We make a big effort in Vostok to choose our clients wisely and there’s a reason for it: when you work with people you admire you work better and quicker. Like a well-oiled machine. There are pros and cons, true, but they’re worth it. Basically because you have days like today.

Today Minube and Ducksboard are taking two important steps forward. For one, Ducksboard has launched. If you haven’t checked out the pretty awesome video yet, do. We made the video with the Riot Cinema team.

Next in line is Minube. After winning Apple’s Spain’s best app of the year award and the App Date [links in Spanish] award a few days ago, they’re organizing a pretty cool event today to celebrate the launch of their social traveler guides on iPad.

All in all, a pretty good way to begin closing 2011.

Only two companies were featured in RTVE‘s (a Spanish national TV channel) coverage of FICOD (Spain’s most acclaimed forum for digital content) last night. We’re proud to say both of them are Vostok’s clients with whom we’ve been working and desigining together for some time now.

Are we bragging? You bet. It’s not every day that two products you did strategy and design for receive this kind of offline attention. We’re thrilled. Kudos to Filmin and Minube :)

You can watch it online here.

The location, the actor and the voice-over are made by Vostok. The script, the photography, the music and the editing are made by Riot Cinema. A special thanks goes to Luis Enrique Carrión. This man can do wonders with a Canon EOS 5D and a bit of light.

I would encourage you to read along side a great post by Arquinauta’s Karina Ibarra in UX Mag that covers extensively lessons learned, she now shares, when designing for kids. Especially kids 3 and under.

We wish Arquinauta’s team the best and hope to see such a beautifully-designed app used in many more languages.

1. Demonstrate from the top that high quality and attention to detail are prioritized and appreciated above everything else, including being the first to market, having the most features, or having the most aggressive prices. If you can get those as well, that’s great, but quality will not be sacrificed to do so.
2. Instill these values in your staff. If you can’t, hire a staff for which you can. Better yet, hire a staff for which you don’t need to.
3. Aggressively pursue simplification, elegance, craftsmanship, and the highest-class user experiences in the product line. Ruthlessly cut or hold features or entire products that aren’t good enough.
4. Make it pretty.

How not to bring good design to a platform?
Skip steps 1–3 above.

Marco Arment

Mark MacKay and María Munuera, former members of the Vostok crew and now merry autonomous soloists started Method of Action a few months ago. In their own words: “peer to peer education for people who want to get things done”. Their latest education tool is pretty fun. It’s called KernType and it’s one of many soon to come tools meant to help people become more familiarized with design notions.

We write about it because it’s a simple concept beautifully designed with a twist on the game-ification of learning (not new but always fun to watch when done right).

Things we like:

• The use of color. Neutral-coloured backgrounds allow color to be used more resourcefully.
• That you need to wait a few seconds to know what your score is. The more you wait, the higher your score, so waiting is not a drag.
• Small details like using lighter/darker shades or subtle lines here or there give a lot of texture to what is basically a pretty monochromatic website.
• You learn a bit about typography (the who’s, the what’s, the when’s).
• Learning is a game (missions are accomplished or failed, you need a certain score to ‘pass’ on to the next mission).

Overall a sweet entertainment for all those closeted O.C.D’ers out there. I would also suggest reading Mark’s post You’re already a good designer alongside it.

Looking forward to what’s next in production. If you want to learn more you can follow Method of Action on twitter.

The expo was huge. We were mostly for the interactive and mobile stuff although you could find many other design areas represented by all sorts of products: cars, domotics, furniture, pottery, home appliances…

After overlooking the whole expo we headed to the mobile design stands. I have to say most of what we saw was not surprising at all: tablets and phones whose only difference was exterior styling (shape and color) but were the same on the inside: android. Perhaps the most interesting was the IIDA infobar, designed by Naoto Fukasawa and Yugo Nakamura. The Infobar has a complete different approach both on UI and exterior design. Also, its marketing campaign is very intense, focusing on the personalization factor. Check the commercial:

I confess I was a bit deceived with the whole thing. Well, I’m an iPhone user, therefore I will judge anything up to those standards. But isn’t IIDA’s Infobar competing with the iPhone after all? There is one thing that really impressed me, though: it’s lightness. It looks heavier than it is. That is a good thing but the counterpart is that It’s not as solid as one might expect.

But the best piece of the whole expo, as seen with interaction design eyes -Eri and I agreed on this- were the vending machines, which happened to be working by the way. A big crisp, colorful touchscreen to chose your favorite beverage. Motion, layers, and directionality all very well applied. Check it by yourself on this video (sorry about the quality, I think I messed up with the frame ratio):

Overall it was a very interesting visit. We are looking forward to come back next year and perhaps display some of the products we’ve designed during this last year at Vostok Studio.

PS: check this post for more info on the Good Design Award and this other post for pics and more info on the expo (in Spanish)

What do you think? We are dying to put our hands on one so we can check by ourselves.

We were hired by Movistar, a high-powered Spanish telecom with important international presence, to envision the best solution for what their online video and television service should be like. We have spent the last few months designing it and collaborating with Movistar’s UX team. And we are incredibly proud of the results.

It’s the product of months of work but, most importantly, it’s a representation of Vostok’s design principles: it’s simple, it’s elegant, it’s honest.

