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.

Some major changes, not always apparent in the video:

• cleaner navigation
• ‘My Times’ a personalized NYTimes.com
• articles are more scanneable and scrolleable
• more videos, and better players
• the sections of most popular, most emailed, most blogged
• Times topics (articles organized by categories and not just sections)
• Articles can be printed and shared online

Years of trial and error redesigns, facelifts, surgeries and tests implemented by the NYTimes.com design team to keep in check. Admirable? Absolutely. Enough? No. What happened with less but better?

• redefining information design to new devices and experiences
• planned obsolescence

It all comes down to market economics and rethinking the value of both paper and digital. Rethinking the concept of “fragile et précieux”. Take paper for example. Before, it was abundant and less valuable. Now, or in the near future, paper will be scarce (not because there won’t be any, but because we won’t use it) and more precious.

For Mineur the question lies in:

…comment les deux peuvent communiquer ensemble de manière intelligente et plutôt complémentaire. Il n’y a pas d’affrontement pour moi.

In other words, how can print and digital best complement each other?  How can they interact to make the most out of their features? How can they be combined to bring down opportunity costs? Think of a newspaper for example, or better still, a monthly magazine that can benefit from both worlds without having to choose one over the other.

Combine a great journalistic piece (on print) about unrest in Egypt, for example, accompanied by your iPhone showing the latest images taken by people in-situ (video, audio, pictures) and bingo, you have both immediacy and insightfulness. Your audiovisual content is updateable but your text isn’t.

The value of your content lies not in getting there first, but getting there better.

Add to that, writing this piece on a type of paper that will get all ink-smudged after 20 minutes (waiting for just the right moment to start the clock on its life) and voilà… Who said print was dead?

No, seriously, there’s a world to explore right there.

We truly encourage you to watch the video, the meat starts at 17:00. Thank you Marcelo Soria for calling our attention to it.

Ryan Tate puts together several reasons why the latest Murdoch’s project for the iPad will fail:

• It will be a *daily edition* published every morning, not a stream of constant information.
• It will cover all topics, without focus, unspecialized.
• “The business model is extremist” meaning that it relies solely on subscription to feed the 100+ journalists on board.
• It’s just for the iPad, although versions for other plattforms have been announced
• Etc.

It surely doesn’t look like the much needed new paradigm but we should wait and see what really comes out of this before having an opinion.

This is what’s wrong with flickr and why we made BlackVostok (among other reasons).

FIRST, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH PIGMENTS

Man has always wanted to tell stories through images. It all started with cavemen and their paintings. Their language was probably not very rich in vocabulary but they knew they wanted to show others what their memories held and what populated their imagination. So they painted it. But access to pigments and the ability to paint on stone was limited to only a few.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH STONE

Sculpture, along with wall paintings (or glass) paintings were the way advanced civilizations (from mesopotamic to christian) represented visually the characters in their stories. Stories were told and not read for many centuries and sculptures would help people visualize their heroes, saints or divinities. Think of sculptures in palaces and churches where generals and saints were displayed in their epic endeavors. Also painted glass windows and mosaics of those who were powerful and where their power lied. Only the “official” artists had access to such expensive means and their stories were limited to what was the official version of the official story.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH PAPER

Paper was a very expensive technology until just a few centuries ago. It was difficult to manufacture and only a few lettered people had access to it: mostly scholars and monks, some of whom were specialized in miniature paintings illustrating the concepts explained in the books.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH INK

Newspapers slowly started to incorporate pictures in their stories but they tended to be small: sending them was techically complex and the ink was expensive. Stories had be told textually or with a few small photographs. Or at least until the 60s when photography became a commodity for magazines.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH CAMERAS

Photography allowed memories to last forever but, again, it was limited and expensive at the beginning. It took 100 years for that industry to make photography available to everyone. In the 70s people could only afford to have one camera per household. Then they were able to have relatively cheap photoalbums where the stories that mattered to them the most were stored: new born babies, marriages, adventures, trips… they were all narrations composed of visual memories. But still, you couldn’t share them easily.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH BANDWIDTH

Photos and images have always been part of the Internet, especially of the Word Wide Web, but the first modems were very very slow. You had to scan a picture (no digital cameras yet), you had to compress it, reduce its size and expect visitors to wait several minutes for the image to load. The standard was around 200 pixels wide for a rectangular picture. So, we had a medium that allowed us to share our messages with the world but the use of images was still scarce. Text was the only way to go.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH RESOLUTION

Digital images became widely available, everyone could create and share them. Bandwidth grew fast: size was no longer an issue. But… Monitors still didn’t have enough resolution to show pictures in all their glory. Remember when 800×600 was the reference when it came to website matters? Nothing bigger than that was allowed. It took us 10 years to start moving to 1024 pixels wide and even then there was some fear of using big format images. Powerpoint was there and allowed some to tell stories visually (most just used it for bulletpointed BS) but images were still just there to dress a good text.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE THE SOFTWARE

