This is the first version of an OmniGraffle template for folks designing iPad apps. It’s not complete; we plan to update it as we’re working on our own designs.
The iPad will save the publishing industry as much as the iPod has saved the music industry. Meaning: There are a couple of things in publishing and user interface design that it will change. What things? What’s going to happen to the news industry? The book industry? Will it allow us to sell content? What impact does it have on user interface design?
Thinking about what’s next online is fun because everything you wish to come true will come true. While commercial products obey to the laws of the market, which in part are influenced by the resources needed to produce these products, the web is defined by the user. If the user wants something he will either get it or create it himself. To see beyond today’s limits of the web all we need to do is see what is needed.
I sat down with the video team of GaijinPot.com for a short interview about the Web Trend Map. As you will learn in the interview we are planning to publish a book (a Web Trend Map Atlas) next year.
First, think about a number between one and ten. Then take a step back and look at the words “User Experience Design” as if you had never seen them. Look at them closely until you hear them with the voice of Christopher Walken: USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN. What do you think?
We decided to sell the WordPress template of our own site. The problem we had to solve was not “why?” but “how much”? After a long back and forth we just couldn’t figure it out, so we decided to try something new: Dynamic pricing.
Why does it seem like Japan is more attuned to the appreciation of beauty? Do the Japanese value the aesthetic component and experience more than other places (for example, America)? Are things in general better designed in Japan?
Here are a few design explorations we did for Internazionale. We’d like to post them without comment as they’re curious to hear what you think.
The story is quite clear: Yahoo is going down. Google is going up, Bing is insignificant. It’s becoming quite clear who the real winner of the Yahoo!-Microsoft deal is.
Compared to their competitors, Bing doesn’t do that well on usability either. As for Yahoo!–the latest UI changes on Yahoo! (and the Microsoft deal?) significantly hurt their [...]
I got an email the other day from a young entrepreneur that asked whether we send out press releases. The answer is twisted: So far I have refrained from sending out press releases. Because press releases suck. But that might change…
After covering a high percentage of newspaper sites in Switzerland and redoing DIE ZEIT, the most prestigious newspaper in the German speaking market, iA moved to the other very challenging side of the online news spectrum: With krone.at we redesigned one of the big players the red-top press industry.
In January 2009 we were invited to take part in a paid pitch for the print redesign for the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. All in all five agencies took part in the pitch. We were the only UX oriented agency. The story of a beautiful failure.
What is the sweet spot in interactivity of a site with a very dedicated readership, how do we make the site deeply interactive but keep in check the dangers associated with such an approach?
iA has redesigned ZEIT ONLINE, the Internet edition of the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT. We have been working on the project since August 2008. With over 10 million visits and 60million page views per month, ZEIT ONLINE is one of the biggest media portals in Germany.
We’ve finally launched the interactive version of our popular poster. Webtrendmap.com turned out to not just be the base for our next year’s poster, it is a new way to find high quality content.
While everybody is chatting about the future of news, we’re shaping it…
When confronted with the necessity of offering news for free, editors are quick at pointing at the cost involved in news production. Which of course is besides the point. Information on the Internet is as common as snow in the arctic. You can’t expect Eskimos to buy snow. But, hey, wait, this is not just another rant with the usual talking points. After producing news site after news site for a wide range of customers, we actually have something to contribute…
As we all perfectly know, designers are narcissists; programmers are nerds, and whoever wears a tie must be a clueless jerk. Designers, programmers and business people love to hate each other. That’s why we keep them separated.
So where is this year’s clickable version of the Web Trend Map? And the screen savers? And the background images? And the PDFs? Answer: Forget about that. We have something way better in the making.
It has been featured all across the web from Reddit and Digg to TechCrunch, BoingBoing, and Gawker. Now the latest version of our popular Web Trend Map is up for grabs. The Web Trend Map plots the Internet’s leading names and domains onto the Tokyo Metro map. Domains and personalities are carefully selected through dialogue with map enthusiasts, and every domain is evaluated based on traffic, revenue, and character.
