This video is a beautiful, mesmerizing piece of work.  Objectively, it is little more than some candid, street footage (admittedly taken in Manhattan) spliced together and laced with a nice soundtrack. Tthose words technically do describe the video — which could easily instead have formed something banal and pedantic — but instead of a snore, the video is a work of art. The magic ingredient — the alchemy which transforms slo-mo candids of people walking down the street into a lush painting of a city in motion –  is the convergence of talent, determination, and vision. And the result is a work of art instead of 3rd-rate documentary filler.

The video is impressive not only as a piece of art, but as a vivid example of how an artist (or designer, or artisan) with vision can make great things with even a minimal amount of tools. Sahuc wasn’t using fancy, high-end equipment. He didn’t have a lighting crew or a budget. He took what he had and made it work.

In other words, as designers our work is not limited by our lack of a new G5 Mac, or CS4, or even our programmers’ (un)willingness to build AJAX interfaces with rounded corners. No. If we can mine our instincts and skills to hone a clear vision, even the crudest of tools can be used to create elegant, enchanting results.

It all starts here.

The eggheads over at User Centric published an academic analysis of the UI of the instrument panel and center stack on the new Mini Clubman. Despite in all their scientific vigor and application of UI expertise, though, they didn’t get it quite right. It all starts off on the wrong foot with the title of the post, “What’s Driving the Mini Cooper? Not the User Experience.” Oh really?

I don’t think User Experience means what they think it means.

The User Experience of driving a Mini is far more than the act of changing the radio station or customizing the tach’s digital display. It starts with the emotional appeal of the body design, the look of the oversize wheels and tires, and the diminutive dimensions of the car. It builds with the sporting mechanicals – the taut suspension tied to the thick, communicative steering wheel, the whir and throttle response of the high-tech 4-cylinder motor, and the snickety shifter. It settles in with the nostalgic dash design, the bucket seats, and the fine craftsmanship of the interior materials.

Speedometer. And Radio.

Then, we get to the dials and buttons. Are they important? Of course. Does their functionality play a role in the user experience? Absolutely. Are they faulty? Yeah. But taken as a whole, the dashboard buttons and readouts are a small fraction of the experience.

What about User Centric’s critique of those controls? They got a lot of it right, primarily the analysis of the radio’s relative disembodiment from it’s buttons, and the volume dial’s distant location. The radio’s dials – not just the buttons – though, are tiny. Why no remarks about that? Also not mentioned: the secondary controls at the bottom of the center stack – which are indistinguishable by touch, even though they perform a variety of tasks.

Speedometer over there, to your right.

One key interface design decision that seems to be an obvious UI element worth examining, and yet  here merits neither comment nor  question, is the placement of the speedometer. Arguably the most important dial for the driver, the Mini’s speedo is mounted in the middle of the dashboard, rather than it’s conventional location behind the steering wheel, directly in front of the driver’s line of sight. This unconventional design choice is exactly the type of thing usability studies like this are meant to evaluate.

The old switcheroo.

This study was worth doing. But based on the published report, it seems that the researchers got caught up in the details or their reportage and lost perspective on the bigger picture. Some important things were overlooked, while the relative significance of the UI is over emphasized. I think that’s too bad. I’m sure the researchers are capable fellas. But this piece doesn’t really do the field of user experience justice.

Kicker Studio designer and author Dan Saffer speaks about the designing and documenting for gestural interfaces. Kind of long, but worth a watch.

I guarantee that you will love this video. For a high-def, albeit briefer, version, visit Capacity’s site.

Although it is tons of fun and entertaining to watch, what is most compelling is the huge leap forward displayed here in the notion of what a logo and a brand can mean. Conventional ideas of brand identity, shaped by decades of emblems and tag lines, still seem to confine it to a word mark or a glyph. This campaign demonstrates how much more fertile ground there is (for the right brand, of course) to define and display the vibrancy of their identity.

The idea is that Cartoon Network is a palette of characters (the Noods) who interact – and not just a cable chanel with an animated bug in the corner of the screen. It is brought vividly to life by first showing us cute but featureless dolls who are then injected with personality by pops and bursts of color and motion. The brand is alive. It is interactive, fun, and playful. (Of course the phenomenal soundtrack plays a key role). Try and get that message across with a logo and a tag line.