The premise: An online service for film, TV series and linear TV that could be accessed anytime, anywhere. For clients and non-clients. Our solution: a native grid system that responds to a set pattern of interactions that work across all platforms (PC, TV and mobile phones).

To share our thought process we have uploaded a slideshow that puts together the design premises we kicked off with. And a webpage that shows a selection of the design aspects in the final product we find most interesting.

Last, but not least we release a video made in collaboration with Riot Cinema that is the perfect accompaniment to this product. Don’t forget to check it out :)

Curious to know what you think.

Hello Javier, I’ve always been passionate about interaction design. I have some notions and I’ve read many books but I don’t have any real experience so it’s hard for me to get hired as an interaction designer. I’ve thought studying a master on interaction design would help me. What do you think?

Interaction design is quite a young discipline and the entry gates are diffuse. Most of those who have been formally practicing it learnt the basics in a semi-selftaught manner. I myself have a background in sociology and new media communications but no formal training in design. All I know I learnt from colleagues, talks, books and articles. Well, and a lot of practice.

These days there are a few decent courses, degrees and masters on interaction design. The good ones are in northern European countries. Mediterranean countries are short of them; besides they usually lean towards the artsy-fashion side of design instead of focusing on what really matters.

So, what is my advice to those who want to enter the field but have no experience? Instead of putting 5000-15.000€ on a masters program, offer yourself as an unpaid intern for 6 months at a very good studio. Work part time there, learn from the experienced practitioners, get involved in whatever you can, get yourself inside meeting rooms and be quiet, listen, observe how designers use their tools, copy their work, ask many things and be helpful in whatever you can. Ask for advice on what to read and practice at home in the afternoons. Show your work to the senior fellows and ask them for guidance. Adopt one or two mentors (one for career issues and one for technical skills). Go have some drinks with them some time and again, listen more than you talk.

It is an investment, yes. You’ll be earning no money in 5 months. Live on a budget during these 6 months and it won’t cost you more than 10.000€. After that you’ll have experience and colleague recognition. Some great studio will be on your resumé, perhaps some nice work on your portfolio and if you are good, committed and sharp you may even get a full time job at that studio. You’ve sacrificed yourself and have demonstrated committment, a good boss will always value that.

Bernardo, for those of you who don’t know him already, is Worldwide Director of Emerging Products at Google.

Website credits:
Vostok has done the design, Pep Gómez has supervised the implementation and Jorge González from Wakalaka has done the mockup and CSS.

www.bernardohernandez.com

They put their visual and interaction design skills to the service of initiatives that, using their own words, matter. Be it to locate and identify stars, endangered species, protected areas, migratory species or even visualizing aid in disaster stricken countries. To put it bluntly, they choose their projects wisely and put their money where their mouth is. It makes us proud to have someone we respect so close to home.

Yesterday they launched a video made by Riot Cinema featuring one of their most recent projects: Planet Hunters. Let them speak for themselves:

Full disclosure: My bank is BBVA. It’s been that way since I arrived in Madrid 3 years ago. Why? I guess it was the bank closest to my house. Nothing else. No bank allegiances or bank favoritisms clouding my perspective. I also know the studio behind the app design, Fjord, and although we respect them immensely, there are no secret allegiances there either. Neither public nor private.

This is an honest account of a girl infinitely grateful that after zillions of years of inept bank management there is finally a space that allows her to get things done quickly and effortlessly. So here we go:

Why making an app for day to day transactions is better than making a web?
Apps are more constraint. They give users the perception that the space they’re handling is less like a labyrinth and more like a familiar and unchanging path. There is a limited amount of things you can do, you know what they are and how to do them. This makes tasks not only effortless but more efficient.

Why is this super important when it comes to managing your bank current account? Because I’m handling MY money, and I’m doing so in MY space, not BBVA’s. An app gives me more a sense of control and personalization than any web tab titled ‘YOUR account’, ‘YOUR profile’, ‘YOUR bank’. I want to feel reassured, secure, I want to feel in control. This might be just the same for an app that handles your photographs, your movies, your web clippings, but it’s even more so when you’re handling your finances.

Plus, the simplicity of apps forces super intricate processes to be stripped down to their bare bones. It’s the perfect milieu to put in practice analytic and synthetic design principles.

Things I like from a customer’s point of view:

• It’s secure without being a f* pain in the ass. It remembers my user number but not my password.
• I can favorite stuff. I no longer have to make a gargantuan effort to consciously ignore the thousand other elements and numbers calling my attention.
• The most common action ‘make a transfer’ is right in the menu. You don’t have to go hunting for it.
• The use of GPS. You’re in the middle of nowhere, it’s dark and you’re in desperate need of an ATM but a branch of your bank is nowhere to be seen. Not anymore.

Things I like the most from a design point of view:

• The use of color to convey information.
• The use of color gradients to help you focus your attention.
• The use of graphs. Lines give you a sense of the oscillations of your spendings and earnings. Bars give you a sense of the amount spent. Position of a bar (below or above the x-axis) tells you if what you’re looking at is income or expenditure.

And that’s it. This app is not fancy-shmanzy. It is what it is. It does what it’s supposed to do. To the team behind this product in BBVA and Fjord: My hat to you sirs.

