Kenneth Grange is a bit of an unsung hero, which is probably why you haven’t heard about him until now. I can however assure you that at some point in your life you have sat in, used or walked past one of his designs. 

Kenneth Grange is an industrial designer known for designing in a friendly manner – Grange has said that he wants his products to be a ‘pleasure to use’. He sort to eliminate ‘contradictions’ in design that failed to make the products easy to use. In this respect, he reminds me of today’s digital UX designers, striving to make the web a better place.

Kenneth Grange has never had a particular style – he’s moved with the times, but what stands out for me is his repeated use of rounded corners, making his products seem refreshingly different yet still maintaining a familiar status. He makes use of the rounded corner on some of his more impressive portfolio subjects – iconic everyday British objects like London’s black cab, the InterCity 125 train, Kenwood food mixers, Thermos tea flasks and Kodak cameras.

Today, web designers use rounded corners in a huge array of their work – the introduction of CSS3 has made it easy for rounded corners to be implemented (in decent browsers) and the technique has been hugely popular amongst web designers, but there is a fundamental difference towards the use of them in their work compared to Kenneth Grange’s legacy.

Grange developed rounded corners to make his products fresh. Whilst it is true that web designers using rounded corners in their work are differentiating web designs from the straight edge of the days before CSS3, the rounded corner alone cannot make a website seem refreshingly different. As more and more websites take on a rounded corner effect, the less effective it becomes in seeming refreshing.

Take the black cab for example, the design is so distinctive and different that you can pick out a black cab with ease in busy London traffic. I know that the black cab has a lot more to it than rounded corners, but the curvature of the design plays a big role in giving the cab it’s persona, it is unusual but still inviting – something that is incredibly important to a taxi. If every car in London had that same curvature, it wouldn’t be as easy to thumb down a taxi.

It’s not just online that our everyday lives are getting rounder and rounder. Just by looking around my room I can demonstrate this. Jony Ive and Apple’s design team have put rounded corners on everything, and in some cases have made new models even rounder than before (the new Macbook for example). PlayStation and Xbox models are rounder than ever before (remember those old straight cut models). Rounded corners are modern.

To conclude, the use of the rounded corner in web design does make devices seem more inviting and friendly, but rounded corners should not be used as the main concept to make a design look fresh.

Photo credit: Jonathan Burr

On my day off I decided to reproduce the Dusted logo through CSS. CSS3 properties have allowed us to reproduce some images and icons purely with code — whilst it is pretty cool, it also has some disadvantages.

From left to right: The original JPG, CSS and CSS — but without border-radius. As you can see, the creation has been pretty successful, I used two key CSS3 properties to help achieve this. Setting border radiuses and gradients of several elements.

The finished product

Technically it wasn’t that hard to produce — a couple of CSS3 properties and we can achieve the below. The tricky bit is getting the shapes and curvature to match the image. It needs a fair bit of trial and error and you could spend hours perfecting it. Matching the typeface took longest — luckily we don’t use a font with serifs.

If you look closely, you will see a small imperfection with the highlighted layer — it should be straighter, but that was the best I could get it. Anyone got any ideas how I can make this line look more accurate? Perhaps by rotating the element slightly?

Whilst this is quite cool, is it the right thing to do?

Semantically I don’t agree with inserting empty HTML elements like divs, although I’ve inserted nbsp in some tags for this example, we really shouldn’t be inserting blank content into these elements — they exist to hold objects like text, not to be styled to look like text. HTML5 Canvas is the current web tool that we should be using or starting to use when drawing 2d elements and graphics. This is just an experiment.

Canvas however, is not supported by ‘less distinguished’ web browsers and that is a problem for developers who need to produce these 2d objects and make them appear consistent across each and every browser. CSS3 tools like border-radius and gradients are also not supported by these browsers — meaning our developments will look like the far right icon above. Here our D appears as an pixelated O — quite cool as it happens, but suicide for the brand. I’m hoping I don’t get shot for that.

For now we can just use images right?

