Marketing and Advertising are like breathing in and exhaling out.

Marketing is gathering information, listening to customers, and applying to business….. It’s the taking in of what the customer/client wants in a product.

It is breathing in.

Advertising is the PR, the promotion, and the case study…..  It’s selling the product back to the market.

It is exhaling out.

Ideally, I want to be a marketeer, it’s the less dirty/soulful side of the coin, but in reality I’m both, and always will be because I have passion for the work I do.  Insane as it sounds I realized this after reading a  totally inappropriate email from a French conglomerate executive congratulating America on their good voting choices.  In that email he said [ .... "we face touch times,....... but our passion"... ]

PASSION

Happy or sad, annoyed or thrilled, tough or good times, I have passion in what I do and because of that I’ll always end up advertising what I do….  and you know, that is what sets me apart.

So where is passion in your advertising capabilities and how often do you admit it?

I was talking to a brand team today about keeping a breadcrumb on a page so that their sales rep doesn’t have to click to see where else he can go.  Realistically the sales rep knows where else s/he can go because they do it 100 times a day and the brand team said “either way, I don’t care and by the way, your competitor didn’t do that for our other product”

..but I know, deep down, that a little redundant breadcrumb showing the user where they are, where they’ve been and can go is a tenet in interactive navigation.  I’m know that because I’m passionate about it, and I couldn’t help but make them feel it.  By the end of the 5 minute discussion I would be hard pressed to believe that a single person in the room doesn’t know why it matters, how much it helps, and has the words to convince every person who challenges it in the future. I’ll bet you money that by end of day tomorrow brand teams I have nothing to do with at the company are thinking about it.

so to end my stream of thought… Innovation was the buzzword this year. I heard and read it a million times.

Next year it’s going to be passion.  Innovation is a given when you’re working with experts, and what idiot hires anyone but an expert.  Clearly no one is paying for innovation, it’s just a way to tell an expert to share what they’re passionate about.

First, there is Revolution Health, who I thought was about personal health storage but now appears to be a news portal for health information. To be honest, it took me over a minute to even fine the registration link on this page and I didn’t need to register to read the news. Who knows what I’d gain by registering…

Second, Microsoft HealthVault. This time I found the registration but really couldn’t decide if I wanted to bother. One thing I did know was that I didn’t want to bother filtering through all the text and images to figure out what I was registering for. After many minutes of reading I seem to have learned that they would like to integrate with personal health devices, like insulin pumps, which really doesn’t concern me, or most of the population that I know…. They still want to store your personal information, they just don’t want to focus on it.

Finally there is Google Health (beta). It’s not pretty by any stretch of the imagination but it’s clear. In 20 seconds I knew what they were offering and how to get it. I also knew what to expect once I did register by simply looking at the screen shot they have placed on the page. It might be ugly, but it’s simple and in a overwhelming market like health care, simple is a welcome alternative.

Next post I will look at the registration process. I’m curious to see who (not holding my breath) made it the least involved.

People familiar with me will note that I LOVE to pick on Apple, probably because they are pretty, but when they produce incredible interfaces that have the consistency of a teenagers moods, I think they have to be called on it.

 ”To create a human connection in technological products with usable form and content by understanding business and user desires, needs, and motivations. “

Steve Jobs said that there is not going to be Flash support for the iPhone because Flash lite isn’t good enough.

Apple’s iPhone, with all its cutting-edge mobile Internet trickery, needs something much better than the current Flash player that Adobe makes for cellphones. The Flash Player option that fits the bill is made for devices like laptops that are larger than the iPhone; as a consequence, it performs too slowly on the iPhone, he said.

http://tinyurl.com/2nxrap

Then there is Dan Harrelson’s comment

This week they release their SDK and if Apple does so with no limitations, then it will be successful. Developers should be able to create an app, upload it to the iTunes store and pick their desired monetization scheme. If Apple puts anything in the way of the interchange between users and developers, then the SDK will fail, just as Michael Mace predicts.

http://tinyurl.com/28jt85

And he’s right, it will fail because they limit too much.

Constraints are good because they force designers to solve for the weakest link, users or hardware. Apple seems to think that constraints are the opposite, the worst thing ever, and in that they only offer the barest minimum of what exists. It’s known that Apple practices Genius Design, which means they see themselves as their own users and can design best without outside input. Instead of solving for constraints, they ignore them. They force them out, call things inferior, or unnecessary and focus on the simplest of offerings for the simplest of users.

It is no wonder that Apple is shunned by enterprise IT support everywhere.

I read this line and immediately thought of Todd Wilkens UX Intensive workshop on Design Research and his insight that “user motivations lead to, drive, and shape their behaviors.”

37signals is the Web 2.0 poster child of applications Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire, all of which are based on a strict mentality of less is more and the belief that saying no to feature requests is the only path to quality software. While I am not a user of their software I did entertain it and go so far as to read their pamphlet Getting Real about building web applications. In which they proclaim

At 37signals, all of our support emails are answered personally
by the people who actually build the product. Why? First off, it
provides better support for customers. They are getting a response
straight from the brain of someone who built the app. Also, it
keeps us in touch with the people who use our products and the
problems they are encountering. When they are frustrated, we are
frustrated. We can say, “I feel your pain and actually mean it.”

