Flash forward, and we have more choice than we could ever need. Do we really need 285 varieties of cookies, 75 of iced tea, 230 soups, 175 salad dressings? We define happiness as having choices, and yet give us too many choices and we get stressed and would rather walk away and not make a decision than put in the effort required to make an informed choice. This is the subject of the book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less” by Barry Schwartz.

Happiness is when we feel like we have the time, the knowledge and the choice required to make the best possible decision. We need filters to help us make these decisions and live in that yellow zone. The Happiness Zone.

As a brand, you have to help people wade through choices and find you. You also have the following related problems to solve:

1. People don’t trust nameless corporations and advertising messages anymore (if they ever really did).
2. People are looking for ways to simplify life, and often make their buying decisions by tapping into trusted sources. According to Forrester Research, “83% of online consumers trust the opinion of a friend or acquaintance who has used a product or service”
3. Your brand is not special to your customer. It’s not the center of their life, as it is to you.

So what should brands do? How do you sell products and have your brand heard over the constant drone of your competitor’s messages? How do you cut through the noise and connect with your customer and have them ‘hear’ you.

Traditionally, brands have done some user and market research, built a product, advertised it’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and repeated the process to keep the product fresh and relevant in the market. This is a throwback to the industrial revolution and no longer relevant. In this world of flux and speed, the touch points with the customer need to be more natural, immediate and constant. Your brand needs to meet your customer where they are most comfortable, and truly engage with them.

Introducing social media. Social Media is the big broad term that takes many forms, from Facebook to a white label wiki. From media sharing sites such as YouTube, LastFM or Flickr, to life-sharing sites such as Twitter or MySpace. Forget stale forums where people post questions and no one relies, GetSatisfaction delivers the promise of community, by allowing companies and their customers to have lively exchange about products.

As brands grapple with the concept of social media, some view it as just another channel to advertise. But that’s one very thin slice of the possibility pie and dates back to thinking from a 100 years ago. Yes, you can create brand awareness, but how do you actually get your customer to care about you, and make you their preferred choice? Instead of using ad-copy, social media allows you to have a more real, meaningful engagement with your customer. You can now discuss things with your customer. And use language that is more natural and accessible to your customer about every subject that matters. To you and your customer.

The wide, wild, undefined world of social media is in it’s infancy. And brands that ‘get it’ are starting to see it’s true potential. It holds promise for creating deeper relationship between organizations and the people they serve, whether that organization is an online company, a bank, or a non-profit organization. If you have something to promote, and communicate about, social media will be a vital part of your communication strategy going forward.

The concept is simple, really. Don’t look at social media as an advertising vehicle. Instead thinks of it like a party. Your customers are attending this party. You are attending the party too. You are not the host, you are just a participant, as are they. Conversation is lively, noisy and on various subjects. How will you join in? How will you introduce yourself to others? How will you mingle in this party, get people to get to know you, appreciate your presence and really want to keep in touch with you, even outside of this party? In short, how will you become the life of the party?

Guido doesn’t get far anymore. People see through the greasy sheen of falseness. Here’s a suggestion: be authentic, and useful. Be(come) the nice guy. The brand that is helpful, and confident. Knowledgeable in what you do, and not arrogant. Proud not full-of-yourself. Communicative not sale-sy. Marriott has joined Twitter and won kudos for creating great conversations with travelers around the world. Even this hot dog vendor in Vancouver has leveraged their geek central location, to talk to their customers on Twitter with great success.

Before you jump into the social media pond, consider how best you will join in the conversation and what do you have to offer.

Here are a few questions to ask, that will help you humanize your brand, and make authentic decisions on his/her behalf:

1. What would your brand be like at the party? (E.g. The clown, the shy one, the chatty kathy)
2. Where would your brand hang out? What online communities would she or he be drawn to?
3. Who are your brand’s best friends? Who trusts your brand and loves them?
4. What are brands that your brand would buy? (Example: Starbucks or the local neighborhood cafe?)
5. What will your brand do or say at the party, that is typical of her/him, that will make people remember her (in a good way)?

On a somewhat related note, you will find DesignStamp on Twitter, but you won’t find us on Facebook. We haven’t figured out why/how we, as a design studio need to be there. And we refuse to attend the party unless we know that we’d look good going in. So we are talking about it internally, dressing for success (a new website is in the works) and making sure we are drinking the Kool-aid we serve. Be authentic, be useful.

We encourage you to contact us and let’s get to work on your social media strategy!