Yes, at the moment images are just fine. If you’re really desperate to produce something with pure code, have a crack at Raphael.js — something which is accessible for all browsers. You can also do a lot more than just draw with it.

The Dusted “D.” device are registered trademarks of Dusted Design Partners Limited.

This article originally appeared on My Blog.

Photo credit: Flickr user sATEK

The Google Maps API is something I hold dear to my heart, I produced my final year project using the service and received a first for my efforts. It is one of Google’s most popular and powerful tools that until now has been free to use and implement across corporate and personal sites on the Web.

Google recently announced plans to charge for high usage but insist policies have been in place for some time now. Site owners are now worried Google are about to start charging for what has been seen as free to developers for six years.

Should you be worried?

If you own a small blog? No. The charges will only apply to you if your site exceeds 25,000 map loads per day per API or up to 2,500 map loads for ‘styled maps’. If you exceed these limits your app will have to be cut to make fewer API calls, or you will have to purchase a Maps API Premier License. The price of this license will cost about 4 dollars per 1,000 page views. A web service like Twitter for example will be paying huge amounts, where their service makes a massive amount of API calls and ‘map loads’ to Google every day.

Is 25,000 map loads a lot?

This entirely depends on how popular your website is. At Dusted, one the busiest sites we manage gets about 15,000 page views a day, but crucially we hold maps for individual business locations that are located on their own sub-pages. If your website includes multiple maps then your ‘map loads’ will quite quickly reach 25,000.

If you are worried, speak to the people who manage your website, or check out your Google Analytics data. This should give you a rough idea of how many page views you are getting per day and you can then estimate a guess at how many times your map is being loaded. It is also worth bearing in mind the fact that page views are usually quite substantial when a website first goes live, it some cases it might be worth buying the premier license to cover this process.

Why are Google doing this?

This is quite simple really, Google has been trying to monetize maps silently through sponsored map markers. These work in a very similar fashion to sponsored search results, where a company pays to have their business identified at the top of a hierarchy of search results. Monetizing maps in this way is clearly unsuccessful and Google are looking for a real return on their popular mapping feature. Google have put real value and engineering into Google Maps, the quality of geocoding and data availability is second to none – so maybe we should just be grateful that the tool has been freely available for this long.

Photo credit: Flickr user akeg.

Google Plus is the new social network from Google. This post looks into the real reasons it has come about, and outlines exactly what it does – analysing some of it’s main features and comparing them to existing social networks.

Why has it come about?

Vic Gundotra, Google’s engineering boss believes “online sharing is broken. And even awkward… We think connecting with other people is a basic human need. We do it all the time in real life, but our online tools are rigid. They force us into buckets – or into being completely public… Real life sharing is nuanced and rich. It has been hard to get that into software.”

Vic’s statement could be genuine, it is true that sharing through Facebook or Twitter means the user can either be completely public or incredibly private. However, there may be a deeper reason for Vic’s concern. Google started off as a simple ‘search engine’ but has grown into one of the Web’s superpowers… To Google, Facebook is seen as a newly established power that can destroy Google’s dominance, therefore actions must be put in place to stop it.

Google Plus is an attempt at the devaluation of Facebook. It is worth noting though, that this is third time lucky for Google to produce a ‘social’ application that hits it off in the public domain, in the past: Google Buzz and Google Wave have both failed spectacularly.

What exactly does it do?

Well, it is early doors. All online applications develop or should develop as time passes by and as new applications and technologies are released. Currently, I like to think of Google Plus as a combination of tools (Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Tumblr and WhatsApp) – popular tools used on the Web today…

Through Circles users can group people they are following. Users can follow strangers or industry heavy-weights (like on Twitter) or users can follow friends or work colleagues. Using Circles, users can then share posts with specific Circles – this is handy if you want to share family pictures with family or a work party with your colleagues.

Through Hangouts users can video call other users (like on Skype). Users can ‘hangout’ with more than one user, creating a kind of video conference call. This is cool, and would be useful for business, however with a feature name like ‘hangouts’, I can’t see businesses using this to communicate with external bodies or clients as the feature name has an unprofessional ring to it.

