SENIOR USER EXPERIENCE DESIGNER

New Brand Media have helped some of the world's leading brands engage, interact and build relationships with their customers through creative, user-centered brand experiences.

Thanks to a rapidly growing pool of digital clients, we are looking for a User Experience Designer to join our creative team. With several years experience, your responsibilities will be to plan, structure and art direct the design and development of a broad mix of interactive projects.

You must have a passion for all things related to User-centred Design. You will have a broad understanding of digital media and branding in general, including an understanding of content layer technologies such as HTML & XML.

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Building for web 2.0 part 2: Brand Design and Designers

by ZDNet's Alan Graham

I'm a sucker for great design. I live for it and I even write about it on my Med Hed blog. Whether in the tangible world, or the world of Web 2.0, great design (UI or branding), isn't an accident. It takes a lot planning and some really talented people. Don't skimp on this!

In this piece I'm going to talk about good design and working with a design firm to help you develop the identity and brand for your new (or old) company.

 

Do Your Homework
Before you even start looking for a design firm, you need to prepare. It isn't the design firms job to look at your technology or company and tell you what your brand and identity is…and that is a mistake many companies make. It is up to you to effectively communicate who you are and what you want to reflect to the designers. Now there are a lot of people who aren't artists and can't communicate visually through words, so what might work best is to include a number of people and brainstorm a variety of words and phrases which best describe what you do. Make this short. Don't write six paragraphs about who you are.

Another fun idea for discovering who you are visually, is play a game of brand Pictionary where each person has to draw a picture of what your company represents. 

 

"Technology is always changing, but the importance of good design and branding remains the same. ID should reflect clear positioning. Image and attitude must be communicated clearly and effectively. Your ID is the unique way your brand is presented visually and reflects your personality. When carried out over a period of time, a well done ID can play a significant role in building 'share of mind' in promoting something online, etc."

-Josh Brown, Capacitor Design Network 

 

Also keep this in mind, regardless of what you think you want, always look a little bit into the future. Will the work ever need to be translated to print? Video? Make sure when you make these decisions, you hire the firm that has experience in all these areas.

Get a Good Designer/Firm.
Whether UI development or branding, you can't underestimate the strength of good design. Period! I've seen a lot of companies who think that because they are good software developers they can build a great brand…and I've seen great branding companies who can't build decent software. 

Not long ago, I was the Marketing Manager of a company and I wanted to create a brand and an image that had been missing since it's inception. After coming up with some ideas with my team, I made a list of websites and companies that reflected the sense of design I wanted. One of those rose to the top…and that was the Delicious Monster site. I didn't want a site just like that, but I knew the company that developed that site could deliver what I was looking for. That firm turned out to be Capacitor Design Network.

Because I did my homework, I was able to tell Josh Brown, of Capacitor, exactly what I wanted and what my budget was. This allowed them to give me a quote and a time frame to work with. As any relationship expert will tell you, communication is key. You have to have a clear dialogue with the people you are working with. If you don't have a clear understanding of time, responsibility, and price…you will waste a lot of time and money. 

The onus of this is on you, since you are essentially their boss.

Ask For Clear Deliverables
You want to make sure that the work you hire for is not only original, but when payment is made, you own all the legal rights. Make sure you get original vector-based Illustrator files or if the work is done in Photoshop, make sure that you have Photoshop files with all the original layers. Don't just ask for gifs, png, or jpegs unless you negotiate in advance for those copies as well.

If your brand work will be translated into print, as well as web and video, you want layered files where the layers are clearly labeled. You will likely have some in-house person convert these files for you down the road, so you not only want scalable art, but you also want to make sure when you are working with files that have 50 layers, you can figure out which layer is which.

You might also want to do a little homework and learn the difference between pixel and vector-based artwork. 

 
Set a Reasonable Time Frame
Many designers want to please their clients, so at times they will agree to unreasonable delivery times. Design takes a lot of time, especially when you are being presented with a first round of ideas. Don't get angry if you ask for the impossible, the firm agrees, and they are late.