So what does it mean to me to be good? I am not sure as yet, but here are a few words that come to mind. I told myself that I won’t spend hours and hours on this blog and write from the heart and not the head. So here goes in no particular order:

• Respect. Yup that word again. I believe in this so much that I chide myself when I don’t follow the mantra. It helps me see things more objectively.
• Curious. To want to learn more because I owe it to my craft to be ‘good’ and more importantly, to always be searching for the ‘better’ way to solve problems.
• Caring. From telling someone that their shirt’s tag is showing to giving a team member timely feedback, it is important to “see” people and demonstrate that noticing and acknowledging behavior and yes, even appearances.
• Educate. This I need to do more. I strongly believe that through education you can positively change a life, and this planet’s course is via education. That is why I teach, and if I ever accumulated wealth, that is what I would want to do with my money. Facilitate learning.
• Question. If I want to improve how things are, and make them how they ought to be, I need to remember to think outside the construct and question status quo.
• Happy. If I am happy, I do better work, and I am good to those around me. I owe others to be happy, so I should take the time to do things that make me happy.
• Travel. What better way to appreciate different cultures and ways of living than to see the world. My work, my attitude to people who are different than me is informed by what I think I know about them. I don’t understand how traveling can not be a priority. It’s mine.
• Give. I need to do more of this. But related to “Educate”, for me giving people money or the basics for living (food, shelter) is not the most productive way to change their life for the better. You have to empower people to be able to make choices, to see the world for what it can be for them, and a way out of where they may be stuck. (Gawd, I sound like a preacher, but I have a story that is too long to type, so ask me and I’ll tell you)
• Voice. If you don’t got one, you ain’t going to be able to change nuthin’. If it’s good, than I need to be able to talk about it, start discussions and challenge others to follow. So it’s important to have a clear message about that good thing, and a voice that can be heard.
• Relate. Even if you have to fake it for a bit, you should try and see the other point of view and ‘relate’. World politics could be very different if we stopped trying to vilify nations and whole continents. How about just trying to relate with those people? Why are they hating us so much, and what did we do to make them feel this way?
• Humility. My mamma taught me this. To do good, to be good, and want good things for those around me, I must remember that I am not the best. I am only one person trying to become better because it’s my obligation to do so. Ego is destructive and I am a designer because I want to be constructive.

So there you go, a blog post more for me than you, but I hope that it will ignite a desire in someone, somewhere to not just do, but think a bit about what they do, how they do it, and why they do it.

1. Keeping a customer is cheaper than finding new ones.
2. If you have high churn, you are viewed as selling a commodity not a brand people care for. You will need to start to compete by lowering price which is not a winning game unless you are a volume behemoth like Walmart.
3. Happy customers are more likely to become loyal customers, and loyal customers tend to become cheaper to maintain than servicing the needs of newbies that are partially willing to “try” you out.
4. History is littered with brands who became too big for their own shoes, and started to forget about who made them big in the first place. The happiest brands are those that keep their customers close, and value their experiences as they do their bottom-line.
5. What can your brand do, to make people say “I love [name of your brand here]“. Make people become irrational about their feelings about your brand. The glow that radiates from people in love is infectious. Try telling a Harley-lover that a Honda is better.
6. In the lean times, it’s your brand advocates that will stick by you. Loyalty is difficult to create, and once you have it, you must hold on it, by frequently checking every customer service point within your company (At Rouxbe, the CEO of the company reads every contact form that comes in).
7. Marketers should be part of the design process, so they understand the product that is being built and who it will satisfy. Slapping on marketing messages after the fact doesn’t work. It’s simply too late.
8. Designers should be part of the marketing process, they are trained to be stand-ins for the end-user. Tap into their knowledge to keep the design and the message unified. Apple does this best.
9. Do things differently. The best way to beat your competition is to stand out and be different. Be less annoying than your competition (maybe my bank machine can start to remember what language I speak, and not ask that question each time?), be more caring (don’t tell phone customers they will get through faster by staying on the line, offer to call them back) and more human (WestJet flight attendants crack jokes when making the same old boring “fasten your tray tables” announcements).
10. Be your own customer. Use your product before you unleash it to a market. Design things for yourself, and design the after-sales service for your family and friends. People who don’t know jack about the intricate details about your product. You owe them a good experience.
11. People talk. And in a myriad of new ways. If you run a business that has customers, you ought to be keeping an ear to the ground to listen to what people are saying about you. You should know about the various (new) ways people communicate.