The biggest feature is Sparks - Here users can search for external content within the Google Plus application itself. This is good in its own right. However, Google have incorporated this into their search results… For example if someone you are following shares a particular link, your search results will make you aware of this. This could well effect the way sites are ranked within Google’s search criteria. Sites with more shares may appear higher than others. This would mean that search rankings would be even more diverse and varied than they are in their current state.

Like Facebook, users can Share posts – However, with Google Plus you can effectively re-share other user’s posts. This reminds me of re-blogging posts on Tumblr, or Re-tweeting on Twitter.

Huddle - This is currently, purely developed for Mobile – Here users can group chat, just like on WhatsApp, rather than having separate text conversations.

Why would people drop Facebook?

Personally, I much prefer sharing my content with selected Circles. A lot of the time I refrain from posting on Facebook because I don’t want everyone to see my post. I personally believe that Vic and Google have addressed ‘broken online sharing’. The Google Plus sharing experience is richer, mainly through Circles - by selecting who to share content with, but also through Hangouts where communication is more ‘real-life’.

What does this mean for business?

On Facebook, a user has a collection of liked pages or brands in their personal about section. Unlike Facebook, Google Plus does not hold special pages or groups for businesses (i.e. Coca Cola). However, currently there is nothing stopping a brand or business setup a Google Plus account looking to address their fans.

A big point to make – Information Liberation

Currently, Google Plus asks you if you would like the organisation to personalise adverts using your data. However Facebook doesn’t do this, it sells your information to personalise those adverts you see on the right hand side of your page. Just so you know, in 2010 Facebook’s ad revenue hit $1.86 billion – (Mashable).

Google are by no means angelic when it comes to data. In the past they have committed some serious acts, including a case where Google stole data from unprotected networks in the UK: read more on that here. Despite this, I prefer that Google asks the user if they can personalise adverts with data – unlike Facebook.

To sum up

Personally, I think Google Plus is looking to be far more promising than Facebook, where technically, it’s levels of sharing and new tools far out shine Facebook’s greatest features. However, will everyday ’normal’ people (people who are not as web geeky as me) appreciate it, perhaps they don’t want to move to an empty network? Facebook, has a huge user base – that is what makes it successful – Google needs to steal those users if it is to really hit off.

Photo credit: Flickr user Bert23

Just before the UK headed into (yet another) bank holiday weekend, changes to the EU online privacy law came into effect – the law that applies to how website owners can use cookies to store user information.

From 26 May website owners now need to gain ‘explicit’ consent from their users before they allow cookies to be downloaded and used, the only exception been ‘essential’ cookies such as those used on e-commerce sites and where users choose to stay logged into online services.

While the law will not be enforced for another year, failure to take any action before 26 May 2012 will result in a fine of up to £500,000 in the UK.

The ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) hopes the new regulations will lead to greater control over personal data but the upshot will undoubtedly be an outbreak in pop-up warnings and messages. The Radio Times website is the first I’ve seen to do this.

Although pop-ups certainly detract from the user experience, I suspect they’re simplicity will see them widely used as site owners decide on the best course of action. It will be interesting to see how the major players handle this new legislation and how users come to terms with the potential confusion of visiting UK and non-UK websites.

Chances are, browser developers will push their cookie management preferences to the front more and build in ‘defaults’ we can check and forget about (over and above what’s possible now) but until then, I’ll leave the following advice for users and site owners alike:

• First, look at cookie
• Now, identify the cookie
• Then, smell cookie
• Finally, eat the cookie… Om nom nom nom!

Photo credit: Flickr user neil conway

IBM are currently celebrating the success of their latest super-computer. Its name is Watson and it won Jeopardy. Jeopardy, for the non-US based amongst you (and the rest of you that haven’t seen Groundhog Day) is a long-running gameshow where contestants are given the answers. Their challenge is to guess what the question is. Watson’s task is the same but ultimately its goal is to be the first step on the road to a machine that will be able to learn and understand what humans are really asking them for.

