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.

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.

Something unique that you’ll remember, but hard for others to guess.

Should contain a minimum of 7 characters and maximum of 12 characters.
Should contain at least one numeric character.
The same character cannot appear more than twice in the password.
The same character should not repeat more than twice in a row.
There should be no spaces in the password.
The password cannot contain the characters Q,q,Z,z.

There’s gotta be some kind of reward to those who make it. Yeah, that’s probably it.

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?

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”.

(via Barbarian Blog)

How much harm has eyetracking done to online newspaper design…

The idea behind open data is that of accountability, enabling a system to work for it’s people and not the other way around. In the U.S. the wheel has already began to turn, initiatives such as the Obama’s administration Data.gov or a society that finds concepts such as democratizing data and e-government more and more familiar, are all important steps towards the right direction.

In Spain the wheel is turning a bit more slowly, but turning nevertheless.  The people behind AbreDatos and all of those who’ve participated are leading the way.

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.

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!

Check it out, please:

How could they dare extracting usability conclusions based on first usage? How can they say things like “One participant actually thought that…

These kind of tests make me feel that either…

a) most users are stupid
b) most of the so called “usability engineers” are stupid
c) most u-tests are totally useless and worthless

I know, this is a total rant but… jesus!! I am so getting tired of the usual “usability thing”…

Now, this is what I call design. Or at least is the kind of design that I do on a regular basis.

Many of my clients come with their own “remote controls” crammed with dozens of buttons. My job is to decide which ones get hidden, which of them remain and how to sort them out. I’ll eventually add something, but that is not usually the case. That’s why I like o say that I am not good at inventing stuff but at improving it.

I saw the picture at Makememinimal, I think I am going to save it for an ocasional presentation. It’s a good way of explaining my job ;)

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.

This makes me very proud since I lead the team who made that possible. I guess I cannot disclose much of the information regarding the project, but I want to congratulate and thank the team who worked really hard to make it possible. We weren’t expecting such success.

Here is the press release and a link to a United Nations page with the full report.

Here is the overall ranking:

This is the detail on the usability category:

This is the paragraph where Madrid’s website is mentioned as one of the best practices all over the world:

Working for the public administration is always dificult. There are many interests and stakeholders which sometimes conflict among themselves and you feel in the middle having to come up with something that compromises all parts and is also what you think it’s best for users. I don’t recall it as an easy project.

Besides, as a professional you have to deliver a plus when working in such projects. Why? For two main reasons:

1. You are being paid with everybody’s money
2. Your users are the Citizens. You work for the public good.

I remember recalling these principles when things used to get tough. It was our big motivation. Now I see it was worth the sacrifice.

My favorite definition/description/whatever goes like this:

Information Architecture: how it’s structured
Interaction Design: how it behaves
Information Design/Visual Design: how it looks

These definitions are not mine and I cannot recall who wrote them first. I’d appreciate any feedback on it. I am also aware that the boudaries between concepts are not clear at all, especially between the last two. They tend to overlap a lot.

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.

Totally wrong.

But today I found something unbelievable:

In order to complete registration, you must provide a valid credit card and billing adress to indicate you are over 18.

Way beyond stupidity.