And now a story:

I am on the phone with Fido (BC, where I live, has only 3 major cell phone carriers, sad). I have a nasty customer experience. The agent is unprofessional, absent and not helpful. He has asked me to repeat my mobile number 3 times now. I have been handed from one department to the next, and no one seems to be able to be able to tell me why my account balance is not being accurately displayed online. The call ends with me hanging up in frustration when they finally decide to blame my computer (Mac) even though I KNOW that there is no way that could be the problem.

My tweets during this call:

Sweet revenge.

Flash back, it used to be that when we would have a bad customer experience, we’d grumble about it to others, if the topic came up. Now, I tweet.

Generation Is uses Twitter. A Tweet refers to messages exchanged on Twitter to let people know what you are doing right now. Or what you think or feel about a particular subject. (Learn about what is Twitter and why it’s so popular and stats on it’s usage). So get searching and find out what people are saying about you on Twitter!

So be good to your customers. Bad stories are more fun to tell than good ones. Revenge is more important at times than spreading joy, and more and more,  your consumer understands the power she wields, in this hyper-connected world.

As I have mentioned before, very often we get people asking for us to design Web 2.0 sites that incorporate community to some level. And while I am all for shorthand (e.g. coffee ordering at Timmie Hoe’s) and I have already written about what web 2.0 means to me, this time let me unpack what community is not. Because sometimes by figuring out what something is not, we get to the core of what it is.

Words that I will use interchangeably to describe community: village, watering hole, gathering place…you get the idea.

Here’s what community is not:

1. It’s not a label to throw up on your site. If you ain’t got community, it’s OK, you’ll get one soon enough. Just stick to what you do best and aim that thing at people who care and sure enough they will gather around and talk you up. You have to have something substantial behind the label to merit making your user click on the “community” button!
2. It’s not what you want it to be. If there is no freedom, there is no community. Censor people, tell them what they can or cannot do inside “your” community and you lose the game even before you start. While communities need a sense of order, people will hack the system to make it what they want it to be, and if the system is too rigid, they will move on to the next gathering place.
3. It’s not a one-way street. Look for perfect circles. I give you feedback on your app. You read that feedback (let people know you read everything they send!), and find that it’s a really good point. Celebrate my input, make me a beta tester, give me “special” access and I will become your brand advocate. Look to complete the feedback and communication loop and you have a lasting relationship with your audience.
4. It’s not just about belonging. People used to join clubs and professional associations just to put that membership on their resume. That’s not enough anymore. People expect communities to be useful. People also like communicating, so let them. The best online communities have strong communication. LinkedIn is not just a professional network, it also offers tools and features that allow people to ask questions, post jobs and communicate with each other in meaningful ways. Providing useful ways to communicate and abiding by personal choices around privacy and noise levels creates stronger (more loyal) communities.
5. The world ain’t flat, and neither are communities. People also like a pecking order, so give it to them. Give people someone/something aspirational, reward them for valuable contributions, so they keep making them. Leading from #3, giving people special status either based on contribution or quality of input is a great way to encourage increased community involvement. Call it karma, call it ranking, call it badges, but provide some sort of tangible, recognition for those that help others. Last fm doesn’t provide any type of rankings beyond what you get if you pay them for the service. But do a search on google for last.fm badges, and you will find people who have created graphics to celebrate the momentous event, when your playlist at last.fm reaches beyond a certain number of songs. Apple provides points that add up to status levels in their support forums. People aspire to receive points by answering questions. Apple wins by having a free support system for their products. People win by being celebrated as Apple gurus.
6. They don’t need it, you do. Because there is big money in online communities, everyone’s got one! So if you have a topic worth talking about, it’s being discussed within an online community somewhere. So don’t create community because you think your user “needs it’. They don’t need your community. You need community features because you want to be loved or at least make people care enough to gather around to talk about you. If you want loyal users and you want to be transparent about everything you do, the best way you can do that is to create a dialog with your consumer.
7. Communities are not just a bunch of people. I want to watch a movie tonight. Flashback to 15 years ago > pick up the newspaper > choose a pretty poster from the movies section > take my chances > go to local theatre > pay $4.99 cheap Tuesday price. Today, it costs over $20 for a movie and I got little time. I also don’t trust my eyes to pick from posters because let’s face it, my mum reads the paper; I scroll, point and click. So I pick online communities to find out what people thought of a movie. I don’t just read individual reviews; I look to see what a bunch of people as an aggregate said about a movie because a bunch cancels swing votes from the the easy-to-please and the gripers. Subjectivity is lost in an aggregate made up of large numbers, I hope. I can also follow specific people that seem to mirror what I like/hate and they become my gurus to help me make decisions. Check out Rotten Tomatoes or Riffs. Communities can be a sophisticated glowing ball of wisdom.
8. It don’t get built overnight! Actually, that’s a lie. It seems like Twitter’s success can be solely attributed to its insanely popular introduction at SXSW. But most online communities need to be seeded, watered and tended to, like a delicate plant that could become a really big-ass tree someday, but not tomorrow. See above for all the seeding, tending things you should consider doing. Love your community and dedicate the amount of resources that you believe is worth building a loyal audience for your product.