Now being a super-computer there are a lot of complex although boring (visually and emotionally speaking) processes going on. So whilst I’m sure the IBM engineers would’ve be on the edge of their seats watching their computer trouncing its opponents via a command line on TV, the rest of us would’ve probably become uninterested within minutes.

For this reason IBM gave Watson a face and a voice – humanising it to a certain extent.

For the visual composition of the screen, you don’t want to have, person, person, and a void

Harry Friedman, Executive Producer, Jeopardy

They auditioned several voice actors, with the successful candidate getting to record 1,000s of phonetic sounds and phrases. For the face of Watson they turned to digital artist Joshua Davis. Davis has plenty of form with turning mathematical processes into beautiful living art pieces. Davis wrote several scripts to convert Watson’s “emotions” into visual representations, so at a glance you can gauge its happiness – how well its doing, and its confidence – the probability it places on its current solution being correct.

IBM and the producers of Jeopardy recognised the importance of user experience – the need to bring some emotional connection between the viewer and the technology. This applies just as much to online communications as it does to a super-computer playing on a gameshow. I’m not suggesting that every website or app should have an avatar (Miss Boo anyone?) for the user to relate to, but you should apply the right “face” and “voice” – face being the visual elements, voice being your copy and messages. Get these right and you may not win any gameshows but you certainly stand more chance of engaging with your customers.

Dusted USA continues to gain a foothold in the American market and just before Christmas, saw the launch of Donald Haack Diamonds & Fine Gems (DHD) – the highly respected jewelry store based in Charlotte, NC. Dusted were commissioned to redesign and build a new site for DHD, who were looking to update and drastically improve their online presence before venturing on a market push this year.

While the redesign was of great importance, the need for a Content Management System (CMS) was also a priority. Due to frequent changes in their product inventory, DHD required the ability to update their website catalog and content in-house.

In addition to the website build, we were also tasked with managing their social media presence (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) and providing an e-mail marketing platform that would enable DHD to easily create ‘e-blasts‘ and analyze the associated data (open rates, click-thrus, etc).

Alongside the online development, DHD were also planning their retail space with Dave Temple and Mike Jeffcoat of Temple + Jeffcoat, a Charlotte based creative firm who developed The Proposals, a series of DHD videos. With just four months until Christmas, we all had our work cut-out to communicate effectively and successfully deliver a new off and on-line brand.

As the project kicked-off, it quickly became clear that in order to successfully modernize the website and develop a social media offering, the existing identity needed a refresh. Luckily, our creative resource has a flair for typography and we were able to offer several solutions before moving forward with a new layout that translates very well across other digital platforms. This new identity is also soon to appear at their retail location, which will improve their visibility and attract new customers around the South Park area of Charlotte.

Although attracting a new, ‘modern’ audience was high on DHD’s list of priorities, maintaining their tradition, ethos and existing loyal customer base was also a top priority. It was vital that we adhered to their core messages – one of quality, knowledge and trust – whilst incorporating several attributes that would provide a fresh, modern approach.

In order to communicate this message, and encourage online customers to make contact, it was important to produce high quality product photography for the catalog. The shots were taken by Steve Cook who did a great job in capturing the essence of the jewelry and providing the photos which worked within the redesigned website.

The new website has been live for two months now, with an immediate upturn in visitors, pageviews, time on site and a drastic reduction in bounce rate. The email marketing platform has also successfully kept their customers up-to-date with the latest offerings and helped to communicate the revised identity and encourage brand recognition.

Moving forward, we will continue to work alongside Temple + Jeffcoat to manage the DHD brand and support their growing online presence.

The political hot potato that surrounds the arrest, custody and legal battle of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, is set to run and run and I’m sure by Christmas, the story will still be headline news. I’m not about to debate whether ‘his’ site is morally right or wrong (personally I believe some things are probably better off kept in a locked cabinet for good) but rather the technology battle that is furiously underway to bring down the site while those on the inside, fight to keep it going – there are some cruelly ironic parallels to draw here.