If you’re interested, you can download the app here.

If you want a copy, here’s the PDF.

The World as Design
Otl Aicher

Honesty and design. It’s a book about integrity, about what decisions should be made, when and why. My favorite book about design, it has really changed the way I see my profession.

The book is a series of essays written by Aicher relating to all sorts of things; from how the Eameses designed chairs to the morals behind choosing one color over another to paint a house façade. This book made me understand that there is a reason for everything and every design decision should have a reasoning behind it.

101 Things I Learned in Architecture School
Matthew Frederick

It’s a tiny book about the basics of architecture and therefore, about the basics of the relationship between people and space. It’s very interesting because it gives you good advice for whenever you need to think about information architecture in terms of environments, just as an urbanist would. Not what happens inside a page but how to receive a user, how to guide him, what should the paths look like. When to make “open spaces” and when to make aisles, etc.

Designing for People
Henry Dreyfuss

Dreyfuss designed many iconic objects we still use nowadays. He was also the first one to apply human factors to his designs. He stated that the characteristics of the human body should be taken into account when desiging something for human use. The idea was revolutionary and completely against the design of his time (the 50′s), which was much more worried about forms that would sell well.

On Designing for People he exposes his ideas along with some thoughts on how to run a studio, its processes and methodologies. A classic.

Universal Principles of Design
William Lidwell

A great compliation on design principles (behavioral, mostly). Each principle is carefully explained; on one side of the page with text, on the other with illustrations or diagrams. Perfect to learn the basics and see them in action; it conveys the message clearly using excellent examples.

It touches on many subjects, among them: how appearance influences people, how many options are optimal, how to order stuff… It’s a must for anybody who wants to understand how users make decisions.

The Psychology of Everyday Things
Donald Norman

A great introduction to cognitive psychology applied to design. Very good at helping understand how we relate to the objects that surround us and the things that go on in our minds. Norman introduces the concept of affordance, among many others, one of the few things I try to always keep in mind when designing.

The Industrial Design Reader
Carma Gorman

A compilation of readings (articles, essays, excerpts…) on design, architecture and the like. I’d say 80% is still applicable to interaction design no matter the year the texts were written (some are from 19th century and very valid).

It’s a good book to help remind us that, even before our times, great minds put a lot of time and effort into thinking how things should be made. It helps me keep focus and give foundations to what I do.

The Invisible Computer
Donald Norman

This book by Norman has a few extremely good chapters on how design (as user experience), technology and marketing interrelate in a project and the role each one should play. It provides you with (and helps you understand) the whole picture; how technological products are made and why most of the time we fail.

Information Architects
Richard Saul Wurman

Wurman coined the term “information architecture” and uses it in a slightly different way to what we are used to. We think of it as structures of webpages, he thought of it as what we now call “information design”. The book is a great compilation of examples by excellent designers on how to shape information in a way that conveys the message more efficiently (most of the times that means visually).

Ambient Findability
Peter Morville

Morville, one of the founding fathers of information architecture, wrote this excellent book about how information acquires new dimensions when leaving the realm of the traditional website. He talks about how GPS, RFID, sensors and many other technologies are creating new forms of data that make information more meaningful. To me, this book was a great introduction to the value of metadata, the internet of things and geoeverything.

Being Digital
Nicholas Negroponte

It’s the bible of the digital realm, a book that sheds light on the consequences of converting everything to ones and zeroes. Most of what he says on the book is stuff almost everyone knows now but back then: it was shocking. It should be a mandatory read for some policy makers even today.

Inside Steve’s Brain
Leander Kahney

Learn marketing, design, communication and product strategy from Steve Jobs. Who else could teach it better? The book is half biography half chronicle about Jobs and Apple. It goes deep into many issues in a very entertaining style. Some chapters are worth their weight in caviar. The book was last year’s Vostok present to our clients.

Designing Pleasurable Products
Patrick Jordan

Forget Donald Norman’s “Emotional Design”. If you want to know about emotional design then get this book. It’s entertaining and rigorous and it has everything you need to know about how emotions play a role in the way we choose and use products.

In Praise of Shadows
Junichiro Tanizaki

It’s japanese aesthetics in prose poetry. It speaks about organic materials, objects that age gracefully and the beauty of imperfection. It describes the secret pleasure of wabi-sabi.

Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
Leonard Koren

A great essay on wabi-sabi, that side of Japanese aesthetics that looks into the graceful decadence of materials, seductive imperfection, shadows, organic materials, wood, ceramics and beautiful rusty colors. To me, modernism is great but sometimes you just need a break, a good break, not one of those breaks that postmo hipster boys have in store.

Braun: 50 Jahre Produktinnovationen
Bernd Polster

Braun is the Apple of the 20th century. This book is a catalog of all the stuff produced by Braun during the past 50 years. You can see the influence of the Ulm School of Design, Dieter Rams, Hans Gugelot, Otl Aicher… And also learn through colorful examples how Oral-B ruined the best design driven company that’s ever existed. The book was a gift from my students some years ago and I go back to it when I need inspiration for use of color, layout, etc. Full disclosure: Dieter Rams is one of my prophets.