So to the gym bunny grandpa: I agree that real people are great to have a conversation with. But in terms of levels of trust, this is how I see the world:

Highest level: I trust my inner circle of family and friends to give me opinions on things because I know them well. I know Robina loves every movie she sees, I know Jo-Ann won’t probably like most “hollywood” flicks, and so I can take their opinion, and self-adjust their subjective opinion to balance out what I have felt about their reviews in the past.

Second level: I would tap into what large crowds think about one thing at an aggregate level because I believe about the power of the collective wisdom of crowds for most things *.

Bottom of the trust totem pole: You, my gym-schmoozer friend. Not because of your oh-too-tight tank and the hefty weight belt that hangs below your beer belly. Only because you are one voice and I can’t rely on your solitary opinion. It’s too risky.

Communities have power, and strong communities can strong and have immense value when they work well.
(* This mp3, points out when crowds don’t work!)

status

1. I have only updated it once (and it’s 2pm). Usually I would update it at least twice by now. My friends seem to update theirs every hour!
2. I woke up from a dismal 3 hours of sleep, and the first thing this morning, I stagger to my office and instead of checking my email, I update my Facebook status first. Before checking my email? Wow.

For those of you hiding under the rock that hides the internet phobic or privacy hounds, Facebook provides you the option of finishing a sentence that begins with <Gagan is…>. That becomes your status for all to see. Some of my status messages from September (from the inane to the informative):

Gagan is telling his dog that wet dog don’t smell good

Gagan is Monday

Gagan is in meetings

Gagan is actualizing (and using big words)

Gagan is CPC, CPM, CPE and every other acronym

In fact if you have any kind of RSS reader , you can keep getting pings throughout the day that will display your friends’ statuses (statuii?) without you doing much of anything at all. The only caveat is that you cannot remove the “is” in

That leads to the name of this post. Generation Is.

I am part of that blurry-eyed generation that is not neatly defined by world politics , war, dreams or the lack thereof . Instead I am defined by the desire for the “now” of information. I don’t have favorite websites, I have favorite RSS feeds. I don’t go out looking for information to be typed up on the pages of a newspaper or even a website for that matter. I rely on my social network to recommend movies, not a corrupt reviewer sitting behind an oak desk. I trust no credentials, but instead I trust the intelligence of masses and look at how many people have saved a link on delicious to decide if a link is good or bad. Give me a bad experience on a website right now, and I make swooping statements about your brand at many cocktail parties. I don’t waste time sorting through spam as Gmail does that for me quite nicely thank you. After all, my status on Facebook can never be as wasteful as “cleaning my inbox”. My here and now status message must wax poetic or be set apart by productivity or philosophy. My networks come with a dot com prefixed to them (LinkedIn, Flickr, Newstoday or, you guessed it, Facebook). I know when a contact has quit their job because she can text me as she walks toward her boss’s door. I know what she tells people about her job officially (LinkedIn) but I also know how she felt day to day at that job (Facebook status). Nothing is hidden from me even information that I have no desire to go search for in the first place. My life, and the information that fills it, has a sense of immediacy to it. My head is constantly filled with ’stuff’. Up-to-the-minute world news, how the planet is going to s#%$ and how people are dying in countries I will never visit. I can now also find out just how my employee or boss really feels about their day or me! A sense of now. A sense of is.

Where is this going?

Gagan is not sure.

Is this good?

Gagan is on the fence.

I look back at how my parents lead their lives. They wrote letters to relatives who lived in other cities. They sent telegrams when there was a sense of urgency and hoped that the news of birth, death and train arrivals got to the recipient within a day or so. My parents actually picked up the phone to arrange dinners and parties. They didn’t even have a day-planner or PDA and instead relied on the calendar with pictures of pretty flowers that hung near the phone. My parents completed a crossword together each day with their morning cup of tea before breakfast. They also read the paper every morning, along with that tea and crossword, to get their daily news. Cup of tea, crossword, newspaper reading and a sit down breakfast. All this before going to work? How did they have the time?