Firstly, there is a great movie to be made. I’m not sure who’s going to own the rights to it, but it will be like War Games meets The Social Network meets The Bourne Identity – something I’d certainly pay to see. Secondly, Wikileaks epitomises the strengths of social media marketing and online community building – even if Assange is locked away for good, the site (and leaks) will continue. “It is not a one-man operation, but a network of thousands motivated by shared culture” is how The Nation magazine described it.

Testament to this is Wikileaks on Twitter, which is still highly active. As Assange was led away by police in London, the latest tweet vowed to carry on with more cables promised as normal.

Despite Twitter’s insistence to quash Wikileaks from the list of trending topics, phrases such as ‘press freedom’ are trending quite happily. Moreover, rumours (strategically?) spread on Twitter stated that Assange had been removed from Time magazine Person Of The Year poll, has actually seen him comfortably leading the field, beating Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg to the top spot. Not bad for a man currently behind bars.

The technology deployed to support the Wikileaks network is quite vast now – over 1,000 (and counting) mirror sites that the US Government can’t seem to stop. In essence, they are trying to switch off something they invented to withstand a nuclear war and in practice, haven’t been able to control such things as on-line piracy – shutting down ‘just’ this one site I doubt will be easy.

They successfully unplugged Amazon’s hosting of the site, and persuaded the likes of PayPal and Mastercard to stop processing donations, but haven’t managed to shut down all the domains. Even if they did, Wikileaks openly publicises its IP number so it’s possible to access the site directly.

In last night’s Evening Standard, Mike Butcher of TechCrunch, suggested, “we may just refer to Wikileaks by its number” which is food for thought given the comparisons we can draw with Orwell’s 1984 – a story of rebellion against a Big Brother state (which even features a Ministry of Truth).

In the book, Orwell’s principle character winds up imprisoned and subjected to psychological interrogation in an attempt to ‘cure’ him of his insanity and hatred for the government. The fate of Julian Assange will hopefully be less extreme, but it is surely no coincidence he has suddenly been detained and refused bail based on charges his lawyer describes as “politically motivated”.

Wikileaks is a site built on anti-censorship and the freedom of information. It describes itself as a universal way for revealing suppressed and censored injustices; an anonymous channel for sources to reveal information to their team of journalists. In theory a perfect contender then for the World Press Freedom Prize – announced yesterday by the US Department of State as part of the World Press Freedom Day, 2011.

I’m sure Julian Assange will see the irony in that.

The session was led by Bermon Painter (@bermonpainter), Dustan Kasten (@iamdustan) and Assaf Weinberg (@assafweinberg) and hosted at Ally Bank. Apparently Ally have a great UX group with their own usability lab but due to the unexpected popularity of the meetup, we had to utilise a conference room for the user testing and discussion.

Remote Testing Tools

The session started with a presentation, which suggested the use of inexpensive online tools to run usability tests. Here are a few of recommendations:

FiveSecondTest – Conducting a five second test allows you to find out which parts of your designs are the most prominent

There are two main options with this tool:

1. Memory Test – Users get 5 seconds to review the design and asked to remember specific elements.
2. Click Test – Users get 5 seconds to localate and click on specific elements

You can run closed or open tests but most of the testers are web savvy so make sure to read through and extropolate the most useful test results.

Navflow – Navflow helps you improve your conversion rates by analysing how people navigate around your websites and applications

With this tool, you upload a series of images that represent a multiple page user path. As with fivesecondtest, you can have an open or closed test (handy for sensitive mockups) but in this case there is no time limit.

Websort – enables you to conduct remote card sorting online.

It’s a great way to gather feedback from users about how information on your site should be managed. You simply create a study, invite users via a link and analyse the results.

Websort also allows you to export your study for use on PlainFrame, which is ‘usability testing for website navigation and app menus’. This tool will present results on how users interact with your navigation structure, which plays an important role in the usability and ease of navigation of your site.