Digital Diagrams
Trevor Bounford

I lend this book to whoever asks me to recommend a book on information design that’s not just theory. Edward Tufte is fine but it may leave you clueless about how to start. This book will give you many examples and even Illustrator tips on how to visually display data. A great book to have around.

The Kitchen is for Cooking
Otl Aicher

Aicher had to redesign a kitchen. In the process he learnt so much about how everything works inside, an entire microuniverse, that he decided to write a book about all his findings. I consider it a great example on how to understand contexts of use, which are often wider and more complex than expected.

Typography
Otl Aicher

There are many books on typography and I confess that I’ve only read a few but, boy is this one good. It makes you feel a complete ingnorant. What’s wonderful about is that it makes you understand how people read so you can make design decisions on how to display your type. You have to read a good book on typography before you design anything intended to be read and this is probably one of the top books to aide you.

From Bauhaus to Our House
Tom Wolfe

Good modernists sometimes get so fed up with ourselves that we need a break. Wolfe’s book is a satirical essay on the modernist madness and all those “white shoe boxes” derived from the first Bauhaus buildings. Is there a modernist aesthetic and you just used it without being it a derivation of function? Perhaps you are modernist-sick. Go get the book.

Conversations with Jean Prouvé
Armelle Lavalou

A tiny but marvelous book on how an industrial designer thinks and works. In this book Prouvé is extremely honest and modest, a quality difficult to find in today’s designers. He was also a real innovator in materials, form and structure. The way the book is written is like having the master talking about himself in front of you.

Sistemas de Signos en la Comunicación Visual / Zeichensysteme Der Visuellen Kommunikation: Handbuch Fur Designer, Architekten, Planer, Organisatoren
Martin Krampen and Otl Aicher

The book is worth its price just for one chapter, the one where Aicher explains the difference between analytical and synthetic information. It’s the first thing I teach to my students every year. When you know that, you know 30% of everything a designer that works with information needs.

The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell

It’s a great collection of stories about how people behave unexpectedly in certain situations. Gladwell is very good at pop psychology facts that sometimes are good for understanding user patterns or for provoking them.

Designing Web Usability
Jakob Nielsen

An introductory classic. One of the books that started it all. Nielsen is not the guru he used to be but he deserves credit for this great compendium of applied human-computer interaction that kicked our profession in its initial days. The book was also great for convincing clients and “evangelizing”, if you ever want to use that word.

Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Steve Krugg

Krugg’s book is also an introductory classic; if Nielsen’s was about principles this one is about techniques. How to run a usability test without a white coat, how to report usability issues effectively, etc. Many examples and cartoons, easy to read (it took me less than 2 hours!). Very good for superbeginners who need to do usability tasks at their products. Also very good for those who’s job is not on the usability/design trench but need notions.

Le Corbusier Talks with Students
Le Corbusier

Designers usually pretend to know a lot about Le Corbusier but they usually know little more than a few modern-design villas with beautiful horizontal shapes without understanding the reasons behind such decisions on form. This book summarizes many of his thoughts on design and architecture. Since the book is a transcript from his talks, it feels very natural and close. You end up learning a few things about systems and contexts from a discipline that has many things in common with interaction design.

UPDATE (31 Jan, 2011)

The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand

Yes, a novel. Setting aside Rand’s political views, The Fountainhead is clearly a good story about honesty and values in creative work. The book is about an architect who fights the world to stay true to his beliefs on what a building should be. There is much about his views on architecture that matches what I consider good design. Also, all the character’s struggle to stay true to himself is a great teaching in a field where clients, peers and fashions have so much influence.

Read it when you feel you are senior enough, not too soon. And stay away from work when reading it. A summer vacation would be ideal.

Javier Cañada leads Vostok, a design and strategy studio that creates smart interactive products. You can follow him on twitter @javiercanada or at Vostok’s blog.

“A stop motion film? What do you mean, you don’t know what a stop motion film is?!  Jeez, man, I learned how to do one of those when I was 3!!  What kinda of stone-aged retarded world have you been living in?”

Pas a Pas is an interactive tool that helps children learn the concepts behind geometry, motion and interactivity. We post this video because it’s got ‘danish design’ (in the line of Bang&Olufsen 1970s Beomasters) written all over it. Funny how if you combine high-tech design with wood, the product immediately speaks scandinavian, no?

If you want to understand how the product works watch the whole video but if you just want the meat then forward to 2:25 min. Beware of these children ’cause they’re sure to take over the world!

hat tip: Ricardo Fernández

Among the many enchanting stories, there is one in particular that caught our eye: a design consultant/ adviser/ counsellor/guide personified in a wedding wardrober. Mr. Kramer- Metraux talks about certain aspects of life that are particularly close to our hearts: elegance, beauty, timeless design.

The series received a Silver award in the Best of Multimedia Design 2009 competition organized by The Society of News Design.

Take a minute to browse through the rest of the stories, they’re certainly worth your time.

The great thing about sites like Verkami is that while connecting creators and audiences, they take down the middleman, empower artists and turn into wonderful spaces where to spot truly smart and creative initiatives.

Some of the design elements we like the most

A detail from the creator’s admin page (project is still up and running):

and when the project has finally reached it’s original funding goal:

For those interested in the development, Linking Paths added the programming muscle.