How can you feel my pain if you don’t know, or CARE about my motivations? It’s examples like this that make me realize that the market will take care of itself. Just like Starbucks coming to terms with the rediculousness of expensive coffee and funny conventions, someone who cares about user centered strategies will quickly cut into the business motivated successes like Mr. Hansson.

I can imagine a small team of AIR developers quickly creating a competing product. In fact any experienced Flash developer with a copy of Lee Brimelow’s FITC Amsterdam slides could probably give them a run for their money, or should I say ‘model’?

While I’m not the person to program it, I may have to take a stab at designing it, for everyone AND me.

[note: CloudCity is what I would call this software]

Jeff Hawkins’ On Intelligence is my source of this insight into the human brain. The goal of On Intelligence is to define a framework to build intelligent software, my goal is to use the understanding in the framework to design interfaces optimized for intelligence. To understand that you first have to understand how the brain processes sequences of stored patterns.

In his book, Mr. Hawkins explains that our cortex is made up of regions that form memories when sequences are presented in a way that the region can predict what will happen next. When the region interprets a sequence it knows, it passes that information up to the next region for further processing.

In his book Hawkins uses the example of memorizing the Gettysburg address. First phonemes are processed into words and passed to the region that knows phrases. The phrases are then processed and passed up to the next region and so on. The higher in the process the more stable the sequences.

This works in reverse too. If you want recite the address your cortex recalls the phrases, sends them down to be recalled as words, phonemes and finally to another part of the brain called the motor cortex which controls the muscles the you use to speak. What’s really cool is that you use the same sequences at the higher levels to speak, write, etc. Another, and possibly the most important, thing to know is that sequences require an element of time. For the purpose of interaction design time is created as your eye saccades ( or rapidly moves) across the screen.

Now you know how your brain works, in Part 2 I will wax on about how to apply it to design.

Opera Mobile 9.5
The upcoming Opera Mobile 9.5 browser for Windows Mobile will also support Flash, according to Opera. Opera hasn’t announced a firm release date for the new browser, though. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2258035,00.asp
http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2008/02/05/

Firefox Mobile
You can already get a Mozilla-based browser for the Nokia N800 and Firefox is a key part of Ubuntu Mobile and the new Intel Internet Project, and most recently ARM has put serious effort towards Firefox on mobile devices. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/schrep/archives/2007/10/mozilla_and_mobile.html

Skyfire
Skyfire is a free, downloadable mobile web browser that makes browsing on your phone exactly like browsing on your PC. Now, you can use the web from your mobile phone with unprecedented speed and simplicity.
http://www.skyfire.com/product

The Iris Browser
The Iris Browser™ brings an unparalleled full Web experience to mobile and embedded devices. Based on the WebKit rendering engine, the Iris Browser is small, fast and user-friendly. It is available exclusively from Torch Mobile on several platforms.
http://www.torchmobile.com/

MSN Direct Smartphone
Find the right information, right when you need it. Use MSN Direct to check for the latest news, current weather conditions, and get stock reports sent straight to your phone.
http://phone.msndirect.com/phone/download.html

Funambol
This is a big deal, don’t glance past it. Funambol is offering PUSH service for free. This is what corporations like RIM, Microsoft, and Apple/AT&T charge out the wazoo for.

Free mobile email, contacts and calendar on mass market phones.
myFUNAMBOL (http://my.funambol.com) enables you to get mobile email on your phone, backup contacts and calendar over the air, and use contacts and calendars from desktop mail clients with your iPhone and iPod…. Also note that while myFUNAMBOL can perform “push” email using multiple methods (such as SMS Push and TCP/IP Push) for 1.5 billion phones on hundreds of networks
http://www.funambol.com

Thunderhawk
ThunderHawk mobile Web browser from Bitstream provides a familiar desktop browsing experience on the mobile Internet.
http://www.bitstream.com/wireless/index.html

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=303900

Somewhere in the middle of this epic is a Windows Mobile expense tracker that uses some really amazing speech recognition. It reminds me of how you can use natural typing to add Calendar entries to Google, or Scrybe. The developer demos himself saying “I spent 20 dollars on a taxi” into his expense tracker and it actually translates it perfectly! He goes on to say that this voice recognition is available to any application on the device through APIs that they provide. So if this exists, why isn’t it more prevalent? Maybe, as they mention, you have to speak in the correct format for it to work so well. I don’t think that is much to ask though. Speaking to a computer isn’t the same as speaking to a human. I’m not going to expect a response, or even expect it to translate more than a sentence.

Thinking about this keeps leading me back to the idea that the iPhone changed the way phones are sold and made by dictating to AT&T what they (the service) had to provide to them (the manufacturer), not the other way around as it’s been in the US.

So what we have now, for the best case, is Apple telling users and services what they want, and rightfully expecting everyone to listen and buy it. They are a cult after all. However wouldn’t it be neat to see users dictating what WE want and then an open market of hardware developers creating that for us and the option to pick a service provider that supports it? The Google Android Project might be the best chance of this happening, but there is no reason Microsoft couldn’t do the same. They just need to educate smart phone owners so we know what they can really do so we can demand it from device manufacturers.

But wait, what’s to stop users like me from rolling my own .cab and putting the best software on my unlocked device of choice? That’s right. Nothing. Microsoft really just needs to accept that Android is about to change the market beyond anything they can imagine and use some muscle to get a provider to start selling supporting phones unlocked. They also need to back a portal to software, like Nokia has done with Mosh. Only when they support a community will they have one.

Thanks for clearing that up for me Channel 9.