Blog comments have an innate communication problem: You can’t discuss and moderate the discussion at the same time.
Here it is, posted in a panic: Web Trend Map 4. We’ll give you a week for final feedback before we send it to the printer.
Last week on twitter, writing the draft for this article, I claimed that social media marketer is just another word for spammer. If that upset you, don’t read the following text.
We all waste too much time reading (and writing!) boring text. Here is one solution to the problem.
In January 2000, T-Online asked us what we’d do if we could design a browser from scratch. Our answer was “Tabs”. Eight years later Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, asked me what I think a new tab should look like. The answer after days of mailing back and forth: “Forget tabs!”
While the first map was hacked together in an afternoon, the second took a week, and the third devoured a month of concentrated work, the fourth Web Trend Map (due in February) has already taken more time in preparation than all previous versions combined.
Doodle is a simple Web app that allows people to “find a date and time for a group event.” It’s free and requires neither registration nor installation. With over 2 million users a month, it’s one of the most successful Web apps outside Silicon Valley.
This is my rundown of the excellent presentation, “The Future of Startup Companies” by Jason Calacanis, whom I had the pleasure of meeting. Below is the video (starts at 9:10).
With websites turning more and more into web applications, functionally as well as aesthetically, it’d be interesting to look at what makes a Web app work in terms of skinning. We start off by comparing two different approaches: HTML-skin vs. desktop-application-skin. In other words, Google versus Apple.
Because so many of you have asked: yes, I still write. And I’m still working on the book. It’s killing me. I also write blog posts, but I don’t publish them anymore. Writing to kill dead trees has made me terribly insecure about my writing. Lately, before I click the “Publish” button, I start hearing that tune, and it goes somewhat like this: You’re so vain~ You probably think this Internet is about you~, and then I want have a smoke rather than attract another thousand page views. Now, maybe it’s not my fault. After all, blogging is over anyways, isn’t it?
“T.S.” came here the day before yesterday; Butch yesterday morning. Muzatani Yuki, Kurita Yuki, Nagaoka Juichi, and Ishita Takahiro came here six hours ago. All of them are waiting for SoftBank’s doors to open. By noon tomorrow they will be proud owners of the Japanese iPhone.
A 14-year old video blogger called Fred somehow managed to get a fan base of almost 45 Million users. Now instead of asking how that’s possible, Seth Godin and Robert Scoble trivialize this success. Did they forget what Elvis said?
Perhaps Switzerland’s most ambitious news project to date, “Newsnetz” joins the forces of major Swiss newspapers and a series of local Swiss papers to become the country’s leading news domain in terms of reach, traffic, editorial size, and production.
We had to be unusually secretive about the following developments. But now, we can finally lift the curtain. First, the big news project is finished. Second, we have opened a second office in Zürich, Switzerland.
The IT-Revolution promised to free and enrich us. To free us from propaganda, to free us from mindless TV, to free us from advertisement torture, and to enrich us by letting machines do all the boring work so we’d have more free time. So, how did it go?
The supposed recession is the best thing that could happen to us—to us readers, to us consumers, to us new media makers.
Dear anonymous reader, if you intend to be critical: Be our guest. But if you’re our guest, act like a guest.
It was featured by The Guardian, WIRED, Le Monde, Corriere, kottke, Boingboing, Techcrunch, Mashable, Valleywag and literally thousands of blogs. We are happy to announce that the coolest gift for geeks, the A0 poster of the 2008 Web Trend Map, is now up for grabs.
In addition to Microsoft and Newscorp, there are rumors of a third bidder for Yahoo: Yahoo Japan. What?
Edward Tufte is big when it comes to information graphics in books—but a quick glimpse at his site will reveal that he is not the man to trust when it comes to interaction design.—Don’t beat an old man even if he’s throwing dirt they say, but when we saw him correcting Apple’s iPhone as if it was the white paper of one of his first year college students the iA alarm bells went off.