For more background and analysis, a good write up from CartoonNothing:

The latest jewel in [LA-based Capacity's] crown is a massive rebrand for Cartoon Network built around Noods, blank Dunny-esque figures created by the crew at Kidrobot. Props to CN for dreaming up such a clever, collaborative concept.

Capacitys CN montage starts off in a minimal white space but builds in complexity and vibrancy as more characters, environments and seasons are introduced. [...] Yoda reducing General Grievous to a puddle of paint [is] a clever way to deconstruct the underlying concept of the rebrand.

The frenetic soundtrack (also created by Capacity) tinges the entire montage with a playful 8-bit tone and moves things forward with a cheery optimism befitting such a grand undertaking.

I might have to rip that soundtrack into an MP3.

The fact that they tie into your Facebook and Flickr accounts, and use built in geo-tagging to support these functions, is icing on the cake. But for a designer, these features are case studies in the profound impact of user-oriented information architecture (or Domain Language, as Paul describes it in his fantastic post over at 37signals). From the post:

A domain language is the set of words that reflect the way you cut up a domain. It consists of the pieces you sliced and the names you chose to give them. This language defines an application and makes it special.

Rather than stick with the old, tried and true – but ultimately dysfunctional – means of organizing pictures (roll and album) the new iPhoto app uses location, face recognition, and of course Events to cull together these artifacts in ways that are meaningful to people, rather than databases.

Each chance we have to examine and perhaps create IA (or domain language) for a new website or other app, we have the same chance to truly examine the way people think of the products or tools they’ll be using, and to ensure – or at least try – to make our language fit the way they think of things, and not the other way around.

Mozilla labs blows minds with this mold-breaking, innovative, and nearly genius addition to the browser kingdom: Ubiquity. As they describe it,

Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone (not just Web developers) to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)

This is an alpha 0.1 release, so I am sure we can expect a few bugs, and sure the interface is less than perfect, but the ability to simply and intuitively do things like: add a map to email; map a selection of housing listings from craigslist; or insert selected items into an email, is so powerful and so useful, that Ubiquity is already, even in this 0.1 alpha stage, remarkable.

Download it or read more from Aza here.

Great design is intuitive. Great design eliminates confusion. But not for everyone, not all the time. The words and interactions you use often have a sophistication that will confuse some portion of your audience.

One  of the constant tensions I deal with, as a designer for a corporate behemoth, is my innate desire to push boundaries vs. the common-sense practicality that rules our culture. Of course, we do take chances on occasion, but the bulk of our daily work is spent making incremental changes. Add a link. Refine the masthead. Remove a disclaimer. … Et cetera.

When projects of a grander scale do arise, there is often a broad sense of wonderment. But inevitably, at some point, novel design conepts are watered down. Could be at the governance review, could be after a usability assesment, or maybe the product manager is concerned that users wont ‘get’ the new features.

Sometimes, though, isn’t that a good sign? Think back years ago, to the first time you rode a bike. It was hard. It took lots of failure before you figured it out. But then, the magical moment occurred, and BLAU! you were riding your bike. And how terrific bicycles are: a place for all your extremities, a place to sit, and never in need of refueling. But. It was hard to get going.

Good designs can be a challenge at first. Heck, I have had to learn how to use my new iPhone. But once you get to understand how to use your contact list, or to save photos to the phone, it is a snap.

In other words, it is ok to have a learning curve. It is ok if not everybody can use an interface flawlessly, immediately. Yes, you may loose a few users. But if the design functions intuitively and easily for most of your audience, then you are creating a great experience for those users. When we dumb things down, or design for the ‘LCD‘ as we used to say, you often lose the magic and fun of a great new design.

Efficient, easy, and safe. Cool.

This ingenious tool uses colored light, built into a special bath plug, which makes the entire tub of water glow hot red or cool blue. Or green, when it is just perfect. Here is the technical description:

The Bath Safeguard uses a waterproof and heatproof silicon plug, a thermal sensor and LEDs to indicate the temperature of bath water without having to risk burning your hand. When placed in the water, it automatically indicates the temperature through color, red for hot water, blue for cold water and other colors, such as green, for temperatures within these extremes.

Ahhh. Just right.

