpersons by gauging how “hetero” you are by analyzing your Facebook friends. The number is generated by giving the site access to your Facebook account and then it takes a minute to go through all your friends and give you a hetro percentage. It is also interesting because when you number is generated you can also see all the hetro percentages of your friends.
After going through the experience and getting my percentage I was left feeling that the site could have been a lot more impactful and effective if it would have exposed the logic and stereotypes that were used to generate the percentages. The promise of the site was to deal with the heterosexual norms affect the everyday lives of gay society but telling me I am 59% heterosexual without the context how that stereotype was created makes the number feel hollow. It’s only effective if I am so prejudiced that the mere suggestion of not being 100% heterosexual would effect me. So while the use of Facebook data is new and unique, something as simple as a report card style breakdown would have given me some insight and enlightened and that would have been much more effective. I hope they grow and revise this foundation to make it more hard hitting because then I think it will really turn into something special and effective.
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