You should ensure that you give them a reference point of when you need the work, and MAKE SURE that it can be done in that time without pressuring them into agreeing. The best way to handle this is to build in extra time for delays before you hire a firm. Decide what a reasonable time is to get the project done in and add two weeks to that.

Trust me…you will almost always go over schedule, so build that time into the project. That way if they come in early, you also look like a management rock star.

 

Managing the Process
Be a squeaky wheel, but don't be a pest. There's nothing wrong with checking in each week to see how things are progressing. It helps them stay on track and reminds them that you are waiting. Don't just send off a job and come back four weeks later and say…"is it done?"

When you get the first drafts back, meet with your team to review what you gave them and what they delivered. The first round is rarely the only round. Talk about what you like and what you don't. Write up detailed critiques and make sure you communicate that back to the firm. Don't be wishy-washy or be afraid to speak your mind. You should listen to their input and listen to their expertise, but ultimately it all comes down to you being happy…you are paying for this…make it right! But remember, if you don't communicate effectively during this process, it could fail. Designers aren't mind readers.

"Provide a single point of communication, and make sure all "stakeholders" are involved in design reviews so you don't get a nasty surprise at the end when a VP decides is isn't blue enough :-)"

-Corey Marion, Iconfactory

 

I asked Josh Brown of Capacitor Design Network to give some of his own input on working with designers…what to think about…and what can knock a project off the rails. 

Client Homework:

1. What are the basic goals of the project?
2. What would be a 'success' for this project? High traffic? Increased awareness? Membership growth? Direct Sales?
3. Are you interested in creating a community of dedicated visitors?
 
Audience:
1. Who is it that you want to attract to your web site?
2. What do you want each user to get from their visit?
3. What do you want them to do on your site? Make a purchase? Come away with a message? Something else?
 
Content:
1. Where will content come from? Will it be new, repurposed, or both?
2. If repurposed, in what format is the new content in right now? MS Word, text, rtf…?
 
Functionality:
What will your web site have to do? Sell things? Display product catalogs? Organize lots of content? Stream video? Link to other sites or commercial sites?

 

What knocks a project off the rails

1. Client blows the original schedule by not providing us with needed assets/content
2. Client sees something and decides to switch direction midstream

"The way to avoid this is we give clients a detailed set of questions before we start an assignment." 

-Josh Brown, Capacitor Design Network 

———– 

In Closing
Whether something is tangible or virtual, great design is what makes people fall in love with something. Great design anticipates what you want before you even know you want it. It communicates and speaks to us from a deep need that we may not yet know. Great design also comes from listening to people outside of your box. As Kevin Hale from WuFoo (one of my favorite examples of good Web 2.0 design) had said in a previous interview on this blog:

"In the early days we did interface testing on our girlfriends, who were very tech-incompetent at the time. Just sat and watched (no help allowed). If they couldn't build a survey with Wufoo, then it wasn't easy enough for us. Their feedback was so great that it lead to releasing an interface demo two months into the project, so we could gather as much feedback as possible while we built Wufoo. The thing is I'm an okay designer when I'm left to my own devices, but with data (passionate data from people who were just as frustrated as I was) I was able to design something much, much better."

 

Get outside of your box and bring in people who might be able to give you inspiration from perspectives you may never have thought. A great design can help distinguish your product from your competitors. Don't underestimate that.

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Brandwatch

Brandwatch tracks your brand quickly and clearly, and then goes into detail - it tells you who is saying what about your brand and why. Where they are saying it and when.

It lets you see the context in which your brand is being mentioned and finds the issues raised in connection with it. Which topics are gaining strength and relevance? It can highlight who and what is influential, pick up the first signs of new markets, and draw out target audiences, profiles, and demographics.

Use brandwatch to gain an instant view of the public perception of your brand and compare it with other brands. Monitor how successful a campaign is. Find out immediately what the web thinks about your new product launch or whether your endorsement is a hit or miss.