Although these tools cannot compare with a fully functional testing lab, the benefit is that the tools are inexpensive and allow you to return test results very quickly.

Coffee Shop Testing

If you are keen on lab situations then there is a great alternative – ‘Coffee Shop’ testing. All you need is a laptop, specific questions and goals, a friendly personality and some courage, oh and maybe some ‘sweetners’ as a back up. Major benefits of this type of testing are that you don’t have to recruit heavily or use expensive resources and you can run through several iterations (five users per iteration) in one week.

As with any user testing, planning is key! You must know what you are testing, have a clear set of goals (e.g clarity of labels, ease of signup), specify your methodology and target audience, and have a strategy to measure your results.

Testing Tips

Assaf Weinberg is an advocate of these tests as he’s experienced success when conducting tests for Travelocity. Here are few tips to completing successful test:

• You must test the test prior to using it in the coffee shop.
• You need to start with warm questions. It’s Important to start by making the user feel comfortable by providing some background and discussing various subjects with them, such as their hobbies and interests.
• Let the user know what’s going to happen before you do it e.g I’m going to show the website homepage.
• Encourage the user to explore and explain their experience.
• You must be careful not to lead the subjects. Ask open questions.
• Make it clear that there are no wrong answers.
• Don’t use the words: ‘We’, ‘Test’ or ‘Survey’. People don’t like to feel that they are being tested or are conducting surveys. They also don’t like the suggestion that you are not alone in conducting the test.
• Do use the words: ‘I’, ‘Help’ and ‘Opinion’. People love to help and offer opions, it gives them a feeling of value.
• A gift card can help sway the user your way if they are undecided about helping or offering an opinion.
• Try not to take notes during the test.

Startbucks is a great place to carry out the tests as there are lots of corporate users and not many highly experienced web savvy users, who could potentially distort your test results. You can also buy (multi-location) gift cards which can be used to sway the undecided users.

Testing Users

At the end of the presentation, we watched as test users were walked through an example website. In each case the user was shown the website for 5/7 seconds then asked to remember the elements. Open questions such as ‘Look around and let us know how you feel’, ‘is there anything else that would interest you’, ‘is that what you expected’, and ‘what do you know about the site’ were used to great effect. The results from the test presented the website developer with suggestions and recommendation on how they could improve the user experience and sign-up rate. It is obvious from these examples that user testing is an essential part of the development process, which can be included in a project inexpensively.

The title being ‘iPhone chips away at RIM dominance‘ eludes to the platform being at the core of the debate, and probably the biggest barrier to the business case (in reality). This was one of the first instances I’ve seen where Apple actually eclipsed all the hype and for me showed that market gravitas and pure hardcore usefulness, coupled with intuitive design-led R&D, have forced a corporate to break the rules based on Apple delivering the brand promise (as we call it). I know it’s a small blip in the market, and everyone (outside of business and finance) has been using iPhones for years, but the line “… also based on them being seen as a useful business tool…” embodies the technological step-change we are witnessing. This article form IT Business Edge goes into it in more depth: RIM vs. Apple: Should Cisco Buy RIM?

With this tiny bit of news in a mainstream UK financial paper, it really proves that even once ‘too-cool-for-school’ technology applications of existing media channels, with enough contributing cerebral input, can turn industries around and make it into the mainstream. Blackberry must be quaking in their boots (but I have to say that looking at the 20-plus Apple devices in my office this comment may have a slightly bias slant).

So, we should probably raise a glass to the Standard Chartered IT team who have boldly put their head above the banking PR parapet and announced such a revolution. This move may open the flood gates as I would expect a large proportion would have both devices running (iPhone for personal/ Blackberry for work), and probably left feeling underwhelmed when they have to use their preferred alternative – which ever that may be? I could make a guess…

As with all technological adoption cycles, the iPhone seems to be following the same path, but will we be referring to all hand held web-enabled smart phones as ‘iPhones’ regardless of manufacturer in the future? Maybe? Who knows…