Take a sec, check it out. No excuses to bum around: start a project or become a patron and make great projects come true!

We’d like to thank our clients and Riot Cinema for this video.

Making something, data in this case, more or less interactive is another way for a newspaper of making a point, taking a stance. Interactivity is suddenly seen as an editorial tool (selecting which data to show, how to show it, what amount of detail it should go into). Interaction design has suddenly immense journalistic value: it all comes down to “how can newspapers (their curatorial expertise) help you, reader/citizen, understand this”. In that sense, it’s just as valuable as say, an Op-Ed piece. The purpose, of course, is entirely different.

What do I mean by this: good interaction design (and good narrative story telling at that) turns raw data into enlightening one and so, for a newspaper to put a big effort into making that information not only available but interactive, speaks volumes of the editorial value behind it. It’s not surprising that the NYT has a team of 25 people working on a deadline to accompany important stories.

Would I be stretching it if I said that somehow, interactivity (in data visualization) resembles accountability?

Plus, if you like NYT’s infographics perhaps you’ll like The Guardian’s new data site.

We are looking for an outstanding UI-UX Designer to help us transform an industry, shaping and driving the overall user experience and visual appearance of our online products & services.

We are an amazing small group of talented people (having fun everyday) in an award winning online start-up out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a fast-paced, creative, high energy, informal atmosphere. We are backed by international investors (a $1,000M Venture Capital fund who is also behind twitter), featured in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and have offices in Boston, USA and Valencia, Spain.

See the full details at http://www.peertransfer.com/pT/ui-ux-web-designer.
Contact us at info@peerTransfer.com

Help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.

Here’s the problem: Hardware Rules at Nokia. The software is written by the software groups inside of Nokia, and it is then given to the hardware group, which gets to decide what software goes on the device, and the environment in which it runs. All schedules are driven by the hardware timelines. It was not uncommon for us to give them code that ran perfectly by their own test, only to have them do things like reduce the available memory for the software to 25% the specified allocation, and then point the finger back at software when things failed in the field.

In addition, I read their “competitive analysis” of the iPhone. It was a short powerpoint deck that proceeded to lay out all of the reasons why Nokia did not have to change what they were doing at all. They even included “developer annoyance at the App Store submission process” as a reason why the iPhone would ultimately fail (this was around the time that the 3GS was released, so they had no excuse).

Bottom Line: Nokia is a hardware company that hates software.

Sad.

It looks like instead of focusing on touch manipulation or voice interaction they are clearly into productivity derived from keyboard interaction. You know, those thenths of a second you grasp when avoiding moving your hands from the keyboard to the mouse and back to the keyboard.

It kind of reminds me of Ubiquity (remember?), which was released two years ago.

What do you think? Are you convinced by this keyboard approach?

the concept is to reuse your furniture…we see recycling as a defeat

Modularity and no-aesthetics as design is my big obsession when designing interactive products (mostly websites). It’s not about designing a good website, it’s about designing a system of elements that can be arranged in certain ways and that can fulfill the company needs over time and for different reasons. If done well, when there is a need for some module that’s not designed, its shape, look and behavior comes out of intuition, it’s evident. My goal is to leave something in the hands of my client that will be there in 4 years, probably rearranged, perhaps with more pieces but within the same system.

When I fist read the Ten Principles for Good Design (that was back in 2004) I was shocked. It was like a revelation that made reconsider all I knew about information architecture and HCI. Here are the ones that hit me harder:

4. Good Design helps a product be understood
6. Good Design is honest
7. Good Design is durable
10. Good Design is as little design as possible

In Dieter Rams’ words: less but better.

Our assumptions

We (both minube and us) put extreme attention to what information mattered the most and made it stand above the secondary data. These were our main assumptions:

• Price matters most than company.
• Price (usually) matters most than hours.
• There is the cheapest and then the rest.
• Airlines are better recognized by their logos/colors than by their names.
• Some things don’t need to be a in a filter: price ranges, airline, websites searched, etc.
• Those with flexible dates need a different way to look at it.
• It’s easier to redo the search than to refine through ajax.
• Flight and flight back are consecutive, so let’s show them consecutive.
• It’s likely that your choice will be among the first 10 results (although you may want to see more).
• White space helps people identify choices, it makes everything clearer.
• Boxes help you separate between different types of content.
• It’s better to show just the essential data.

Old and new versions side to side

Minube is always quesioning how they do things and how these things can be improved. I like to say that at Vostok we are not good at innovating but at improving. The old version was good. But good as it was it could be, and should be improved. Here you have both versions side to side:

Facts prove it

We know the new one is more beautiful and more honest. Facts prove it. Raúl (Minube’s CEO) told me about the A/B Test results and the main indicators doubled in the new one. You should check Raúl’s post in Spanish about it.

We both believe

It’s a great thing we have clients who share our believes. Working with minube is always of great pleasure. We have a relationship based on trust and shared values. They also think that beauty and honesty are two of most important principles of good design.

It left me thinking about Planetaki and its iPad version, whether it should have a sidebar or not.

For those of you who don’t know, Eskup is a kind of social network, twitter-like, microblogging plattform which merges Elpais.com content with user generated microposts. Kind of like the dull answer to “how do we, newspaper, take advantage of social media?”