This morning I tried to read the tea leaves. I’ve been studying the stocks of Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google to see whether Wall Street knows more than Silicon Valley.
Steve Clayton from Microsoft is not so amused with their placement on the Webtrendmap. In the light of the hostile Yahoo! takeover Blitzkrieg we had this very revealing little exchange.
Like most Italians that lived through the war my Italian grandmother was a big fan of the United States: “They brought peace to Europe. You can’t beat that.” She told me to visit New York before 1999. “In 1999 the city is going to drown into the sea,” she said, “go there for me—before it’s too late.” And so I did in 1997, and it made her very happy. I ended up staying in New York for quite some time. Since then I have been addicted to New York and to American politics.
Is it all his fault? Yes and no. Being cheap with technology and going with a trashy server company is all our fault. Yet, when it comes to funky strategies and loads of attention, it’s all his fault. Without Seth there would be no trend map. Without the trend map there would be no attention. Without the attention there would be no server problems. Ironically, it was Seth that gave our server—the only and last trashy thing at iA—the death blow.
This redesign was in the making for a long time. It’s still a bit buggy, but we went for it now as the Web Trend Map forced us to change servers.
We present you with the 2008 Web Trend Map, in all its beautiful beta glory. This time we’ve taken almost 300 of the most influential and successful websites and pinned them down to the greater Tokyo-area train map. By popular demand, we enlarged the poster size from A3 to A0. We guarantee it will make a great addition to your home or office.
Today we will present our Web Trend Map v3.0 at the Tokyo 2.0 event. This is the last sneak peek (more here) before the full map is posted for input prior to finalization.
As you can tell, we’ve redesigned the Web Trend Map from scratch. It’s now presented as an isometric landscape.
If the following predictions are as accurate as last year’s, we should make this a paid service. This year we have seven predictions.
Here’s what we said was going to happen in 2007 one year ago, compared to what really happened…
It’s been a hell of a year. Since our post, “Interface of a Cheeseburger” one year ago no stone has been left unturned, and next year is shaping up to be even crazier. At this point we need your help to move along…
The release of music for free online is certainly no new thing, with many bands finding success through file-sharing. That fill-sharing kills the record industry is also nothing new, however Radiohead recently made it official by showing that it’s possible the make and reach millions without either.
We have hated this thing for over 12 Years now – the button that launches a pull-up menu. Only the twisted minds over at Redmond could come up with this. Yeah, I know it’s not a real “Start” button anymore, with Vista it’s become more of a clickable logo like the Macintosh one. But, after all this time, it is still a push-up menu. And that is another major branding crime. Why?
No not this one. This one is how it should be. With the new iPods now also torturing us with data entry designed for spiderfingered martians and the confirmation of our suspiscion in Khoi’s article we felt that it is time to state the obvious: Apple, tough coming from brand=interface, interface=brand paradigm, has to fix the keyboard.
The Belgian weekly magazine with the funny name “Knack” ran a four page article on us. And of course we are very proud and happy about that. Yet, as it’s written in Dutch, we couldn’t comment on it. Until, flipping through the magazine, we discovered the flattest laptop.
A wonderful example of what not to do. Let us say it again: Brand = Interface. Copying interfaces defines you as a lamo second choice company. Their excuse is a milestone of ignorance in contemporary branding. Nokia’s Executive VP & General Manager of Multimedia.
Yes, the Interface is the brand, and we all appreciate that Toyota (no, it’s not Reuters or Havoline) now uses legible font sizes—but few interfaces qualify to leave out the main orientating element… And this one certainly doesn’t. So where is the logo? And how could this happen?
A company may choose to rebrand itself because of a merger, a bankrupting scandal, or because they simply have outgrown their name. These are solid reasons; however, on the web, rebranding should be considered with the caution of a face transplant.