Brandwatch can generate data for any brand across the entire internet, fast. We automate the process that a team working 24/7 would have had to do manually. It saves money and time and eliminates human bias. Our technology is transparent. And because we own it we can develop it in new directions. There are no illusions. It has been developed over time, by top engineers into a robust, simple to use system.

To see how Brandwatch works, take a look at our quick online demo. For further information on Brandwatch, please contact us at info at magpie dot net.

More about the technology behind Brandwatch

By Giles Palmer
Managing Director, Magpie

We group brands together into industries to help people compare the performance of two or more similar brands. Let's say, for example, we want to look at the online performance of brands in the health and beauty industry. What we need to start with is a (long) list of websites, blogs and forums that are important for the health and beauty sector as well as a list of health and beauty brands, companies and products.

Armed with this, the Magpie web crawler visits these sites daily (sometimes several times a day) and picks up the new pages. On average we are finding that we are picking up almost 2 new pages each day for each website we crawl

When we have the data, we analyse it and make sense of it.

The first thing we do is match each of the new pages we have found with our list of brands and products. Some of these can be done in a straightforward way with key word matching - for example a unique brand name like 'Pantene' will return high quality results, whereas a generic name like 'Boots' (the chemist) won't. One of the downsides to having a generic word as your brand name is that it is hard to isolate the discussions around your brand from other uses of the word. So we have to use some different matching techniques for difficult brand names.

Once we have the matches, or mentions, we do some further analysis on the sentiment being expressed, as well as try to understand the topic or theme that is being discussed.

Enter the world of statistics and automatic classifiers! The way they work is basically as clever comparison systems. We train the system using lots of examples of stories from the health and beauty sector, previously classified by humans as being positive, negative or neutral. The system uses these to learn about positive, negative and neutral stories in the industry so that when we pass it new mentions it can compare them to what it has learned from its training and make a good guess at their sentiment.

To get anything meaningful from our sentiment analyser, we need to pass into it only the bit of a text that refers to a particular brand....and that's not easy. We have developed a set of rules around page structure, sentence structure, occurrences of the particular brand and separation from other brands within the page to try to pull out the right bit of the mention automatically. We'll never be perfect at this as even two people are likely to disagree about which words in a piece are talking about one brand in particular, but we are getting pretty good at it. Rather, our system is getting pretty good at it.

We now have the nuggety bit of text which is hopefully the bit talking only about our brand, but it also contains lots of statistically noisy words like the, of, if, and, then and so on. So the system cleans these out and we are left with text which is probably meaningless to you and I, but our machines love it!

Remember we train our sentiment classifier. Well, the language that is used to talk about health and beauty brands and products is, as it turns out, very different to that used with Mortgages and Insurance. What this means is that to get good accuracy on sentiment for both of these industries, we need to train two different classifiers. Furthermore blogs and news sites use different languages too. So we end up with multiple classifiers.

As well as sentiment, we measure the credibility of a site. A very negative mention from a site that nobody reads is not as important as one from the New York Times for example, so we want to take this into account. The system uses properties of the individual pages and the websites they come from, to judge how credible it is within the industry.

Once we have matched a brand to an online mention and assessed its credibility and sentiment we create a score for that mention. The scores range from +10 for a positive mention on a very high credibility site to -10 for a negative mention from a high credibility site. A neutral mention from a low or very low credibility site would score a 0. We do this every day and at the end of each day, the system updates all the scores for each brand.

The final piece in the jigsaw is to build a website that allows people to access this data in as rich but simple a fashion as possible.

We hope you like it.

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In-Depth Look at Branding and Social Media

Late last year, Dan Newman of the Wanganui (New Zealand) School of Design submitted his Master's thesis on the subject of "Malleable Branding: Realising the Potential of Online Social Networks and User Generated Content" (PDF, 92 pages). It's not a lightweight read (which is appropriate given its original context), but it does provide a lot of solid background into the effect social media has had on branding in recent years.

Here's the abstract:

The emergence of new technologies alongside the change in consumer behaviour (specifically their use of online social networks and newfound creative ability) has led to advances in how consumers interact with brands. These advances will require a new strategy on how existing and future brands will be managed, advertised and designed. Future identity designers, marketers, advertisers, brand strategists and business leaders will need to understand these changes and why countless brands have a lack of malleability.