Flash forward to the now and the “is” of me. I just got back from Europe and paid a lot of money for that vacation so I could have the luxury of checking my email only once every couple of weeks. However I couldn’t help it. I fell right back into the “is”. I updated Flickr photos and wrote back to panicked clients and curious friends/family. I even found myself greedy in the “is” of being a tourist. I rushed around taking in sights, food and drink. I was exhausted every evening just from the is-ness of the day. I felt forced to relax by siesta in Barcelona and couldn’t get used to everything coming to a standstill and shutting down every afternoon. I was “is” more often than not, running from one gallery to the next. But truth be told, I wish I had taken the time to just siesta! I guess now that siesta is no longer an option; I yearn to be less “is”.

But it ain’t all bad. I love technology and the immediacy of communication and connection in the world I have bought for myself. I love what all my devices and machines let me make, play and enjoy.

That said, I have to disconnect from IM, email, Skype, Facebook and the phone just to get work done sometimes. And I don’t think everyone I work with understands that need to disconnect, to create. Sometimes a work day is made up of communication. Where does all that communication about the “is” of projects really get me, or for that matter, the project?

I is tired of pings and updates. I is going to log off. I is done for the day.

Client X (in email): XYZ referred me to you. We saw your work for Rouxbe and were impressed. We need a serious web2.0 redesign.

Me(in email): I would really appreciate it if you could complete our project initiation survey (it is only a few questions). This will help us to be better prepared for our meeting on Thursday.

Client X (in Survey): We want a best of breed, slick website that is just like myspace, linkedin, facebook, flickr and digg. Our site needs features from all of the above but be different.

Me (reading Survey): …Scratching head…

The above scenario is familiar to most designers. Everyone wants to be part of the big bandwagon called Web 2.0. Most have no idea what Web 2.0 is or it’s value. What they do know is that their current site doesn’t work and they want something better. I attended the DocTrain conference in Vancouver and the folks from Adaptive Path shared similar stories. In fact, they go one step further, and now use Web 2.0 as a shield to break through traditional bureaucracy. Tell people that what you are proposing is very web 2.0, and the cool, vague term opens doors for new ways of doing things.

This article is broken into several parts because this is a loaded topic, with lots of unknowns to unpack. This month, we look at how to know if it’s time to freshen up your website and redesign it. We will then make sense of the process of redesign and then apply Web 2.0 innovation , where appropriate, to bring the website in line with where we want it to be.

So…

Your company already has a website. And without knowing who you are, what your company does, and why you have come to DesignStamp to help you redesign your site, let me tell you what is probably wrong with your site right now:

1. Old, and Not In a Good Way:You had it designed about 5 years ago, and while it looked good then, it’s starting to feel tired today. It’s failing to display correctly on modern browsers, and the look and feel of the site is very 1990’s. Like a pair of jeans, it hugged your butt for a while, but now it’s starting to sag.
2. The Site Map ala the Winchester House .Time has taken it’s toll on planning as well, and every reactive addition to the website has resulted in several hundred orphaned pages. If you can’t draw a mental site map of your site’s structure, chances are your user most certainly cannot, so they may never find what they came looking for. You’ve inadvertently built stairs that lead to the ceiling!
3. Your Copy Lies About You. The market has done a 360°. Your customer has changed and so has your competition. You are no longer selling the same vision, and in some really bad cases, not even the same product(s). Your website is, essentially, lying about what you do and why you do it.
4. No Funnel, No Conversions, No Happy. Most websites that were designed in the 90’s and early 00’s lacked one small detail on their home page: stating the reason to exist or what the french call raison d’etre.Which means that while attention was paid to adding cool animations, we lacked the wisdom(that comes from failure), to make sure that people quickly understood what the website (and company) does, and then lead the user to the crux of the matter in the most targeted manner. See the home-page of Rouxbe.com: nothing stands in the way from telling people about the site and getting them signed up and all set to watch food videos. Now look at http://www.sap8.com/. Enough said.
5. Your Brand’s Clothes Don’t Match. Make sure the logo and colors of your website match with your biz card, your delivery van and the trade show collateral you just got designed. Your corporate identity are the clothes that your brand wears, and they need to match! A consistent, well-matched corporate identity builds trust and trust leads to the magic money-in-the-bank word… credibility!
6. You’re doing all the talkin’! In this brave new world, companies now have to have the courage to have a two-way conversation with their customer. So if your website features a lowly contact form as the only way for your customer to speak with you and create dialog, then perhaps, it’s time to consider creating a community around your website, and more importantly, around your brand.
7. Accessibility is a Dirty Word. Chances are that when your website was designed, the possibility of someone coming to your site unable to use a mouse was an edge-case not worth considering. There are several compelling business reasons to ensure that your website is accessible. One compelling way to think about accessibility and having xhtml standard compliant sites today is that they have a better chance of working on handheld devices and nifty little cell phones and Wii consoles. You never know where your customer thinks about you and wants access to your site.
8. Your Sales Staff Shudder, Your Tech Staff Dream Bad Dreams.Old websites usually have un-fresh first point of contact information and offer poor after-sales support. After all if the content is difficult to update then who will ever want to update it? And if the content is difficult to upkeep, your tech staff (or the guy who knows a lot about computers) is stressed out by just having to do simple text replaces in this very cumbersome website.
9. Your Competition Looks Better. While a me-too approach is never the best one, we do need to keep up with the Jones’ in this case. If your competition provides helpful features such as side-by-side comparisons, external online resources etc, they are stealing your online business from right under your nose. Your customer is turning to them as a trusted source for what they are looking for.
10. You Know It. Most organizations know that their website needs a refresh. While some may disagree about the extent of that refresh (a makeover, or a new beginning), most will acknowledge that the website has stopped meeting the organization’s needs. This checklist may just help you advocate internally for that change, and the need to hire professionals to do the job right!