El Pais seems pretty excited about this. Their excitement is directly proportional to my skepticism. They’ve done a great deal of programming for this and they’ve taken risks, which is good. But they URGENTLY need to rework the design and functionality so the product is more understandable and easy to use. Otherwise it will be another missed atempt at redefining online journalism in Spain.

These are some of the principles we’ve applied here:

• Place the alert as close as possible to the spot where the decision has to be made.
• Add visual feedback that something important is going on (the message flashes) so it is noticeable.
• Change the form (size, color and text) of the confirmation element to make sure the user notices the alert

Here’s the full scene:

If we knew that not noticing the cards was too frequent we’d consider haing another step in the process just for filling the cards. But we are unsure about that and there is no easy way for knowing this (no, usability tests don’t work for that because users pay extra attention when observed). So instead of redesigning the process making it more effective and painful we went with this “user interface hack”.

We also have a promo code for a premium account at Filmin (any movie, any time anywhere) which we’ll give to the person who makes the best list (it’s ok to repeat some movie suggested by someone else). Easy peasy japanesey. A neat gift for little effort.

These are the movies/docs we have so far:

Kitchen Stories (Bent Hamer, 2003)

The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949)

Tucker: The Man and his Dream (Francis Ford Coppola, 1988)

Helvetica (Gary Hustwit, 2007)

Powers of 10 (and other films by Ray y Charles Eames, 1977)

The RTVE series ‘Elogio de la luz‘, each episode covering an architect

The Belly of an Architect (Peter Greenaway, 1987)

Sketches of Frank Gehry (Sydney Pollack, 2005)

Play Time (Jacques Tati, 1967)

Full disclosure: We’ve done Filmin’s web redesign and we love it (the service, not the redesign. Well… both). We’ll go into details in a future post.

Here’s video proof:

(via Barbarian Blog)

You may say “c’mon, that was solved a long tome ago” but common tools only give you the time difference. From that you can guess if it’s morning, afternoon, night… But you often feel confused wheter it’s “today or tomorrow or yesterday”. That’s exactly what everytimexone.com fixes.

I’m sure it would make a very popular iPad/iPhone app.

It all changed dramatically in the 50′s when the transistor was invented. Technologically it allowed for smaller and cheaper radios. It was no longer one radio per family, neither one radio in the center of the house. It meant that content wasn’t shared anymore. Content was moved to the bedroom and to the car thus alloing new forms of entertainment: late night shows where people would call to air their confessions, and music in the cars. Youngsters could have their own radio. Rock’n'Roll was then on the streets.

The iPad could be the same catalyzer today.

The iPad as a transistor

Today I read this quote on how the managers of Hulu think it makes sense to move it to the iPad:

Typically media consumption in the house was confined to the living room or home office, tablets allow consumers to serendipitously discover and consume media in every room of the house.

Jason Kilar (hulu) at The New York Times

Don’t you see parallelisms? Traditional visual media (shows, movies, series) has always been something that was consumed socially. All we wanted was good content and both the biggest scren and the biggest couch we could afford on our living room. Laptops are ok for that but still they have a design that’s optimised for work (big keyboard+trackpad, short battery span, a complex UI and OS…).

The iPad could be the transistor for the new media. It could bring consumption of narrative media (especially audiovisual content) everywhere: to the very private sphere and to the streets, allowing for new forms of consumption.

Augmented reality, yes but also… Augmented fiction!

Imagine being on a vacation in Barcelona, stopping for a café at a terraza in a cal square at the Born while watching movie scenes that happened right there, on the streets you just walked. That’s not augmented reality but augmented fiction. Same goes for long train or plane trips (movies about hijacked planes, love stories on the train? Thousands!). Nothing impossible these days, we only need a comfortable device and an app that takes care of it.

That would also be possible for cheap productions, not just big movies. If I owned a hotel and had to make a promotional video about it I’d make a short fiction film instead where the barman, concierge and all the staff are part of a cool story wich at the same time informs the customers about all the hotel facilities. I would make it available on the internet, of course, but also for customers who are already there with their tablets. I woud even put that in context with the surroundings and the nearby attractions if it was a touristic destination, so it was informative to visitors. That’s geolocalisation mixed with amateur cinema mixed with portable media devices.

Private realities

Now think of private spaces, specifically your bedroom. Transistor radios favored programs where people would call to talk about their love problems, to complain about their jobs, to make anonymous confessions. Could a iPad-like device be good at that? Could it be better than a laptop? Perhaps, if we put a camera on it.

I see the iPad as the best videoconference tool ever (if it ever comes with a camera). And now I’m thinking of chatroulette. Not the best example but maybe a good starting point if someone ever comes up with an app that has different mood or themed chatrooms where you can have *real* conversations with *normal people* (not just perverts, or piano dudes).

I’m also thinking as videodiaries, private ones, just like the one Jake Sully had on Avatar. Wouldn’t you love to see yourself 10 years in te past talking about your life back then in a decent video quality? I’d love to do that right now if I had the right tool and could do it on the spot, not just in front of a computer that needed a surface to stand.

Yes, you can do all this that I mention with a laptop or even an iPhone but they are not optimised for that. The iPhone is not good for video and carrying a laptop while traveling and opening it in the middle of the street doesn’t sould like leisure. And… welll.. I know that the first models of the iPad won’t have camera or GPS but you get the point, right?