Brands that lack such malleability will struggle to create or maintain brand awareness in a new consumer market driven by revolutionary technology. Without realising the potential of online social networks and user generated content, existing brands will fail to move into the 'conceptual age', where malleability will be vital in their success.

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Building for web 2.0 part 2: Brand Design and Designers | Web 2.0 Explorer | ZDNet.com

Building for web 2.0 part 2: Brand Design and Designers by ZDNet's Alan Graham -- [Note: This is part 2 of a series I started here] I'm a sucker for great design. I live for it and I even write about it on my Med Hed blog. Whether in the tangible world, or the world of Web 2.0, great design (UI or branding), isn't an accident. It takes a lot planning [...]

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How 7 Basic Human Needs are Driving the New Social Web2.0

I recently read a insightful piece from Ben Hunt about the future of the web2.0 social experience.  It was particularly relevant as I am heading to the Web2.0 Expo here in San Francisco today and will have a chance to see many new technologies later this evening at the "Booth Crawl" event at the opening of the Expo. 

Thinking about the future of the social web can be overwhelming - particularly if you look at the quantity of new sites and technologies that are being launched each day.  While we may not suffer from the same overfunded hype of the early 2000s, hype is certainly alive and well and I will likely see quite a bit of it tonight at the Expo.

Yet for most, Web2.0 is about the next evolution of the Internet and how it is becoming more useful for everyone.  Yes, there are lots of cool technologies, and the search for the "killer app" that Hunt brilliantly deconstructs in his paper is important.  The underlying theme, however, is how new services are helping each of us to solve some of our most basic needs from the Internet.  In my opinion, these include:

1. Search - There is no doubt search engines are the dominant tool for finding information online.  More recently, the search for meaning is about more than using powerful algorithms to offer hundreds of thousands of search results.  The social search revolution is about how people are helping other people find information.  The most innovative Web2.0 tools for search are the ones that combine sophisticated algorithms with the ability and dedication of individuals to help highlight, describe and categorize information.
2. Discover - If search is about actively seeking information on a specific topic, discovery is about uncovering information that is likely to be relevant for you presented to you based on your browsing history, habits, related content, or relationships and declared interests.  The popularity of StumbleUpon as well as the millions of people using social bookmarking tools such as Digg and del.icio.us point to the rising use of sites, tags and recommendations to discover new websites or web content.
3. Connect - Managing relationships through contact managers such as LinkedIn is not a new activity online, but there are new tools that are helping each of us to get smarter about how these contacts are managed and make them more useful.  A core concept that Hunt talks about which is now starting to appear is the idea that not all relationships should be treated equal and there needs to be a way to rate the strength of a particular relationship.  When contacts are measured in terms of degrees, connecting to others through your network becomes a much more valid exercise, and one more likely to mimic offline behaviours that take the strength of particular relationships into account. 
4. Protect - As technology enables more innovation, it can also have a dark side with hackers, phishers, and spammers.  Web2.0 has not just been about finding better tools for communication or information, it is also about new thinking for protecting each of us from the dangerous, or just plain annoying.  As more of our digital lives, transactions and communications move online - this area will continue to be vitally important for keeping the Internet a trusted and credible channel to conduct these activities.
5. Publish - Central to the rise of social media is the ability for individuals to easily publish just about any type of content from blogs to podcasts to online video.  This includes publishing in the sense of contributing to dialogue online through reviews or comments.  New services are likely to help make it easier to publish as well as better tools to customize your efforts.  Also, there will continue to be more new sites and social networks on which to publish your content on just about any topic.    
6. Organize - Whether it relates to organizing your personal life through "lifehacker" style tools such as personal calendars or to-do lists, or organizing your bookmarks and saved content, Web2.0 innovation continues to produce many tools for doing so.  On sites that offer access to content published by others or through sites that could be considered "aggregators" (for RSS feeds or other content), organization is a core principle that is seen as another key human benefit.
7. Share - This is a broad concept that includes each of our desire to share our thoughts and expertise, as well as the cause related side of this which includes sharing wealth or supporting causes one believes in.  New tools for giving, and new sites for sharing expertise fit into this category.