…are like night and day. While he is rich and important, I am fighting my little Lego battles with my little business, while he’s known as a right wing five star tycoon, the evil media emperor, people call me a dirty blogger, and last but not least he’s old and ugly. And that is where the two of us start getting similar.
We have done it before: the 200 most successful websites pinned down on the Tokyo Metro Map, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective. Now we have done it again — and better. Back by popular demand: here is iA’s next Web Trend Map.
We have been challenging a couple of common web and business assumptions. Here is our summary of what works and what doesn’t.
The other day we got a telephone call from a guy that wanted to “exponentially increase” his Internet performance. He had an existing, custom built CMS and he wanted a complete re-design and re-build. We met with him, and he explained that he would like us to “design everything, ready to program”. He would then send our “detailed plans” to India and let a cheap team program the whole site.
We first announced our plans for a web toolbox back in February, with the intention of launching our inaugural product a few weeks later. Soon after, however, we had to shift all of our energy to the wiki project. With that safely launched, we now have a little breathing space and have found the time to polish off our first product: The Ideal Website. After some hesitation, we decided to give it out for free.
After three months of hard work, changing office, shipping around the cliffs of a provider that tells us 10 hours before the launch that we won’t have a working server, restricted server access, database space oddities—we made it!
The last couple of days we have received some excellent feedback. First of all thank you to everyone who took the time to study our problem and form an opinion. To be able to receive input from the best people in the field is extremely rare and rewarding. So what we’ve got is: Lots of applause, some questions and some reservations. Let’s take a look at some of these now.
After our last posts on the future of news we have been asked again and again to illustrate:
Earlier this year we speculated that in 2007 “Big ad investments start streaming in”. Our prognosis was heavily understated.
News organizations cannot continue to ignore the global shift from institutionally controlled media to user controlled media. They have to redefine their processes and face the obvious question: Do we still need old media for news?
The San Francisco Chronicle is in financial trouble. InfoWorld stops printing. Time Magazine redesigns its print edition and fires 50 people. Old media is in trouble:
You often hear people saying that other people understand or don’t understand the media. Funny enough that the appreciative “he/she understands the media” is applied to success in old media, while “he/she does not understand the media” is applied to old media people fumbling with the Internet.
Paul Kedrosky posted an interesting article on the first decade of Internet advertising that verifies iA’s prognosis that we are heading straight into an era of highly profitable Internet advertising.
When I read this morning that USA Today “refashions itself as a social network”, I got a little shock as I was worried that they are going to eat our client’s lunch. Fear nothing, client. Among information designers the USA Today redesign is a laughing stock.
The amount of spam and flooding blogs and mailboxes is getting worse and worse and worse. This is Akismet’s graph of ham and spam since they have started. “Ham” is what they call a non-spam message.
The bad news is that we are going to leave a wonderful work environment with the inspiring Anatole, the fantastic Bodhi and the incredible Dadako, and move on to a new bigger office.
I read Mike’s latest article three times. Not because it’s hard to understand, but because it’s amazing stuff. I read it again and again and then I went through a whole series of his articles.
Yes, we still get requests from people that want us to work for free or deliver comps and sketches “just to see”. And we did some work for tire kickers in the past and once got really screwed by a couple of con-men. So actually we do have some advice for young creative companies and students that work in our field.
What started as a fun new years card made quite some waves. Google search now reveals almost 50,000 search results for our Web Trend Map 2007, which means that it generated around 50,000 blog entries.
And once again, Apple proves that nowadays the interface is the brand. It goes without saying that I’ll be getting that little miracle as soon as I can (here in Japan, we will have to wait until next year), yet my Uncle Fritz isn’t so keen on buying any of those fancy iPhone accessories beforehand. He is still desperately waiting for the other Apple promise to be fulfilled: simplicity.
As a Christmas and new year’s present to our clients and readers we have created three fun Internet overviews.
After looking closer at what made the web in 2006, it is time for some bold predictions.
Before looking into who will make headlines next year let’s see what made websites successful in 2006. In short: Marketing, Content, Usability, Design and Behavior are the main factors that make a website work.
