Publishing’s future is in its past

We have been doing some very interesting work for the publishing industry of late. Many publishers are trying to figure out their “digital” business model in an effort not to become extinct.

The truth is, their evolutionary model has been staring at them this whole time. Their history is their future.

Most of them have been focused in the model of “launch and forget” – create a monthly issue, print it, and forget about it because the next issue is 30 days away. On occasion, there will be follow-up stories, or editorials on last month’s story. But there is a much bigger opportunity than anyone has truly realized.

Creating content must still be a significant part of the business, but adding the ability to understand the true history and evolution of their content will give their audience major value.

Gathering and digitizing their archive of content gives publishers the ability to add meta-data searches, going back in time. In some circumstances, over 100 years.

Imagine reading an article on the plight of the rain forrest today. Isn’t it interesting to understand what the perspective was 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago?…written in that time without a historian’s opinion inserted. Isn’t it important to understand not only where things are today, but how they got here? If we made that interaction simple and intuitive, wouldn’t you want that perspective?

The content that already exists in the publishing world makes it impossible to easily compete with them – their differentiator is the history of content. And the relevance history brings to the story today.

Ahead Of The Curve Appearance

Yesterday I was taped on Steve Portnoy’s “Ahead of the Curve” on ABC. I was asked to talk about our Complete National Geographic project:

National Geographic 1888-2008.

I gotta say, I was relaxed until I sat down on set, then got totally nervous. Very weird how you freeze up a little on camera.

There is a ton written on the project already. Its a great product, and should be another award winner for our team.

Press Release if you are interested can be located here

Check it out on National Geographic’s Website

(its also available on Amazon and soon at Target and Walmart)

A respectful disagreement with some good friends

Recently, my friends at Forrester Research published a great white-paper titled “Best Practices In User Experience (UX) Design”, by Mike Gualtieri. In it, Mike quotes someone who I very much admire Bill Buxton at Microsoft, author of “Sketching User Experiences,” who said:

. . . the last thing that you should do when beginning to design an interactive system is write code.

The point of this particular section was to warn program managers and development managers about the dangers of rushing into code too soon. I want to be very clear when I say this as to not be misunderstood : For most enterprises, this it the absolute WRONG thing to do.

In the last 5 years, we have developed over custom 250 applications, mostly for the Fortune 1000’s – and in every circumstance where we were not allowed to start coding early, we have experienced (to put it mildly), issues.

“Why?”, you may ask… 3 reasons:

Reason #1 : Integration

We are not architecting a building, which can be easily described in blueprints and executed in a waterfall fashion. Software is a complex and adaptive system that requires constant refinement and compromise. How do you know that your designs are going to have the data structures to support them? How do you know the legacy systems can handle the newly proposed business logic and user flows. Simple, you don’t, and can’t without early technical prototypes (aka – coding very early)

Reason #2 : User Feedback

Once you get developers involved, you can have them develop prototypes to test designs for utility, usability, and desirability. Paper prototypes and design compositions just to not have the tactile feedback required to truly measure how a user will actually interact with the software.

Reason #3 : Collaboration

Truth is, our developers often come up with some of the best interface design ideas for our clients. When you remove them from the early stages of design and user research, you miss out on a wealth of logical thinking. Having the team collaborate early will often save you a TON of money and heartache.

To give the benefit of the doubt to my friends above, I will say that the way many enterprises are coding today is not always effective. They are leading a project with developers, and design is often an afterthought … I’ve heard, on many initial client calls:

We are all done with the code, its really good. But our executive team does not like the way it looks, and we are getting feedback from our beta customers that the software is hard to use. Can you guys take the next two or three weeks and skin the application to make our executives and users happy?

The curse of marketing buzzwords

Found this funny interactive agency description on an internets today, I removed the agency name to protect the guilty

XYZ offers interactive services across strategy, ideation and professional services delivery. Built on enterprise methodologies and rooted in entrepreneurial spirit, XYZ has focused on web 2.0’s strategic transition from cutting-edge niche to monetized enterprise initiatives with social networking architectures and features, and the creation of distributed media (content outside the website). We specialize in affiliate and integrated initiatives for organizations in early stage or reinvention.

I’ll be talking a bit about the curse of buzzwords at my Adobe Max Session on Tuesday at 1:30 (twitter tag #adobemax213) - hope to see you there!

( I’d include a link to the session, but I could not find a way to link to my session in the Adobe session viewer :(

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) Are Dead

Over the last several months, we’ve been discussing with our clients the value of user experience. I’ve noticed a shift in our industry, one that I think is worth mentioning.

First, a bit of history. EffectiveUI started as a Flash development  company – Me, Andy, Drew, Geoff, Jim, Sean, RJ; all were admiring our ability to write beautiful code in AS3. At some point (I think it was at the time they all decided to kick me out of the development team:), we realized that there was more to what we were doing – we were all uniquely focused on creating more user friendly software… a focus on the UI. The term everyone started using : rich Internet applications. We liked it better than “Web 2.0″, because it was more descriptive – and it made us believe that we were part of a more unique, niche movement of developers that loved well designed software. When we added Lance to the team, our eyes were opened wide to the power of designer/developer collaboration. “Rich” really meant all kinds of interesting things… brand consistent, animation, skip intro, emotive experience, high design, useful… etc.

But times have evolved, our customers have evolved.

I’m not saying that we have evolved beyond the features of the RIA platforms – I’m saying that all software will need to live up to the original RIA standard. The original standard was simply: “make software that is connected, engaging, and respects user adoption over technical integration” – something we are all now calling a “focus on user experience”.

Marketing buzz words have value. “Social Networking”, “Web 2.0″, “Semantic Web”, “Cloud Computing”, “Rich Internet Applications” – but they also all typically have a shelf life. I’m suggesting “RIA” has reached this point. All great software from now on will be “rich Internet applications”, so the term “RIA” has no meaning. It no longer adds any truly descriptive value to the conversation.

Imagine a hollywood director today pitching a movie simply on the idea that he would film it in color… We need to stop stop talking about RIAs as though they are novel and understand that all software needs to value user experience and the connected world.