Related footnote. I made a presentation entitled web design makeover in conjunction with VFS and Vancouver Public Library. Check out the PDF

We Belong

Tribe members are a brand’s strongest advocates. They feel like they helped build something (I am…trying…to resist another 80’s pop reference…but I can’t!!) and will go to bat for the website they are a part of. Brands have relied upon way tribes before social networking became cool. Avon and Mary Kay cosmetics relied upon women selling to women like themselves. Amazon relies on book lovers sharing their love for the written word with others like themselves. The key is to be driven by niche. If you share a deep love for something with someone else, you already have something in common, so relating with them becomes that much easier. And if you side with the small guy fighting the big guy than the community feeling is even stronger. Consider the linux community or the teeny bopper MySpace community. Both rely on people sharing what they have in common. Music, code, wanting to belong to just belong, whatever.

The Future of the Future

I love the promise of what they are about to become. I love them and I promise to love whatever they do next. I am in love with the future of this brand. Basecamp became successful even before it launched because it could rely on a strong fan base that read the 37 signals blog everyday. Google has future fans who flock it’s official and ‘fan’ blogs and scour it’s labs. This user consumes not just based on subject but based on what their idol is currently interested in or promoting. They are fanatical about their idol and will irrationally support it’s future endevours. So Google completes its grid and we follow and invent rationale to use their next beta app. Firefox built itself a brand by having loyal fans that cut and pasted banners promoting the new browser even when it was a fledgling. They had bought into the promise. Into the future.

I Just Can’t Stop Loving You

What started as a hobby has become something much bigger. And this love must be shared with others and celebrated whenever, wherever. The love could be for a hobby, a technology, a gadget, a game or even food. This person probably trolls sites such as mac rumors or wii’s world, has RSS feeds to sites dedicated to their favorite subject. They might be closet junkies choosing to only revel with others who share this love. They appear normal from the outside. Inside, however they hunger for new information and sharing with others (sometimes under aliases). They will spend some time everyday keeping up with their interest. This person will also sign up for newsgroups and even meet people IRL about a subject that is close to their hearts. It was love at first click. My friends at Industrial Brand are “out” as big-time foodies!

Don’t Forget Me (When I’m Gone)

Just browsing as they call ‘em. The surfer starts out not knowing where they are going, just that they got time to kill. They bounce from one site to the next, clicking on blogrolls, del.icio.us links or just clicking for the sake of it. But sooner or later they realise that the web is really a small place and end up coming back to the same site. There is huge oppurtunity here as this user can be seduced into staying or coming back. They got time. Surfers will come back to sites that look, feel and behave differently than other sites because, they are more memorable and somehow managed to stand out from the other 50 sites that were pinged earlier that day. Give them a newsletter or a contest, get them to sign up and chances are they may just click their way back to you.