There may likely be other core needs that could be included on this list, but thinking about Web2.0 in terms of these categories will help me to evaluate new sites from the show as well as new thinking and opportunities for marketing.  Check back tomorrow for a recap of some highlights from the Web2.0 Expo as well as a list of examples of sites and services that fit each of these categories ...

About the Author

Rohit Bhargava is the Vice President for Interactive Marketing with Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide.

http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com

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Corporate Blogging & Podcasting: Financial Times Article on Web 2.0

"Brands are completely exposed in social media,"

Who says that elephantine old media can't learn a few new dance steps every now and again? See what we've done for you this week - a bright new look, with this column being pummelled, stretched and contorted into an entirely different shape. Hard-core Web 2.0 types may laugh and accuse us of merely "rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic". But I say: you ain't seen nothin' yet. (And, by the way, I'm sure the guy who rearranged the deck-chairs on the Titanic did a perfectly reasonable job. Show some respect.)

Jupiter Research found that almost half were planning to advertise on so-called "social media" networking sites

Business leaders worry about the web. It wasn't around when they were growing up, or when they were at business school. Most people in senior management positions built their careers in the pre-digital era. The internet economy is a great big "known unknown", perhaps the scariest of Donald Rumsfeld's famous epistemological categories.

But businesses have woken up to the web's potential. A survey of US brand marketers carried out last month by online analysts Jupiter Research found that almost half were planning to advertise on so-called "social media" networking sites - MySpace, Bebo, Facebook - this year. Managers are rushing to catch up with the phenomenal growth of blogs and social media, which has left a lot of companies feeling a bit vulnerable.

"Brands are completely exposed in social media," says Simon McDermott, co-founder and chief executive of Attentio, a Brussels-based internet monitoring company that tracks the blogosphere and social networking sites. "It's inevitable that people are going to talk about you, for good or ill, and they may well have a propensity to write some pretty negative stuff."

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The purpose of design is to facilitate communication between user and content

Designing for the web means designing sympathetically with the way people actually use the web, not how we think they should.

This section looks at the discipline of web design, how to approach design as a job, and introduces some mental techniques for increasing enjoyment and success.

People approach web sites in very different ways to how we design them

• They skim pages for clues, instead of reading
• They make snap decisions, instead of evaluating and judging carefully
• They might not even be looking at the complete picture
• They are driven by their goals, not ours

Designers need special skills to succeed in this environment

• We must gain the best possible insight into our users' goals, so that we can help achieve them.
• We must get clear on our design's purpose, and have the mental discipline to stick to it
• We must pursue simplicity ruthlessly - if an element adds complexity but not value, it must be changed

To start learning ways of designing for real users, we can gain insights into what the brain is good at. This provides a useful foundation for developing and evaluating design techniques.

Fortunately, the mass experience of digital design is at our disposal, and provides us with patterns and conventions that are proven to work.

Contents

Web Design Process Overview

Read this first - my complete no-nonsense step-by-step guide to designing web sites

Attention Map

Pencil & paper tool for planning page layout

Design like no-one's watching

Designers need to learn to look at their work through fresh eyes

The Design Spectrum

A visual tool for picturing the relative aesthetic and functional elements of a design solution

Don't Decorate, Communicate!

Concentrate on the content of the message you're communicating, which is far more important than how it looks

Golden Rule of web design

My golden rule - a simple touchstone to help all design decisions

Pursuit of the Original

The value of laziness in design, and why the pursuit of the original can be detrimental to design success

Simplicity in web design

Explains why the principle of Simplicity is so helpful in web design

Think Then Do

A discipline for visual designers that minimises fiddling

Work smart, not clever

Why designers should practice working smart instead of being clever.

10 Productivity tips

My top 10 tips for working more productively

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