October 23, 2007
Marketing
How many million times have we been told that new media is changing the way people relate to and consume a product? But if we want living proof, Nike provides a substantial case study.
A trailblazer in new marketing forms, Nike has been reducing its traditional advertising in favor of alternative ways of reaching consumers online and in person. Its budget for TV commercials, for example, has dropped from 70 percent in 2006 to 45 percent for the first half of this year, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus.
Trevor Edwards, Nike’s corporate vice president for global brand and category management, puts it bluntly: “We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive; we’re in the business of connecting with consumers.”
In fact, many companies who depend on consumer sales and feedback are ditching traditional advertising in favor of alternatives that allow direct interactions with consumers–as with social networking/blogging and video sharing (like YouTube). In Nike’s case, this new kind of interaction includes the Nike+ sensor ($29), which works with the Nike+ line of shoes and your iPod to deliver a customized–and highly branded–workout.
Full story at the New York Times
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- October 23, 2007 at 8:24 am
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- agonzalez
One of the pillars of ergonomics, interaction design and human-computer interaction (HCI), Fitts’ Law establishes the relationship between the time needed to acquire a target and that target’s distance and size. It’s used to model the act of pointing (with your finger/hand or with your mouse). Fitts’ Law can indicate the difference between an application that’s a pleasure to use and one that’s a horrible nightmare.
Simple as it is, Fitts’ Law embodies a lot of complexity. If you take interaction design seriously, take the challenging quiz at asktog.com–it applies Fitts’ Law to scenarios we’re all familiar with. The answers may surprise you. (Try doing it without cheating!)
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- October 19, 2007 at 8:24 am
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- agonzalez
October 17, 2007
Technology
One of Schematic’s core values has always been to experiment and innovate at the forefront of cutting-edge technology. Having established a great relationship with Microsoft thanks to our recent work with Windows Media Center and Silverlight, we have been selected to acquire one of the few Surface tables in existence, which is presently at our Los Angeles office. This will certainly prove a tremendous help in deploying and testing our present and forthcoming Surface-oriented applications.
Just in case you haven’t heard about it, Microsoft Surface aims to change the way we interact with digital content. By means of a touch-sensitive, smart tabletop display, we can manipulate digital files (photos, documents, etc.) much as we do with their real-life counterparts, using our hands and human gestures without the need for any peripherals. Currently, Surface technology is destined for commercial outlets, to provide information and entertainment to customers in a fun, efficient and memorable way. Commercial use of Surface applications is scheduled to begin in late 2007 at select venues.
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- October 17, 2007 at 9:36 am
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- agonzalez
The first brainstorming sessions on a project can yield lots of ideas to pick and choose from. But sooner or later, you’ll have to organize that big bulk of ideas into smaller, more manageable chunks. How do you move from the “idea pool” to the planning stage in record time? Enter the affinity diagram (also known as KJ method, after its author, Kawakita Jiro).
The affinity diagram was developed to discover meaningful groups of ideas within a raw list. In doing so, it is important to use the right side of the brain and let the groupings emerge naturally, rather than according to preordained categories. Thus, affinity diagrams allow us to identify and organize relationships between similar ideas in a fast and intuitive way, without sweating over individual details. The main thing is to quickly establish groups of broadly related concepts, which can be fine-tuned or broken down into more specific groups if necessary.
According to Kaoru Ishikawa, author of the book “Guide to Quality Control,” the affinity diagram should be used when facts or thoughts are uncertain and need to be organized, when pre-existing ideas or paradigms need to be overcome, when ideas need to be clarified, and when unity within a team needs to be created. Sounds a lot like our day-by-day challenge, doesn’t it?
Affinity Diagramming at UsabilityNet
Affinity Diagrams at Skymark.com
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- October 12, 2007 at 2:26 pm
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- agonzalez
October 11, 2007
Technology
Developers who adhere to web standards know that it’s important to solve webpage layout and design using CSS, and to leave HTML tables to do what they were originally intended to do: display tabular data. But how to find something quickly in a large HTML table filled with data?
Tablecloth, a Javascript/CSS hybrid, allows user-driven interactive highlighting to be applied to any webpage featuring tables–using just two lines of code. This is a useful asset for, say, spreadsheet-type online applications, online game scoreboards and just about any other information display type that relies on tabular data.
via Digg
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- October 11, 2007 at 8:45 am
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- agonzalez