Daddy Cool

Give me the latest gossip. Tell me about the latest trend. Show me something new. I am a cool hunter on the prowl. I got people who rely on me to tell them the latest greatest and I can’t dissappoint! This person thrives on sharing and being the first. They depend on finding and dispersing information about new things to maintain their ‘cool’ status. They will forward, post on newsgroups and comment about the latest, greatest just to be the first to do so. This type of user created the buzz factor that surrounds the front-page of Digg and makes Tech crunch spit out one of the top RSS feeds on the internet.

Got to tell you, writing this article made me want to gel my hair, stitch some pleats in my pants and wear white socks (again). Not!

happy prosumer

1. The eBay seller who put up the camera for sale, listing it’s features, putting up photos of the camera, to get me to bid on that camera.
2. Me: I had a ability to take that photo of my dog, and then add meta data to that photo in Flickr by adding the photo to a set, submit it to a dog-lovers group, and add comments to the pic.

The Good: Power to the People

We can celebrate the power of being able to share content instantaneously. Tragic events such as the London Bombings are instantly found on various sites through “citizen journalism” around the world with cell-phone videos, podcasts, blogs and photos from every angle. Unedited or censored.

And let’s acknowledge that it is kinda cool to skip traditional distribution channels (and the tax-man?) by being able to buy and trade things even wholesale products from each other in easier ways than ever before.

The ability to create and distribute content has shifted power of content creation from the few (read media mogul Rupert Murdoch who interestingly enough owns MySpace, a cluttered example of user-generated content) to the many (at least to those that have the access to increasingly cheap technology). Get free web space, spit out your message and you have just created content for all to consume. You could have the attention of millions. No censorship , no barriers. You are now a publisher, a distributor and you could even surround your content with ways to monetize on your new found powers. If you are a musician, you are finding ways to get famous without the help of record companies. And you can even gain celebrity status for yourself by just picking on famous people. Just find your niche and create content for them. And they will consume it.

The Bad: (The Reason why user generated content…umm…sucks?)

The problem with this whole scenario is this. No one stopped me sharing that photo in the scenario above.
I might suck at taking photos but no one stopped me from adding that blurry photo to the trash heap that is the internet today.

Let’s talk about YouTube: how many videos are actually worth the bandwidth that was spent uploading them and then serving them up to unsuspecting bored explorers? And sites that accept user-submitted content realize this problem, so every user generated piece of content must offer features such as ratings, reviews. Tell the system if the piece of content is good, tell the system if it is miserably useless. Help us bury it or float it to the top. And even then fake content or hoaxes ends up tarnishing the credibility of good websites.

And while bad content rarely ever makes it up the ranks, it still leaves someone, somewhere having to take the time to watch the content to censor or celebrate it. And time is precious. The world is melting, we have crazy weather outside and frogs are going extinct at an alarming rate. But we are spending our time flagging content that should never have been made in the first place. Worse yet, we are provided more and more choices everyday to showcase our small lives in duplicate ways. And no one is asking why.

The Inevitable J.Lo Syndrome

Luckily, the system has a way of correcting itself. It’s called the the J.Lo syndrome. Remember when we couldn’t get enough of J.Lo’s well-endowed behind, her bling and her men? Well at some point we got bored and we turned away. She went into hiding, came out made a couple of movies but has not generated the same tabloid frenzy again. User-generated content is here to stay, don’t get me wrong (just like J.Lo’s behind). But we are going through the dreaded “Ben Affleck engagement” phase of the J.Lo syndrome at the moment. Over-hype and over-saturation. We have been provided too many ways to share pointless content.

At it’s best user-generated content gives us incredible, unprecedented power to share, contribute to a collective intelligence and find new ways to communicate with each other. But it is the emphasis on quantity (with ways to weed through the abysmal, to get to the average) that has to shift. We all want good content, not millions of ways to submit and access bad content.

Once the saturation point hits and websites with identical business models that live off or leverage user-generated content start to cannabalize each other and starve each other of investment dollars, we will gravitate back to sites that offer us good content, whether that content is created by one or many. Good content always wins. The author can be a “user”, a “pro” or a prosumer, it don’t really matter! What matters is that the focus will be back on quality and not the aggregation of masses of content submitted by the masses. And no more talk about seeding and weeding a gigantic compost heap of content.

It was a typical interaction design project, testing initial assumptions, validating business logic with a user-centric philosophy and asking simple questions like “why” and “how”.

However, looking back at the project and the path it has taken over the last few months, it has been anything but typical.

It is my pleasure to introduce you to Rouxbe.