New audiences

The transistor made radios cheap and affordable. One family, one radio was no longer valid. Now the kid could have his transistor and go out with friends to listen to music. Radio stations saw the opportunity and started to air that new music the youth were listening. Not orchestras or big bands but Rock an Roll.

The iPad will be to our parents what the transistor radio was to the 50′s youth. They now barely use the computer and are unable to take full advantage of it. Websites are not designed for them, too crammed with lots of info and buttons. Operating systems are also a nightmare for those over 50 years old.

The iPad (or any tablet where file system and OS are invisible) will make a difference for these audiences. I’m not saying anything new here, you know… “the iPad will be the perfect computer for my mom” it has been said a thousand times already. But…

I see an oportunity for content to be tailored to these audiences. There is no media for them on the web right now. Studios make movies and shows for their audience and that’s people from 15 to 45 the most. Would that change if we had 10 milion elders ready to watch movies? All the classic movies would be available for them easily. Someone would make that move. Also new fiction could be made. Videoconference would be easy for them: no window resizing, no other programs on the background that would pop and overlap confusing them… Just contacts and a call button. Grandpa could call my son from everywhere, be that his favorite armchair or in the middle of a country walk when he sees that beautiful flower they were painting days ago and wants to show it to his grandson right away.

The transistor brought true mobility for old media and morphed it into something completely different. This new device, be it the iPad or whatever similar, allows for completely new scenarios too. The most exciting thing about it is that none of them is science fiction. It’s all completely available, it only needs some work from our side, which is what I’m about to do right now.

UPDATE: Michael Flarup has taken down the VV2 icons that were a ripoff and claims to have contacted Helveticons.ch in the hope of have the issue straightened out.

Some dude at iconpark.net is ripping off the excellent work of Maximilian Larsson on Helveticons. Check it out:

Click to see the whole comparison

This guy (who happens to be Michael Flarup @flarup) is on top of the Vostok’s Pyramid of Suckytude ^TM:

1. Appropiating the work of others (this totally sucks)
2. Just bitching (this sucks)
3. Just bullsitting (this kinda sucks)
4. Just theorizing (this doesn’t suck but doesn’t rock)
5. Doing, building (this doesn’t suck at all, it rocks)

Shame on you iconpark!!

I was baffled by this particular interface controller:

At first it looks like a radio button, but it doesn’t make sense becuase there is no other choice. You might even fear tapping it, as there is no way to uncheck a radio button unless there is a second option. The perfect Catch-22 situation.

But if you tap it, it reveals it’s actually a checkbox which modifies its label! Just imagine being part of the support staff: I know it sounds stupid, but if you want to attend an event, tap on ‘No’..

We are kinda proud of how it is designed. Its main goal is to minimize uncertainty. Some of its virtues:

• It tells (and shows) right away what did you buy and when it will be delivered.
• Direct invoice download.
• A visual reminder that your flowers will arrive closed and will blossom after.
• Info on what to do if you want to change anything (links, email adresses and even a phone number).
• Minimal visual identity elements from Floresfrescas.com, just so you can identify the email quickly and without reading anything.
• Print-friendly layout.
• It can be read with images disabled (for those malware-aware).

  Confirmation emails are a very important part of a purchase process and sometimes are ignored by interaction designers. Do you have any good examples of this? How would you improve the Floresfrescas one?

  ]]> http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/floresfrescascom-confirmation-email/feed 8 http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/i-just-turned-off-buzz http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/i-just-turned-off-buzz#comments Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:45:27 +0000 Javier Cañada http://www.vostok.es/blog/?p=1162 I just turned off Buzz.

  It took me a while to understand why I didn’t like it and then I realised it’s quite a simple reason. Google Buzz, like Twitter or Facebook are for entertainment while Gmail is mostly work.

  When I want to concentrate I usually shut down anything distracting and focus on what I may be doing whereas it’s sketching, designing, writing emails, proposals, etc. I usually have a break every 10-15 minutes. Something short, just to check my planetaki, twitter and perhaps facebook (that happens less often). Everything is on separate tabs so work and distractions don’t get messed.

  

  And then came Buzz with this bold number of “buzzs” right next to the number of messages in my inbox so every time I checked if there was eny new email I’d see that there was some fun going on at the Buzz Cantina and I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t have my Continuous Partial Attention the way it was supposed to be, in moderate intervals.

  And friends, that is why I am shutting down buzz. Not because I don’t like it (in fact I really hate facebook for what it has and Buzz lacks) but because it’s too invasive, just like my friends throwing a party at our studio at office hours.

  ]]> http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/i-just-turned-off-buzz/feed 1 http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/re-google-by-yusef-hassan http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/re-google-by-yusef-hassan#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:15:39 +0000 Javier Cañada http://www.vostok.es/blog/?p=1159 Now this is a nice proposal (Spanish) for a search engine redesign by Yusef Hassan:

  

  Where Search does a “classic search”, Re-find looks on what I already have seen (and starts digging on my social info up in the cloud) and Discover does te opposite bringing results I’ve never seen before.

  It makes sense to me, ¿Does it to you?