Since the PR giant Edelman and Technorati are working together they are both trying to become an industry reference for statistics on the blogosphere. Of course this is free publicity for both and in plus they can sell the data for good money to their customers. The question is how reliable is Technorati’s data? How serious is that business? Have a look.
Imagine a guy that gets hundred of millions of page views and has no interest in monetizing. Imagine a guy that could sell his website for two billion dollars and is “just not interested”. That guy doesn’t exist? Meet Jim Buckmaster (yes, that’s his real name), CEO of Craigslist.
On the Internet democracy has established itself as the main engine of commercial success: Successful website are and have always been democratic: YouTube, Myspace, eBay, Amazon, Facebook…
You actually need to go to the toilet, but you’re a little late because you had to finish up that contract. You’re late for that second entrepreneur event, an exclusive CEO lunch, so you pack your cell phone and run out the office: Taxi! To the Canadian embassy please…
Imagine that you have been introduced to that exclusive CEO entrepreneur club by one your friends in slightly higher places. He told you that “with your rare and high value offer all you need to do is network. Those guys will jump on you.”
We all had a baaad feeling about this right from the start. Why is the blog watch-and-search engine Technorati bonding with the the No.1 PR giant Edelman? Can we trust the hub for independent bloggers after they hook up with the biggest corporate opinion maker? Why a 260 Million Dollar PR agency is actively engaging at the core of the free media is quite clear, but why Technorati continues its relationship with Edelman after their latest Wal-Mart caprioles raises questions.
Web 1.0 started as a streaming publish-to-read medium; web 2.0 has established itself as a publishing platform for everyone. Now web 3.0 is said to be a technologically advanced Internet, where the user executes and the machines do the thinking.
There are no books that you have to read. Good books are the exception to the rule. The rule is: Books are dead boring. If you ever find a really good book (quality sign: if you hold your breath, laugh or cry while reading) try to read it over and over and over again. It’s very rewarding. Here are the seven best reasons why you should try to read your favorite books seven times or more.
Seriously. This is not a joke: “New Brunswick’s education minister has banned fast-food mascot Ronald McDonald from all public school classrooms. The corporate mascot for the fast food giant McDonald’s will no longer be allowed to visit public schools to talk to students about healthy living.”
Every time I’m low on hopes and energy with my company or my book, I think about that guy that builds planes for his wife and bang! I’m back on track.
If you have a website that is not user friendly, you have an unfriendly website which basically means that you lack manners. The specialists use that word (”user friendly”) so often that they forget that “friendly” actually is an ethical term.
Most websites are crammed with small text that is a pain to read. Why? There is no reason for squeezing so much information onto the screen. It’s just a stupid collective mistake that dates back to a time when screens were really, really small.
Why designers have an attitude, why Borat is 1/3 of an Ubermensch, and why car web sites have low traffic.
Last Sunday they started airing the “Hello, I’m a Mac… and I am a PC” ads here in Japan. And big surprise: They are different. The Mac guy is not that cool and the PC guy is kind of a real “sararyman”. The ads are not as obvious as the western originals. In Japan subtlety sells:
When people ask me about my background, they’re confused. I studied philosophy. How come I do web design? In short: The old Greeks brought me here. What can Internet workers learn from the old greeks?
Professor Edward Tufte, an information design heavy weight world champion veteran from the early eighties, just hacked my website and my second most popular article into pieces…
An avalanche of comments, hundreds of applauding blog entries, honoring honorably mentions from cooler and more sublime and hotter and higher places, forum discussions, translations in Chinese and partially in Italian and even blunt plagiarism was incited by one of my recent notes. In order to not answer to each commentator individually, I decided to write a summary that answers most of the raised concerns, accusations, questions. As a result I think that managed to make things a little clearer.
In 2001, usability guru Jakob Nielsen—according to USA Today “the next best thing to a true time machine”—was convinced that by 2007 books would be gone and “fully replaced with online information.” Was he being serious?