While this product is especially useful, given then safety and energy saving implications of knowing your bath’s water temperature, on a broader level I am drawn to it becuase of the perfect use of ambient information. That is, the Bath Safeguard doesn’t ask the user to stick their face close to the water to read a temperature gauge. Instead, just by being near the water, you’ll be able to discern the important information that you need. Brilliant.

via Yanko

After watching the WWDC keynote, however, I have a profound feeling that this time is different. What Apple has wrought with the new iPhone SDK, iPhone 3G, and MobileMe seems clearly to be a momentous, singular shift in the technology continuum. This, my friends, is a game-changer.

The wicked, once-mythological concoction of real mobile Internet access, location-based functionality (especially GPS mapping), multi-device synching, and an open development platform into one easy-to-use handheld device inexorably alters – accelerates – our technological trajectory. Many ideas once written off as pie-in-the-sky sci-fi are now, literally, within our grasp.

Family functions, friendships, work environments, education, exercise routines, hospitals, doctor visits, game-play, shopping, socializing, – everything - is going to change, and not in some theoretical distant future, but right before our very eyes, starting next month.

Video of the eye-popping MIMVista app:

Those were interesting times. Here I was, head full of the great (and lame) things that I experienced with my old job at Wells Fargo, now tapped into the pulse of Bank of America’s user experience design group. My eyes were fresh, my hopes and expectations not yet re-formatted (crushed?) by the new ‘realities’.

The upside of this temporary naivety? Fresh eyes. That is, having not yet been indoctrinated into the new environment and culture, and having still-vibrant recollection of life in my old organization, I brought new ways of looking at things, a temporary condition that comes to an apex maybe 6-12 months into such an experience. That moment one has learned enough about the new reality, yet still have strong memories of past experiences that ideas of new, better ways to do things still flow freely.

But the window of opportunity does not last forever. Eventually, soon, the organizational structure, politics, brow beatings and red tape of the new reality become routine. Aspirations of change, improvement, or flat-out new ways of looking at people, products, or problems begin to dissipate, overtaken by numbness and apathy. The once-fresh eyes grow stale, the voice of change grows muted, and the great velvet tomb begins to encase you, as you grow comfortable with the ‘way things are done around here’.

The iPhone is a great example of this phenomenon, on an industrial scale. A year and a half ago, before anyone had seen Apple’s seminal new device, blogs, newspapers, and magazines were full of naysaying cellphone industry executives and pundits proclaiming that their business was tough and complicated. That some newcomer (Apple) was going to face some hard knocks climbing the handset mountain.

Oh really? Apple, with a fresh perspective on the industry, and of course bringing their own sense of independence, innovation, and the crucial lack of indoctrination into the old ways, changed the game.

Carrier-dictated feature set? No. Traditional retailing and activation model? Gone. Mini plastic keyboard? Never. More of the same? Haha. Instead, Apple has created a revolution in “phones,” transforming a lumbering industry into a sexy, dynamic, and culturally important sector.

Yes, a huge amount of that is due to Apple’s unique talents. But as a reference to my overarching point, it is clear that only Apple could have done it, not only because of their skills, but just as importantly because of their fresh eyes. I have no doubt that Motorola, Nokia, Sony, and others are full of technically brilliant engineers and artistically gifted designers. And possibly even executives capable of great vision, willing to take massive risk.

But none of that matters, because all of them bought into the cellphone industry orthodoxy: carriers dictate features, smartphones must have Qwerty keyboards, it’s ok if mobile browsers completely suck.

——

This model can apply in any aspect of life: Political campaigns (people-powered vs. top-down), industry, socializing (the new kid at school), family matters, and especially, most commonly, within corporate work environments, which are made up of a constantly shifting blend of employees, managers, and organizational charts.

What can be done?

Tapping that vein of inspiration, during the time of optimal value is crucial. Once the window closes, the opportunity is lost. Moreover, an organization that values and acts upon the visions of the Fresh Eye is likely to foster a more dynamic culture which can evolve into a self-sustaining environment of innovation, and thus stave off the seemingly always-inevitable descent into the ruts of routine.

Give the Fresh Eyes a voice! New employees ought to be seen as the trove of ideating treasure that they are. Round tables, process improvement teams, associate satisfaction surveys: new employees deserve a place in any effort such as these. And best of all, heeding their ideas will help build an employee with more investment in your business, and foster great morale to boot.

Don’t let those fresh eyes go stale.