Rouxbe helps people to cook simple recipes using video. Gone are the days of printing off complicated recipes and guessing what those fancy French words mean, and not being sure just how to get to that all important end-result. You can now have a chef walk you through the process without the camera attempting to make the chef the celebrity. Right now, you have subscriptions to magazines that show beautiful food. Now see how that food is made, and you control your viewing experience. No ads to skip through. Just lots of videos recipes. Amazingly shot and served. You don’t need to follow along. Just watch, learn and then go make.

Rouxbe was different for DesignStamp for a lot of reasons. Our commitment to Rouxbe is ongoing and our involvement is much more collaborative and immersive than the consultative role that we usually play. We have been involved in the building of Rouxbe, it’s online presence and technical development from ground up. From building the proprietary Flash player, to creating a complete website including e-commerce components, we are working with Rouxbe to take the user through a smooth, hassle-free experience. Nothing should come between the new user and the food recipes that they can sample.

One of the other key things that makes Rouxbe different is it’s commitment to a cause much higher than profit. To feed starving kids around the world. Having worked in the field for years, one can get a bit jaded and just about everyone you talk to has the next big Web 2.0 idea that they want to bring to market and get bought by Google. One of my first meetings with Joe Girard, the CEO of Rouxbe was not about the financial promise that Rouxbe held, but about Rouxbe for Life. A good cause that is whole heartedly supported and believed in by all of us that are working to build the Rouxbe brand. In fact, we all contribute money towards the cause each time we eat a meal together (working at Rouxbe means that there are a LOT of delicious meals before, after and during every meeting!)

In the next few months, I hope to be able to share details about our design process and the development of Rouxbe as a trusted brand. Till then, I invite you to try Rouxbe and give us your feedback. After all, the proof is in the pudding. Or more precisely, in the Crème Brulée!

Whether you are building a product or even a campaign to sell it, read this article, consider its impact on how you have traditionally thought about things, and then ensure that your company is working responsibly (and hiring responsible designers). Pre-thought, planning and good judgement are your most powerful allies and secret weapons for survival in this increasingly complex, fast moving economy.

Lets’ assume you goal is to make a ‘good’ product. What will define this goodness? Is it:

• The feature list?
• Launching in time for (insert your choice of event here). Or
• Making your investors happy?

I can assure you, that if you answered yes to any or all of the above, you are not alone. Most businesses tend to start to stare at their belly buttons at one time or another. It’s natural and it’s a reaction to concentrating on the known instead of dealing with the unknown. While it is good to look inward at times, there is a danger off being blindsided by the real changes that are occuring in the marketplace everyday. Navel gazing is comfortable and offers an addictive sense of control. You can bully your developer into producing the feature list you desire, and working crazy hours will produce a broken alpha product ready for your targeted launch date. You can present a bouncy PowerPoint presentation to your investors and their eyes will glisten with the promise of what you put forth as a future release.

But the global market is littered with the ghosts of companies, big and small, that died from the effects of navel gazing. To stare at your collective navel as a company leads any one or all to the following phenomenon. (Consider the following to be the ‘what not to do’ part of the article’s title.)

1. Amnesia (Simple questions such as: What are we doing? Who are we? Why are we in business, remain unanswered)
2. Blindness (Our competition is way too far behind us for us to care)
3. Paranoia (Make our NDA longer, with more legal clauses than the next prenup Anna Nicole Smith would have to sign…they are out to steal our idea)
4. Temporal Megalomania (We control time. We lead the industry and have the best product. The market only changes when we are ready for that change)
5. Self-Inflating egos (We will always be better than them. We know best)
6. Manic Mood Swings (We have the world’s best product, we have the world’s worst red-tape, we have competent management, we have incompetent workers)
7. Self Mutilation (Fire, lay off and basically chop off limbs in an effort to fix the unknown problem)
8. Suicidal Tendencies (Work on the basis of a fixed burn rate. Spend the money today, we may not have a tomorrow to look forward to)
9. Prostitution (We are building a cool product because we want a company like Yahoo! Or Google to buy us. We don’t need to ship to market, we just need to build the bloody thing, so we don’t need to prove worth)
10. Inertia (The inability to react to anything due to all of the above)

So who’s thinking about your end-user? No one. The user is, for all intents and purposes, dead. They have been sacrificed for a quick turnaround and a bloated piece of technology. In next month article we will delve into the elements to focus on instead of that navel.

Companies that have thought about these elements have always prospered. Whether it is huge success such as that enjoyed by companies like Google or Apple, or the small resounding success of your neighborhood ‘no-brand’ coffee shop. They all share something in common.

Till next time…!