Brands make us associate positive values and positive experiences with the products they mark. Brand values are defined by the senior management in the “Brand Matrix.” Coca-Cola recently changed their brand matrix. Are we soon going to associate other things with Coca-Cola?
All things have an interface. Shaping interfaces is shaping the character of things. The brand is what transports the character of things. When looking at McDonalds, iPod, Nintendo DS it becomes quite obvious that the interface is the brand.
95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
Corporate design manuals, CSS, information architecture and object oriented programming follow the same principle. They are modular.
Simple websites are easy to use, easy to understand, nice to look at. In practice, websites are either unusable or ugly and in general filled with too many complicated words. Why do designers have such a hard time to keep it simple?
The New York Times, Cuban, Doug Morris and Calacanis are discussing weather YouTube is nothing by a pirate bay or not, weather it should be shut down or or not weather it’s success is earned or not, they all forget one important thing…
iA was founded under the name of Sarx (System Architects), exactly 6 years ago, June, 2nd. What has happened since then? Time to look back.
The Internet business took a hard hit around 2000 after the tech bubble crashed. To call yourself an “Internet agency” or even an “Internet startup” was considered nothing less than masochistic. That is when most Internet companies started to get into “consulting” and “branding” and “marketing”, while they just wanted to get rid of the negative connotations of “Internet” and “agency”. How do you find out if an Internet consultancy is really a consultancy and not just a web design company ashamed of itself?
Since I’ve started developing websites I’ve been looking for the ideal layout. Today I got another hint on the direction to take. Jacob Nielsen calls it the “F-Pattern.”
We now have over 75 million websites we can go to, but still we only visit six of them regularly, as we just learned from a study recently made public by Directgov. Their findings make us think of a new phase of the Internet.
iA and Usability: when to start and an insight into the financial benefits of information design.
As corporate websites are often the initial and most frequented brand touch points, solid online branding has become a cornerstone of any successful business. Yet on the web design and usability often conflict. How does iA solve that problem?
As an information designer the interfaces we currently work on – no matter whether Apple or Windows – bother me. Yes, OS X looks a lot better than its predecessors, and Windows’ upcoming rip off of OS X looks better than the previous rip off. But however pretty, glossy and lickable those Interfaces may look, no matter how many twist and turn effects they build in – the problem they have is not one of special effects.
If it is your side column on your website you want it. But does your user see or even read it? You might argue that the side column is a common standard. So we do need it. Do we?
For some reason designers are hypnotized by the idea that it is the navigation that defines the basic grid of a website. This is totally wrong. Navigation only comes into play, when a user feels lost. It is more a parachute than a joystick. Designers should focus more on text body and the text grid.
Internet users can give websites a thumbs up or thumbs down in less than the blink of an eye, according to recently published study report. Nature.com and Wired recently reported on the fact that we pass judgement on a website in less than second. This sounds like good news for web designers. Is it?
Ever wondered who else visits your favorite bar? Ever wondered what other alike places there are around? Ever get tired of the same old cafe you hang out every time? Then you have to check out our latest project.
“Web 2.0″ defines a second phase of development of websites, its architecture and its functionality. When people talk about web 2.0 they often refer to different things…
I needed an accountant for my new company and so I checked out a couple of websites and made a couple of appointments. And if you think accountants are boring, you are so very wrong. Accountants can be comical, scary, amusingly threatening and sometimes also really smart.
Of course, speaking, reading and writing Japanese is key, when doing business in Japan. But, unless your Japanese is perfect, don’t even think about doing business with Japanese. Hire Japanese staff, if you want to go that way. Until you are ready to do so, stick with the gaijin market. It’s small but very welcoming, if you have something to offer.
Lately Apple, or more precisely their ad agency TBWA. was accused of plagiarism. Apple supposedly used Lugz’ idea for a commercial. Now Lugz wants money. What is an idea, and how much is it worth?