  ]]> http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/re-google-by-yusef-hassan/feed 3 http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/astudillo-on-ucd http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/astudillo-on-ucd#comments Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:56:23 +0000 Javier Cañada http://www.vostok.es/blog/?p=1156

  I think of UCD (User-Centered Design) a little as I think of Christianism. The fact I’m an atheist today does not stop me from recognizing that some Christian values have shaped my worldview and my belief system in very positive ways.

  César Astudillo

  ]]> http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/astudillo-on-ucd/feed 1 http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/user-centered-design-doesnt-work-for-innovation http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/user-centered-design-doesnt-work-for-innovation#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:14:52 +0000 Javier Cañada http://www.vostok.es/blog/?p=1153 Ariel Guersenzvaig, who knows me well and understands my take on user-centered design, refered me to Apple’s Secret? It Tells Us What We Should Love, an article that questions UCD as a tool for radical innovation. I’ve been moving from true believer in UCD to these positions over time and, although I think it’s easy to use Apple as an example, I consider this article by Roberto Verganti full of true statements:

  User-centered innovation is perfect to drive incremental innovation, but hardly generates breakthroughs. In fact, it does not question existing needs, but rather reinforces them, thanks to its powerful methods.

  Firms that create radical innovations make proposals. They put forward a vision. In doing that, of course, they take greater risks.

  Thanks to this process these companies are serial radical innovators. Their non-user-centered proposals are not dreams without a foundation. Sometimes they fail. But when they work, people love them even more than products that have been developed by scrutinizing their needs.

  User centered-design (observation, interviews, user testing, etc. ) is for those who want to improve something existing, not for those who want to create something new. Those need to understand human nature but don’t need to microscope every little behavior and take it as a starting point.

  ]]> http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/user-centered-design-doesnt-work-for-innovation/feed 11 http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/renfees-by-keko-ponte http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/renfees-by-keko-ponte#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:36:02 +0000 Javier Cañada http://www.vostok.es/blog/?p=1144 Our admired Keko Ponte (we want to cosmomeal with you!) suggested a redesign for renfe.es, übercrappy and ultrabuggy website for the Spanish railroad company. This is his proposal:

  

  Just call. It’ll be easier.

  ]]> http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/renfees-by-keko-ponte/feed 2 http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/time-spent-on-a-pop-up-ad http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/time-spent-on-a-pop-up-ad#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:55:50 +0000 Javier Cañada http://www.vostok.es/blog/time-spent-on-a-pop-up-ad

  I Love Charts

  ]]> http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/time-spent-on-a-pop-up-ad/feed 1 http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/want-it http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/want-it#comments Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:38:42 +0000 Javier Cañada http://www.vostok.es/blog/?p=1110 When I see these things I feel designing websites doesn’t make any sense at all anymore:

  (thanks denegro)

  ]]> http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/want-it/feed 2 http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/fail-spanish-online-newspaper-design http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/fail-spanish-online-newspaper-design#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:51:30 +0000 Javier Cañada http://www.vostok.es/blog/?p=1094 Spanish online newspapers seem to be clueless when it comes to designing their homepages. Their strategy seems to be “put everything on the homepage, no matter how”. No order, no sequence, no freakin’ idea about reading patterns. I’m not making this up, check these screenshots, they speak for themselves:

  

  The images correspond to El País, El Mundo and ABC.

  These structures bleed consensus and politics from every pixel. I’ve been in a couple of these projects and I understand the politics behind a newspaper redesign. All the “we cannot harm our current readers” and “we need to find a spot for this and that” only leads to having the same again and again.

  And the constant increase of screen resolution is not helping but increasing the damage. Remember when most newspapers went from 800×600 to 1024? Instead of using those extra pixels to make everything bigger and give some white space they came up with an extra column for junk.

  Much has been said about how to renew online journalism. If they just started by questioning these obsolete structures… Jeez… I am so looking for the day when a big exec has the guts to get rid of commitees, consensus and departmental presence to make something different, some design where you see a strategy, a point, a purpose.

  ]]> http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/fail-spanish-online-newspaper-design/feed 14 http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/incompetence-design-and-some-large-companies http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/incompetence-design-and-some-large-companies#comments Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:41:41 +0000 Javier Cañada http://www.vostok.es/blog/?p=1076

  A few months ago I wrote an article expressing my displeasure with American Airlines‘ hideous online presence. I also spent some time mocking up a redesigned version of their website. To my surprise, a user experience designer at AA.com emailed me an amazing response describing some of the design problems faced in large corporations. You should read my original article here and the response from Mr. X here.

  An hour after I posted the response, American Airlines fired Mr. X.

  Dustin Curtis at The Incompetence of American Airlines & the Fate of Mr. X

  (Thanks Bastian)

  ]]> http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/incompetence-design-and-some-large-companies/feed 0 http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/helsingfors-series-by-juan-leal http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/helsingfors-series-by-juan-leal#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:37:40 +0000 Javier Cañada http://www.vostok.es/blog/?p=1073 Juan Leal is on a travel trip in Helsinki. He is using his blog to document his observations and meetings with interesting people in the interaction design field. That is what he calls Helsingfors Series, definitely worth reading.
  ]]> http://www.vostokstudio.com/blog/helsingfors-series-by-juan-leal/feed 0