Sure there is flickr now, and many others, but until not so long ago there was not a single piece of cheap software that allowed people to tell visual stories in a sequence of images. Just as we could do in a photoalbum, or a Powerpoint in fullscreen mode, attracting the viewer’s full attention. Images that ARE the message and not just the accompaniment. The Big Picture, at Boston.com got it but they didn’t make it sequential. The iPad did it with its image galleries but they weren’t shareable on the internet. We were almost there…

AND NOW…

We now have the bandwidth, the cameras, the screen size and the Internet. We all need to tell our stories, to show our projects, to be able to share our memories with pictures and videos. And we cannot pay a high price for it.

So we, at Vostok, have made it possible. It had to be done.

We created a tool that allows people to tell stories visually and to share them with the rest of the world. We also made it affordable. It’s a WordPress theme, it’s called BlackVostok – www.blackvostok.com and it’s just $16.

Now tell your story, take over the full browser window with your images and share them with the world.

BlackVostok
Here’s the website: www.blackvostok.com
Here’s the theme in action: www.blackvostok.com/test

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.

Want to help?

The best thing about it is that you don’t need to chose beforehand, you just install one file and BOOM! Both themes appear on your WordPress so you can fit them both and chose one right away.

Remember, Vostok Theme is for those who don’t want attention to be distracted from content. Colors and typography have been carefully chosen to achieve maximum legibility with minimum eye fatigue. Also, code has been written with extreme care for web standards and accessibility.

NOTE TO TUMBLR USERS: Ricardo Fernández just made an adaptation and now you have the Vostok Theme for Tumblr available in black (white soon to come).

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?

I’d sell my soul to Lucifer to be on that team.

In some of my recent talks I’ve mentioned the story behind USA Today. I think it’s one of the best examples to learn about information consumption and adaptation.

USA Today launched almost 30 years ago built on a premise: that most Americans didn’t read, that they mostly got news from television (color television) and that they spent a lot of time in front of the tube.

Al Neuharth, USA Today’s founder, understood the new context and decided to design a newspaper from scratch, one based on these premises where:

• there was color all over (for pictures, for sections) just like on TV
• photos drove the stories and not the opposite
• articles were short
• news didn’t need a follow-up, there was no incremental coverage

This was the result, the fresh design of the USA Today in 1982:

And here is what the New York Times looked like in the early 80′s (see how big the change was?):

In short, USA Today wasn’t targeted to newspaper readers but to TV watchers. The critics called it the McPaper, the junk news, the fast food of information. But despite that they ended up being the most read paper in the USA. They understood their new readers and the new context. They won.

And that is why most old newspapers redesign for the internet or for the ipad and they fail miserably. Why? They don’t pay attention to new users and their new contexts of use.

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.

Marco, who also happens to be the lead developer at Tumblr, dealt with several issues when designing the iPad version of his product:

• Placement of the controls: follow Apple’s lead or do what he finds it’s better (standarisation over effectivity).
• Placement of the action buttons (not where they fit but at the specific spot where you are when you may need them).
• Text margins and line readability.
• Single column vs. multicolumn layouts.
• Color and brightness for legibility (pure black on pure white on a screen is an aberration, don’t get fooled).
• Pagination tap zones (and differences between iPhone and iPad).
• Tipographies.

I wonder why Mr. Arment decided to let the user chose between 6 different fonts instead of chosing himself the one or two he thinks it works better on that context. What do you guys think about this one?

UPDATE:

Marco just answered my enquiry through twitter:

Marco: Because the people who care about fonts REALLY care about them, and appreciate the choice.

I think Hoefler Text works best, so I made it the default. I take the default settings VERY seriously.

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!!

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.

(thanks denegro)

It makes me think about the convergence between video and data in new storytelling formats. These narratives jump from analytical (narrative details ordered in a lineal fashion) to synthetic (big picture view, more visual) communication styles back and forth, which kind of maps how people learn.

It’s interesting to see that this new format, which is kinda popular for explaining new internet products and services, jumps to the mas media and merges with old style things such as the anchor’s voice.

Do you think it’s just another import made by the old media from the internet (just as when they use Google Earth) or we are in front of somehting bigger? What’s your take?

(seen at the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs)

Now pray for this to be sold in stores before Xmass.

We, Vostok, were hired by Google to help them design the interface that allows you to browse betweeen cities, celebrities and their favorite places:

We, Vostok, helped minube designing the creation and personalisation process which you can see on this post at the Minube blog (Spanish).

Ah, here’s an example of what a guide looks like (pdf). Pretty awesome. Congrats to the minube guys!

Awesome!

OMG, this is so exciting!

We proudly introduce you thecosmonaut.org and its Spanish counterpart elcosmonauta.es: the website for the movie The Cosmonaut which we mentioned some time ago.

Check it out! It has a cool store where you can buy merchandise and become a producer of the movie. The Cosmonaut is special for several reasons:

• The plot is awesome
• The movie is crowdfunded (anybody can be a producer)
• Everything will be released under Creative Commons license, free of cost
• The list of people who support the idea is amazing (in quantity and quality)

We, Vostok, designed and developed the website (in three weeks!!) falling in love with the project and becoming producers too, so expect a little friendly spam every now and then ;)

He is going to make it with two arduino boards and I presume it all will be opensource. That’s why he’s asking for donations (besides explaining the project) to raise the €145 he needs to do so. Not a big deal.

I wonder how many different things you can do if you use the capabilities of an arduino board to do such measurements: all that information in digital format asking to be designed and displayed in many ways.

Good luck, Alex!

The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia reports that all of its user data was irretrievably lost in the Jan. 30 database crash that knocked the service offline. That means that users who were unable to recover their bookmarks through publicly available tools (including other social media sites and the Google cache) have lost all their data.

This makes me think about bad luck, I mean REAL bad luck. There is another paragraph that left me thinking:

It turns out that Ma.gnolia was pretty much a one-man operation, running on two Mac OS X servers and four Mac minis. A clear lesson for users is not to assume that online services have lots of staff, lots of servers and professional backups, and to keep your own copies of your data, especially on free services.

I think it’s great that such a small team and infrastructure could manage a service like Magnolia. What don’t get is the lack of backups. Any hosting service would give you that for just a few bucks a month. I hope everything is back to normal soon. They deserve it.

Everything is here.

Sony Japan has released a Bravia App SDK for those developer interested in bringing interaction to the TV. Most of the info seems to be in Japanese, though. I wish they opened it to the rest of the world so we could build a light TV version of Planetaki :)

It left me thinking about its application to an online service of say… dating. Most of todays online dating websites are based on browsing or searching. In fact it’s a combination of the two, since it’s some sort of filtering (gender, age, location, etc.). But no one, or at least no one that I know, has implemented an online dating system based on recommendations: “Javier, I know you so much I bet this girl is definitely a good match for you”.

I am sooo thinking about it these days.
This will be Vostok‘s next project.
Yeah!

planetaki -

.

Ah, and make sure you check Mort’s Ubiquity tips for users and developers.

Are you a video trendsetter, an expert at finding the cool stuff on YouTube? Now you can share what you find immediately by Active Sharing with other YouTube users.

Click the “Start Active Sharing” button, then go watch some videos. Your username will show up on the page of the videos as you watch them, and a list of the latest ones you’ve seen will appear in your profile.

I don’t think that such a small feature deserves so much explanation, activation and even a name (ActiveSharing). It could be because Youtube guys want to feature something that will be surrounded by a bunch of other confusing features. I think that removing some functionality would be a better strategy than adding more stuff to the mess.

My suggestion if you want to share videos with your friends is to use Unvlog, especially now that it has an English version. Way clearer, simpler, smarter, nicer and to the point.

Orange-Cosmo comes from Smupf, a beautiful store of vinyl toys where there sure is something cute for your next gift, something that will stand on the owner’s table and say “hey” every morning.

On the typical usability test set-up you have the usual screen pointing to users’ face and also some camtasia-like software for recording what goes on the screen. Then you dream of merging it together to create a killer DVD for your client but actually never do so because of the time it would take to review both tapes, digitalise and do the necessary video edition.

I am a big fan of contextualised user testing: doing the testing as close to the real user environment as possible. This really makes it easier. Taking advantage of the Mac computer which usually has an embeded webcam, makes the test way less intimidating for the user.

The solution is so clever I wonder why nobody did it before. Congrats to the guys at Clearleft. I may use it soon.

By the way, did I post this video already?

Man, you gotta love these guys!

The admin interface, being a derivation of such a simple concept, is necessarily beautiful:

And the result, in terms of appearence, could be something like this.

I love such a fundamentalist approach to web applications .
Congratulations to the people at Tumblr and good luck.

PS: Tumblr domain ends with .net. You gotta love such details!

The service is intended to work as a social bookmarking and commenting tool for real-life businesses and services. I guess you could call it a real-life del.icio.us.

I could say many nice things about 11870 but since I’m defenitely biased I better let you inform your own opinion and let some time pass and see how it behaves. Just one detail before I shup up: being a Spanish service as it is, yesterday it made to the first place on Technorati (ain’t that amazing?).

I hope we soon have the english version up and running.